The Man Who Sued God - Big Questions

Rosh Hashana, 5768

by Rabbi Neil Janes

When I was a child I can remember feeling jealous of my older sister.  Of course there were times when the feelings went the other way, but on this particular issue being the younger child definitely had its disadvantages.  What, you might be asking, was it that I was jealous of?  Well, in retrospect it doesn’t seem such a big deal, but at the time it seemed unfair.  I can remember the evenings when she and my dad would be laughing away and then sharing the amusement again in the morning.  You see, she was allowed to watch Billy Connolly’s stand up comedy.  Of course, now I understand fully why my parents wanted to protect me from the, well how can I put it, colourful language.  I was a sweet and innocent youngster; the vocabulary of Connolly’s humour would surely have meant that I wouldn’t have been such a delightful child.  If you want to know how accurate a picture I am painting of myself you need only ask my parents!

So, from an early point in life Billy Connolly held a place of mystery and intrigue.  I think it was a few years until I actually watched a whole routine on stage and by then, let’s just say I was not unfamiliar with the fresh terminology.

However, I suppose it is natural that when I have the opportunity to see him on tv or video that I have a sort of spontaneous desire to watch.  So it was a couple of years ago, while training to become Rabbi, when I was searching for a video in the video store and came across the title, “The Man Who Sued God” starring none other than Billy Connolly – I couldn’t resist.  It seemed like a perfect match.

The story behind the film, set in Australia, is in brief:

Billy Connolly has given up life as a lawyer to be a failed fisherman.  He has debts up to his eyeballs and still depends on his ex-wife.  As he is returning from another failed lobster catching expedition he gets back to the jetty to realise he’s forgotten the one catch he made.  As he motors back to his fishing boat a storm brews up and a bolt of lightening strikes – destroying his fishing boat.  Thinking that he has insurance and there will be no problem making a claim he doesn’t worry.  Until the assessor comes to visit and tells him that the lightening was an act of God and the insurance doesn’t cover ‘acts of God’.

So begins the story of the man (Billy Connolly) who sued God.  Cue a few amusing moments with representatives of God – priests from the Catholic and Anglican Church and a Rabbi – who is shamelessly stereotyped but in a harmless way (I think).  The film is typically Connolly, but also quite a feel good movie with a love story thrown in for good measure.

In one of the scenes, as Connolly’s character stands in court representing himself, he states the following:

“I’ve brought an action against someone who doesn’t exist….

If God exists, I don’t think he sits around sinking people’s little boats, I don’t think he causes earthquakes and landslides or dreams up ways to make people’s brakes fail.  If there is a God, surely he’s everywhere, he’s in everything.  He’s even in this courtroom.  He’s in the sea, he’s in a lobster.  He’s in a line of Robert Burns...He's in the face.”

I won’t spoil the ending, which as you might expect was rather saccharine sweet.  However, in thinking about my sermons over the High Holy Day period I was reminded of this film.  In spite of appearing, on the surface, to be heretical for a rabbi I quite enjoyed the, albeit simplistic, formulations of what come to be called ‘The Big Questions’.  I looked at a few reviews of the film and discovered that those which were concerned less with the acting and more with the content were unhappy – focussing on the philosophical inadequacies and immature theology.

But, though I say almost all year long that we have a higher level of sophistication in our theological understanding, when it comes down to it we are no more equipped to understand the mystery of the world than we have ever really been.  It is the intelligent, or at least courageous, individual who accepts that with all the advances in science and culture we remain in the dark or eclipsed from access to The truth.

John Humphrys writes about these questions in describing a childhood experience:

“By now it was dark. The glory of the night sky had yet to be lost to light pollution and on cloudless nights the stars went on for ever. That was what troubled me. How could they go on for ever? And if the universe was everything, what was it all in? And how could it be in anything because that would have to be in something else and . . . and . . . and so on. And what was there before any of it existed? And how did it all come into existence? And finally – the really, really Big Question – why?

“The other Big Question came to me at about the same age. I was on a bus returning from our week’s holiday in Aberystwyth. I hated buses. I was always sick on them. It was while I was hanging over the platform at the back that I discovered mortality. For the first time in my short life I realised that one day I would die.

“Once again the question was: why? What was the point of being born if all there was to look forward to was dying? For the length of that ghastly journey and into the next day, everything seemed completely and utterly pointless. Then the normal service of childhood was resumed and it went away. But it came back. Questions like that always do.”

The article was in the Sunday Times just two weeks ago, headlined ‘In God We Doubt’.  In style I discovered that John Humphrys on this subject reads less like a ‘terrier’ and more like a ‘Lionel Blue’ – though many years of learning and specialisation on the subject certainly give Rabbi Blue an advantage.  In fact, in a rather prophetic turn, Lionel at my ordination said:

“In our time, your time that is, we have to be discriminating about what god we worship.  Perhaps it is better to be an honest agnostic than to worship a false god.  Think of the false gods of the last century and the havoc and murder they caused in this continent.  In every part of the world religion is not just the answer but also part of the problem.  So be careful and don’t be seduced by groupie feelings.  You may well ask at this point, ‘Rabbi Blue do you practise what you preach?’  The answer is ‘I try, just like you!’”

The difficulties that John Humphrys experienced in belief led him to create the radio series ‘Humphrys in search of God’ and finally a book which is about to be released.  What I learnt, in reading his article, was that with the hullabaloo created by the proclaimed ‘New Atheists’, like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, there remain a body of people who have a sense of the transcendent – they may not describe it as God, or even in any terms that we would recognise, but it can certainly be put down to a spiritual awareness.

At about the same time that John Humphrys was writing in the Times an article was printed about the diaries of Mother Teresa, who it was revealed was in a perpetual state of pain over the question of the existence of God.  As if she, a woman on her way to possible beatification should have only had pure thoughts of the existence of God.  How could she have been in doubt?  She writes:

“The damned of Hell suffer eternal punishment because they experiment with the loss of God.

"In my own soul, I feel the terrible pain of this loss. I feel that God does not want me, that God is not God and that he does not really exist."

As far as I am concerned, the question is not how could she have been in doubt but why are we surprised?  For me it portrays a much more genuine struggle than a fundamentalist who has no question in their mind that they are correct.  Humphrys himself said:

“The interviews left me back where I started – well, rather further back as they had spectacularly failed to satisfy me on any intellectual level. Their arguments did not stack up. In the end they did not concede you had to believe first. This has always been a problem for me. Faith is faith. If you have to satisfy the intellectual argument, then it’s not faith.”

If only he had read Rabbi Neil Gillman, whom I mentioned last night in my sermon.  He writes about the story of Elijah at Mount Carmel who had ‘proved’ that it was God to be worshipped not Baal with the burning fire pans:

“The story of Elijah at Mount Carmel has entered the literature of philosophy of religion as the paradigm of the kind of proof for God’s existence that turns some into believers and leaves others unconvinced.  But the most disturbing question addressed to this story is posed by the eminent Jewish theologian-philosopher Emile Fackenheim.  He asks: What would Elijah have done if God had not answered his call? If a fire had descend to consume the sacrifice to Baal?

“One thing is clear, Fackenheim answers: Elijah would not have converted to the worship of Baal.  He would have continued to work for God, even in the face of God’s silence or absence…I doubt whether a miracle of comparable magnitude would be any more effective today.  God is simply not subject to ‘scientific’ proofs of this kind…Our experience leads us to feel that belief in God is not demonstrable…What does matter is where we choose to cast our lot.  Our choice is not God or Baal, but God or one of the many idols such as fame, wealth, or our nation, or substitute gods that we use to lend coherence to our lives.”

(Traces of God, p.8-9)

As I read all of these articles, in practically the same week, it occurred to me that they were highly relevant to the High Holy Day period.  For me, Rosh Hashanah is a time for humility – we must be humble and acknowledge that no-one has come up with the answers to the Big Questions in a way that can satisfy us intellectually.  When it comes down to it we might even be daring enough to admit that.  Rosh Hashanah reminds us of our place in the world, that we are not the centre of the universe.  We are not sovereign over all, we must leave that to a Higher Power.  In our humility we might just discover in our hearts a searching.  It is that searching which is the mark of true religion, not the fundamentalist answers proffered on street corners or relayed in Blogs and in hellfire and brimstone sermons.  A search that we undertake as a community.  In the darkness we might discover a light, the light of fellow searchers who accompany us on our journey.  It is only then, with the realisation that we are so small, that true teshuvah can begin. A return, not to a God made in our image – the image of our desires, of our egos and of our arrogance.  A return to God, in whose image we are made, and who, when we can listen, calls to us in the Still Small Voice.  To return to my teacher Rabbi Lionel Blue:

“If this contact makes you more honest about yourself and more generous to others, if it helps you push aside the bla and bling of modern life and helps you see the obvious, if it makes you wider in your sympathies then go for it…

“You will also find that you cannot know it without it changing you.  Most of us go into religion to use it, though we may not be conscious of it or admit to our very mixed motives.  Under the influence of the spirit we become in part what we worship and it begins to use us instead.”

That change is teshuvah.

May 5768 be a year of health, happiness and peace for you and your families and may this be God’s will.  Amen.

Rabbi Neil Janes

Finchley Progressive Synagogue