Liberating God as well as ourselves:

Sermon by Rabbi Elli Tikvah-Sarah - 13 April 2006

I love Pesach, but each Pesach I am troubled by the role played by the central character – God. I’m not keen about what the Eternal One gets up to in the narrative recounted in the first chapters of the Book of Exodus. I’m not happy with the focus on the role of God in the traditional Haggadah, to the exclusion of all the human players in that great drama – Miriam, Moses, Aaron – not to mention, the midwives, Shifra and Puah, who saved the baby boys from Pharaoh’s genocidal decree. On the one hand, the Exodus is about liberation from slavery; on the other hand, it seems more like a contest between two Patriarchal tyrants – God and Pharaoh – and we all know who wins and becomes ‘top God’ as it were: Mi chamocha ba’eilim Adonai, ‘Who is like you among the gods, Eternal One?’ (Exodus 15:11). The song that the newly-liberated slaves sang when they passed through the Sea of Reeds on dry land suggests that they certainly got the message.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter that the image of God conveyed in the Exodus narrative is of an all-powerful supreme Dictator, who brooks no challenge, and is prepared to kill and destroy to get His own way. After all, it is a very old story reflecting the totalitarian political structures of the ancient Near-East. But then, the Sages responsible for the development of Judaism after the Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE, who created post-biblical Pesach observance, including the seder and the Haggadah, maintained this image of the Eternal One – and, with very slight modifications, the same image has survived to this very day. As we read in the Aleynu prayer, written by the Sages, initially, as part of the liturgy for Rosh Ha-Shanah, God is melech malchey ha-m’lachim, ‘the king above the king of kings’ – and ‘the king of kings’ was the greatest Imperial tyrant of his time. Liberal Judaism may have made the translation more gender-inclusive (Siddur Lev Chadash, p.520), so like elsewhere in our liturgy, the word ‘King’ is substituted by the word, ‘Sovereign’, but we’ve not actually tackled the issue of the Eternal One’s supreme ‘Sovereignty’.

At this point, one or two of you may well be thinking, ‘what’s her problem, God simply is a Dictator – that’s the whole point of God: to be all-powerful and in control of everything’. But is that really what you think? Is that really what we think? Consider the implications in the context of the Exodus story: The slaves were liberated from slavery to Pharaoh in Egypt to become the slaves of God. That is, indeed, what the text of the Torah tells us: Shalach et-ammi v’ya’avduni – ‘Let My people go that they may serve Me’ (Exodus 9:1b). The story of liberation is not about liberation at all: Rather, it’s about how one tyrant gets toppled by another tyrant, who claims the enslaved people as His trophy. Am I going too far? Well, again, it wouldn’t matter so much if it was just an ancient story; it wouldn’t be a problem if Rabbinic Judaism had not preserved and promoted this image of God; and we could treat it as merely a curiosity if it were not for the fact most Jews today – including most Liberal Jews – remain enslaved, if not to God, then to this image of God.

I, for one, could not be a religious Jew and could certainly not be a rabbi if I thought about God in this way. So, most of the time – not only at Pesach – I find that I’m at odds with the God portrayed in the Torah, in the Bible, in much of rabbinic writing, and in much of the liturgy. And yet, I am a religious Jew – and a rabbi. How is this possible? Rather than address this question directly, let me share some of my personal history: I was not raised to be religious. My mother, brought up in an orthodox family in Highbury, North London, had rejected orthodoxy on the grounds that it hadn’t caught up with modernity and discriminated against women, but she liked the home rituals and songs associated with Shabbat and the festivals. My father, who came from a progressive background in Vienna, responded to the Shoah that destroyed the world he grew up in, by rejecting every manifestation of a particular identity – including Judaism – as tribal and potentially lethal. So, although my mother was more committed to Jewish life, they both saw Religion with a capital ‘R’ as highly dangerous. You can imagine how shocked they were when I told them that I’d decided to study for the Rabbinate! They both thought I’d lost my reason. They both imagined I’d start telling them what to do Jewishly-speaking. They also thought I’d misunderstood the Jewish education I’d received from them; that being Jewish was primarily about challenging oppression and making the world a better place.

As it happens, I didn’t just leave home and decide to become a rabbi. I spent ten years being an active socialist – a Marxist, in fact – and I didn’t change course and begin a new journey into Judaism because I discovered religion; I didn’t. I became religious some way along that journey. But, while I started my Jewish journey in October 1983, when I began learning my Alef-Beit, the turning point for me actually came seven years earlier – although I didn’t realise it at the time – and it was this turning point that was responsible for me developing a very particular kind of understanding of religion, which does not revolve around the image of God as a supreme Dictator.

As most of you will know, Karl Marx made short shrift of Religion: Thinking primarily of Christianity, he called it ‘the opiate of the masses’. So, ardent Marxist that I was during my LSE years, I was curious to investigate how it was that the Africans enslaved in the Americas, fed on Christianity by their slave-owners in the hope that it would make them quiescent and accepting of their servile fate, transformed the religion they received into a radical clarion call for liberation. Sitting in Karl Marx’s seat in what was the old British Library during the Academic Year 1976-1977, writing my under-graduate dissertation on ‘The Role of Religion in North American Slave Resistance in the Ante-bellum Period’ changed my life. I learnt many things during that process, but the most important lesson was that Religion is not simply an instrument of oppression; in the hands of the oppressed, it can become a source of empowerment and liberation. When the slaves read the Exodus story, they not only translated the narrative to their own lives, they also received the message that they must go free.

So that was my starting point: The oppressed must go free. That was the beginning of my religious education as a young adult: Religion wasn’t just what the Religious establishments of the different religions said it was – and it wasn’t just what anti-religious individuals and groups said it was. It also had the potential to be something else. That’s one of the main reasons I decided to study for the Rabbinate – to be involved in developing that potential for Religion to be a liberating force in our lives, and to discover a God who wasn’t a Dictator. But it took quite a while to discover a God who wasn’t a Dictator. Fortunately, my encounter with Feminism that began during the year after I left LSE, taught me that there was an alternative to Patriarchal ways of thinking and acting, but once I started on my path into active Jewish life, I was so busy studying Hebrew, getting acquainted with Jewish texts, and learning the prayers, and all the different blessings that I didn’t have time to think about God! But then I decided to write one of my 4th year Jewish Religious Thought essays on Holocaust Theology under the guidance of Rabbi Albert Friedlander, Zichrono Livrachah, May his memory be for Blessing, and discovered that my questions were shared by others – and that there were so many more questions that I hadn’t yet considered.

We don’t have the time to explore all those issues now, but as I completed my pre-ordination rabbinic studies a year later, I was left with one big question that emerges out of Shoah Theology and is related to the Exodus story – and the way in which I have responded to that question has informed my way of thinking about God ever since. We ask: Where was God during those terrible twelve years, when six million of our people were murdered by the Nazis? We don’t ask: Where was God during the more than 200 years that our ancestors were enslaved to Pharaoh in Egypt? This suggests that we are asking the wrong question altogether. According to Rabbi Hugo Gryn, Zichrono Livrachah, May his memory be for Blessing, another one of my teachers, we should be asking not, ‘Where was God? – But rather, where was Man?’ He was right – our angst about the deeds perpetrated against our people should be directed against the perpetrators. But that’s not enough. That doesn’t address the problem of our ways of thinking about God, which lead us to say, ‘Where was God?’ in the first place. After all the assumption behind that question is that, whoever was responsible, God should have done something about it – and the assumptions behind that assumption, are manifold, principally – that God is an all-powerful Being and that this all-powerful Being intervenes in human affairs in general and the affairs of the Jewish people, in particular. It’s not surprising that we should think like that, of course – given the way in which God is portrayed in the Exodus narrative.

But perhaps, the problem is not so much the account of the Exodus in the Torah, but the way, following the early rabbis, we continue to read it. How would it be if each one of us really took the Haggadah seriously, and saw it as our obligation, ‘in every generation’ to imagine that we had personally come out of Egypt? How would it be if we imagined we were the black slaves in the Americas discovering the Exodus narrative? How would reading the story as if we were slaves – not free people – make a difference? Perhaps, if we read it from the slave’s perspective, desperate to be ‘free at last, free at last’, we would not be prepared to swap the oppressor that torments us for another tyrant – however benign. If we identify with the oppressed and long for liberation, God can only be the force in our lives that works for liberation. Once you know that freedom is possible, you cannot submit to any form of tyranny again.

So, rather than liberate us, the God portrayed in the Exodus story fails us – or rather we fail God. Is freedom so threatening that we have to turn our liberation from tyranny into acquiescence to the Divine? In 1995 I was asked to deliver the Jewish key-note lecture on the theme of ‘Speaking of God Today’ at the International Conference of the International Council of Christian and Jews, held in Budapest. Preparing for that lecture, I discovered the work of Marcia Falk, a feminist liturgist working in the United States. For Marcia Falk, God is not Melech Ha-olam, ‘King’ or ‘Sovereign’ of the Universe, high above us, but rather Eyn Chayyim, the Source of Life, who empowers us and works within us, and enables us to confront oppression (See: Marcia Falk, The Book of Blessing, Harper, San Francisco, 1996). What difference might it make to our reading of the Exodus story if we acknowledged God, not as Sovereign of the Universe, but rather as the Source of Life? What difference might it make to our lives? In the spirit of freedom this Pesach, may each one of us rise to that challenge. And let us say: Amen.

Rabbi Elizabeth Tikvah Sarah
Brighton & Hove Progressive Synagogue – Adat Shalom Verei’ut
13th April 2006 – 15th Nisan 5766