Shalom my friends, Eliana Light here. Welcome back once again to the Light Lab Podcast. So glad that you are able to join us as we play with prayer and hold the gems of our liturgy to the light. I'm recording this at 10pm, which, for those of you who know me, and I'll tell you if you don't yet not really a night person, this is later than I usually stay awake, certainly the latest I have ever gotten my microphone out and my headphones on. But that's because I'm about to embark on some really exciting travel, at least for me, because I love conferences. Anytime we get to gather together, to learn to sing, to be to meet each other and be in community is exciting for me. So I'm doing this now, late at night, good to hear me headed tomorrow to a gathering that the Covenant Foundation is putting on, really grateful that they are supporting the first ever T'fillah Teachers Fellowship that the Light Lab is doing, bringing in 15 amazing fellows from all over the country to immerse in and explore our t'fillosophy, and what that means for themselves and what that means for the students that they teach. Then, after some lovely being with friends, I'm going to Hava Nashira, the incredible song leader and prayer leader gathering that really kind of kick started my song leader journey before I went to have a 10 years ago, I didn't know what a song leader was, or that it was a job you could have. And now it's my job and I love it so much. I'm so so excited. I'll be with Cantor Ellen Dreskin in person. We're going to miss Josh very much we're going to photoshop him into to the picture we've decided. But speaking of Cantor Ellen Dreskin. She was the one who first brought today's guest to my attention. Already last year she said, you know Rabbi Toba Spitzer has this amazing language around metaphor and God language and these different metaphors that might replace the dead metaphors that are prevalent in our liturgy. If you're like, what's a dead metaphor? What does this mean? Well she goes into it, in our conversation, our interview today. Rabbi Toba Spitzer has served congregation Dorshei Torah (correction- Dorshei Tzedeck) in West Newton since 1997. She is a past president of the Massachusetts Board of Rabbis, the co chair of the Massachusetts chapter of T'ruah, the rabbinic call for human rights. She is a popular teacher and writer on a wide variety of topics, including new approaches to Jewish theology, the sacred use of money in our everyday lives, and changing the conversation around Israel/Palestine. For more information about Rabbi Spitzer and her amazing book God is Here, you can visit Rabbitobaspitzer.net. Of course, we're going to link to it in the show notes. I have recommended this book to almost anyone and friends, you might know that I have a bit of a thing for God language and the way that she talks about it, weaving in such incredible philosophy but also her own life lived experience. Every chapter ends with practices, we're gonna get to experience one together on the pod but if you don't already have a copy of Goddess here, go check it out. I hope you enjoy the conversation that Cantor Ellen Dreskin and I had with Rabbi Toba Spitzer.
Welcome Rabbi Toba. So glad to have you here!
I am happy to be here!
And also welcome Cantor Ellen Dreskin, regular podcast co host, so glad that you're here and also that you made this interview happen.
I am particularly excited to be here today.
So excited. What an incredible group in this, I was gonna say zoom, but we're using this platform called Riverside now, which is a bit more of a mouthful, but so great to be on the Riverside, with all of, with both of you. Rabbi Toba, I want to start where we usually start here, which is when you were a kid, what was God to you? Not did you believe in God, but when you heard that word, what did you think that meant?
That's a great question. I have no idea. But I seem to have avoided the big man in the sky that you know, so many of my contemporaries, you know, got stuck with and I'm saying I don't know, because I know that I think I was very spiritually curious. As a kid, but it grew up in I grew up in a Jewish home. But without any God talk in it. My mother had sort of fled a somewhat dry and meaningless Orthodox upbringing, my dad had grown up Reform. And so we were not observant, but you know, we lit Shabbat candles and I, beginning after, in the summer after sixth grade, I went to a socialist Zionist summer cam, Habonim. And then also in sixth grade, we got involved in the Farbrangen Havurah, this was like circa 1974-75. So the very early days of the Hubble rom movement, this sort of funky alternative member led thing, so I think I always just say, I think I was exposed to a lot of different ways to connect to the Divine without it being called God. You know, and and Farbrangen was an interesting combination of the things, they just got whatever prayer book they could find. So it was like, these old orthodox prayer books that had no transliteration. So I would just like spend most of my time trying to keep up, you know, but the Torah discussions were very lively and alternative and people that were very serious. My guess is, I mean, I was a kid, so they look old, but I'm sure they were all their 20s and 30s. And, you know, we're very intent on, on what was going on. And so I think that really appealed to me as sort of intensity. Father was very connected to nature. So I think I got connected, you know, to a sense of the sacred in nature. And my, you know, and I was very intrigued by, you know, books about Native Americans. And I was, I think, intrigued by that path of spirituality. So I think in all these different ways, I, I got exposed to a sense of the Divine without a lot of actual God talk, but I was comfortable with it, I don't and so maybe it was a power a process of forest or something like definitely not a person. I think somehow I avoided that. I have a very distinct memory. I think I was maybe in 10th or 11th grade and one of my counselors at Habonim Camp said Toba? How can you be a socialist and believe in God? I said, I don't know but I do. That somehow I reconciled all of those things. I feel very blessed that I never had a sort of religious school experience that shut me down the way some of my contemporaries, you know, how that occurred with them. So I feel quite blessed in that in that regard.
Can you say maybe a little bit about how that turned into a path toward the rabbinate for you?
That's an you know, that's another great question. I so I entered rabbinical school when I was 30. I searched my talk about this a little bit in the book, but I, you know, I searched my journals for any like, you know, hint of rabbinical school and couldn't find it. I think my path to rabbinical school was much more about sort of community organizing and politics, at least, you know, sort of explicitly, I was sort of in the lefty world, I was not happy with what was going on. And, you know, in the sort of nonprofit lefty world in DC that I was a part of after college, I felt like organizations that spouted wanting to change the world but weren't treating their employees, my friends very well. And I remember hearing a speech by Martin Luther King, Jr. One of his not so famous speeches then. And I just remember thinking that's the language I want to be speaking like a morally grounded spiritual, not like Christian language, but a morally grounded, spiritually grounded language from which to do social change works. That's what led me to the rabbinate. I think it did not think of myself as a spiritual leader at all. I don't think I thought of myself as particularly spiritual. So I think that's what the five years of rabbinical school was about was getting more comfortable with that part of myself.
Yeah. And how did you find in rabbinical school, you were able to talk and learn about God more directly, or perhaps less so?
Yeah, that's so interesting. So I think it's very different now. So I entered rabbinical school in 1992. And I think, my classmates and I were sort of like, why aren't we talking about God more? I remember, it's totally different now. But I remember, I did, I took myself on a little retreat to a Quaker, Quaker retreat center, Pendle Hill, outside Philadelphia, and they were just showing me around, I was going to be staying in this little hut by myself. And I just asked them, What do you do here? And they said, Oh, you know, we've rented out to different people and seminary students come here, you know, to sort of do spiritual direction and spiritual development. And I was like, Oh, you could be a seminary student and be doing spiritual. This was not happening in Jewish seminaries, you know, in the early 90s. Now, now, there's spiritual direction, there's much more, but a friend and I actually started our own little our own little study, we call it mud wrestling with God. Like, it's like our own. I think we were born we wanted to be doing something. But yeah, it was sort of, we were talking about it. Obviously, we're reading Torah. We were reading rabbinic texts, but it wasn't part of our formation at the time. And I mean, again, that has really changed. I mean, I was in the first I was a rabbinical school and they first introduced any kind of chaplaincy training, like it was this was like the 90s was just starting. And the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College where I was, I think, was the first seminary to like, be doing that, you know, and again, it's not what I think common everywhere, but yeah, I mean, so it was probably happening more in Jewish Renewal worlds and maybe in the Lubavitch worlds but anything in between. It wasn't happening then. So yeah. But for me, I think I was very influenced and just really, I think led to the book ultimately, was Mordechai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism. And his, he talked about God a lot and was very adamant, you know, now talking about his writing in the 1920s, and 30s, and 40s, very adamant that a God concept had to make sense to people. I had to align intellectually as well as emotionally and spiritually. And so my search was like, okay, so what is the God language that's going to work for me and people like me, i.e. highly educated people grounded in science, you know, who are not going to believe things that don't make sense to them. So that I think I was intrigued with all of rabbinical school. And part of what I think brought me to the Reconstructionist movement was Kaplan and his willingness to wrestle with this, you know, we're talking about 100 years ago, but he was very, very forward thinking in that way.
Very much. And it sounds, I'm hearing themes of kind of a gap right in your upbringing, a gap between your spiritual inclinations that you really felt, and this thing we called God that we didn't really talk about. And then even in rabbinical school, the gap between we're learning about liturgy and we're learning Torah, but then we're still not talking about God. And I'm, I'm wondering, you shared a couple ways, but how else in rabbinical school and in your early rabbinate? How did you attempt to bridge that gap for yourself and for others?
I don't, uh, it's a good question. Great question. I, I think probably in retrospect, just by learning, you know, just by exposing myself, I remember, Rabbi Rami Shapiro came and did a mini course. And he was talking a lot about God to taking a mini course with him. You know, I was blessed to be in rabbinical school at the same time as Rabbi Shefa Gold. And so and she was running classes. So I mean, that for the school, she was on her own, doing, you know, doing so going with first I think part even though I didn't really identify as Jewish renewal, and I'm much more like a Litvak. I'm much more, you know, sort of, I guess, that's a funky and my personal aesthetic, I was drawn, actually, to people who were exploring these things. So I think that's, um, if I would have named it then, you know, I think I was just interested in intrigued, but I think that was, that was part of it. You know, and then some of it was explicitly learning. I, you know, and I really, again, I, as I said, I really entered rabbinical school coming from a social justice commitment. And again, there was nothing in any rabbinical school at the time, explicitly teaching about social justice and Judaism like that was not on the menu at all. And and now it is. So a classmate now now colleague of mine, Lina Zerbarini and I started our own, e did our own independent study, you know, Jewish liberation theology. So there was that aspect as well, not just the sort of about spiritual practice, but also about how, whereas there, you know, a theological grounding for doing social justice work in Judaism, I did a, Rabbi Arthur Wascow, was my first Torah teacher when I was 11. And then he was in Philly, when I was in rabbinical school, me still there. And, you know, I did an independent study with him. So I think was partly just search searching out opportunities for learning. You know, and again, I'm not saying the curriculum to deal with it at all. But I think I added the pieces that that I needed, as, you know, as I in those five years of study.
You mentioned earlier about when you were a child, and everything was in Hebrew, and you were you said, and you got really then I was just trying to keep up. And so I'm curious about the role of ritual in in your spirituality, and how that and the role of prayer has evolved for you.
Yeah. Again, I think I was drawn to it. I have a I have a very clear moment. I remember I think I was in eighth grade. And we had gone to Fabrangen, we didn't go for Shabbat, we went for High Holidays. So we weren't really members of Fabrengen. But my mother had started a, a parent-led religious school with Art Wascow. So we were connected to Farbrangen through Arthur, but we would go there for High Holidays. And I remember being at Kol Nidrei services, and pretty sure it was Kol Nidrei, and the service ended and some of the people were just sort of there and they had their Tallit, their prayer shawl over their head. And they were just like, in quiet afterwards. And I remember sort of like wanting to be there, but we're like, something that we really was yearning. And then we went home. It was clear night, I remember his very clear memory of standing in the bottom of my driveway, you know, in suburban DC, and thinking, Oh, I feel sort of cleansed. You know, I feel sort of like something has happened. So I knew ritual, you know, was, was powerful. I think I had my own rituals. I spent a lot of time in the woods with my dog. And I think that was a ritual for me. I went again, at this Habonim Camp, which was completely secular, but I was there in the 70s and on Shabbat afternoon, they first of all Shabbat was the first time I'd ever experienced real Shabbat was at camp and even though it's a secular Shabbat, Shabbat was different. It was quite magical. And, and the counselors would offer different things you could do in the afternoon and there was one called playing dead and what you would do you go to the little Sifira, the little library, which was basically a shack with some books, and they would play like bootleg tapes of Grateful Dead concerts. And there were like, and there were two rules. You couldn't talk and you couldn't fall asleep. And we'd lie there like, three hours, like listening. You know, it's always like, whenever I was, like 12 years old, but it was clearly like, this was a religious experience. It was a religious experience for the counselors who were like all of 19 and 20. And we were like, listen, so I, again, I think there are all kinds of things that were like, you know, were rituals. And again, I couldn't have named it at the time, but definitely were feeding, feeding something in me, you know, so yeah, playing dead, I still remember that it was great.
I feel like you're very, you know, open how wonderful that you had exposure to these innovative kinds of rituals. And, and always feel like you had the permission, which is not so normal, or usual, I guess, to go out to look outside the box and to bring things from outside the box back in and understand that it was all part of sounds like for you one thing.
Yeah.
You know, and I'm there.
No, I do feel blessed. And again, thinking back I think, you know, in my, I think my, my parents were probably on their own journeys. My mom certainly was, you know, and, and my dad and his way so, yeah, I think there was no box to be in, you know, and, and I think for that reason, even though I, you know, right after rabbinical school, I started going regularly to, you know, Buddhist meditation retreats. While I've learned other practices like Tai Chi and Buddhism, I never sort of had to, I mean, a lot of my friends, like, it was interesting, a number of my rabbinical school colleagues, you know, had sort of had periods of, oh, I was a Buddhist for a while, or I was a Wiccan or I was a Paegan, whatever, like they had gone out, or I was Orthodox, whatever they call it, like searching, and then come back in a way to like, liberal Judaism, and I never had to go that far. You know, I feel like because I was exposed, but didn't have to, like, reject anything. So it all, it all sort of felt integrated. And again, and I give, and I think being part Fabrangen and growing up is very progressive chavurah, and, you know, on Simchat Torah, like, we would just go take the tour and go in the middle of Mass Ave and DC, which if you've noticed, is a major street and just dance in the middle of the street. It wasn't like the police, or if I were shutting it down, and we just did it, you know, or, or when the when DC or there was a ballot measure to like abolish the tax on bread and milk, and they sang Hallel. So like, I was getting a very basic message that like, social justice, is connected to spirituality, spirituality is connected to social justice. And again, and as you said, as a ritual piece, we're going to say Hallel when this happens, so I was gonna let it really, I again, deeply grateful a lot of positive messages, you know, I think growing up connected to the more alternative Jewish scene in DC in the 70s. And then I came back to DC after college and reconnected in the early 80s was really quite a blessing.
That's really powerful. I'm also hearing from you something I've seen in my own life, like I say, not flippantly, and it certainly condenses at all, but that Reconstructionism and Kaplan, gave me an idea of God that I could understand and think about, and Renewal and Reb Zalman gave me ways to pray to that God, because it can be hard to pray to that God, if it's, if it's only intellectual. And so I'm wondering, I love these stories kind of, from your childhood and young adulthood and early rabbinate about about that particular gap, the intellectual and the spiritual, and maybe bring how that brought out an interest in God language for you.
Yeah, and I think that's, maybe that's what, I'll enter into talking about the book because I think that that leads right into, into God is Here. Yes, I think there was an intellectual piece because again, I agreed with Kaplan that, you know, people, you know, would see liturgy or see claims about the Divine and not be able to stomach it, and then just leave religion altogether. And I was sitting at my congregants, you know, and I was serving this, you know, highly educated community, in Newton, Massachusetts, and knowing how much an obstacle that liturgy, liturgy was the English translations and, and some of the God language. So which led me for a while to Process theology. So Kaplan, Kaplan was not a systematic theologian, but he knew the work of Alfred North Whitehead, who was, you know, who sort of founded what was called Process Thought. And then, followers of Whitehead started something called Process Theology, which is predominantly a Christian School of Theology. For a while, I was very interested in that, and I wrote a few articles, and I sort of thought I'd found the answer: God as process. And again, Kaplan referenced this, but it was a little more systematic in process theology. And I taught it. And I wrote about it. And I think there was that question early on, how does one pray to this, but there was a little bit of an answer there because if God is possibility or the sense of becoming, there is a way to connect to that. But I don't think I was taking that question as seriously because during all of this exploration, I was always, I was pretty comfortable with the traditional liturgy. It's not like I needed to make radical changes. I mean, I might switch the gender of God up, just keep things fun. But you know, and I explored, you know, Martial Martial Fox liturgy, which is a very imminent sense of the Divine. So I think I was thinking about prayer, but also just doing the prayers and do With my own I call them you know, mental liturgical gymnastics. Well, you know, while saying the traditional urges, liturgy, whatever was going on in my head. And then I came across this book, and I talked about this in the introduction, the first couple chapters of Goddess here. And I was familiar with the work of George Lakoff, who's a cognitive linguists, but I came across this book called AI as an other. And I think in the early 2000s, and the author makes the claim James Geary makes the claim, it doesn't make a claim, he summarizes really the work of cognitive linguistics beginning in the 80s, into the early 2000s. The claim that sort of as embodied humans, because of the way our brains work, we can really only apprehend reality through metaphor. So when we especially conceptual metaphor, so when we think about, or trying to access big things like time, or love, or life or emotions, we use metaphor. And metaphors are always grounded in our embodied experience. And in the beginning of the book, Gary uses this analogy of volcanoes, to talk about metaphor. So an active volcano, an act of metaphors and metaphor that, you know, as a metaphor, so I think the example I use in the book is a line from Mary Oliver poem, The Dark hug of time. So you read that and it's poetic, it's a little weird, and you know, the time can't really hug anybody. And that's what active metaphors Do they just get you thinking? Then Gary talks about dormant volcanoes, dormant metaphors, which is a metaphor when you hear it, you know, it's a metaphor, but you sort of, because you're familiar with it, you don't have to explore it. I think one example he uses is I'm up a creek without a paddle. So when I say that, you know, I'm not in a creek, or sitting in a boat without a paddle. But you also know what it means because it's it has meaning in our in our culture. And it finally talks about an extinct volcano and an extinct metaphors. And George Lake off. And Mark Johnson call these metaphors we live by, and an extinct metaphor is a metaphor that's so embedded in our experience in our consciousness, we have no idea it's a metaphor when we use it. And some of the examples of these are something saying something like, I see what you mean, which is grounded in the metaphor seeing is knowing and it's based in an early infant experience, that if you don't see something, it's not there. So seeing is knowing. So I see what you means means I understand you, it has nothing to do with visual sight. But people use it, even people without visual sight use that metaphor, because we all know it, you know, it's so grounded in our experience in our sort of collective experience. She's a very warm person, you know, comes from an Afghan from an infant experience of being held. And having, you know, sort of physical warmth translate into a sense of emotional connection. And like, often, Johnson postulated this in 1980, by looking at looking at language, and then later in the 90s, neuroscientists were actually able to see parts of the brain connecting, so that when a person, you know, thinks about kicking a habit, the metaphor of kicking a habit, the part of their brain that activates when they actually kick is activated, that actually, you know, sorry, the part of the brain that is activated, when you actually kick something is activated in that metaphor. So I suddenly realized, when I read this, ah, the goal is not to find the way to talk about God, it's not that God is a process, that's just a metaphor. And you can't actually have just one metaphor, you need lots of metaphors. And then I think we can come back to prayer, because different metaphors for the divine or for anything, speak to different aspects of our experience. And so what prayer might mean, you know, when I'm in crisis is very different than when prayer might mean when I'm joyful, or when I'm engaged in social change, work, you know, or when I'm joining in community, and so on. And each of those different experiences of prayer of ritual, might connect to a different metaphor for the divine. And so that really started this process that ended with the book. And so I started exploring different metaphors found that Jewish tradition is rich. With metaphors, which we have in our liturgy we have in our biblical texts, we I think we just weren't taking them seriously, maybe, or we were taking them seriously as poetry but not as actual ways to connect to the divine. And that's really what the book is, it's an attempt to say, Okay, what, what happens when we experience God as water, what happens when we experience God as rock, or as becoming, or as voice, you know, or as cloud, and then that led to new explorations. So that's sort of where I, where I ended up. So it really did move from me still, it still, it still happens in the head. It's still like an intellectual proposition about the metaphor, but then it has to really go into the realm of experience, which is why in the book, each chapter, each metaphor is accompanied by practices because we have to really come to a body. The metaphor has to move out of the head and into our bodies and into our experience.
I'm so intrigued with the words that you're using, that I find different from what we normally hear when people are talking about God. Specifically, that we often ask people and Eliana and I are, I think on the same page here Asking people do you believe? As opposed to, and I know Eliana loves this question too, it's great to change the question to what is your experience of God? Or how is your relationship with God? As opposed to do you believe? Because then I can say, my relationship is tumultuous and filled, you know, just fraught with anxiety. And it's still a relationship.
Right. Or even I'd like to have a relationship, right? Maybe you don't have one, but you'd like to, you know, that's another which is, again, not very distant, right. For a lot of people, they like to have a relationship and even know where to start, you know, but it's not I totally agree. I think there's like 2000 years of most of mostly Christian scholastic debate that has sort of infected and I use that term advisedly. I mean, it transferred, and this debate translated to Judaism and Islam as well. But I don't know for sure. My guess is the roots are more in the Christian Church, of debates, and then, you know, and fill in philosophy, sort of Western philosophy about God's existence, you know, and needing to prove. Whereas if you go to our most ancient texts, they are not proving anything they're talking about their experience, you know, they're there, you know, in both biblically and rabbinically, I think the, you know, a little bit in the, in some of the rabbinic texts, which are probably later and already exposed, and maybe it's maybe an infection came from Greek philosophy, I'm not sure exactly where it came from, probably from Greek philosophy originally, over the past few 2000 years, belief has been at the center, you know, and I think part of the goal of my book is to put that aside, and I'm quite explicit about that, to tell people, I'm not asking you to believe anything, but to open ourselves up to experience and to accessing that experience. And often when I'm teaching this, people will say, are you saying g?d is a metaphor? I'm saying, No, g?d is a realm of experience that's probably beyond my ability to articulate. I'm what I'm arguing is that metaphor, we can only access that through metaphor. We can only access time through metaphor, we can only access love, through metaphor, right? And do you believe in love is not a very useful question, but how do you love? Who do you love? When do you love? Those are interesting questions. And I think similarly, with you know, when talking about the realm of the sacred when we shift the metaphor, we shift the questions and then the questions become much more fruitful.
May I take a quotation from you?
Please!
About metaphor that I think is where there and if you wanted to add anything on to it. You say on God, religion and metaphor you say, I would insist, however, that models of God are not definitions of God, but likely accounts of experience of relating to God with the help of relationships we already know.
I don't think that's, is that Sally?
That is Sally McFague, theologist.
Yeah, yeah, that's not my, I just want to be clear. It's not my quote. Yes, Sally McFague is a Christian theologian who writes about metaphor. Yes, yes, yes, we're talking about language to articulate our experience. We should be. We're just going back to Kaplan, I don't quote Kaplan in the book. But that's basically what Kaplan said, he said, we can't do any more than really talk about our own experience, which doesn't mean, the Divine is real. I mean, it's a huge realm of human experience that we can't dismiss, I really believe that. But ultimately, metaphor is speaking to our experience. You know, in the example I give is the example. The metaphor of time is money, which is a very dominant metaphor, in our culture, time is a precious resource, or time is a money, you know, time is money all over our language, we buy time, we save time, we waste time, we spend time. And we feel it, we don't just use those words, right? We're sitting in a doctor's office, you know, waiting in our, you know, past our appointment time, we feel like we're wasting time. But time is not a precious resource, time is not money,you know, that's silly. But, but we don't need to believe it is to experience it as that you know, and it's an it's a metaphor that shapes our lives, and deeply impacted. It entered our culture a few 100 years ago, it didn't used to exist, it doesn't exist in every culture. So that's the power of a metaphor to shape our experience. So it's, I think, sometimes people can be dismissive of what you're just talking about our experience, you're not talking about God. And I'm saying no, like these metaphors are ways to get at like some of the deepest part of our experience. But we need the metaphor, and metaphor has the power to shape our reality. So if our dominant metaphor for God is as a distant tyrant, like, what does that say? Lik, what are we saying about Godly power? What are we saying about the Divine? That's our only metaphor that's sort of problematic. And maybe there are other metaphors that you know, help us access power in other parts of our experience in more wholesome ways.
Part of what I think is incredible about the book and the work that you've been doing, right, it's first saying, once we see these as metaphors, it kind of lets us play with all of the different colors in the crayon box. And look at all these amazing crayons that we haven't really used for many years, that are still a part of our tradition. And that what you're what you're doing is radical in in the way that you're sharing it, but of course, if we look at Jewish history, it's not like we have so many people saying, well actually, when we call God, King, we're being literal. So like, even last night, and I just want to share this, because knowing that we were having this conversation coming up was really incredible. I am learning with a hevruta Olat Reiyah, which are essays on prayer from Rav Kook. And they're really incredible. Lots of mixed metaphors with Rav Kook. But last night, he was in the book, he was talking about the difference between prayer and Torah. But here, this is an English translation by Rabbi Mike Fewer than I'm getting off of Sefaria, and we'll link it in the shownotes. This is why the sages permitted descriptions of the Holy One in prayer, because they are a fit aid in feeling the impression of those truths, which are already clear and revealed. And the soul's feeling is best stirred by these descriptions, in that humanity is a physical creature. Sometimes an image which is unrefined in and of itself is precisely what awakens them. Right? We're physical creatures with bodies, the language that we put to our experience of God is going to feel like an of this world language and right, it's not just Rav Kook, it's Anim Zemirot, saying, All the prophets only saw images of You. And it's the Kaddish, where we say anything we could say about God is le'eilah min kol birchata v'shirata, right? Beyond a blessing and song. So I'm wondering if you see other points, where you, you connect your offering of metaphor, not separate from the flow of Jewish history and thought, but within the flow of Jewish history in thought.
Oh, for sure. And I think even much earlier than that, there's a pretty early Midrash that says it's a comment on, a Midrash, on the giving of Torah in Exodus chapter 20. Where the Divine is addressing the entire you know, Israelite community and says, I'm Anochi Adnoai Elohecha, which is singular, I am your, I am your God personally, you're, you know, you individually, God who took you out of Egypt. And the Midrash goes on to say, you know, the Israelites encountered in a God at at Sinai as a scribe and at the sea as man of war. And, you know, they just go on to like, talk about these different, but it's just one God. You know, so already the rabbis are saying we understand that our language about the Divine is shaped by human experience, and they go on us as I think crazy, I can't believe they use things they say, the same Midrash goes on to say, it's as if there was a statute. So they're linking God to a statue, which is very interesting, like this is why maybe written during Roman times, this God as a statue, and 1000 people see it, and each person feels like it's looking directly at them. So this Midrash is two things. One is our experience of the Divine is shaped by what's happening in the moment. And the Israelites needed different things, what they needed at Sinai, and what they needed at the crossing of the se, and what they needed at different times was different. And it's deeply personal. So how you experience the Divine and I experienced the divine in you and experience the divine, like were, you know, that is deeply personal. That's that's a relatively early rabbinic text. So and I think the whole notion of reading things literally is very modern. And that's the problem. You know, I was admonished my congregants, you know, y'all reading the Bible, like, you know, in a sort of very Baptist way, you know, which is a very hyper literal way. Note, no, no, no offense meant to Baptists. But just there's an American English way of reading the Bible, that's not a traditional Jewish way, which is to read it through layers and layers and layers of Midrash and whole notion of literal thinking is relatively modern, you know, so when the rabbis entered into the Torah, they were they had that sense of play, they made these outrageous Midrashim. So I think, and they know, they didn't have language like metaphor, you know, this kind of technical language, but I think that's what they were doing. They were they were just getting into it and playing and certainly the Mystics did that as well. So I feel very strongly this book sort of was channeled through me, I don't take a lot of, you know, I take some credit for shaping it. But it really is going back. And I think the only place I would differ a bit from some of the more modern commentators, like Rav Kook, or Kaplan or even Maimonides, is there's a, there's a tendency to diminish the metaphoric aspect, or the physical aspect to say, well, God is actually something very abstract that we can't actually apprehend and unfortunately, the only thing we can do is use our bodies and use the physical to get at it. And maybe this is the more feminist part of me, but I want to say like, that's true that that makes me sad, that that that layer in of the commentary, because I think what the the most ancient parts of our, of our tradition that the folks who wrote the oldest parts of the Hebrew Bible understood was, we encounter God right here and it's nothing less lesser about that. And you can't separate the spirit and the body, we are embodied creatures. And, and even our categories of abstract and physical or spiritual and embodied or are just made up categories. So I, you know, it's all, you know, at the level of a quark, if I were, you know, if we were all quarks, I don't know what we'd be saying, but we wouldn't be seeing separate bodies, you know we'd be, we'd be on a completely other level of, of experience. So, to me, a lot of these, most of the metaphors in the book are biblical, they're not, they're not modern or even rabbinic, there's one rabbinic metaphor in there. It's to go back to a very earth based culture, you know, tribal culture, that of the, you know, the folks who wrote the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, who I think really did encounter divinity, in nature, in water, in rock, in cloud, in, in the vibrations of sound. And words in any way, diminishing that or saying that that was somehow less than the actual God, that God is really abstract. And these are just ways to, to get to it. So that's I think what I'm trying to do is sort of go a little bit against that sort of intellectualized scholastic tradition, which you can see in Rav Kook, you can see, you know, I think ever since Maimonides, you can see it, sort of an embarrassment about the earlier texts and embarrassment about the nature imagery and the embodied imagery. And I think there's nothing to be embarrassed about, I think it's beautiful. You know, and it gives us access.
When I'm teaching, and students would say, or, and I think I still want to say, well, I don't believe in God, because you know, that whole story about God creating the world in six days, or, you know, that's not at, or the parting of the Red Sea, they point to the big God miracles of Torah. And what I have realized over the years is, for me, it was never that far a stretch to take Torah and prayer metaphorically, because I said, you don't even have to get to the six days, the minute it says in the first three verses of Torah, God's said, to me, that's the first that's the first, Oh, this has to be metaphorical. Because God doesn't have a voice box and lungs, and you know, so even the word said, has to be taken as a metaphor. And that's, I tried to keep that in my mind all the time. And I confess that when I got towards the end of your book, and perhaps you said it at the very beginning, and I wasn't listening, but at the end, when you said something along the lines of even the man in the sky, which everybody says, I don't believe in God, because I don't believe in that, or that King, that even the man in the sky is just a metaphor. And this is after the chapter on fire in the chapter on water. And, and, and yet, I was so astounded and relieved and excited and happy to share. Hey, just that's just a metaphor, too. That's just a metaphor, too. But I had no difficulty. I found myself surprised that duh, in that way.
It's an extinct metaphor. It's deep in our conscious, if you're if you come out of the Abrahamic religions, it's just very deep in our consciousness, and you have to do work. And again, it's not to get rid of it. It's really important. I mean, at the beginning, I am critical of that metaphor for, you know, this, because it's sidetracks a lot of people but the reality is metaphors aren't bad unless they lead to, you know, unwholesome action. But, but if any, there's any one metaphor we say stuck in becomes idolatrous, so that really, you know, it's the additive principle, I think, I love the analogy used, Eliana, is the crayons in the crayon box. Like, let's you know, why we recolor only with blue when we have, you know, whatever the original box was 54, you know, colors, and yes elements, and that's, that's the thing, people because I've taught this material people set me up, that's not really God. And I know what they're saying. They're saying, my, really God is that, the God that knows, acts, judges, loves, does, you know, all those human actions and if it's not that and it can't be God, because they're so wedded to that metaphor, unconscious, completely unconsciously. That you know, so I think the first step is to sort of start to see that that's a metaphor, peel it off a little bit. And then I'm sort of asking people just to enter into the other metaphors, try them out, see what happens. And what I found is that when people do that, you know, they, these other pathways really do open up. You know, and sometimes it's nice for God to be a big human, maybe not a king, but you know, maybe a parent, or a lover or a teacher. Those are beautiful metaphors, I don't want to get rid of them. I just those they don't work all the time. In every situation. Other metaphors work better. So it's, it's good to have, it's good to have the whole crayon box at our at our disposal.
Why we hang on to those to the ones that we can easily get rid of, is puzzling to me. May I ask, where does in your thinking today, or in metaphorical thinking, does process theology come back in for you, and I also wanted to ask you about non-duality that I know the Rabbi Jay Michaelson has written a book about it. How does that come into your thinking?
Yeah, so process is in the book, it's the the chapter on becoming I sort of treated as another metaphor. And it's a very explicit metaphor in the Torah, you know, God is eheyeh asher ehyeh, I will be that I will be. And so in that chapter I explore this notion of that's probably the one metaphor I explore that's not concrete. But the notion of God as possibility, as becoming, I think, that speaks to a lot of people. And it's and it's part of our reality, it's part of physical reality that you know, that we're constantly in the process of becoming our you know, our bodies are shedding cells and new cells are getting added, and, you know, so. So I explore. I don't go as deep as I do, as in my articles about process theology, but it's there in the book, and in that chapter. I'm not that interested in it, maybe I could say, because I think, for me, entering into the different metaphors is more important. And I think some of the metaphors, I think, so duality is the notion that I'm here and God is over there, or that God is somehow separate from the created world that you know, that's part of classic, classic theology, I would say, certainly, Christian and Jewish, I can't speak to Islam with much authority, but I think it's still coming from the metaphor of God as a person, I think, is the problem. I think the problem of duality is a metaphor problem. So for example, once we shift to met the metaphor of God is water. Very famous statement. In the early you know, very beginning of the of the Torah, the Bible, you know, that humans are created, but B'tzelem Elohim, in the Divine Image, you know, some medieval Christian art took that very literally, God must look like us, you know, if God if we're creating God's image, that means, you know, God looks like a white man, you know, European man in the DaVinci, and other people's paintings. But what if God is water? You know, then it means something totally else, then it means we're 70% water like we're God is us, we are God. Same thing, you know, with God is rock. I quote a, the Christian theologian who talks about God is Earth and Earth is in us were made of minerals. So I don't know is that non dua? Is that dual? I have no idea. But I find it dualism a little bit abstract, and an attempt, I think, in some sort of Neo Hasidic realms, which, which some of my teachers come from and I it's it's been important work. There's, I think there's a metaphor of God as one or oneness that is being held up as a definition. I personally am not interested in definitions of God, I'm interested in metaphor, sometimes I actually need God to not be me. And that's okay. You know, non dualism really can't deal with with, with pain and suffering as much. It's, it's hard. It's hard to say this is all God and something terrible just happened to me, you know, so what does that what does that even mean? But, you know, as I talked in the book, and if you'd like, I can read that little part. You know, God is water was enormously helpful to me when my spouse was dying of cancer. And that metaphor was really helpful. But saying everything is God would not have been helpful in that moment actually, would have been sort of insulting. So I don't think there's any one size fits all I think we need different metaphors and different times. Does that answer your question?
It does, I'm very interested in it because I'm thinking also about what you said about your original inclination towards social justice. And so I'm find myself wanting to come back and ask you now about what metaphors work for you in a social justice sense. I asked because, for me. process theology and non dualism helps me to think about, oh, if I, if waters are good God metaphor for me, and I'm 70% water, then the part of me that is doing social justice work, is kinda like you might say, you know, God flowing through me in that sense, or process that the God that tzelem that is within me, the God form in me. My actions are influencing the whole process of the universe, whether they be large or small, yeah, in certain ways, and just how active I can be and accept my own responsibility for God's and the universe's positive evolution.
I think there's not one metaphor and I'll just tell you what I touched on in the book, I think in the water chapter, I actually do I use, I use water as the metaphor to address how do we talk about godly power if we don't want to use the, you know, the metaphor of God as a king and that kind of power, which is coercive power, the power to make other beings do Your will. Water is incredibly powerful. So I do I actually think it's useful metaphor, and I explore that there and the notion of a line and in the Bible biblically, the prophets use, you know, sort of justice as a fluid and the metaphor of, of God and justice is a fluid and how do we align ourselves with a godly flow? That's one. When I had I was, I think afraid of it. But I, when I decided I had to look at fire, I had to look at all the parts about God getting really angry. And in the Tanakh and Hebrew Bible, and God gets angry when injustice is done. So I had to look at anger. As a white person I, you know, had I was looking at the rage of African Americans in the summer of 2020, when I was writing that chapter and, and then, you know, and honoring that anger and figuring out how was that kind of anger, which sometimes erupts and fire that's can be even self destructive, but, but can't be, you know, diminished. So fire I think, another important metaphor, when we talk about our rage at injustice, and our necessary, sometimes necessary disruption to create something new, I think sometimes, you know, would say, sometimes we wait, folks want to keep everything very nice and friendly. And we're not as open as we should be to anger and rage, and maybe some necessary destruction that has to happen. So that. that can be an important metaphor. And I talk a little bit about rock, God is rock, you know, when I was visiting folks who are really for no reason sitting in jail in 2017, 2018, because of their immigration status, and just their incredible faith that kept them grounded in like, really horrific conditions, you know, and the sense of God as their rock and rock as a powerful image, you know, for oppressed peoples over the over the centuries. So I don't think there's one metaphor, I think, again, which part of the experience are we talking about? Are we talking about encountering suffering? Are we talking about what inspires us to do change? Are we talking about how, you know, oppressive forces operate in the universe? And how do we address them? So water, fire, rock, all of those I have found to be quite, quite powerful. And yeah, I think the idea here can also be beautiful in the sense of what you know, what are we aspiring to? What, what, how do we become our best selves? How do we help our society become its best self. So I think all of those are, are a piece of it.
I want to take us back just for a minute to thinking about a person who is perhaps holding on to that metaphor of God is King, God is person. I'm thinking about a session I did with families and a young man who said, God is a puppet master controlling the world, and I don't believe in God. And as we said, it was so hard for me to say like, well, what if God was something else? But I also think those questions, especially from like, middle schoolers that we might be working with, is often about what God has the power to do, and what God has the power to make change in the world? Because either God is all powerful, and can act in the world as God acted in the world in Torah times. If so, then God isn't using God's power to make the world better. So what's up with that? But if not, why are we praying and reading about God anyway, if God doesn't actually have the power to do anything? And I feel like that's the place where a lot of kind of middle schoolers in their spiritual development and really in their development as people where things are like black and white, they're one thing or another thing. And it often takes years right for someone to have a more complex or complicated or nuanced understanding. And yet, this is when the kids are in our classes. And this is when the kids are in the B'nai mitzvah tutoring. And sometimes I feel like among educators, we get this feeling like, well, we have to help them figure it all now, because there's no guarantee that they're going to walk into a Jewish space again, when this is over. So we have to, we have to do it now. I'm wondering, yeah, your thoughts on education, how we talk about God with kids? And that idea of what does God have the power to do? How does that show forth in your work?
Yeah, and I'm hoping that the next version of my book will be at a young person's version, I need to work on that. That's my next project. I think I would suggest that if a Jewish educator or any educator, religious educator is educating kids, that the the God of the Torah is all knowing and all powerful, they are actually not reading the text and they are teaching it very poorly. I mean, the Torah is extremely clear within the first six chapters, that God creates things and then has no idea what's going to happen. You know, and by chapter six, you know, we've gone from the chapter one, everything's good, God loves the creation, everything's good. Chapter six, oy vey! What did I do? This God talking, right? I made these humans and they're completely evil, like, you know, and, and I've got to start all over again. So God creates humans, humans have free will they make bad choices, or they make a choice whether it's bad or not, we can debate and then from there, humans go and do horrible things. So the Torah is extremely clear. We are given choice. God does not have that kind of power again, that all the all powerful all knowing whenever I think that comes from Greek philosophy, it does not come from the Torah, starts to edge in into rabbinic texts, but it's not the Torah. So if someone is, so I have, so I think the Torah is being taught improperly, I would say flex sort of Torah malpractice. So if the towards being taught properly than kids, then I would turn it around that I say this to kids, if kids say why did God do this? I said, I don't know what God does or doesn't do. The Torah was written by humans. question I would ask is why would someone write the story this way? What What's the story about? I mean when I study Bereshit, you know, the Creation story with with seventh graders on the way to bar mitzvah, I'm like, okay. You know, I tell the kids about a rabbinic debate, you know, Hillel vs Shammai, humans should have been created, should never been created. What do you think? I mean, what do you think? Is the Torah telling us? Should we have been created or not? Like we've been debating this for like, 2000 years? That's what we should be engaging kids with? Not can God do this regard to that? So that's one answer. I think we teach Torah properly keep should keep kids minds open, because because the Torah is actually much more complex. The second thing I would say, and this is an insight from process theology, process theology points out that the kind of power usually attributed to the Divine is called coercive power. And coercive power is the power to get other people to do what I want them to do. It's the kind of absolute power that most humans most people don't wield. But perhaps emperors in ancient times didn't wield that, i.e. they could actually put you to death for no good reason. And that was always the kind of power that God was imagined as having process theology says, actually, that's impossible, because if God has all that power, then other creatures have no power. And then the very word power becomes meaningless. Because then because power means the ability to affect change. So that kind of power actually doesn't exist on a cosmic level. Process theology suggests that God has something called persuasive power, which in the water chapter, I talk about water having, you know, water runs over things and smooths them, runs to Earth and creates a canyon. It's it's constant power, it's pressure, it can be subtle, it can be overflowing, it's but it's the kind of power that a teacher exerts, or a parent exerts, you know, so you teaching a kid can't make them study Hebrew, you can, you know, encourage them, you can, you know, you can incentivize them, you can maybe punish them if they don't, I don't know, but you can't make them. And that's, and that's actually what power is. And so that's another way to think about godly power. And I would say, to a young person or an older person, you know, the the Torah begins with a choice and it ends with a choice. I think the Torah is very clear about the kind of power that the Divine wields, it's persuasive power. The first humans are given the choice, you know, gain consciousness or not, they decide to gain consciousness. At the very end of Deuteronomy, there's Moses saying to the people, I've put before you a choice, blessing or curse, life or death, it's up to you, no one's going to make you do anything. It's up to you, you might suffer enormously if you make the right choice, not individually as a species. Here we are, we have reached, you know, we are reaping the fruits of our series of bad choices, you know, and endangering life on the planet. That's the kind of power that the Torah thinks the Divine has. What kind of power created this universe? I don't know, like that. That's sort of that's above my paygrade. I have to turn to a physicist to answer that question. So I think if we're really honest about the texts, they're actually great for these kinds of conversations. It just it's these other, it's these dominant metaphors that aren't in the text have been dominating our thinking dominating our teaching. And I think really, just, I don't know perverting it, almost perverting you know what, what the actual teachings are. So I think we have to reclaim them. That's my little diatribe.
I mean, I'm so grateful for your diatribe. And I'm also grateful for a forthcoming version of of God is Here for young people.
Another 10 years, but hopefully one day talking to you about that.
I'm wondering kind of as we around the corner, towards the end of our conversation, but more learning because listener, I hope that you will go get a copy for yourself of God is Here, we'll put a link to do that in the show notes. Of course, I found it really powerful. Just to say a little personally, I've been in a place of feeling insecure, insecure and unmoored in my life. And I had put down the book. And then I was like, sitting in a hotel room, having COVID, rethinking all my life decisions, and I open up the book, and it's the eheyeh chapter. And I almost threw the book across the room. I'm like, This is too on the nose. I guess I needed this. And I have found those practices really helpful. I'm wondering right now for you, is there a metaphor, or a practice that is calling to you, or that is feeling particularly resonant for you right now. And I'm wondering if you could lead us and our listeners in a practice that we could do together?
I don't think I ever am, like, hanging out in one metaphor, you know, at any particular time. I think it's more what's going on in the moment. You know, I do spiritual direction monthly. And sometimes, you know, my spiritual director who I, you know, played with these metaphors a lot with her as I was writing the book, you know, will sort of ask me, What is God in this moment? I never know until I say, you know, and sometimes it's very human, like, oh, I need God to hold my hand, you know, or sometimes the image comes to me of rock or water. Why don't I do a chant with you all and, constantly coming back to what we were talking about Ellen sort of, you know, dual non dual and a different kind of different way of approaching that. So, when my spouse Gina was in her last months, I didn't know was her last months of life but I knew it was, the end was approaching, she had she had breast cancer, metastatic cancer. There was a chant by a chant of a verse from Isaiah the the music written by my colleague, my teacher, my friend, Shefa Gold, and in Hebrew it's ki ta'avor bamayim itcha ani uvaneharot lo yishtafucha. Which means when you pass through the waters I am with you. I won't let the rivers overwhelm you. So I was writing, I was working on the water chapter and learning this chant, and Gina was you know, dealing with with chemo and all the horribleness of that, and I said okay well if God is the water, then what does it mean? And in the I in this verse is God speaking through the prophet when you pass through the waters I am with you I won't let the rivers overwhelm you so, you know God has capital our reality these are the waters that I'm in, they're waters that Gina and I would not choose to be in their overwhelming waters and what's the promise here? The promise is that even in the waters the Divine is with me and it will not let allow me to become overwhelmed. And so the question becomes not how do I handle this or or you know, God, why are you doing this to me? Or why is this happening to me, it's, wow, how do I navigate this? How do I keep my head above water? And you know, and that's how I find that a useful question. You know, how do I navigate this? So let me just do that is with your permission I'll do the chat I can send you guys the link to that if you'd like to link to it on Rabbi Shefa's page. So it goes like this in and as we chanted just you know, if there's anything that's feeling overwhelming, to you to see, see where the chat takes you. Ki ta'avor bamayim itcha ani, itcha ani. Ki ta'avor bamayim itcha ani, itcha ani. Uvaneharot lo yishtafucha, lo yishtafucha. Uvaneharot lo yishtafucha, lo yishtafucha. When you pass through the waters, I am with you. Yes, I am with you. When you pass through the waters, I am with you. Yes I am with you. I won't let the rivers overwhelm you. I will be with you. I won't let the rivers overwhelm you, I will be with you. And if we were really doing that practice, we'd sit and chant for 5 to 10 minutes. But that's the that's the chant. And I find that a really powerful practice in those moment. I'm not feeling it the second but in those times, if you're one is feeling a little bit overwhelmed or wondering how you're gonna make it through turbulent waters, it's a beautiful practice.
Oh, thank you so much. Yes, thank you so, so much Rabbi Toba for this beautiful and inspiring and meaningful conversation. I think it's one I'll be returning to again and again. Thanks for joining us in the Light Lab today.
My pleasure. Really great to talk with you both.
And thank you, Ellen, as always. And thank you so much for listening. Our podcast is edited by Christy Dodge, thank you Christy. Our show notes are done by Yaffa Englander, thank you Yaffa. You can find us on social media at the light.lab. Visit our website at light lab.co. To follow along with the copious shownotes, learn more about what you have been hearing about in this podcast so far and check out all of our past episodes. We are rounding the corner soon on our Amidah journey, so if you need to catch up, definitely take a listen there and we hope to be learning with you again very soon. Bye y'all.
