"We all worship the same God." While that aphorism bears a lovely sentiment that conveys only the best intentions, when we say it, we are minimizing the beautiful complexities of the different ways in which the world's religions understand God. The last 250 years or so of the Enlightenment have seen a proliferation of theologies in Christianity and Judaism. And wonderfully, there's been a great deal of engagement that allows philosophers from one religion to inspire those of another. While a survey of their ideas is far beyond the scope of this short kavanah, suffice it to say that some of the world's greatest minds have been engaged in the task. For Judaism, the first controversial thinker actually preceded the Enlightenment. Writing in the 12th century, Maimonides postulated that God is wholly other, separate from any physicality, and fully perfect; God is the very order that establishes the rules of [...]

For a while, in exasperation after my teenage opposition, my father would say, "Just do it because I said so!" As parents, we've likely had occasional recourse to that approach. The books of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers have that understanding of God in common. "Do it, because I am Adonai, your God!" But parents soon learn that, as our kids enter adulthood, they want and deserve a deeper explanation. "I'm asking you to do this (or more strategically: "suggesting that you do this") because these will likely be the consequences of you not following this particular path." That is the tone of Deuteronomy and many of the Prophets. Of course, just like parents, those who embraced this consequential view of God quickly discovered that even the promise of rewards or punishments brings unpredictable results! Like many of us, our ancestors longed for an ordered world where behaviors had reasonable [...]

It has been said, mostly by critics of Judaism, that the God of the Hebrew Bible is a vengeful God. Unfortunately, that anti-Jewish simplification undermines an appreciation of how our ancient text captures complex ideas of God. Our ancestors were far more nuanced. The beauty of the text is that it actually captures divergent opinions reflective of the historical circumstances in which the many authors found themselves. Not only do different books of the text offer different interpretations, but there are variations even within those books, sometimes from chapter to chapter, verse to verse.Each of the first two chapters of Genesis, in fact, present very different understandings of God. The first chapter's God is fully transcendent, a disembodied God that forms the world with speech alone. This chapter's author imagined a non-physical, distant entity that set time in motion and stepped back to watch creation unfold.The second chapter of Genesis [...]

One of the most beautiful and steamy love poems appears in the Hebrew Bible. No doubt, some of you have words from that poem on your ketubah or wedding ring: "I am my beloved's, and my beloved is mine." In Hebrew: אֲנִ֤י לְדוֹדִי֙ וְדוֹדִ֣י לִ֔י (Song of Songs 6:3). The ancient rabbis, though hardly Puritans, eschewed the literal sense of the poem and opted to read it as a parable for the relationship between God and Israel. They read the name of this coming Hebrew month— אֱלוּל —as an acrostic for the phrase quoted above; the first letter of each word spells the name of the month. Elul is the month directly preceding the High Holy Days, the time when the largest numbers of Jews (and perhaps their non-Jewish partners) find themselves in synagogue. Arguably, it is the time of the year when many of us, simultaneously, contemplate our own understanding of what [...]