how involved is God?

[cellio]

Well, all right. Maybe I will write more tonight. (I was going to watch West Wing, but Dani has already gone to sleep.)

I suspect that most people who believe in God believe in a God who intervenes, who (potentially) responds to individual prayer, who involves himself at least a little bit in each person's life. I'm not really any different here except to the extent that we might differ in degree. But there are problems with believing this.

We've all heard people say things like "it's a miracle I was running late and missed my flight on that plane that crashed". Some of those people are in fact attributing it to a miracle -- divine intervention. But I can't accept that in those cases. If God wanted you to miss your flight, doesn't that mean that God wanted the people who were on the plane to die? If you go down this path, then every death, every injury, every setback has to have divine origin, because you can't credit God with the good parts without also blaming him for the bad parts. And we become nothing more than puppets.

One standard hedge for this problem is to look for the hidden good in bad situations. Sure, sometimes it's there, and it's happened to me -- getting laid off only to get a better job, breaking up with someone only to find my life going in better directions that wouldn't have been possible within the relationship, etc. But it's hard to see hidden good all the time; some things are just bad no matter how you spin them.

On the other hand, if God is aloof and completely uninvolved in our affairs, then why bother to pray? Are we just fulfilling commandments to pray in certain ways because God will smite us if we don't? Yes, religions have been built around intimidation alone, but I don't think of myself as belonging to one of them.

Maimonides believed that God set the world in motion, including "programming in" certain miracles ahead of time (like the parting of the Sea of Reeds), but that he doesn't exert any control now. I don't understand Maimonides well enough yet; I can't tell if he's saying that God's preprogrammed world includes certain rules, like "prayer of this sort elicits this response", or if that's something I'm just reading into it. Any acceptable solution, both to me and to Maimonides, has to preserve free will. There's a difference between "if people pray [X] then [Y] will happen" and "people will pray [X] and [Y] will happen". We were given commandments and told to do them; I think that means God wants us to choose to do them of our own free will, else he could have just made robots.

Pre-programmed rules sound reasonable intellectually, but when I pray every morning and ask (among things) that a certain friend be healed of her cancer, I don't think I'm just activating a rule that might or might not produce the desired outcome. I think I am actually petitioning God, who might (or might not) take action as a result of that petition. But if I believe that, then I am forced to believe that if my friend doesn't recover then it's because God wanted her to be sick, and I don't want to believe that.

Of the Jewish prayer that is petitinary (rather than praise or acknowledgement), the vast majority is communal petition. There is very, very little of the form "please do such-and-such for me". (And, you'll note that the rewards and punishments spelled out in the Torah are largely communal -- crops, strength of the nation, land, and so on.)

I guess it's the old immanent-versus-transcendant debate. I believe God is both, even though that's hard to reconcile, and even though I'm not yet able to answer some of the consequences of that, like why one person was on that plane and another wasn't. But, I am convinced, I have experienced the immanent God, so I can't accept a God who is never involved. (No, I haven't heard voices or anything like that -- but I am convinced that my path to Judaism had an external origin and that I got some nudges along the way.)

Maybe I should actually go find a copy of Kushner's Why Bad Things Happen to Good People, which I have never read.

This doesn't keep me up at night, but it is an as-yet-unaddressed issue in my theology, and every now and then something reminds me that it's there.

Comments

[cellio]

I agree that we can't expect to understand God; the gulf is too great. We can't just blow the question off, though, because we need to tackle a subset of it: what is my proper relationship with God?

Because I believe one can have a relationship (beyond "just do this because that's the law"), I can't believe in a completely transcendant God like Maimonides did. The hamster analogy below is very good, and matches much of my thinking. (I'll comment more there.)

But I also don't believe in the degree of immanence needed to support the "God saved me from that disaaster" approach. I, too, twitch when I hear people say things like that. There is a flip side to that coin that the speaker usually hasn't thought about. (Actually, I don't know what's worse: when people don't think about it or when they do and come up with things like "AIDS is God's punishment for homosexuality".)