On the first day of Rosh Hashanah, I spoke about Sukkot. Sukkot offers an incredible opportunity to bring more joy, gratitude, and inclusion into our lives. I spoke about how our sukkot tables and our congregation often don’t reflect the true diversity of our community, mentioning in particular the children of interfaith parents, Jews who are not white, and people who are struggling to put food on their tables each day.

I then challenged you to consider what elements of diversity are missing from your own lives. And I invited you this year to build a sukkah, and invite those people to eat in it. 

On the second day I spoke about Simchat Torah. How we are the People of the Book, members of a religion whose foundation is a book. And we have interacted with God and one another through the study of books for millenia. But we are holding books this morning in a city in which only 10% of the public school students are reading at or above grade level. So we, and our friends here at Breakers Covenant Church International, are partnering with a public school, Palmer Park Preparatory Academy, in the school’s literacy tutoring program designed for volunteers like you and me. I invite you to become a tutor, to bring hardback books for Kindergarten through 2nd graders to the synagogue on Simchat Torah, and to commit to our own learning, too. I encourage you to study our sacred texts, even, or especially, when we don’t think we have time to do so.

This morning I am going to talk about Yom Kippur. But not with a focus on teshuvah or forgiveness, but with a focus on God. We read about the High Priest’s attempts to approach God, and according to the Mishnah, Yom Kippur was one of the times he would also speak God’s ineffable name. And on Yom Kippur, we try to approach God in our way, and probably speak to or about God more than any other day. 

And understandably, we may do so with trepidation. Not only are we warned in our machzor that our very lives depend on being granted God’s forgiveness, we read a Torah portion that begins 

וַיְדַבֵּ֤ר יְהוָה֙ אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֔ה אַחֲרֵ֣י מ֔וֹת שְׁנֵ֖י בְּנֵ֣י אַהֲרֹ֑ן בְּקָרְבָתָ֥ם לִפְנֵי־יְהוָ֖ה וַיָּמֻֽתוּ׃

The Eternal One spoke to Moses after the death of the two sons of Aaron who died when they drew too close to the presence of the Eternal One.

So if we don’t get close enough to God, fully approaching God in tshuvah, we could die. But perhaps if we get too close to God, or approach God in the wrong way, we could die. We can get stuck.

We speak to God, and in the fraught intimacy of our speech, we typically don’t hear God responding. Perhaps we hear nothing. And wonder if God hears us.

Or we hear the word God, both inside and outside of our tradition, associated with some terrible things. The word God has been used to justify bigotry and violence. We are told that if we follow God’s commandments and make teshuvah we’ll be sealed for blessing in the book of life. And then we watch wonderful people die. In the Torah, we read about the God character, a term I first heard from Rabbi Lizzi Heydemann in Chicago, appropriate because all we have is human language to describe what God said or did. This character in the parshiot that we read over these Yamim Noraim is seemingly cruel. God tells Avram to kick Hagar and their son out of his home, presumably left to die. God tells Abraham to kill his other son. And then God kills Aaron’s sons. The traditional Torah reading for this afternoon includes the verse that has lead to horrible violence against people we love, including men who love, and make love, to other men. 

And despite the fact that God appears many times in our liturgy, I find that progressive Jews often have trouble talking about their belief, or not, in God. We talk about justice and ritual and tradition and family, and rightfully so, but not so much about God. 

And when we use the word God, we rarely probe what we mean when we say it.  God is so unknowable that Maimonides said in the 12th century that we can’t actually say anything about what God is. We can only say what God is not. God is not more than one. God is not a person. To say what God is would limit God. 

So like Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride, when I hear people using the word God over and over again, particularly when used to incite fear or bigotry, I often want to say, “You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.” Whether you believe in God or not, the concept of God can mean so many things to so many people over so many years that it is impossible to encapsulate the infinite, the unknowable, into one word. In other words, to use the word God to actually express the divine, is well, inconceivable.

And so, for the rest of this sermon, I am not going to keep using that word. I am going to draw from the nearly 100 names and metaphors that are used in the Tanakh, rabbinic writings, and liturgy. And I do so because on the day that we repeatedly address the divine, it has been helpful to me, and I hope will be to you, to have as many words as possible to draw from.

And because doing so helped Moses, as he entered into an intimate encounter with the divine. He heard a voice emanating from a bush burning in the desert. The narrator identifies the source of this voice with a name spelled yud-hey-vav-hey, as an angel of yud-hey-vav-hey, and by the name Elohim. The voice says: “I am Elohey Avicha, Elohey Avraham, Elohey Yitzhak, v’Elohey Yaakov.“ And Moses hid his face for he was afraid to look at HaElohim. 

Within six verses, this single divine character is given 8 names: “yud-hey-vav-hey,” a name that we don’t know how to pronounce and traditionally do not say out loud; “Elohim” and “HaElohim,” which come from “El,” a name used to identify divine beings in the ancient Near East. And then Elohey Avicha, Elohey Avraham, Elohey Yitzhak, v’Elohey Yaakov, linking this relationship to our ancestors in general, and importantly, in specific. Elohim is both eternally one, and different to each one of us.

So it is understandable when 7 verses later, Moses asks:

“When I come to the Israelites, and say to them, ‘Elohey Avoteichem has sent me to you, and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” And the voice said to Moses, “Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh,” continuing, “Thus shall you say to the Israelites, ‘Ehyeh sent me to you.”  What does Ehyeh –Asher-Ehyeh mean? The closest we can come to translation is “I Am What I Am” or “I Will Be What I Will Be.” And then, perhaps, Moses looks completely confused, because in the next verse, we read: “And Elohim said further to Moses, ‘Thus shall you say to the Israelites: yud-hay-vav-hey, Elohey Avoteichem, Elohey Avraham, Elohey Yitzhak, v’Elohey Yaakov has sent me to you.  This shall be My name forever. This My appellation for all eternity.”  

But of course, although yud-hey-vav-hey is used over 6,000 times in the Tankah, in part because we can’t say it, other names are used, too. And Jews have created additional names ever since. So today we stand in intimate proximity to Adonai, the word often substituted for yud-hey-vav-hey, and because we are not the High Priest, we address HaShem, the name, perhaps without knowing what name to use.

And to make it even harder, as we approach the divine we hold a machzor and many of the names, words, and metaphors in our machzor come from either the biblical or rabbinic periods, times when our collective relationship with the divine was based on lives quite different than the ones we live today.

Our people’s historic relationship to the divine can perhaps be divided into three periods, and I want to thank Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, a modern Orthdox rabbi from New York, for helping to clarify my thinking on this during a presentation to the Michigan Board of Rabbis.

In the Biblical period, from Abraham through the destruction of the Second Temple in 70CE, El Shaddai, God Almighty, was perceived as all powerful and directly intervened in human history, including by speaking directly to our patriarchs, matriarchs, and prophets. Elohim, or perhaps Mekor HaChayim, the Source of Life, creates the world, Elohei HaIvrim, the divine power of the Israelites, or perhaps Tzur Yisrael, the rock of Israel, redeems us from slavery, and the Torah is revealed by a source who self-identifies as yud-hey-vav-hey Eloheicha Asher Hotzeiticha Me’eretz Mitzrayim MiBeit Avadim, linking the action of redeeming us from slavery to the source of revelation. 

Then we enter the Rabbinic period, when the mystics tell us that Ein Sof, the one without end, has done Tzimtzum, pulling back to allow us to be partners in the repair of a broken world. And in that retreat, HaKadosh Baruch Hu becomes less visible and although the Shechina embraces us beneath her wings, Avinu Malkenu determines whether our teshuva merits us a place in the Book of Life.

But as we enter the Modern period, many of those names and metaphors no longer describe our experience of the divine. For some of us, Adonai, or perhaps Dayan HaEmet, no longer seems to be intervening, speaking, or judging in the same way. So theologians like Heschel, Buber, and Mordecai Kaplan introduce us to radical amazement, the I-Thou relationship, or the Power that Makes for Salvation.

We are responsible for finding the words, metaphors, and approaches that bring us closer to the divine, perhaps unable to rely only on the ones before. As Rabbi Greenberg put it, God (his word, not mine) is broadcasting on XM radio, and we are still tuning our dials on AM. 

I don’t always find the broadcast, but I keep trying. In each text study, in each service, in each holiday, in each sacred conversation with one of you. Because I believe that Ruach HaOlam, the spirit, or wind, that transcends the world, helps me to breathe, and we live in a time when we could use a little deep breathing. In the cycle of breaking news, instant gratification, and rapid change, Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh reminds me that we can’t actually control all of it and may not know what the outcome will be. Ein Sof reminds me to look at the stars and see my part in the context of infinite time and space.  And Heschel’s call for radical amazement helps me to see the world with awe and wonder.

The power that we call by many names is One. Whether through hospitality on Sukkot, the study of our sacred texts, helping kids to read, or using the words of our machzor, just to name a few, we can get closer to that Oneness. I believe the Eternal One is waiting for us to approach. May we find the words and the ways to do so.