(An Open Letter to God)
Tate in Himl: I can’t take it any more! I have read Your words, and the words of those that were close to You; there are so many instances in Torah, all through Tehillim, the Writings, Your Holy Prophets, where it says that You love those with a broken heart; that those who are battered by life, who have lost (something, anything—their husbands, their wives, their parents, their health, their faith), who have been made less than whole and hale, who are grieved at their sins, their infirmities, their succumbing to the wiles of the yetzer—that those are the ones that are special to You, the ones You lift up the way one hoists a small crying child into the sky until it laughs and is happy again.
What I can’t take any more is that in many of those same texts there’s another voice! This other one is ... how shall I put it, not at all like You, not one bit, and I don’t understand how You can be both! I love You as the One who is compassionate and forgiving, Tate, who understands our weaknesses and our strengths, and who has chosen us not because we’re so good and obedient, but despite the fact that we are anything but.
Sometimes the desire for perfect children that characterizes this Your alter self is barely discernible, but at other times it is so inescapably THERE, it takes my breath away.
One Above: breakable and broken from the start, that’s how You made us, both in body and soul. We may be holy because You are holy, but it is our sorrow makes us so. You are the one who wept at the Egyptians’ drowning in the sea, just as surely as You weep today when we hurt and maim one another. Being perfect is not only not interesting, it is somehow less ... less human, less b’tzelem Elohim, leaving us no way to change and grow.
And You, if you were truly perfect, could You be our Thou, would we be able to relate to You, come to You with presents of grief and joy, and believe that You really understand!? Perhaps You are both, echad and perfect, on one hand, and (post-tzimtzum) temperamental, sometimes unjust, angry, arrogant and pompous on the other.
It is this latter You against whom I rail, this being the one I can fathom. And complain I do precisely because You are my Thou, my Du, my Everything: What is this constant insistence that all who serve You in some capacity, that is, all of us,[1] be immaculate, perfect, unblemished?! Just listen to Your list of “musts”: must not marry a harlot or a divorced woman, must not have any defect such as blindness or lameness or a short limb or a broken limb; must not be a dwarf or a hunchback, or have a cancerous eye or injured testicles? (Leviticus 21: 7-20) And why? Because any of these “defects” would profane the places you made holy!
This is just one example. But it’s enough. More than enough, frankly. You are my God, but I need to know You did not mean this! Reading, I wonder: firstly, who are You, and, secondly, do You even want me who came late to Sinai, as one of those doing Your will? Not only did I come late to Sinai, I’m also a whore, I’m divorced, I’m short-sighted (literally and metaphorically), I limp and stumble through life, now this leg being too short, now this foot too cloven; I have a forever broken heart, I’m fat, droopy-eyed, ugly, and I’ve been told that I’m something of an intellectual midget. I only know that You are my God, and that even as I love You with all my being, I need You at least to consider loving me. Not for what I am, but for what, even now, I may still become: one You cradle in Your arms, one to whom you whisper ”weyn nikht, herzele.”
Comments
Post a Comment