The G-d Question: Beyond the Bearded Man in the Sky | A Candid Discussion.

In this eye-opening session, Rabbi Yisroel Bernath explores one of the most profound and misunderstood topics of all time: What is G-d? Moving beyond simplistic childhood images of a supernatural sky-being, we delve into Jewish, Chassidic, philosophical, and even scientific perspectives on the Divine. Drawing from thinkers like Einstein and the Alter Rebbe, this class gently unpacks a paradoxical truth: G-d is not less than personal, but also infinitely more than any person. Whether you’re a believer, skeptic, or somewhere in between, this is a class that will stretch your mind and open your heart.

Takeaways:

Not All “G-ds" Are the Same
The God that many reject may not be the G-d Torah and Kabbalah actually describe.

Beyond Supernatural vs. Natural
Judaism sees G-d not as a supernatural being outside nature, but as the source and essence of all existence, both within and beyond nature.

Personal and Infinite
G-d is not a person, but also not less than personal. The Divine is both the cosmic Author and the intimate Listener.

Language & Metaphor Matter
The Torah uses varied metaphors to relate to G-d, each revealing a facet, none capturing the whole.

G-d Is Experienced, Not Just Explained
You may not "prove" G-d like a theorem—but you can encounter G-d in awe, in kindness, in Torah, and in the quiet moments of the soul.

#God #theology #thegodquestion #chassidus #Kabbalah #chabad #Spinoza #einstein #jewishphilosophy #Faith #personalgod #infinite #soul 

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Transcript

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Before we get started today, I just want to remind you that we're in the middle of our annual raffle, and tickets are just fifty dollars, and it really helps support all the wonderful work that we're doing. If you buy a ticket today, I'll send you a personal thank you letter and a little gift. It's really easy. Just go to www.ndgeraffle.com. That's ndgraffle.com. I'll be ever so grateful to you. Now let's get started. Good morning, everyone. It's a special morning. So today I am continuing, somewhat continuing, Alana's question from last week, and she had a second question. And this is a topic that I've wanted to cover for quite a while. And so I thank you, Alana, for the impetus to cover today's question. And it's probably the biggest question in Judaism today. Maybe the biggest question in theology today. It's the God question. If God is not a supernatural old man in the sky, then what is God? The question that Alana asked is essentially about God's nature. If there's no supernatural God, what is God? How do we talk about God? Is God just a metaphor? Maybe for morality or the good in humanity? These are such important questions. And I think that so many of us wrestle with them. I know that I have at times. So before I get started, I want to acknowledge something. The word God means very different things to different people. Many of us, at least since the Renaissance, picture Michelangelo's famous painting of that mighty old man with a flowing beard reaching out from the heavens. Others may think of the subtle sense of order in the universe, or the inner voice of conscience. When someone says, which I get so often, especially from students on campus, when someone says, I don't believe in God, the question that I want to ask is, which God don't you believe in? Often the God that people have rejected is a kind of caricature. The previous Rebbe, Rebbe Yosef Yitzhak, which is his birthday just passed, he once told someone who was a self-proclaimed atheist, he said, the God you don't believe in, I don't believe in either. In other words, if if you imagine God as a petty, uh capricious man in the sky wielding thunderbolts, so we, and I say we, we as Jews, we reject that image. Because an infinite God cannot be a limited, angry old man. Actually, the Ten Commandments that we heard at Sinai, God told us not to make any image of him at all. So any picture we draw, anything we're gonna draw, anything we're gonna paint, maybe even a picture in our mind, is gonna fall short. Unfortunately, many of us were taught a very simplistic notion of God in our childhood. And it could have been a form of discipline for some, maybe a tool of comfort. But as adults, so often we just conclude that there's no God, it doesn't hold hot water, but what we're looking at is this childlike version of God. I often compare it to science. If someone were to tell you that all science is, is baking soda and vinegar and making volcanoes, you'll say, that was exciting when I was 10. But we as adults understand that there's a lot more to science than making volcanoes. And so I think that often a lot of us learn about Judaism, we learn about religion as children. And as a result, especially this great question that we're going to tackle today can be infantile in our minds because of it. Here's the good news. Judaism's mature concept of God is profound. But in order to really understand it, we might need to unlearn the simplistic version to appreciate the deeper one. So I want to clarify some terms. Um, Alana, in your question, you phrased it as if there is no supernatural God. So the word, and this is this is common in the questions that I've seen, the word supernatural can be tricky. Because some people say, I don't believe in the supernatural, I only believe in the natural world. But what if God is the ultimate nature of reality? Or what if God is beyond what we call nature? In Hebrew, one of the names of God is Hateva, which literally means nature. And that's it's used by Kabbalists to indicate that what we call the laws of nature are themselves an expression of God. They themselves are an expression of the divine. So I suspect that some people here, when I say unlearning, might feel uncomfortable with the notion of a magical miracle-working deity, but we're maybe open to talking about God as the forces of good, as the forces of love, as the force of creativity in the universe. And there's actually a rich legacy of Jewish thought along those lines, though I would say with an important caveat. So, what I want to do is I want to go through a couple of ideas that maybe a lot of us knowingly, or maybe even unknowingly, use as the foundational elements of our idea of God. The first idea is from Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan. He was the founder of the Reconstructionist Jewish movement, and he famously rejected the idea of a supernatural interventionist God. Kaplan.

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We'll be back after a quick break.

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I just want to say thank you to everyone who picked up the forgiveness experiment. Your messages, your stories, they mean so much to me. And together we've taken this book to a number one bestseller on Amazon. I'm really grateful. If you haven't read it yet, if you haven't picked it up yet, it's available on hardcover, paperback, on your e-reader. You can listen to it, uh, the audiobook on Audible, and you'll find all the links in the show notes. Didn't want to discard God entirely, but he redefined the term in a in a non-personal way. He often described God as the power that makes for salvation. That was in his book, meaning the sum of all the life-affirming constructive forces in reality. He wrote there also saying that God is love, might not be as helpful as saying love is divine. So whenever you experience genuine love, you experience justice or you experience creativity, you're touching God. That God is the process by which we overcome chaos and we create cosmos by which we bring good out of a confusing world. It's beautiful, but it's a very naturalistic concept of God. He actually, Kaplan actually even used terms like God is the sum of the animating forces of the universe. And he completely avoided imagining God as a big person or as a miracle worker who violates nature, so to speak. So for him, God was in the natural, or as he said, transnatural, beyond what we currently know of nature, but but not breaking its laws. And he wasn't alone. Many, many uh theologians, especially modern theologians, Jewish and Christian, move towards seeing God as a metaphor or as a symbol of our highest values or a symbol of the inner force of evolution towards goodness. Now, there is some beauty in that approach because it makes God very accessible. Everybody can somewhat agree with that. It's not really taking a strong stance on whether God exists and what or who is God. Essentially, what it's doing is equating God with the best ideals that we strive for. It removes the clash between religion and science. Simple. God doesn't suspend physical laws. We don't have to have any awkward debates about miracles. And what it does also, and I understand Kaplan for this, is that it resonates with educated people who feel uh that they outgrew the children's tales of a mighty wizard in heaven. Actually, if you if you look at Einstein, now Einstein was not traditionally religious, and he said he believed in Spinoza's God. He was referring to the philosopher, the great philosopher Barak Spinoza. Now, Spinoza's idea of God was basically nature itself, the infinite substance of reality. So in Einstein, he put it like this: He said, I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of the world, and not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and the doings of mankind. Now, when Einstein said this, it was a breathtaking statement. Einstein felt a reverence for the order and the majesty of the cosmos, which he poetically calls God. But he couldn't imagine a God who watches over each person or intervenes in daily life. And there's many people today who feel similarly. People say to me, I don't pray to a personal God, but I do feel there's there's something uh spiritual in the universe, perhaps a unity of nature or or the principle of love. Now I want to get into now the personal god of the Torah. The the beyond versus the within. Where does traditional Judaism stand on this? Now here's the fascinating part. Traditional Judaism actually encompasses both of these ideas, and we don't even stop there. Judaism absolutely teaches that God in Kabbalistic terms is called en-suf. E-I-N-Ain S O F S, which literally means infinite or beyond all attributes, that God is not a finite body or even a finite mind, that God is the source of all being. Maimonides, the Rambam, our great medieval philosopher, he said it like this Aside from him, there is no true existence. What he was saying is only God exists in an absolute sense, that everything else exists only because God wills it at every moment. Now, this is Maimonides, which which resonates with Spinoza's idea that everything is in God. But Judaism doesn't equate God purely with the physical universe that we see. I mean, it's very nice. Whatever I see, I mean, there's so many things that we don't see that are still happening. Instead, we say the universe is like a tiny animation, like a like a tiny emanation of God's creative energy. God is both transcendent, beyond the universe, and imminent, present throughout the universe. Again, God is both transcendent beyond the universe and imminent, present in the universe. And here's where the Alta Rebbe comes in. Rabbi Schneer Zamun of Liadi, the author of Patanya, he taught a radical understanding of God's oneness. He said, There is nothing else besides God. Now that statement doesn't mean nothing exists. Obviously, trees exist. The table on which my computer is sitting on right now, it exists. But what it means is that nothing has independent existence. That all reality is a manifestation of divine reality. Now, if I lost you and it's hard to wrap your head around, here's my metaphor. Think of the ocean and its waves. The waves are many and they're varied, but they're nothing but the ocean's water in motion. All of us in our world are like waves in the great ocean of being that is God. So, in a sense, Judaism agrees that God is not a little supernatural part of reality, that God is all of reality's foundation. The prophet Isaiah said, holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is filled with his glory. We say this in the morning prayers. God fills all worlds and surrounds all worlds. It's funny because high-level Kabbalah Chasidis actually uses almost scientific language. It says that God is the chayut. Chayut means vital energy that within every atom, keeping it existing and at the same time beyond the entire physical, spiritual cosmos. So if we stopped right here, I think we would have a pretty pantheistic or at least some level of theology. And maybe some of you would be very satisfied. I would not be satisfied. That basically God equals the ultimate reality that underlies everything. That sounds a lot like what Kaplan or Einstein might describe. It's nice. It's not an answer that I'm satisfied with. Here's where I want to go with this. The Torah and Kabbalah and Hasidic teachings insist that God is not an impersonal force. That God is not an abstract totality. That God is also personal. Also personal. Not only personal, also personal. And has will and consciousness and the capacity to engage in relationships. And this is where traditional Judaism diverges sharply from Kapuan or Spinoza. We say God is not a person, but God is also not less than a person. That God created persons, God created us in his image. That's what it says in Genesis, meaning, though the qualities that we have, intellect, emotion, the urge to do good, to love, the reflections of qualities in God on an infinite scale. So now, while Kapwin let's say would say God is the power of salvation, or by Schneer Zauman or Hasidis would say, yes, and that power has an author behind it. That there's an ultimate knower and communicator, and we call that Hashem. Literally, the word Hashem in Hebrew means the name. We often don't even give God a single definable name. That's why we use the word Hashem. So the paradox is that God is both more abstract than a secular thinker's big idea, and more intimate than the most loving person you ever met. So I don't lose you. I want to use a little metaphor here. Imagine you're playing chess against a computer. The computer runs on electricity. Electricity is a blind force of nature. But it also has code and algorithms. We're going to call that an intelligence of sorts. A purely naturalistic view of reality might say the universe is like the electricity, the impersonal energy, and a purely humanistic view might say only the code is what humans make of it. Morality is our own construct. And what does the Torah say? What does Judaism say? That the universe is more like that computer being operated by a true intelligence. There are laws like algorithms of physics and morality, but behind them is a composer who wrote the score. Behind them is the author. And we, with our limited minds, can't fully grasp the composer. But we can discern hints of the author or the composer's presence in the music. And we're talking about the music of the cosmos, and of course, in our hearts. Now, I know, I know for those of you who struggle with the supernatural, the claim that God is personal and cares is going to raise a lot of issues. Where's the evidence? The first question I'm sure that comes to mind is why is there suffering? If God is personal and if God cares, why is there suffering? And I can go on and on because we all have questions on this. And these are huge questions on their own. Maybe I would focus just on those in one class. Today, I want to focus on how we talk about God and how we experience God. Because Alana asked me, how do we talk about God? So in Kabbalistic tradition, we often begin with the intellect to approach God. But ultimately the goal is relationship. What we're trying to really have is an emotional relationship with God. Some of you are fans of, and we've spoken about this here before, of the sefirot, that in the various emotions. So the word in Hebrew dvekut, which means cleaving or or connecting to a higher power, to the divine. We talk about God in metaphors often, in the negatives. By negatives, I mean we have to say what God is not, like God is not finite, like God is not physical, or God is not limited by time. And by metaphors, I mean we use human analogies. We call God Avinu, our father, Malkinu, our king, our teacher, our friend, a lover. If you look at Song of Song, Shira Shirim, God is a lover. Most beautiful love story ever told. When we use these metaphors, or when the great sages or King Solomon use these metaphors, he didn't mean God is literally a lover, or God is literally male, right? A lot of people say, oh, why does God always male? Why can't God be female? And it wasn't referring to God being a king on a throne. These are the ways for our finite minds to relate to infinite goodness, to infinite wisdom. If someone feels those metaphors don't work for them, perhaps their relationship with their father was strained, or kingship, especially in our world, feels alien to democracy. So Jewish liturgy, the texts actually provide multiple angles on God. For example, sometimes God is described as the source of compassion, Rachamana, the merciful one, sometimes as justice, the dayan, the judge, sometimes as ultimate reality, like we said, Ainsof, the endless one. The Kabbalists speak of the Ten Sephiroth that we've spoken about here, the attributes, the emanations, like kindness, like strength, like beauty. These are all facets of how God interacts with the world. They're not ten gods. The Greeks had it wrong. They're not ten gods. One God could have all ten facets, but the way we look at them is as ten colored lenses through which pure light of the infinite is refracted so that we can perceive it. If this sounds abstract, let's think of it this way: To one person, God is most present in the moments of kindness, like people feel God when they give or when they receive. God is felt in the awe-inspiring order or the natural world. To someone else, God uh is encountered in the stillness of meditation, in the stillness of prayer. They have to go into the forest and connect with nature and they find God there. All of these are valid, and they're all just one way of interacting with God, they're just glimpses. One of my teachers once said, we don't have a concept for God. God is the context for all concepts. And what he meant is that God isn't something that you can fully define within our intellectual framework. God is the broadest reality in which everything exists. And this aligns with that Hasidic idea that no place is empty of God. And yet it's beautiful enough, the Torah teaches that we can speak to God directly in prayer using our simple, very, very limited words. We believe God hears the cry of a distressed, the whisper of the humble. So, how to make sense of that if if God is an infinite force? It's mind-boggling. But the belief is that the infinite source of all being is also, by virtue of being infinite, able to care about the tiniest details. Far from being limited, like a superman who might be strong, but not infinite. God's infinity means every detail, every person, every sparrow that falls from the tree, every single bit are all within God's attention span, so to speak. It's said very beautifully in Psalm 147. King David says that God counts the number of the stars. And in the same breath, he says, and God lifts up the humble and heals the brokenhearted. The same breath, God's counting the number of stars and lifts up the humble and heals the brokenhearted. The words of King David. A great Hasidic Rebbe once said that God is higher than the highest concepts we can imagine, and closer than the closest thing that we can feel. That's a lot of theology. Let's bring it down to a story. Because stories often clarify what philosophy convolutes. You can quote me on that. I'll share two brief stories that I think illustrate different angles of God. I heard this story from an AA speaker, Alcoholics Anonymous. Believe it or not, I think there's credible spirituality in those circles that are deeply akin to the Kabbalistic idea of higher power. And people who have been friends of Bill who have gone through AA, they can attest to that. A certain woman was an avowed atheist struggling in life. But as part of her recovery, she needed to come to believe in a power greater than herself. That's part of AA. And she just couldn't accept the God of the Bible that she grew up with. Her rational mind rebelled. And one day she sat in her kitchen fretting over this step. She looked out the window and she saw a magnificent oak tree in her yard. And she thought to herself, well, I certainly did not create that oak tree. That tree is alive. It's beyond me. It's a power greater than me. And on a whim, she decided to start talking to the oak tree as her higher power. And whenever she was anxious, whenever she was in need, she'd mentally address the oak tree and pour out her heart. And oddly enough, she felt comfort and guidance in those moments. And years later, he told me, after much personal growth, she was moving to a new home. And she realized with some worry that she'd be leaving behind her oak tree. How would she cope without it? But then she smiled and she said, By the time I left that house, I realized it was never really the oak tree. And guess what? She said, God came with me. I love this story because it shows that even if we start with a very naturalistic idea of God, literally a tree, if you're genuine and reaching beyond yourself, you may discover a real caring presence on the other end of the line. In Hasidic thought, we'd say she accessed God through that part of nature, that the tree was a catalyst for her openness. And in that openness, a genuine relationship with God began. Even though initially she wouldn't call it God, this actually she's in good company. This echoes the path of our forefather Abraham, who, according to Maimonides, first looked at the natural cosmos and reasoned that there must be a oneness behind it all. And as a child, the Midrash says, that Abraham gazed at the sun and the moon and the stars and realized that no infinite thing could be the ultimate cause, that there must be one unseen cause behind the entire orchestra of heaven. That through nature he found the cause of causes, which is God. So if you feel more attuned to God as nature or God as the universe, Judaism says, great, that can be a starting point. The important step is recognizing something beyond ego. Ego stands for edging God out. That even believing in the power of a majestic oak tree or the vast galaxy can humble us and open us to gratitude and to wonder, which are doors to the divine. So from there, we can eventually discover that the source of the oak tree, the source of nature's wonder, can also hear the prayer of our of our humble heart. Now there's another anecdote. This anecdote is attributed to a bunch of different rabbis. So I won't I won't quote which one it is, but I've seen this quoted to a number of great rabbis. A young skeptic once came to a rabbi and he said, I don't believe in God. Now instead of arguing, the rabbi replied, Tell me, he asked him, tell me about this God you don't believe in. And the young man said, uh, I don't believe in an old man in the sky who watches our every move, who who loves only one people and punishes anyone who thinks differently. So the rabbi nods and he said, You know what? I don't believe in that God either. The God I believe in isn't an old man or a limited being. And he said, Let me share with you a different understanding. And this conversation led the student to realize that he might have thrown out the baby with the bathwater, which I think a lot of us do, rejecting a childish image and with it mistakenly rejecting a deeper reality that it was pointing to. I often feel that the term God has gotten so cluttered with problematic imagery that sometimes we need fresh language. I can't believe, and the word God that is used for some of the most vile and hated hatred, incredible hatred in the world, I don't want to believe in that God. So maybe we need new terms, and you'll often hear me using other terms like the infinite, the creator, the source of life, the divine. And I'm not doing it to be new agey, but to jolt our minds out of picturing this humanoid deity. And even in the Torah, God has many names reflecting different aspects. Right? The the true name of God that's given to Moses at the burning bush is is the is Havaya, is Yud, and then Hei, and then Vav, and then Hey, which is called the Tachagrammatan. It's actually a form of a verb. It means Havaiah means to exist or to be. It's as if God was telling Moses, I am the is-ness of reality, I am being itself, right? He said, I will be that which I will be, and I am with you. How profound is that? That God is saying, I'm not a being, I am, I am being. Yet this infinite being is also the compassionate God of our fathers, who has seen the suffering of the Israelites and will redeem them. And so God combines ultimate reality with ultimate compassion just in that moment with Moses at the burning bush. The next part of Alana's question, she says to me, is God essentially a metaphor? Maybe for morality or a guide for behavior? My answer to this would be: God is not merely a metaphor, but we use, we often use metaphorical language to describe God's impact on us from our point of view. And many people treat God language as a way to talk about our highest ideals. For instance, people say God is just the universe's way of encouraging us to be good. Okay, that view definitely aligns with secular humanism in religious disguise. Or Judaism would respond that our moral sense is a reflection of God's will. We believe ethics aren't random. They're not just uh human preferences, but rooted in a divine order. But if you say God equals morality and nothing more, then a lot of our traditional God talk, like about prayer or love of God or God's guidance, a lot of that loses its substance because you don't have a relationship with an abstract principle the way you have a relationship with a loving being. So one of the most beautiful aspects of Chabad Hasidism, at least I think so, is how it emphasizes having a personal relationship with an impersonal sounding God, that we bridge that gap through the concept of the soul. And this comes from the Tanya. The Tanya, in my opinion, is one of the incredible foundational conversations about God. It says there that each person has a nishama. A nishama is referred to as a divine soul. It says that it's literally a piece of God above. And that means at our core, we have an intimacy with God built in. We're not separate creatures trying to awkwardly approach a distant creator. We're beloved children reconnecting with our source. The moral compass inside us, when properly calibrated, is actually the voice of that soul, which is God within. So when someone Is God a metaphor for morality? I would tweak it and say our morality is a signal of God's presence within us. It's not a human invention, it's a godly inheritance. Our drive to seek justice, our drive to seek compassion, our drive for meaning. This class, these are all gifts from the divine image that we carry. So let me be real here. Can we prove any of this scientifically? No. God is not a theorem to be proven, God is an experience to be lived and a truth to be discovered continually. The evidence of God is more like the evidence of love. You can't put love in a test tube. But you see it in people's actions and you feel it in your heart. And people who earnestly seek God, whether through intellectual study, through meditation, through acts of goodness, many people have told me that they sense an encounter. It may be faint, it may be overwhelming, but it's meaningful. And I can share personally that some of the most moving moments in my life were times of prayer, of times of learning, where I suddenly felt I'm not alone in this world. There is a you listening and caring. Other times I've seen what people would call coincidences line up in uncanny ways. And I quietly acknowledge, okay, God, I know it was you guiding me. I thought I was supposed to be here right now, but I'm actually supposed to be somewhere else. And often it's through other people, people that I interact with, that I sense God. A timely kindness from a friend or even a stranger. A nice message. Sometimes that feels like God's hand in human gloves. The Kabbalistic teachings actually encourage us to find God in very worldly things. There's an often quoted idea from the Baushem Tov, the founder of the Hasidic movement. He said, from everything you see or hear, you can learn a lesson in serving God. I interpret this to mean that nothing is godless if you have the eyes to see it. Every humor, business, technology, each contains sparks of the divine. For example, someone once asked the Rebbe why God would allow someone, or sorry, why God would allow something like the internet to exist. They were worried about the negative uses. It was the beginning of the internet, and they were worried about the negative uses of the internet. And the Rebbe said that if such technology exists, it's because there's a holy potential in it. And in this case, to spread wisdom, to connect people, look at what's going on right now. Look at this class. Look at the good that we can do using this technology. And to me, that outlook answers the question: how do we talk about God? We talk about God not only in lofty sermons, but in everyday life. When we bless our food, when we admire a natural event, thunder, lightning, when we comfort someone, being God's agent of kindness, when we discuss ethics, what does God want me to do here? God is not restricted to churches or synagogues on a shelf. God is the reality we interact with all the time, whether we know it or we don't. As it says in Proverbs, Behold, know him in all your ways. Find God in everything you do, from eating to working to loving. And I think that's really what I what I wanted to teach you here today. That we need to fuse the worldly and the spiritual. Alana asked me to make it worldly. And so I tried to bring in secular thinkers like uh Kaplan, Einstein, Spinoza to show how their ideas compare to traditional Jewish ideas. But I want to flip it now. Let's bring in a secular anecdote with a traditional Chabad twist. There's a story about Soviet Russia in the 1920s. A communist official had gathered a crowd proving that by all materialistic arguments that there's no God. And afterwards, an elderly Jewish man shrugged and said, What he says is true. The God he doesn't believe in cannot and certainly doesn't exist. And I think this echoes our earlier point. A lot of atheism is directed at a false God, not at Ainsov, not at the true God. The true God is subtle enough to be missed if you're only looking for magic shows, but present enough to be felt if you open your inner senses. Elijah the prophet experienced at Mount Carmel and said, God wasn't in a loud wind or fire. He says, but in a still small voice. Now, somebody might say, I admire how you see God and the sum of good human endeavors. Judaism actually taught that ages ago, when we would act with justice and love. We're walking in God's ways, we're revealing godliness, but we also believe that there is an origin that makes justice and love objectively real, not just human preferences. And we call that originating will God as well. And that God can speak to us, not in English from a cloud, but in the language of meaningful coincidences. We call that Ashkacha Pratit, in the tug of our conscience, and of course in the sacred texts of the Torah. So let me tie it all together for you. And I'll as you know I love stories, I'll share a short Hasidic tale. Once a young boy from a traditional shtetel, from the from the shtetl, he went off to study in a in a modern university. And he came back declaring himself agnostic. He confronted his old father and he says, Abba, Tati, you dive in, you pray every day to God. How do you even know God exists? Let alone cares. All those blessings, isn't it just talking to the wall? By the way, we've been talking to the wall for a long time. The father, a simple but wise man, he smiles and he embraced his son and he said, My boy, my boy, I'm so happy you asked. All these years I've been praying. I've always been talking to God, but thank you. Now, for the first time, I hear God talking back through you, asking me to explain myself. The son was taken aback. The father continued, you want proof? I only have the proof of my life. When I pray, I feel someone listens and gives me strength. When I study the Torah, I feel I'm hearing someone's wisdom echo in my mind. When I light the Shabbat candles, when your mother lights the Shabbat candles, we feel a loving presence enter our home. I can't put that in a textbook. But it's as real as the feeling of the sun's warmth. I can't prove God in words, but I can introduce you. Come, spend Shabbat with me. Unplug. I'm saying unplug. Sing Shalom Aleichem with me and see if you don't feel the reality of the one we welcome as a Shabbat queen. What I think that story sends is God is best understood not as an abstract debate, but through lived relationship, through lived experience. We start with faith, emuna, which in Hebrew literally means trust based on our inner knowing. And we seek dot, we seek an intimate knowledge of God through learning and personal growth, and both are needed. Actually, Chabad stands for chma bina dat wisdom, understanding, and knowledge, an intellectual approach to God. But the goal is that all of that intellect, all of our learning, everything we're doing, is to set the heart on fire with a love and awe of God. So let's just circle back. Many of us have spent decades maybe thinking or being taught that religion is essentially a human construct and that God is an idea that was created by humans. And here we are having a conversation about God and Torah, as if they are as real as the chair that you're sitting in right now. And maybe listening to this, or maybe you'll hear it again later, you feel a mix of curiosity, hope, probably a bit of skepticism. And I want you to know that this class is just unpeeling the first layer of the onion. There's so many layers underneath. It's just to get you thinking. And there's no questions. No questions in Judaism are the most important, they're the most holy. Israel, Yisrael, literally means wrestles with God. That's literally what we're called. Even Moses questioned God. Abraham argued with God about justice. Job challenged God about suffering. So if you're questioning and you're skeptical, you're in good company. And what I hope that you take from our conversation today is that the Torah that you're coming to study has depth upon depth. It's not a fossil of a past society. It's a living wellspring. And yes, we believe that Moses wrote it down from God. We spoke about this last week, but that doesn't lock it in the past. It means that it's an ongoing conversation between the infinite and us. And the God that you're learning is not a simplistic guy in the sky with a long gray beard, but the very essence of reality and goodness. And also your loving parent or a partner that makes the world better. And if the supernatural God sounds off-putting, then think of God as supranatural, beyond the physical nature, but also saturating it. Think of God as the author of the narrative, in which you and I are the characters, a story that is still unfolding, and in which our choices truly matter to the author. And I want to acknowledge, from a worldly perspective, even secular thinkers acknowledge the power of faith. Harari himself, after deconstructing religion, admits that humans are wired to seek meaning, and shared meaning is what creates communities. Victor Frankl, the great psychologist, not overtly religious but spiritual, survived Auschwitz. And he observed that those who had faith in something larger in God, love, a higher purpose, had a better chance at survival. Frankel wrote that man can endure anyhow if he has a why. And for many, God is the ultimate why. It's the belief that life is not random, that that goodness and justice are not mere human inventions, but they have a cosmic backing. And that we are unconditionally loved by the source of all. And I would say Hasidic philosophy, Chabad philosophy would add, not only can we endure with that why, we can illuminate the world with it. That we have God in our lives, not necessarily in a dramatic, supernatural way, but in that still small voice or that guiding hand, we become part of that hope, an agent for that hope, an agent for that light. We see every person as a reflection of God, as a reflection of their godly soul, every moment as an opportunity to partner with God in creation. That life becomes a dialogue with the divine. It's a two-way relationship. And so I hope you walk away from this, feeling that these big questions are not only answered in one way, but the start of an ongoing exploration. Judaism does not want, need, or demand blind faith, but it wants faithful questioning. The Kutzka Rebbe once said this. He said, I'd rather wrestle with God than ignore him. So keep asking. Alana, keep learning. In our wrestling and in our dialogue, maybe one day you'll feel that connection, and maybe that connection will be genuine. And maybe one day we'll realize that the Torah that seemed so ancient, and the God that seemed so hidden, was actually the oak tree, was actually here with us all along. And maybe one day we'll move on and we'll find out that it wasn't the oak tree. It was God all along waiting for us to discover God's presence in our own minds, in our own hearts. Thank you very much. This challenge and discussion has been uh an absolute honor for me, and I hope that I've done it a little bit of justice. And with that, I wish you all a beautiful day with blessings, with peace. As tonight uh is my Jewish birthday. So, and it's the birthday that I celebrate. And in a birthday, we have a special uh the stars are aligned on our birthday, and so we have a special power to bless. And so I bless you all with being able to continue this beautiful journey with meaning, with purpose, with presence. My my commitment this year, as every year, as part of our Hajjbun and Nefish, as part as part of our uh looking and trying to be better and and becoming becoming better. My we take on a resolution, and my resolution this year is presence, is being really present. We get so, so confused, and and there's so many distractions every day, and trying to be able to cut through the noise and find presence in a world that's so distracting. And Hashem should bless each and every one of us with this presence, with the love, with the joy of those who are who are who are sick, who who need a speedy recovery. May they have a speedy recovery. And those who need to have a blessing in their life that is becoming very, very challenging for them, and they feel like there's no hope. Don't be in despair. There is hope. There's always hope. There's a beautiful God, and our God is bigger than your struggles. Have a beautiful and wonderful day.