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INDEPENDENT
I humbly refer the question to rabbis far older and more learned than I, beginning with the third-century Rabbi Yochanan. His response (in the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Megillah 31a) begins, “In every circumstance where you will find mention of the greatness of the Holy Blessed One there you will find alongside it mention of Its humbleness.” The sage goes on to quote from Deuteronomy, from Isaiah and from Psalms, all of which juxtapose descriptions of God’s mighty powers with attributes such as “who advocates for the rights of the orphan and the widow, and loves the stranger, to gift him with bread and clothing” (Deuteronomy 10:18) or “father to those who are orphaned and Who executes justice on behalf of widows (Psalms 68:6). Another midrash has God speaking directly to us with the same message: “I operate as father and as mother. I act as father, as is written in Psalms 103:13— ‘Like a father has compassion on his children, so does Hawayah have compassion on those in awe of Him.’ I act as mother, as is written in Isaiah 66:13— ‘Like the comfort which one receives from his mother, so shall I comfort you.’ Thus do I operate as father and as mother” (Midrash Pesikta D’Rav Kahana 19:3).

• Rabbi Gershon Winkler
  Walking Stick Foundation
  Golden, CO

HUMANIST
Is God merciful? Some Torah stories and rabbinical interpretations leave that impression. Is the biblical incarnation of God fiercely judgmental? Tales about Noah or Sodom and Gomorrah suggest that, too. Can this God be simultaneously loving, capricious and cruel? Abraham and Sarah might attest to love, but the Midianite women of Numbers 31 and Jephthah’s daughter might feel differently. Is God a “strongman”? If some of this describes a leader ruling by force and violence, then the answer can be yes.

• Rabbi Jeffrey Falick
  Congregation for Humanistic Judaism of Metro Detroit
  Farmington Hills, MI

RENEWAL
Certainly in some of our biblical texts, God is the gibbor milchamah, the war-king, the ultimate and all-mighty power. For a long while that image drowned out other, more tentative portrayals of God in the Bible. After all, a small nation trying to survive in a dangerous landscape doesn’t need a warm and fuzzy god. It needs a warrior god, giving life and dealing death: “Has any deity ventured to go and take one nation from the midst of another…by war, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm and awesome power?” (Deuteronomy 4:34). But our rabbis, having experienced the trauma of the loss of the Temple, realized that the earlier God-model was not working for them. God was no longer functioning as the super-Spider-Man who swooped in to rescue the Israelites from Egypt. In a not-famous-enough Talmudic text in Yoma (69b), the rabbis pondered the change in paradigm they were living through. After all, each of the adjectives that Moses had used to describe God —gadol, gibbor, nora (great, mighty, awesome)—seemed irrelevant when heathens could dance with impunity in God’s palace and destroy it. So now what? The rabbis came to the notion that a different kind of strength was called for. God was holding back and allowing history to unfold, even if Israel was to be harmed by other nations. As with a parent refraining from intervening on a playground, the hardest thing of all is self-restraint. It’s the sign of ultimate strength.

• Rabbi Gilah Langner
  Congregation Kol Ami
  Arlington, VA

RECONSTRUCTIONIST
If God is ultimately unknowable, far beyond human form or understanding, then let’s avoid anthropomorphizing. In imposing finite human characteristics upon the Infinite, we box God in. Such images are fine if held humbly but devastating when deemed truth. For starters: Since humans all bear the divine image (Genesis 1:27), divinity must be non-binary, neither male nor female. God is no man of any sort, much less a strongman. Sure, some early sources may depict God as a bossy ruler, but these tell us more about the authors’ time and less about the Timeless One. Richer metaphors abound: Better than praying to a Dictator, let’s embrace the Mystery, be nourished by Divine Water, seek strength from the Rock, align with the Unity. And what is “strength,” anyway? Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers) defines it as mastery over one’s impulses; in Avot d’Rebbe Natan, it’s turning an enemy into a friend. Hardly the moves of a blowhard politician! So-called “strongman” leadership that projects deceitful and insular machismo-strength is deeply un-Jewish—and un-Divine. Idolators worship the part in place of the whole, whereas the holy and just are devoted only toward Divine Oneness. Let’s affirm that true Godliness unifies, rather than divides.

• Rabbi Fred Scherlinder Dobb
  Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation
  Bethesda, MD

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