How do we relate to God? What is our model for approaching the divine? Sometimes we talk to God as Father. Other times we speak to God as Lover: “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.”³ On some occasions God is Mother, and we seek to return to the divine womb through immersion in the ritual bath. God is shechina, the feminine presence, who embraces us and makes us feel safe. And very often, perhaps most often in Jewish literature, God is proclaimed King.

What do we mean when we call God “King”? How does God’s kingship express itself? That God is a lover, present in our lives, embracing us in dark moments is, paradoxically, easier to understand than that God is King. For kingship implies power, it denotes sovereignty. A king is one who decrees and whose decrees are fulfilled. Therefore, in Jewish law, one who violates the decree of the King has violated his essential kingship. Jewish law calls this person a mored bemalchut, one who has rebelled against the kingship of God. Yet, can we truly and honestly say God is King in this world? If God is King and kingship implies power, the world looks confusing. Because, after all, when we say that God is King, we mean that God has the power to fulfill his will.

What is God’s will in Jewish tradition? God is good; one of God’s holy names is “the Good One.” If God’s will is good, if God’s essence is good, then God’s desire in the world is to make the world a good world—a world of goodness and of joy, a world of fulfillment, without pain or suffering. In fact, R. Moshe Haim Luzzato suggests in The Way of God that the fundamental purpose of creation is for God to bestow his goodness.⁴

And yet, even a cursory survey of our own personal reality and the reality of the world, yields the conclusion that God seems unable to fulfill his own will. God’s kingship, God’s power of decree, seems to be lacking or weak. The distended stomachs of hungry children dot the landscape of our world. Harsh physical suffering, cruel torture, make up the daily stuff of human existence. And this is before one speaks of the existential torture of lonely people sitting isolated in their rooms, or in their mansions, desperate for embrace and real connection—with themselves, with the world, with some “other” and with God. If God is King, if kingship implies power, and if God is good, then the world should reflect that power and it should reflect that goodness.

So how can we say that God is King? The Talmud prescribes that a Jew should say one hundred blessings every day.⁵ And each one of these blessings must contain within it the expression of God’s name and a declaration of his kingship. One hundred times a day the Jew re-expresses God’s kingship, and yet—is it true? Is God really King?

God may be Friend, God may be Father and Mother. But adults know that a father or mother can’t always protect us. God may be Lover, and yet we understand full well that a lover may suffer with us and sometimes even disappoint us.

But is God King, sovereign and absolute? At least at first glance, an honest observer of our reality would be hard-pressed to affirm God as King, at least not King in a way that I can understand, not kingship as meaningful to me. God’s power would seem to be too well-hidden in our world to allow for easy declamations of kingship.

 

Is this question about God’s kingship a legitimate one? Is the conclusion we have experienced religiously correct? Or does the religious reader need to stop his reading because such a challenge is heretical? Do we have the right to question? Is questioning a movement away from the divine center towards a periphery which is empty and secular? Or is the act of questioning, even of challenging God’s essential kingship, an act of profound religious passion, even an obligation? If we say hamelech, the King, we need to know what it means. It must express a reality that is true to our experience, that we understand. If it doesn’t, then it is dishonest. And God cannot possibly want dishonest religious language.

The Talmud poses the question: Why were the Men of the Great Assembly, who canonized the prayers recited by the Jewish people, called by that name? What was their greatness? And it responds: “They returned the crown to its glory.”⁶ 

How? The Talmud explains: Moses praises God as “the God who is great, powerful, and awesome.”⁷ Yet when Jeremiah praises God he mentions only his greatness and power, leaving out any mention of God’s awesomeness.⁸ Jeremiah had watched the holy Temple go up in flames. He had seen strangers mocking and desecrating the sacred site. He did not see or experience God’s awesomeness. For this reason, Jeremiah changed the traditional description of God which had been handed down from Moses, the divinely inspired description of the experience of God’s awesomeness. The experience of divine awesomeness was alien to Jeremiah, so that he deleted the word.⁹ Later Daniel, who saw strangers enslaving and oppressing the children of Israel, did not witness or experience God’s power, and so he similarly altered Moses’ formula and praised God’s greatness and awesomeness—but not his power.¹⁰

Jeremiah and Daniel refused to use religious language which they did not understand, which did not express their reality. The Men of the Great Assembly explain that in God’s absence, in God’s silence, is God’s power and awesomeness. Only in God’s apparent silence does the miracle of the Jewish people’s survival emerge—the miracle which allows the Jewish people to be the representation of God in the world. This is God’s very greatness and God’s very awesomeness. The theology suggested by the Men of the Great Assembly in their response to Jeremiah and Daniel is beyond the scope of our present discussion. Critically, however, what emerges from the text is that because they were able to experience God’s greatness and God’s awesomeness, they returned the text to its original form, the form suggested by Moses—God who is great, God who is heroic, God who is awesome.

And then the Talmud asks the most essential question: How did Jeremiah, Daniel and the rabbis have the audacity to do what they did? How did they assume the authority to uproot the decree of Moses? How could they change words which were divinely inspired? The Talmud responds: “Because they knew that God is true, they did not want to be false to him.” So they deleted words from a sacred text, rather than express that which was not true to their experience. And, adds the Eleventh-Century commentator Rashi, as if to drive home the point: “God affirms that which is true, and God hates that which is a lie.”¹¹

Clearly, Rashi’s intent here is not an objective lie, but that which is a lie to our experience. To say that God is King when we do not experience God’s kingship without deeply questioning and challenging that reality, is essentially to lie. To violate the essential requisite of honesty in religious language is to violate God; God despises the lie. The Talmud gives us the right of silence. It gives us the right to not engage in religious dialogue, in religious expression which does not reflect our deepest truth. But it does not yet give us the right to challenge God.

The Men of the Great Assembly insist on the honesty of religious language. When religious language is unable to express itself in a manner which is true and honest, the prophet becomes silent. Silence is a religious option to be preferred over the lie.

Yet our question goes deeper. Do we have a right to move beyond silence into the realm of actual questioning? May we formulate, and express, a divine challenge? Can I cry out to God and say: Yes, you exist, but are you relevant? Are you a personal God who is just and fair, or are you a God who allows a million children to be destroyed in the Holocaust? Are you the God who allowed my mother, at age five, to see babies ripped apart before her and then to have to pick up the pieces and bury them? Are you a God who allows a child, as in Dostoyevski’s description, to be torn apart by a hundred dogs in front of his mother—because of the casual whim of the retired officer on the horse? Is there any theology which can justify such agony?

May we scream our question towards God, demanding in all of our human brokenness, an answer? May we ask, is God King? That is the question. Can we, in the face of travesty and suffering, affirm, before the open grave, God’s kingship? And is it possible to hurl that challenge while still remaining in the arena of the sacred? What is our response to the open grave? What does our tradition formulate as the words to flow from our lips as we stand before the freshly dug grave?