Wrestling with God

D’var Torah from July 25, 2025

Parshat Masei-Matot

Part 1: “God”

A decision I made early on in Community Shabbat was to not shy away from using the word God. 

Part 2: Why we don’t mention God

Pretty much every other setting I am in avoids talking about God. 

Talking about God is like inviting over a difficult relative who says some problematic things, arrives with a lot of baggage, and knocks some things over. 

We’ve also been trained by Christian hegemony that we are supposed to “believe” or “not believe” in God. Pick a side. Or that God is like Santa or the tooth fairy, something we are supposed to stop believing in as we grow up. Something we have to suspend our logic for. 

Part 3: Are we angry with God?

But when you go a layer deeper on the subject of God, and people get talking, they say some very interesting things. 

I’ve noticed that they say things like this: 

“How could I believe in God?” 

“If there’s a god, where is she?

Even, “I wish I believed in God”

These are profoundly theological things to say!

Can my belief and doubt co-exist? 

How can I connect to something that is so big, so distant? 

Why would I align myself with religious people when I see them acting violently in God’s name? 

How could there be a just, loving God, in a world like this? 

Part 4: This week

We come to shabbat after a week of the most immense violence imaginable. 

This violence is the cruelest, most disturbing kind. It’s a screeching noise at all times. 

It is set on the eradication of certain kinds of people. Children who someone decided are dangerous. 

It is beyond. Beyond beyond. Unfathomable and yet constant. 

Part 5: This week’s portion

In this week’s Torah portion, the section of our holy book that we read weekly, we meet head-on the God of genocide. 

I wish I could erase this from the tradition for you all. I wish I could protect you from it. But I can’t. 

In our text this week God instructs the Israelites, upon entering the holy land where the Cannanites live, the following: 

You shall dispossess all the inhabitants of the land; you shall destroy all their figured objects; you shall destroy all their molten images, and you shall demolish all their cult places. And you shall take possession of the land and settle in it, for I have assigned the land to you to possess.

God

I wish I could erase all of the ways that God has been a tool of violence, destruction, genocide.

Part 6: Job

Next week, we observe a fast for the holiday of Tisha B’Av: a day when we mourn our own destructions. The times that someone else’s God instructed them to genocide us, our culture, out temples. 

I learned that Portuguese and Spanish Jews read the book of Job for Tisha B’av. Job is one of the most remarkable books in our tradition. One of the books of the Writings, Ketuvim, it deals most intimately with the break in connection with God brought on by suffering. 

Here’s how it goes: Job, a thoroughly righteous man, is struck by intense suffering. He attempts to reconcile how he, a good person, has come to suffer at the hands of God, supposedly a God of justice. 

Job’s voice is one of untapped suffering, 

“I am sick of life”

“Why did You [God] let me come out of the womb?”

Job is visited by his friends, who at first sit with him and empathize. But then they get impatient as his suffering continues and they demand him to admit that he really hasn’t been a righteous person, that his suffering is his fault.  

But Job persists in maintaining he has done no wrong. And we are compelled to believe him. 

He maintains his innocence as well as God’s just power. 

And thus, in his suffering, he is caught in a major theological dilemma. 

“I cry, “Violence!” but am not answered;

I shout, but can get no justice.”

“It makes sense. It makes sense” his friends say. 

And Job maintains “It doesn’t make sense”. 

Part 7: 2 visions of God

In our current state of crisis, 

even the unfaithful feel abandoned by hope.  

Even the un-religious are angry at God. 

There is a God which exists outside of our sphere. A God which is powerful and intense. 

Sometimes it is really important for us to have this God. A God to blame. A God to be angry at. 

But there is another God too. The God that sits with us in our pain. The God that cries with us. The God that is a friend, a lover, an empathizer. That God is with us in our Friday night liturgy. 

Actually, she never leaves our side. 

Yedid Nefesh (the soul friend) 

Av HaRachamim (parent of mercy) 

Shechinah (feminine dwelling presence)

The God who cries with Job. The God for whom life is the utmost treasure. For whom genocide is unfathomable. 

Maybe you’ve met this God once or twice. 

Part 8: Somewhere in the middle

Sometimes, I want a God who I can be angry at. 

Sometimes, I want a God who gets me, holds me in my grief. 

Sometimes, we need both of these at once. Someone who is in charge and also understands. 

Part 9: Wrestling 

The fundamental theological question of suffering is not something Job or us can resolve. 

But I believe in his story because it dares us struggle with suffering. It dares to wrestle with suffering in a way that helps us feel, live, breathe, cry, and fight for a world where good things happen. 

12: To wrestle

The name Israel, the name of our people, means “God-wrestlers”. 

The current ethno-nationalist state of Israel could not be more of a distortion of this word and our peoplehood. It has chosen one God, the God of genocide. 

It will be a big task but I dream that we could return to being the people of God-wrestlers. To our 4000 years of tradition that pre-date the state of Israel. I can imagine that it would require honoring our doubt, our fear. Finding friendship and mercy in ourselves and God. 

Might we return to what it means to be God-wrestlers. 

And reclaim that we have all access to a God that holds, sees, and loves us in all of our suffering.