Does God Need a Standing Ovation?

Oh boy, I can already see how angry — or simply dismissive — some of you may be. So before you sharpen the knives, allow me to follow this thought wherever it goes.

I grew up with Yemenite grandparents, steeped in Jewish culture, tradition and religion. Over the years, I developed my own brand of belief and acceptance, one that doesn’t always fit neatly into a box. I don’t pretend to have the answers, nor can I possibly explore every theological argument in one essay. I’m simply asking you to indulge the questions.

So, with that out of the way, let us begin with the most generous assumption possible: God exists.

Not because I am insisting that He does but for the purpose of this argument, I’m simply willing to grant the premise. Maybe there is a God, maybe there isn’t. But disbelief gets us out of this particular query rather quickly, and I’m interested in the harder question: if there is a Creator, what exactly are we entitled to assume about Him?

I mean, we’re talking the whole package; say we’re talking about the Creator of heaven and earth, the designer of the mosquito, the human brain, gravity, chocolate, cancer cells, sunsets, earthquakes, hemorrhoids, mothers-in-law, the fifth digit on our foot — the little toe — and whoever decided that women’s bathing suits needed removable pads…

All right, so let’s say God made everything. But now, I have a question: why does God need us to tell Him how wonderful He is all day, every single day of our lives? It’s exhausting, no?

And while I’m already getting myself into trouble, why do we assume that God is good?

Maybe we’re just here to entertain Him… And again, I’m not saying this idea is what I believe. I’m asking why that possibility is eliminated before the conversation even begins? If we’re willing, for the purpose of argument, to assume a Creator, why must “good” automatically come bundled into the package?

I ask this as a Jew because Judaism provides an impressive number of opportunities to acknowledge God. An observant Jew wakes with blessings, prays in the morning, afternoon and evening, and encounters blessings and commandments throughout ordinary daily life.

There’s a blessing for bread as most everyone knows. But take away the bread and there’s a different blessing for certain grain foods, another for fruit that grows on a tree, another for produce that grows from the ground, another for wine. Another for pretty much everything else.

Finally, in case you think you’ve finished, there are blessings after eating too. Definitely, it can feel like: blessing for this, blessing for that, stop, acknowledge, eat, acknowledge again. Phewwww!

Apparently even God has a filing system!

But no, an Orthodox Jew is not blessing every individual carrot, but still, the system itself is remarkably detailed.

I will say this–the traditional explanation makes sense, and it’s rather beautiful. We can all agree that eating should not be relegated to mindless consumption. The blessings make us stop, think, appreciate, and not take anything for granted. We acknowledge that this abundance came from somewhere. I did not manufacture the earth, the rain, the tree, the animal or, ultimately, myself…

I understand that, albeit the frequency of the blessings not so much. Not at all actually. Once a week would have sufficed as far as I’m concerned. And yes, I can already hear the objection: once a week becomes once a month, once a month becomes Rosh Hashanah, and before long I’m thanking God only when I need a parking space.

Perhaps ritual requires repetition precisely because human beings are spectacularly good at forgetting what we’re supposed to remember. Hmm.

What I struggle with is the rigidity that can accompany it: the sense that you must stick to every prescribed detail as though your life depended on it, and that veering even slightly from the path carries enormous spiritual significance.

Gratitude I understand, mindfulness I also understand. But somewhere between “remember to be grateful” and an elaborate system determining which blessing accompanies which food and what follows afterwards, I begin to wonder whether we’ve wandered rather far from the original lesson.

And then there’s the tendency among some — not all — to look down upon Jews who don’t observe with the same devotion, as though there were only one legitimate way to be Jewish. But that’s an entirely different can of kosher worms. Another essay really.

What I still don’t understand is why gratitude needs a rule book. And, more importantly, why an omnipotent Creator needs — or commands — this extraordinary degree of acknowledgment at all.

Take God out of the sentence for a moment. Imagine a ruler who said: Before you eat, acknowledge me, when you wake, acknowledge me, before you sleep, acknowledge me. But also, obey my laws, devote particular days entirely to me, and teach your children about me. Never ever forget to praise me collectively, ask me for what you need, ask me for forgiveness, ask me for mercy. And remember that I am always there for you.

Would we call that ruler humble? Or would someone eventually whisper that perhaps His Majesty had developed a rather alarming need for attention?

Attach that behavior to almost any human leader and we become nervous. Attach it to God and we call it devotion. Why?

If a husband told his wife, “Everything you have is because of me. You should be grateful, always follow my rules because I know what is best for you,” nobody would suggest that the mere fact that he provides for her proves that he is loving. We might start asking questions. So why does the questioning stop when the authority becomes divine?

Enter Rambam

Of course, Maimonides would object immediately. Rambam does not allow me to turn God into a gigantic insecure man sitting above the clouds counting compliments.

In The Guide for the Perplexed, he goes considerably further. Our ordinary positive descriptions of God are inadequate because God is not simply a human personality enlarged to infinity. Rambam’s famous discussion of negative attributes argues that we understand God more accurately by saying what God is not than by pretending our human adjectives adequately describe Him.

God, in this conception, cannot be needy because this would suggests deficiency. An absolutely perfect being lacks nothing. God therefore cannot require praise because He suffers from low celestial self-esteem.

Fair enough. But this creates a problem rather than solving mine. If God doesn’t need the praise, why require it? And if God needs absolutely nothing from us, what exactly explains this enormous architecture of obedience?

Rambam has an answer for that too. The Torah’s commandments are directed towards our own perfection. In Part III of The Guide, he speaks of the well-being of the body and the well-being of the soul: creating a functioning, moral society and developing correct beliefs and human perfection.

Okay. Let’s say I go with that explanation. But “it’s for your own good” is a sentence with a rather checkered history. It may genuinely be for our good. I am not dismissing Rambam. I am asking why that explanation gets to be the end of the inquiry. If God doesn’t benefit from my obedience, while I supposedly do, then shouldn’t we be able to ask what the benefit is? Shouldn’t we be allowed to examine the proposition instead of being told that obedience itself proves righteousness?

And that brings me to the question that is considerably more uncomfortable: what if God exists but isn’t good? What if there is no God? Of course that’s possible. But for this particular exercise, it’s almost too easy. No God, no divine character to defend. So the question that interests me more is: What if there is one? What if there really is an intelligence behind all this? What if He really did make us?

Who proved that the Creator is benevolent? We call Him merciful, just, and loving. But are these things we have established about God — or conclusions we were taught to begin with?

An abusive husband can tell his wife that everything he does is because he loves her. He can remind her of everything he provides and tell her his rules are for her protection. He can insist she should be grateful. But does his saying so make it true?

No, I’m not saying God is an abusive husband either. I’m asking why an assertion of benevolence should count as proof of benevolence simply because it comes from the authority whose behavior we are examining.

I want to see the evidence. And believe me, there’s plenty of evidence for beauty: people sacrifice themselves for strangers, parents do not abandon their sick children, people fall in love, flowers grow through cracks in concrete, someone who has almost nothing will divide it with someone who has less, a desert that appears dead can suddenly explode into flowers after just a few drops of rain. Whales sing across oceans, snails have sex lives considerably more elaborate than anything I need to understand. And then there are the miracles for which the evidence is standing right in front of us, but we’d still rather not think too hard about how they happened. Take ourselves; we;re living proof that our parents had sex, a fact humanity has somehow managed to know and repress at exactly the same time.

So now we can all agree there is beauty, absurdity, generosity, and plenty of love, and then I look in the other direction.

A baby is born with a devastating condition before she has had the opportunity to perform a single meaningful act of free will. Another child gets cancer, and then a  perfectly ordinary family kisses their child goodbye in the morning and loses him that afternoon to a random act of violence. A child is born into hunger… Someone works every hour available and still lies awake deciding which bill can safely remain unpaid. And that may be their entire life: work, worry, scrape by, retire if they’re lucky, get sick and die.

One person overeats while knowing perfectly well there will be food tomorrow. Somewhere else a mother doesn’t know whether there will be food tonight. There are earthquakes, diseases, miscarriages, children abused by the adults who were supposed to protect them, and wars in which people who never chose the war pay for it with their bodies.

There are couples who live blessed lives together for fifty or sixty years and then one dies, leaving the other sitting on one side of the bed wondering how exactly they are expected to live another day.

It’s cruel. And then we are told: you have to believe, because God is good. Perhaps He is. But again: how do we know?

Free will can’t do all the work

“Free will” cannot answer everything. Free will might attempt to explain the murderer but it doesn’t explain the tumor. It might explain the thief but can it explain the earthquake that kills thousands, leaves tens of thousands homeless, children orphaned and parents childless?

And it doesn’t entirely explain October 7. Human free will can explain why terrorists chose to murder, mutilate, rape and kidnap. It does not answer a different religious question: If an omnipotent God exists, why didn’t He stop them?

The way I see it, free will can explain some human evil, but don’t tell me that it carries the entire prosecution’s case. And I know religious Jews who live inside this contradiction. They haven’t stopped believing or observing. They keep Shabbat, say the blessings and follow the rituals. And they are furious with God. I know of someone who struggles with Him daily.

That fascinates me, because perhaps anger at God isn’t the opposite of belief. It’s rather difficult to remain furious with someone you are certain isn’t there. And there is something profoundly Jewish about continuing the argument…

Abraham apparently didn’t get the memo

Abraham did it. When God reveals His intention concerning Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham does not respond: “Well, You’re God, so whatever You do must by definition be moral.” Instead, he challenges Him: “Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?” Genesis 18:25.

Think about these words: The Judge of all the earth is being asked whether He Himself will behave justly. That may be one of the most audacious sentences in the Torah. Abraham appears to invoke justice against God. If anything God does automatically becomes good merely because God did it, then what exactly is Abraham asking?

He bargains too. Fifty righteous people? Forty-five? Forty? Thirty? Twenty? Ten? He refuses to submit, rather, he negotiates. Abraham seems to believe he is entitled to ask God to explain Himself.

Moses goes even further. After the Golden Calf, God tells Moses of His intention to destroy the Israelites. Moses argues back, and invokes God’s reputation, he famously invokes the patriarchs too. He asks what the Egyptians will say. And according to Exodus 32, God relents.

Moses argues with God too — and the argument matters. So Judaism itself hardly presents an unbroken history of humans smiling sweetly and saying, “Whatever You say.” We wrestle, complain, bargain and accuse. Sometimes, apparently, we win.

And then there is Moses and that rock

Moses’s eventual punishment is often simplified, so let me not cheat here. He wasn’t barred from entering the Promised Land because he dared disagree with God. The episode occurs at Meribah in Numbers 20. God tells Moses to speak to the rock, but instead, Moses strikes it twice. God tells Moses and Aaron that because they failed to trust Him sufficiently to sanctify Him before the Israelites, they will not bring the people into the land.

But after everything Moses has done, the punishment itself invites a question. Wait, so after one failure and one rock there’s no Israel? Really? That’s harsh. Or how do Israelis say it:

זה ממש קשוח

Again, let me remind you that we’re talking about Moses: the man who faced Pharaoh and led an enslaved people out of Egypt. The man who endured forty years of complaining Israelites. Forty years. Anyone who has spent twenty minutes in a homeowners’ association meeting should appreciate the magnitude of this achievement. And yet, in the end, he doesn’t get in.

Jewish commentators have spent centuries arguing over precisely what Moses did wrong. Rambam, Rashi, Ramban and others don’t even identify the offense in exactly the same way. That disagreement matters, because apparently generations of very serious Jewish thinkers also looked at the story and thought: Wait. What exactly happened here?

Plato would like a word

And the Jews weren’t the only ones asking uncomfortable questions about divine morality. In Plato’s Euthyphro, Socrates asks what eventually became one of philosophy’s most famous questions: Is something holy because the gods love it, or do the gods love it because it is holy?

The wording belongs to another civilization and another conception of divinity, but the problem remains irritatingly relevant. Put it into my less elegant language: Is something good because God says it is good? Or does God call it good because it actually is good?

Because if something is good simply because God commands it, “God is good” starts becoming circular. God is good because God does what God does, and whatever God does is good because God does it. Here you can see we’ve defined Him into acquittal.

But if words like good, just and merciful mean something independently recognizable — if they involve protecting the innocent, opposing needless suffering, extending mercy — then surely those words have enough content for us to ask questions about God too. Otherwise, what exactly are we saying when we call Him good?

What if we’re chess pieces?

So let me propose the thought experiment that makes me most uncomfortable. What if we’re chess pieces? What if God really does move us around the board—some of us protected, some sacrificed, some knocked over before we’ve even figured out what game we’re playing? Maybe He doesn’t spend Tuesday afternoons moving us around for entertainment, but how the hell would we know?

We keep insisting there must be a plan. Fine. But a chess piece is also part of a plan. It just doesn’t get to know what the plan is.

What if the Being moving the pieces really can intervene but sometimes chooses not to? What if He hears the begging? What if He hears the mother sitting beside a hospital bed promising absolutely anything if her child survives? What if He hears a starving person? A hostage? A terrified soldier? A woman hiding from the man who is about to kill her? What if He hears millions of people simultaneously asking for mercy?

What if He can intervene? And what if He doesn’t?

Is He testing us? Teaching us? Allowing free will? Perfecting our souls? Hiding His face? Working according to some cosmic plan that our pathetic little human brains couldn’t possibly comprehend?

Perhaps.

Or — and this is the question religion understandably doesn’t enjoy — what if we assigned benevolence to the Being in charge because the alternative is simply too frightening?

What if He is having a laugh?

I don’t know. That’s my point.

Job has had enough

The Book of Job exists precisely because the problem doesn’t go away. Job’s friends offer versions of an explanation humanity still finds comforting: surely suffering corresponds somehow to wrongdoing, or there’s a reason, or the universe makes moral sense.

Job refuses to play along. Also, he already knows he is suffering and he wants answers. And when God finally responds, we get the magnificent speeches from the whirlwind: Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Do you understand the sea? The stars? The creatures of creation?

It’s breathtaking literature. But philosophically, I am left with another question: does overwhelming Job with the incomprehensible scale of creation actually answer why Job suffered? Or does it establish that God knows infinitely more and possesses infinitely more power? Those are not quite the same thing. “I understand things you cannot possibly understand” may be true. But it is not automatically a moral explanation.

And here is where “we cannot understand God” gets tricky

Religion has sophisticated answers to suffering: free will, God’s silence, the limits of human understanding, suffering that is supposed to shape us, punishment, a world to come where injustice is finally corrected, some larger purpose we simply can’t see from where we’re standing.

Some of these ideas have occupied minds infinitely more sophisticated than mine. Some are beautiful, some may even be true but none of them gives the mother her child back.

Also, “God’s ways are beyond our understanding” creates a peculiar philosophical problem. If I am too intellectually limited to judge God’s actions as cruel, why am I sufficiently equipped to judge them as good? And if human moral reasoning is too primitive to question God, why is that same human moral reasoning suddenly trustworthy when it praises Him?

We cannot possibly have it both ways.

Either words such as “good,” “just,” “loving” and “merciful” have enough meaning for human beings to apply them to God — in which case difficult questions about suffering remain legitimate — or God’s nature is so completely beyond human moral comprehension that we cannot confidently call Him cruel. But then perhaps we cannot confidently call Him good either.

Now, Rambam might actually push me further in that direction than some of his defenders would like. If human adjectives are fundamentally inadequate descriptions of God, perhaps I should be cautious not only when I accuse God of cruelty but also when I confidently announce His benevolence. Maybe “good” is another little human box into which I am trying to squeeze the infinite. I don’t know. And there it is again: I just don’t know.

Maybe doubt isn’t the enemy

For some people, those three words seem threatening but I find them liberating. I don’t know whether there is a God at all. And even if there is, I don’t know why a child gets cancer or why one person is born into comfort and another into famine.

I don’t know why some prayers seem miraculously answered and others seem to disappear into silence. I don’t know why Moses can plead successfully for an entire nation and another person cannot plead successfully for one child. I don’t know whether suffering has a meaning invisible to me, and I don’t know whether every tragedy is somehow woven into some eventual cosmic justice. And I certainly don’t know enough to tell another human being standing beside a grave that “everything happens for a reason.”

Perhaps faith is not knowing all the answers. Or perhaps some of us simply aren’t certain enough to call what we have faith at all. Either way, uncertainty should not disqualify us from asking the questions.

Abraham demanded, so did Moses. Job demanded too. Jewish history is filled with human beings who refused to let God off easily. And maybe that is the Judaism I understand best. There is no blind obedience from me; I cannot pretend that a child dying becomes less horrifying because somebody attaches the word “plan” to it. I will continue to wrestle, argue, and question.

I know Jews who are angry at God and still make Kiddush on Friday night. There is something almost unbearably moving about that. They are essentially saying: “I’m furious with You, I don’t understand You, I don’t trust what You’re doing right now but go ahead, pass the wine.” Maybe that relationship is more honest than certainty.

And for those who don’t believe there is anyone on the receiving end of the argument, perhaps the questions still matter. We are, after all, examining ideas that have shaped civilizations, laws, families, wars, rituals, ethics and billions of individual lives. Whether God exists or not, what human beings believe about God has consequences.

So does God need a standing ovation?

Probably not, if Rambam is right. Perhaps the blessings and the prayers aren’t for God at all. Perhaps they’re for us.

Perhaps saying ha’etz before biting into an apple really does make a person pause long enough to experience gratitude instead of entitlement. Perhaps ritual gives shape to a life that would otherwise race by unnoticed, and perhaps thanking God three times a day doesn’t inflate God’s ego. Perhaps it deflates ours.

I can accept that possibility but I’m still not prepared to surrender the larger question. Because power is not proof of goodness and creation is not proof of love. Authority could never be proof of morality and worship is not proof that the object being worshipped deserves it.

Maybe that is as close to illumination as any of us gets. Not the answer, but the search. A lifetime of looking for something that remains, maddeningly, just beyond our reach.

And perhaps that’s why I’m suspicious of anyone who tells me they have God completely figured out. If thousands of years of arguing, praying, studying, suffering and searching haven’t settled the matter, I’m not sure any of us gets to announce that we’ve cracked the code.

If God exists and God is good, then surely God can survive my asking why. Surely an infinite Being is not threatened by one Jewish woman with questions.

And if He exists and created my brain, my skepticism, my stubbornness, my sense of justice and apparently my inability to leave well enough alone, then frankly He has only Himself to blame.

Maybe one day I will understand, or never will. Maybe there is nothing there to understand in the first place.

But until then, I reserve the right inherited from Abraham, Moses, Job and several thousand years of argumentative Jews to look upward and ask: Are You sure this is justice?

Perhaps there is someone listening, perhaps there isn’t. I’m simply no longer certain that the existence of the Listener — if there is one — tells me everything I need to know about His character. And if that makes God angry? Well, at least now He knows how some of us feel.