The hidden face: where is God?

“We have no one to rely on”

There used to be a common bumper sticker, “We have no one to rely on except our Father in heaven,” and it spread mainly in times of distress. Some also rebuked: “Is it only in distress that we rely on him? He is with us always, at every step.” And many say “with God’s help” and “God will help,” and mean it. But those same people know very well that it is the paracetamol that brings down the fever, and that fighting well is what brings victory, and they plan their steps accordingly. Sometimes “God will help” is just a way of speaking: “I hope.” But there are people who truly feel it, and their feelings should not be dismissed. And yet, the picture we have presented so far remains: there is almost no divine intervention in the world today. No miracles, no prophecy, no “hand of God” that can be identified. And this is also a historical fact: the further back in time one goes, the more miracles, prophecy and open involvement one finds. And the further forward, the less.

Odeya’s question

A girl named Odeya wrote a question that came up for her “every few months”: where is God? Why does he not reveal himself? There are days when she rebels, and days when she accepts the judgment in submission. Her question matters because it is not philosophical. She is not asking for proof. She is asking for connection.

One could answer her with arguments: here, God exists, here is the evidence. But that is not the answer to her question. The answer is a picture.

The model of withdrawal: God as a parent

Think of a parent. When the child is small, the parent is involved in every step: feeding, lifting, preventing falls, deciding for him. As the child grows, the parent deliberately steps back. He lets him walk alone, make mistakes, decide. Not because he loves less, but because he wants the child to stand on his own feet. A parent who goes on feeding a twenty-year-old harms him.

So too in the relationship between God and humanity. In the biblical period he was very involved: miracles, prophecy, open intervention, reward and punishment in this world. As the generations passed, the intervention diminished. Not because God weakened or despaired, but because humanity matured, and he wants it to stand on its own feet. The withdrawal is not abandonment. It is part of the plan.

There is a hint of this in the Torah itself, in Parashat Ekev. The Torah describes the transition from the desert to the Land of Israel as a change of policy. In the desert, manna fell from heaven, the clouds of glory protected, and everything was open. In the Land of Israel one must plow, sow, and wait for rain: “a land that… drinks water from the rain of heaven.” And the Torah warns against the mistake that will follow this transition: “And you will say in your heart, my strength and the might of my hand have made me this wealth.” That is, the Torah itself describes a process of withdrawal, and warns that the withdrawal should not be read as if there were no God.

And where is God now?

The answer to Odeya is that God is found in everything we look at. In the laws of nature, in the order of the world, in our ability to understand it. He does not need to reveal himself in miracles, because he reveals himself all the time through the world itself. Whoever looks for him in departures from nature is looking in the wrong place. He is found precisely in the routine.

And from this also an answer to the fear of many believers, that scientific progress is a “disaster” that hides God. The opposite is true. Science is part of this maturing. The more we understand, the more we do exactly what God expects of us: to stand on our own feet. The present decline is actually the reverse: after the attitude to miracles gradually sobered over the generations, today, out of difficulty in maturing, there is a return to belief in miracles, segulot and “wonders.” It is hard for us to mature. But God expects us, more than our predecessors, to do so.

And in the time to come?

Tradition says that in the time to come God will reveal himself again: the Messiah, prophecy, perhaps miracles. Not all the traditions about this are equally well founded. But one can propose a picture: after humanity matures and stands on its own feet, perhaps a direct connection will return, but a mature connection, more between equals, and not the connection of a child and a father. There is a beautiful homily about Esther, who is called “the doe of the dawn”: dawn is the transition from night to day. And perhaps it was precisely the age of miracles that was the “night,” and the age of nature, in which we understand the world by ourselves, is the “day.”

What has changed

It is worth summarizing what has changed for someone who accepts this picture. He no longer has to live with the feeling that “everything is from God.” He can understand that usually no miracle will happen, that what happens is the result of the laws of nature and of what he himself does, and that this is exactly the world God wanted. One can breathe freely. And rationality does not contradict faith. It is part of it.

And if someone asks: “How can you go against the tradition of the generations?” the answer has three parts. Better to remain with a difficulty about the Sages than to lie to yourself. These are questions of fact, and on facts there is no authority. And the Sages themselves had no special source for this knowledge: they relied on reasoning, on the science of their time and on interpretation of verses, and they themselves disagreed on these questions.

Note: what the Rishonim said

Since these ideas sound new, it is worth knowing that they are not. Maimonides (Guide III:17) wrote that there is no individual providence over animals and plants: “I do not at all believe that this leaf fell by providence.” Providence, in his view, is over human beings only, and according to the measure of their intellect. And the commentators on Maimonides of the Ibn Tibbon family, and especially Moses of Narbonne, understood that even providence over human beings is not intervention from outside, but a result of using the intellect God gave him: whoever uses his intellect is careful and survives, and that is his “providence.” The Ran, in his Derashot, describes that the sun warms and ripens the fruit, and it cannot help also warming the head of whoever walks on the road in midsummer, even if he is righteous. The laws of nature are general, and they also strike whoever “does not deserve it.” That is exactly the picture presented here.