Paula Mack Drill
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Rabbi Paula Mack Drill has been one of three rabbis of the Orangetown Jewish Center, Orangeburg, New York since she was ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary in May 2004. She is a recipient of a Wexner Graduate Fellowship. Prior to returning to full-time study in rabbinical school, Paula worked for eleven years as a social worker (Columbia University/JTS Joint Graduate Program) in the Jewish community at Daughters of Israel Geriatric Center and Golda Och Academy, both in West Orange, NJ. Additionally, she served as the Assistant Director at Ramah Day Camp in Nyack, NY for seven summers. Paula’s passions are advocacy on behalf of mental illness and people with physical disabilities, community support of the homeless, and education about domestic violence. She was honored by the New York Board of Rabbis for her work in Domestic Violence Prevention. She is currently a member of the Jewish Federation of Rockland Board and on the Executive Council of Rockland Clergy for Social Justice (with work focused on the Constitutional rights to education for the children of the East Ramapo Central School District).
Paula and her husband Jonathan are the proud parents of six children, Noah and his wife Rochelle, Sarah and her husband Sagi, Ben, and Josh. |
1
Faith in the Fog
Before dawn I crossed the bridge
In a fog so thick
That the city could not be seen at all:
No lights no skyscape no brake lights no
City at all;
The evidence seemed clear:
New York had disappeared overnight.
Yet in a wild leap of faith,
I suddenly believed
that the City was still there
Awaiting my crossing.
Heart pounding at the discovery of faith
I hesitantly peered through the windshields
Of the cars on the way to the Cross Bronx
Clearly they did not know
I could see it in their faces
They neither realized that the city had disappeared
nor that we could believe that the city was still there
And I – alone in my car –
Soul filled to over-brimming
With the certitude of faith
Turned another way.
Trusting in the revelation, I turned
Down Riverside
The city opened before me
In a moment
It all became clear:
In the fog
In a fog so thick
That the city could not be seen at all:
No lights no skyscape no brake lights no
City at all;
The evidence seemed clear:
New York had disappeared overnight.
Yet in a wild leap of faith,
I suddenly believed
that the City was still there
Awaiting my crossing.
Heart pounding at the discovery of faith
I hesitantly peered through the windshields
Of the cars on the way to the Cross Bronx
Clearly they did not know
I could see it in their faces
They neither realized that the city had disappeared
nor that we could believe that the city was still there
And I – alone in my car –
Soul filled to over-brimming
With the certitude of faith
Turned another way.
Trusting in the revelation, I turned
Down Riverside
The city opened before me
In a moment
It all became clear:
In the fog
2
The Jewish Definition of OMG: In Pursuit of a Personal Theology
Oh my God! So many of us tend to use these three words, and there’s a good reason for it. God is a code word for an experience felt so deeply and powerfully that no other word will do. I often say it when the sunset is particularly flamboyant or when I am standing at the top of Bear Mountain looking at clouds gathering over the Hudson River. I chanted it hypnotically over and over when I sat in a student lounge at JTS 16 years ago watching the Twin Towers fall. I said it when I stood under the chuppah with Noah and Rochelle a month ago, looking at Jonathan’s parents watching their first-born grandchild. Okay, yes, I admit, I said it too when I tasted the zeppola with caramel at a recent birthday dinner.
And I teach my seventh graders that if they say OMG with the correct amount of feeling, it becomes a prayer.
Tonight, I am speaking about this code word, God. On the eve of the holiest day of our year, I am well aware of the presumptuousness of speaking about God, whose nature, I confess, I do not know. That same God, I pray, will be generous and forgive me for doing so. And the contradiction and nuance begins.
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks has written that Yom Kippur is an intensely personal day of conscience and self-reckoning. Unlike all other Jewish celebrations which are about our national history and communal nature, Yom Kippur is deeply personal. It is the time when we wonder about the big questions that are uniquely ours. The liturgy, music, fasting and long hours of sitting and standing lead us toward those questions. We are meant to wonder about the nature of God’s relationship with us.
Judaism does laws, ritual, prayer and study. Judaism does action and values and ethics. But Judaism doesn’t particularly “do” theology. My teacher Rabbi Neil Gilman tells the story of his decision to study Jewish theology in graduate school at Columbia University and JTS. His mentor at McGill University was shocked at his decision. “Jews don’t do theology. They don’t talk about God, they live with God every day.”
Rabbi Gilman went on to influence several generations of rabbis to think about and teach about personal theology, writing and teaching for more than fifty years, anchored in his conviction that a coherent theology is crucial for a Jewish religious identity. Notice I did not say: THE coherent theology. All of us are unique. So are our beliefs and our questions about God.
One particular week this past summer, congregants seemed to be asking the hardest kinds of questions.
A little girl asked her mother: why should I try so hard to be good if everyone dies anyway? Her mother referred her to the rabbis.
A 20-year-old had coffee with me before leaving for her junior year in college. She wondered aloud how there could possibly be a God when the world seemed to be filled with people doing horrible things to each other. What is God doing anyway?
A man going through one painful, harsh loss after another told me, “I’m not sure why I am being targeted for punishment. What kind of God would behave like this?”
And that same week, a wise man of 80 years challenged me: “I’ve tried all my life to do what is right. But it says in the Torah that God is jealous, vengeful and harsh. Moshe is almost perfect but look how he gets punished for one small mistake. I am far from perfect. What are my chances of a good ending?”
What a week! It was exhausting. The questions ran the gamut of theological challenges: the purpose of life, the presence of evil in the world, why bad things happen to good people, did God write the Bible? What is God?
Interestingly, all of the questions emerge from the same theological assumptions – those that we learned when we were children.
I don’t fault any of the questioners for this fact, and I don’t say it as a condemning judgment. I mean, at least one of the questioners WAS a child. The theology driving these questions are childlike because the last time most of us thought about our relationship with God with any consistency, we were children. . . and our thinking was concrete and literal.
Questions about the nature of God and our purpose on earth prove the necessity of developing and continually revising a personal theology as adults. At times, we recognize our thinking as it changes and shed old ideas. At other times, we must live with the fact that flux is part of the process. There simply is no “correct” way to think about God.
I remember learning about God at children’s services on Yom Kippur at Temple Beth El in Portland, Maine. God was a wise and thoughtful old man who had this enormous Book of Life in which he wrote all of my good deeds and all of my mistakes… including, the ones my mom and dad hadn’t found out about.
Even today, it is hard to shake that idea. It was planted when I was just a kid. I find it creeping around the edges of my High Holy Day experiences every year.
When the real questions of life come up, however, a Santa Claus character up in the sky rewarding good behavior is frankly not helpful. So most of us give up. God doesn’t make sense when we mature in our understanding of the way the world works. We feel let down and cut off when the world behaves like… the world… but God doesn’t seem to be acting like … the God of our Junior Congregation.
Most of us find ourselves stuck with hard questions when bad things happen in the world or to us personally.
We don’t have to begin the quest for theological sense only when it is catalyzed by tragedy, disappointment, or loss.
There are so many positive reasons to figure out where you stand with regard to God. A solid theological foundation can answer other kinds of questions. Questions like…
How can I be the best version of myself?
How can I feel whole?
How can I stop working so hard to try to fit together the broken pieces of myself?
What is my purpose here in life?
And so, I come to the blessing and the curse of being a Jew. Judaism doesn’t tell you what to believe. There is no credo that must be accepted in order for you to be in the fold. Other religions are founded on a theological premise. Jews – not. We are founded on a covenant, a history, a book, a set of rules. What we believe? That’s up to each one of us.
For many of us, Judaism’s openness to searching and developing personal beliefs regarding God is a blessing. But for others, it is a curse of sorts. Some of us just want to be told what to believe. Be good, and you’ll be rewarded. Walk in God’s ways and you will never suffer. God loves you but expects a great deal from you.
Those theologies work. They work for many, many religious people in the world. They work . . . until they don’t.
We are good, but feel punished.
We walk in God’s ways but suffer illness and loss.
We feel unheard, unknown and unloved by God.
Medieval commentators and the rabbis of the Talmud asked about the nature of God and answered with a certainty and confidence that is astounding…. considering that they all disagreed with each other! But in our open society, in a world where we know about other religious traditions and cannot assume that we have a monopoly on the truth, confidence in our theology is hard to establish.
Jews are less a community of faith than we are a community of fate. We are not united by a common understanding of God, a common established liturgy, or a common observance of ritual. Such matters of faith are not even shared within one stream of Judaism or one synagogue, never mind all Jews in the world.
Jews just never got the hang of dogma.
Let’s concede that we cannot know God’s essence. Okay, but we still speak of God, after all we are a community of faith. We speak about God, all the while realizing that everything we say about God is only marginally accurate, that it is impressionistic, imaginative and subjective. That’s the point that we often miss. Rather than accept that we speak of God though we cannot know God’s essence, we act as though the more we speak, the more thoroughly we will nail down just what God is. To quote the great philosophers who wrote The Book of Mormon, “It’s a metaphor!”
Developing a personal theology takes work. It requires study, deep introspection, a facility and fluidity of the mind that is always challenging. Our thoughts come to the end of the rational path on which they began. We see before us a wall that cannot be scaled or a cliff from which we will plunge. We give up. Better to fall back upon that all powerful and often angry God and throw up our hands.
Tonight, I am asking you not to throw up your hands. Developing a personal theology is tough and you need to work hard. It requires willingness to think for yourself, to observe and correct and to overcome setbacks.
If you want to understand what it means to be a human being,
if you are interested in where you come from and where you are meant to go,
if you want equanimity in the face of difficulties and sorrows,
then the journey inward toward understanding your relationship with God is where you must go.
I have been crafting personal theologies since I first studied with Rabbi Gilman in 1983. Over these years, I can tell you that my beliefs have been inconsistent, difficult and totally unproveable. As the rabbis in the Talmud say about seeking God: it does not just change the way one sees things, it transforms the person who sees.
Rabbi Harold Kushner says that the attempt to understand the immortal God is ultimately no more than understanding what is immortal within each one of us.
What can I promise you if you do this work? I can’t promise you’ll get what you want. I can’t tell you that if you figure out what God is, you’ll have the upper hand on life.
Life, I promise you, will continue happening. And it will at times offer you so much joy and blessing that you will find yourself saying: Oh my God.
And life at times will also break your heart. You will be brought low. But if you commit to the work of really asking and answering the questions about your beliefs about God, you will find strength and balance. If your current theology isn’t helpful, you’ll craft a new one.
With permission, I invite you to listen as I share something Rabbi Scheff said this past August, in the Daily Chapel of our synagogue. Sam and Jill Beer had come to the end of shloshim for Daniel. For thirty days they had recited kaddish for their son, surrounded by friends and community. Their obligation to kaddish was ending. Their life without their eleven-year-old son was just beginning.
This is what Rabbi Scheff said when he addressed that minyan:
In the wake of this tragic loss, I know less about God than I did 30 days ago. And yet, in some ways I know more about God than I did 30 days ago, having seen the way this family has found strength in community, and how this community has come together for a family.
When Daniel died, Rabbi Scheff’s belief in God was shaken. Over the years, he has developed a theology based upon a partnership between God and humanity. We have had other losses in our community. In fact, in the last three and a half years, we have lost four precious children. This past month, we have been knocked over by six more losses in our community, including the death of Burt Heller, a patriarch in our shul. Rabbi Scheff’s theology has changed, flowed, and always seemed to carry him through with the strength and faith to serve. This past July, however, when Daniel died, he found that belief system lacking. As we enter a new Jewish year, he is doing the work of shaping a new personal theology, the next generation, to make room for his evolving relationship with God as the world comes to rest in a new balance, a new reality. It isn’t easy work. Not for him and not for any of us.
Last year, students in the Thursday evening Darkeinu class spent a month studying and crafting personal theologies. We will no doubt return to that task in this year’s class.
You can also begin your investigations in a three-week class with rabbinic intern Chazzan Shoshi Rosenbaum called Jewish Theology 101, being offered on three Tuesdays at 11:30 am - November 7, 14, and 21.
You might choose to use a journal to ask and answer your questions. You might find yourself a havruta, a study partner, and challenge each other. Your rabbis would be delighted to suggest writers, teachers and books that can inspire you on the way.
What then is God? I don’t know. But I most definitely want to continue trying to figure it out. The turbulence of life, the fast pace of information, the in-your-face methods of receiving news about the entire world, the very personal losses and sorrows of our community – all require a mature, fluid theology. I will keep working on mine. I wish you success in your attempts to work on yours in the year ahead.
G’mar chatima tova.
Kol Nidre 5778 September 29, 2017
And I teach my seventh graders that if they say OMG with the correct amount of feeling, it becomes a prayer.
Tonight, I am speaking about this code word, God. On the eve of the holiest day of our year, I am well aware of the presumptuousness of speaking about God, whose nature, I confess, I do not know. That same God, I pray, will be generous and forgive me for doing so. And the contradiction and nuance begins.
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks has written that Yom Kippur is an intensely personal day of conscience and self-reckoning. Unlike all other Jewish celebrations which are about our national history and communal nature, Yom Kippur is deeply personal. It is the time when we wonder about the big questions that are uniquely ours. The liturgy, music, fasting and long hours of sitting and standing lead us toward those questions. We are meant to wonder about the nature of God’s relationship with us.
Judaism does laws, ritual, prayer and study. Judaism does action and values and ethics. But Judaism doesn’t particularly “do” theology. My teacher Rabbi Neil Gilman tells the story of his decision to study Jewish theology in graduate school at Columbia University and JTS. His mentor at McGill University was shocked at his decision. “Jews don’t do theology. They don’t talk about God, they live with God every day.”
Rabbi Gilman went on to influence several generations of rabbis to think about and teach about personal theology, writing and teaching for more than fifty years, anchored in his conviction that a coherent theology is crucial for a Jewish religious identity. Notice I did not say: THE coherent theology. All of us are unique. So are our beliefs and our questions about God.
One particular week this past summer, congregants seemed to be asking the hardest kinds of questions.
A little girl asked her mother: why should I try so hard to be good if everyone dies anyway? Her mother referred her to the rabbis.
A 20-year-old had coffee with me before leaving for her junior year in college. She wondered aloud how there could possibly be a God when the world seemed to be filled with people doing horrible things to each other. What is God doing anyway?
A man going through one painful, harsh loss after another told me, “I’m not sure why I am being targeted for punishment. What kind of God would behave like this?”
And that same week, a wise man of 80 years challenged me: “I’ve tried all my life to do what is right. But it says in the Torah that God is jealous, vengeful and harsh. Moshe is almost perfect but look how he gets punished for one small mistake. I am far from perfect. What are my chances of a good ending?”
What a week! It was exhausting. The questions ran the gamut of theological challenges: the purpose of life, the presence of evil in the world, why bad things happen to good people, did God write the Bible? What is God?
Interestingly, all of the questions emerge from the same theological assumptions – those that we learned when we were children.
I don’t fault any of the questioners for this fact, and I don’t say it as a condemning judgment. I mean, at least one of the questioners WAS a child. The theology driving these questions are childlike because the last time most of us thought about our relationship with God with any consistency, we were children. . . and our thinking was concrete and literal.
Questions about the nature of God and our purpose on earth prove the necessity of developing and continually revising a personal theology as adults. At times, we recognize our thinking as it changes and shed old ideas. At other times, we must live with the fact that flux is part of the process. There simply is no “correct” way to think about God.
I remember learning about God at children’s services on Yom Kippur at Temple Beth El in Portland, Maine. God was a wise and thoughtful old man who had this enormous Book of Life in which he wrote all of my good deeds and all of my mistakes… including, the ones my mom and dad hadn’t found out about.
Even today, it is hard to shake that idea. It was planted when I was just a kid. I find it creeping around the edges of my High Holy Day experiences every year.
When the real questions of life come up, however, a Santa Claus character up in the sky rewarding good behavior is frankly not helpful. So most of us give up. God doesn’t make sense when we mature in our understanding of the way the world works. We feel let down and cut off when the world behaves like… the world… but God doesn’t seem to be acting like … the God of our Junior Congregation.
Most of us find ourselves stuck with hard questions when bad things happen in the world or to us personally.
We don’t have to begin the quest for theological sense only when it is catalyzed by tragedy, disappointment, or loss.
There are so many positive reasons to figure out where you stand with regard to God. A solid theological foundation can answer other kinds of questions. Questions like…
How can I be the best version of myself?
How can I feel whole?
How can I stop working so hard to try to fit together the broken pieces of myself?
What is my purpose here in life?
And so, I come to the blessing and the curse of being a Jew. Judaism doesn’t tell you what to believe. There is no credo that must be accepted in order for you to be in the fold. Other religions are founded on a theological premise. Jews – not. We are founded on a covenant, a history, a book, a set of rules. What we believe? That’s up to each one of us.
For many of us, Judaism’s openness to searching and developing personal beliefs regarding God is a blessing. But for others, it is a curse of sorts. Some of us just want to be told what to believe. Be good, and you’ll be rewarded. Walk in God’s ways and you will never suffer. God loves you but expects a great deal from you.
Those theologies work. They work for many, many religious people in the world. They work . . . until they don’t.
We are good, but feel punished.
We walk in God’s ways but suffer illness and loss.
We feel unheard, unknown and unloved by God.
Medieval commentators and the rabbis of the Talmud asked about the nature of God and answered with a certainty and confidence that is astounding…. considering that they all disagreed with each other! But in our open society, in a world where we know about other religious traditions and cannot assume that we have a monopoly on the truth, confidence in our theology is hard to establish.
Jews are less a community of faith than we are a community of fate. We are not united by a common understanding of God, a common established liturgy, or a common observance of ritual. Such matters of faith are not even shared within one stream of Judaism or one synagogue, never mind all Jews in the world.
Jews just never got the hang of dogma.
Let’s concede that we cannot know God’s essence. Okay, but we still speak of God, after all we are a community of faith. We speak about God, all the while realizing that everything we say about God is only marginally accurate, that it is impressionistic, imaginative and subjective. That’s the point that we often miss. Rather than accept that we speak of God though we cannot know God’s essence, we act as though the more we speak, the more thoroughly we will nail down just what God is. To quote the great philosophers who wrote The Book of Mormon, “It’s a metaphor!”
Developing a personal theology takes work. It requires study, deep introspection, a facility and fluidity of the mind that is always challenging. Our thoughts come to the end of the rational path on which they began. We see before us a wall that cannot be scaled or a cliff from which we will plunge. We give up. Better to fall back upon that all powerful and often angry God and throw up our hands.
Tonight, I am asking you not to throw up your hands. Developing a personal theology is tough and you need to work hard. It requires willingness to think for yourself, to observe and correct and to overcome setbacks.
If you want to understand what it means to be a human being,
if you are interested in where you come from and where you are meant to go,
if you want equanimity in the face of difficulties and sorrows,
then the journey inward toward understanding your relationship with God is where you must go.
I have been crafting personal theologies since I first studied with Rabbi Gilman in 1983. Over these years, I can tell you that my beliefs have been inconsistent, difficult and totally unproveable. As the rabbis in the Talmud say about seeking God: it does not just change the way one sees things, it transforms the person who sees.
Rabbi Harold Kushner says that the attempt to understand the immortal God is ultimately no more than understanding what is immortal within each one of us.
What can I promise you if you do this work? I can’t promise you’ll get what you want. I can’t tell you that if you figure out what God is, you’ll have the upper hand on life.
Life, I promise you, will continue happening. And it will at times offer you so much joy and blessing that you will find yourself saying: Oh my God.
And life at times will also break your heart. You will be brought low. But if you commit to the work of really asking and answering the questions about your beliefs about God, you will find strength and balance. If your current theology isn’t helpful, you’ll craft a new one.
With permission, I invite you to listen as I share something Rabbi Scheff said this past August, in the Daily Chapel of our synagogue. Sam and Jill Beer had come to the end of shloshim for Daniel. For thirty days they had recited kaddish for their son, surrounded by friends and community. Their obligation to kaddish was ending. Their life without their eleven-year-old son was just beginning.
This is what Rabbi Scheff said when he addressed that minyan:
In the wake of this tragic loss, I know less about God than I did 30 days ago. And yet, in some ways I know more about God than I did 30 days ago, having seen the way this family has found strength in community, and how this community has come together for a family.
When Daniel died, Rabbi Scheff’s belief in God was shaken. Over the years, he has developed a theology based upon a partnership between God and humanity. We have had other losses in our community. In fact, in the last three and a half years, we have lost four precious children. This past month, we have been knocked over by six more losses in our community, including the death of Burt Heller, a patriarch in our shul. Rabbi Scheff’s theology has changed, flowed, and always seemed to carry him through with the strength and faith to serve. This past July, however, when Daniel died, he found that belief system lacking. As we enter a new Jewish year, he is doing the work of shaping a new personal theology, the next generation, to make room for his evolving relationship with God as the world comes to rest in a new balance, a new reality. It isn’t easy work. Not for him and not for any of us.
Last year, students in the Thursday evening Darkeinu class spent a month studying and crafting personal theologies. We will no doubt return to that task in this year’s class.
You can also begin your investigations in a three-week class with rabbinic intern Chazzan Shoshi Rosenbaum called Jewish Theology 101, being offered on three Tuesdays at 11:30 am - November 7, 14, and 21.
You might choose to use a journal to ask and answer your questions. You might find yourself a havruta, a study partner, and challenge each other. Your rabbis would be delighted to suggest writers, teachers and books that can inspire you on the way.
What then is God? I don’t know. But I most definitely want to continue trying to figure it out. The turbulence of life, the fast pace of information, the in-your-face methods of receiving news about the entire world, the very personal losses and sorrows of our community – all require a mature, fluid theology. I will keep working on mine. I wish you success in your attempts to work on yours in the year ahead.
G’mar chatima tova.
Kol Nidre 5778 September 29, 2017