Depending on their religious tradition (or lack thereof) and personal experiences, people will have widely varying occasions to invoke – or just bring up – God in conversation. Is God a being (perhaps humanoid) that is intervening (or interfering) in our lives? If so, how do we account for the moral unfairness of the universe, the disproportionate fortune or misfortune some people seem to receive?
After the sudden death of his daughter at the age of 26, Rabbi Richard Agler, DD spent years interrogating his theology in an attempt to find some kind of acceptance and inner peace. His book “The Tragedy Test: Making Sense of Life-Changing Loss” came, in part, out of this difficult journey. More recently, he has co-edited the volume “A God We Can Believe In: What Educated Belief and Spirit Can Look Like in the Twenty-First Century.”
Rabbi Agler was ordained in 1978. He is the founding rabbi, now Rabbi Emeritus, of Congregation B’nai Israel in Boca Raton, Florida. He has also taught accredited graduate courses in mysticism and his gift for bringing complex ideas to life makes him a speaker in demand. In addition to essays of Judaic interest, he has published articles and letters on political ethics, interfaith relations, and baseball. He currently serves as Co-Director of the Tali Fund and is the Scholar Emeritus of Congregation Ohr HaYam/the Keys Jewish Community Center in Tavernier, Florida.
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Richard Agler: Thank you very much, Geoff. My honor and delight to be here.
Geoff Mitelman: So I want to start, because there’s a line – I think it’s quoted from a few different people, but I usually quote – I believe in the name of Laura Novak Winer, but I’m sure that she said it [after] someone else, but: “All theology is really autobiography. What we say about God has much more to say about us than what we say about God.” So I’d love for you to share a little bit about your theology, and how you became interested in these questions, and ultimately editing this book about “a God we can believe in.”
Richard Agler: Yeah, I use a variation on that line myself. I’ve used it for many years. I quote Tip O’Neill, the former Speaker of the House: “All politics is local and all theology is personal.” So, absolutely – that’s very much the case. So, my own theology – I would describe it as kind of an evolution. I decided to study to become a rabbi because I had some kind of experience of God that’s a little bit difficult to describe in ordinary words. I was a young man searching for I’m-not-sure-what, when all of a sudden I found myself out in an open field with the sky above and Mother Earth below. And I felt an intense – the only way I can describe it – as something of a sense of God’s presence, the wonder and the grandeur of the universe, or whatever you might say. And it was very, very powerful for me. And I decided I wanted to learn about this, and I applied to rabbinical school – I thought that might be a good thing to do.
And as we know in Judaism, there’s kind of a trinity – not an official Trinity like the church has, but it’s God, Torah and Israel. And for me, the main thing was God. And I learned a lot of Torah along the way, and proud to be part of the people Israel, of course, and love of the state of Israel. But for me, it was really – my rabbinate was, or my personal growth was, about God. And I’d always look for our texts and traditions to find beauty and meaning and guidance in them. And that was kind of how I lived my life as a rabbi.
Now, as we know, God is not an easy subject. (Laughs) There’s always plenty of questions, and the biggest questions, of course, are, how come there’s injustice in the world? And as the rabbis put it, rasha v’tov lo, tzadik v’ra lo. Why do the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer? Why did my loved one die? And whenever those questions came up, those are theological questions. And I would always answer in one variation or another: “We don’t know. But that’s okay. There’s a lot of things we don’t know, a lot of things we can’t know. And there’s no sense really giving up on religion, because it can’t answer everything when it can answer so many things very well.”
And that was my belief, and I really hold that to this day. And then something happened 10 years ago, in January of 2012, tragically, I’m sorry to bombshell your audience like this – we lost our daughter, 26 years old, a beautiful, wonderful, vibrant, talented young woman. She lived and worked in Washington. She had a career in international development. She went out for a jog after work one day, and was struck by a motor vehicle, and that was the end of her life. It was tragic. And my God understanding could not account for this. It wasn’t working. All the answers that I had given people and myself weren’t good enough all of a sudden.
And so I sat down to write, essentially, and I ended up putting a book together, the one that before this one. Can you hold it up? It’s called The Tragedy Test: Making Sense of Life-Changing loss. And, yeah, I needed to find a God who could pass the tragedy test. Not only a God who’s there on sunny days, but a God who was there through the worst storms. I think that’s a reason why a lot of people have questions with theology or questions that are with belief. “How do I believe in a God who allows x, y, z to happen?” We’ve all heard that said, and most of us have thought it, if we’ve done any thinking.
So I kind of evolved my theology to something that I call the God of law and spirit. This is a God of law – as in the laws of the universe, the laws of science and physics and nature and all of them. God is that law. But not only that – God is also spirit, the spirit of love and kindness and understanding and compassion, without which any kind of life would be untenable, really. So the God who is non-intervening, who does not supernaturally respond to prayer, who does not necessarily protect His faithful and chosen, who does not necessarily execute righteous judgment – a God who can pass the tragedy test – turns out that’s very important, and it’s why many people do not believe.
And so I thought it would lead a little bit more to this new book. Well, that’s why we called it “A God we can believe in.” And so I was able to reach out to colleagues such as yourself and others, and we said, “Okay, let’s write about a God we can believe in, because there’s a real need to understand that when so much of our sacred texts and traditions don’t answer these questions well enough.”
So I know that was a long answer. I hope it wasn’t too long. And there we are.
Geoff Mitelman: Thank you. And I’m so sorry about your daughter. And it’s interesting, because a lot of the reason why I became a rabbi is that when I was 15, four days after I turned 15, my brother, who was 26, died. A lot of why I became a rabbi and I talked about a lot with my parents, was, there are a lot of questions in this world. And I was a mathematician, actually, growing up, which is why I do a lot of work on science and religion, but there were a lot of things that were answers. And I realized that when we have questions, we sometimes look for answers. And better than looking at answers are responses. My mother had a great line, which was that “Life is not multiple choice. Life is an essay question.” And that was a very helpful framing for me, because of trying to be able to say, why did this happen? There is a reason that you could give – and there are laws of the universe, as you’re talking about, right? You could come up with a natural reason. But when we talk about “what’s the reason,” we mean it in a different kind of way, and that’s…
Richard Agler: – a higher reason. What kind of greater purpose? There is this, right? As I say, I’ve said many times since this already, the physics of this particular tragedy I understand. I can understand the physics of most of all of them. The metaphysics are another question. And the higher reasons – yeah, we want to know those things. We’re human beings. We can ask those questions. And because we can ask those questions, we want at least some kind of response – if not an answer, if not a solution, to them.
Geoff Mitelman Well, there’s another line that I love from, actually, the musical of The Book of Mormon – which if people have not seen, it’s phenomenal, it’s hysterical, it’s now more than ten years old. But there’s a lot of great theology in there – although it’s obviously more from a gentle making fun of Mormonism – but there’s a thing where at the end of Act One, something bad happens to the main character, and he sings, “Heavenly Father, why do you let bad things happen? More to the point, why do you let bad things happen to me?”
And that is one of the most brilliant theological statements, because that’s what we say: “Why could a good God let bad things happen?” That’s not actually what people are asking. They’re asking, “Why did God things happen to me? “And in a lot of ways the answer is, “Well, why not you?” Right? Because that’s–
Richard Agler: No, that’s absolutely the case. Yeah. As a congregational rabbi, and I was a congregational rabbi for 35 years, overwhelmingly, the moments when these questions come up is, after someone’s lost a loved one, and “Why did my loved one die?” That’s the question that they ask. That’s the trigger question, or the trigger event, if you will, that makes people ask the question.
Yeah, and we want to know! Because it brings it home in the way – I’m sorry – like a flood in Bangladesh or something does not. And so, yeah, it becomes intense. And that was, like I said, it was my story, too. This brought it home for me in a way that – I took a lot of classes and I had a lot of experience and a lot of counseling, a lot of all this, and all of a sudden I need[ed] to take this to the next level.
Geoff Mitelman : It’s interesting that my experience – and your story is very different than what I’ve heard from a lot of colleagues and a lot of friends and a lot of Jews, because my experience, at least, is that jews are not so comfortable with talking about God. Jews are very comfortable with Torah. They’re often probably most connected with at least being able to study, if you think about an intellectual element. There is an element of the connection to the peoplehood. But for a lot of Jews, God is way down in terms of how they connect to their Judaism. So I’m curious – has that been your experience as well? And how do you then talk about these kinds of questions in a way that Jews might feel a little bit more comfortable talking about these theological questions?
Richard Agler: I concur with your assessment. I think out of God, Torah and Israel, it’s the most difficult one for people to talk about or even to think about – with, I think, good reason. Torah, we can get our heads around, the people Israel, we can get our heads around, and sometimes it’s politics or cultural or what have you – we get all that. That’s relatively easy, compared to God, to speak about. But God, and especially often the way God is presented to us during our annual holiday cycle, even Shabbat – or even daily, if you pray daily, which relatively few Jews do – I think there’s a disconnect there between ourselves and our people and God. And there are problems with our tradition that put forth God-images and understandings and teachings that are quite simply – our people don’t accept them for a lot of good reasons in modern day. And even 150 years ago, when education was not as widespread, higher education was not as widespread among vast segments of our people – okay, we could let it go and let the mythology do its thing. But not anymore. We’re a highly-educated group of folks, and we need to have a theology that speaks to a highly-educated population. So, yes, I agree entirely that it’s very difficult for people.
Geoff Mitelman: And I think that what’s interesting, is – I’ve developed not a lot of relationships, but some relationships, with the more liberal Evangelical Christian community, specifically the Evangelical Christian community that engages in science. Because when we think about science and religion, people are usually thinking about Evangelical Christianity and science. And so there are some great organizations that explore that. And a person that we’ve worked very closely with, Dr. Jennifer Wiseman, who identifies as an Evangelical Christian, [is] also a NASA astrophysicist; she’s about to become the Director Emerita of the Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion of the AAS. What she has said – and this is something that stuck with me – is: We can understand why some Evangelical Christians or some fundamentalist Christians might reject, push back, against science, because accepting evolution, accepting even climate change – there’s actually an identity marker there. And there’s not necessarily any benefit of being able to say, like, “Yes, I accept Darwin’s theory of evolution,” it doesn’t impact their day-to-day life. But if they say that, they could be ostracized from their community, they would lose their support system. Again, all theology is autobiography. What are the real, live issues?
So, for Jews, look, I think a lot of the reason that the Jewish community has been historically more educated is that was a great way to be able to integrate or integrate into society, to be able to advance, 50, 100 years ago. And so that’s also an identity marker, right? Jews tend to be very proud of our educational achievement.
Richard Agler: Yeah, absolutely. 100%. Yeah. I was going to say, if there’s any pressure, so to speak, on us, it’s in the opposite direction. It’s to be educated, it’s to accept science and its teachings and so much that higher learning has made clear about the universe for us. So, yeah, as far as I’m concerned, very happily, we’re able to embrace these things.
Geoff Mitelman: I think that’s what’s – the line that we often say is “the challenge in the Jewish community is not getting Jews excited about science, it’s about getting Jews excited about Judaism.”
Richard Agler: Yeah. And I think, again, because, and our people are nothing, as you know this. As we all know this, we are nothing if not stupid, okay? We are not stupid people. And when we see images and ideas and teachings about God that are clearly mythological, and yet they are being presented to us in some way that’s not acknowledging the mythological or legendary nature of them, we disconnect. And it’s not a coincidence, I don’t believe, that as far as surveys from Pew and others, regular worshippers, we consistently come out fairly low on the scale because we haven’t, again, made worship or made prayer – worship is a funny word, I know, for some people – but we have not made prayer connection to God. That’s ultimately what prayer is, and that’s what services are supposed to be about. We have not made them intellectually resonant with too many of our people, and we voted with our feet, and it’s something that we need to address. And that, again, kind of brings us back a little bit to the book, A God We Can Believe |In, that we were able to put together.
Geoff Mitelman: Well, I’d love to know a little bit about some of the pieces that surprised you, or – I’m assuming you read at least nearly every word, if not every word of every paragraph.
Richard Agler: Oh, yes. Every word. Several times, yes. (Laughs)
Geoff Mitelman: Because as the editor, you have to. What were some of the pieces that surprised you the most or spoke to you the most, or you think may. Obviously, every contributor is writing something wonderful, so I don’t want to necessarily say “this essay is the one to read,” but I’m curious as to a couple that struck you or surprised you.
Richard Agler: Well, let me answer the question in another way. I can come back to the specific question you’re asking, if it’s okay. But the thing that surprised me the most about the whole endeavor, and this was something I embarked upon with our co-editor, Rifat Sonsino. I want to mention him because he was absolutely essential to making the whole thing work. But the thing that was really most surprising to me was how easy it was to find people who wanted to write for this project. It was really terrific. Sometimes you have to go down ten alleys to find one jewel, so to speak – no. We had many more acceptances than rejections, and we could have gone on and on and on and on. Rifat and I joked from time to time, “We’re going to have to do a second volume, because we just have so many people who were willing to do this.” So I think that was really wonderful to see how many rabbis share (and scholars) the vision of a non-theistic, a non-intervening, science and higher learning, that ideas of God that don’t contradict those teachings. So that was a wonderful surprise. And I had written an article for the Reform Jewish Quarterly a couple of years ago where I raised these kind of ideas. And a colleague (former classmate, actually) wrote to me and said, “Nice job. I think if you had an honest response, here you are speaking for the theology of more than three-quarters of the Central Conference of American Rabbis,” which I think is maybe the case, may be the case. And the thing is, again, we don’t talk about it so much from the pulpit either, for various reasons, but I think we should be doing a better job of that.
I was also delighted and surprised that, just – by the way, how did we get all these authors? Well, we heard “well, so-and-so might be interested.” So I sent out a copy of the preface, which is a one-page item. And just on the basis of that, people said, “Yes, I want to be a part of this,” including even one of the rabbinical school classes. One of the professors at the Hebrew College in Cincinnati said,
“this is important. I’m going to have a session on this.” And he brought me on, and what have you. So the surprise was really very much a pleasant surprise, that this was just a very rich strike, so to speak, and very fertile ground. And so we got a lot of people who are really thinking about this, and we’re going to look to maybe build this into the next great conversation, if we can be so bold, within liberal Judaism. But to your more specific question, I don’t know if you want to comment on that.
Geoff Mitelman: No, I think there is something – that there’s a hunger, but it’s got to be framed in the right way, because if it’s presented [in a certain way], some people will say, “not so much.” But I’m excited to hear that. There was so much interest to be able to say, “I want to write about this.”
Richard Agler: Yeah, absolutely. So, yes, a lot of people have wonderful formulations. One that just strikes me – and I didn’t really think of this in advance, so I hope I’m thinking on my feet a little bit here – was one of our contributors, Hillel Cohn, [who] wrote about something he called reverent agnosticism. Reverent agnosticism. Oooh, what a good phrase! Let’s unpack that. What’s an agnostic? It’s someone who’s got questions, and don’t we all? And yet to have a spirit of reverence, despite or along with the questions – what a great way to look at things. What a great way to look at things. So I was very much moved by what he had to say.
Another of our colleagues – I’m sure I can quote this because he wrote it in his essay – Sam Cohan, a dear friend of mine, talked about when he was newly ordained and he was in a relatively small community somewhere in the Bible Belt, he was the rabbi in town – the only one there. And he went to some ministerial meeting or something like that, and they asked him, “Rabbi, why don’t you say the prayer?” And he writes that he had no idea what to do, because we weren’t taught to pray that way. We were taught to pray from the siddur and from the prayer book, and those are our prayers. And those were clearly not the right thing to do with that kind of a moment. And I think a lot of Jews in the same situation would have responded similarly. So, yeah, all these personal life experiences that kind of came out. And again, all theology is personal and autobiographical, however we might wish to describe it. Yeah. So it was wonderful seeing all of that from other folks.
Geoff Mitelman: Yeah. It reminded me, too, of when I was in a hospital chaplain. They were offering me – “Rabbi, can you offer up a prayer?” And my inclination was always, “Let me go to the rabbi’s manual. Let me get–“ And it’s hard to come up with a spontaneous prayer. And we’ve talked about this on the show multiple times, of how much the conversation in America is based on an assumption of essentially white, Evangelical, Protestant Christianity. And that’s the norm. That’s what religion is. And Judaism is different from that.
Richard Agler: Yeah, very much so. Very much so. Again, we have this image of religion – just as you say – that’s defined in those parameters, and by an intervening God, a God who’s going to come down and answer our requests. And we don’t believe that, by and large. When I say “we,” there are Jews who do believe that, but most of us don’t. And I say “us” – I mean, again, highly educated, secularized in all the best ways kind of understanding. So we need something better and different that works – a “God that we can believe in,” again, to quote the title of the book.
Geoff Mitelman: I want to unpack a little bit about the word “believe,” because I’ll often get the question of “Do you believe in God?” And I will say that I actually don’t like that question, because it becomes a binary question. I like how you phrase it, of “a God we can believe in.” But I usually tend to say that it’s not a question of do you believe in God, or do you not believe in God, it’s what do you believe about God, and how our beliefs impact our lives. And that’s a lot of what science says about belief. Belief is valuable because it is a prediction machine that allows us to be able to calibrate against the natural world. If I believe that saber-toothed tiger is going to be tame, that is a belief that is not going to be borne out by experience – or, I believe the sun is going to rise, right? A lot of that belief is valuable to the extent to which it impacts our day-to-day lives. So when you talk about this word, “a God we can believe in,” why did you talk about the word?
Richard Agler: Because you’re right. And it deserves unpacking, and it deserves lots of different foci coming in at it. But it’s the word that people use. “Do you believe in God?” You ask people that, and that’s the question that’s in our culture. “Do you believe in God?” And people will very often say, “I wish I could, but I can’t,” or, “I do,” or, “I don’t,” or, “It’s a struggle,” or “I don’t get it” – or somewhere in that continuum, is where everybody responds to it. So it’s a jumping-off point. And yeah, to kind of show the kind of… how do you say… the kind of things that people don’t necessarily believe in God or about God – “I don’t believe that God does x, y, z.” But yet it’s still possible to believe in God. A lot of rabbis – and I’m sure you’ve heard this, too – will respond to a question. A congregant will come in and say, “Rabbi, I just don’t believe in God.” And the response is, “Well, tell me about the God you don’t believe in.” And they’ll tell, and the rabbi will typically say, “Well, I don’t believe in that God either. So now let’s have a discussion about what we can believe in and what we do believe in.”
Geoff Mitelman: And what’s interesting is that could become alienating to people in an interfaith setting, but I have been called an atheist by both people on the far right and other people who are atheists – like, well, what atheists will say to me is, I’m sure this is something you’ve heard, I’m not the only rabbi who said this. I’ve had atheists who come up to me and say, like, “Well, what you’re talking about is something I could believe in, but I don’t believe in God. Therefore, you’re an atheist.” No, I’m not!
Richard Agler: Right. And I think, here it comes again, back to identity. People see themselves as an atheist, and they’ve got those four “L”s around them and that’s their thing. Well, they need to be open to other possibilities as well.
It’s interesting, I love the way that you just recounted that conversation. “I’m an atheist, but this is what I believe.” Well, even the atheists believe in some things, and what is it that they believe in? And I think a lot of them would intersect, at minimum with what we consider to be a living God. I think also, a lot of times that question leads people to conjure up an image of a personal God. “Do you believe in God?” “Well, all right. There’s the old man with the long hair, the gray beard, in the sky, on a throne and what have you”… or again – a little bit more sophisticated – the God who intervenes in history, the God who protects His faithful and so on – and of course it’s “His.” So that God, yeah, is not one that people necessarily believe in.
So Harold Schulweis gets quoted a few times in this book – Rabbi Harold Schulweis, a late, great teacher and rabbi. “God is not about whom, God is about when.” That God is when, you know I snuggle with my grandson. God is when all the beautiful things, that I look out of my window and can see some. God is when people rise and fight for justice – you know, these kinds of things. So, yeah, it’s a reframing that we need that I believe – and if you want to use the word believe, I think it fits there. “I believe that God is when x, y, z.”
Geoff Mitelman: Well, that’s why Harold Kushner, who wrote the book When Bad Things Happen to Good People – you ask people “What’s the title called?” And they will call it “why bad things happen to good people,” because their inclination is to be able to say, “oh, this is why bad things happen to good people.” And Kushner says, “no,, I want to explore a little bit about when this happens. We don’t always know the why on the metaphysical level.”
Richard Agler: For sure. For sure. But he describes, you know, my book, which my first book, The Tragedy Test, which Harold Kushner was kind enough to endorse for me – he doesn’t endorse many books, so I was very grateful for that. It kind of starts in the same place that his book starts, with the loss of a child, and how that impacts us. But his was written almost 40 years ago now, and mine – they kind of go in different directions theologically, I have a bit more “why” in it than he did, and that’s fine, of course. But my “whys” are kind of naturalistic. “Why? Because, well, tragically, if a slight human being is hit by a motor vehicle traveling at speed, that’s why. We understand the physics of it.” And the metaphysics – well, I go into that in the book, too, and that’s maybe just the way that life works.
Geoff Mitelman: Well, that’s why a lot of what we do and what we think about is this integration of science and Judaism and science and religion, of what’s naturalistic and what’s, for some, supernaturalistic. Or, is there – I identify more as a naturalistic theist. Understanding is part of the natural world. God is not above the natural world for me, and a recognition that I am a small, finite human being that has only a limited amount of knowledge. So that helps me explore these kinds of questions. But I’m wondering [about] parts where you’ve seen the connection of science and theology, either whether that’s something personal that you’ve seen or from the essays that you’ve been reading or your book, because there are a lot of the naturalistic elements of understanding the theology, but there’s also – I’m teaching a course at the Academy of Jewish Religion right now about scientific literacy, and rereading a phenomenal book, called Origin Story, by a guy named David Christian, about a scientifically-grounded story from the Big Bang cosmology to today.
And human evolution is a complicated part, even for Jews, because there’s part of me that, in my kishkes, I would say there is something different as a human being from other animals. I can’t prove that we are part of nature, but there is something qualitatively different of human beings than other animals, which we might say is our neshama, right, our soul. But if you draw back from an evolutionary perspective, what does that mean – that one common ancestor did not have a neshama and then one did? Evolution is a natural process, but a lot of religion is creating these demarcations. So would love to hear your thoughts on some of these questions.
Richard Agler: Yeah, it’s fascinating. Yeah. Well, the first thing I’m thinking of while you’re speaking about it is that you’ve delineated law and spirit. Law are the laws of the universe – the laws of evolution and the theory of evolution, which we have a pretty high degree of confidence, and that’s how we all got here. But at the same token, again, it’s not just law. There’s spirit, too. We have a neshama. So where did that neshama come from? Wow, what a great question. And do the animals have an neshama? Okay, I don’t know anybody who has a dog, I think they’re going to answer that question in the affirmative.
Geoff Mitelman: Literally. Today, actually, in the New York Times, Happy the elephant, who was at the Bronx Zoo, there were advocates [saying] that she should have habeas corpus and personhood and be freed from being in the zoo. And the New York State Supreme Court said “No,” but I think it was a 6-2 or 8-2 decision, which then there were two dissenters there.
Richard Agler: Just this weekend, we took my grandson to a petting zoo or reptile farm or what have you, not far from here. And the attendant, the handler of the reptiles now, was talking. They had, I don’t know, a dozen different animals, from snakes to tortoises to – I forget he’ll be disappointed in me, I don’t remember, but this exotic dragon looking creature – and he’s telling me about the personalities that each one of them have. They all have personalities.
Geoff Mitelman: Personality, right. Like that.
Richard Agler: Personalities, right. Now, is that a neshama? I don’t know. It’s pretty close to one. If it’s not, listen, this is the wonderful thing about science, and also about scientific faith, is that we’re still learning and we haven’t figured out all the answers yet. But the pursuit is wonderful, isn’t it? And it’s a great thing to be able to grow and to learn as we go along, to find all the ways in which God manifests Godself throughout the creation.
Geoff Mitelman: As you’re saying, “God and Godself,” and of not falling into the trap of saying “he” or “him.” But I’m curious because I think so much of theology, of the Torah and rabbinic literature, and up until 50 or 60 years ago, theology was predominantly written by old white men – Judaism and Christianity as well. Where does feminist theology come in, and how has that impacted you and your thinking? There have been a lot of people that have influenced me.
Richard Agler: Honestly, I’m out of my comfort zone to answer this question, but I think feminism in general has contributed an enormous amount to our understanding of humanity, of personhood, of the world, and the importance of looking at our magnificent gender flowerings. That’s part of creation, too, and we have to acknowledge that, and honor that, and be respectful of that.
Geoff Mitelman: Yeah, I think some of that is what are the metaphors that we use. And what’s the language?
Richard Agler: That language is tricky. As you know, every time you change language, people, okay, “How come this word was always good enough and now it’s not?” And there’s typically a backlash, and it takes time for it to work out. Maybe this word is going to survive in the culture, maybe this one won’t. Maybe it’s consensus time to kind of move out of the way of this word and adapt this word. But when there’s too much of that, it makes people’s head spin and they get turned off and “don’t bother me with this,” and all of that. So we have, as we’re all painfully aware, those kinds of struggles in our culture.
Geoff Mitelman: Yeah, I think that’s what’s been interesting in the Jewish community and actually in the wider world – in the scientific community, too – which is, how do we get more people at the table? How do we have more voices in there? Because it can very easily be a self-reinforcing conversation. So how do we expand those discussions? Because that’s also helpful for people to be able to say, “Wait a second, I hadn’t thought of it like that before.”
Richard Agler: Yeah, absolutely. It’s good to have a multiplicity of voices, and very important to do that. I’m reflecting while we’re speaking here – so I’ve been going around speaking primarily about the first book, The Tragedy Test, since the new one’s only been out a little while. And I’ve gone to synagogues, I’ve gone to churches, I’ve spoken to rabbinic organizations, and I’ve spoken to ministerial associations of mixed faith. And somehow I’ve been able to, fortunately, avoid controversy of this nature, I guess, hopefully, by focusing on that which is acceptable across a broad spectrum. And there’s so much that is acceptable across the broad spectrum – not that we shouldn’t be mindful of any legitimate concern, wherever it may come from, but I think, broadly speaking, there’s a corpus of teachings here that we’re speaking about, that we’re trying to promulgate, as it were, that, whether it’s issues of gender or orientation or any of that, I think it fits into what we’re talking about.
Geoff Mitelman: And I think some of the discussion – and you talked about this at the very beginning – of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s line of “We praise before we can prove.” And one thing that we love to be able to explore, and this is something that we talk about all the time with Sinai and Synapses, is the role of awe, which is very Heschelian. But starting with a conversation of “Tell me about an experience when you felt awe.” And when you were talking about your story, that it started with an experience – that it starts with something and sharing with – what is somebody’s experience? Because you can’t ever deny someone else’s experience – like, “no, that’s not what happened,” right?
Richard Agler: We absolutely need to honor that. And through experiences. Experience of awe is an experience of God – or an experience of a beloved teacher of mine with whom I was very close back in college. When I was thinking of becoming a rabbi, I told him this. He was a psychologist, a professor of psychology, and his big thing was consciousness. And I said, “I think I’d like to study for the rabbinate.” And he looks at me and says, you know, well, “How do you know God? How do you know your consciousness? It’s maybe kind of the same thing.” “Oh, okay, let’s go there.” So there’s lots of ways we can – linguify, that’s not a word, but to put it into language – the God conversation.
Geoff Mitelman: Yeah. Being able to translate experience into language, which is always going to be imperfect. I think that’s an important element of theology.
Richard Agler: One hundred percent. And this is not a finish for us. This is not something new for us. I mean, Maimonides talks about this all the time. He’s speaking about the experiences that are recounted in the Torah, in the Bible, and he says, “This is obviously a metaphor. This did not happen the way it’s described. It could not happen. Torah speaks in human language, period. End of discussion.” It was clearly not the end of the discussion, but that’s an understanding that we should have. And again, to understand metaphor as metaphor, and not to literalize it or not to make it that way. And that was very controversial when he was saying it. As you know, there was a tremendous backlash to so much of what he was offering. But over the centuries, that understanding has come to be prevalent, if not unanimous.
Geoff Mitelman: So as we come towards a close, I’m curious if there are – other than your books, obviously – are there other books or thinkers that you would suggest people look at to explore some of these questions of theology? Because it tends to be a little bit foreign to the Jewish community.
Richard Agler: Yeah, it’s a good question, which I may not have an answer to, but let me respond anyhow. And that’s that when we wrote this book, that we absolutely instructed every author, as you will recall, to write in terms addressing an audience of educated laypeople, not writing for rabbis. We’re not writing for scholars. We’re not writing for trained philosophers, theologians, or academicians or any of that. We want to speak to someone who can just read on that level. So I don’t know, honestly, how many other books of theology could be found that are written in that way. I’m sure they’re out there. I just know. I’m sorry. I don’t have them at the tip of my tongue. But you read this book, and within each of the essays that all the contributors, there are often references to this one or that one and what have you. It’s a good starting place. It’s a great text, if I may say so, for adult learning, or even I should say, post- bar and bat mitzvah learning, because this is when the kids really start to ask these questions, and it’s no BS with them. And they want to know what really is true, and they want to be able to hold on to something that’s true.
You teach at the Academy for Jewish Religion? I’m going to count on you to bring this preface into your classes there and make a siddur out of that, to make a lesson out of that. Because, yeah, rabbis need to be thinking about this sometimes – maybe with a little more clarity than they do. And I’m going to just say one more thing on that theme. When Rabbi Dr. Eugene Borowitz, of blessed memory – who was, as far as I was concerned, the pinnacle of modern Jewish theology – when he started teaching at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, there was almost no such thing as theology. There was like, “What are you teaching? What is this about?” The other faculty members were asking this. And he understood that this is a very important part of what it means to have a Jewish identity and to live a Jewish life.
Geoff Mitelman: Yeah. And I think that’s when you’re talking about bar and bat mitzvah. I was in the pulpit world for seven years, and I’d say “you show me a 7th grader, I’ll show you an atheist.” And some of that is because being able to have, what’s a more sophisticated way to think about and talk about These kinds of questions.
Richard Agler: Absolutely. So I think this is kind of important. And we’re looking to have the book, of course, hopefully have an impact and affect the conversation. And I haven’t been secretive about this, but we’re starting on our next project, some of us, and we can talk about it, is to kind of see if we can compose a siddur that’s addressed to a God that we can believe in. So we can actually put something in people’s hands and say, “ah,” instead of, “oh, I don’t get this, I’ll turn it off,” “Oh, okay. This really speaks to me.” So it’ll keep me off the streets for a little while.
Geoff Mitelman: And finding the language for that, for sure.
Richard Agler: Absolutely. It’s going to be a challenge, but I think we’re up for it.
Geoff Mitelman: Well, Richard, thank you. And also thank Rabbi Rifat Sonsino for co-editing this volume. People can buy A God We Can Believe in wherever books are sold. But if they get it at richardagler.com. The proceeds will go to the Tali Fund, which is in memory of your daughter, correct?
Richard Agler: Yeah, that’s correct. Thank you. And we support the Talia Agler Girls Shelter in Nairobi, Kenya, which is a shelter for abused and trafficked and otherwise exploited girls and young women. In memory of my daughter. She worked there. There’s a long story. You can read it at the website. But yeah, as opposed to sending profits to some random millionaire, you can send it to where it’s going to really do a lot of good. So richardagler.com. You’ll see the little thing there, my books. It’ll be my privilege to sign and send you a personalized copy. So thank you very much.
Geoff Mitelman: So I encourage you to be able to get the book and get the book there for sure. Our conversation partner next week is going to be Professor Augustín Fuentes, who is at Princeton University, who’s a professor of biological anthropology – an expert in human evolution. So we’ll be talking with him next Tuesday at 02:00 p.m. You can follow me on Facebook and on Twitter or on sinai and synapses. I’m at rabbi Middleman. Or at Sinai synapses. We’re also on Facebook. And you can join us for these conversations at jewishlive.org/sacredscience or at Sinai and Synapses. Richard, thank you for taking the time with us here this afternoon, and thank you all for joining us here for this great conversation.
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