Finding God Today
Yom Kippur Morning Sermon 5784
There I was, dressed in all pink, wondering why the other theatergoers seemed to be avoiding me… when I realized that I misread the Facebook posts and Tweets directing me how to prepare to attend the biggest summer blockbusters. I thought that was the proper attire for watching Oppenheimer. Oops.
So there were two huge movie releases this summer, and they couldn’t have been more different. The Barbie Movie drew enormous crowds dressed in pink to cheer on their imaginary heroine as she went on an adventure of growth, a plastic protagonist’s journey of discovery. The second film, Oppenheimer, drew huge—not quite as enormous—crowds to watch a three-hour IMAX biopic about the father of the atomic bomb. I must admit to not having seen the Barbie movie yet, but I’ve been exposed to its previews, music, merchandising and social media, as has every human being in America and on most of the planet. I did, however, go to see the Oppenheimer film, although not really dressed in pink.
First, I must make my chronic complaint about how Jews in films and TV series these days are typically portrayed by non-Jewish actors. Look, if you are making a film about brilliant 20th century physicists, you are essentially making a movie about Jews, right? And in this excellent film Robert Oppenheimer, Albert Einstein, Oppenheimer’s adversary, Louis Strauss, and Oppenheimer’s brother and lover, who were all Jews, are played by non-Jewish actors. There are two token Jews in the lead cast, David Krumholtz who plays Isaac Rabi, and Benny Safdie who plays Edward Teller, both Jewish and playing Jews. Otherwise, it’s non-Jews pretending to be Jews. If Jews control Hollywood, we are doing a pretty poor job of promoting our own kind…
This is a minor quibble; I mean if Mrs. Maisel and both of her parents can be played brilliantly by non-Jewish actors, I suppose that it’s all fair game.
In any case, the film presents Robert Oppenheimer as a brilliant physicist given the most important, most expensive, and most preposterously difficult development and production task of the entire 2nd World War in spite of never having run anything more complicated than a graduate seminar. And he succeeded. Oppenheimer is presented, warts and all, as a hero—arrogant, impatient, imperious, unfaithful, but still, in what he accomplished for our nation, a hero.
And then his heroism is challenged on two fronts. First, he realizes from the beginning that he is creating a weapon and giving human beings a power that can destroy the whole world. His challenge is that he simply must create it before the Nazis do. But after successfully shepherding the Manhattan Project to its goal, he is tormented by his own responsibility for the mass deaths that result from using the bomb. And second, now of only academic interest, Oppenheimer’s early political involvement with the Communist Party comes back to derail his career at its very apex.
When the atomic bomb exploded at the first test, Oppenheimer famously thought of the quotation from the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu scriptures, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” In a way, he had. And anyone with access to that button, or later that nuclear football, also became a potential destroyer of this world.
The Oppenheimer movie gives us a foretaste of the human potential to destroy the world. What is fascinating is that unlocking the mystery of one of the smallest building blocks of the universe, the atom, that unleashed this powerful potential to annihilate. What is even more fascinating is that since that time, scientific exploration of the tiniest aspects of our physical world has revealed creative truths more meaningful than the mere capacity for destruction. In fact, it was a scientific accomplishment in physics that has given us the greatest glimpse into the origin of everything, and let us have perhaps the closest view of God we have ever had. Allow me to explain.
We have known for a while that there are smaller elements in the universe than the atom, what are referred to as subatomic particles. Theoretical and then experimental physics has been exploring these particles for quite some time, and they work in weird and wonderful ways.
That is why there was a great deal of publicity a few years back about the discovery in physics labs and supercolliders of a new result, called in the media the discovery of “The God Particle.” For a few days this God Particle story was trending at number one on Yahoo and Google search engines, and even had its own Twitter handle--@Godparticle, hashtag #Genesis, believe it or not. It was particularly surprising to see the story of a physics discovery with exactly no practical applications penetrate the consciousness of our over-stimulated, information-addicted society, albeit briefly. It even excited physicists, quite possibly the least excitable of all human beings.
The God Particle story described the confirmation of something with the unappetizing name of the Higgs-Boson particle. So what exactly is a Higgs Boson, or God Particle? And what does it have to do with God, or us?
It turns out that the name “The God Particle” comes from a 1993 book by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman—he is, of course, Jewish; he’ll probably be played by a non-Jewish actor if they ever make the movie, though—called, The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? The idea is that through over 40 years of experimental tests what is called the Standard Model of particle physics has been proven to correctly explain the elementary particles and forces of nature. It explains nearly everything about how the universe works, and even how it came into being and thus far has all been proven to be true by experimental physics—with one exception. It cannot explain how most of these particles acquire their mass, a key ingredient in the formation of our universe. Without mass there is no universe. So what gives these fundamental building blocks of creation their mass?
That’s where the God Particle comes in.
Back in 1964 scientists proposed the existence of this new particle, now known as the Higgs Boson, whose coupling with other particles would determine their mass. In other words, every particle would have to interact with this “God Particle” to give it mass. It’s a bit like the story of Noah naming the animals, but it all happened 14 billion years ago: each particle would couple with the God particle which gave it its mass, and then expansion explosively began.
If this God Particle really exists, it is the one element in the universe that determines what all other elements become.
It’s a kind of wild idea, but people much brighter than I am believe it describes just how our universe came to be. The only problem was actually proving it’s true, which required finding this Higgs Boson, this God Particle. That quest became the Moby Dick of contemporary physics: deeply desired but very hard to capture.
Experiments at the two most important and expensive supercolliders in the world, the one in Switzerland and the Tevatron collider at the Department of Energy's Fermilab outside Chicago both looked for the Higgs boson for years, but it eluded discovery. To search for this God particle the Europeans just took apart their giant supercollider and rebuilt it much bigger and better, creating the Large Hadron Collider, which came on-line about 15 years ago. Finally, after decades of developments in accelerator and detector technology and computing, scientists reached the moment of knowing whether the Higgs Boson, the God Particle, was the right solution to this problem. And it was!
That is, most physicists now are convinced that the Higgs boson, the God Particle, explains how we, and the rest of the universe, exist. It explains why all matter created in the Big Bang has mass, and is able to coalesce. Without that, as a background paper to the experiment explains, "the universe would be a very different place… no ordinary matter as we know it, no chemistry, no biology, and no people." All energy, all everything, was present in that initial creation, and the God particle shaped every part of it.
Does that mean that seeing this boson, or scientific evidence of it, is like seeing panim-el-panim, the face of God? I mean if this is the God Particle, is its confirmation scientific proof of the existence of God?
Well, that kind of depends on what you mean by God.
If by God you mean the classic idea of a super-human being who looks like us, or speaks in audible words, and sits on a white cloud up above Mt. Everest, maybe not. But perhaps that’s not really what God is at all.
So I ask you to sit back now, and listen in a state of relaxed attention, truly listening. And allow me to describe creation in somewhat different terms.
Breisheet Barah Elohim… In the beginning there was the belief that God was an Old Man with a long white beard seated upon a cloud, hovering over the face of the universe that He—for God was male—had created. And the Lord God was all-powerful and all knowing, transcendent, very, very big and very, very old, and he spoke in Elizabethan English with many Thous and Thines, and was called the Lord of Hosts and the Holy King and the Lord God. And this paternal Lord was the font of all truth and right.
And this God created the whole world, and the universe, and knew everything that happened before it occurred. And human beings, man and woman, God’s greatest and most challenging creations, filled the world God created and were supposed to carry out God’s will. And when they didn’t they were punished. And this conception of God worked for many people for quite a long time.
Then things began to change. New ideas popped up: emancipation; rationalism; science; atheism; psychology; sociology; the transitory isms of communism, fascism, and socialism. World War shattered the idealistic rationalism of progress, and another World War and a Holocaust annihilated the shards. Slowly and then suddenly, that all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good God with the white beard on the high cloud seemed more fantasy than reality.
In fact, in the face of this unending assault of ideas and circumstances, God the Old Man was in danger of just fading away. He seemed not even to be He anymore, and perhaps just flat out irrelevant. At least not relevant in the way so many people had thought about Him—Her? It?—for so very long.
But it turned out that just as God was disappearing from the world that God created, new ways of understanding God, and the universe God set in motion, were developing. And those new ideas ranged over the broad span of collective human creativity, the magnificent ways in which human minds could act b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God.
Sometimes those new ideas coincided in surprising ways with the discoveries of science, and the realities of the world that we know from our own observation. And then, even more surprisingly, those ideas about belief and God and science and creation all came together.
That is what’s happening today. We are seeing a kind of harmonic convergence, a new and deeper understanding of God in the universe around us.
The Jewish way of thinking about God has always included a subtle, subversive understanding that is quite different from the transcendent concept of an old man with a white beard on a cloud. That is the 2500 year-old mystical conception of God. And that view of God, and our place in the universe, harmonizes beautifully with the scientific understanding of the universe that continues to develop. Right now, in the year 5784, we have reached a kind of nexus between scientific discovery and mystical belief that is both intellectually convincing and extraordinarily beautiful.
It is the Kabbalistic conception of the world that most closely aligns with our scientific understanding of the universe today. It is that mystical approach, long considered esoteric, elitist, and, well, flaky, that offers us the best ability to accept the presence of the divine in ways that have contemporary meaning. Specifically, it is viewing God as the Shekhinah, the divine presence in Jewish mysticism, that allows us to understand God and the universe with intellectual integrity and spiritual meaning.
The very word Kabbalah has become both popular and controversial, of course. Kabbalah literally means receiving, and it is a more contemplative, accepting, subtler way of finding God than many of us are used to. I am not talking here about the kind of Kabbalah practiced by Madonna, or Ariana Grande, but the rich tradition found in the deep discipline and profound texts of the Zohar, masterpiece of Jewish mysticism. In the Zohar, Shekhinah is simply the name given to the indwelling presence of the divine in this world, the essential holiness that can be sought and that seeks us, if we only become aware of it in our lives.
In essence, Shechinah is God in the natural forces of the universe, in the laws that govern our world and its processes, and in every creature in this world of ours whose creation we celebrate today. The mystical God is both creator of the natural laws that govern our universe and the paradoxical, quantum presence that provides creative energy and animating life to all beings in that universe. The Shechinah is everywhere at once, and our ability to sense that presence, and to cultivate that sensitivity, is what is required to actually find God today.
And with some confidence we can now say that our scientific understanding of the world not only allows for such a creative essence, a Shechinah that motivates and forms all existence, but nearly requires it.
In the Zohar, a text written 700 years ago, creation, and the essential divine quality, are described this way: "A spark of impenetrable darkness flashed within the concealed of the concealed, from the head of Infinity—a cluster of vapor forming in formlessness, thrust in a ring, not white, not black, not red, not green, no color at all. As a cord surveyed, it yielded radiant colors. Deep within the spark gushed a flow, splaying colors below, concealed within the concealed of the mystery of Ein Sof."
In trying to comprehend what is meant by “The God Particle,” I came across this passage: “In the Standard Model of physics, the Higgs boson is a type of particle that allows multiple identical particles to exist in the same place in the same quantum state. It has no spin, no electric charge, no color charge. It is also very unstable, decaying into other particles almost immediately.” And from that decay, that differentiation of the essential unity, comes all creation.
I would never contend that that Moses de Leon, writing the Zohar in Spain in the 13th century, understood contemporary particle physics as of September 2023. But I can say that the parallels are often eerily fascinating. And that the Kabbalistic approach to understanding God is both spiritually fulfilling and has intellectual integrity. For when we become aware of the extraordinary beauty and elegance of that initial creation and understand the presence from that moment of a divine guiding element, we can and will find holiness, resonance, harmony, and energy in every element of this beautiful, sacred universe.
[Physical science researchers have reminded us that that we were each present at that initial creation, as energy shaped and formed by a greater power—just as today we are partners, with God, in the process of creation. Junior partners, perhaps, but partners nonetheless.]
According to physicists, that moment of creation was an instant of unparalleled, unrepeatable release of energy. It was that enormously creative expansion that began everything knowable in the universe. From the birth moments of creation came everything that matters, including matter itself. Fascinatingly, our own energy was present at that creation, and remains present. Everything began in the same way, at nearly the same time. And everything in this universe is therefore connected.
The interrelatedness of all being is a fact of life: a mystical insight, but also good common sense, and pure science besides. We can trust that we are part of a vast web of existence constantly expanding and evolving.
As Zohar scholar Danny Matt puts it, “By attuning ourselves to the divine pulse animating all life, we can overcome our estrangement from nature. By exploring and contemplating the origin of the universe, we discover that our evolution is a step in a cosmic dance. Engaging the world spiritually, we realize there is no sharp line between the here and now and the ultimate. Looking for the spark, we find that what is ordinary is spectacular.”
As Matt concludes, “God is not somewhere else, hidden from us. God is right here, hidden from us. We’ve lost our sense of wonder in the fast pace of life. God is right here, in this very moment, fresh and unexpected, taking you by surprise.”
Our task in this new 5784 year is to become aware that God’s presence, the divine spark, really is everywhere. And to relearn a sense of wonder at that amazing reality.