"Thanksgiving and Theology" (11/28/08)

I find that it is easier to celebrate Thanksgiving than it is to think about Thanksgiving theologically!

That "Hallmark" image of extended family seated around the overflowing table on Thursday afternoon, telling the story of the first Thanksgiving and remembering the Thanksgivings of previous years, has become an American icon. In that 'greeting card' image, the family gives thanks to God for blessings received, as the edges of the scene glow in golden hues. What a warm and wonderful celebration—just don’t think too much about the theology it represents.

One of the occupational hazards of being “in the religion business" is that I really want to make theological sense of what is happening around me in the world. If God is at the heart of Life, then living ought to affirm the Divine presence, and what we experience in Life ought to correspond to that affirmed belief! If God is both benevolent and “in-charge,” if God blesses the righteous and curses the evil-doer, if God rewards good behavior and punishes wrong behavior, then that Truth ought to be evident and manifest in the reality of our lives.

These are important issues for me not only because I am a believer, but because I am a questioning and challenging believer. I need to test the strength of my beliefs, holding them up to the light of rational and reasonable analysis. And in doing so, I discover that I have a problem with this Thanksgiving image of thanking God for the abundance of God’s goodness.

I look outside through windows that open onto the real world on this Thanksgiving, and through the window-screen of 24-hour news channels with their steady stream of live-video from India. Over one hundred seventy innocent people slaughtered, terrorists with machine guns and bombs in a suicidal killing spree. I do not see a world that is "blessed" by God. I see pain and suffering here, disease and catastrophe there, and greedy, selfish, self-serving people everywhere-- I see a world that for all appearances is far more cursed than blessed!

Barb and I got an email yesterday from a family friend saying “After seeing the news today we realize how thankful we are to be blessed by God, living here, safe and sound.” Thank God that God cares about me! Apparently God doesn’t care too much about the tourists at the Taj Hotel! But thank you God for blessing us because we deserve Your blessing!

Bad things do happen to good people and to innocent people, as evil and corruption, hatred and terrorism increasingly define our lives. If God is the loving, just, all-powerful deity who is in control of heaven and earth--why aren’t we seeing it "in heaven or on earth"?

What are we to say to someone in the aftermath of personal tragedy? Traditional theology declares: "God is Great, God is Good, and God’s in control of Creation-- so it’s all in God’s plan"?! To me-- these words ring hollow in the face of innocent suffering, particularly today. If God were great, if God were good, if God were in control...the innocent would not suffer!

Can we in good conscience give thanks around our tables for having been blessed by God, when God should have been protecting and blessing those who really needed it!? How can I be thankful to God for what I have, when God seems to have ignored the well-being of others? How does God work in the world? What is our relationship to the Divine? What is it that I ought to expect out of Life and from God—really!?

These are not, of course, new questions. And though they define the essence of the religious quest of Reform Jews, we are only the latest generation of Jews that have asked them. As early as the Book of Ecclesiastes in Hebrew Scripture, our tradition has challenged us to confront the realities of our world within the faith-covenant of Judaism. Kohelet, the author of Ecclesiastes, dares us to define meaning and value in Life. He dismisses the long-range plans of individuals and communities as futile, and challenges the worth of ever trying to find significance and relevance in our all-too-short lives. He recognizes that bad things do happen to good people, and that it is foolish to think that a good life is anything but good luck. Kohelet's Thanksgiving sermon would be: be happy with what you've got-- it may be gone before you know it. Kohelet would dismiss as childish, our prayers giving thanks to God, as if we have been blessed because we somehow deserved it!

The difficult problem we have making theological sense of bad things happening to good people, is not because God is failing in God's responsibilities-- but rather that we have misjudged and wrongly understood God's relationship with the world. We have always assumed that the Creator God can and does "reach" into our universe in response to our pleas. We have always assumed that when we use the "right words" God will bless us and answer our prayers.

The truth, however, is that these faith-expectations of prayer are not fulfilled. Prayers for health and wealth and success, regularly repeated in the liturgy, don’t seem to do the trick! And when God's intervention is not forthcoming, we react in one of three ways: we say 1) our prayer was not worthy; 2) or God did heard, but is punishing us; 3) or there isn't any God to hear the prayer in the first place. Because the faith-assumptions we’ve presumed since childhood of a parental, protecting God don’t seem to work themselves out in the real world, we are forced into uncomfortable realizations.

The only way out of this quandary is to do one of two things: re-define reality (which is what the fundamentalist expressions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam do) or re-define our explanation and understanding of how God works. And since I can only perceive the world in the way that it presents itself to me, I find that I have to correct my understanding of God so that theology and reality may confirm each other.

I would begin by saying that God does not reach down and change our natural world, that God is in fact, removed from the natural order of ongoing-Creation. I believe that God has so designed the universe that God may not stop the natural cause of disease or catastrophe, accident or injury. It’s not that our prayers for Divine intercession are ignored or unanswered, it’s that God has safeguarded the world from God's own intervention!

If God would remove the cancers consuming our families and friends, if God would stop the racing car from hitting the child in the street, if God would do all the things that we want God to do--then this would be a world without natural law! If the falling airplane would be saved by the temporary cessation of gravity, then everything we know about the world around us would dissolve. And if God saves that plane today, God will have to save every plane, and adult and child (and cat and dog!), everyone and anyone who merits salvation, from disease or accident, from flood and fire, storm and earthquake and terrorist attack. There would be no natural order, no science, no human accountability-- and ours would be a world of utter chaos.

The truth is that we know, in our hearts and souls, and with the rational intelligence of our minds, that God will not remove a cancer because we pray for it, any more than God can reward a child with new bicycle for good behavior. We know that God could not have stopped the terrorists in India, just as we know that God didn’t cause them to kill. We know these things, and yet we still ask God to intervene, and change the reality of the moment!

Don't we understand that if God could cure and change bad things, then this would be an un-natural world?! And if God is a God of love and justice and righteousness, and I believe that God is-- then the fact that God does not interfere and adjust our world, must only mean that God cannot change the course of natural events. It must mean that God specifically, intentionally, planned this to be a world of natural (and dependable) order, where accident and injury also follow the rules of nature.

So then, what does it mean to be "thankful"? If I have been blessed, it is not because God has personally responded to my plea or need. God doesn't answer my prayers any more than God ignores those of someone else. Giving thanks, I am grateful for blessings, for what I have rather than what I lack. And I am grateful for being lucky. I am thankful to live in a country of freedom and liberty, for I just as easily could have been born somewhere else! If then blessings are the result of good fortune and good luck--what benefit is there in prayer?! What worth is any relationship with the Divine? And what value really is there in "giving thanks to God”?!

I pray to God for the strength to bear my burdens, for the courage to face the uncertainties of life, and for the wisdom to see its joys. I am thankful that God has been with me today, even as God was with me yesterday and will be tomorrow. I am very thankful that whether I am lucky or not--I am not alone. My prayers for strength and courage and wisdom are ones that God does answer, and so I do give thanks to God! I cannot pray that God will make my life free of problems-- God can't! I cannot pray that God will keep my family immune to disease and tragedy-- God can't! We know that what happens in the world-- happens in the world! It is just as Kohelet says in Ecclesiastes!Neither God nor I can change that. But together God and I can overcome obstacles, even when they cannot be moved. When we pray for strength, courage and wisdom our prayers are heard, and sensing the Divine standing with us, we give thanks to God.

So in thinking about Thanksgiving, I am thankful for the source of life within me, the source of life which urges me to create a community of fellowship and a nation of freedom. I am thankful for the Divine within me and with me, for God’s gifts enable me to make this a better world. That is the source of my faith, and my surety. And with that faith, I pray that we might finally make ours a world of brotherhood and sisterhood and peace, a world of eternal thanksgiving.

Rabbi Joseph P Klein
Temple Emanu-El
November 28, 2008