(And Why He Didn’t Abandon You)

by TM Garret Schmid

Today I saw a banner with Gandhi’s face on it. Below his image, it reads: “There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.”

I started thinking. God appears as bread to the hungry. Not as a divine being in the clouds, not as a voice from the burning bush, but as bread. As sustenance. As help. As action.

This got me thinking about what God actually is, and I remembered a PDF written by Rabbi Cantor Davod Julian of the Or Chadash synagogue in Memphis, which I proudly consider my spiritual home. The Guide to the Rosh Hashanah Machzor. A guide for those who have trouble connecting with the service in general or finding meaning in prayer. 

Why is God So Angry?

I’ve heard it quite often that people have issues with ‘God.’ That God has abandoned them. How can a God exist when there is so much misery in the world? How could God let the Holocaust happen? Or personal tragedies? Some are angry at God or think God is angry at them. How can we personally connect to such a God? 

The Rabbi’s brochure explained it this way: When we say “God heals the sick,” what are we really saying? Rabbi Harold Schulweis taught something called predicate theology, and it changed how I understand every prayer I recite. He said we should flip these statements around. “God heals the sick” becomes “Healing the sick is godly.” “God raises up those who fall” becomes “Raising up those who fall is godly.” “God protects the Jewish people” becomes “Protecting the Jewish people is godly.”

Suddenly, the prayer book and the service isn’t just about God. It’s about us. It’s about the qualities within ourselves that are godly, and it’s urging us to use those qualities in the most powerful way possible. And I found learning how to be a good human being to be a central theme in all our services. The Torah as a teaching document. “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. This is the whole Torah.” Hillel the Elder hit the nail on its head over 2,000 years ago. But he also added: “The rest is commentary. Go and learn it.”

It is so simple when you understand, but it takes some time to wrap your head around it. Once you learn and begin to understand, it just unfolds like a decoded mystery and is now crystal clear.

The Conglomerate of Divine Attributes

So, what is God to the single individual? To some it is the man with the white beard. An eternal and all-powerful entity who actively interferes with our daily lives and yet lets tragedies happen every day.

To the hungry, it is the food they receive. To those held hostage by circumstances or terrorists, it may be the rescuers that God sent. And as Chanukah is approaching, did the oil last 8 days because God let it appear enough out of thin air? One thing is clear: Whatever the Maccabees did, the oil lasted for 8 days. Was it godly intervention? Did one of them have a God-given idea to make it work? We will never know. And it is not the moral of the story. But what I am trying to say is for different people, the godly part may look different.

The meaning of life, or the question why we are here, is simple. God wanted the humans he made, after his own image, to take care of his creation “and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (Genesis 1:28) and “to till and tend” Garden Eden (Genesis 2:15). And the Torah is the teaching document for how to treat his creation and our fellow human neighbors with respect and dignity. After his image, with his attributes, he wants us to go do his work.

Heal the sick, raise those who fall, be slow to anger, free the captive, and more.

Is God some distant supernatural entity watching us from above, unreachable, impersonal, judging, like he is keeping score of our sins and virtues? This is how I was taught. And this is why I never could connect with God. It never felt personal. I never felt “the spirit.”

But the Rabbi’s brochure made me think. It inspired me to study. It was my foundation to accept and understand Judaism and God.

God is the potential to do godly work. It’s always there, within us, waiting to be activated. Within us. It is like the Native American parable of the two wolves that live within us. The bad wolf and the good wolf. Both are within us. But only the wolf that you feed is the one who wins the battle.

Even when the bad wolf wins, God has not abandoned us. The godly virtue is still in us, like the Yin and Yang in Taoism, and also, maybe not even so surprisingly, represented in the Magen David. In Kabbalah, the two interlocking triangles represent the balance of opposing forces. That’s why God never abandons anyone, because that potential never leaves us. It’s eternal.

For me, the lightbulb came on when I realized that God is nothing unreachable that I can’t understand, but the conglomerate of all these attributes we assign to Him. Compassion. Justice. Mercy. Healing. Protection. Love. These qualities don’t die. They can’t die. They’re eternal potentials within humanity. As long as humans exist, the potential to embody these godly qualities exists. That’s why God is eternal.

When Humans Abandon Godly Will

What about the question that is as old as mankind itself? Why does God abandon us sometimes?

Maybe it is time to rephrase this question. If God is eternally omnipresent in us, doesn’t this mean he is never abandoning any human being?

But then again, why is he letting bad things happen?

The answer is, he doesn’t. God gave us free will. Like a parent is not always interfering with their children’s homework and sometimes just decides to have them have their learning lesson. The goal is to find the godly attributes within us, over and over again. And because we are human, we will miss the mark. Between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur we have the opportunity to reflect and to find the godly attributes. We recite them over and over, promising to do better in the attempt to do God’s work.

God doesn’t make bad things happen to humans. Humans do bad things when they abandon godly will. When they abandon these qualities, compassion, justice, mercy, they are no longer acting godly. And that’s when they are capable of doing terrible things.

It makes perfect sense if you think about it. If you don’t have God in your heart, meaning if you don’t embody these godly attributes, you will turn into a bad person. You’ll act without compassion. You’ll hurt others. You’ll serve only yourself.

I know this from experience. I spent years of my life without God in my heart. I was filled with hate instead of love, cruelty instead of compassion, division instead of unity. And during those years, I did terrible things. I hurt people. I spread poison. I was, in every sense, a bad person.

But here’s the thing: God never abandoned me. Even when I had abandoned God, abandoned those godly qualities, the potential was still there. The capacity for compassion, for love, for healing was always within me, waiting for me to choose it again.

But What About Creation?

Now, I know what you’re thinking. If God is just godly attributes, what about the creation of the world? Who made the universe and everything in it?

Here’s the thing: I don’t know how the universe came to be. Nobody does, not really. Was it the Big Bang? Was it created ex nihilo, out of nothing, as traditional Jewish and Christian theology teaches? Was it always here in some form, with God shaping chaos into order, as some readings of Genesis suggest?

The truth is, it doesn’t matter for my understanding of God’s role in my life today. What matters to me is that the world exists. The world is. And it is good.

“Bereshit bara Elohim.” In the beginning, God created. The Hebrew word bara suggests bringing something into existence that wasn’t there before. Whether that was from absolute nothing or from formless chaos.

But here’s what I know for certain: whatever creative force brought this universe into being also embedded within it the potential for godliness. The capacity for compassion, for justice, for love, for healing. These aren’t accidents. They’re woven into the fabric of creation itself.

Some Jewish thinkers embrace panentheism, the idea that all creation exists within God, that God is both transcendent (beyond creation) and immanent (within creation). In this view, we’re not separate from God’s creative energy. We’re participants in it. We’re partners in ongoing creation, what Process Theology calls “continued Creation.”

The Kabbalah teaches that God’s presence fills all worlds and surrounds all worlds. That creative spark, that divine potential, it’s in everything. Including us. Within us.

So when I say God is the potential to do godly work, I’m not denying God as Creator. I’m saying that whatever brought this universe into existence did so with intention. With purpose. And that purpose includes us embodying godly qualities and continuing the work of creation through acts of compassion, justice, and love.

The creation is good. We are made in the image of God, tzelem Elohim. And our job is to recognize that divine spark within us and act accordingly.

The Eternal Potential

The divine potential within you is eternal. You can’t destroy it. You can only ignore it or embrace it.

When we do this heavenly work, when we feed the hungry, heal the sick, protect the vulnerable, love our neighbors, we create an eternal place of peace. We create Heaven. Not in some afterlife, but right here, right now. That is what God wants us to do. That is the meaning of life.

And it is also the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam, repairing the world. Like I mentioned earlier, we are not passive recipients of divine intervention. We are active participants in divine work. We are the hands of God in this world. When we embody godly qualities, we ARE God appearing to others, just like God appears as bread to the hungry.

How To Ignite The Spark

In one of our most important prayers, the V’ahavta calls us to love God with all our heart, soul, and might. But to accept, love and spread God and his godly attributes that we are supposed to embody, we need to know what love is in the first place. We need to know how to love and how to receive love.

This is the catch that took me years to understand: you can’t love others, can’t truly serve them, can’t love or even understand God, let alone be loved by God, until you first love yourself. Loving yourself is crucial. The Torah commands us in Leviticus 19:18, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” That last part is critical. “As yourself.” It presupposes that you love yourself. Isn’t that what Hillel meant too? “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor,” or to many better known as the “golden rule.” Treat others the way you want to be treated. With love. But if we don’t love ourselves, how can we love our neighbor? How can we love God?

Self-love isn’t selfishness. It’s the foundation upon which all other love is built. When I hit rock bottom, when I was at my own personal Mount Sinai moment, I didn’t love myself. I was filled with self-hatred, and I projected that hatred onto everyone around me. I couldn’t embody godly qualities because I didn’t believe I was worthy of them.

But when I finally learned to love myself, to see myself as tzelem Elohim, created in the image of God, that I embody these godly attributes, everything changed. I could finally receive love. I could finally give it. I could finally do godly work.

In modern therapy there is the question: “Ask yourself whether you are a good person who sometimes does bad things, or if you are a bad person who sometimes does good things?”

This self-acceptance as a good human being is basically accepting the godly attributes and accepting that God has never abandoned you. And it is a very personal God.

Be aware, people abandon God. They might turn away from compassion, from justice, from love. They might make terrible choices and hurt people. It seems that whole societies become godless. Not because God has abandoned them, but (I know I repeat myself) they abandoned God.

I certainly did. But the potential to return, to do teshuvah, is always there. The capacity to choose godly action over cruelty, love over hate, healing over harm never dies.

That’s what makes God eternal. Not that some being lives forever in the sky, but that these qualities, these potentials, can never be extinguished as long as humans exist.

Even when we abandon it for a while.

Even when we think we’re beyond redemption.

Even when we’ve done terrible things.

The potential remains. Eternal. Waiting.

Ready for us to choose it again.

B’shalom