Does God Nap?

A feature article by John Penberthy, Dec 26, 2007         

I once watched a television show about the Holocaust involving a panel discussion of three people, one of whom was an elderly Jewish rabbi. When the moderator asked him the question, “How do you reconcile the notion of a loving God with something as horrible as the holocaust?” the rabbi responded, “God was napping.” I don’t claim to know the mind of God, but I do think I can say with some certainty that God doesn’t take naps. If he did the entire universe would disappear.

Last year I had an online dialog with another much younger Jewish rabbi. She said, to my surprise, that the Jewish faith believes that God is imperfect. This belief is, in my opinion, a powerful example of an anthropocentric (man-centered) notion of God, of man creating God in his image.

Nonetheless, the question posed by the TV moderator was a good one: How do we reconcile the notion of a loving God with something as horrible as the Holocaust? How could God let the Nazis exterminate six million innocent Jews?

The only way to reconcile this is to question the premise—the premise of a loving God—and define love. Clearly love in this instance is interpreted to be love toward humans. Yet if we step back and look at the bigger picture of God as the divine creative force manifesting as this entire universe, a universe characterized by creation, violence and destruction and re-creation, we see that God didn’t let the holocaust happen, he was the holocaust, just as he was/is/will be everything else. If you truly believe that God is omnipresent and omnipotent there is no other conclusion to come to.

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Remember—God isn’t just good; God is. If we want to live in alignment with the Way, with God, we need to let go of our judgments and labels—good/bad, right/wrong, pretty/ugly, happy/sad, creative/destructive—for they’re all anthropocentric, every last one of them. The wandering Buddhist monk, Sengstan, put it quite well 1,400 years ago:

“The great way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. Make the slightest distinction, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.”

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