Wrestling With God: Judaism's Essential Gesture

Today’s episode is a Shabbat Replay of our service on December 6th when Rabbi Lizzi delivered a drash on what it means to wrestle with our tradition’s competing understandings of God and the meaning of Hanukkah.

For our gelt, the true meaning of Hanukkah is friendship — and shopping! Find your holiday gifts at Mishkan’s first-ever Hanukkah Market. Come early to services on Friday, December 12th, at Second Unitarian to browse Judaica, jewelry, and crafts made by Mishkanite artists while sipping wine and schmoozing with friends.

https://www.mishkanchicago.org/event/mishkan-hanukkah-market-2025/

As we reflect on the journey we’ve taken together this past year, we are inspired by the resilience and love that defines our community. If Mishkan Chicago has inspired you in these trying times, if you’ve been moved by our podcasts, services, classes or events — or just knowing we’re out here doing our thing, trying to decrease polarization and increase sanity... Please, consider making a donation! We need your support to continue doing the work of praying and fighting for a better world like it depends on us. Because it does. Donate at the link below or send a check to our office: 4001. N. Ravenswood Ave Suite 101 Chicago IL 60613

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Produced by Mishkan Chicago. Music composed, produced, and performed by Kalman Strauss.

Transcript

Transcript

This week’s Torah portion had me thinking about Orange is the New Black (b’mitzvah kids, this was a show on Netflix when you were too young to watch it, about the lives of female prison inmates). The particular scene I’m thinking about is the scene when Cindy, known on the show as Black Cindy, decides she wants to be Jewish, and sits before a rabbi and a beit din, or legal court of witnesses comprised of other Jewish inmates. She asks the rabbi, “Can I be Jewish?” He says, “What is this to you?” And she replies, “I think I found my people. I was raised in a church…where I was told to believe and pray. And if I was bad, I’d go to Hell. If I was good, I’d go to Heaven. And if I’d ask Jesus, he’d forgive me, and that was that. And here y’all saying ain’t no hell…ain’t…sure about heaven. And if you do something wrong you got to figure it out yourself. And as far as God’s concerned, it’s your job to keep asking questions and to keep learning and to keep arguing. It’s like a verb. It’s like you do God. And that’s a lot of work.” 

Suffice it to say, the rabbi and the beit din agree that Cindy is Jewish. It’s not exactly an emphatic declaration of faith, and yet what she’s describing any Jew would recognize as the essential gesture of Judaism: wrestling.

Oscar described the famous story we read in this week’s Torah portion, where Jacob wrestles a mysterious man and the result is he is injured — walks with a limp for the rest of his life, but also receives a new name, Yisrael, which means, you have struggled with divine and human beings and prevailed.

This is the first appearance of this word, Yisrael, that becomes this defining word, an identity, not just for Jacob, but for all his descendants, for all time, including us — we’re known as B’nai Yisrael, the Children of Israel, the Children of GodWrestler (Children of Abraham is how we refer to all monotheistic faiths, no one considers Isaac their spiritual father, and Jews are Children of Yisrael). So I want to take a few minutes this morning to explore this fundamental word and concept, and see how it shapes our understanding of who we are as a people and how we’re supposed to live in this world.

We Jews ourselves to be God-wrestlers, challengers, people who question, who don’t take your word for it but want to see the evidence so we can make our own decision. Comfortable with pushing back on authority, with noncompliance and protest… turns out our bnai mitzvah teenagers didn’t invent this: this goes as far back as Abraham arguing with God to save the cities of Sodom and Gemorah from destruction. And here Jacob does it when he wrestles a divine being and is given a blessing and a new name. Pushing back on authority and being allergic to intellectual and spiritual coercion, is an essential part of our inheritance. 

Importantly, tucked into that same set of letters yud, shin, resh, aleph, lamed are the words Yashar, meaning straight or upright, which is to say, morally upstanding. This God wrestling isn’t just protesting and pushing on authority for the sake of being difficult, rather it is a relentless striving that has to do with moral integrity, that resists easy answers to hard questions.

When it comes to matters of our religion, and of how we understand the divine, we wrestle because there are often multiple truths happening simultaneously, and we’re not afraid of that… we wrestle with it. Is God a mysterious, all-powerful force beyond our comprehension, or an intimate, gentle, and deeply knowable presence that lives in each of us? YES. Do divine miracles happen every day, or for all intents and purposes, is God non-existent because if we want anything done we have to do it ourselves? YES. We’re constantly wrestling, even within ourselves, let alone in a group, where the joke is you have two Jews, you have three opinions. Wrestling is part of what it means to have a real relationship — whether with another person, with a text, with God, or with our tradition. Wrestling makes us vulnerable, and it makes us strong. Wrestling is what we teach b’mitzvah kids is the essence of Judaism — to truly be B’nai Yisrael, a descendant of the original God wrestler. We give you a hard task, learning to read and chant, Torah, and learning to interpret a difficult and often inscrutable, and sometimes really problematic ancient text, not because it’s easy but because it’s hard. We want you to wrestle. This is a Jewish value.

Back in the early days of this community, circa 2012-2014 (back when this b’mitzvah class was in the womb), Mishkan used to meet at a place called the Bodhi Spiritual Center that called itself a post-religious spiritual community. Knowing we’d be meeting in their building, I wanted to get to know their community so attended a Sunday service. They were so welcoming, they had beautiful music — all in English, very inclusive — and when the Reverend stood up to speak he talked about a God who was pure love, pure forgiveness — you need to just open your heart to love and be transformed by God’s loving power flowing through you.

I loved hearing this. It was beautiful. And I have to tell you: I was so uncomfortable. And not because I disagree with what he said. Actually everything I just described is very Jewish, and you’ve all heard me talk about how Judaism is about love, how before and after the Shema (where we say Shema Yisrael, listen descendants of Jacob, Children of Israel, God is one, is everything), before and after that statement we have whole paragraphs about love — God’s abundant love for us, our ability to channel that love into the world, wherever we go, the v’ahavta. It’s a really core, central Jewish notion… And yet, as I was sitting there I was so uncomfortable… There was no wrestling. They didn’t want me to wrestle. That wasn’t their culture. Their culture was on some level about removing the friction from religion, making it easy. But there’s a Yiddish phrase: shver zein a Yid, it’s hard to be a Jew. Sure, for all the reasons you might think, antisemitism, BBQ pork ribs not being kosher…. But being B’nai Yisrael actually values the struggle, values the friction, values the questions and the challenge, values that it’s hard — because it makes us stronger people. 

As I sat there that morning I thought, of course God is love and light and forgiveness, but why is it that people we love and who don’t deserve to suffer, will suffer? And why will people, and governments, behave in inhumane and cruel ways that hurt people, that destroy families? In our bones we know this history. Where is the God of justice that holds doers of harm accountable? Where is the God of justice in the theology of people using religion as a weapon to harm our LGBTQ community, or immigrants, or the poor? Where is God the warrior, God the liberator, God who, with their mighty hand and outstretched arm, overturned the oppressive empire of Egypt? God, according to our Torah, is both full of love and forgiveness, of course… and also is gadol v’norah — great and awesome, and even terrifying. And also hester panim, hides God’s face like in the Esther story, acting as if he/she/they is not there. Acknowledging all of these versions of God or a higher power or whatever you wanna call it are all authentic expressions of a real relationship with the divine. It’s like we “do” God. It’s a verb. Wrestling is only natural. We don’t push it away — we embrace it. In fact, that’s kind of what wrestling really is: a loving tussle with someone or something you’re close enough to hug, yet struggling with. And this is holy.

And that wrestling of b’nai Yisrael isn’t just about God, it’s about everything in our tradition. We live on two calendars: the Gregorian calendar (or the calendar of whatever society around us we happen to live in at any point in history), and the Jewish calendar. Our Sabbath is on a different day, our holidays are a wild list of holidays that don’t appear on most American calendars and if they do they’re often wrong or misspelled, reminding us that those calendars aren’t really for us. While December 25th is an insignificant day on the Jewish calendar, we respect that it’s a very important day on the American calendar and on the Christian calendar — which we might observe in any number of ways, from sharing Christmas with people we love who celebrate, to taking advantage those empty airports and roads to get to wherever we’re going on vacation (lemme tell you, flights on Dec 25th are a gorgeous tapestry of non-Christian minorities in America). 

But what’s the 25th of the Hebrew month of Kislev? That’s the first night of Hanukkah! Which is meaningless for 97.5% of Americans, and they won’t know or understand what we’re doing as we gather around the chanukkiah, in our front windows or at our dining room tables, singing blessings and songs, frying latkes and playing dreidel, but we’re fine with that. We’re fine if people don’t understand our traditions as long as they don’t persecute us for practicing them (which is kind of what Hanukkah’s all about — I’ll say more about that in a second). Truthfully, Hanukkah is one of the more accessible and well-known holidays to people who aren’t Jewish, because of its proximity to Christmas and the symbolism of light in darkness is so relatable, and something we share across traditions and cultures. 

But think about some of our other holidays and what they ask us to do: blow a horn that came off a ram’s head 100 times; fast for 25 hours and avoid leather shoes; build a fort made of natural materials in your backyard, and if you don’t have a backyard, your front yard, and if you don’t have a front yard, in the bed of a pick up truck and slap a sticker on it that says Mitzvah Mobile and drive around with a megaphone inviting people to get into the fort made of sticks on the back of your truck, and observe the joyful holiday of Sukkot. Think about all of the constipating glory of eating matza while everyone around eats bread? Or the challenges of keeping kosher in a society that eats everything. Shver sein a Yid — it’s hard to be B’nai Yisrael, it’s hard to be Jewish, no matter your level of observance or how you “Jew”!  Unless one lives in an entirely enclosed Jewish community, which is not possible in very many places in the world, to be a Jew is to live with some amount of friction with our society, which is to say, it requires actively wrestling with how and when to do Jewish things, knowing most people around us won’t get it. We can only hope they’ll be as supportive, curious, and loving as Oscar’s classmates and family here! But it’s worth just lifting up and clapping up, that making the choice to become bar mitzvah, to affirm your Jewish adulthood, in America or anywhere else in the world, is a big deal bc it’s not easy and many folks won’t get it! Yet as much as this tradition can feel hard, we see being a descendant of Yisrael, the original God wrestler, as a blessing, even as it might sometimes feel like a burden. 

And I know that in today’s world, that can sometimes feel like a burden. It can even be dangerous to be Jewish. Many of our families came here to America because that’s been true in other places, and it’s sad and frustrating that it can sometimes feels true today, especially online. And so I’m thinking about Hanukkah, a holiday whose origin story has echoes in the present, and it’s worth wrestling with what those echoes lead us to celebrate this year as we like candles. 

One version of the story goes like this: Once upon a time, in the Promised Land, Eretz Yisrael, an occupying army and government, the Assyrian Greeks, forbade Jews from practicing their traditions, even studying Torah. Their oppression forced Jews into hiding. But as the story goes, the creative, scrappy, guerrilla freedom fighters, the Maccabees, stood up against their oppressors, fought them off, drove them out, reclaimed their streets and their Temple, and finally got to celebrate the 8 day holiday of Sukkot in the Temple, making up for the holiday they missed in the fall. That is a story of resistance, perseverance, reclamation, and fighting against all odds for our freedom. Shver sein a Yid — it’s hard to be a Jew sometimes, we’ll fight for our right to do this hard thing any day of the week. And that tenacity and belief drives our commitment to stand shoulder to shoulder with anyone being persecuted for the crime of being themselves. That’s one version of the story, valorizing the people who fought for and won our freedom.

But wait, you say, I thought the 8 nights of Hanukkah was about the miracle of the oil? That the Maccabees found only one little cruise of pure oil enough for one day to light in the menorah of the Temple, and miraculously, it lasted 8 days — evidence not of the power of might and force, but the power of God and the resilience of the human spirit, the inspiring hope to even bother lighting anything at all, against the backdrop of such darkness. That’s the other version of the story.

So which story is the real Hanukkah story?… YES! We keep our complicated stories to wrestle with, because in different moments we need to draw on different dimensions of the tradition, and of our history. It means our sermons take longer and our faith isn’t simple. It means that we have an inherent intellectual restlessness, an attraction to the ethical tensions that animate the truth of the world we live in, and it means that we often won’t agree with each other and when we don’t, we’re often both right.  And sometimes we’re both wrong, and most of the time we’re both a little bit right and a little bit wrong. It means that as annoying as it is when our kids ask a million questions and argue with our reasoning on something, underneath the feeling of wanting to tear our hair out, we’re secretly proud of them.

So as we enter the season of Hanukkah, I want to invite you to both embrace and enjoy the wrestling that comes from family and friends getting together in all of their delightful and deeply held opinions — take it in humor and in love, and as a demonstration of the incredible resilience, feistiness and creativity that are the reason we’re still here as a people. And when it feels like being a God wrestler, a part of Benai Yisrael, is hard, know you’re in good company, and have been for millenia, and it’s part of what makes you strong, and that you play an important role as a fraction of a percentage of people in this world lighting the way toward respectful debate, an obsession with questions, with integrity and righteousness, and of course, with love.

Happy Hanukkah and Shabbat shalom.