Thought for the Week

Dear Members and Friends,

The little black cat is back lodging with me. We have re-established our relationship, with me as the main provider of food and many strokes, she as an endless source of wonder and conversation. Night times are when she is most chatty, although it is more than often difficult to understand what she is saying. Food? Always. Caresses? Almost always when she pushes her little head against my knuckles.

My son, her true owner finally brought round her plaything. Two toy mice, each one attached to the two ends of a long red rope tied to a green ribbon. Dangling one end in front of her, she is simply not interested. But hide one under a rug and tug at the rope and she will attempt to lift the end of the rug with her paw and claws and capture the mouse, holding it for a few moments between her paws. Then her interest wanes.

It took me a while to work out why she was more interested in the act of searching for the mouse than finding it. The game reminded me of a passage in our Siddur – an extract from an unpublished sermon, delivered on Yom Kippur 1965 by a previous LJS Rabbi, Dr David Goldstein (zichrono livrachah).

The sermon speaks about the searching and finding of God. Rabbi Goldstein compares two kinds of searching: the searching for something that is lost, such as a precious stone, which is separate in time from the act of finding.  ‘We can,’ he says, ‘describe the very point at which the searching ended, and the finding began.’ But, he continues, there is another kind of searching:

‘It may be likened to listening to a piece of music. Now it is true that the piece of music will have a final climax and resolution, and that will be our finding. But that climax, unlike the precious stone, is completely worthless without the musical moments that have preceded it. In fact we have begun to discover that climax as soon as we have heard the first note of the music, and the whole of the listening process not only leads up to the discovery, but is the discovery of the climax’ (Siddur Lev Chadash, page 240).

For the little black cat, it is her animated search that constitutes the finding of her toy mouse, for the discovery does not result in any triumphant victory.  In searching for God, says Rabbi Goldstein, ‘those who feel that the search for God must necessarily end in some kind of experience which will in effect be the finding, are generally disappointed.’

There are those who may feel alienated from this language that speaks of the search for God. After all, what does it mean to search for God? Or, for that matter, that God searches for us, as S/He did in the Garden of Eden, calling out to the first human beings Ayekkah – ‘Where are you?’ (Genesis 3:9)

And there are those for whom the search for God may be rooted in their faith, in their daily lives, their desire to be their best possible selves. Abraham Joshua Heschel, whose book God in Search of Man encapsulates God’s pursuit of humanity, God’s patience, waiting for us to respond to a call in some way, sees that call to Adam and Eve ‘Where are you?’ as a call that goes out again and again.

‘Faith comes out of awe, out of an awareness that we are exposed to [God’s] presence, out of anxiety to answer the challenge of God, out of an awareness of our being called upon. Religion consists of God’s question and [humanity’s] answer… Unless God asks the question, all our inquiries are in vain’ (God in Search of Man, page 137).

Prayer, ritual, community, ethics – are these our responses to the question ‘Where are you?’ I watch the little black cat, her small body seated on a narrow window sill, her gaze intent on something outside. Does she know that she cannot reach the bird, the mouse, the people walking in the street? That she cannot rub her neck against the rough bark of a tree? Does she feel disappointed that she cannot explore that world in its material sense? I don’t know, but I learn from the way she is completely absorbed in the present, from her stillness in the moment, her silence and the observations that are apparent to her but hidden to my limited gaze.

Shabbat Shalom,
Alexandra Wright
 
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