This Is My God To Whom I Will Give Glory

Rabbi Zachary Mayer
Religion Outside the Box

Parshat B'shalach: Exodus 21:1-24:18This is my God to whom I will give glory.

In this week's portion, Beshalach, are the wonderful, wonderful words "This is my God to whom I will give glory; my father's God, to whom I will give honor."

(Before I continue on in a different direction, I want to point out that Rashi, in Shabbat 133, notes that "Ze Eli v'anvehu" ought not be translated as "This is my God to whom I will give glory," but instead as "This is God and I am God!" As fabulous a direction as that is, this d'var torah is going with the more standard translation of "this is my God to whom I will give glory.")

At the tender age of 17, the young Menachem Mendel Morgenstern, the man who would later become the revered Kotzker Rebbe, chose a route towards God - black-hat Hasidism - that wasn't the path his father wanted him to follow. He quoted to his father this verse from Exodus 15: "This is my God to whom I will give glory; my father's God, to whom I will give honor." He explained it as this: "I must first search for God in ways that have meaning for me. Only then can I honor to the God of my father."

How true! How true! It is only when any of us find God in a way that makes sense to us that we are able to give God - the God of our traditions - glory.

Our common understanding of the tautology of the phrase "the God of" before each ancestor's name in the Amida instead of the more concise "the God of our ancestors" is that each of the Biblical forefathers and foremothers had a unique relationship with God. And ours should be different than theirs, too! The relationship that our parents had with God is not and cannot be the same as the one that we have.

We as often mistakenly believe that Judaism, and all the more so our version of Judaism is the right path for giving God glory.

It's not.

The crux of religion is to help people find and be with God, as they understand God.

We need to remember that we do not hold a monopoly on paths to God. Everyone has his or her own path. We ought to empower people to take their own paths. We oughtn't shame or look down on anyone who chooses a path different than our own. We ought to encourage them until they are able to say, "This is my God to whom I will give glory."
We must encourage people to find paths to God even if those paths do not closely resemble those of our their parents. Really.

My rabbinate is devoted to doing just this. I've written a book called "How to find out what (the) God (of your understanding) wants from you" and run a fairly popular Internet based congregation called Religion-Outside-The-Box (rotb.org). I don't tell anyone what to do or what to believe. I encourage people to figure out answers for themselves so that they - like the Kotzer Rebbe - can sing a new song to God.

Please, my dear colleagues, let us not get confused. Let us not think that our institutions are anything more than paths to a goal; they are not. The goal is the important thing, not the path. God is what is important. We must help people to search for God in ways that have meaning for them so that they can give glory to God.

"This is my God to whom I will give glory." Amen.