The finger of God
Passover
This is the season of our freedom, which Jews in America certainly celebrate. Few countries have welcomed us as readily as this one has. But being free citizens entails responsibility, not the least of which, these days, is insisting on religion in America that is more than juvenile.
Take the notion of prayer that dominates our media, publications, and even Congress, painting God as an anthropomorphic Superman ready to respond to the prayers of the faithful by curing the sick or even winning a football game. At first glance, our Passover story seems to support that claim. The events described in the Haggada include, after all, the Israelites’ crying out to God from the midst of bondage, and God “heard our cry and saw our affliction, our misery, and our oppression.” (Deuteronomy 26:7) Biblical literalists cite this kind of thing to prove their case.
What then should we make of the recent study (New York Times, March 31) that demonstrates that prayer doesn’t work that way; patients with heart disease who were prayed over did no better than patients who were not. Many did even worse. God doesn’t seem to “hear our cry and see our affliction, our misery, and our oppression.”
The study is actually good news. Suppose a statistically significant sample of prayed-over patients (70 percent, let us say) did better than the not-prayed-over (only 40 percent). We would then have to wonder about a God who unaccountably lets 30 percent of the prayed-over die and then abandons innocent patients just because no one thought to pray for them. Knowing God does not micromanage medical cures saves God from an accusation of capriciousness.
To be sure, I have not a clue as to how God works. Nor has anyone else, as anyone who is honest and thoughtful should admit. Who can comprehend the nature of a Being so distant from human imagination? I get this from Maimonides, who, almost 1,000 years ago, explained how words cannot describe God adequately. So I do not know what God is — I know only what God isn’t. God is not a divine puppeteer awaiting a 9-1-1 prayer and then pulling the right string to cure us. God snaps no finger to make us well. God has no fingers.
But I pray anyway, because God heals. “Healing” is not “curing.” Curing is what doctors do when they find antidotes to whatever is destroying us. We keep upping the ante on the cures medicine finds, but diseases up their own ante faster. Until recently, who ever heard of SARS, or Bird Flu?
So we will always have diseases for which medicine knows no cure. But regardless of the disease and even without a cure, there is still healing, a realm where God does indeed appear. In contrast to the born-again claim of a superhero-God swooping down to save the faithful, we have the Talmud’s image of God as an ally, albeit not a curer, in our fight against disease. God hovers over our bed when we are ill; God cries with us.
Divine healing (but not, alas, curing) at least allows us to come to terms with tragic ailments. I do not say that lightly! I deal with such ailments regularly in my own family. I see how people with afflictions somehow soldier on. Their soldiering is the metaphoric finger of God.
Knowing God is not a superhero liberates us to reconfigure God and lay the ground for intentionality — the way we humans plot our years with intentions and then die contentedly, knowing those deepest intents have added to the world’s store of goodness.
I still say prayers for healing, then, as I hope others will say them for me. If they do not wholly penetrate heaven, they at least bounce off, surrounding me with an aura of intentionality — the intention of others to help me come to terms with what is and breathe a sigh of acceptance. That umbrella of prayer is a whole lot better than the secular bromide, “I hope you feel better tomorrow.”
Still, there is our Passover claim that insists God “heard our cry and saw our affliction, our misery, and our oppression.” I see now why that is called a miracle. Getting saved from bondage or from illness doesn’t happen all the time. Our tradition counts only classic occasions: Hanukka, Purim, and Passover. We are also told that God will somehow enter history one more time — to bring ultimate redemption. In the meantime, we are left with sobering reality. For cures, we are on our own.
For healing, however, God dwells among us, even perched above our head in hospital beds. That is just a metaphor, I know, for a God we will never fully grasp, but it is a good metaphor. It keeps me going.
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