Opening to God: Haftarat Lech Lecha: Isaiah 40:27-41:16

What if no one is listening? This week’s Haftarah opens:

Why do you say, O Jacob,
Why declare, O Israel,
‘My way is hid from the Lord,
My cause is ignored by my God?’

The rest of Haftarah Lech Lecha is devoted to explaining how God really is there, and it will all be all right. The problem is that if someone feels abandoned by God, proclaiming that God loves them does not help very much. They do not need arguments; they need experiences. That is true whether it is a collectivity or an individual.

Like most people for whom spirituality forms a key part of their lives, I have often felt that No One is listening. Luckily, I have been able to avoid the abyss or severe depression: even my sadness isn’t particularly interesting. But that is the point: anyone who seeks God must feel lonely because there no one can be in an I-Thou relationship with God very much of the time. This sort of loneliness is thankfully not clinical or medical: it is existential. It is necessarily part of the human condition. We call out, and very often, no one answers back.

And here is what I do.

Silence

Stand silent before Me, coastlands
And let nations renew their strength

(Haftarat Lech Lecha, Isaiah 41:1). For many, the feeling of spiritual loneliness leads us to reach out, to search in the external world for a place where or a person in whom God is speaking. The Haftarah suggests that that is going in the wrong direction. Instead, one must first be silent. Why might this be?

In seeking wisdom, the first step is silence. Avot 3:17.

We can hear much of the outside world when we are talking; we can even understand a good bit of that outside world when we are talking. But we cannot hear inside ourselves when we are doing so. Try it. Try to reflect or contemplate, or focus closely on yourself while you are talking or having a conversation. I can’t.

We must listen inside ourselves because that is where God is. Arthur Green, perhaps the greatest living Jewish theologian,