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 |  Subject: Idiot claims: With four words, God healed one soul  Sat Oct 04, 2008 4:50 am | |
| On Thursday, Oct. 8, 1981, at 1 p.m. PST, God spoke to me. Four words. In English. A male voice. Definitely God's voice.
At first, I told many people the story of how I came to hear those four words.
Later, though, I began to study Torah a little. Reading my ancestors' stories, I wondered: Did I really hear God's voice? Abraham did, and so did Moses. So did 600,000 Israelites when God revealed the Ten Commandments. It began to feel like colossal chutzpah (nerve) to put myself in this exalted company. And yet, I know what I heard.
Twenty-eight years ago, I was newly separated from my husband, on the way, it turned out, to divorce. Before the High Holidays, we had divided the children: I to have them for Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year), he to have them for Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement). I brought my father to the eve-of-Yom Kippur service. As I surveyed the huge assembly of worshippers, I seemed to see row upon row of perfect, intact families: son, daughter, wife, husband. Like mine had been. I felt a sense of dislocation.
Leaving the service, I was overwhelmed with panic as I pictured going to Yom Kippur services the next day. I knew I could not, would not return … at least, not without my children at my side. My husband, I knew, did not intend to go to services. I called and explained. He declined, noting we had struck a deal.
The words of God
The next morning I awoke in anguish. I called my dad to say that I wasn't going to services, but I would call a cab for him. No, he said, he'd watch the service on television. Pow! Sin No 1. Failure to honor my father. On Yom Kippur, yet.
When I am beset, I vent my feelings through writing. So I headed for the typewriter. I wrote, and I cried. Hours went by, until, emerging from my typewriter rant was the most appalling realization: I could not forgive my husband for refusing to give me the children.
Pow! Sin No. 2. Confronting this realization, I felt doomed. Because I believed, as it is written, that "for transgressions of one human being against another, the Day of Atonement does not atone until they have made peace with one another." Yet I felt so bitter about my husband's decision that I couldn't even contemplate forgiving him.
I wrote some more, twisting my soul this way and that. I tried to wrest the sin from it, to galvanize the required contrition. I could not. It was no use pretending. God certainly would see through counterfeit t'shuvah (return and repentance). The conclusion was clear: I would not be earning a place in the Book of Life for the coming year. I was filled with a hideous sense of peril.
And then, from I know not where, came a voice. A male voice … deep … of this world, yet not. God said: "I forgive you, child."
Instantly, I sank to my knees. Instantly, my fight, my fear vanished, as if they had never been. I was enveloped in loving-kindness. I felt cherished and protected, by a God who on this holiest of days, beseeched by Jews around the world, broke through His silence to forgive me, though I was surely "of little merit." With four words, God granted me tikkun, the healing of my soul.
Bedrock of faith
As the decades have passed, I have wondered: was it really God's voice I heard? At times I've thought that in my torment I worked myself into an altered state of consciousness, ripe for hallucination. Or, that the "still, small voice" within me had mustered sufficient force to become manifest. And yet, I know whom I heard.
I have also realized that my theology and my psychology that day were a little confused. That is, I have come to realize that my inability to forgive my husband was not at issue, nor was it a sin.
The real sin that day was against myself: for unreasonably expecting myself to rise above my pain in order to fulfill the Yom Kippur mandate in the time-honored ways.
Years later I met with Jonathan Stein, then Senior Rabbi of Congregation Beth Israel in San Diego. Yes, he said, it is entirely possible to hear God speak, as did our forebears in the Bible.
He lent credence to the validity of my experience by noting that people are most open to God's presence on two occasions: during the Days of Awe, and at the time of life-cycle events, including divorce.
I have never heard God's voice again. At least not in the stunning way that I heard His voice so long ago. Yet so pivotal was that experience that the four words God spoke have become the bedrock of my faith. While my theology is a work in progress, it is grounded in my belief in a caring, loving, attentive God. One who speaks in many ways, through mitzvot (good deeds) and through conscience, in music and poetry, in marvels of nature, through the miracle of birth, and in some quirky ways you just wouldn't believe. But, that's another story.
LNK
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Anarcho-Capitalist, AnCaps Forum, Ancapolis, OZschwitz Contraband
“The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.”-- Max Stirner
"Remember: Evil exists because good men don't kill the government officials committing it." -- Kurt Hofmann |
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