INTRODUCTION



Let’s say you walk into a restaurant that you’ve heard a lot about. You’re looking for something to satisfy your hunger and give you strength to get through the day. The waiter hands you the menu, and you sit back, scanning all the sections—salads, soups, lunch, dinner. You begin to realize, sadly, that nothing on the menu looks particularly appetizing. The choices sound bland, unsatisfying, or just strange. Much of the menu is incomprehensible. Resigned, or maybe even a little bit angry, you put the menu down and leave. You convince yourself that you’re not so hungry after all and head into your day.

This is what happens to many of us as we realize we have a spiritual hunger. The body needs food to survive, and, while it may not hit us in as obvious a way, our spirits also need to be fed. Yet, so often, we either don’t know where to go to satisfy this hunger, or the places we do know about just don’t satisfy. We walk into the “restaurant” of organized religion and realize there’s just too much we can’t swallow.

We all need a system of meaning to make sense of our lives, to help us answer big questions. Why am I here on this earth? What should I be doing to make a difference in the world? How do I instill values that are important to me in my children? What are the right choices to make—about work, about what to do with the money I have, about complicated ethical situations? How do I make sense of difficult events in my life, loss, and sorrow? In confusing and challenging times, what can I do to bring calm, clarity, and joy into my day-to-day living?

Religions of every sort came into existence to help answer these questions. Because every religion came into being in a specific time and place, and were created by specific groups of people, there are differences in how each one answers universal questions about life and death, meaning and morals. What all religions share is an awareness of Something both within and beyond us, a Power that shapes and guides our lives, especially if we actively seek It out.

For those of us raised in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religions, that Power is called, in English, God. While the stories about God, and what it means to serve God, differ greatly in the Abrahamic religions, there is a cluster of ideas that, for most people, define what God is: very big and awesome, holding ultimate power over us, a force for ultimate good. And even though the religions differ greatly on how explicit we can be about God’s humanlike qualities, most people who talk about God use very human language to describe what God does and is. God knows, God acts, God loves, God judges, God gives and takes away life. No one would use those verbs to describe a river, or an electrical current, or a hurricane. So somewhere in the back of our minds, whether we explicitly believe it or not, God is a Big Person who knows everything and can do anything God wants.

The problem is, many of us just can’t believe in a God like that. We can’t, we just won’t, believe in a Big Person that controls the world and our own lives like a puppet master. We know that we can turn to science to explain what happens in the natural world. Our own experience tells us that we have free will, that our choices are real. We can’t believe in Someone or Something that we’re told is both all-powerful and all-good, because when we look around the world, when we look at our own lives, it’s very clear that there’s a whole lot of not-good there. So either God is irrelevant, or not so good, or just not very plausible.

So we fold up the menu and push back from the table. God doesn’t exist, and religion is either obsolete or a force for bad. We take our spiritual hunger somewhere else, where a God-belief isn’t required (meditation, perhaps, or a yoga class), or we try to ignore our spiritual hunger by going shopping, or watching TV, or preoccupying ourselves with work or alcohol or sex.

This book is my attempt to create a new menu, because I believe the hunger is real for most people, even those who say they have no interest in religion or God. I believe we all need spiritual practices to ground us, to make us stronger and more compassionate. I believe religious communities can be models for creating the kind of society we want to inhabit: communities where we can live values of justice and love, and teach our children to be good and caring people. I believe that all human beings need meaningful rituals to mark important life transitions—whether welcoming a child into our lives, beginning and ending intimate relationships, mourning the deaths of those we love, or preparing for our own deaths.

And perhaps most importantly, I believe that we need to have language to talk about Something that is greater than ourselves, and greater than the things that our consumer culture tells us are ultimate. We need to believe in something, and the fact is we all do believe in something. So the question isn’t really: Should I believe? But rather: What do I believe in? What do I think has ultimate value? To whom, and how, am I connected, beyond the tiny circle of my family? What are my responsibilities—to myself, to the people around me, to my society, to the planet? And what is there, beyond myself, that supports and sustains those values, connections, and commitments?

At a time when the human race is confronting the enormity of our destructive power in the context of climate change, we need to reject two myths. First, that a superhero God is going to magically appear and save us. And second, that human beings are so good and so powerful we can save ourselves. In between those two misconceptions is a deeper, urgent truth: there is Something operating both within us and around us that, if understood and accessed properly, can help us foster the wisdom, compassion, and resilience to perhaps save ourselves and our planet. We need to know It by Its many names, and learn from each of those names what is asked of us. This book is a step toward doing just that.



1: METAPHORICALLY SPEAKING



What Metaphor Is and Why It’s Important

When I read books by people who believe in God, and by those who don’t, I’ve noticed that they share one basic assumption: that when we’re talking about “God,” we’re referring to some kind of superpower entity, a Someone or a Something “out there” that exerts Its influence over us. Theologians of all different stripes try to make sense of this entity, how It works and how best to understand Him (or sometimes Her/Them). Atheists and humanists reject the whole idea of God because, they assert, there is nothing “out there” beyond what can be explained by the natural sciences and human nature. The crux of the debate between God-believers and God-nonbelievers is whether there is any truth to God’s existence.

I’d like to suggest an entirely different way of thinking about the issue. What if, instead of arguing about whether or not God exists, or trying to come up with a definition of “God” that will finally convince everyone, we took a look at us? I invite you to accompany me into the realm of cognitive linguistics, the first step in creating our new “menu” of ways of thinking about, and experiencing, God.

Based on the work of George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, and others who seek to understand how human beings make meaning of the world around us, it is crucial to understand the central role of metaphor. “Metaphor” in this understanding isn’t just a literary turn of phrase, like “Her eyes were deep pools of mystery.” Rather, metaphors provide the framework for how we understand and talk about much of what makes us human.

For example, we tend to associate happiness and other positive feelings with the physical sensation of being “up,” while “down” is associated with sad feelings. We say, “I’m feeling up today” or “I’m high on life” when we’re in a good mood, and “I’m feeling so low” or “That really brought me down” when we’re not. Why? As the writer James Geary explains, “Because we are literally up (i.e., vertical) when we are active, alert, and awake and we are literally down (i.e., horizontal) when we are sluggish, sleepy, or sick.”1 This association of “up” with positive and powerful and “down” with sad and weak is so fundamental that we may not even realize that we’re using a metaphor to describe our feelings.

In this understanding, our minds use metaphors to translate our concrete, embodied experiences to things we experience that are very real but are not physical—like ideas, or arguments, or love. For example, most people would agree that love exists. We’ve experienced it in many ways—as a child or a parent, as a friend or a spouse, as a pet owner or a student. Yet we know that love is not a “thing,” not something we can point to and say, “There it is!” While there are physical aspects of love—those things that happen in our brains and in our bodies when we experience different sorts of love—most of us wouldn’t say that these neurological and chemical reactions equal “love.”

So if love is more than a bodily process, what is it? When we think about love, and when we talk about it, we use what are called conceptual metaphors, drawing from other areas of our lives to make sense of our experiences of love. Lakoff and Johnson, in their research, have found these common metaphors for love:

LOVE IS A PHYSICAL FORCE: “I could feel the electricity between us”; “She’s very attracted to him.” LOVE IS MADNESS: “I’m crazy about them”; “She constantly raves about her.” LOVE IS WAR: “He fled from their advances”; “She won her heart.” And there are many more: Love as a Journey, as a Patient, as Magic.2 Usually, we make use of these conceptual metaphors in a relatively unconscious way. We don’t think, Now I’m going to describe love as a kind of madness, before we say, “He’s crazy about her.”

Another very basic conceptual metaphor in our culture is IDEAS ARE FOOD. We may not realize it, but we function within this metaphor all the time—whenever we “chew over” a suggestion, or wonder whether we can “digest” a particularly shocking idea, or marvel over how our child “devours” a new book. One of my favorite metaphors is ANGER IS A HOT LIQUID IN A CONTAINER, expressed in phrases like “I’m steamed up,” or “She’s boiling mad,” or “He blew his top.”

In many cultures today, a powerful metaphor is TIME IS A LIMITED RESOURCE or TIME IS MONEY. We spend time, we lose time, we budget our time. And we don’t just talk about time this way, we actually experience it this way, as anyone who has “wasted” an afternoon in a doctor’s waiting room or felt good about “spending” their time wisely knows.

But not everyone in the world experiences time like this; in fact, most people didn’t until the past few hundred years, when industrialization introduced the idea that people get paid based on how many hours they work. It is quite possible to experience time in other ways—for example, as an endless flow. If time is not experienced through the metaphor of being a precious and limited resource, then waiting hours for a bus or a doctor’s appointment doesn’t feel like a “waste of time.” While “time” is certainly something real, how we understand it and experience it depends on the unconscious metaphors within which we function.

In recent decades, cognitive scientists have been able to see how metaphorical reasoning functions in our brains. There are areas of our brains that are active not just when we are doing an action but also when we are just thinking metaphorically about doing that action. For example, when I contemplate “kicking a habit,” the part of my brain that is involved when I physically kick something is activated, making the metaphor “real” in a powerful way. In another example, our early experience as infants being held by an adult and feeling their physical warmth becomes connected, via neurons, to our emotional understanding of affection. We express this metaphorically when we say things like “My friend is a very warm person.” The metaphor AFFECTION IS WARMTH is much more than a turn of phrase—it becomes a basic way that we experience personal interactions.

Lakoff and Johnson write:

In all aspects of life … we define our reality in terms of metaphors and then proceed to act on the basis of the metaphors. We draw inferences, set goals, make commitments, and execute plans, all on the basis of how we in part structure our experience, consciously and unconsciously, by means of metaphor.3

The “metaphors we live by” are central to who we are, how we act, and how we make meaning of the world around us.

Metaphor and the “Real World”

Why do I think all of this is important? Because this new science of the brain tells us something intriguing about what “truth” is, which leads us back to the discussion about whether or not God exists. One of our most basic assumptions about the world is that there is a reality “out there,” and that all that our senses and our brains are doing is telling us (more or less clearly, depending on the quality of our senses and our brains) what that reality is.

But if we accept that our minds use metaphors to make sense of large parts of our experience, then we need to shift a bit in how we think about what’s “true.” This means that even in the realm of science, where we tend to believe that we are getting at what’s “really” going on in the world, things are a little more complicated. As the scientist and author Theodore Brown observes in his exploration of the role of conceptual metaphor in the work of science: “In this way of looking at things, truth is the product of human reasoning. It follows that science does not proceed by discovering preexisting truths about the world. Rather, it consists in observing the world and formulating truths about it.”4

This statement doesn’t mean that there is no reality, or that we can’t make true and untrue statements. What it does mean is that truth—at least, the truth as far as we can know it—arises from an interaction of our bodies and brains and the world around us. What is “true” for us is some combination of what’s actually going on in the world, and our experience of it. Because of this interaction, what we know as “true” can change and develop as we learn new things about the world and as we create new metaphors for understanding it. This is how we can go from thinking that the sun literally “rises” above the horizon to describing how planets move around the sun, or how the study of physics can evolve from Newton’s theory of gravity to Einstein’s theory of relativity. Instead of embodying some abstract, ultimate “truth,” different ideas and theories help us make sense of the world around us, and help us live in that world. A good theory will explain things well and give us tools to live in ways that are productive. At the same time, it might be replaced at any time by a new theory that brings us a new understanding of “truth” and that gives us new and different abilities and awareness.

I imagine it’s hard for most of us to accept the notion that how we know things is limited by the way our minds and bodies work. We’re used to thinking that there’s a world “out there” that we can make sense of “in here” in our minds; that when we talk about the sky being blue, the sky is blue. But color is not an inherent quality of the things around us; it is something we perceive based on the interplay of our eyes, our brains, and the way light reflects off objects we’re looking at. Does this mean color is not “real”? Of course not. Color is an essential aspect of human experience and the universe around us. So on the one hand—as far as our daily lives are concerned—“The sky is blue” is a true statement, even if we can show scientifically that the quality “blue” is not inherently part of our atmosphere.

Coming back to the notion that science “consists in observing the world and formulating truths about it,” rather than “discovering preexisting truths,” I would argue that if this is true for the sciences, how much more so for religion! Based on new understandings of how our minds work, we can borrow Theodore Brown’s insight and say that “religion does not proceed by discovering preexisting truths about the world. Rather, it consists in observing the world and formulating truths about it.”

So is it true to say that God exists? I would say God exists like love exists, like time exists, like colors exist, like good and evil exist—because all of these are fundamental aspects of human experience. Some of these things, like time and color, can be investigated and represented in scientific terms. Others, like love or a sense of good and evil, can only be known through our experiences and our reasoning about it. They are all “true” in that they shape our daily lives and tell us important things about ourselves and the world we live in. Yet they are not entirely “out there.” They all involve some amount of interaction between our bodies and brains and the world around us.

So instead of arguing about whether God “exists,” or fighting over whose version of God is “true,” I suggest that we explore what it means to live as beings who have a profound sensitivity to what has come to be called the “sacred” or the “Divine.” Since at least the beginning of recorded human history, if not earlier, we know that human beings at all times and in all places have had what we can call spiritual experiences. We also know that all human cultures, in a large variety of ways, have developed systems of religious thought and practice to enable people to engage with the cosmos and with one another. To ignore this realm of human experience, to relegate it to random firings of neurons in our brains or dismiss it as superstition, is to overlook a significant part of what makes us human.

Metaphors on the Menu

What I will do in the rest of this book is to explore what is most problematic about our current God metaphors, and the assumptions that so many of us have about what “God” must mean, and then suggest some different ways of thinking about the divine. Each chapter will explore a metaphor that is in many cases very old, yet for us today might seem very new. My hope is that these different God metaphors will make it possible for you, the reader, to reengage with some important spiritual and religious teachings. You may be somewhat comfortable with traditional God language, or be totally turned off by it. Either way, I hope you will enter into this exploration with an open mind and heart.

I am hopeful that this exploration of new ways of thinking about and experiencing the divine will be attractive to people of all backgrounds. My approach to this work comes from a Jewish perspective, using the texts and traditions that I am familiar with. I will be especially focusing on metaphors for God that can be found in the Hebrew Bible, for a few reasons. The first is that it is the foundational text for me as a Jew and as a rabbi, especially the first five books, which Jewish tradition refers to as the Torah. It is also a foundational text for Christians, as it makes up (in slightly different order) the Old Testament, the first part of the Christian Bible. Stories about and images of God from the Hebrew Bible have done a great deal to influence how we think about God in Western culture. Yet at the same time, many of the biblical metaphors have been lost to us. The authors of the Hebrew Bible were very closely connected to their land. As such, they experienced the sacred in ways that may seem more familiar to us from other Indigenous traditions—in earth and fire, in water and sky. In excavating and resuscitating these biblical metaphors for God, I hope to offer to people of both Jewish and Christian heritage, and to anyone of any background who shares this interest, new ways to approach these holy texts.

I will also be looking at the insights of two thousand years of Jewish commentators who, in their exploration of the Hebrew Bible and their own encounters with the divine, came up with new ways to think about God. In every era, my rabbinic ancestors have been quite brilliant at incorporating aspects of their world into the traditions they received. While I can’t match their brilliance, I hope to follow their example in weaving together what I find most compelling in Judaism with the realities of the world I live in.

Because my study of new theories of metaphor has shown me that how we think about the world affects how we act, and because I strongly believe that what we believe about God does and should influence our everyday lives, in each chapter I suggest a set of practices to activate a particular metaphor in our lives. These practices are a way of bringing the metaphors off the page and into our lives.

Ultimately, religion is not about a set of beliefs but about how we act and who we are. My hope in coming up with a new “menu” of God metaphors is that once we are properly nourishing our souls, we will be better equipped to live lives that exemplify holy qualities like wisdom, justice, and compassion. Thank you for joining me on this journey.


Copyright © 2022 by Toba Spitzer