Every Move You Make

Every Move You Make ...

(Providence is a place in Rhode Island)

Rabbi Michael L. Feshbach

"Every step you take, every move you make, I’ll be watching you ..." My first substantive paper when I was in graduate school at Brandeis University in the field of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies was about the book Of Deuteronomy. The paper was called, "Motive Clauses in Deuteronomy." (It was also the first paper I had typed on a word processor, on my father’s now Long-retired original Apple. When I was done with the paper , a mischievous friend of mine , who "knew about " computers and their capabilities, did a "Search and Replace " function , removing the word "motive " and replacing it with "Santa. " Fortunately, I caught it prior to the final draft. )

What is a motive clause? It is the exhortation we occasionally find following a commandment , giving us encouragement to obey the law, telling us what will happen if we do (or if we don 't). "Honor your father and your mother ... in order that you may have a long life on the land that the Lord your God is giving you." Do this, and your crops will come. Does that or your enemies will dance on your city streets?

These incentives are inextricably linked with the Biblical notion of Divine Providence, the doctrine of Reward and Punishment (given its fullest force, perhaps, in the book of Deuteronomy). If you obey, good things will happen. If not, you’ll get hit by a crazed camel.

What is most interesting about these motive clauses is that they reveal, through the proffered rewards and the threatened punishments, the highest hopes and deepest fears of the average ancient Israelite target audience. Blessings, bumper crops and healthy children. War, famine and exile. All premised on the notion that our fate follows from the kind of life we lead.

But there were some commandments with a "different” motive clause. "Have honest weights and measures," we are told, "do not curse the deaf," we are told, "because I am the Lord your God." It seems that the sins you could get away with, the kind of things that only you would know if you were doing Them ... a followed by a sharp reminder that, no, you are not the only one who knows. There is another One. When you commit a crime and cover your tracks (even if you don’t leave a bloody glove behind), you know. And God knows.

Like the song says, "every move you make, every step you take ..." The entire system of Divine Providence is based on the notion that you know, and God knows, and God knows that you know, and you know that God knows. (Work it out. You need all four.)

The thinking behind the Biblical tradition, taken to its logical extreme, is that every schlub whose numbers are called out right, every "innocent" child who gets sick is feeling the hand of an ever watching, ever knowing, Puppet -pulling God. And when the Biblical writers realized that not every nice farmer has a good harvest, they invented(alright, excuse me, borrowed) the notion of life after death. There is a place; they said ... there is a time, they said, when it will work out in the end. Where every good deed will be tallied and weighed against every sin, where the balance of our lives will be placed in judgment by an external power. I don’t buy it. Not the part about God causing everything, anyway. To me, Providence ... is a place in Rhode Island. Sometimes, you know bad things happen. And hoping and wishing and wanting won’t change them. They did not happen because you deserved them. And they won’t go away with even the most heart-felt prayer.

In our High Holy Day machzor , during the Yom Kippur Yizkor service, we read the following words : "If some messenger were to come to us with the offer that death should be overthrown , but with the one inseparable condition that birth should also cease ..." Why? I always wanted to ask. Why link the two? Why can’t we have, birth and creation, growth and change ... and eternal life? What does the one have to do with the other?

But they are linked together, birth and death, and this prayer has a compelling logic of its own. Personally , I believe that bad things happen because death is part of the universe , that in order to have growth we must inevitably have decay , that to have new things come to be you must also have old things transform , change form, make room, take root, to return anew as something else . Over time we cannot have the growth of the new without the moving aside of the old.

Indeed, if you think about it, any time we change, any time we grow, there is that instant, that paradoxical transformative moment: before we can be what we are to become, we must surrender what we have been. The yet-to-be cannot overlap the once-was.

Rabbi Daniel Matt notes that the Hasidic rabbi Dov Baer , the Maggid of Mezritch noticed that the Hebrew letters in the word "ani", meaning "I, " "myself ," are the very same letters as in the word "ain, " meaning "nothingness ." It is only when we pass through the nothingness that the once was can become the yet-to-be . Death, then, is the ultimate nothingness through which we pass . It is thus a part of life, a requirement for life .

But once it is here , no one and no thing, not you, not me , not the best doctors in the world , not the Doctor of the World can fully control it. We try . We strive . We make progress . But we cannot control it all, not fully . Even God cannot . Death and disease need to be part of the picture of life . But once in the frame, they function , perhaps , at least partly at random . So even God, in my belief , cannot change the outcome of events . But is God watching? Is God (or a Democratic president with a Republican Congress) still relevant?

Elie Wiesel tells the chilling story of a man who cries out in anger in Auschwitz : "Where is God? God has abandoned us ." And another man responds . He points at the guards, at the smokestack and says : "This is not the work of God . This is the work of human beings. " Then he points at a man hanging on the gallows , swinging in the wind . "There," he says . "There is God ."

Did he mean that God was dead, that the tradition is over and done? Or could it be that it is time to transform the tradition . To stop looking for a God who pulls our strings . To realize that God was there . Even there . A shoulder . A touch . A push . A nudge . Crying . Weeping with us at a tragedy that should not have been .

I believe that God is not a puppeteer. But God is there . Watching . Wanting . Waiting for us ... to do the right thing . Not for any reward . But because it is the right thing to do. So the song is wrong . It’s not : "I'll be watching you ." It’s the theme song from Friends . "I 'll be there for you ." No matter what happens . No matter how much you hurt .

That is a song I can sing . And a tradition I can embrace.