While teaching English at a Yeshiva in the Bronx, I was surprised one day to become part of a theological thought experiment so creative and meaningful that it has stayed with me ever since. After recently learning that the universe may “die” much sooner than previously thought, I recalled that incident at the Yeshiva, as it offered metaphorical depth and poignancy to a scientific truth.
One day, a rabbi came to speak to our teaching staff. I was touched when he singled me out with a friendly gesture, a small, personal act of welcome from a community that had warmly embraced me, and I was happy to be a part of, even though I came from a different religious background.
He said, genuinely smiling widely, eyes sparkling with warm-hearted mirth, “I heard this guy here is quite a mensch! Yes? No?” To my relief my kind and supportive colleagues smiled at me and nodded their heads. “So he’s a good guy? I heard the kids like him. OK.”
The rabbi continued, “Now here’s my question. If I were to put Dan, this good guy, in Antarctica, in a hut with food and water, but no life, no life at all, not even a cockroach, nothing alive for miles around, nothing living that Dan could see, so Dan would be completely isolated, would he still be good?”
It was a clever setup. Most teachers nodded. One said, “Yeah, of course he would. He’s good, period, wherever he is.” But the rabbi, still smiling, said, “Well, if you think about it, you can’t be ‘good, period’. Goodness without someone to be good to isn’t goodness.”
Then he offered a surprising analogy: this, he said, was God’s condition before the “creation” of humankind. Only with others, with humanity, could God be good. Goodness needs relationship. Without humanity, God was not good, and God needed to be good. God had just been itching to be good.
I wish I could remember how he explained it exactly, but I recall him saying that God specifically created humanity so He (sorry, what’s God’s pronoun?) could be good. The whole point of humanity’s existence was for God to realize His goodness and engender it in others, to actualize this amazing and emergent quality in the universe, to become the first agent of goodness.
Now, I’m not the most religious guy in the world, in a world that often measures religiosity through fake and ostentatious metrics. I call myself a Progressive Christian because I lean toward tolerance, forgiveness and pacifism and I like the religious symbolism of the Gospels and find great meaning in the humane teachings of Jesus. I believe the true message of the Bible is still highly relevant and calls on each of us to deeply examine how we live, how we respond to others and to rise to a higher level of goodness.
Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that, as a metaphor, I thought this explanation for the creation of humanity was so beautiful, brilliant and creative. I can’t tell you how grateful I felt to hear it and how happy I am to pass it on to you (if you haven’t already heard it).
Recently, years later, as I read the latest data that the universe will die faster than we thought, the memory of that rabbi came back to me. So I thought back to that rabbi’s God, the one who needed us in order to be good. If the universe ends, and no one remains, God would now be sitting alone again, the way I would be in Antarctica, without even a cockroach for company.
But to me, the story becomes more compellingly tender and affecting now. Now the story presents a tragic God, one who is bound to love but also to loss. A God who created to love and to express goodness, even though He knew the story would end. We have an eternal God now with the memory of love and goodness but, for eternity, the inability to ever recapture real love and goodness.
In Jewish and Christian thought alike, God is often described as omnipotent, impassive, beyond suffering. But this version subverts the image. Here is a God who willingly binds Himself to grief. Here is a God who chose to suffer for all eternity so that we weak, fragile, ephemeral creatures would have a sense of justice and mercy and humane self-development in the world.
Maybe that makes the act of creation, and the good we do as mirror images of God, even more meaningful; not because it lasts forever, but because it doesn’t. Maybe the highest form of goodness is not eternal, maybe it’s the kind you do anyway, even if they say it doesn’t matter.
Not to mix silliness with sublimity, but God becomes like Puff the Magic Dragon once Jackie Paper disappears. Remember how sad that made you feel when you were a kid hearing that song for the first time? Puff the Magic Dragon as the tragic God, forgotten, left alone in his cave, unable to be what he once was because the child (creation) has gone away.
In the rabbi’s parable, God seems closer to Puff than to Aristotle’s unmoved mover. That image holds enormous emotional power, and it softens the second law of thermodynamics with the intimate.
Now let me tell you, as an aside, that if you want to read from the creator of this incredible metaphor, the rabbi at the Yeshiva apparently was referencing the writings of Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, who was born in the Republic of Venice in 1707 and who died in the city of Acre, of the plague, in 1746 after leading a tumultuous and non-conformist life dedicated to spiritual discovery.
Mesillat Yesharim (1740, The Path of the Just) is his masterpiece, a virtual guidebook to overcoming one’s flaws and reaching toward real spirituality, and he is also famous for Derekh Hashem (1736, The Way of God), an exposition of the main tenets of Judaism which includes the topic of God and creation.
So God as Puff the Magic Dragon says that even if the universe ends, it mattered that we were here. It mattered that we worked, that we loved, that we tried to use our minds and hearts to rise in our humanity, to recognize and overcome what might be harmful in us so that we could be good too, for the same reason as God. There will be a God crying over our loss and this God may never stop crying. That’s how good this God would be.
I kind of wish one of my colleagues at the Yeshiva had said, “But what if Dan remembers the children he taught? The volunteer work he did at a homeless shelter? Or he remembers those who were kind to him but didn’t need to be? What if Dan starts to cry in Antarctica? I contend, dear respected rabbi, that Dan is still good, even without a cockroach in his hut!”
What would the rabbi have said? Isn’t mourning a sign of goodness too? Maybe mourning is the highest form of goodness. What if God created us so God could mourn? In any case, even in a universe headed toward oblivion, the fact that we ask these questions, that we try to be good, that we recognize goodness in others, may be the most divine thing we can do.
So this may be the only kind of God who makes sense anymore, God as Puff, not eternal and untouched, but involved, wounded, nostalgic and mourning. This may be the only kind of goodness that’s real, the kind we do even though we won’t last and the kind that might cause us to mourn if we were suddenly isolated.
Maybe Puff will wait in that cave, not for Jackie Paper, but for the echo of every good thing Jackie dared to be. We won’t last, but the memory of our sincere efforts will last with the eternally mourning God.
Or perhaps, against all odds, God will be joyous, treasuring the fleeting gift of being good and having loved. God will be like Shiva, the dancer, Shiva as Nataraja, the cosmic being who turns mourning into action, whose dance holds both destruction and creation, sorrow and joy.
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Thanks Daniel !