שֹׁפְטִים וְשֹׁטְרִים תִּתֶּן־לְךָ בְּכל־שְׁעָרֶיךָ אֲשֶׁר יְהֹוָ”ה אֱלֹהֶיךָ נֹתֵן לְךָ לִשְׁבָטֶיךָ וְשָׁפְטוּ אֶת־הָעָם מִשְׁפַּט־צֶדֶק׃
Judges and officials you are to provide for yourselves, within all your gates that YHWH your God is giving you, for your tribal-districts; they are to judge the people [with] equitable justice. (Deut. 16:18, transl. Fox)

This week’s Torah portion, Shoftim, is about judges and justice. Every town needs justices and magistrates who must judge the people with equitable justice. This is also the Torah portion where we find צֶדֶק צֶדֶק תִּרְדֹּף / “Justice, justice shall you pursue!” Just as Torah spent a lot of time in Leviticus telling us to be holy as YHVH our God is holy, now we’re reminded that we also must act justly because YHVH our God is just.

In the mind of our tradition justice is one of God’s fundamental qualities, balanced with lovingkindness. The sound of the shofar is said to move God from the “throne of justice” to the throne of mercy or lovingkindness. We imagine two heavenly thrones, but our tradition also teaches that justice and love are inextricable: without justice, love is meaningless. And without love, justice isn’t just. They are part of each other.

And. This week of all weeks, I need to name something difficult. For some of us it may feel painful or impossible to speak of a God of justice or a God of love when we know that unjust things happen in our world all the time, including here and now. One of you asked me this week: how do you believe in God when a child’s life is cut short? How is the death of a child ever just? How does a loving God allow such a thing to be?

My answers are simple: it’s not just. It’s not fair. It shouldn’t ever happen.

It happens somewhere every day, and every time it happens it’s unthinkable.

I can’t pretend to understand why. I can only try to offer comfort after the fact.

Although Torah describes a God who is involved in the world in a hands-on way – speaking with our ancient spiritual ancestors directly in words they could understand, choosing to create a Flood when humanity’s evils disappointed Them – my personal theology is not one in which God directly makes things happen. I don’t believe that God reaches in to our world and changes things anymore, for good or for ill.

There are so many different ways of understanding God even just within Jewish tradition and Jewish community; I’m willing to bet we have many different theologies even just in this room. Sometimes I really relate to Rambam, who said we can only describe what God is not. In R. Danya Ruttenberg’s powerful words, God is not a vending machine who offers desirable outcomes when we insert the right coins into the slot.

I believe God set the laws of physics in motion, and the natural law that actions change the world around them. This is akin to what our Buddhist cousins call dependent arising: the world is an infinite combination of cascading actions that lead to other actions. And sometimes those cascading actions lead to tragedy, as they did one week ago tonight in our community – as I know they do somewhere, to someone, every day.

I don’t believe God “causes” that. I do believe that God grieves with us. This is a very old Jewish idea. As far back as the book of Jeremiah we find the image of God weeping for us and with us when we suffer. The Talmud depicts God weeping at our suffering. And the image of Shekhinah going with us in exile is all over rabbinic tradition: a “part” of God accompanying us in our sorrows, with us and within us, feeling with us.

Feeling with someone when they suffer is a profound expression of love. It’s a way of saying: I can’t lift what you’re enduring, but I can endure it with you. You’re not in it alone. I am with you in it, and I’ll be with you when it eases.

It turns out that’s exactly what this month is for. On Wednesday at sundown we entered the lunar month of Elul, the month that leads us to the Days of Awe four short weeks from tonight.

The name אלול / Elul can be read as an acronym for ani l’dodi v’dodi li, “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.” (Song of Songs 6:3). This isn’t just about human beings who love one another, though of course it’s about that. And, it’s also about us and God. As we’ll sing in just a few short weeks, “אָנּוּ רַעְיָתֶךָ, וְאַתָה דֹוֵדנּוּ / Anu rayatekha v’Atah dodekha,” – “we are Your companions and You are our Beloved.”

(In fact we’ll be going deep into the imagery of that prayer in Tuesday night’s Worth A Thousand Words class.)

During the month of Elul, tradition imagines God walking with us in the fields, listening to the outpourings of our hearts. I imagine walking in a meadow of wildflowers, bright with butterflies and happy bees and August cricketsong, with the divine Presence by my side holding my hand. I imagine the divine Presence weeping with us at every shiva, and consoling us with the comforts of Shabbat.

It may not feel like “enough.” I’m not sure anything would feel like enough in a week like this one.

In the words of another high holiday prayer: וּתְשׁוּבָה וּתְפִלָּה וּצְדָקָה מַעֲבִירִין אֶת רֹעַ הַגְּזֵרָה / teshuvah ut’filah u’tzedakah ma’avirin et ro’a ha-g’zerah, “Teshuvah, spiritual practice, and just charity transform the harshness of the decree.” These don’t change the griefs of our lives, but they can change how we live them. Whether or not the world is “fair,” our calling is teshuvah, tefilah, tzedakah – and accompanying each other, as God accompanies us.