The Voice of God

Rabbi Elliot Dorff, PhD

Sol & Anne Distinguished Professor in Philosophy, Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies

University Rector, American Jewish University

Rabbi Elliot Dorff, PhD is AJU’s Rector and Sol & Anne Dorff Distinguished Service Professor in Philosophy. He is Chair of the Conservative Movement's Committee on Jewish Law and Standards and served on the editorial committee of Etz Hayim, the new Torah commentary for the Conservative Movement. He has chaired four scholarly organizations: the Academy of Jewish Philosophy, the Jewish Law Association, the Society of Jewish Ethics, and the Academy of Judaic, Christian, and Islamic Studies. He was elected Honorary President of the Jewish Law Association for the term of 2012-2016. In Spring 1993, he served on the Ethics Committee of Hillary Rodham Clinton's Health Care Task Force. In March 1997 and May 1999, he testified on behalf of the Jewish tradition on the subjects of human cloning and stem cell research before the President's National Bioethics Advisory Commission. In 1999 and 2000 he was part of the Surgeon General’s commission to draft a Call to Action for Responsible Sexual Behavior; and from 2000 to 2002 he served on the National Human Resources Protections Advisory Commission, charged with reviewing and revising the federal guidelines for protecting human subjects in research projects. Rabbi Dorff is also a member of an advisory committee for the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History on the social, ethical, and religious implications of their exhibits. He is also a member of the Ethics Advisory Committee for the state of California on stem cell research.

He has been an officer of the FaithTrust Institute, a national organization that produces seminars and educational materials to help people avoid or extricate themselves from domestic violence. For eight years he was also been a member of the Board of Directors of the Jewish Federation Council of Los Angeles, chairing its committee on serving the vulnerable. In Los Angeles, he is a Past President of Jewish Family Services and a member of the Ethics committee at U.C.L.A. Medical Center. He serves as Co-Chair of the Priest-Rabbi Dialogue of the Los Angeles Archdiocese and the Board of Rabbis of Southern California.

posted on January 17, 2009

Torah Reading

Exodus 1:1 - 6:1

Haftarah Reading

Isaiah 27:6 - 28:13; 29:22-23

Moses said, "I will turn aside to look at this marvelous sight; why doesn't the bush burn up?" When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to look, God called to him out of the bush: "Moses! Moses!" He answered, "Here I am." (Exodus 3:3-4)

What did the voice of God sound like to Moses? What does it sound like to us? And how do we know that it is God talking and not a figment of our imagination?

One Rabbinic comment (Exodus Rabbah 3:1; Tanhuma Yashan, Shemot 16 [Buber ed. 19]) asserts that what Moses heard was the voice of his father. This immediately alleviated Moses' fear and made him feel comfortable, but it also posed the risk that he would identify God with his father. That is why God immediately introduces Himself by saying that I am not your father but rather the God of your fathers, "I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob" (Exodus 3:6).

Sometimes we indeed think of God in our parents' - or our grandparents'- image. I remember, in fact, that at my first High Holy Day service, when I was eight years old, we were using the Silverman prayer book designed for youth, and through it we were saying prayers to "Our Father." I remember wondering why I was praying to my Father in the synagogue when I could just go to the main sanctuary and talk to him! More seriously, Philo of Alexandria points out that the Ten Commandments are arranged as they are, with the command to honor parents as the fifth, the last of what are traditionally thought to be the commandments between humans and God, because it is from our parents that we learn about God: After dealing with the seventh day [the Fourth of the Ten Commandments], God gives the Fifth Commandment on the honor due to parents. This commandment He placed on the borderline between the two sets of five: it is the last of the first set, in which the most sacred injunctions [relating to God] are given, and it adjoins the second set, which contain the duties of human beings to each other. The reason, I think, is this: we see that parents by their nature stand on the borderline between the mortal and the immortal sides of existence -- the mortal, because of their kinship with people and other animals through the perishableness of the body; the immortal, because the act of generation assimilates them to God, the progenitor of everything....

Some bolder spirits, glorifying the name of parenthood, say that a father and mother are in fact gods revealed to sight, who copy the Uncreated in His work as the Framer of life. He, they say, is the God or Maker of the world; they [the parents] only of those whom they have begotten. How can reverence be rendered to the invisible God by those who show irreverence to the gods who are near at hand and seen by the eye? (Philo, Treatise on the Decalogue, Loeb Classical Library edition, trans. by F.H. Colson, Vol. 7 (1937), pp. 61, 67, 69.)

This may work if our parents are warm and supportive while also showing us how to live morally, but if one's parents are less than that - and maybe even abusive - seeing God in the image of one's parents becomes problematic. Rabbi David Blumenthal has written about such an image in his book, Facing the Abusing God: A Theology of Protest. Even if one has lucked out in having terrific parents, as I did, the Midrash cited above cautions us to remember that God is not to be identified with our parents, however good they are, for they are, after all, human beings and not God.

If not in our father's voice, then, how do we hear God? This was an immediate, technical problem for the producers of the movie, The Prince of Egypt, on which I was asked to consult. The producers had originally wanted to have God speak in a blend of voices to indicate that we hear God in many different ways. This would have fit nicely with the Midrash that states that at Sinai each person there heard God according to his or her own ability (Exodus Rabbah 5:9; 29:1). Technically, though, that made it impossible to understand the voice of God. The producers were immediately thinking of someone like James Earl Jones to be the voice of God - a rich, deep bass to symbolize awe. To get them thinking beyond the obvious, I suggested, in response, Barbara Streisand or Julie Andrews (the British really know how to give class to the language!). Ultimately they decided that it should be the same actor who played Moses who speaks the voice of God because, according to a Midrash they quoted that I have not been able to locate, we hear God in our own voice. That would make the voice of God even more familiar and inviting than if God spoke in the voice of one's father, and it would say that God is our higher self speaking to us - or, in Freudian terms, our superego speaking to our ego.

But especially if we hear God in our own voice, how do we know when it is God speaking and when, instead, we are talking to ourselves? The context of the verses on which we are focusing gives us at least one answer: We recognize that it is God talking when the voice we hear spurs us to fight injustice with justice, to free the enslaved (whether physically, as in the Torah's case, or figuratively enslaved by drugs, alcohol, or prejudice) from the shackles of their bonds. We know that it is God talking, in whatever voice He or She speaks, by the moral content of the message. May we heed that call, as Moses did, and may we act on it.

Shabbat Shalom.