See? I knew that would get your attention.

Jacob Staub, a self-styled gay Reconstructionist rabbi, has published an essay on the Zeek website with this title: "Worship for Agnostics: Building a Personal Relationship with a Non-personal God."

Reading the rabbi's story reminded me in some ways of similar testimonies on numerous "ex-Fundamentalist" websites, where people gush about how their strict, religious upbringing left them psychologically and/or emotionally scarred.

Please don't misunderstand. I don't doubt that there are some religious wackos who do indeed inflict damage on their children; but I also think some of it is blown out of proportion. Sometimes you just want to say, "Come on, already. Enough is enough. Grow up and get over it."

In Jacob's case, he grew up in Orthodox Judaism, but ultimately left Orthodoxy because He couldn't accept its caricature of God which he felt was "judgmental, mean-spirited, and stifling." He doesn't say whether the fact that Orthodox Judaism generally condemns the practice of homosexuality played any role in this parting of the ways, but I suspect it did.

At times, his view of God sounds like a New Age mantra, almost pantheistic: "If God is a Process that grounds all existence, a Force embedded in the universe upon which we can draw in our efforts to become better people and repair the world, then we can pray without having to imagine an old man in the sky or a difficult mother’s embrace."

Not surprisingly (since such philosophies generally come in packages), Jacob also decided that there's very little literal truth in the Bible. Its stories are metaphors (e.g., God didn't create the world in six days or split the Red Sea so the Israelites could walk across it to safety). More importantly, according to the rabbi, the God that the Bible presents is a construct—not a real Person:

The God that Jews have constructed throughout history — Exodus’ Man of War who splits the sea with his outstretched arm; the seductive and elusive Lover of the Song of Songs; the Talmud’s Shekhinah, who weeps as she accompanies us into exile; Maimonides’ ineffable One, who is unchanging and unaware of this world and yet is the object of our passionate love; the Kabbalah’s infinite Ein Sof, who is beyond all description and mediated by more accessible Sefirot (emanations)—all are only our constructions of God. Because God is beyond accurate description, our ancestors felt licensed to describe God in any and every way that they, in their limitations, imagined perfection. The best of these inherited metaphors point beyond themselves, guiding us to the mystery of existence.

But to me, here's the really sad part. Jacob writes, "God can only be metaphorical. By definition, God is beyond human understanding and description. It is beyond our capacity not only to see God but also to know God. At best, we get glimpses, flashes, intuitions. And we are never able to verify what we glimpse or experience."

This makes me sad not only because it's Jacob's view, but also because he speaks for multitudes of Jewish people around the world. And they're not all fringe Reconstructionists or Renewalists. Many are Conservative and even Orthodox. For them, Judaism has devolved into more of a cultural exercise than a way to experience God. I was looking on a certain synagogue's website the other day (I won't tell you which one because my purpose here is not to embarrass them) and noticed, to my surprise, that God wasn't mentioned even once anywhere on the site (at least, nowhere that I could find). It was all about their activities and programs—and believe me, they have tons of them. Need a support group? They've got one for you. And yes, they gratefully accept donations. But nothing about God. Zip. Nada.

For crying out loud, how do you compose an Orthodox congregation's core values and mission statement without mentioning God?

God is unknowable.

God cannot be seen or experienced.

This is what many Jewish people believe. Maybe that's why they think they don't need God in their mission statement.

And like I said, I think it's sad.

Why? Because this just flat out isn't what the Bible teaches. (And by "Bible," I'm referring here to both the Old and New Covenants.)

The Bible tells us that our God is not just personal—He's intensely personal. Not only can He be known; He wants to be known.

In fact, life's highest and noblest purpose is knowing Him.

And the Messiah was willing to give His life to bridge the gap and make it possible (John 3:16-17).

This was the Apostle Paul's message when he visited Athens:

Then Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus and said, "Men of Athens, I perceive that in all things you are very religious;

"For as I was passing through and considering the objects of your worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Therefore, the One whom you worship without knowing, Him I proclaim to you" (Acts 17:22-23). 

In the Torah, the LORD God heard the cries of a pregnant, brokenhearted Egyptian teenager named Hagar. It was sometime around 1900 BC. She had fled into the desert and thought she would die there. But the Angel of the LORD "found" her (Gen. 16:7). He spoke with her, listened to her concerns, and told her what she should do (vv. 8-11).

Hagar was ... well, blown away. Utterly amazed. God spoke with her! None of the Egyptian gods had ever expressed any interest in her. Amon Ra, for instance, had never asked her where she had been and where she was going. Not so much as a word. But here was the LORD God of Abraham, engaging her in personal conversation. She was so impressed, she did exactly what He told her to do. She even named a nearby well after Him because she wanted everyone to remember what He had done for her there (v. 13). The name she chose was Beer Lahai Roi. Literally, it means "Well of the One Who Lives and Sees Me."

How's that for "personal"?

Oops, I forgot—the Hagar account didn't really happen. Alas, according to the rabbi, the patriarchal narratives are also metaphors.

Sometimes you just can't win for losing.