by Daniel Gauss
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 moment 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, “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 nodded. Some 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 startling analogy: this, he said, was God’s condition before “creation.” Only with others, with creation, 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, 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. I sometimes call myself a Progressive Christian but that’s because I lean toward tolerance, forgiveness and pacifism and I like religious symbolism and find great meaning in it. But as a metaphor, I thought this explanation for the creation of humanity was so beautiful, brilliant and creative.
Years later, as I read the latest data that the universe will die faster than we thought, the memory of that rabbi came back. And so I thought back to that rabbi’s God, the one who needed us to be good. If the universe ends, and no one remains, will goodness vanish too? 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 in a dying world.
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.
I suppose in Norse mythology there is something similar: Ragnarök, where even the gods meet their end. Divinity is not immune from tragedy in that tradition. In the rabbi’s parable, God seems closer to Puff or Odin than to Aristotle’s unmoved mover. That image holds enormous emotional power, and it softens the second law of thermodynamics with the intimate.
It says: 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 his little nephews and nieces? The children he taught? The volunteer work he does currently 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.
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