Reflections About God

by Norman Licht September 16, 2025

Carolynn, on her second-to-last day of life, cried out, “Help, help me”, twice. On her last day her eyes were closed, and she slept through both lunch and dinner, I left her after dinner, and an hour later the nurse called me that she was not responding, and I should go to her apartment,   I did, and waited until the manager of Hospice and another women came and declared she died at  11:15 pm, 5/29/2023.  I waited until Sinai Chapel came to take her away.

The next day, I was reminded of Psalm 121: “I lift mine eyes to the hills, from where does my help come? My help comes from the Lord, maker of Heaven and Earth”.  Rabbi Levy said, “It does not say my pain or tragedy comes from the Lord.” 

My belief is in the theology expressed by Rabbi Harold Kushner as stated in his book When Bad Things Happen to Good People:

“We find proof of God in the fact that laws of nature do not change. He has given us a wonderful, precise, orderly world. There is gravity. There is chemistry. We can predict when the sun will rise and set, and when there will be an eclipse. Our human bodies obey the laws of nature. When a bullet is fired, the laws of nature take over. Many people feel pain, and people die. When something bad happens, we should not ask why, but rather, what do I do now that it has happened?. God let us be free to choose to do right or wrong”.  A survivor of the holocaust said, “God doesn’t owe us anything; we owe our lives to him.”

We pray to God for strength, determination, and willpower. Prayer and ritual are to join the community; the Jewish prayer Mourner’s Kaddish should only be said in a minyan of 10 people. Prayer redeems people from Isolation. God gives us the strength to cope with a problem and to go on.  

Rabbi Kushner’s son Aaron, had a disease known as “rapid aging” that caused him to die at age 14.   

A review of the book concludes, “God exists and created the universe, but he does not cause our suffering. Bad things such as illness, disease, and accidents are caused by the unchanging laws of nature, which are morally neutral and impersonal.” Why would God allow so many tragedies to occur? What can explain man’s inhumanity to man?

There is a book entitled Einstein and the Rabbi by Rabbi Naomi Levy, which includes this prayer written by Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav in the late 1700s.

“Master of the Universe, grant me the ability to be alone; May it be the custom to go outdoors each day among the trees and grass, among all growing things, and there may I be alone, and enter into prayer, to talk to the One I belong to. May I express there everything in my heart, and may all the foliage of the field, all grasses and trees, and plants may they all awaken at my coming, to send the powers of their life into the words of my prayer so that my prayer and speech are made whole through the life and spirit of all growing things, which are made as one by their transcendent Source.”

This prayer from so long ago captures the essence of our daughter Diane. Her profession was Landscape Architecture; she planned gardens for others and always had he own beautiful garden. She had a vast knowledge of trees and flowers. She practiced an adaptation of  Buddhism with a group of Jews in Marin County, and studied Kabbala, which is Jewish mysticism.  She often said that her spirituality came from her experiences with Nature. 

The author, Rabbi Naomi Levy, wrote,

“When I was 15, my mother and father were walking down the street one night, a man approached them with a gun, demanded money, then shot and killed my father. God, you are a lot less powerful than I once imagined, but more perfect than any of us can ever conceive”.

“When my grandfather was 74, he suddenly fell into a profound depression. He had a wife, 3 married children, 9 grandchildren, and a business. He didn’t leave his chair. His wife asked what the matter was. He said,"‘There’s no one left’.  He had recently buried the last of his circle of close friends.”

I have a good life in a wonderful retirement home. I’ve made many new friends in the 3 years I’ve been here, but I am sad when I remember the great many relatives and friends who have passed away. I’ve realized it is not possible to make new “old” friends. I carry on because I still have treasured relatives and friends, both old and new.

The author, Rabbi Naomi Levy, wrote, “The secret of the Upper World is the voice planted already inside you that knows instinctively what is good, what is true, and what God wants from you.”

She wrote this prayer. “May you come to see that you are the right man for the job. May you live to say the word ‘sure’, to stand tall in your conviction.  May you be filled with a longing to restore the souls of others, and may you come to see that in saving others you are saving your own soul.   

She wrote several memorial prayers; these are parts of them. “May those who have loved and lost visit us in our dreams and in all our days. May their memory, their legacy, their love, and their light shine on us always. Your life ended, but your light can never be extinguished. It continues to shine upon me on the darkest nights and illuminates my way. May God bless you as you have blessed me with love, with grace, and with peace. “

About death, “May your soul’s vision of loneness enter you and calm you and illuminate you, May it take its rightful place inside you. May you come to see your own eternity”.

Albert Einstein is one of the most famous scientists; his theories about the Universe were based on his knowledge and also his intuition about matter, energy, space, and time, with proof left for others to do later on. He wrote, “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind”.

Rabbi Robert Marcus’s 11-year-old son, Jay, died of polio while the Rabbi was away helping others. Rabbi Marcus, in his heartbreak, reached out to Einstein seeking words of comfort”.  Ellie Weisel remembered that Rabbi Marcus was a US soldier who was among the forces that liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp. He led the first prayer service there. Rabbi Marcus died in 1951.

Einstein wrote this letter to Rabbi Marcus: “A human being is part of the whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts, and feelings as something separate from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Nor to nourish the delusion but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind”.  Rabbi Levy wrote, “Einstein never lost faith in the oneness of all things. When you seek out a man like Einstein for inquiries about the soul, you are bound to get an answer that is out of the ordinary”.

Other times when Einstein was asked about his religion, he said this:

“The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and science. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly; this is religiousness.”

“Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe – a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble. In this way, the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is indeed quite different from the religiosity of someone more naïve”.

Einstein was born in 1895, and he revealed his theory of relativity in three stages in 1905, 1915, and 1919. He died in 1955. Einstein said:

“I’m not an atheist. The problem is too vast for our limited minds”.    Biographer Walter Isaacson wrote of Einstein, “he displayed a profound faith in the orderliness of the Universe.  He believed in something larger than himself”. 

Biographer John S. Rigden quoted him, “God does not play dice” and “God is not malicious”.  He believed in a “oneness” and a “spirit”, which others would call God. He was more direct when he said, “Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving”.