THE INTERVIEW God the Needy Baby, God the Weary Parent: Care as Sacred Wrestling

A conversation with Rabbi Zvika Krieger

Welcome to Made with Care, a newsletter and community for people who dream of a world in which parenting and caregiving isn’t only valued and supported, but treated with the curiosity and fascination it deserves. I’m obsessed with understanding how parenting and caregiving —dependency care—got left out of nearly all of our meaning-making systems.

Every month, all subscribers will receive THE ROUND-UP, a list of curated recommendations around a theme; THE ESSAY, a piece of memoir-laced cultural criticism by me; and THE RESTACK, an often new—but sometimes old—essay from one of my favorite fellow care-obsessed Substackers.

Paid subscribers will also receive THE INTERVIEW, a deep dive into care with interesting thinkers from a wide variety of disciplines and political persuasions, and access to THE CONVERSATION, live seminars and convenings exploring care.

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Thank you to everyone who subscribes, with special gratitude to my paid supporters.

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“But also, as we both know and anyone else who has spent extended amounts of time with a baby knows, let’s not romanticize it. It’s hard, but even in that hardness it can open you up to a sense of oneness. We’re all connected. In this way, care is inherently spiritual. If you believe in non-dualism, if you believe, like I do, that God is not separate from us, if you believe in a God that is everything, then care has to be a core spiritual practice.”

Zvika Krieger

I find talking about God really challenging.

And, I really love talking about God.

Oftentimes when I try to apply language to my God thing, which is to say my relationship with something I sense as divine, it can feel as though it all turns to dust. Not the faith exactly, but the belief that I will ever be able to articulate it to anyone—including myself. This is especially true when chatting with those who don’t have any kind of relationship with God and carry with them a U-haul’s worth of assumptions about us God-folk. Or with those who believe that the way they do God is the best and only way.

But with the right person, these conversations count among my favorites, bringing me to realms of vulnerability, honesty, and deep searching that can be hard to alight on when discussing other subjects.

My friend Rabbi Zvika Krieger is the right person. I’ve been lucky enough to talk God with him in both private and public conversations, and left not only with expanded ideas about what it means to do and feel God, but also how we can talk about God in a way that speaks to the present moment and its spiritual needs.

One of the topics that often comes up in our conversations—and you won’t be surprised—is how parenting, faith and religious practice are tangled up in surprising, evocative, and provocative ways. As I wrote about in the last chapter of my book, I believe ongoing dependency care (more colloquially, caring for people you are kinda stuck with) is as rich and demanding a spiritual experience as anything else, and yet wasn’t treated as such in a meaningful way by most major religions.

Writing that chapter felt like only the beginning of my pursuit of a better understanding of the connective tissue between care and encountering to the divine.

In my conversation with Zvika, we dive deeper into this subject, touching upon how: metaphors make God relatable, and the ones we use matter, even if God is ultimately unknowable; our relationships with our parents shape our understanding of God; our experiences as parents shape our relationship with God; imagining God as someone who depends on us reframes parenting and caregiving as holy, tender, and spiritually meaningful; care and faith are both, by design, ongoing, difficult, and demand continual wrestling and growth.

What makes Zvika a particularly interesting conversation partner on the subject is that he comes to it with a wealth of experience that extends far beyond the rabbinate. Check out his bio:

Rabbi Zvika Krieger is the Spiritual Leader of Chochmat HaLev, ​​a progressive spiritual community in Berkeley, CA for embodied prayer and mindfulness, mystical wisdom, and heart-centered relationships. He served as the first-ever director of Responsible Innovation at Facebook/Meta, led the World Economic Forum’s Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, served as the U.S. State Department’s first-ever Ambassador to Silicon Valley, was a writer and editor at The Atlantic and The New Republic, and Middle East correspondent for Newsweek, and leads wild Shabbat services at Burning Man for 1000+ dusty seekers. Follow him on Instagram at @zkrieger.

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ELISSA: Zvika, thank you for talking about God and care with me! Let’s start with trying to define this thing we call God a bit, and how metaphors for God factor into that definition. Because those of us with any kind of faith practice say the word God a lot, and those of us without any faith practice carry many assumptions of what a relationship with God entails—but rarely do we stop and try to articulate what we are talking about.

ZVIKA: I think there is a core tension in Judaism, and it probably exists in other religions, too. On the one hand, we don't know anything about God. God is mystery. God is inherently unknowable. In Judaism, the primary name for God is unpronounceable. It's a 4 letter word that's mispronounced as yahweh sometimes, but it's by design ineffable.

And according to some theologians, attributing any sort of human attributes to God is a sin. Like Maimonides, who's arguably the foremost Jewish philosopher of all time, says that attributing any human traits to God is idolatry and heresy. And the Jewish mystics define God as infinite nothingness. Or they frame God as the sum total of all existence—not a person or a being, not separate from us at all

And then you have all the Jewish texts and liturgy, where it’s the opposite. There you have a super-duper anthropomorphized God. And those texts are overflowing with metaphors and analogies. There is the God character of the Torah, and then hundreds of other metaphors across Jewish sacred texts. God is a shepherd. God is a wellspring. God is a pregnant woman.

And so how do you square these two things? On one hand, God is unknowable, God is a mystery, God is nothingness, and God is definitely not a person. But then you open up the Torah or any prayer book, and God is described with all these metaphors, attributed all of these human-like traits, and is very much a separate being from us.

All this brings up core theological questions, and there are a lot of ways to answer them. For me, how I answer it, is that none of those metaphors are God. And that’s why I refer to God in the Torah as the God character.

And yet, these lyrical metaphors for God evoke something in us. They’re meant to make us feel something, and that feeling is kind of what divinity is. I think of God as something you experience rather than something you interact with, and not something you can intellectually conceive of.

The Jewish mystics thought of these metaphors as God’s levush—God’s clothing or God's costume. And on the one hand, it's like, don't confuse the clothing for the person, right? God's clothing is not God. But on the other hand, the clothing does give you the contours of the person, and tells you something about them. So it’s not like we can ignore that clothing. Because ultimately these metaphors are how we know God, and knowing God is important. And it’s not necessarily rational. It’s, by design, emotional.

ELISSA: Which metaphors, or clothes, for God are most prominent in Judaism?

ZVIKA: I’m not sure which are the most prominent, but there are so many parental metaphors in Judaism. Images like “our heavenly father” or “our father our king.” We also do have some where God is a mother. One of the names of God is Shaddai, which comes from the word breast. We also have Bina, the divine womb.

ELISSA: My experience with all those metaphors—and I’ve definitely had way more exposure to the father ones vs. the mother ones—has been that God is someone who cares for us. But not someone we care for. And by thinking of us as God’s children, it kind of erased caregivers from the equation.

Because God, these metaphors tell us, is the almighty, all-knowing, all-powerful, supermom meets superdad caregiver, and unknowable to a degree, and therefore caregivers and caregiving was placed in the realm of the unknowable.

But then I became a caregiver, a parent to two kids, and the act of caring for them felt deeply spiritually charged, brimming with productive friction. So this God as mighty parent thing kinda fell apart for me, on both ends. I didn’t connect with God the perfect parent because I was myself and imperfect parent. And I didn’t connect with being a child of God, because I felt like making and raising two children made me a kinda co-pilot of creation.

I read a book by Jewish theologian Mara Benjamin in which she contemplates what happens when we think of God as a baby, and it blew my mind. It changes everything about how we perceive God, and how we perceive ourselves as both people in relationship with God, what parenting entails, and the fraught and potent divinity bound up in care.

But then when you and I chatted about this a little while back, you mentioned this idea that God our father might be an old, feeble man, maybe with some dementia and it opened up a whole new way to think about the relationship between care and metaphors for God.

Where did that come from, and how did it upend your ideas of God as the almighty caregiver?

ZVIKA: My way into this is pretty personal. My dad left when I was one, and I had very little interaction with him for most of my life. And so he existed more as a kind of ghost, or a hologram, or something that I projected on, rather than an actual person. And so my relationship with God is, I think, inextricably linked with my relationship with my dad, or more specifically the lack thereof.

I think it's true for a lot of people that their relationship to God is a projection of their relationship to their parents. God is often either like the golden parent that you wish you had, or God is the shadow parent that can hold all the negative feelings you have about your parents.

So generally, if you have a bad relationship with your parents, either you have a really good relationship with God, because God fills in for the parents that you never had, or that you wish you had, or you hate God because God stands in for your parent, and it's somehow easier to hate God than it is to hate your parents. Or, you can do both simultaneously.

So, about 4 years ago I reconnected with my dad and I hadn't seen him in 20 years—from ages 18 till 38. He walked into the coffee shop and I just had this visceral moment of like, “who is this old man?” He's in his sixties now, and so he was, you know, a little hunched over. His abandonment really tormented me for a long time, and then he walks in and I think: that's the guy who's been living rent-free in my subconscious for the past 40 years? Huh!

And so that's where I started to reconceptualize my relationship to God. God as father can be domineering, abusive, abandoning, judgmental—or just like old, sweet, maybe a bit senile. A core tenet of what is called “process theology” is that the God character in the Torah spends the whole time learning how to God. It’s a provocative but compelling take captured beautifully in Jack Miles’s God: A Biography, which won the Pulitzer prize, and also by Rabbi Harold Kushner in The Book of Genesis: A Biography.

ELISSA: What I love about this answer is that we still have God as a parent (unlike the idea of God as a baby)…but it’s God as a flesh-and-blood parent who stumbles. This way of thinking makes parents/caregivers much more real, and, in doing so, better reflects the divine qualities of parenting. The constant adaptations are part of the divinity, as opposed to being evidence for our earthly, petty shortcomings.