San Diego (special) --Three Reform rabbis and two Conservative rabbis shared their personal beliefs about God at a lunchtime forum Tuesday, April 15, sponsored by United Jewish Federation's Task Force on Jewish Continuity and the San Diego Rabbinical Association.

As the meeting was held in the social hall of Congregation Beth Israel, Rabbi Jonathan Stein was host and leadoff speaker. 

"For me personally, my rabbinate has changed radically since my ordination," said Stein, who is a Reform rabbi. "In rabbinic school... I had it all figured out: I knew the definition of God...Since I used to think that I knew how to define God, I never experienced God because God was an intellectual abstraction that came out of a classroom.

"What I've learned in my rabbinate is that God is not an idea, but something to be experienced in different ways in human life," Stein said. "So I've despaired of the theology and the intellectualizing lately and come to rely more on my intuition, on my sense of what is right or wrong, of my identifying certain moments in my life as religious and spiritual moments that I cannot logically define, nor would I want to."

"So I have come to think that experience is more important than intellect or rationality," Stein added. 

A Reform colleague, Rabbi Lisa Goldstein, who serves as executive director of Hillel of San Diego, told the luncheon group that she is the "daughter and granddaughter of German scientists, and so I think because of that I do not have a mystical bone in my body, but God is something that is very much part of my every day existence."

Previously, as an assistant rabbi in St. Louis, Goldstein related, "I was asked by a woman to come to her house. Her husband was dying of cancer. He was in his 50s, a young man, and she wanted me to talk to him because his death was imminent. So I went to their house. I went upstairs. This man did not want to talk. He was in denial about how sick he was. He did not want to deal with it. The last thing he wanted was to talk with a rabbi." 

Rabbi Goldstein continued: "So I tried making small talk for a while, and it was clear that it was not going to work. I said to him 'Can I sing to you?' Now I don't sing to people; it is not something I ordinarily do, and he sort of looked at me and said 'sure,' so I held his hand and I knew exactly what song I would sing: I sang Eli Eli. ... II pray that these things never end, the sand, and the sea, and the rush of the waters, the lightning in heaven, the prayer in the heart. 

"I sang it to him twice, in English and in Hebrew, and when I looked up his face was just totally calm. Whatever he needed to go through--what his wife had hoped he could do through conversation with me--had been done. He died a week later."

Goldstein said after that encounter, "I remember I walked down from the house and I went into my car and I started to cry because I knew that was not me at that moment. It had been such an incredibly profound moment of feeling God work through me to help another human being deal with an enormously difficult passage of his life." 

"For me this is one of my most precious memories and one of my most precious understandings of one of the many ways in which I feel a relationship with God. There are those moments when I feel God coming straight through me, and every time it happens, I feel so enormously blessed."

Rabbi Martin S. Lawson, the third Reform rabbi, who is spiritual leader of Temple Emanu-El, said he believes that "I have personal freedom but I do not have the freedom to leave the covenental relationship with the Creator of the Universe; that I am bound as a Jew in a relationship with God."

"I don't always understand that relationship, to be very honest about that, ...but I am bound to struggle within it," Lawson said. "I use the transition of Yaacov (Jacob) to Yisroel (Israel)--the struggle that Jacob made--the constant struggle, to understand who I am as a person in relationship to God." 

"I also try to keep very much in mind not to confuse the fact that I am a junior partner in the relationship," Lawson said. "There is a Senior Partner in the universe....My first responsibility, I believe, as a Jew, as a person of faith, is to help other Jews understand God in their life and to help struggle along with them, alongside them, to undertand God..."

Rabbi Bernard "Bud" Frankel of Temple Beth Sholom was ordained as a Reform rabbi, and served as a chaplain in the Navy for many years. Today, he is spiritual leader of a Conservative congregation in Chula Vista.

"I am a pretty simple and direct guy and I take my faith, my concept of God, in a simple and direct way," he said. "I believe that there is a God, Who is very real to me, Whom I don't attempt to define too clearly, but I know that He is real because I feel Him and I sense His presence in my life when I reach out to Him."

"I feel that God is infinite in nature, that He is everywhere in the universe as we know it, yet at the same time--this may seem a contradiction--He is also a God with Whom I feel a personal relation. I feel that when I pray, when I talk, I dialogue with God," Frankel continued.

"I believe that God was the creator of the world and the universe as we know it. At the same time I believe in a scientific way that He created the world with natural laws governing it...a world that came into being with evolutionary process....(Whether it was by a Big Bang or some other process), the important thing is that God was the creator, and science just fills us in as to the details."

Rabbi Arthur Zuckerman of Congregation Beth Am grew up in an Orthodox home, and now is spiritual leader of a Conservative congregation in Solana Beach. "I don't like reinventing the wheel, so I chose to look at Maimonides' fundamentals of Jewish faith," Zuckerman said. "The Rambam (an abbreviation for the philosopher Maimonides) had 13 principles of what faith is, what are our beliefs."

One of those principles, he said, is "I believe with perfect faith that God is the creator and ruler of all thiings. He alone had made, does make, and will make all things." 

Zuckerman said he has a "problem" with referring to God as "He" because "I believe that God has no gender. Once you designate a gender for God, you've limited God's abilities, and God has no limitations. Therefore God cannot have a gender."

A second principle is that "I believe with perfect faith that God is One."
A third is "I believe with perfect faith that God has no body; physical concepts do not apply to God." Therefore, said Zuckerman "if we say 'the face of God' ....that is a term that is purely poetic."

Zuckerman said rather than enumerate all 13 principles of Maimonides, he would simply indicate one other with which he has a "problem." That one states: "I believe with perfect faith that the dead will be brought back to life when God wills it will happen with the coming of the Messiah."

The Conservative rabbi said whereas "I believe that there will be a final redemption, I am not exactly sure if all the bones are going to start jiggling out of the grave--I would probably question that one."

He described himself as a "mystic," explaining that there is a higher understanding than that which humans are capable. "Maybe one day it will be meant for us to know and maybe not," he said.