I dance around a lot when I davven. For those who are unfamiliar with the word davven, it is Yiddish and means to do what you do when you do your prayers. I like to use the word davven instead of worship, which is too formal, and does not accurately describe what it is that I do in services. Mostly, I think, I say and sing and chant a lot of words, and I dance around a lot.

I dance around because I have always been a fidgeter. We have psychological diagnoses for kids who fidget a lot in class now, and they take medicine to calm them down. But back when I was a kid, they had neither the diagnosis nor the medicine, so I remain, to this day, a fidgeter, but a high functioning fidgeter.

If you are here with your small children, or even your larger children, you may well see them fidgeting, too. It is hard for us fidgeters to sit still when we davven. So I use every opportunity I can to dance around.

Dancing around, in Yiddish, is called schockelen, from the German word zu Schaukel, meaning, to shake. I learned this word on a ski lift in the Bavarian Alps, where a sign warned us Achtung! Nicht Schaukeln! Translated: Yo! You Shake, You Fall! All in all, not a good place for professional fidgeters like me.

But I can shake and schokel without fear when I davven. That is why I have taken every traditional excuse for movement in prayer and used it as my personal liberation from the prison of my seat. In the Germanic, full-decorum Reform Temple in which I worshipped when growing up we did not schokel. We sat very still, and we stood very still. I had no idea that movement was an authentic form of Jewish worship, er, excuse me, davvening, until I met Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, alav haShalom, may he rest in peace, who taught me both about traditional forms of schokelen and davvenen, but also who taught me, through his personal example, that Chassidic prayer is just too exciting to be still for. Reb Shlomo was always dancing and jumping and wiggling and doing all kinds of Chassidic Chip-Chop to the driving davvening music he played on his guitar. One dose of Shlomo and I was hooked. I have never sat still since I found out about official Jewish fidgeting.

Don't worry, I'm not going to try to get all of you to move. That would make everybody very uptight. If you like sitting and standing like a statue, by all means, continue to do it. I do see almost everybody swaying during Avinu Malkeinu, but don't get self-conscious. As I said, this is not about getting you to fidget. It is about a certain way I fidget during the Amidah.

In the first blessing of the Amidah, the prayer that says, El0hey Avraham, El0hey Yitzhak, vEl0hey Ya'aqov, El0hey Sarah, El0hey Rivkah, El0hey Rachel, vEl0hey Leah, I bow once each time the G0d of each Ancestor is mentioned. I learned this so long ago I don't remember who I was watching. It is not a universal tradition, and is in no way a mitzvah. I am telling you this because many of our congregation, seeing me do this, think that all Jews are somehow expected to do it. But we are not. I do it because I saw somebody do it, and it gave me a new way to officially fidget.

After a while, people began to ask me why I do it. I decided I ought to have a more rabbinic answer than just having a new way to officially fidget, so I came up with an answer. I made this up, so don't think this is traditional, either. I believe it, and it is meaningful to me. But it is my own idea. Here it goes:

I bow seven times, once for each of our founding ancestor's ideas of G0d, to acknowledge that each ancestor had a different view of G0d, which legitimates my having my own view of G0d. I repeat: I bow to acknowledge that each ancestor had a different view of G0d, which legitimates my own view of G0d.

You see, when I think of the "G0d of Avraham, and the G0d of Isaac and the G0ds of Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah," I don't think they all had the same relationship with G0d. That's the secret for tonight.

In my article in this issue of our Congregational Bulletin, the Connections, I wrote that this year, 5764, can be represented by Hebrew letters that form the word SohD, or secret. I also wrote that I would reveal secrets during my talks and discussion groups during these High Holy Days, just as it says in Psalm 25:14:

Ad0nay's secret is for those in awe of G0d, in order to show them G0d's covenant.

So here is the secret: even though our ancestors, who put G0d of Avraham, the G0d of Isaac and the G0d of Jacob into our prayerbook (quoting Exodus 3:15) were affirming that we, their descendants, still worship the same G0d, in fact, we see G0d differently. Yes, there is only one G0d. No, no two people have the same relationship with or idea of G0d. Not now, and not then. In fact, our founding fathers and mothers did not even call G0d by the Names we now call G0d.

I know this because the Torah says so. In Exodus 3:15, Moses, at the Burning Bush, asks G0d, "And when I come to the children of Israel and say to them, the G0d of your ancestors has sent me to you, and they say to me, 'What is His Name?' what should I tell them?"

G0d answered, "Ehyeh asher Ehyeh, I will be as I will be. Tell them that Ehyeh sent you…and also tell them, the G0d of your ancestors, G0d of Avraham, the G0d of Isaac and the G0d of Jacob sent me to you."

Now you hear the quote from our prayerbook in its context. G0d self-identifies as the G0d of Moses' ancestors. But later, in Exodus 6:2-3, G0d says to Moses, "I am YaHuWH. I appeared to Avraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as "El Shaddai," but my Name YaHuWH I did not make known to them."

An aside: I will, from hereon out, pronounce the four letters of G0d's Name, Yud Hey Vav Hey, as YaHuWH, to distinguish it from El, meaning, generically, "G0d." We usually pronounce YaHuWH as Ad0nay, which means, "my L0rd." That was a piety introduced when Jews began to feel that G0d's full Name was too holy to say. So I won't say the whole Name, just the part of it, Yahu, that Jews pronounce when used as a suffix, as in Netan-Yahu.

Now we return to the main point, which is that G0d says to Moses that the Founders did not know G0d by the Name we all use today, YaHuWH. They called G0d El Shaddai, which may mean El/G0d of Shaddai/My Mountains, or, the Mountain G0d. Shaddai actually means breasts, but it means mountains in the same way that the French name Grand Tetons, the name of one of our national parks, Grand Tetons means Big Mountains.

So, in effect, the G0d of our ancestors, Avraham, Isaac, and Jacob, was not the same as the G0d of Moses, at least not in name, and certainly not in relationship. El0hey Avraham, El0hey Yitzhak, El0hey Sarah, El0hey Rivkah—their G0d was El Shaddai, Breasts G0d, or Mountain G0d, but not Ad0nay, not YaHuWH.

From this verse in the Torah, we learn that Moses brought Israel more than just a Torah. He also brought new legislation, new holy days, and a new name for G0d. Can you imagine me, or any other rabbi, saying, let's call G0d by a new name? Moses was just that radical. He brought us a whole new religion.

And why, you might ask, did G0d need a new name? The commentators wondered that very question. They all answer in a variation of what RaShY, the father of biblical commentators, from 11^th century France, said: "The G0d of Avraham and Isaac let them die in Cana'an, and Jacob's G0d led him to Egypt, where he and all his children and grandchildren died. Moses' G0d led him and all the Israelites out of Egypt." So, the Name El Shaddai was one that did not fulfill the Divine promise of giving us the Promised Land. Only YaHuWH brought them out of Egypt and into the Promised Land. And that is why we only pray with the Name YaHuWH, instead of El Shaddai. El Shaddai left us in Cana'an and Egypt to die. YaHuWH brought us out to live in the Land of Israel.

So, even if our prayers identify us as davvening to the same G0d our Founders worshipped, we actually do not. If we did, we would be saying, Baruch Atah El Shaddai. But we don't. The only time we use Shaddai today is on a mezuzah, both on the case and on the scroll. Sometimes you only see the letter "Shin," the first letter of Shaddai. Why Shaddai? The most common explanation is that it is an acronym for "Shomer Daltot Yisrael" (Guardian of the Doors of Israel). Otherwise we do not use Shaddai today.

Nor do we use the Name of God that Moses introduced, for if we did we would be saying Baruch Atah YaHuWH, but we don’t. This is because, as I said, along the ages G0d's four-letter Name became too holy to use at all. Instead, we substitute Ad0nay, My L0rd, for YaHuWH, which is a verb that means "Wh0 causes existence." When I say Ad0nay, I think YaHuWH, meaning "Being" and "Existence." To me, Ad0nay/YaHuWH is the answer to my question, "Why do I exist?" I exist because of Existence. Existence created me.

Still, even though I use a name of G0d two iterations away from the Founder's Name for G0d, I identify with those first monotheists, followers of El Shaddai, who gave birth to us. And that is as it should be. For what we are doing is putting ourselves into the long line of the development of monotheism, even while acknowledging that our beliefs have changed over time.

But not just over time. Also over gender. We liberal Jews add El0hey Sarah, El0hey Rivkah, El0hey Rachel, vEl0hey Leah to our prayers, in a non-Biblical, non-traditional way, because of the insights and prophecy we have received over the millenia which now moves us to explicitly acknowledge the women of Israel and their experiences over history. Even though Moses' Torah leaves them out in his report of what G0d said to him, we make sure to include them. Moses' G0d was the G0d of his fathers. Our G0d is the G0d of our fathers and mothers.

And you can be sure that these women had very different relationships with El Shaddai than their husbands did. Take Sarah, for example. One day Avraham came home, having been gone for about a week, and explained that he had almost sacrificed their son, an event we will read about tomorrow morning. Now Sarah had been through a lot with her G0d-intoxicated husband's following El Shaddai wherever El Shaddai wanted Avram to go. Avram had moved them from Haran to Cana'an. Then he heard G0d commanding circumcision for all the men in the household, and changed his name to Avraham and hers to from Sarai to Sarah. Sarah went along with all these revelations that happened to her husband, but when he came home claiming that G0d had told him to sacrifice Isaac, and that he tried to go through with it until G0d stopped him, well, what would you have said?

The commentators notice that the next verse in the Torah is that "Sarah died." Though the Torah does not say this explicitly, the commentators assume that Sarah's heart gave out when she heard what Avraham had done this time. But no matter how we read the Torah, we can see that Sarah's relationship with and definition of G0d was nothing like Avraham's. Had you had the chance to ask them personally to describe G0d, you would have gotten two very different stories.

Now, as I go along, I will say Avraham's G0d, Sarah's G0d, etc. There is, of course, to us monotheists, only one G0d. But I am not talking about G0d's reality. I am talking about our relationships with, experiences of, and descriptions of G0d.

For example, let's talk about Rebecca's G0d. Avraham sent a servant back to Mesopotamia to get a wife for Isaac, and insisted that his servant not tarry in bringing her back to Cana'an. So when Rebecca's father suggests that she stay for a while to get used to the thought of leaving her family, and to say goodbye to everyone, Avraham's servant insists that she come away the next day, for it is G0d's will that the mission not be delayed. So in the end, young Rebecca is whisked away, that very day, never to see her family again.

When she meets her new husband, the Torah says Isaac took her into his tent and "was comforted for the loss of his mother." Most women I talk with are not expecting to marry a man in order to be a mother to him.

And then, imagine Isaac introducing himself to his new bride. He says something like, "You know, my mom died after my dad told her how he tried to sacrifice me." What do you think Rebecca thought at that moment? It's likely she screamed inside, "Mama, get me outta this family!!!"

But she remains faithful to her committments, and stays. Later, pregnant after twenty years of trying, she is afflicted with horrible pregnancy pains. She asks G0d for an answer, and G0d answers her, saying her problem is due to two twins in her womb who will battle and wrestle with each other in the womb, and all their lives, and all their descendants' lives. Hearing this prophecy, she is again sure she is part of a family where a man can sacrifice his son.

Anyway, in this same prophecy Rebecca hears that Jacob, the second born, is supposed to inherit the authority in the family. It does not say if Isaac ever heard the prophecy, but Isaac does everything he can to favor his first-born, Esau. Rebecca has to pull a huge con on her husband and first-born son to ensure that G0d's will is done. In all these ways: leaving home and country, and engineering the transmission of the covenant to fulfill G0d's word, Rebecca proves herself to be more Avraham's spiritual heir than Isaac is. Her relationship with G0d was surely different than that of her husband, who never left Cana'an, never left home.

In addition, Elie Wiesel compares Isaac's relationship with G0d to that of those who survived the Holocaust. Seeing his own G0d-intoxicated father knife in hand, about to kill him, had to have left a lasting impression on Isaac. So you see, Isaac and Rebecca worshipped two different G0ds.

So far I have shown you only a little of how the G0d of Moses differed from that of the G0ds of the Patriarchs, how those G0ds differed from the G0ds of two of the Matriarchs, and how the G0d of the Father, Avraham, differed from that of the G0d of the son, Isaac. Now let me show you how the G0ds of the third generation of Founders differed from those of the first two.

We'll start again with the Matriarchs. The words El0hey Rachel vEl0hey Leah roll easily off our tongues, but no two G0ds could be as different as the G0ds of Rachel and Leah. Rachel was loved, and Leah was not. Leah tried to be loved by having sex and seven children with her unappreciative husband. I can only imagine Leah, alone with her own thoughts at night. A pious traditionalist might imagine her saying, "Well, this is not the life I thought I would have, but at least I get to be a Founding Mother of the first Monotheistic people."

I am not quite sure that rationalization worked for Leah. Her father used her as barter for seven years of Jacob's shepherding services. Her husband had to be tricked into marrying her and cajoled into not divorcing her because he was in love with her sister. Her sister is described in the Torah as beautiful, while Leah is described as having weak eyes. Leah got the short end of every stick in that family, and in her new family. She is never recorded in the Torah as speaking with G0d, but I imagine her asking G0d why she was born unlovely and married unloved.

Rachel, on the other hand, was a stunner, but barren. Though Jacob, no doubt, spent infinitely more nights with her than with her sister, she could not bear children, while unloved and unlovely Leah could get pregnant each of the infrequent times she got a chance. Finally, Rachel did have a child: Joseph. And then, while having her second child, Benjamin, she died in childbirth.

Jacob remained bitter about her dying that way until the day he, himself, died. He was bitter about a lot of other things, too:

like having had to compete for the affection of his father just as his two wives competed for his affection;

like having lived for so many years with the thought that his son, Joseph, had been eaten by a wild animal;

like having his brother chase him to kill him for stealing his birthright,

like wrestling in the dark with something or somebody who called himself G0d, and who, in a great show of unsportsmanlike conduct, kicked him in the groin to make him give up the fight, and then named him Yisrael, G0dwrestler.

Jacob was so bitter about all of this that when Pharaoh asked Jacob how old he was, he answered, "I have wandered around for 130 years. Few and bitter have the days of my life been, and I have not lived as long as my fathers."

So let me return to how I began this talk: I bow once each time the G0d of each Ancestor is mentioned: El0hey Avraham, El0hey Yitzhak, vEl0hey Ya'aqov, El0hey Sarah, El0hey Rivkah, El0hey Rachel, vEl0hey Leah. At this point, you might be wondering why I would bow at all, to any version of our ancestors' G0d.

Let me answer that in two ways. Once I heard a speech by an Israeli editorial cartoonist who spent the entire evening bashing the government of Israel, the country of his self-chosen citizenship. Finally, someone asked him, "If you have such a hard time with Israel, why do you live there?" He answered, "If there were another Jewish country, I would move there."

You see, there is only one Unity encompassing life, death, heaven, and earth, light and darkness. No one can find another 0ne. It was the genius of our ancestors, male and female, that they understood that the whole world was the product of a Unity of purpose. It is to their credit that, against all odds, they stuck with this commitment to a Universal Unity, 0ne G0d, a G0d of justice and mercy, ethics and morality. I owe a lot to them, and to the ethical monotheism they founded.

But their monotheism has changed over the years, reenvisioned by us, their descendants. For example, the G0d of the Founders was not the G0d of Moses. The rest of the Bible goes on to dispute the Torah in many key ways.

For example, Isaiah's G0d was a more radical Unity than any Founder's G0d. Isaiah 45:7, which we paraphrase in the morning service Yotzer Or, just after the Barchu, asserts that G0d "creates light, fashions darkness, makes peace, and creates evil." There is only one address for good and evil, and that is G0d. If I truly assert that the Universe is a Unity, I can't avoid this conundrum. I can't move to another universe, so I can't move to another G0d. Even leaving the word "G0d" behind does not move me out of the Unity of the Universe, out of the fact that the 0ne-ness that creates us also horribly destroys us.

People ask, where was G0d in the Holocaust? Here is the answer to that question: "Where wasn't G0d in the Holocaust?" If we chew on that assertion for a while, we may again find ourselves asking, isn't there another G0d we can move to? But then, that G0d would not be the 0mnipotent, 0mnipresent, and 0mniscient G0d our rabbinic ancestors developed the vocabulary to describe during the first thousand years of this era.

Another counterpoint to the Torah's view of G0d is in the Book of Ecclesiastes, which disputes the Torah's view that G0d rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked. Ecclesiastes 7:15. Says, "All things have I seen in the days of my vanity; there is a just man who perishes in his righteousness, and there is a wicked man who prolongs his life in his wickedness." Ecclesiastes is more in line with a modern perspective of what occurs in our world than the Torah is, and that is why it is my favorite philosophical Book of the Bible. It is also traditional to read Ecclesiastes on Sukkot, and I will reinaugurate Torah study with it on the Thursday of Sukkot, in our congregational Sukkah, which will stand, with your volunteer help, in the courtyard of our congregational church.

So, to sum up, YaHuWH/Ad0nai has been the G0d of our ancestors, at least since Moses, and El Shaddai was our ancestors' G0d before that. We are descendants of the first monotheists, the first men and women to grapple with the Unity of the Universe and of all its creations. But their understanding of and experiences of G0d are not always ours. We can read about their relationships with G0d, and try to intuit what the text of the Torah does not reveal, but we can never know G0d as they did. We can only know G0d in the context of our own realities, our own relationships with the Unity of Existence. But our expectations were pioneered by our ancestors.

G0d told Moses, Ehyeh asher Ehyeh, I am Being and Existence, Past Present and Future, and I will be with you howsoever I will be with you. I am different with you than I was with your ancestors, and I will be different to your children. So when your children ask you Wh0 I Am, tell them that I will be with them Wh0 I will be. They may know Me by a different name, or they may not, but, after wrestling in the dark with Me, they will certainly know Me in their own way. I am El, G0d, and they are Yisra-El, wrestlers with G0d.

I don't know if you'll bow seven ways to acknowledge our ancestors' relationships with G0d, and I honestly don't care if you adopt my custom of personal piety. But now you know the secret. When I bow in my ancestors' seven ways, it is to make way for my own way, my own, personal, fidgety Jewish way.

I do know this: once you have looked at G0d through the lives of our ancestors, you will never again assume that they saw G0d the same way. I hope you will find that this makes way for your own relationship with the Unity that encompasses life, death, heaven, and earth, light and darkness. You have these holy days, and the rest of your lives, to wrestle with that.