The Archer and the Painter – One God – Many Facets
This morning, I want to talk about God.
That may sound obvious — it is Yom Kippur, after all. But in truth, Judaism often speaks more about what God wants from us than about what God is. We speak about mitzvot, about justice, about compassion. We speak about teshuvah, returning to what matters most.
But what about God? What do we believe, here and now?
The truth is, if we polled this room, we would find many different answers. Some of us hold tightly to a personal God, a God who judges, forgives, comforts, guides. Others imagine God more abstractly, as a spirit, energy, light, source, wholeness, mystery…. Still others aren’t sure they believe in God at all.
And yet — whether we use the word God or not — most of us, at some point in our lives, have felt something. A sense of connection bigger than ourselves. A glimpse of meaning that transcends us. Sometimes it comes in small ways: the hush of a sunrise, the beauty of music that sends a shiver through us, the warmth of belonging when community gathers. Sometimes it comes in deeper ways: the mystery of birth, the peace of holding a loved one’s hand at the end of life, the sudden clarity that breaks through in a moment of struggle. However it comes, it carries the same truth — a sense that we are part of something greater than ourselves.
A little boy was once drawing with crayons. His teacher asked, “What are you drawing?”
He said, “I’m drawing God.”
She replied, “But nobody knows what God looks like.”
The boy smiled and said, “They will in a minute.”
I love that story because it reminds us: there are so many ways we imagine God. And this morning, I want to share my own thoughts about God — that God is not outside creation, but within it. That everything is in God, and God is in everything. The sages called this pantheism and painted it this way in a midrash:
When God began to create the world, the Divine breath filled all the void. God exhaled, and light appeared. God exhaled again, and water formed. God exhaled once more, and the trees, the animals, and finally humanity came into being.
A student asked: “Master, why did God create by breathing? Why not by speaking, or simply willing it into being?”
The Master answered: “Because creation is not separate from the Creator. With each breath, God gave life to the universe but also entered the universe. The world was not made and left alone. The Divine is in every blade of grass, in every ripple of water, in every heart that beats.”
From the very beginning, the sages remind us, God is not distant, observing creation like a detached architect. God is bound up with it, present in it, inseparable from it.
And here is where ancient intuition meets modern science.
Today we can map the universe at its largest scales — vast filaments of galaxies, woven together in a web of light and dark. What scientists are finding is astonishing: the structure of the cosmos looks strikingly like the neural networks of the human brain. Vast clusters of galaxies connected by filaments, like neurons connected by synapses.
It makes you wonder: just as thoughts travel through our minds, could there also be a kind of communication flowing through the stars — a cosmic mind, a consciousness that underlies all being? The mystics would not be surprised. For them, creation was never silent matter; it was always alive, pulsing with awareness.
They taught that nothing is ever lost: every word spoken, every kindness given, every prayer uttered leaves a trace in the fabric of creation. Just as the neurons of the brain carry memory, so too the universe carries the memory of all that has been. And since time and space are part of the same field, that memory is not only of the past — it contains the knowledge of all time. Past, present, and future a, like thread are interwoven in a single tapestry.
We live, in other words, within a field of divine remembrance — a living Torah written not in ink but in starlight and breath, holding the story of all that was, all that is, and all that will be.
Think about what physics teaches: Every atom in our bodies was born in the heart of a star. The carbon in our bones, the oxygen in our blood, the calcium in our teeth — all of it forged in stellar furnaces billions of years ago, long before our planet was born. We are literally stardust. Micro to macro, we each move within the same unfolding story.
String theory goes even deeper. It suggests that beneath even atoms, beneath quarks and electrons, lie vibrating strings of energy. These strings hum at different frequencies, and from their vibration arises everything we see and touch.
It’s as if the universe itself is a great instrument, forever playing. Sometimes in harmony, sometimes in dissonance, always in motion.
And when I read that, I think of the mystics who said creation began with a Divine word, a sound, a vibration. That existence itself is God’s music, still echoing through time.
Quantum entanglement adds another layer. It tells us that particles which were once connected remain linked across vast distances. Touch one, and the other responds instantly, no matter how far away.
You don’t have to be a physicist to feel that. You’ve lived it.
The phone rings — and it’s the person you were just thinking about.
You dream of someone you love, and the next day they call.
You walk into a room and sense the mood before a word is spoken.
Or perhaps it’s a different kind of knowing:
You meet someone for the first time, yet you feel you’ve known them forever.
You arrive somewhere and instantly recognize a path you’ve never taken — a street, a room, a moment — as if your soul remembers.
You think of a memory that hasn’t happened yet, and later, something in your day unfolds exactly that way.
Moments like these remind us that life is woven from invisible threads. That our consciousness, in ways we cannot fully measure, vibrates with the world and with each other. We are entangled. My life reverberates with yours. Your sadness can weigh on me. My laughter can lift you.
A Hasidic story captures this beautifully.
A disciple once went to his Master in tears.
“Master,” he said, “I don’t understand what is happening to me. When my neighbor suffers, I feel his pain in my bones. When his child is sick, I cannot sleep. When his fortune improves, my heart leaps as if it were my own. Why is my heart so connected to his?”
The Master took him to a well. He told him to look into the water.
“What do you see?”
“I see my own face,” the disciple said.
“Look again,” said the master.
The disciple gazed more deeply. As he focused, he sensed — in the reflection and in his own awareness — the presence of his neighbor’s joys and sorrows shimmering alongside his own.
The Master said: “This is the secret. You and your neighbor are not two souls, but one soul, stretched across many bodies. When one part of the soul trembles, the whole soul trembles. When one part is healed, the whole soul sings. That is why your neighbor’s joy and sorrow live in you — because you are carried on the same current, like waves meeting on the same water.
Isn’t that what Yom Kippur is telling us? That’s why our prayers are plural: Not “I have sinned,” but “we have sinned.” That’s what Yom Kippur is telling us: that we are woven into one another like threads in a single fabric, and our confessions rise together like voices in a choir – no single voice perfect, but together, holy.
This realization can leave us with awe. We live in a universe so vast and so intimate at the same time. We are small and mortal, yet we are also threads in a cosmic web that stretches from the beginning of time to the end of time.
It can also leave us with humility. We cannot always control the winds — the illnesses, the accidents, the random turns of fate.
But it also leaves us with responsibility. If my life vibrates with yours, then what I do matters. My choices ripple outward. My words, my kindness, my cruelty — they echo, sometimes farther than I will ever know.
That is why teshuvah matters. Because it’s not just about me. It’s about all of us. When I return to what matters most, when I tune my strings toward harmony, I help bring the whole universe back toward balance.
And so we come back to our story — the archer and the painter.
The archer takes aim, steady, precise — the note of intention.
The wind blows, the arrow drifts — the dissonance of life.
The painter circles the place it lands — the harmony of acceptance.
And together, they create something whole.
The painter’s circle waits on the canvas, and the archer’s arrow seeks its mark. Alone, each is incomplete — a target with no arrow, an arrow with no destination. But when intention and artistry, science and religion come together, they create something whole.
So too with us. None of us is whole without the other. That is the power of this community, and the promise of these Days of Awe: not I or we, but both — woven into one.
That is what we do on Yom Kippur. We take aim again at the lives we want to live, knowing we will miss. We circle our failures, our regrets, our unintended consequences — not to justify them, but to transform them into meaning. We trust that the Holy One, who hums through every atom, will circle us with mercy.
And then, harmonized as we are, we add our voices — our trembling strings — to the great song of creation.
So this morning, I leave you with a prayer:
May we learn to live as though every vibration matters,
because it does.
May we hear the music beneath the noise,
and join in its harmony.
May we honor the mystery that binds us to one another
and to the God who is both within us and beyond us.
And may our lives, like the archer’s arrow and the painter’s circle,
join together to form a beauty greater than either could alone.
G’mar chatimah tovah.