was asked to reflect on that part of the liturgy known as malchuyot—the celebration of God’s sovereignty. Well doesn’t that just go to the heart of a religious and existential dilemma? I am a sceptic about the concept of Divine Power. I may even be a non-believer. So what am I doing here on Rosh Hashana, and why didn’t I just choose to keep my scepticism to myself?

I’m only guessing, but I think many of you—certainly not all—share my doubts about Divinity, and sense a contradiction about participating in a religious service, even an alternative one like this, in which God is apparently omnipresent.

So let’s try and work this out. Something intangible draws us to this unlikely place at this time, year after year. In part, it is the desire to connect with a community, to get outside ourselves, to find respite, if only for a few hours, from the frenetic, demanding, and highly individualistic lives most of us lead. We find an oasis here. It allows a space for quiet contemplation, and how frequently does that happen in any given day?

Another reason I’m present, my theological uncertainty notwithstanding, is that I have learned not to take the Bible, the Torah, the liturgy, literally, but to try to elicit meaning from them, to treat them as symbols and metaphors, and even the source of new insights. Maybe that’s just a trick and a rationalization, and it certainly wouldn’t pass muster in more traditional, let alone fundamentalist, religious settings, but it works for me.

I think that it is possible not to believe literally in God, but still to be overwhelmed by god-like things and events that are so much larger than our individual selves: for example, the force of nature, both its beauty and its terror. Our family travelled to the Maritimes this summer and we were witness to the stunning, spectacular sight of the Cabot Trail in Cape Breton. We returned home to the impossibly devastating scenes of Katrina, preceded by those of the tsunami and followed by those of Rita. The contrasts are aw(e)ful, in every sense of that term. Another example: what could be more indescribably astonishing than the birth of your child, or so painfully agonizing as the death of a loved one, especially a child? Who can explain such things? How in this world can good and evil co-exist, each striving to dominate and eliminate the other, neither yet quite able to do so.

I’m not sure if God, sovereign or not, has anything to do with any of this. What I do know is that the world is magnificent and mysterious, moral and malevolent. We gather here, periodically, to ponder these colossal matters, and clearly, we would rather do it together than alone.

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