I received this email early Friday morning: “Rabbi, I  wish that I could boost my spirits up for attending HH Services on Zoom but I am unable to do it. I am worn out of Zoom services. They leave me unfulfilled. I feel that God is not on Zoom. No need to answer.”

I immediately pictured an image of a computer screen with many boxes of people in a zoom room. There was one black square, with words in the lower left-hand corner, where there’s usually a name, that says God’s Place.

And I imagined the following scenario:

Rabbi: God, you need to turn on your video please.

God:

Rabbi: God, if you’re saying something, you’re muted. You’ll need to unmute yourself.

God:

Rabbi: Want to try putting a message in the chat?

God:

Rabbi: God, if you’re having troubles, maybe you should sign out and try again.

God‘s box disappears from the screen and does not reappear. Rabbi shrugs and continues with the service.

Meanwhile, God is sitting in front of a computer, with the same zoom room on the screen. From God’s end, the conversation unfolds like this:

Rabbi: God, you need to turn on your video please.

God: Rabbi, you know better than that. You can’t see Me with your eyes.

Rabbi: God, if you’re saying something, you’re muted. You’ll need to unmute yourself.

God: Rabbi! You certainly know better than that. You can’t hear Me with your ears.

Rabbi: Want to try putting a message in the chat?

God: Now you expect me to type?! Are you feeling OK rabbi? Because this is straying into the absurd.

Rabbi: if you’re having troubles, maybe you should sign out and try again.

God: Excuse me, “rabbi” but I think you’re the one with the problem. Of course you can’t see Me, I’m God. No one can see Me. If you think my Voice is going to come out of those tinny little speakers on your laptop, you’d better think again. And if you can’t hear Me at all, that’s your fault, not Mine. Screw this, I’ve got better things to do with My time.

God starts to get up and storm off, but suddenly hears something pleasing to God’s ears, and sits back down at the computer. The rabbi is talking.

Rabbi: My friends. Of course we can’t see God with our eyes or hear God with our ears. I don’t think that’s how God wants us to experience Godself.

Rabbi continues: God wants us to see and hear with our hearts and experience the Divine with every fiber of our being. God is so much bigger than our earthly senses, and God is so much bigger than Zoom. But God is just Flexible enough, just Creative enough, that if you want to have a God-experience, you can do it right here on Zoom, right now.

And God was happy.

That’s my fantasy. But in truth, I do understand my correspondent from the morning. The Jewish idea of God is a hard one to grasp intellectually.

The Torah gives us a God who walks and talks with people, who has an easily pushed hot-button and a sense of humor (because otherwise how could there be ostriches and giraffes?). God can even have a change of heart and rewrite the rules.

Even in Deuteronomy, where the idea of God is quite different from the previous four books, we’re told to see and to listen. It’s natural for us to understand those words literally.

But the God we’re asked to worship is nothing like that God. Our God is much harder to reach, and frankly much harder to believe in. With this God, we cannot be literal when it comes to seeing and listening. We have to use other senses for that, senses that we may not be accustomed to using, which are probably a little rusty.

It might feel unfair that the onus is on us. After all, there is a saying that God wouldn’t exist at all if people didn’t believe. You’d think that under those circumstances God would have a vested interest in making sure that we believed.

I’m doubtful about that. My guess is that if humans became extinct tomorrow, God would still go on being God.

Whatever that means. I certainly have no idea. God might be that guy at the heavenly computer, for all I know. And if that’s an easier way for you to access the Divine, to have a healthy relationship with the Creator, then I’m all for you believing that.

My teacher Rabbi Harry Zeitlin put it much eloquently when he wrote in his blog, “…the fallacy [is] that we are able to even fathom the reality of the Creator and that the limits of our imaginations actually limit His Reality.”

In the long run, during the length of our brief human lives, I don’t think that our perception of God matters. How a person imagines God or doesn’t imagine God has no bearing on God. God is going to keep rolling on, doing whatever it is that God does or doesn’t do.

Our task isn’t to figure God out. It’s to figure ourselves out. To learn how to experience God in a transcendental moment, and sitting at a computer, and in the dark of the night. To understand that wherever you are, God is there too. Wherever you are, God is there too.

And once we figure that out, we need to reach a place where we understand our role in the world, and truly grasp what it means to be the hands of God on earth.

And then? Roll up our sleeves and get to work.