“Who invented the idea of God?” Could there be a more middle school question than this? All at once, the student who asks “who invented God?” signals both a rejection of received wisdom and curiosity. This is a loaded question, a provocation, a challenge to the teacher—and an opportunity not to be missed.

Middle-schoolers are at a key moment in their religious development. Even as they prepare for b’nei mitzvah, they question everything they have been taught and push back against authority and hypocrisy. They need support and opportunities to wrestle with the conflict between the literalist and anthropomorphic God ideas they grew up with and their growing rationalist approach to understanding the world. 

This is a tall order for schools and educators, many that could use the same opportunity to wrestle with G-d! Yet what a loss it would be to squander the opportunity to use students’ desire to wrestle with questions about G!D and to find ideas that resonate with their own experience.

Student questions about God are doors that we can either walk through or walk past. When we choose to walk with the students as they smash their previous understandings like Abraham in the idol shop, they can be incredulous. “Are we even allowed to talk about that?” a teen once asked me (during a workshop called, “Can I Pray if I’m not Sure Anyone is Listening?”). 

Last year, educator and musician Eliana Light and I challenged students to personally explore the question, “What do we mean when we say the word ‘G!D’?” Learners were students in Greensboro, North Carolina at the B’nai Shalom Day School, a pluralistic Jewish day school where I am a rabbi and teacher.  

We used tefillah experiences, music, text study, art, and interactive discussions to access students’ emotional and intellectual selves. We also amassed a video library of rabbis, musicians, and artists talking about their ideas about God from childhood onward. Eliana’s interviewees modeled diverse ways of relating to, believing, experiencing, and talking about God. Each talked about how they felt about God as a 13-year-old and how their God-ideas have developed and changed throughout their lives.

Even before we started, Eliana already wrote and recorded an entire album of Songs About God, as well as a vocabulary and method for nurturing theological “idea seeds'' in children and teens. We collaborated to build on our previous experience in the area of spiritual and Jewish education as we designed classes, batei midrash, art workshops and tefillot for our middle school students. 

In tefillah, Eliana modeled an understanding of prayer that goes beyond the literal, to joyfully connect relevantly and emotionally with children. For instance, in the last verse of Lecha Dodi, Eliana opined as she sang, “We’re not welcoming a real bride of course. But you know how you feel when someone you love is about to arrive? That’s how we feel about Shabbat!” Her talent for this was astounding and students loved her for it.

Throughout the semester, students filled our digital question box, zoom chat boxes, and student journals with questions, indignant objections, and insightful observations.  

Why do people talk about “believing” in G?d, if it’s really more complex than that?

• So, if G?d is one, how can there be G?d's a dude in the sky vs. G?d [is a word for] things we can't explain?

• Why do people say "Oh my God" or "Thank the Lord" or other things like that if G?d does not do that?

• Will we still need “god” if we figure out how creation really happened?

• When are we going to learn more about the Torah’s authorship?

• Couldn’t we just say “God,” or “they” instead of he/she?

• He??! Why are most people saying or typing “he” [in the chat] for G?d?

Students interrogated their own ideas, particularly at the beginning of the program. Students were especially taken with the idea that we can reject a literal understanding of God as a “dude in the sky,” even as that idea can be useful. They considered why humans are drawn to the “dude in the sky” God concept. They were especially interested in gendered God language and concepts of God. 

Perhaps most importantly, students now know that there isn’t just one way to relate to God that we can either accept or dismiss. There are alternatives. Our God ideas change over time, as demonstrated by the exemplars in the video interviews. 

By the end of the program, students were able to go beyond their initial ideas about God and write “OMG help!” request prayers after studying the structure of traditional and innovative tefillot. “This is very different from the classical idea of g-d as a being.” wrote one student about the idea of “experiencing” God rather than “believing.” “This might actually be my idea of g-d i really don't completely know yet but it's a possibility! (Gr. 6)”

After exploring multiple names of God, including some that were more abstract, an seventh grader wrote: 

“Why not just talk to god? I didn’t like these names, and I didn’t know why. But I realized a few nights ago. It’s because the conversation I would have with God would sound fake. If you’re talking to a friend, you wouldn’t call him “friend”, “owner of a cool trampoline in his backyard,” or “brother of my friend’s brother.” You wouldn’t call him “thing” or “a presence in the wind.” Because that doesn’t sound like a conversation.

I would like to talk to god as a person. I don’t think he is a person, but I don’t think I should suck up to him. It wouldn’t flow with me. It’s not like buttering up the guy would make things work for me. I just want to talk to him, and that’s just by talking to him.” (Gr.7)

Talking about God at our school has become normal. Certain phrases from Eliana’s songs have become part of the student vernacular, a shortcut for referencing ideas we explored together. “Dude in the sky,” from Eliana’s song “Skyman,” is shorthand for how hard it is to get beyond old images of God that persist even when we rationally reject them or have more abstract God-ideas. Students invoke it often when we study Torah.

In our final session, we reminded students that no one can hand them a God-idea. Each person must do their own wrestling. 

“You must discover all this for yourself,” Eliana taught. “It is the treasure buried in your own backyard. First, you need to know it’s there. Then, grab a shovel and dig!” A sixth grader responded in the chat: “You've given us a shovel! 😂😂😂”