Submitted by Kay Augustine

At the Milwaukee Friends Monthly Meeting on July 11, 2000, the clerk, Judith Gottlieb shared this reading, one written by Rabbi Harold Schulweis and chosen by the youth at Congregation Sinai for their confirmation Shabbat service.

God is not in me
nor in you
but between us
God is not me or mine
nor you or yours
but ours.
God is known
not alone
but in relationship.

Not as a separate, lonely power
but through our kinship, our
friendship,
through our healing and binding
and raising up of each other.
To know God is to know others,
to love God is to love others,
to hear God is to hear others.

More than meditation,
more than insight,
more than feeling,
between us are
claims, obligations, commandments;
to act, to do, to behave our beliefs.


I seek God
not as if God were alone,
an isolated person, He or She,
a process, a power, a being, a thing.
I seek God
not as if I were alone,
a thinker, a mediator, a discrete entity.

I seek God in connection,
in the nexus of community.
I pray and celebrate the betweenness
which binds and holds us together.

And even when I am left alone,
I am sustained by my
memory of our betweenness
and the promise of our betweenness.

God is not in me, or in you, or in God’s self,
but in betweenness
and it is there we find the evidence of
God’s reality and our own.