The Unknowable, Loving, and Aggravating God

 I am as I shall be (Shemot 3:14)

The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man. –G.K. Chesterton^[1]

Jewish Tradition forbids the pronunciation of the four-letter name of God. This name, rooted in the Hebrew word for “being,” consists of the Hebrew letters: Yud, Heh, Vav, and Heh. According to the Sages, the name reflects the various dimensions of “being” related to time: past, present and future. As such, God figures as the One Who lives in these three dimensions and exists simultaneously in all three. This actually makes these dimensions all one, which means that God is completely beyond time, while paradoxically existing also within the confines of time. And that is why human beings are not allowed to pronounce this name, for if they were to do so, they would give the impression that they actually understand the unfathomable concept that God lives simultaneously in the past, present, future, and beyond.^[2] That would be an untruth, and Jewish law forbids lying. God is incomprehensible and beyond all description.^[3] He can only be addressed; His being cannot be expressed.^[4]

The great Kabbalist Rabbi Moshe Cordovero (1522-1570) elaborates on this in his famous work Elima Rabati:

When your intellect conceives of God . . . do not permit yourself to imagine that there is a God as depicted by you. For if you do this, you will have a finite and corporeal conception of God, God forbid. Instead, your mind should dwell only on the affirmation of God’s existence, and then it should recoil. To do more than this is to allow the imagination to reflect upon God as He is in Himself and such reflection is bound to result in imaginative limitations and corporeality. Therefore, put reins on your intellect and do not allow it too great a freedom, but assert God’s existence and deny your intellect the possibility of comprehending Him. The mind should run to and fro — running to affirm God’s existence and recoiling from any limitations, since man’s imagination pursues his intellect.^[5]

A three-dimensional reality on a flat surface

Introducing God is one of the most difficult things to do. It is like presenting a three-dimensional reality on a flat surface. Still, God is the most captivating figure in human history and His track record is most unusual. His deeds are unprecedented, yet very disturbing. He is to be loved, but often irritates. He transcends human limitation, but He gets angry and downright emotional. He is beyond criticism, yet He is judged by the strictest criteria of justice. Religious people believe that He is the only One Who really has it all together and knows what He is doing. But others are convinced that He is absent-minded, allows matters to get out of hand, and causes unnecessary pain to some of His creations.

Nobody has ever been the cause of so much controversy, deafening silence, and admiration. And no one is so conspicuous, even while using an ingenious hideout, which we call the universe. Though He is the great mystery in our lives, some people have a relationship with Him as if He were their best friend, one with Whom they can converse and to Whom they can complain. He is the personal psychologist of millions, but is ultimately blamed for anything that goes wrong. Others deny His existence because of the many inconsistencies in His behavior. And then there are those who believe in Him but, out of anger or frustration, refuse to speak to Him. In the words of famous novelist and poet Miguel de Cervantes, “Man appoints, and God disappoints.”^[6]

Who is this strange figure called God?

It’s important to realize that the term, “God” is used arbitrarily. It often stands for completely opposing entities used by religious and quasi-religious ideologies. All of them agree that “God” affirms some absolute reality as the ultimate. But they fundamentally disagree as to what that reality entails. For Benedict Spinoza, the Dutch philosopher and supreme Jewish rebel, as for other pantheistic thinkers, He is really an “It,” a primal, impersonal force, identical with nature — some ineffable, immutable, impassive Divine substance that pervades the universe, or is the universe. God is only immanent, not transcendent; a Divine spirit that has little practical meaning in a person’s day-to-day life.

Although this view is close to the kabbalistic idea of Ein Sof (the Endless and Boundless One), this is not identical to the Jewish perception of God. In the Jewish tradition, God is not just an idea or a blind force. God is the Ribono shel Olam, the Master of the Universe, Who is both immanent and transcendent, surpassing the universe, which is His creation. He has the disturbing habit of being everywhere and anywhere, and He is known to interfere with anything and everything. He is a living God, a dynamic power in the life and history of humanity, moving things around when He sees fit, smiling when He is pleased with the behavior of His creatures and annoyed when they have blundered yet again. But most important, while He does not fit into any category, He has — for lack of a better word — “personality,” and His own consciousness. Indeed, His essence cannot be expressed, but He can definitely be addressed.

The obsessive fascination with Halacha as a substitute

No doubt this is the reason why religious Jews spend little time discussing God, to the extent that it can seem as if they have expelled Him from their emotional and intellectual lives. This may explain their “obsessive” fascination with Halacha, God’s Law; it offers the only way to draw close to Him. Their intense preoccupation with Halacha compensates for their inability to discuss His very Being, as Prof. Haym Soloveitchik writes:

Zealous to continue traditional Judaism unimpaired, religious Jews seek to ground their new emerging spirituality less on a now unattainable intimacy with Him, than on an intimacy with His Will, avidly eliciting Its intricate demands and saturating their daily lives with Its exactions. Having lost the touch of His presence, they seek now solace in the pressure of His yoke.^[7]

This, however, has led to great problems in Jewish education, because it has ignored the enormous need of searching young people to actually discuss basic issues concerning faith, theology, and the meaning of life, on which the whole premise of Halacha stands or falls. Even prayer, which is the most direct way to address God, has by now been so “halachized” that in many synagogues it is the laws concerning prayer that have taken precedence, often at the expense of realizing to Whom one is actually speaking! It was the Hassidic Movement — with its emphasis on the actual experience of prayer — that tried to respond to this acute problem. It is not surprising that this has led to some antinomian tendencies within the Hassidic movement.^[8]

The radical differences in the conception of God make for an equally profound divergence in attitudes about all of life and the universe. While in pantheistic and other non-monotheistic philosophies, God has no moral input, nothing could be further from the Jewish concept of God. In Judaism, He is the source par excellence of all moral criteria, although He seems to violate some moral standards in the way He deals with people. Apparently, this is due to the fact that He needs to achieve certain goals with His creation that are known only to Him, and remain unintelligible to humans. God’s perfection, then, is not that He is already perfect but that He strives for it. If He were to be perfect, He would lack the capacity to become perfect, which would be a terrible deficiency in His being.^[9]

Pantheism

According to pantheism, the world is eternal, with no beginning. As such, it has no intrinsic purpose, since purpose is the conscious motivation of a creator to bring something into existence. It therefore follows that in the pantheistic view, human beings, too, have no ultimate purpose. They, like the universe, just are. Moral behavior may have some utilitarian purpose, but no ultimate one. For radical pantheists, acting morally is not the goal of humans; it is simply a means to their survival, a way to prevent pain and achieve happiness.

On a deeper level, some pantheists view the universe as an illusion — a flux of sensory deception — to be escaped. Made from a purely Divine substance, it cannot accommodate any physical reality and therefore can have no real meaning. In that case, neither can humans. Once their physical existence is branded an illusion, they can no longer be of flesh and blood. Nor are their deeds of any real value. Since it is the body that enables people to act, and the body is part of the deception, it must follow that all human behavior belongs to the world of illusion.

It is this view that Judaism protests against. God is a conscious Being, Who created the world with a purpose. This world is real and by no means a mirage. People’s deeds are of great value, far from an illusion. While they may not be the primary goal of creation,^[10] they are of enormous importance. Judaism objects to the pantheistic view of human beings, which depersonalizes them, and must ultimately lead to their demoralization. If people are part of an illusion, so are their feelings. Why, then, be concerned with a fellow human’s emotional and physical welfare?

Paradoxically, this version of pantheism infiltrated Western culture via the back door. When we are told by certain modern philosophers that a person is “merely” physical, and that the body is “merely” a mechanical mechanism in which emotions are just a chemical inconvenience, we are confronted with pantheism turned on its head. While pantheism denies the physical side of existence, this scientific approach rejects the spiritual dimension of a human being. In both cases, emotions are seen as part of an illusion, and therefore of lesser importance.

God’s emotions

Judaism, on the other hand, declares that emotions are what make the person; they are real and of crucial importance. In fact, emotions are central to human existence, since they are the foundation of moral behavior. It is for this reason that Judaism views God as an emotional Being. Metaphorically attributing emotions to God raises emotions to a supreme level. If God has emotions such as love, mercy, jealousy, and anger, then these feelings must be genuine, important, and not to be taken lightly in humans.

While some philosophers considered such anthropomorphism scandalous, the Jewish tradition took the risk of granting God emotions so as to uphold morality on its highest level and guarantee that it would not be tampered with. For the sake of humans, even God is prepared to compromise His complete Otherness, albeit not to the point where He would be regarded as a human being.

In Western society, God has become insignificant. While the vast majority of people declare their belief in God, they seem to add two words to their declaration of faith: “I believe in God; so what?” In this way, the most radical encounter a person could ever have with the Master of the Universe is reduced to a senseless blur of charlatanism. It is to this that Judaism objects. Abraham Joshua Heschel put it very plainly: “God is of no importance unless He is of supreme importance.”^[11]

Or is He?

Notes

^[1].    G.K.C. as M.C.; Being a Collection of Thirty-Seven Introductions by G.K. Chesterton, selected and edited by J.P. de Fonseka, “Introduction to the Book of Job,” (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1929), 47.

^[2].    The only person who was allowed to pronounce God’s full name was the High Priest on Yom Kippur in the Holy of Holies, the single place where time did not seem to play a role. (See Yoma 39b; Kiddushin 71a).

^[3].    See Yoma 69b; Rabbi E.E. Dessler, Michtav Me-Eliyahu (Yerushalayim: The Committee for the Publication of the Writings of Rabbi E.E. Dessler, 1987), 3:315.

^[4].    Donald J. Moore, Martin Buber: Prophet of Religious Secularism (Fordham University Press, 1996), 134.

^[5].    Elima Rabati (Lvov, 1881) 1:10, p. 4b, translated by Louis Jacobs in Principles of the Jewish Faith: An Analytical Study (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2009), 125.

^[6].    Miguel de Cervantes, The History of the Ingenious Gentleman, Don Quixote of La Mancha, trans. from Spanish by Peter Anthony Motteux (London: Hurst, Robinson, and Co., 1822), 5:137.

^[7].    Haym Soloveitchik, “Rupture and Reconstruction: The Transformation of Contemporary Orthodoxy,” Tradition 28, no. 4 (1994): 103.

^[8].    See Shaul Magid, Hasidism on the Margin: Reconciliation, Antinomianism, and Messianism in Izbica-Radzin Hasidism, (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). 

^[9].    One is reminded of American writer and philosopher Elbert Hubbard’s famous observation: “Life is a paradox. Every truth has its counterpart which contradicts it; and every philosopher supplies the logic for his own undoing.” Selected writings of Elbert Hubbard (New York: W. H. Wise & co., 1922), 9:408.

^[10].   See below “The Idolatry of Theodicy” on page 57

^[11].   Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1955), 153.

^[12].   “Rupture and Reconstruction: The Transformation of Contemporary Orthodoxy,” Tradition 28, no. 4 (1994): 103.

Questions to Ponder

1) “Instead your mind should openly dwell on the affirmation of God’s existence and then it should recoil.” Does Jewish prayer, as currently or previously prescribed, fit with this admonition by Rabbi Moshe Cordovero? Could we, or should we, take something from this sentiment to transform our prayer experience?

2) Does it trouble you that God doesn’t adhere to the “moral” standards He has set for humankind? In general, does it bother you that you don’t understand the ways of God? Have you ever wished He had created us with the ability to decipher His ways (at least to some degree), or been angry that this is not the case?

3) Dr Haym Soloveitchik in his seminal article “Rupture and Reconstruction” discusses the focus in contemporary modern Orthodoxy on learning Halacha through text (as opposed to experientially) as follows: “Zealous to continue traditional Judaism unimpaired, religious Jews seek to ground their new emerging spirituality less on a now unattainable intimacy with Him, than on an intimacy with His Will, avidly eliciting Its intricate demands and saturating their daily lives with Its exactions. Having lost the touch of His presence, they now seek solace in the pressure of His yoke.”

Rabbi Cardozo, in the essay above, expresses a similar concern, defining this escape into Halacha as an acute problem.

a) Do you feel that spirituality can still emerge, notwithstanding a shift from intimacy with God to intimacy with His will?

b) Aside from these explanations, can you think of other reasons for the lack of “God talk” existing in some halachic circles today? Could “God” simply be an emotionally-laden topic, making people who are “less emotional types” (more rational/practical) uncomfortable – and hence the more rationalistic-leaning modern Orthodox community largely avoids it…?

4) “In fact, emotions are central to man’s existence, since they are the foundation of moral behavior. It is for this reason that Judaism views God as an emotional Being.” Do you view God as an emotional Being? Why/why not? Do you agree that emotion is the foundation of moral behavior?

5) If emotion is indeed the foundation of both the ability to discuss/experience God, and of moral behavior, then should not the “less emotional types” we mentioned in question 3 above be encouraged to learn to connect better with their own emotions (overcome blocks and inhibitions and open their hearts to vulnerability)? After all, as Rabbi Cardozo points out, this issue has ramifications for young people, the synagogue space and much more, and as such is potentially very damaging.