God Does Not Exist. So, Let’s Serve Him!

Some strange things happen with God’s name at the beginning of Sefer Shemot.

In last week’s parasha when Moshe asks for the name of God, God responds with the famous words: “Ehyeh asher ehyeh”, that is “I shall be what I shall be”

But what kind of answer is this?

It seems to be more a riddle than an answer.

The meaning of Moshe’s question is clear: “How will the Israelites recognize You when I, Moshe, come to tell them that You will take them out of Egyptian slavery?”

Moshe might have continued: “This, God, is a profound question: We have not heard from You for 210 years! Not one word! Do You not understand that many Jews no longer believe that You actually exist? So why should they believe me when I tell them that You spoke to me?”

And when God replies with the famous: “I will be what I will be”, Moshe might have responded: “In what way does Your answer help? What do You mean when You say: I shall be what I shall be?”

It seems that God’s answer is no answer at all. It may be true at a deep level, but it is too abstract, too elusive. It is an answer that a philosopher might appreciate, but not at all comforting to a people facing oppression and slavery, a people mired in the darkest despair.

So, God comes back to Moshe in this week’s parashah and says: Here I am again. I am the Ineffable name, the Essence of Being. But… “I appeared to Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaacov as El Shadai, not through my Ineffable Name….” (Shemot 6:2-3).

“El Shadai” means: The God of Enough. We might say, the God Who said: “Enough. I do not have to give away more of Myself than necessary.”

That name was good enough for Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaacov, who did not experience God as the ultimate, incomprehensible God, in all of His contradictions: God who simultaneously exists in the past, the present, and the future, i.e. beyond time and space; omnipotent; in nature and beyond nature; immanent and transcendent. God who is good and nevertheless allows—and even causes—human suffering. God who allows mankind freedom of will but knows in advance everything that will happen. Contradictions and paradoxes without end…

Or, as atheist turned believer, Antony Flew (1923-2010) once said concerning reconciling all these contradictions “the death by thousand qualifications.”[1]

But now with the beginning of the Exodus, God needs to reveal Himself on a much more sophisticated level. He becomes a World Power, a Mover of History, a Creator of Miracles, overturning the laws of nature, splitting the seas, stopping the sun etc. He is now the Ineffable Name, the Name that includes everything.

This is God Who no longer “exists”, but Who is beyond existence, in a category of His own. He becomes as paradoxical as relativity, quantum physics, transfinite numbers, and other counterintuitive phenomena.

Who then is this God?

Yehuda Gellman once described God’s relationship with the world thusly:

Consider the relationship between a computer’s chip and hard disk (the inside), on the one hand, and what you see on the screen when you view the computer… What you see on the screen is the result of what is inscribed in the inside. Change the contents in the inside and you will see something different showing on the screen. What is inscribed in the inside is nothing like what you get on the screen. Inscribed in the inside are no colors or shapes of the picture on the screen…. You can peer into the inside through the most powerful microscope and you will see no pictures of people or words. [Still] the computer has a translation mechanism from inside to the screen…. In God there is nothing like what you get on the world screen. If we knew God as God is, we would not see what we see when we see God on the world screen.[2]

So, in God there is nothing that justifies the phrase “to exist.” When we say that He exists, we mean that there is something in God that is projected on the world screen as God’s existence, but in God there is no such thing. When we say that God changes His mind, regrets what He has done, or gets angry, it only means that on the world screen something in God (the hard disk) has been translated to project that God is changing His mind, regretting His earlier decisions, or getting angry.

For God to be meaningful to us, He must appear on the screen in ways through which we can identify with Him—“In the image of God He created him”. But God on the hard disk, in His essence, is something totally different about which we mortals have no clue.

This is the message of  I shall be what I shall be — “On the world screen I am, but on the disk I am not” — at least not in any category that we can call “existence.”

This is what is inherent in the Ineffable Name by which God introduces Himself to Moshe and the Israelites at the beginning of the grand story with which the exodus opens.

God is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere. As many philosophers pointed out, all talk about God is impossible. His essence cannot be expressed but He can definitely be addressed.

So, does God exist?

God forbid!

And precisely for that reason we should serve Him and observe His commandments. Were He to exist, all our prayers would be meaningless, and our adherence to the mitzvot mere idol worship.

Questions for Discussion

1. If God only “appears on the screen” but is unknowable in Himself, are we in a relationship with God — or only with our projection of God? Do you feel that mitzvot are still binding if they are commanded by a God that is so far “above” human life?
2. The essay suggests that God had to reveal Himself more dramatically because the Exodus required it. Does this mean God changes according to historical need? If so, is God shaped by history rather than its author?
3. If God is beyond good and evil, beyond existence, beyond categories — on what basis do we accuse God of injustice, or praise God for kindness?
4. Rabbi Cardozo claims that if God “existed” in the sense that things in the world exist, prayer would be meaningless and mitzvot idolatrous. Do you experience prayer as addressing something that exists — or as participating in something that transcends existence? Which feels more authentic to you? And if prayer does not change God, and God does not “exist” in the way we imagine — who or what is actually changed by prayer?
5. Is Rabbi Cardozo’s God someone you could love — or only someone you could think about? Where in your own life do you most feel the presence of God — and where do you most feel His absence? What does that say about what kind of God you believe in?

Notes:

[1] Antony Flew, “Theology and Falsification,” in Antony Flew and Alasdair C. MacIntyre, New Essays in Philosophical Theology (New York, New York: Macmillan, 1964), 99.

[2] Jerome (Yehudah) Gellman, God’s Kindness has Overwhelmed Us, A Cotemporary Doctrine of the Jews as the Chosen People, Boston, Academic press, 2013, pp 20-21.