The Attenuation of God in Modern Jewish Thought

Critical Bible scholarship reveals much diversity in ancient Israelite notions of God, but whatever the theology, the Bible rarely leaves room for doubt that God is alive, alert, vigorous and righteous; even Job, despite his sense of injustice, does not doubt that ultimately God is just, and is in control of events. Modern times have seen a change of attitude, not simply on account of the apparent injustice in the world, but more fundamentally because the successes of science have made God redundant as an explanation for natural phenomena. Twentieth-century Jewish thinkers such as Mordecai M. Kaplan have sought to replace God by social constructs, while those who retain traditional God-talk range from Heschel, whose “anthropopathic God” shares human emotion, to Eliezer Berkovits (“the hidden God”), and from J. D. Soloveitchik (the God of halakha) to Richard Rubenstein (the non-interventionist God) and David Blumenthal (God as abusing parent). In this paper I shall review some of the main theories, while enquiring whether their proponents have anything in common with ancient and mediaeval believers, or whether they have subverted the older God-language, in some cases attenuating the concept of God to the point of atheism. The Bible and its Aftermath Broadly speaking – the dividing lines are not sharp – talk about God has moved (“shifted”) through three phases, or models (“paradigms”):  In the ancient world the Israelite claim that there was One, supreme God, was essentially a denial; it meant that human affairs were not controlled by several powerful, conflicting superhuman agencies.  Medieval Jews, Christians and Muslims all agreed that there was only one supreme Power; discussion was dominated by the practical question of how to relate to this One Being, and the theoretical question of how to accommodate his undoubted existence within some rational scheme.  Contemporary thinkers, by contrast, are concerned neither with demonstrating the superiority of the One God, nor with proving his existence, but by attempts to make sense of the “God-concept”; discourse revolves around the question of what, if anything, do people mean when they use the word “god.” Critical Bible scholarship reveals much diversity in ancient Israelite notions of God. Sometimes, for instance Psalm 82, the Bible portrays God as the greatest and most just of the gods; elsewhere, he is the only God. The theology varies, but the Bible rarely leaves room for doubt that God is alive, alert, in control of events, righteous and caring. Even Job, despite his sense of injustice, does not doubt that ultimately God is both all-powerful and just, if inscrutable; Kohelet is perhaps more sceptical. * Fellow in Modern Jewish Thought at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies (retired). Email: norman.solomon@orinst.ox.ac.uk MELILAH MANCHESTER JOURNAL OF JEWISH STUDIES 12 (2015) 98 Jews in Late Antiquity, like Greeks reading Hesiod and Homer, were worried by the attribution to God (or gods) of human characteristics, especially those commonly regarded as vices, such as anger and partiality; surely a supreme Creator ought to be beyond such things, perfect and unchangeable (since, as Plato argued, a perfect being could only change for the worse). The Jewish philosophers Aristobulus and Philo, followed by the compilers of Aramaic Targumim, found a line of escape by interpreting anthropomorphic language as metaphor. Some of the Rabbis went along with this but others, maybe the same ones at different times, basked in the plurality of images. Why, they asked, did God open the Ten Commandments with the declaration, “I am the Lord your God”? Surely, his identity was evident to all? But: Since he revealed himself to them at the Red Sea as a mighty man of war, as it is said, “The Lord is a warrior, the Lord is his name” (Ex. 15:3); than as an elder, replete with mercy, as it is said, “They beheld the God of Israel, and beneath his feet was a pavement of sapphire” (Daniel 7:9-10) ... so, to allow no pretext to the nations to say “There are two powers,” (he declared) “I am the Lord your God; it is I who am in sea and on dry land, in the past and the future, in this world and the next” (Mekhilta r’Rabbi Ishmael: Hachodesh 5 on Ex. 20:2) Not satisfied with the plurality of biblical images of God, they generated more, casting God in the image of themselves; R. Ḥana bar Bizna in the name of R. Simon the Pious says that God wears tefillin (bBer 7a), Rabbi Yoḥanan that he stands like a precentor in prayer (bRH 17). Howard Wettstein has aptly dubbed this “hyper-anthropomorphic.”1 The revival of philosophy in the Middle Ages reignited debate. Maimonides, an extreme opponent of biblical literalism, adopted the Neoplatonic via negativa.2 Nothing could be asserted of God; you gained knowledge of him only by denying attributes so that, for instance, saying “God is great,” was essentially to deny that he was small. Moreover, anyone who attributed material characteristics to God was not only mistaken, but an atheist; what he believed in as God was not God, but a material object (Mishneh Torah: Teshuva 3:7; Guide 1:60). Kabbalists, on the other hand, insisted that biblical talk of God was literal, though with reference to a profounder form of reality (whatever that means); but even they eventually had to come to terms with the apophatic tradition, and conceded that though the Shekhina – identified by Naḥmanides (on Genesis 46:1) with God – might be spoken of in terms of the sefirot, corresponding to parts of the (male) body, the ףוס ןיא (Infinite) itself remains beyond the bounds of language. There were always problems. You might declare that God was just and all-powerful and that he favoured the people of Israel, but this was hard to square with apparent injustice and the current lowly state of the “chosen people.” Also, the relationship with whatever science was known to the Sages was not always comfortable; they were occasionally forced into a defensive position, for instance with regard to miracles: 1 Howard K. Wettstein, The Significance of Religious Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 14, passim. 2 Pseudo-Dionysius formulates apophatic theology in Peri mustikes theologias (“On Mystical theology”). “Mystical” here means “hidden,” rather than (as later) a private experience of transcending one’s self. Maimonides’ principle source for his concept of emanation would have been the philosopher Alfarabi. David Gillis has recently explored Maimonides’ interpretation of the chain of being in Reading Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2014). THE ATTENUATION OF GOD IN MODERN JEWISH THOUGHT (SOLOMON) 99 תומש( ונתיאל רקב תונפל םיה בשיו ה"ה לארשי ינפל ערקיש םיה םע אוה ךורב שודקה הנתיה ןיאנת ןתנוי 'ר רמא רודואית( הבר תישארב[ ואנתל )זכ די ]ה השרפ תישארב תשרפ )קבלא God made a condition with the sea that it should part before Israel, as it is written (Exodus 14:27) towards morning, the returned according to its condition.3 We do not know whether people abandoned or even questioned belief in God in consequence of such challenges, often articulated by pagan philosophers;4 our records were compiled by believers, rendering doubters largely invisible. However, human cruelty and natural disaster persisted, science progressed, and the problems became ever more acute. In the course of the twentieth century several new Jewish theologies emerged, all of which were shaped to some extent in the light of these persistent problems. These are the problems which led the three seminal 20th-century Jewish thinkers about whom I shall speak to water down the traditional view of God as alive, alert, in control of events, righteous and caring. Let me clarify what I mean by “watering down” or “attenuation.” When the Bible, or other pre-moderns, speak of God as “alive, alert, in control of events, righteous and caring,” they convey the sense of a Presence whose Will provides a satisfactory explanation for what we observe around us and for what happens to us in daily life, who exercises that Will with justice and mercy, who has guided our history and revealed how we should conduct our lives, and who responds actively to those of our appeals he deems worthy. The thinkers I discuss, even if they continued to use traditional language about God, effectively abandoned that sense. It is sometimes suggested that the fact that Jews in modern times talk of God in ways different from their forbears is a consequence of the Holocaust. But this is not correct. Reflection on the Holocaust certainly led thinkers such as Ignaz Maybaum, Eliezer Berkovits, Emil Fackenheim, Richard Rubenstein and others to formulate theologies focusing on that event. However, far more important in re-evaluating the God idea have been the rise of modern science as explanatory hypothesis for events, scientific and historical challenges to traditional truth-claims, the psychology of belief, and developments in the philosophy of language. Ever since Cain killed Abel there has been apparent injustice in the world; Newton, Darwin, archaeology, Freud and Wittgenstein are new.