Personal Theology

The following was my final assignment for a course in Modern Jewish Thought, taught by Rabbis Drs. David Ellenson and Eugene Borowitz at HUC-JIR. It represents my thinking thus far on several big Jewish questions.

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In this personal statement, I will attempt to address the following questions: What is God? What is the nature of revelation, commandment, and prayer? Why be Jewish?

What is God?

God is the All-ness that underlies the universe. Humans, being finite, primarily experience this All-ness not as Infinite Unity, but in duality. Thus, we experience God through two primary categories: the transcendent and the immanent.

I will later spend more time defining each of these categories. For now, I’d like to offer a few words about what may appear to be a dualistic (rather than monotheistic) framework. I imagine these two categories as different expressions of the same idea, like two branches stemming from one tree trunk, or like the many sefirot emanating from ein sof. Our tradition has many names for God—Adonai, Elohim, El Shaddai, HaMakom, to share but a few. And yet, all these names refer to the same One God. To what may this be compared? To a human being on earth, who by some is called Mom, by others is called Sister, by others is called Daughter, by another is called My Love. As Brad Artson points out, the Platonic assumptions that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent are not native to Biblical or Rabbinic thought. Freed of these assumptions—open to the possibility that humans experience God’s Infinite Unity in a refraction of complex duality—we may begin to uncover something about the nature of God.

I have said that I think of God as manifesting in two categories: transcendent and immanent. By transcendent, I mean that God is the Source and Substance of All Creation, to borrow a phrase from Rami Shapiro. (God is the sum-total of all matter, energy, intellect, and emotion in the universe [Substance], and also the well-spring from which they originate [Source].) This aspect of God is impersonal. This is the aspect of God that keeps planets as well as electrons spinning in their orbits. This is the aspect of God that turns day into night and season into season. This is the aspect of God that maintains natural law and enables human beings to harness science for our own ends. This is the aspect of God for Whom “m’lo chol ha-aretz k’vodo / all of creation is filled with God’s presence,” and yet also is “l’eila’ min kol birchata v’shirata / above all blessings and songs.” To borrow a phrase from David Sacks, this is the aspect of God that “we’re swimming in,” and that also is “beyond beyond beyond.” This is the aspect of God that Walt Whitman called “the procession … along the grand roads of the universe.” This is the aspect of God that causes in us Heschel’s “radical amazement.” This is the aspect of God that, in the Piyyut “Adon Olam,” is referred to as “b’li reishit, b’li tachlit / without beginning, without end.” This is the aspect of God that, according to the Kabbalists, is manifest by the attribute of “din / discipline / restraint.” This is the aspect of God that our Biblical writers imagined as having created a highly ordered universe in a highly order six-day process (in Genesis 1)—an aspect of God that they called Elohim.

The other category in which God manifests God’s self in the universe is the immanent. By immanent, I mean the aspect of God that might be referred to as “the God within”—our consciousness and conscience, our divine spark. This aspect of God is personal.  This is the aspect of God that “hotzeiti etchem mei-eretz Mitzraim / redeemed (and redeems) us from our place(s) of bondage.” This is the aspect of God that, in the Decalogue, chooses to introduce God’s self to the entire Israelite people not as Creator, but as Redeemer (to borrow an observation from Ibn Ezra). This is the aspect of God that “shomei-a t’fillah / is sympathetic to prayer” and understands “imri fi v’hegyon libi / the words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts.” This is the aspect of God that keeps the Gates of Repentance always open. This is the aspect of God that exhibits Heschel’s “divine pathos.” This is the aspect of God that Henri Nouwen said that we access when we act as a “wounded healer.” This is the aspect of God that heals (not to be confused with “cures”) the sick. This is the aspect of God that, in the Piyyut “Adon Olam,” is referred to as “eili, v’chai go’ali / my God, my Living Redeemer.” This is the aspect of God that, according to the Kabbalists, is manifest by the attribute of “chesed / love / boundlessness.” This is the aspect of God that our Biblical writers imagined as having the empathy to notice that “it is not good for a human to be alone” (in Genesis 2)—an aspect of God that they called Adonai.

Above, I noted that the aspect of God that “heals” the sick (Immanence) does not have the power to “cure” the sick. “Curing” is subject to the laws of nature—within the realm of God’s transcendence. While this personal statement will not deal at length with the nature of suffering, I will say for now that suffering is a result of the dual nature with which we perceive the world. The aspect of God that worries about our suffering (Immanence) is—devastatingly—distinct from the aspect of God that could cure our suffering (Transcendence). This is a function of the duality through which we experience the universe: we live in a dual world, and as a consequence, there is suffering.

The ultimate Unity that underlies all of existence is, for the most part, just beyond the horizon of human perception. Ourselves being finite, we can only contain finite amounts of the Infinite. Thus we live in a world where a person cannot be both Mother and Daughter to another single person. Thus we live in a world where we can experience both God’s immanence and transcendence, but rarely in the same moment. When we do, we do so only in split-second flashes of All-ness, where all the gears align and all the gates are open. When we die, we rejoin the “procession … along the grand roads of the universe,” and we are restored (both on the levels of the body and the soul) from our finitude to the Infinite All-ness from which we came and of which all things are a part. Then, duality again becomes Unity.

One more thought about these two aspects of God. In the Akedah (Abraham’s binding of Isaac)—one of the most troubling, most thoroughly studied, and richest texts in our canon—we see both aspects of God at work. Elohim (Transcendence) asks Abraham to sacrifice his son. Adonai (Immanence) intervenes before the act can be completed. There are two verses in the Akedah in which the names Elohim and Adonai are comingled: an angel of Adonai says to Abraham, “Now I know that you are in awe of Elohim” (Gen. 22:11-12). Indeed, the universe is a “testing” (Gen. 22:1) place; we live constantly on the threshold; natural disasters, illness, and human tragedies could at any moment change the course of our lives forever; and even if we live a life free from these catastrophic and unpredictable sources of suffering, all of us will some day die. This is the transcendent nature of the universe, impervious to our grasp; this is Elohim. When we live our lives in awe of Elohim—in awe of the God’s transcendence, in awe of the chaos and orderliness of the universe, in awe of our smallness amidst the vastness—when we live our lives in awe of Elohim, then we are better able to hear the voice of Adonai—better able to experience God’s immanence, better able to live our lives with compassion, better able to find redemption in our moments of exile.

What is the nature of revelation, commandment, and prayer?

Revelation must, by necessity, precede Commandment. Revelation refers to that split-second moment of simultaneously experiencing both God’s transcendence and immanence—a flash of All-ness, when all the gears are aligned and all the gates are open. Revelation is, in the words of Art Green, a religious experience—something that “the heart understands before the mind knows how to express it.” Revelation is non-intellectual; it occurs through nature, through poetry, through humanity, through art, through the body.

Poetry may provide a helpful framework for understanding revelation. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that “every word was once a poem.” Every word is a symbol that tries to express an idea that is beyond the word. The word “water” is not water itself; rather, water is that clear, wet, liquid substance that we call “water.” This is what Emerson meant when he said that “every word was once a poem”: every word is an attempt to manifest something that is beyond the word. (As Heschel said about his own poetry: the words are meant to evoke a sense of the Idea beyond the words.) The same is also true of nature: nature is a symbolic manifestation of ideas that are beyond nature. A tree is a symbolic manifestation of rootedness, of breathing, of shade, and many other ideas. Nature is a poem, a symbolic expression of ideas that are beyond physicality.

Revelation, then, happens when we experience the Idea that is beyond the symbol. This experience can only be achieved through physical engagement with the symbol. Thus, revelation happens not intellectually, but bodily—through the experience of nature, through the words of poetry, through interactions with humanity, through the movement of dance, through the sound of music, through the colors, shapes, and lines of art, through the physical sensation of the body. The symbol is a gateway that must be entered in order to experience the Idea beyond the symbol. When a person experiences the Idea—when a person hears the Idea speaking the words “I am” through the symbol—that is Revelation. The Idea speaks in 1^st person. All intellectual activity (to borrow an idea from Art Green)—all of philosophy, art criticism, even this personal statement—is an attempt to talk about that Idea in the 3^rd person: “It is…” “God is…” “Revelation is….”

Torah, then, is not Revelation itself, but rather is a symbol of Revelation—a symbolic manifestation through which a person may be able to experience the Idea of Universe, a gateway through which a person may be able to hear the Voice of the Universe saying: “I am.” As Buber explained it: Torah is an I-It document that is intended to point to the I-Thou relationship between God and the world. Torah isn’t Revelation itself, but rather is a symbol through which we may access Revelation.

I began this section by saying that Revelation must, by necessity, precede Commandment. Having explained what I mean by Revelation, I shall now attempt to explain the rest of this statement.

Commandment is a constructive, synthetic attempt to experience (or re-experience) Revelation. Commandment can be understood in two categories: [1] the ethical (which, as we shall see, corresponds to Elohim), and [2] the ritual (which corresponds to Adonai). (Revelation, we should recall at this point, transcends these two aspects of God—it is “that split-second moment of simultaneously experiencing both God’s transcendence and God’s immanence.”)

To understand the ethical commandments, I rely on the thinking of Hermann Cohen. Cohen, an intellectual disciple of the ethicist Immanuel Kant, praised Judaism as a religion of reason. Writing at the height of Enlightenment rationalism, Cohen (and Kant) believed that everything in the universe could be understood through reason. Kant is famous for his idea of the categorical imperative—that a person’s ethical duty can be discerned through logic. Therefore, actions that are logically ethical (as determined by reason) are actions that are categorically ethical for all persons (and thus imperative). This emphasis on ethics led Cohen and his colleagues to believe (almost messianically) that reason would lead to the betterment and perfection of the world—an idea was expressed in the Union Prayerbook (1940) as follows: “Fervently we pray that the day may come … when corruption and evil shall give way to integrity and goodness, when superstition shall no longer enslave the mind, nor idolatry blind the eye.”

Cohen Judaized Kant’s ideas. Cohen believed that we live in the World-As-It-Is (represented by natural law and the human condition), while ever aware of the World-As-It-Should-Be (represented by ethics and the ideal). Cohen understood that there had to be a grounding field in which both of these Worlds stood—that, since natural law/the human condition and ethics/the ideal do in fact coexist, there has to be an idea that transcends and encompasses them both. Cohen labeled this idea: God. In this way, God is neither the World-As-It-Is nor the World-As-It-Should-Be, but rather, God is the process by which the former becomes the later. God is the bridge that enables us to cross from the World-As-It-Is into the World-As-It-Should-Be. And since the World-As-It-Should-Be represents ethics, crossing that bridge is a categorical imperative—a duty of every human being. Crossing that bridge is a commandment.

This idea is expressed elsewhere in Jewish tradition in non-philosophical terms. Tzedakah, I often tell my students, is different than charity. “Charity” comes from the Latin word caritas, meaning something like “love.” Tzedakah, on the other hand, comes from the Hebrew word tzedek, meaning “justice.” In this way, tzedakah isn’t only a loving thing to do, it’s the just thing to do. Tzedakah isn’t only a nice thing to do, it’s the right thing to do. It is required of us. Similarly, a classmate of mine likes to teach that, as Jews, when a person asks us for money, we’re relieved of the difficult internal deliberation of having to decide whether or not this person deserves our help. Rather, as Jews, we’re simply obligated to give. I heard Ruth Messinger explain it thus: a Jew doesn’t dispense of his/her tzedakah obligation by writing a large check at the beginning of the year. Rather, giving tzedakah is like using a muscle: it has to be exercised regularly in order to remain strong.

In other areas of ethics, Judaism requires a similarly high level of obligation. Whereas most states in the US do not have a Duty to Rescue law, Judaism requires that if you see a person in need of help, you are required to help (even if that means calling 911, rather than jumping on the tracks to save him). Whereas popular culture in the US is awash with celebrity gossip, Judaism strictly forbids three categories of unethical speech—lashon ha-ra (spreading hurtful truth), motzi shem ra (libel), and rechilut (triangulation).

I stated earlier that the ethical commandments correspond to God as Elohim. Elohim, let us recall, may be referred to as The Source and Substance of All Creation, the impersonal aspect of God, the force that keeps planets as well as electrons in their orbits, the Kabbalistic sefirah of “din / discipline / restraint.” Elohim is strict—natural law is maintained, regardless of how we may feel about it. So too, our ethical obligation (the categorical imperative) is strict—we’re required to give, regardless of how we may feel about it, because it’s the right thing to do. One might imagine that ethics would correspond to Adonai, rather than Elohim—after all, giving tzedekah feels not like “strictness,” but like generosity. But here, we should remember that we’re talking about tzedek, not caritas. Observing the ethical commandments is the right thing to do, rather than a nice thing to do. Our ethical obligation is strictly defined.

In order to understand the nature and purpose of the second category of Commandment—the ritual—it is necessary to undertake a short discussion on the limits of reason. Champions of the Enlightenment believed that reason—applied to the fullest possible extent and in all areas of thinking—could save humanity from its baser instincts. If every human being undertook to reason his/her way to the categorical imperative, we would live in a perfectly ethical society. As I mentioned earlier, Cohen and his colleagues believed in reason with almost messianic fervor. But Cohen and his colleagues did not live to see the horrors of the 20^th century—two World Wars, 11 million people murdered in the Holocaust, the instant annihilation of 100,000 people at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and many other horrors. As Eugene Borowitz has put it, the champions of pure reason committed “a gross overestimation of human goodness and discernment.” Thus, reason alone could never be the single source of Revelation. A second category of Commandment (the ritual) is needed to balance the scales that pure reason—take to its extreme end—would otherwise tip.

To understand the ritual commandments, I rely on the thinking of Franz Rosenzweig. Rosenzweig served as an infantryman during WWI, an experience that greatly shaped his philosophy. He argued that any philosophical system that relies on rationality alone ignores our inherent human fear of death. While rationality can take us to great heights, death and infinity are beyond the horizon of reason. They are, by nature, unknowable. Thus, Rosenzweig (and other existentialist philosophers) argued that philosophy must start with the Self, with that which makes the person an “I.”

Building on this Self-oriented philosophy, Rosenzweig argued thus: Jewish ritual, when approach only on the level of reason, is completely impersonal. It is a set of dry, objective statues, addressed at once to everyone and to no one in particular. And in order for a ritual to become personal—to become addressed to the individual, to feel personally commanded—it must be taken down off the shelf and tried on for size. It must be practiced. No amount of explaining could simulate the experience of lighting Shabbat candles, or shaking the lulav, or wrapping tefilin (though explanation may heighten all of theses experiences). Thus, ritual becomes meaningful not through reason, but through practice. Rosenzweig was careful to note that even with practice, some rituals may never cause a person to feel as if that ritual was personally addressed to him/her. Even so, without practice, the likelihood of feeling personally addressed—of feeling personally commanded—is infinitely diminished. Using Rosenzweig’s model, we may speak of rituals not as commandments, but rather as invitations: invitations that we must opened in order to see if they’re addressed to us.

Rosenzweig’s idea—that ritual becomes personal commandment/invitation only through practice—is echoed elsewhere in Jewish tradition. Halakhah—the term for Jewish law—may literally be translated as “the path” or “the way of walking.” In order to engage with the halakhah, one must be engaged with the path—moving, exploring the road. Notice that halakhah is not a destination—as if a halakhically observant life is a place that can be reached, a goal that can be ultimately fulfilled—but rather, it is the journey, the road itself. A person may be said to be halakhic so long as s/he is somewhere along the road—so long as s/he is trying rituals on for size, trying to experience the commandments/invitations to see where they are personally addressed to him/her.

I stated earlier that the ritual commandments/invitations correspond to God as Adonai. Let us recall that Adonai may be referred to as “The God Within,” the personal aspect of God, the aspect of God that is sympathetic to prayer and suffering, the Kabbalistic sefirah of “chesed / love / boundlessness.” An invitation is an outpouring of love, an opportunity to draw near to God. The ritual commandments represent an opportunity to find one’s name personally inscribed on an invitation from God.

Adonai/Elohim are ultimately One; similarly, the ethical and the ritual commandments are ultimately one. Neither one is complete without the other. The Torah recognizes this fact, and makes no distinction between these two categories. Thus, what is perhaps the core ethical maxim of the Torah—“Tzedek tzedek tirdof / Justice, justice you shall pursue” (Deut. 16:20)—is bookended by two ritual commandments: a description of the pilgrimage festivals, and a prohibition against idolatry. As Gunther W. Plaut writes in Torah: A Modern Commentary: “both [ethical and ritual matters] are seen to pertain equally to the fulfillment of Israel’s covenantal obligations. … Law is religion, and religion is law.”

I began this section on Commandment by stating that Commandment is a constructive, synthetic attempt to experience (or re-experience) Revelation. I will now attempt to explain the process by which Commandment can lead to Revelation, and Who or What is doing this synthetic construction.

Revelation can happen (but doesn’t always happen) when a person undertakes an ethical or ritual Commandment. The commandments are an opportunity to experience the All-ness beyond our duality. The commandments (like nature, like language, like art) are symbolic manifestations of an Idea beyond the symbol. And only by engagement with the symbol—only by practicing ethics and rituals—can we enter the gateway and encounter the Idea. In this way, Jewish practice (both ethical and ritual) is a constructive, synthetic attempt to create (or re-create) the experience of God’s All-ness that occurs in spontaneous moments of Revelation.

Who or What is doing this synthetic construction? Both we can God are aware that our dualistic world is only a refraction of God’s Unity. God desires our unity through the duality; we as humans (whether consciously, subconsciously, or if on no other level than our own inevitable return to the “the procession … along the grand roads of the universe”) desire God’s Unity through the duality. The synthetic construction of Commandment is thus created and maintained in both directions: from God to humans and from humans to God. This is the nature of Covenant: it is, by definition, a partnership.

Prayer too (as a ritual), is a synthetically constructed attempt to experience Revelation. I spoke earlier about Art Green’s notion that philosophy is an attempt to speak in the 3^rd person (“God is…”) about the ultimate 1^st person address of Revelation (“I am…”). Prayer, in Green’s model, bridges the gap between 3^rd and 1^st person, by addressing God directly in the 2^nd person (“You are…”). When we speak of God not as some distant, abstract concept (in the 3^rd person), but rather as a nearby, relational Being to whom we can address ourselves (in the 2nd person), we approach the gateway of hearing “I am…” (in the 1^st person).

Why be Jewish?

Judaism provides a particular set of gateways for experiencing Revelation. They are no better or no worse than any other religious tradition’s set of gateways. They constitute, to borrow a phrase from Larry Hoffman, our “cultural fabric.” They belong to every Jew, even if s/he was raised on only the thinnest thread of our cultural fabric. The goal is to become rich with threads so as to see a larger swath of the tapestry, so as to discover more and more gates to Revelation.

I’d like to conclude with an idea from Franz Rosenzweig, and a story from David Sacks. In addition to his philosophical writing, Rosenzweig also established the model of the Lehrhaus—a place of Jewish learning where the Self is as much a part of the learning as the mind. Yes, the goal was to acquire more and more threads so as to see the richness of the tapestry, but moreover, the goal was to see more and more of the tapestry so as to find oneself within the fabric.

David Sacks deftly illustrates this point in a story: A certain Rebbe ran the foremost Yeshivah at the height of the golden age of Chassidut. And all of the brightest minds came to him from all over Poland to become illuminated with Torah. One afternoon, the Rebbe contacted the father of one of his students and said: “I’m expelling you son.” The father responded: “Is he not learning well?” The Rebbe: “He may be the brightest student I’ve ever had.” The father: “Then why are you expelling him?” The Rebbe: “Because I noticed that when he learns, there are no tears in his eyes.”

Jewish tradition suggests that when a person cries, the Gates of Universe are wide open. This then is our goal: to enlighten our eyes with Torah; to approach the Gates of the Universe; to feel that beyond the symbolic duality through which we experience the world, everything is part of the One.

Baruch sheim k’vod malchuto l’olam va-ed.