Opening remarks from the Jewish Theology class called God Is I am teaching this semester. This is a very large project and I am only now trying to form its basic contours. As a confirmed halakhist, Im going to need some help along the way...especially because there is no way that I can properly index all the necessary content alone. ** As this series of classes begins, I want to say that I am approaching them with a great deal of trepidation. Like many other observant Jews, halakhah is what I live and breath; like many other observant Jews, halakhah has also been my major sparring partner. Today, religious arguments within the Jewish world are almost always arguments about Jewish law or about the authority upon which Jewish legal texts are based. What is almost entirely absent from any of these discussions is substantive conversation about how Jews should and should not relate to God. Though God is not entirely hidden from our discussions, neither is God at its centre. The divine presence is always in our peripheral vision, which is to say: close enough to know it is there without really knowing its form. And why should we look directly? The Torah itself says that staring would be lethal. We are the people of naaseh venishma, the ones who do before they comprehend, the ones who put action before reflection. When God restricts himself to the four cubits of halakhah, why should we do otherwise? If six million deaths does not make us lose faith, it may leave many of us declaring to heaven along with Yosl Rakover, I love you, but I love your Torah more. After centuries, the world created by the rabbis is so very deep that it is almost enough to overwhelm Gods world. Why not just stay inside with our books and our commentaries and once in a while mouth out the words, Yitgadal veYitkadash shemei rabbah? Who needs more than four cubits anyway? Perhaps no one needs God more than people who attend shabbat morning services. In the last decade there has been a great increase in the number of independent minyanim, and each minyan functions according to a set of guiding principles. Some minyanim pivot on gender equality or pluralism, but there are also a set of minyanim for whom the central principle is that services should be as short and as efficient as possible, for whom the minyans end goal is to have the minyan end. A minyan can have a mechitzah, not have a mechitzah, or have two mechitzahs, but without Gods presence these services are just projections of our own ideologies onto an arbitrary ritual status quo. Neither revolution nor preserving tradition is a guarantee that we are engaging the divine. Worse, it is entirely possible to use zeal for a particular religious praxis as a way of distracting ourselves from thinking about God directly. Devoting oneself to a religious movement can seem the same as devoting oneself to the religion itself. There are so many things to enrage us in the Jewish world—the state of Jewish education, demographic crises, political scandals, intolerance, treatment of queer Jews—that one can feel like one is fulfilling ones religious mission just by being level-headed. Indeed, we *do* have a responsibility to reform the Jewish world for the better. But the need to solve local problems does not absolve us of the need to engage with the core of the religion itself, with the faith that lies behind the words. In the short term, the risks of ignoring this faith are not so great. The rabbinic corpus is large enough that we can pretend that talking about Jewish law is the same as talking about Judaism in its entirety. But if we continue to ignore faith, if we only gesture at God with snippets of Heschel or with creative reinterpretations of the meaning of Mount Sinai, then we turn a pillar of Judaism into a mere caricature, reducing thought to afterthought. To be fair, Jews have been playing with God for a long time. In the Torah and in rabbinic literature, we have imagined Gods behaviour, his conversations, and his temperaments. We have argued theology with one another, but theology was not usually the main reason for our community fragmenting. The Talmud even allows for a God who not only respects but desires sons who come together and defeat him. But I think what has happened in the past century is that we have mistaken a God who allows us to revise our relationship with him for a God who simply fades into the background of praxis and falls silent. Inside our four cubits of halakhah, Gods myriad faces and names seem not only impossible to approach but downright non-Jewish, as unworthy of the rigour of our practice. In searching for a God who governs halakhah alone, we are bound to be disappointed by divinity conveyed in aggadah. And disappointment is, I think, where most Jews stand in their relationships with God. Sometimes we say that we envy a Christian God, a God who loves unconditionally, a God whose image never fluctuates, who has a recognizable form and whose body is accessible. We are desirous of a Judaism that has strong things to say about God even while more than two millennia of exactly the sources that we seek stand before us. We do this—and it is the goal of this class to attempt to correct this—because we view Jewish theology as a loose string of arguments and counterarguments without ever really stopping to think about what any one vision of the Jewish God really *feels* like. Entangled in arguments about divine existence and divine simplicity and divine knowledge and divine will, we eschew all images of the divine without taking seriously the admission of Maimonides and Saadia Gaon alike that descriptions of God are there for *us*, there for us because images persist in being vital for all relationships—between human and human and between human and God. Though the Torah describes a God who feels, we feel unable to engage in such behaviour. Instead, we halfheartedly repeat the phrases in our siddurim, praise a God who we know should not need praise, and hope that services end in a timely manner or at least have some nice singing in them. I believe that Judaisms many images of God are there not to obfuscate a rationally untenable position, but because God is perceived in many ways and each of those ways is valid and deep and worthy of our attention. I believe in a God who is a Melekh and a God who is a Shekhinah, an Adon Olam and a Makom, an Echad and an Emet. What I want to emerge from this class—both for you and for me—is enough language to describe each of these images of God that we can make them real for ourselves in daily life, that they can appear not simply as historical Jewish descriptions of the divine, but as the divine itself. What I am searching for in this class is better language. I hope you will help me find it.
Posted on: Mon, 24 Feb 2014 17:14:24 +0000
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