As I wrote in last month’s article, the traditional theological position that the Torah was revealed quite literally in discrete words and letters, commanded by God to a people who are obligated to be obedient to God, was countered by a theology of religious naturalism. As Mordecai Kaplan saw it, human nature is endowed with an innate religious impulse; religion flows naturally out of the everyday activities of human beings and their communities. For Kaplan, there was first and foremost a Jewish people, and this people created its religion. The question arises, though, that if revelation is accessible to human intellect, then what is so special about the Torah? Kaplan was aware of this problem. The Torah is unique, he says, because it is ours: Israel’s characteristic and cumulative vision of the best we can imagine for our lives. Other communities have their “truth,” and we have ours. The Torah deals with ultimate questions of human existence in a global fashion. And its answers, which arise out of human nature and are not divine commandments, come from Israel’s collective life over the millennia.

But these two approaches to Jewish theology – the traditional view that grants complete and unquestioned authority to the Torah on the one hand, and religious naturalism on the other – are both incomplete, and some argued that they are equally dissatisfying.

A middle ground was developed over the early years of the 20th century, principally by Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) and Abraham Joshua Heschel (1915-1972). Rosenzweig, working with his friend and colleague Martin Buber, saw revelation as the outcome of an “I-Thou” relationship (to use Buber’s terminology) between the personal God of the Bible and the biblical community, and then with any human being who is willing to enter into it. It is a mutual relationship, but it does not reveal any form of behavioural code; it doesn’t tell us what to do. There is no commandment, just a relationship of mutuality and meaning. The Torah is not, says Rosenzweig, the revelation, it is Israel’s response to revelation. Neither Buber nor Rosenzweig thought that law and commandment are part of the content of revelation, but Rosenzweig believed that the idea of “being commanded” is in itself part of the nature of the revelation. Buber disagreed; for him, God’s love for Israel is all that is needed to inspire Israel to live in a certain way.

Abraham Joshua Heschel’s version of this middle option is different. He accepts the personal, transcendent God of the Bible, but he insists that God is totally beyond human thought (and in this, he is a theological heir of the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides). We can never “know” God or describe God in any adequate way. So, for Heschel, the worst thing one could think is that our theological concepts are literally true or even adequate. The Bible is itself a human interpretation of some primal revelation that is beyond human comprehension. Judaism thus reflects “a minimum of revelation and a maximum of interpretation.” The source of authority is not the words we read in the text, but Israel’s understanding of the text. But despite a philosophical scepticism, Heschel takes very seriously the legal system that has developed out of the text.

Both Rosenzweig and Heschel reject both the traditional view and the religious naturalistic view, but they disagree with each other as to what was revealed. For Rosenzweig, what was revealed was God’s presence in an intimate, commanding (though not legislating) relationship with the Jewish people. For Heschel, the Torah represented God’s will for Israel, though not as some kind of blueprint to be followed, but rather our ancestors and our own understanding of what the Torah contains. The Torah is uniquely authoritative, not as the explicit word of God but as a response to (Rosenzweig) or expression of (Heschel) God’s concern for Israel, and by extension for humanity.

In their different ways, they avoid some of the theological problems of the traditional and the naturalistic views. But even so, pluralism, historical development and ambiguity are inevitable.

With freedom from the traditional, authoritarian view comes responsibility – and anxiety.

And that anxiety is a familiar place for modern people like us who seek some kind of authentic relationship with our tradition, without the framework of revelatory certainty on the one hand, or Jewish law that must be obeyed on the other. But, I would argue, this uncertainty and anxiety give us more, not less, of a reason to engage with our tradition. We can find it in the “myth” that Neil Gillman sees as central to the ongoing theology of the Jewish people. The Jewish myth (which we know to be a myth but still find a compelling way to organise our understanding of the world) is embodied in our practice and our texts. It is our way of meeting a world that might otherwise be nothing but chaos without meaning. The Jewish myth is not in any sense objectively true, but it provides a framework of meaning that is a step beyond the straightforward understanding of what is true. For me, I suppose, it is the uncertainty and the argument themselves that are the most compelling aspect of Jewish engagement, and what I enjoy the most about studying it.

Rabbi Gershon Silins

Thoughts for the Week

Last month, I began the exploration of revelation, a critical idea in Jewish theology (and in theology in general), and this month’s column continues it. The concluding thought last month was that divine revelation, the communication by God to

humanity, is for Jews bound up in the picture of God we get from the Hebrew Bible. But if our image of God is based on the biblical description, then revelation is not only possible but necessary. This month, the discussion continues.

I think most modern people would prefer to think of revelation as something that continues, with each generation understanding the world more completely, and humanity improving. And although Progressive Jews might say that God can be described as “speaking,” it is only in a metaphorical sense. But from the Biblical point of view, revelation is an event, not a process. It happened once and everything that we can learn from God comes from that event, and the stories we tell about it. The story of what our ancestors experienced in Egypt and at Sinai is our story, and we recount it daily, and annually at the Festivals, in order to allow it to live on with immediacy.

Though its lessons may be eternal, the event was historical – something that happened in the past to people who are no longer living. Our ancestors knew that God is beyond history, but they could distinguish certain moments in which God becomes manifest, and they thought that God was the source of those events, and that their meaning was revealed to us and it is through us and our particularity as Jews that they enter the world.

Particularity, however, is a difficult concept for modern people because, along with our Jewish story, we have inherited the Platonic, classical Greek philosophical understanding of the world, which tells us that only that which is timeless, unchanging, eternal, universal and abstract has genuine reality.

True reality is a world beyond the senses and accessible only through reason. What we see and experience in the world as it is presented to our senses is but a shadow of reality.

But the biblical view is that this world, the world of our everyday experience, is of primary significance, even to God, and so from this understanding, it makes sense that God might relate to particular people in a historic context. The two viewpoints are at odds. Neither, however, is literally true, and both are created out of human experience in the attempt to capture an elusive or hidden reality. The biblical understanding is that the world of everyday experience, charged at times with eternal meaning, is therefore not “less than” a timeless, other world that we can only know through reason.

The next question that arises is, which reported event of revelation carries a freight of meaning that is rich enough to be considered God’s message to us, or to people in general. As Jews, we principally rely on the revelatory event at Sinai, as interpreted and carried forward to us through a chain of tradition that may be human but is (our tradition asserts) divinely inspired. Though we respect other religions, we don’t grapple with the complexities of the revelations that give rise to, for example, Christianity or Islam.

But we have a difficulty that is similar to theirs, in that the proof of the validity of our version of revelation is the revelation itself, a kind of circular proof that relies on itself in order to prove itself. We know the biblical account is true because – it’s in the Bible! The traditional, orthodox view is that the Torah was revealed quite literally in discrete words and letters, and is unequivocally binding on all Jews, and even those commandments that make sense to the rational mind are not valid because they appear to be rational, but only because they are commanded by God to a people who are obligated to be obedient to God.

A strong counter-argument to this view is that of Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Re-constructionist Judaism in the mid-twentieth century in the United States. Kaplan did not believe in the supernatural, but he was s religious naturalist in that he believed that human nature is endowed with an innate religious impulse; religion flows naturally out of everyday activities of human beings and their communities. For Kaplan, there was first and foremost a Jewish people, and this people created its religion.

This does not imply that religion is a fiction – Kaplan views all of this natural religious activity as informed by the work of God, who is not a supernatural being, but a “naturalist” God, who functions as a process or power within the natural world order. For Kaplan, that process is the human striving for evergrowing levels of perfection, which we might term “salvation”, or in biblical terms, “ge’ulah”, And so, Kaplan’s definition of God is “the power that makes for salvation”. Kaplan had an enormous influence on mid-twentieth century Judaism, and his book Judaism as a Civilisation is persuasive.

Rabbi Gershon Silins