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

Thoughts for the Week

Last month, I wrote about a book I had rediscovered on my bookshelf, Sacred Fragments: Recovering Theology for the Modern Jew by Rabbi Neil Gillman. The introduction discusses Mordecai Kaplan’s teaching that there are three possible ways of identifying with a religious community: by behaving, by believing, or by belonging. Traditional Jews identify principally through behaving, progressive Jews principally by belonging.

But what about believing? Are there ideas about God and the world that we, as progressive Jews, adhere to, whether or not we acknowledge them? Gillman explores some of these ideas in his book.

The first chapter is an analysis of the concept of revelation: what really happened? On Gillman’s account, without revelation, Judaism would be merely a matter of peoplehood and culture, essentially not a religion at all. Revelation is some kind of act or communication that brings God into relationship with human beings. And it is the particular revelatory event that a religion accepts as authentic (as  opposed to those it dismisses) that distinguishes one religion from another, whether it be God’s voice at Sinai, or the parables of Jesus, or the call to Mohammed in the Arabian desert. And how we understand revelation also determines how we deal with religious authority.

For Jews, whose primary source of information about how God was understood by our ancestors is the Torah, things are made more difficult because the Torah understanding of God is diverse and sometimes contradictory. But that obscures the more crucial questions: is it possible to believe in revelation? Did any such event ever actually take place? And what was revealed – was it God’s presence, or God’s will, or God’s place in a historical event? The answer to any of these questions will affect the way we understand the others.

Is revelation possible? For Gillman, this question begins with asking whether God creates. There is no reason why there is something rather than nothing (a question taken up in Jim Holt’s book Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story). From a religious perspective, one might say that if God created the world, God needed something to exist besides God, and if that’s the case, then perhaps God needed to communicate with that created world, which includes us.

The Hebrew Bible describes this communication as being filled with emotion: anger, pleasure, sorrow, disappointment, frustration. God in the Bible is personally involved in the events of history, and desires certain outcomes. But because human beings were created with free will (and, as Gillman notes, nothing in creation matches that for surprise) God’s plans are tentative and conditional, even though God’s power is assumed.

The ways in which that communication (assuming we accept that idea) might take place are also diverse. Traditional Jews would insist that God spoke the very words recorded in Torah. After all, to deny that God could speak is to deny God a power that even human beings have, and this would deny the biblical God entirely. Progressive Jews would more likely say that if God can be described as “speaking”, it is only in a metaphorical sense. But in either case, if our image of God is based on the biblical description, then revelation is not only possible but necessary.

As I explore this theological pathway, I’ll be interested to hear about your thoughts on these things.

Rabbi Gershon Silins

One of the few things I have been enjoying about moving house is the excitement I feel when I rediscover something I already own. It’s better than buying something new because I already know I like it. It’s especially nice when I have forgotten that I owned it, and even better if it’s a book that I liked when I read it, and actually need now. The other day I was talking to a young man who is interested in Judaism, not (I think) to convert, at least not yet, but to begin to understand some of the theological and philosophical issues that he is grappling with in his life. I have a number of books I recommend to people who are interested in Judaism, but none of them seemed to suit his needs. And then, on a pile of unsorted books, I saw Sacred Fragments: Recovering Theology for the Modern Jew by Rabbi Neil Gillman. The book dates from 1989, but it deals with universal and perhaps eternal concerns. A few chapter titles give a sense of what it is about: “Revelation: What Really Happened?”; “Religious Authority: Who Commands?”; “Encountering God: Existentialism”; “Suffering: Why does God Allow It?” These are all issues that have continued to be important despite the passage of thirty years.

In his introduction, Gillman describes his intellectual history and his relationship to Jewish theology. He was raised in French Canada in a nominally Jewish household, and discovered, in his undergraduate experience in the early 1950’s, the excitement of philosophy and literature. Jewish life seemed an irrelevant intellectual anachronism. And then he went to a lecture by a very influential (though now largely ignored) Jewish philosopher named Will Herberg, who himself had found his way back to Judaism only a few years before. Herberg’s book Judaism and Modern Man (1951) was a personal reworking of Jewish philosophical thought in terms of the existentialism of Buber and Rosenzweig, two important pioneers of Jewish philosophy. Herberg’s book connected Jewish philosophy with all forms of serious thought: Kierkegaard, Tillich, Sartre, and their predecessors, Plato and Aristotle, David Hume and John Locke. Heady stuff. And through Herberg, the Bible came alive for Gillman, who went on to study with Mordecai Kaplan and Abraham Joshua Heschel.

Gillman says that the issue of the legitimate role of theology and philosophy in Judaism was brought forward by Kaplan, who used to teach that there are three possible ways of identifying with a religious community: by behaving, by believing, or by belonging. For Kaplan, the primary form of Jewish identification is belonging – the sense of kinship that binds Jews together across geographical and temporal boundaries. This was controversial, and I’m not certain that I fully agree with it either. But it was particularly galling for traditional Jews, for whom “behaving” is primary, and determined fully by Talmudic and halakhic literature. Mere “belonging” is, they would argue, simply emotional attachment with neither demands nor commitment.

This of course misses the third criterion, believing. Believing has not generally been the primary way Jews identify, despite the efforts of Maimonides to create a criterion of belief based on his Thirteen Principles of Faith, which he insisted comprise the minimal belief system that every Jew must adhere to. But as much as Maimonides is respected in both traditional and non-traditional Jewish circles, generally speaking, Jews don’t debate belief, they debate practice and authority, in the context of Jewish law. Jewish beliefs about the nature of God, for example, have long been diverse, and even the Hebrew Bible alone demonstrates significant changes in the nature of the God who is at the centre of the story.

And, as Gillman points out, where the Roman Catholic Mass has a section called the “Credo,” meaning, “I believe,” there is no parallel statement of belief for the Jew. To be honest, most of us don’t give much thought to what we might believe about God. “Of course we believe in God!” we generally say. And then we talk about which of the Chanukah candles should be lit first.

But it is not true that Jews don’t have theology, it’s that it is generally expressed as a verb rather than a noun. It is not an accident that the principal Jewish concern is “halakha,” the Way, not “Da’at,” the belief. And this is an important challenge to progressive Judaism, which has largely moved away from specific Jewish practice toward a definition of Jewish identity based on belonging.

Gillman notes that the attempt to create a contemporary philosophy of Judaism will be controversial, and is doomed to be unsatisfactory. But to me that is not necessarily a bad thing. Speaking for myself, I’m more comfortable with interesting questions than persuasive answers.

Rabbi Gershon Silins

Thoughts for the Week

It’s surprising how often this happens to me: I pick up a book to read that I think will be completely non-Jewish, and it turns out to have some Jewish connection (can it be because I’m a rabbi?).

This happened to me yet again when I began to read Hamlet in Purgatory by Stephen Greenblatt. You might say, well, rabbi, what did you expect from a Professor Greenblatt? But I didn’t expect it. Greenblatt, a Shakespeare scholar, has written widely outside the bounds of Shakespearean scholarship, and one of my favourite books ever was his book The Swerve, about the discovery by Poggio Bracciolini of a manuscript of a long-lost classical poem, Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura (“On the Nature of the Universe”). I can imagine that this doesn’t meet everyone’s description of a page-turner, but it was a real adventure in popular scholarship, well-written and exciting. So I expected the same of Hamlet in Purgatory.

But if I thought this book would take me away from my Jewish interests, I was proven wrong almost immediately. The preface speaks of the universal need somehow to come to terms with death, and Greenblatt talks about the Jewish experience of death, and his own family’s experience as well.

He recalls that his father, rather surprisingly, left a sum of money to an organisation that would say kaddish for him, clearly not expecting his sons to do it. This had the ironic effect of impelling Greenblatt to do so, which he might otherwise not have.

He says, “I … did not know why Jews prayed for the dead at all. After all, biblical Judaism has only what seems like a vague and imaginatively impoverished account of the afterlife.

The Hebrew Bible speaks of a place called sheol, often translated by Christians as “Hell,” but it is not a place of torture and has very few of the features of the Christian or classical underworld.” In addition, it appears that the kaddish as we know it is relatively recent, and apparently arose in its modern use as a prayer of mourners in the wake of the horrors of the crusades in the Rhineland in the 12th century. At the time, Jews began to keep memorial books in which the martyrs of that period, along with benefactors of the community, were commemorated, with inscriptions linked to the kaddish, and the recitation of that text began to include all the dead. As Christianity began to formalise the practice of praying for the dead in order to alleviate their sufferings in Purgatory, Jews began reciting the kaddish, perhaps for similar reasons, if not in such in organised way. It is for this reason that sons are given the responsibility of saying kaddish for their parents; indeed, a son is traditionally referred to as a man’s “kaddish,” the one who will take on this responsibility after the father is dead, caring for him in some undefined afterlife.

Greenblatt quotes John Donne, during whose lifetime very few Jews were dwelling in early modern England, the Jews in England having been officially expelled in 1290. Speaking as though he had personally witnessed it, Donne says, “This is true which I have seen, that the Jews at this day continue … in practice … when one dies, for some certain time after … his son or some other near in blood or alliance, comes to the Altar and there saith and doth something in the behalf of his dead father …” Greenblatt adds that he himself, “who scarcely knows how to pray,” undertook this responsibility for his own father.

When it comes to death, it seems to me that none of us really knows how to pray. Like Greenblatt, we cling to certain traditions as to a rock in a storm, hoping that they will provide us with some sense of certainty when faced with loss. Death, and our response to it, is universal in human society, but our tradition offers us a rock to cling to, without forcing us to accept a theology of death. In its very ambiguity, Judaism provides a supple support in times of trouble and loss that is, in my view, more powerful than a more specific system of belief, such as something like purgatory, would provide.

by Rabbi Gershon Silins

Shabbat is a central facet of Jewish life and identity, a focus of energy and attention (to varying degrees, depending on one’s level of observance) and an indicator of the Jewish framework we choose. It is no less complex for more traditional Jews than it is for us, and indeed, the biblical commandments around Shabbat observance required clarification and generated controversy from the very beginnings of rabbinic Judaism and still do to this day. Apart from the oft-repeated injunction to “do no work” on Shabbat (in Exodus 20:10, 35:2, and Deuteronomy 5:14, among others), the only other specifics mentioned are a few prohibitions such as those against kindling a fire, gathering wood, and plowing. The injunction to “do no work” must have been clear enough to our biblical ancestors, but after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, the biblical rules left many questions that needed to be answered in order to create authoritative Jewish life in a world without the sacred centre of the Temple. The early rabbis disliked grey areas. They sought clarification in the biblical text itself, believing that everything could be found there if you knew how to look for it. In the process, they created the foundation of rabbinic Judaism, which serves as the basis of modern Jewish life; Shabbat observance was a central focus of their efforts.

They saw that the biblical text (in Exodus) sets forth all the various labours that needed to be done to create the tabernacle that travelled with the Israelites in their wandering. These labours became the basis for the work that would be prohibited to be done on Shabbat: 39 basic categories of labour. These activities, and any that were similar or related to them, formed the basis of future Shabbat restrictions. Their choices thus focused Shabbat prohibitions on activities involving creating and destroying, and they added to this list other activities not specifically banned, in their view, but nevertheless inappropriate to the Sabbath. The rabbis also turned the commandments to “keep” and “remember” Shabbat into liturgy, creating the Shabbat services we know today.

Shabbat observance changed in response to the actual living situations of Jews in the lands of our dispersion. Other traditions rose which made significant additions to Shabbat, including the entire “Kabbalat Shabbat” service on Friday night, which came out of the mystical traditions of Safed and the emergence of Kabbalah.

As complicated as Shabbat observance is for the more traditional communities, how much the more so it is for us as progressive Jews. Traditional Shabbat is all about observance, family and community. What kinds of observance make sense for modern Jews? Many of us must work, or choose to do so, on Saturdays, so a traditional version of “rest” is not possible or desirable for us. Shabbat services are (at best) meaningful and lovely, but it isn’t always possible to attend. The familial and community aspects of Shabbat are compelling, but many of us live on our own or with partners who have little interest in religious observance. Making Shabbat for ourselves is hard to do. Some progressive Jews are Shabbat observant in their homes, refraining from doing things that disturb the atmosphere of Shabbat, like using electronics and so forth. Some focus on a Shabbat dinner with its rituals, inviting others to share it with them. Some spend Shabbat reading books and articles on Jewish subjects, making it an opportunity for study and reflection in areas that they don’t always make time for during the week. And of course, whenever we have Shabbat activities at NLJC, I encourage you to come; those activities can be the centre of meaningful Shabbat experience. I’d be interested to hear the ways in which you make Shabbat special for yourselves and your families.

Rabbi Gershon  Silins