Language: The Challenge Discussing God
"Moreover, people who believe in God mean many different things by the word “God,” and they differ even more widely in the role that that belief plays in their lives and what it means in terms of their actions. Conversely, people who deny belief in God mean to state many different things in describing themselves that way, and their denial may be a pervasive part of their lives - they fight belief in God as often as they can and with as many people as they can - or it may be just a minor aspect of their lives.
This is all very confusing. After all, if people mean very different things by the word “God,” they presumably mean very different things by asserting or denying belief in God. Furthermore, the kind of evidence we would look for to convince us of their belief or denial depends crucially on what they mean to assert or deny in the first place. One can legitimately wonder whether people actually share anything when they speak about God or whether God-talk is a series of people using their own private languages, languages that can only be understood and assessed by others if they have the patience to ask each person many questions about what they mean by “God” and why they believe whatever they assert about God...
...One last point will be helpful for our discussion of modern Jewish conceptions of God. Because we have the faculty of memory, our pictures of other human beings can often remain the same long after we lose track of them. That is clearly true for my memory of many of my friends and students in years past and, I presume, it is equally true of their memories of me, unless we happen to see each other years later. If, however, we are still interacting with each other, it is probably important to adjust our images of each other so that our current interactions reflect the new realities. That is clearly the case with parents and children: as children mature, parents need to change their image of them and their expectations of them, or there will be trouble! My point here, then, is that sometimes it is very important to update one’s former image of a person in order to reflect the changed circumstances of our relationship.
The implications of this human analogy are hopefully clear. If we have multiple conceptions of human beings, where, after all, one can point to one physical body as the person in question, how much the more will that be true of God, where no such physical body exists. Furthermore, if various people can and do have multiple and widely varying conceptions of a person, all the more should that be true of God, who presumably is open to interaction with everyone. In fact, in light of the number of people who profess a belief in God, it is amazing that there are not vastly more conceptions of God than there are.
The relevant and trustworthy sources of evidence for any one of those conceptions will depend on the particular description of God, just as it does with human beings. If God is defined as “the Creator of the universe,” for example, the evidence depends on theories of astrophysics. Questions like these are then relevant: Did the world come into being at a given moment, or has it existed eternally? What evidence is relevant to deciding that question – or is the answer to that question completely beyond human capability to know? If, for the sake of argument, physicists find grounds to believe in the Big Bang, is that equivalent to a belief in God as the Creator? On the other hand, if God is portrayed as a powerful and loving, covenantal partner with the People Israel, as most Jewish sources do, what kinds of evidence can and should we look for to make belief in such a divine Partner reasonable? However we answer that question, the nature of the evidence will clearly be different from what we need to demonstrate a divine creative force.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we need to be willing to reconsider our images of God in the past - and especially those of our childhood - in light of our more mature thinking and our added experiences as adults. God may have been “the Man on the Mountain with the flowing white beard” when we were seven or eight, but that will not do for seriously religious and intellectually alive adults – any more than second- or- third-grade mathematics or English skills will suffice for an adult." - from "God in Modern Jewish Thought" by Rabbi Elliot Dorff, PhD
MAIMONIDES (1135-1204): Anthropomorphic Language as Metaphor
"In the first book of the Guide Rambam addresses the language of the Bible, where we frequently find God described in very stark human and physical terms. All this anthropomorphic terminology, he says, it to be interpreted figuratively. The Biblical authors wrote this way because their audience would otherwise have difficulty with the absolute abstraction of a disembodied deity. God is a purely simple essence, not comprising any attributes and not subject to accidents. Therefore, the only statements we can make about God that can be taken literally are those that describe the results of God’s actions, which Rambam terms “attributes of action.” - Rabbi Joel Rembaum, PhD
MORDECAI KAPLAN (1881-1983): GOD AS THE POWER THAT MAKES FOR SALVATION
"Using our everyday experiences, he defines God as “the power that makes for salvation,” that is, the forces within nature and our own human experiences that actualize potential in both nature and people. “Salvation” here does not mean saving from sin, as Christians think that Jesus does; it rather means saving from the limitations and frustrations of life – from illness, poverty, ignorance, immorality, prejudice, etc. So God is the force that transforms the acorn into the oak tree, a bad baseball player into a good one, and an immoral person into a moral one. God is also the natural force that created the universe in the first place and enables it to continue functioning.
Because God is a force of nature and not a person, God cannot command anything. Kaplan therefore understands Judaism’s moral laws as norms built into nature and thus presumably incumbent on all human beings. Judaism’s ritual commandments he interprets as “folkways” that are critically important for a people’s sense of self-identity and therefore should be taught, practiced, and creatively enhanced. They should not, however, be seen as laws to be enforced, for modern societies do not legally require people to identify with any religion, much less to practice a given religion in a particular way. Moreover, because the whole point of folkways is to give people a positive sense of their identity, enforcement would be counterproductive." - Rabbi Elliot Dorff, PhD
MARTIN BUBER (1878-1965): GOD AS MY PARTNER IN DIALOGUE
"Buber’s view of God is virtually the polar opposite of Kaplan’s and Rubenstein’s. God, for Buber, is highly personal. He famously distinguishes between two kinds of relationships that we have with other human beings, with animals, and even with trees. In “I-It” relationships, the I uses the It. For example, if I hire someone to paint my house, I use him to get my house painted, and he uses me to earn a living. There is nothing wrong with such relationships; in fact, life would be impossible without them. However, if that is the only kind of relationship that we have with other human beings, we have lost what is distinctly human in us – namely, the ability to relate to others for the sake of the relationship itself. He calls this “I-Thou” relationships. All human “I-Thou” relationships (e.g., parents-children, spouses, friends) inevitably include some I-It elements in them. The only absolutely pure I-Thou relationship that humans can have, Buber maintains, is with God. People might try to use God to obtain some goal of theirs, but they will never succeed, for God cannot be used. The only authentic relationships we can have with God is of the I-Thou sort. We learn to have such relationships through the I-Thou encounters we have with other human beings (“Every particular Thou is a glimpse through to the eternal Thou”) and through reading the ways in which other people had true encounters with God, especially the accounts of the biblical Prophets and the Hassidim, and Buber therefore writes extensively on both of those Jewish groups." - Rabbi Elliot Dorff
"When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.”
- Martin Buber
"Buber believed that one comes to know God through one's relationships with other people." - My Jewish Learning
ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL (1907-1972): GOD AS WHOLLY OTHER
"God, according to Heschel, can be encountered in three ways: through nature, through God’s word in the Bible, and, most importantly, through sacred deeds. While Kaplan concentrated on the creative forces of nature to find and identify God, Heschel instead focuses on the sublime, the mystery and the glory of nature and the reactions that those aspects of nature engender in us – namely, wonder, awe, and faith. The sublime is “that which we see and are unable to convey” (God in Search of Man, p. 39); it produces in us a response of wonder – “Wow!” The mystery to which Heschel refers is not what we do not yet know, which would lead to inquiry; it rather is the surprise that anything exists at all, which engenders in us a sense of awe or radical amazement – “Oh!” The glory is “the presence, not the essence, of God; an act rather than a quality; a process, not a substance.” It is the experience of God’s abundance of goodness and truth, which produce in us a response of faith – “Yes!”
“God is more immediately found in the Bible as well as in acts of kindness and worship than in the mountains and forests” (ibid., pp. 311-312). But Heschel is anything but a fundamentalist: “The surest way of misunderstanding revelation is to take it literally” (ibid., pp. 178-179). Instead, one must one must see the Bible as the record of human beings being overwhelmed by God and trying to describe their admittedly inadequate understanding of such experiences in their own words: “As a report about revelation, the Bible itself is a midrash [interpretation]” (ibid., p. 185). Revelation is therefore an ongoing process, in which the Bible gives each of us a clue of God’s meaning for our lives each time we study it.
Finally, the most effective way to find God, according to Heschel, is through obeying the commandments and through worship. Piety is a primary way to attain faith: “A Jew is asked to take a leap of action rather than a leap of thought” (ibid., p. 283). Simply obeying the commandments, though, can lead to “religious behaviorism”; to avoid that, one must fulfill the commandments with focused attention (kavvanah), and one must root one’s observance in theological awareness, one’s halakhah in aggadah.
All of these paths to God, however, are only clues to something beyond experience. Ultimately, God is “an ontological presupposition” – that is, a fact about being that we must presuppose before we ever experience anything, let alone think about it. In that way, God is like “thing” or “movement,” both of which we must presuppose before we can experience anything, let along think or talk about it. “The meaning and verification of the ontological presupposition are attained in rare moments of insight” (ibid., p. 114), and the God we encounter through such clues and in such moments is ultimately unknowable: “Our starting point is not the known, the finite, the order, but the unknown within the known, the infinite within the finite, the mystery within the order” (ibid.). God is, then, wholly other from what we know in human experience, but God can be discovered if we are sensitive enough to the clues in nature, the Bible, and in sacred deeds and worship and if those lead us to the insight of the reality of God behind all those phenomena and His importance for our lives." - Rabbi Elliot Dorff
"It is not from experience but from our inability to experience what is given to our mind that certainty of the realness of God is derived…Our certainty is the result of wonder and radical amazement, of awe before the mystery and meaning of the totality of life beyond our rational discerning. Faith is the response to the mystery, shot through with meaning; the response to a challenge which no one can for ever ignore. “The heaven” is a challenge. When you “lift up your eyes on high” you are faced with the question. Faith is an act of man who transcending himself responds to him who transcends the world…
God is the great mystery, but our faith in Him conveys more understanding of Him than either reason or perception is able to grasp…This, indeed, is the greatness of man: to have faith. For faith is an act of freedom, of independence of our own limited faculties, whether of reason or sense-perception. It is an act of spiritual ecstasy, of rising above our own wisdom." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
MARCIA FALK AND ELLEN UMANSKY: GOD AS FEMININE
"Feminism has affected not only Jewish law and Jewish educational and institutional structures, but also Jewish theology. Roots of the feminine aspects of God embedded in the Presence of God (Shekhinah, a feminine noun), articulated in Rabbinic and Kabbalistic texts, ground modern explorations of what it means to take seriously that God is infinite and therefore neither is nor has a body. If one is going to depict God at all in human terms, then, one must do so in both male and female images, recognizing all the while that neither is adequate to the reality of God. That has led people like Marcia Falk to suggest non-human images for God altogether (a spring of water, for example), and it has led other feminist theologians like Ellen Umansky to explore what it would mean to assert both masculine and feminine images of God in both our thought and our prayers." - Rabbi Elliot Dorff
"…My root experience is that God means one thing to me in moments of thought and another in moments of prayer and action. When thinking about God, “God” signifies, among other things, the superhuman (and maybe supernatural) powers of the universe; the moral thrust in human beings; the sense of beauty in life; and the ultimate context of experience…In contrast, when I experience God in prayer or action, the God I encounter is a unique personality who interacts with the world, most especially in commanding everyone to obey the laws of morality and the People Israel to observe the Mitzvot. It is the one, unique God who cannot be reached by generalization…" - Marcia Falk
BARUCH SPINOZA (1632-1677): The All-Encompassing, but Impersonal God
All is God
"God is one, that is, only one substance can be granted in the universe." [I.14]
"Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived." {I.15]
"God is the indwelling and not the transient cause of all things. All things which are, are in God. Besides God there can be no substance, that is, nothing in itself external to God." [I.17]
"Individual things are nothing but modifications of the attributes of God, or modes by which the attributes of God are expressed in a fixed and definite manner." [i.25.]
An Impersonal God
"Nature does not work with an end in view. For the eternal and infinite Being, which we call God or Nature, acts by the same necessity as that whereby it exists...Therefore, as he does not exist for the sake of an end, so neither does he act for the sake of an end; of his existence and of his action there is neither origin nor end." [iv. Preface]
"God is without passions, neither is he affected by any emotion of pleasure or pain...Strictly speaking, God does not love anyone." [V. 17]
"He who loves God cannot endeavour that God should love him in return." [V.19]
ALBERT EINSTEIN (1879-1955): God as the Mystery of the Universe
"I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind." - Einstein
"Scientific research can reduce superstition by encouraging people to think and view things in terms of cause and effect. Certain it is that a conviction, akin to religious feeling, of the rationality and intelligibility of the world lies behind all scientific work of a higher order... This firm belief, a belief bound up with a deep feeling, in a superior mind that reveals itself in the world of experience, represents my conception of God. In common parlance this may be described as "pantheistic." - Einstein
"Your question is the most difficult in the world. It is not a question I can answer simply with yes or no. I am not an Atheist. I do not know if I can define myself as a Pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. May I not reply with a parable? The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe. We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations. I am fascinated by Spinoza's Pantheism. I admire even more his contributions to modern thought. Spinoza is the greatest of modern philosophers, because he is the first philosopher who deals with the soul and the body as one, not as two separate things." - Einstein
"The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the power of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is inpenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms— this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the rank of devoutly religious men." - Einstein
RICHARD RUBENSTEIN (1924- ): GOD AFTER THE HOLOCAUST
"Rubenstein, in sharp contrast [to Kaplan], roots his view of God in the Holocaust, a manifestation of evil if there ever was one. He maintains that the fact that God did not intervene to prevent the slaughter of millions of innocents finally and indubitably proves that the traditional Jewish notion of a God who intervenes in history is false. The only part of the traditional God we can still legitimately believe in is the God of nature, but that God is not necessarily benevolent. On the contrary, the communities and rites of Judaism are important not so much to celebrate happy events, but to enable us to cower together and gain strength from one another as we cope with the tragedies in life, tragedies like illness, earthquakes, hurricanes, etc." - Rabbi Elliot Dorff
Modern Jewish Atheism: "You Don't Need to Believe in God to Believe in Judaism" by Benjy Cannon
I grew up in a Modern Orthodox community. While the day school I attended was devoutly pluralistic, I was wrapping tefillin (phylacteries), praying three times a day, and keeping strictly kosher. My faith in God was the center of my life and my Judaism. Eight years later, I’m an atheist, but my commitment to Judaism is just as strong.
The turning point was in my first ninth grade Jewish history class. I had just come from a Tanakh (Bible) class in which we had analyzed God’s directive to Joshua that he conquer Canaan. It was the first course I had ever taken in Jewish history, taught by a PhD in Anthropology of Religion, where we were to discuss the origins of the Torah. The teacher started the class by saying that our first unit would be on who wrote the Torah, and when. She was met with collective gasps. “This is first and foremost a history class,” she replied. “That means we’re going to talk about what we have evidence for. I don’t want to discredit anyone’s beliefs, but empirically everything we know points to the Torah being written by multiple authors over the course of hundreds of years.”
It was a shock to my system. I had grown up believing in the Torah’s divine origins. But hearing a different story from a Jewish history teacher in a class in my Jewish day school meant that it was okay to question, okay to doubt. That revelation started me on my path to Jewish atheism.
After all, if I could question the Torah’s divine origin, there were surely other aspects of Judaism that I could question. From my kashrut to God’s existence, I doubted, questioned and slowly changed my views. I started reading Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the “New Atheists,” who disdain religion and extoll the values of faithlessness. A lot of young atheists stop there, denounce and abandon religion, and lambast the faithful.
But I wasn’t content with the New Atheists’ answers. After all, I loved my Jewish upbringing, I loved reading about Judaism every night and I loved the chagim (Jewish holidays) most of all.
What’s more, unlike many atheists, I never felt forced to choose between my Jewish practice and my lack of faith. When I told my Jewish friends and family that I was an atheist, it spurred some interesting conversations, but no one seemed particularly bothered. Belief in God has never been a litmus test for my involvement in Jewish spaces. Questioning and doubting were encouraged by my Jewish day school. And so I joined a proud tradition of Jewish atheists.
Becoming an atheist never curtailed my Jewish practice. Realizing that I didn’t believe in God just forced me to ask why I wanted to keep practicing.
Last week, my friend and I were driving through her neighborhood, where she’d moved a few months ago. She, also a Jew and also an atheist, remarked “I wish I went to church here; it just seems like the best way to get to know the community.” That sentiment gets to the heart of my practice.
Church and synagogues are gateways to community, because religions provide an elegant structure to our lives. This structure is at its best when we are at our most helpless. When a close family member dies, Judaism lays out a period of mourning; the seven-day shiva, followed by thirty days of shloshim, followed by a full year. The whole community knows how to act and how to help; everyone is working from the same protocol to support the grievers. God or no God, I can’t imagine a better way than these Jewish customs to cope with life’s most challenging moments.
Still, my Jewish practice is not what it used to be. I don’t pray every day anymore, keep strictly kosher, or wrap tefillin. That’s because I practice Judaism for myself and my community, not for God. I want to celebrate the chagim because they give me an excuse to be with my family and talk and debate about Jewish issues and their contemporary meanings. I fast on Yom Kippur because it forces me to confront my own and my community’s transgressions. I always try to make a minyan (prayer quorum) because I want to offer the same support to others saying kaddish (mourner's prayer) as I know I’ll get in return.
In that sense, my connection to Judaism is straightforward. I love the ingenuity of its structured life and find comfort in its assurance that I will always have a community to fall back on. I’m not sure that these qualities are unique to Judaism. In fact, I know they’re common to all faith-based communities. But Judaism was the vehicle that showed me religion’s capacity for bringing comfort and mobilizing the collective in times of strife. As an atheist, I feel indescribably fortunate to have that kind of community in my life.