Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition (Franz Rosenzweig Lecture Series) - Softcover

Arthur Green

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0300152329 ISBN 13: 9780300152326

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2010

Synopsis

How do we articulate a religious vision that embraces evolution and human authorship of Scripture? Drawing on the Jewish mystical traditions of Kabbalah and Hasidism, path-breaking Jewish scholar Arthur Green argues that a neomystical perspective can help us to reframe these realities, so they may yet be viewed as dwelling places of the sacred. In doing so, he rethinks such concepts as God, the origins and meaning of existence, human nature, and revelation to construct a new Judaism for the twenty-first century.

About this title

About the Author

Rabbi Arthur Green is professor and rector of the Rabbinical School of Hebrew College in Newton, MA.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Radical Judaism

Rethinking God and Tradition

By ARTHUR GREEN

Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2010 Arthur Green
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-300-15232-6

Contents

Preface....................................................................
ix
Introduction...............................................................
1
1 Y-H-W-H: God and Being...................................................
16
2 Evolution Continues: A Jewish History of "God"...........................
34
3 Torah: Word out of Silence...............................................
79
4 Israel: Being Human, Being Jewish........................................
120
Notes......................................................................
167
Glossary...................................................................
191
Index......................................................................
195

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Y-H-W-H: GOD AND BEING

In the Beginning

I open with a theological assertion. As a religious person I believethat the evolution of species is the greatest sacred drama of all time. Itis a tale—perhaps even the tale—in which the divine waits to bediscovered. It dwarfs all the other narratives, memories, and imagesthat so preoccupy the mind of religious traditions, including our own.We Jews, Christians, and Muslims are all overinvolved with proclaiming—orquestioning—the truth of our own particular stories. DidMoses really receive the Torah from God at Mount Sinai? Did Jesustruly rise from the tomb? Was Muhammad indeed God's chosenmessenger? We refine our debates about these forever, each groupcertain that its own narrative is at the center of universal history. Inthe modern world, where all these tales are challenged, we work outsophisticated and nonliteralist ways of proclaiming our faith in them.But there is a bigger story, infinitely bigger, and one that we all share.How did we get here, we humans, and where are we going? For morethan a century and a half, educated Westerners have understood thatthis is the tale of evolution. But we religious folk, the great tale-tellersof our respective traditions, have been guarded and cool toward thisstory and have hesitated to make it our own. The time has come toembrace it and to uncover its sacred dimensions.

I believe that "Creation," or perhaps more neutrally stated, "origins,"a topic almost entirely neglected in both Jewish and liberalChristian theology of the past century, must return as a central preoccupationin our own day. This indeed has much to do with the ecologicalagenda and the key role that religion needs to play in changingour attitudes toward the world within which we humans live. But italso emerges from our society's growing acceptance of scientific explanations—thoseof the nuclear physicist, the geologist, the evolutionarybiologist, and others—for the origins of the world we haveinherited. The finality of this acceptance, which I share, seeminglymeans the end of a long struggle between so-called scientific andreligious worldviews. This leaves those of us who speak the languageof faith in a peculiar situation. Is there then no connection betweenthe God we know and encounter daily within all existence and theemergence and history of our universe? Does the presence of eternitywe feel (whether we call ourselves "believers" or not) when we standatop great mountains or at the ocean water's edge exist only withinour minds? Is our faith nothing more than one of those big molluskshells we used to put up against our ears, convinced we could hear inthem the ocean's roar? Is our certainty of divine presence, so palpableto the religious soul, merely a poetic affirmation, corresponding tonothing in the reality described by science? We accept the scientificaccount of how we got here, or at least understand that the conversationabout that process and its stages lies within the domain of science.Yet we cannot absent God from it entirely. Even if we have leftbehind the God of childhood, the One who assures and guarantees"fairness" in life, the presence of divinity within nature remains essentialto our perception of reality. A God who has no place in theprocess of "how we got here" is a God who begins in the human mind,a mere idea of God, a post-Kantian construct created to guaranteemorality, to assure us of the potential for human goodness, or forsome other noble purpose. But that is not God. The One of which Ispeak here indeed goes back to origins and stands prior to them,though perhaps not in a clearly temporal sense. A God who underliesall being, who is and dwells within (rather than "who controls" or"oversees") the evolutionary process is the One about which—orabout "Whom"—we tell the great sacred tale, the story of existence.

I thus insist on the centrality of "Creation," but I do so from theposition of one who is not quite a theist, as understood in the classicalWestern sense. I do not affirm a Being or a Mind that exists separatefrom the universe and acts upon it intelligently and willfully. Thisputs me quite far from the contemporary "creationists" or from whatis usually understood as "intelligent design" (but see more on thisbelow). My theological position is that of a mystical panentheist, onewho believes that God is present throughout all of existence, thatBeing or Y-H-W-H underlies and unifies all that is. At the same time(and this is panentheism as distinct from pantheism), this whole ismysteriously and infinitely greater than the sum of its parts, andcannot be fully known or reduced to its constituent beings. "Transcendence"in the context of such a faith does not refer to a God "outthere" or "over there" somewhere beyond the universe, since I do notknow the existence of such a "there." Transcendence means ratherthat God—or Being—is so fully present in the here and now of eachmoment that we could not possibly grasp the depth of that presence.Transcendence thus dwells within immanence. There is no ultimateduality here, no "God and world," no "God, world, and self," onlyone Being and its many faces. Those who seek consciousness of itcome to know that it is indeed eyn sof, without end. There is no end toits unimaginable depth, but so too there is no border, no limit, separatingthat unfathomable One from anything that is. Infinite Being inevery instant flows through all finite beings. "Know this day and set itupon your heart that Y-H-W-H is elohim" (Deut. 4:39)—that Godwithin you is the transcendent. And the verse concludes: "There isnothing else."

By mystical panentheism I mean that this underlying oneness ofbeing is accessible to human experience and reveals itself to humans—indeed, it reveals itself everywhere, always—as the deeper levels ofthe human mind become open to it. Access to it requires a lifting ofveils, a shifting of attention to those inner realms of human consciousnesswhere mystics, and not a few poets, have always chosen toabide. The "radical otherness" of God, so insisted upon by Westerntheology, is not an ontological otherness but an otherness of perspective.To open one's eyes to God is to see Being—the only Being thereis—in a radically different way. Such a unitive view of reality is entirelyother (ganz andere, in theological German) from the way we usuallysee things, yet it is the same reality that is being viewed. I am also onewho knows that religious truth belongs to the language of poetry, notdiscursive prose. I recognize fully and without regret that theology isan art, not a science. We people of faith have nothing we can prove;attempts to do so only diminish what we have to offer. We can onlytestify, never prove. Our strength lies in grandeur of vision, in anability to transport the conversation about existence and origins to adeeper plane of thinking. My faith, but also my human experience,tells me that this shift profoundly enhances our understanding of ourown lives and of the world in which we live. Opening our minds, andultimately the mind of our society, to the truth accessible from thatinner "place" constitutes our best hope for inspiring change in theway we live on this earth. There is nothing mere about poetic vision.

This point in the discussion calls for a greater clarification of theterms "One," "Being," and "God," which I now appear to be usingquite interchangeably. Am I speaking of a "what" or a "who," thereader has a right to ask. Let me answer clearly. When I refer to"God," I mean the inner force of existence itself, that of which onemight say: "Being is." I refer to it as the "One" because it is the singleunifying substratum of all that is. To speak of Being as a religiousperson, however, is to speak of it not detachedly, in scientific "objectivity,"but rather with full engagement of the self, in love and awe.These two great emotions together characterize the religious mindand, when carried to their fullest, make for our sense of the holy. Areligious person is one who perceives or experiences holiness in theencounter with existence; the forms of religious life are intended toevoke this sense of the holy. In a mental state that cannot be fullydescribed in words, such a person hears Being say: "I am." All of ourpersonifications of the One are in response to that inner "hearing."

In biblical language, the "I am" of Sinai is already there behind thefirst "Let there be" of Genesis. Creation is revelation, as the Kabbalistsunderstood so well. To say it in more neutral terms, we religioustypes personify Being because we see ourselves as living in relationshipto the underlying One. I seek to respond to the "I am" that I havebeen privileged to hear, to place myself at its service in carrying forththis great mission of the evolving life process. To do so, I choose topersonify, to call Being by this ancient name "God." In doing this, Iam proclaiming my love and devotion to Being, my readiness to live alife of seeking and responding to its truth. But implied here is also afaith that in some mysterious way Being loves me, that it rejoices for afleeting instant in dwelling within me, delighting in this unique formthat constitutes my existence, as it delights in each of its endlesslydiverse manifestations.

Creation: Reframing the Tale

With regard to "Creation," I understand the task of the theologianto be one of reframing, accepting the accounts of origins and naturalhistory offered by the scientific consensus, but helping us to viewthem in a different way, one that may guide us toward a more profoundappreciation of that same reality. The tale of life's origins anddevelopment, including its essential building block of natural selection,is well known to us as moderns. But what would it mean torecount that tale with our eyes truly open?

We would understand the entire course of evolution, from thesimplest life forms millions of years ago, to the great complexity ofthe human brain (still now only barely understood), and proceedingonward into the unknown future, to be a meaningful process. There isa One that is ever revealing itself to us within and behind the greatdiversity of life. That One is Being itself, the constant in the endlesslychanging evolutionary parade. Viewed from our end of the process,the search that leads to discovery of that One is our human quest formeaning. But turned around, seen from the perspective of the constantlyevolving life energy, evolution can be seen as an ongoing processof revelation or self-manifestation. We discover; it reveals. Itreveals; we discover. As the human mind advances (from our point ofview), understanding more of the structure, process, and history ofthe ever-evolving One, we are being given (from its point of view)ever-greater insight into who we are and how we got here.

This ongoing self-disclosure is the result of a deep and mysteriousinner drive, the force of Being directed from within, however imperfectlyand stumblingly, to manifest itself ever more fully, in ever morediverse, complex, and interesting ways. That has caused it to bringabout, in the long and slow course of its evolution, the emergence of amind that can reflect upon the process, articulate it, and strive towardthe life of complete awareness that will fulfill its purpose. Here on thissmallish planet in the middle of an otherwise undistinguished galaxy,something so astonishing has taken place that it indeed demands to becalled by the biblical term "miracle," rather than by the Greco-Latin"nature," even though the two are pointing to the exact same set offacts. The descendants of one-celled creatures grew and developed,emerged onto dry land, learned survival skills, developed languageand thought, until a subset of them could reflect on the nature of thisentire process and seek to derive meaning from it.

The coming to be of "higher" or more complex forms of life, andeventually of humanity, is not brought about by the specific and consciousplanning of what is sometimes called "intelligent design." Butneither is it random and therefore inherently without meaning. It israther the result of an inbuilt movement within the whole of being,the underlying dynamis of existence striving to be manifest ever morefully in minds that it brings forth and inhabits, through the emergenceof increasingly complex and reflective selves. I think of thatunderlying One in immanent terms, a Being or life force that dwellswithin the universe and all its forms, rather than a Creator frombeyond who forms a world that is "other" and separate from its ownSelf. This One—the only One that truly is—lies within and behindall the diverse forms of being that have existed since the beginning oftime; it is the single Being (as the Hebrew name Y-H-W-H indicates)clothed in each individual being and encompassing them all.

If we could learn to view our biohistory this way, the incrediblegrandeur of the evolutionary journey would immediately unfold beforeus. We Jews revere the memory of one Nahshon ben Aminadav,the first person to step into the Sea of Reeds after Israel left Egypt.The sea did not split, the story goes, until he was up to his neck inwater. What courage! But what about the courage of the first creatureever to emerge from sea onto dry land? Do we appreciate the magnificenceof that moment? Or the first to fly, to take wing into the air? Orthe moment (of course each of these is a long, slow process ratherthan a "moment," but the drama is no less great) when animals weredivided from plants, when one sort of being was able take nourishmentdirectly from the soil while another was able to exist withoutthis form of nourishment, developing the mechanism to "feed" onplant, and then animal, life. How is it possible, with all of them descendingfrom the same single-celled creatures?

The incredibly complex interplay of forces and the thick web ofmutual dependency among beings are no less amazing than the distancetraversed in this long evolutionary journey. The interrelationshipsbetween soil, plants, and insects, or those between climate, foliage,and animal life, all leave us breathless as we begin to contemplatethem. It is these very intricacies and complexities that have led thereligious fundamentalists to hold fast to the claim that there must be agreater intelligence behind it all, that such complexity can only reflectthe planning of a supernatural Mind. But they miss the point of thereligious moment here. Our task as religious persons is not to offercounterscientific explanations for the origin of life. Our task is to notice,to pay attention to, the incredible wonder of it all, and to find God inthat moment of paying attention.

There is indeed something "supernatural" about existence, somethingentirely out of the ordinary, beyond any easy expectation. But Iunderstand the "supernatural" to reside wholly within the "natural."The difference between them is one of perception, the degree towhich our "inner eye" is open. The whole journey is a supernaturalone, not because some outside Being made it happen but becauseBeing itself, residing in those simplest and most ancient of life-forms,pushing ever forward, step after simple step, to reach where we aretoday, continues to elude our complete understanding. The emergenceof both bees and blossoms, and the relationship between them,took place over millions of years, step by evolutionary step. Howcould that have happened? There is an endless ingenuity to this self-manifestingBeing, an endless stream of creativity of which we areonly the tiniest part. If we do not destroy or do too much irreversibledamage to our planet, it will continue to bring forth ever more diverseand creative manifestations long after we are gone.

The poetic reframing of our contemporary tale of origins that I amproposing here might be better understood by reference to a priorexample, one with which we happen to have an intimate bond. I referto the opening chapter of the Hebrew Bible. The authors of Genesis1 effected a remarkable transformation of the creation myth thatexisted in their day. The common theology of the ancient Near East,reflected in both Canaanite and Mesopotamian sources, featured therising up of the primal forces of chaos, represented by Yam and Tiamat,gods of the sea, against the order being imposed by the youngerbut more powerful sky gods. The defeat of that primordial rebellionwas the background of Creation; earth was established upon the carcassesof the vanquished. That tale of uprising and its bloody end,now largely forgotten, was well known to the biblical writers and theiraudiences. It is reflected in various passages in the prophets, Psalms,and Job, and is subtly hinted at even within the Genesis narrative. Butthose who wrote Genesis 1 reframed the story completely. Everythingwas created in harmony, willfully, by a single God who keptsaying: "Good! Good!" in response to His creations, giving His blessingto each.

That reshaped tale helped to form and sustain Western civilizationfor several thousand years. The faith that God loves and affirms Creationprovides the moral undergirding for all of Western religion,manifest differently in each of the three dominant faiths. Some believedit naively and literally; others interpreted it and tried to reconcileit with various other ways of thinking. I am suggesting that weneed to undertake a similar effort of transformation for our current"Creation" story. Our civilization has been transformed in the pastcentury and a half in no small part by our acceptance of a new series oftales of origin, an account that begins with the Big Bang (which itselfmay turn out to be myth) and proceeds through the long saga of theorigins of our solar system, the geohistory of our planet, the emergenceof life, and biological evolution. Nuclear physicists and cosmologistshave become the new Kabbalists of our age, speculating inever more refined ways on the first few seconds of existence much asour mystical sages meditated on the highest triad of the ten divineemanations. The picture that science offers is one of unimaginablyviolent explosion, of particles hurtling through indescribably vastreaches of space, and only then of the emergence of an order—solarsystems, gravity, orbits, air, and water—that makes for the possibilityof life's existence. As living things emerge and develop we are againpresented with a tale of violent and bloody struggle, that of eachspecies and creature to eat and not be eaten, to strive for its momentat the top of the evolutionary mound of corpses. This story too, I amsuggesting, is in need of reformulation by a new and powerful harmonisticvision, one that will allow even the weakest and most threatenedof creatures a legitimate place in this world and will call upon us notto wipe it out by careless whim. This is the role of today's religion.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Radical Judaism by ARTHUR GREEN. Copyright © 2010 by Arthur Green. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300152329
• ISBN 13: 9780300152326
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224