Association for Progressive Judaism talk

Reform Judaism is the last and most radical of all reform movements in Judaism with the possible exception of Zionism, and even Zionism would have been impossible without Reform Judaism

Throughout Jewish history there have been numerous reform indeed revolutionary movements beginning with the great Prophets of the eighth century. Then ensued the canonization of the Book of Deuteronomy. This reform made the legal code of the book of Deuteronomy normative and it replaced Prophetic authority. Next came Priestly Judaism with the authority of Aaron as the high priest. The Pharisaic revolution followed which rejected Priestly authority and replaced it with the authority of the Rabbis. There were two reforms or modifications of Rabbinic Judaism with its insistence on the written and the oral Torah. The first was Philosophical Judaism and the second Mystical Judaism. Both forms of Judaism rejected the centrality of Jewish Law and replaced it with Philosophical or mystical understanding These forms of Judaism did not do away with Halachah or Jewish law since the societies of which they were a part functioned according to the Halachah.

Reform Judaism was the first from of Judaism which had the daring to actually reject Halachah
It affirmed that Halachah would give us guidance but not governance. Reform not only accepted the ideals of the Enlightenment but also emancipated Judaism from a Ghetto or medieval mentality. In doing so it not only aligned itself with prior reforms but emphasized the ethical and rational ideals which were at the heart of Prophetic, Rabbinical, and Philosophical Judaism.

Reform Judaism sought to self consciously decide what to preserve, what to reject and what to innovate in the religion of Judaism. Its most significant contribution is its liberating Judaism from Jewish law, which over the centuries had become more rigid and inflexible and dogmatic.

It introduced the Reform principle. This principle enjoins Jews to find the essential element in Judaism and not confuse it with its myriad historical embodiments. It affirmed that a contemporary Judaism must build on what is unique and true in Judaism.

Furthermore it sought to recognize that there is much in the Jewish past of a negative nature that had to be rejected, not apologized for or explained away.

Finally it believed in being open to the best in all traditions and cultures. It affirmed an openness to the world, not an escape from the world. In affirming an encounter with the world it sought to work with other religions to find common ground and strive for the betterment of all.

The Reform principle is opposed to Orthodox principle

Here Reform as a progressive and creative form of Judaism distinguished itself from that view of Judaism that maintained that the primary purpose of a religious tradition is preservative. Simply put such a preservative approach claims that what a religion should do is change as little as possible. That the way to proceed is to unreflectively hold on to as much as one can of the traditions of the past

But more important Reform entails

a- A willingness to critically examine one’s own religious presuppositions in the light of the best ethical and cultural knowledge available. This entails being open to highest elements in surrounding society with the entailing rejection of any view which claims that these presuppositions are absolute.

b- It affirmed that the only way to properly preserve Judaism is to understand it historically and see it as a changing reality which must be altered to fit changing conditions.

c- It became clear that an objective review of Jewish history showed that overwhelmingly the changes were not minor but creative adaptations, innovations, necessary for the continuity of Jewish life

d- It taught an openness to truth from all sources, not just from the arts and sciences, literature and philosophy, but, in an inter religious world there must be a willingness to respect and acknowledge the value of other religious traditions.

e- As a result, faith is not a first postulate that has to be held to dogmatically by which to criticize and reject all that challenges it but rather the full and integrating synthesis of all that we hold to be true in terms of the best in Judaism, reason, ethics and aesthetics.

f- While insisting on the debt that Reform Judaism owed to the past, it nevertheless rejected the belief that all Judaism should be a repetition of the past. Why not go further. Why not have the greatness of the past be followed by a greater future.

Reform has abandoned the legal structure of the mitzvoth with the corresponding idea that one does the mitzvoth in order to be rewarded either here in this world or in the world to come for observing them and be punished for not observing them.
A legal system only makes sense when it functions in a context of legal enforcements and punishments.

The ritual enactments fit into a legal system whose main components were civil and criminal. But with the abandonment of all civil and criminal law (which is not even operative in Israel) and the reduction of the Halacha to strictly ritual acts and laws of personal status, the legal structure collapsed.

Can the ritual enactments be legal injunctions?
Certainly not

Reform had the courage to question this basic premise and indeed affirmed that no dogmatic assertion on the part of any religious tradition was exempt from critical, logical and historical scrutiny. It affirmed that all claims to validity have to be critically validated by reason and experience. Reform therefore rejected the "self authenticating character of religious assertions."

In embracing a self conscious critical understanding of Judaism Reform made a fundamental distinction between a pre-critical, critical and post critical understanding of Judaism. Other ways of making this distinction is Mythological, critical, symbolic. There is much in the foundational texts of the Jewish people that are written from a mythological, magical and parochial point of view. To accept these views literally and uncritically was to betray what they could mean if these teachings were demythologized, demystified, and, in fact, use the very ethical achievements of prophetic, universal monotheistic Judaism to evaluate all prior parochial and tribal elements. In this sense there is a pre-systematic, systematic, and post systematic Judaism. Only a Judaism purified from its most primitive elements and what can only be described as accommodations to the limitations of the structures of the civilizations of that time; only such a Judaism -- the reformers felt was worthy of belief.

In pursuing this task as Leo Baeck has clearly demonstrated Reform Judaism has been the most significant force shaping modern Jewish life. He said: “Without Reform there would be not only no liberal Judaism , but no new Conservatism, no new Orthodoxy, no new Hassidism, even no new Zionism.”

I once had a conversation with Harold Schulweiss and asked him to tell me what innovation the Conservative movement introduced.

He could not think of any. Grasping for something he mentioned the Chavurah movement but then he immediately corrected himself and said that that was introduced by Kaplan the founder of the Reconstructionist movement.

The orthodox Rabbi Emanuel Rackman stated to the consternation of his Orthodox colleagues that without Reform there would have been a stampede away from Judaism, since Reform became the only alternative to Medievalism and assimilation.

But what has happened to the great tradition of
Reform?

First of all the reform principle has never been fully carried out so that today we see the Reform movement rapidly going in the opposite direction towards an anti intellectualism which resorts to myth, superstition, and parochialism. Reform has become increasingly a movement concerned with ritual for rituals sake without seeing ritual as an implementation of the ethical and truly spiritual.
A renewed narrowness toward parochialism and tribalism.
But perhaps most disconcerting is the introduction of sacraments that are more akin to Christianity that Judaism

What this means is the return to a parochialism almost an ethnic identity.

g- It also means a return to myth in the characterization of the divine without any sophisticated way of dealing with theological concepts.

The Reform insistence on distinguishing between mythological; critical-rational-historical-ethical-aesthetic and symbolic. Or perhaps between pre critical, critical and post critical Judasim has collapsed and in the place of rational and ethical analysis feeling and unreflective piety has taken its place

h- The essentially democratic lay involvement of Reform has been transformed into a heirarchical structure with the bestowers and receivers of religious gifts, i.e. sacraments.

What needs to be done is to offer an alternative to the hundreds of thousands of Jews who are seeking a rational, ethical religiously compelling form of Judaism.

With the rise of intermarriage we must provide a theology of Reform and a corresponding practice that is appropriate and fulfilling.

There is much to build on. The teachings of Hermann Cohen, Leo Baeck, our own
Teachers such as Lauterbach, Kohler, Goldenson, Morgenstern Rivkin.

Do our religious beliefs cohere with all the other things in all other areas of experience that we affirm? And further, most particularly does it also meet the highest ethical standards? There was in classic Judaism an aristocracy of learning. But this learning cannot be restricted to Halachic niceties unconnected to human life in the modern world which is the sum and substance of modern Orthodoxy

By contrast Prophetic Judaism rejected all sacrifices and uniquely set forth a form of Judaism as an affirmation of the ethical as inseparable from the Holy.

It is for this reason that the ritual on the Day of Atonement has such significance. In the confession of sins the sins enumerated are all ethical and nearness to God is conditioned on reconciling ourselves with our neighbor. The day of atonement deals with the ethical and in the traditional liturgy rises to a crescendo in the Neilah service with a repetition of the Midot affirming God’s attributes culminating in the affirmation that a God with those attributes is the true God. Here the ethical is indissolubly connected to the religious.

Judaism is not having exquisite religious experiences; rather it is the living of a religious life

The only way we can overcome bad religion is through good religion.We will never overcome bad religion with irreligion. Also science cannot destroy superstition and myth only authentic religion can.

What religion must do is give us three things

1- some sense of intelligibility of ourselves and our place in the world

2- some sense of reassurance in the face of the perils and vissicitudes of life

3- some way of life that gives us a proper way of seeking and finding recognition.

There is a precritical Critical and Post critical form of religion

We can move forward to a post critical religion or return to myth Magic Parochialism Sacramentalism
This is what has happened And the ethical and intellectual is lost.This is the common task we share.

The new Pittsburgh Statement of Principles for Reform Judaism has a distinct impetus and direction, a perspective that clearly distinguishes it from the prior Statements of Principles of Reform Judaism.

This perspective is not its vague and abstract reaffirmation of God, Torah, and Israel, but rather in its insistence on Holiness as its leitmotif and especially with its call to observe the Mitzvot defining them as “Sacred Obligations” as its fundamental idea.

While the text continually reaffirms the centrality of these Mitzvot, or Sacred Obligations, nowhere does it indicate what these Mitzvot are, nor their source, or authority.

Nowhere does it attempt to distinguish those Sacred obligations which are essential and still should be accepted, from those Mitzvot that may have been accepted in the past by some Jewish religious texts or in a particular period in Jewish history and that are now obsolete or insignificant or time bound.

Nowhere is an argument presented that Reform Judaism should be a religion of Mitzvot with all that it implies: a commanding God, Sinaitic revelation and rewards and punishments.

The implication is that the Mitzvot refer to the “so called 613 Mitzvot” of Jewish tradition which are taken over “as given” in traditional Judaism. This seems to be implied in the statements’ affirmation that “we are committed to the ongoing study of the whole array of Mitzvot and to the fulfillment of those that address us….. some of these Mitzvot , Sacred Obligations have long been observed by Reform Jews; others both ancient and modern demand renewed attention as the result of the unique context of our times.”

Nowhere does the text indicate what makes a “Sacred Obligation” sacred. Nor what is the basis of the obligation, nor why if indeed they are sacred and obligatory only a purely subjective decision as to whether to observe them or not is demanded of Reform Jews. Nor is there any clarification as to what is the “unique context of our time[s]”

The statement does not take the trouble to inform us that the whole idea of returning to the 613 commandments the “Taryag ha Mitzvot” is impossible for any Jew today including the most observant and punctilious orthodox Jew.

It does ignore the fundamental Reform principle that we are duty bound to distinguish between those values and ideals in Judaism, (notice not commandments) which we must take seriously and indeed see them as Holy or Sacred Obligations, and The Mitzvot concerning Kings, the High priest, the sacrifices and the priestly service, all civil and criminal laws; the Mitzvot concerning slavery which are completely inoperative.

But even if one were to exclude all these and retain the perhaps 100 or so Mitzvot left, the document does ignores the fundamental Reform principle that we are duty bound to distinguish between those values and ideals in Judaism, (notice not commandments) which we must take seriously and indeed see them as Holy or Sacred Obligations, and those that should be simply preserved as folkways, or as ceremonies which are part of Jewish culture.

There is no attempt to clarify which Mitzvot were enacted as accommodations to an unfriendly environment, or introduced to deal with emergency situations, or those that Reform rejected in the past and still need to be rejected because of their unethical or discriminatory or obsolete nature. For example, the Mitzvot that treat women and non Jews as second class citizens. These are very much a part of the 613 commandments and should be rejected as contrary to the essential principles and teachings of Reform Judaism.

Nowhere is it clear what are the fundamental principles and teachings that distinguish Reform Judaism from the other branches of Judaism and where it does so implicitly, not explicitly it makes the enterprise subjective. “We are committed to fulfillment of those that address us as individuals and as a community”. Who is to decide which are the ones that should address us as individuals and as a community? Does each individual decide which are Sacred Obligations and which are not? There no guidance in the document helping us in deciding which are Sacred and which are not, what constitutes their authority for Reform Jews and why Reform Judaism should have as its goal the acceptance of the whole traditional structure of Commandments at all? What is it that makes them obligatory if they are dependent on the subjective decision, perhaps whim of each individual.
The principle of autonomy is indeed central but nowhere is it discussed or explained.

The word Holiness is used so globally as to apply to anything and everything which renders the term meaningless. To indiscriminately assign Holiness to anything and everything is simply to belie the essential contribution of Judaism to the world: the affirmation of Ethical Monotheism and the rejection of idolatry. Since Idolatry is to have a false sense of the Holy—the making of something sacred which has no right to that status, Pittsburgh 2 obscures the vital contribution of Prophetic Judaism. This contribution is to affirm not only the essence of Judaism as ethical but that one must continually guard against the temptation to attribute Holiness to the projection of our fears and desires and not to what is truly Sacred.

The Prophets condemned not only separating the Holy from the Ethical but fought all attempts to make morality secondary to ritual precepts. They also rejected the conversion of morality into a ceremonial precept, and thus incorporating morality into a ceremonial –legal tradition, thereby disassociating morality from moral insight and ethical motives.

What we must do is distinguish the Legal – ritualistic and the ethical –spiritual, aspects of Judaism

Reform Judaism is a religion of ideals, of ethical and spiritual principles, which uses rituals to implement and embody the ethical and spiritual dimensions of Judaism. Mitzvot are not an end unto themselves but must fit into a value framework that gives them their proper place and significance. To understand this significance Reform Judaism must remain true to its prophetic mandate.

All references to the holy or sacred must be made within the context of some doctrinal affirmation which indicates what it is about the postulating of what is sacred that makes it sacred. This becomes very clear when we view the Sancta of other religions. Individuals and objects that may be sacred in other religions are not sacred to us. Therefore there can be no positing of the holy or the sacred without a further clarification of what it is that makes what is holy to us holy.

It is like the joke where a rabbi and the priest are talking, and the rabbi says to the priest, " how in the world could you believe in the virgin birth, the incarnation and the resurrection?" And the priest says, " I understand how difficult it is to affirm these doctrines but don’t you believe that Eve was created from the rib of Adam, and that Joshua told the sun to stand still, and that the Red Sea parted to let the Israelites through?" And the rabbi, in shock responds saying, "yes, but they're in the bible."

does ignores the fundamental Reform principle that we are duty bound to distinguish between those values and ideals in Judaism, (notice not commandments) which we must take seriously and indeed see them as Holy or Sacred Obligations, and The Mitzvot concerning Kings, the High priest, the sacrifices and the priestly service, all civil and criminal laws; the Mitzvot concerning slavery are completely inoperative. But even if one were to exclude all these and retain the perhaps 100 or so Mitzvot left, the document does ignores the fundamental Reform principle that we are duty bound to distinguish between those values and ideals in Judaism, (notice not commandments) which we must take seriously and indeed see them as Holy or Sacred Obligations, and those that should be simply preserved as folkways, or as ceremonies which are part of Jewish culture. There is no attempt to clarify which Mitzvot were enacted as accommodations to an unfriendly environment, or introduced to deal with emergency situations, or those that Reform rejected in the past and still need to be rejected because of their unethical or discriminatory or obsolete nature. For example, the Mitzvot that treat women and non Jews as second class citizens. These are very much a part of the 613 commandments and should be rejected as contrary to the essential principles and teachings of Reform Judaism.Reform Judaism is a religion of ideals, of ethical and spiritual principles, which uses rituals to implement and embody the ethical and spiritual dimensions of Judaism.

Mitzvot are not an end unto themselves but must fit into a value framework that gives them their proper place and significance. The problem of course is that if you're going to use critical methods, there is no way that you can arbitrarily stop using them. You're going to have to use them wherever they are applicable.

The first criterion that we would have to apply, the first question we would have to ask is , is it credible? In employing the criterion of credibility we are asking: is it true? Do we have good reasons for believing it?

Judaism is deeply concerned with truth. The Rabbi’s state God?s seal is truth. Truth is one of the central pillar of Judaism How significant truth is in Judaism can be gathered from a passage in the Talmudic tractate Yoma (69b) It states, ? Moses had come and said the Great God, Almighty and Awful.” Then came Jeremiah and said: “Aliens are destroying His Temple! Where then are His awful deeds? Hence he omitted from his prayer the attribute ?awful?. Daniel came and said ?Aliens are enslaving His sons, where are His mighty deeds? Hence he omitted from his prayer the attribute of “might.” How could these prophets dare abolish something established by Moses? Rabbi Eleazar answered: ?Since they knew that the Holy One insists on truth, they will not ascribe false things to Him?.

Can we affirm anything in Judaism that we do not believe is credible? Can we seriously affirm anything that cannot meet the most rigorous tests of reason and experience?

Do our religious beliefs cohere with all the other things in all other areas of experience that we affirm? And further, most particularly does it also meet the highest ethical standards?

Prophetic Judaism uniquely set forth a form of Judaism as an affirmation of the ethical as inseparable from the Holy.

They express their concerns for Justice and righteousness and express their ethical convictions in the name of God. What this means is that their ethical convictions were based on a reality that was far greater than they were. In fact, the most significant result of ethical living is making it possible to be near to God, to know God and such connection is what they mean by spirituality. The severest consequence of evil doing is that it separates one from God and such isolation from the Divine becomes spiritual death. If the highest good is nearness to God then unethical action separates one from God and ultimately from our own creative potential.

The Prophets condemn the belief that ritual can replace ethics in binding oneself to the divine. In fact if Amos 8:11 is correct the worst famine will be one in which God becomes unavailable to us because of our failure to fulfill our ethical obligations. (CF Isaac 1:15-18; Jeremiah 9:23-24).

Ritual as such without ethics is not only fruitless but also ultimately idolatrous, since it seeks to achieve by ritual what should have been achieved from ethical living. I believe that there is a deep consciousness in all of us, that at times, perhaps not very often, if even only to ourselves, faces the truth about ourselves. Thus there is a true self that needs to be nourished and fulfilled whose mark is the endeavor to face the truth about oneself. There is also a false self, that only wants praise and to feel good, not by any genuine effort of personal responsibility, but from lording it over others
does ignores the fundamental Reform principle that we are duty bound to distinguish between those values and ideals in Judaism, (notice not commandments) which we must take seriously and indeed see them as Holy or Sacred Obligations, and The Mitzvot concerning Kings, the High priest, the sacrifices and the priestly service, all civil and criminal laws; the Mitzvot concerning slavery are completely inoperative. But even if one were to exclude all these and retain the perhaps 100 or so Mitzvot left, the document does ignores the fundamental Reform principle that we are duty bound to distinguish between those values and ideals in Judaism, (notice not commandments) which we must take seriously and indeed see them as Holy or Sacred Obligations, and those that should be simply preserved as folkways, or as ceremonies which are part of Jewish culture. There is no attempt to clarify which Mitzvot were enacted as accommodations to an unfriendly environment, or introduced to deal with emergency situations, or those that Reform rejected in the past and still need to be rejected because of their unethical or discriminatory or obsolete nature. For example, the Mitzvot that treat women and non Jews as second class citizens. These are very much a part of the 613 commandments and should be rejected as contrary to the essential principles and teachings of Reform Judaism.Reform Judaism is a religion of ideals, of ethical and spiritual principles, which uses rituals to implement and embody the ethical and spiritual dimensions of Judaism.

Ritual as such without ethics is not only fruitless but also ultimately idolatrous, since it seeks to achieve by ritual what should have been achieved from ethical livingIt is for this reason that the ritual on the Day of Atonement has such significance. In the confession of sins the sins enumerated are all ethical and nearness to God is conditioned on reconciling ourselves with our neighbor. The day of atonement deals with the ethical and in the traditional liturgy rises to a crescendo in the Neilah service with a repetition of the Midot affirming God’s attributes culminating in the affirmation that a God with those attributes is the true God.
Here the ethical is indissolubly connected to the religious.
.
Notice also, that when Job in the 31st chapter defends his integrity and his innocence and his “religiosity” before God he only speaks of ethical acts and idolatry. He does not mention a single ritual act.

Also Rabbi Simlai in BMAK.24A states that six hundred thirteen commandments were given to Moses and they were gradually reduced:

Rabbi Simlai taught:
‘Six hundred and thirteen commandments were imparted to Moses—three hundred and sixty-five of which were prohibitions, answering to the number of the days of the year, and two hundred and forty-eight positive precepts, corresponding to the number of members in the human body.
‘Then came David and reduced them to eleven, even as it is written (Psalms XV):
Lord, who shall sojourn in Thy tabernacle?
Who shall dwell on Thy holy mountain?
He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness,
And speaketh truth in his heart;
That hath no slander upon his tongue,
Nor doeth evil to his fellow
Nor taketh up a reproach against his neighbor;
In whose eyes a vile person is despised,
But he honoreth them that fear the Lord;
He that sweareth to his own hurt and breaketh not his word;
He that putteth not out his money on interest,
Nor taketh a bribe against the innocent.
He that doeth these things shall never be moved.
‘Then came Isaiah and reduced them to six, even as it is written (Isaiah XXXIII:15):
He that walketh righteously, and speaketh uprightly;
He that despiseth the gain of oppressions,
That shaketh clear his hands from laying hold on bribes,
That stoppeth his ears from hearing of blood
And shutteth his eyes from looking upon evil.
‘Then came Micah and reduced them to three, even as it is written (Micah VI:8):
It hath been told thee, O man, what is good,
And what the Lord doth require of thee:
Only to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.
‘Then came Isaiah once more and reduced them to two, as it is said (Isaiah LVI:1):
Thus saith the Lord:
Keep ye justice, and do righteousness.
‘Then came Amos and reduced them to one, as I is said (Amos V:4):
Seek ye Me, and live.’
Rabbi Nahman the son of Isaac (a Babylonian scholar of the second or third generation after Rabbi Simlai) suggests as an alternative conclusion:
‘Then came the prophet Habakkuk and reduced the commandments to one, which one is the verse (Habakkuk II:4):
The righteous shall live by his faith.’”

Rabbinic passages abound that stress the centrality of the ethical, for example, “all the precepts and ritual laws (of the Torah) put together cannot equal in importance one ethical principle of the Torah” (Peah 16D) or “a ritual precept or ceremonial law is strictly prohibited if it involved the disregarding of an ethical principle.” (Suk 30A)

Indeed the essence of prophetic teaching is that the chief sin is idolatry. Idolatry for the Prophets is the root of all evil and for them it is fundamentally an indissolubly ethical-religious sin.

All of us agree with Hillel’s dictum “do not do unto others what you do not want others to do to you.” The problem is that while we all agree with it in principle, very few if any of us can do it in practice. Now if this is the essence of Judaism, is the essence of Judaism unattainable? On one level, yes, it is unattainable, without proper education and practice and discipline, therefore go and learn how to do it. It is for this reason that I believe that ritual must be the means to build on the yetzer tov and transform, in light of the yetrzer tov, the yetzer ha ra. Ritual should help us develop a proper placement of self, overcome egotism, self centeredness, feeling good at the expense of others, developing a proper respect for the common good and the realization of my indebtedness to others for all that I have.

This can be expressed as determining our proper place in the scheme of things. The symbolism and the forms in which this is achieved are derived from a dynamic Jewish tradition.

This is not simply ethics as to the right and the good. This is a process of character formation that makes us into proper worthwhile human beings.

Reform Judaism convincingly differentiated between the Sabbath and other holidays as having continuing significance for the Jew but separating them from the multitude of minutia in the Halachic (legal –ritualistic) way in which they are to be implemented.

Must we not as Reform Jews, continue to separate the basic institutions of Judaism from the way in which they have been actualized in countless details most of which were developed in particular historical situations answering particular historical needs, needs which may no longer be applicable today. Must we not differentiate between the ethical- spiritual aspects and embodiments of the festivals from their ritual legal form? Must we not subsume the ritual manifestations of the festivals to their ethical- spiritual essence?

We cannot accept the view most clearly stated by R. Johanan ben Zachai that the commandments are revealed to us by God whose purpose we cannot understand nor question (ghezerah gazarti or ghezeroth Melech) His famous statement “ it is not the dead who contaminate or the water which purifies” it is “uniquely a peremptory ordinance of the supreme emperor of the universe; God has spoken, has imposed a law, he has pronounced an ordinance and no one is free to transgress my decisions.”

Must we not question whether such a concept of God is even intelligible to us in “our unique context”?

When Maimonides ,in his Mishne Torah, states ,“He who on principle or from mere whim disregards any of the Mosaic commandments, has no claim upon pity and compassion and should rather be thrown into a pit than to be rescued from peril” ( Edut xi ,10 ; Akkum x,1 ) he is enunciating a Mitzvah which we are duty bound not to subjectively entertain as something to return to, but something to categorically reject.

Nor can we accept the view that we will be rewarded for observing the commandments or punished for transgressing them in the world to come. The whole of the Halachic process rests on the divine origin of the Mitzvot and it is such divine origin that makes these rules normative.

When people speak of taking upon themselves the 613 commandments so as to lead a full Jewish life they are making the Halachic, legal- ritualistic the framework within which the Ethical- spiritual is contained.

This is indeed a form of Judaism which Reform has rejected and it must be made clear that we cannot return to such a form of Judaism.

One cannot now at this time in our situation of perplexity and religious pluralism set up the doing of the 613 commandments as the norm for all Jews including Reform.

But apart from the fact that no individual can fulfill the 613 the very goal of performing these Mitzvot enthrones the legal ritualistic as the authoritative form of Jewish religiosity at the expense of the ethical -spiritual.

We believe in Ethical Monotheism, not Halachic Monotheism.

Is there not some central core teaching of Judaism as a religion which makes Judaism what it is, and claims our allegiance as Jews?
Should not these core teachings be embodied in rituals which are responsive to the needs and values of our contemporary world rather than be a re-enactment of the cultural and religious forms of the past with all their limitations and restrictions.

We are Jewish because we believe that Judaism embodies fundamental truths about ultimate questions.

If we were to not make the ethical spiritual central we would be facing the condition Steinberg points out in his A Partisan Guide to the Jewish Problem. There Steinberg states, “ It would in the end reduce Jews to the pass where they would have to go outside Judaism for those truths and values which Judaism created and gave to the world.”

It is our task to refashion Judaism and this has been what each generation has done. In many instances it was a creative process. I do believe, however, that halachic Judaism completely lost its flexibility through the oral teaching increasingly being written down and finally in the codes the range of flexibility became minuscule, especially considering the reluctance of the Rabbinate to significantly alter Halachah.

But the whole foundation of the Halachich process, which is the revelation at Sinai of the Torah, cannot be accepted in the light of Biblical scholarship and historical understanding.

It is important to historically situate the formation of the ceremonial – legal in Judaism. The Law was a great advance over traditional magical customs and taboos since the authority of the magician is replaced by the rules of a lawgiver given for all. All law was seen as coming from God and his laws of righteousness and for Judaism as against Zoroastrianism there is the incorporation of the ceremonial into the moral. The danger nevertheless continually exists to reverse the priority of the moral vis a vis the ritual, and the great contribution of the Prophets was to subsume all ceremonial- legal piety under the imperatives of the moral. Prophetic Judaism brought about a change in the ritual-legal. It set it free from the purely agricultural cycle and the preservation of agriculture. It rejected sacrifice as propitiation and bribery, making it inoperative with respect to moral sins desacrilizing it into a symbol of sin expiation and atonement for cultic sins.

Cannot Judaism be seen as a creative synthesis of four factors:

Elements in the past that we reject,
Elements in the past that we accept,
Ideals that can be actualized in the historical situation and the response to the contemporary challenge which integrates the first three.
Let me provide an example of this.
On the question of non Jews we should retain Maimonides interpretation of “mipne darchae shalom” as enunciated in the conclusion of his “ Law of Kings.” This concept is a sub category of imitatio dei. He states “ the sages commanded us to visit the sick of the pagans and to bury their dead together with the dead of the Israelites and to support the poor amidst the poor of the Israelites to promote the ways of peace. As it is said, ‘ God is good to all and his compassion extends to all his creatures”(Psalms 145:9). And it is said ‘ its ways are ways of pleasantness and all its paths are peace.’”( Proverbs 3:17). On the other hand we must reject what Maimonides said in the very same Mishne Torah in the section on the “laws of idolatry”. Here, in invoking the principle Mipne darchae shalom he is restrictive and narrow. He states “ these rules apply only when Israel is exiled among the Gentiles or when the Gentiles are in a position of superior strength. But when the Jews are in a position of superior strength, we are not permitted to suffer idol – worshipping Gentiles among us.” (Hilkhot Avodah Zorah 10:8). You may remember that this was the text appealed to by Haredi Jews in Israel when they refused to get an ambulance for a non-Jew who had suffered a heart attack on the Sabbath in their district.

Furthermore, understanding Jewish statements historically we can see that the Mishnah’s use of of mipne darchae shalom in Gittin chapter 5 differs from the talmudic mipne eivah,(prevention of animosity) which is a strictly pragmatic concerns for the Jews welfare in a non Jewish world.

Since the ideals of Judaism are enunciated in the doctrine that all human beings, Jews and non Jews alike are made in the divine image, and due to the changing character of our relation with non-Jews we now have an imperative to accept the former statement of Maimonides but also to reject the latter. This means that we must reinterpret the concept the “seven Mitzvoth of the sons of Noah” realizing that gentiles are Monotheists. Finally, the challenge for us today is religious pluralism and in responding to that challenge our answer must integrate all of the above elements.

In this way one does not diminish continuity nor overly stress change. Rather it sets forth principles that can help us differentiate what is valuable in the Jewish tradition and what is to be seen as rules developed during times of hostility between Jews and Gentiles.

I am not denying that there are other functions of ritual than the establishment of character and the implementation of the ethical. What I do deny is that the other elements can be separated from the ethical. Indeed the origins of ritual was Magic where individuals through incantations etc. sought to control the gods, as Cassirer states exerting “an unlimited power over the gods, bending them and forcing their will.” (Philosophy of Symbolic forms: Mythical Thought p222) The essence of Magic and later of Sacrifice was a means of controlling or propitiating or bribing the deities. (ibid 223) Only in Prophetic Religion was “ a purely ethical correlation [is] established between I and thou “, between human beings and God. Isaiah and the other Prophets while against sacrifices were not against ritual. What they condemned was the belief that ritual can take the place of ethics, or that one can use ritual to make up for unrighteousness.

Of course we need ritual as Baeck states for the solidarity of the Jewish People and to help us develop symbols for the sublime and transcendent experiences of life. But what can be more sublime than taking upon ourselves the burden of ascent. does ignores the fundamental Reform principle that we are duty bound to distinguish between those values and ideals in Judaism, (notice not commandments) which we must take seriously and indeed see them as Holy or Sacred Obligations, and The Mitzvot concerning Kings, the High priest, the sacrifices and the priestly service, all civil and criminal laws; the Mitzvot concerning slavery are completely inoperative. But even if one were to exclude all these and retain the perhaps 100 or so Mitzvot left, the document does ignores the fundamental Reform principle that we are duty bound to distinguish between those values and ideals in Judaism, (notice not commandments) which we must take seriously and indeed see them as Holy or Sacred Obligations, and those that should be simply preserved as folkways, or as ceremonies which are part of Jewish culture. There is no attempt to clarify which Mitzvot were enacted as accommodations to an unfriendly environment, or introduced to deal with emergency situations, or those that Reform rejected in the past and still need to be rejected because of their unethical or discriminatory or obsolete nature. For example, the Mitzvot that treat women and non Jews as second class citizens. These are very much a part of the 613 commandments and should be rejected as contrary to the essential principles and teachings of Reform Judaism.Reform Judaism is a religion of ideals, of ethical and spiritual principles, which uses rituals to implement and embody the ethical and spiritual dimensions of Judaism.
Mitzvot are not an end unto themselves but must fit into a value framework that gives them their proper place and significance The problem of course is that if you're going to use critical methods, there is no way that you can arbitrarily stop using them. You're going to have to use them wherever they are applicable.

Ritual as such without ethics is not only fruitless but also ultimately idolatrous, since it seeks to achieve by ritual what should have been achieved from ethical livingIt is for this reason that the ritual on the Day of Atonement has such significance. In the confession of sins the sins enumerated are all ethical and nearness to God is conditioned on reconciling ourselves with our neighbor. The day of atonement deals with the ethical and in the traditional liturgy rises to a crescendo in the Neilah service with a repetition of the Midot affirming God’s attributes culminating in the affirmation that a God with those attributes is the true God.
Here the ethical is indissolubly connected to the religious.
.
Isaiah and the other Prophets while against sacrifices were not against ritual. What they condemned was the belief that ritual can take the place of ethics, or that one can use ritual to make up for unrighteousness.

Holiness in Judaism cannot be divorced from righteousness and the fact that on Yom Kippur we only state ethical sins and that we read from Isaiah 58 condemning fasting as if it could be a substitute for the ethical should be clear does ignores the fundamental Reform principle that we are duty bound to distinguish between those values and ideals in Judaism, (notice not commandments) which we must take seriously and indeed see them as Holy or Sacred Obligations, and The Mitzvot concerning Kings, the High priest, the sacrifices and the priestly service, all civil and criminal laws; the Mitzvot concerning slavery are completely inoperative. But even if one were to exclude all these and retain the perhaps 100 or so Mitzvot left, the document does ignores the fundamental Reform principle that we are duty bound to distinguish between those values and ideals in Judaism, (notice not commandments) which we must take seriously and indeed see them as Holy or Sacred Obligations, and those that should be simply preserved as folkways, or as ceremonies which are part of Jewish culture. There is no attempt to clarify which Mitzvot were enacted as accommodations to an unfriendly environment, or introduced to deal with emergency situations, or those that Reform rejected in the past and still need to be rejected because of their unethical or discriminatory or obsolete nature. For example, the Mitzvot that treat women and non Jews as second class citizens. These are very much a part of the 613 commandments and should be rejected as contrary to the essential principles and teachings of Reform Judaism.Reform Judaism is a religion of ideals, of ethical and spiritual principles, which uses rituals to implement and embody the ethical and spiritual dimensions of Judaism.

Ritual as such without ethics is not only fruitless but also ultimately idolatrous, since it seeks to achieve by ritual what should have been achieved from ethical livingIt is for this reason that the ritual on the Day of Atonement has such significance. In the confession of sins the sins enumerated are all ethical and nearness to God is conditioned on reconciling ourselves with our neighbor. The day of atonement deals with the ethical and in the traditional liturgy rises to a crescendo in the Neilah service with a repetition of the Midot affirming God’s attributes culminating in the affirmation that a God with those attributes is the true God.
Here the ethical is indissolubly connected to the religious.
.
Isaiah and the other Prophets while against sacrifices were not against ritual. What they condemned was the belief that ritual can take the place of ethics, or that one can use ritual to make up for unrighteousness.

Holiness in Judaism cannot be divorced from righteousness and the fact that on Yom Kippur we only state ethical sins and that we read from Isaiah 58 condemning fasting as if it could be a substitute for the ethical should be clear

Reform’s emphasis on the rational, historical, and ethical as essential aspects of Judaism is what our statement of principles seek to effectively present.

In this sense the heritage of the Enlightenment, Kant’s dare to know and not be dependent as a child on an external authority, the recognition that we cannot accept anything that goes contrary to reason and ethics still stands firm.

The enlightenment gave us the understanding that we can only champion a faith if it becomes a personal possession. It is not something finished and handed down. We must recognize it as making sense and being true and we must determine it to be right. We must strive to build upon the past The enlightenment taught us that the dogmatic form of absolute truths, of infallible orthodoxy, an infallible revelation, infallible scriptures must be rejected.

God seeking as a continual quest must take the place of God knowing as an infallible certainty especially in the historically conditioned forms of the past.

Today we are witnessing a renewed search for spirituality especially among our youth. There are many different ways of trying to understand this phenomena, but I think it cannot be separated from the sense of alienation that is being felt everywhere. There is a need for being connected to something abiding and valuable in the nature of things. Today we are experiencing among many individuals and not just Jews a search for security, certainty, and reassurance that one’s life embodies something of meaning and significance. It is both a personal search and a search for community. It is a search for something more profound in myself, and a way of connecting that element of profundity in myself to that sense in others and which is of ultimate meaning in the scheme of things.

There is also the need here for emotional intensity, for deep feeling and commitment to something of value. The hope is that a sense of the holy can fulfill this need.

The interesting thing about all this is that it signifies something that is indeed universal and not particular. This is the attraction of the Eastern religions especially Hinduism and Buddhism, Theosophy and all of their offshoots. What we must do is preserve the genuine aspects of this need for reaching deeper and higher elements in oneself and others and what transcends us, but also separate it from what unfortunately is a vague, self centered romanticism of the worst sorts.

Spirituality, rather, is inner growth. It is the nurturing of the divine spark within us. It deals with those potentialities in our nature that elevates us in moral worth and dignity and links us to the Divine.

I cannot see how this is anything but the blossoming of that which makes us uniquely human, the taking upon ourselves the tasks of character development, the paths of righteousness, the acceptance of our responsibility to live an ethical life. It is the striving to realize and embody in ourselves and in others a higher, broader, enhanced way of life. For me there is no spirituality without responsibility and the facing of the burden of ascent. Slonimsky has taught us that the mark of the truly religious person is that he is willing to take on more than his share in the process of value enrichment, of the production and conservation of personal and group values. The Prophets teach us that there is something at stake in every historical situation and we can, by acting or failing to act, make a decisive difference in our lives, in those we come in contact with, and in the world.

This is what Holiness and Spirituality are all about.

Spirituality, must be the living of life with all its risks and obstacles, successes and failures. I am reminded of Matthew Arnold’s Emedocles on Etna

Is it so small a thing?
To have enjoyed the sun
To have lived light in the spring
To have loved, to have thought, to have done
To have advanced true friends, and beat down baffling foes?

does ignores the fundamental Reform principle that we are duty bound to distinguish between those values and ideals in Judaism, (notice not commandments) which we must take seriously and indeed see them as Holy or Sacred Obligations, and The Mitzvot concerning Kings, the High priest, the sacrifices and the priestly service, all civil and criminal laws; the Mitzvot concerning slavery are completely inoperative. But even if one were to exclude all these and retain the perhaps 100 or so Mitzvot left, the document does ignores the fundamental Reform principle that we are duty bound to distinguish between those values and ideals in Judaism, (notice not commandments) which we must take seriously and indeed see them as Holy or Sacred Obligations, and those that should be simply preserved as folkways, or as ceremonies which are part of Jewish culture. There is no attempt to clarify which Mitzvot were enacted as accommodations to an unfriendly environment, or introduced to deal with emergency situations, or those that Reform rejected in the past and still need to be rejected because of their unethical or discriminatory or obsolete nature. For example, the Mitzvot that treat women and non Jews as second class citizens. These are very much a part of the 613 commandments and should be rejected as contrary to the essential principles and teachings of Reform Judaism.Reform Judaism is a religion of ideals, of ethical and spiritual principles, which uses rituals to implement and embody the ethical and spiritual dimensions of Judaism.

Mitzvot are not an end unto themselves but must fit into a value framework that gives them their proper place and significanceThe problem of course is that if you're going to use critical methods, there is no way that you can arbitrarily stop using them. You're going to have to use them wherever they are applicable.

Ritual as such without ethics is not only fruitless but also ultimately idolatrous, since it seeks to achieve by ritual what should have been achieved from ethical livingIt is for this reason that the ritual on the Day of Atonement has such significance. In the confession of sins the sins enumerated are all ethical and nearness to God is conditioned on reconciling ourselves with our neighbor. The day of atonement deals with the ethical and in the traditional liturgy rises to a crescendo in the Neilah service with a repetition of the Midot affirming God’s attributes culminating in the affirmation that a God with those attributes is the true God.
Here the ethical is indissolubly connected to the religious.
.
Isaiah and the other Prophets while against sacrifices were not against ritual. What they condemned was the belief that ritual can take the place of ethics, or that one can use ritual to make up for unrighteousness.

Holiness in Judaism cannot be divorced from righteousness and the fact that on Yom Kippur we only state ethical sins and that we read from Isaiah 58 condemning fasting as if it could be a substitute for the ethical should be clear
God seeking as a continual quest must take the place of God knowing as an infallible certainty especially in the historically conditioned forms of the past.
Spirituality is not having exquisite religious experiences; rather it is the living of a religious life.
Can there be anything more spiritual than to overcome the divisions within us? Is it not to face all those aspects in ourselves that are unworthy of us, or at least, of us at our best, and strive with God’s help to overcome the worst in ourselves, in our society and in the world? Is it not to be in touch with the best, and using that best to transform the worst?

And is it not spirituality to find and develop rituals that will continually remind us of the best and help us in pursuing it?
What we condemn in a vile, unfeeling, self centered person is not so much that he is continually intruding his self in everything but the self he has chosen to assert and the self he has chosen to deny. Should not ritual be a means of building nobility of character, practices which realize our fullest and deepest potentials.

Also, it must be made clear that there are goods, which only a community can provide, and the distinction between personal and communal good is a false one. Are we not better the more involved we are in and with the life of others? Buber in this sense was right, all real living is meeting but here again what in ourselves connects with what in the other?

It was Hosea and Jeremiah who said that we take on the character of what we pursue. If we go after things of naught then we become naught. It was the prophets who taught that evil is the perversion, frustration, degradation, of all that is the divine in us. Hence I believe spirituality is how we can develop the image of God within us. The reason that it states that God made man in his image is so that each individual can grow that which is divine in him into full flowering. In this sense Jonas was right when he said man was made not just “in” but “for” the image of God.
Spirituality means that each individual is unique. In the world of ethical and religious values what is truly valuable is unique and irreplaceable.

Does not Judaism teach us this in pointing out that he who saves one life is as if he saved an entire world, and he who destroys one life is as if he destroyed an entire world.

What better way can we teach the uniqueness of each individual than by the Rabbinic statement that when a king of flesh and blood mints coins they are all the same whereas when God created all human beings in the divine image each one is distinct and thus each can say for my sake the world was created?

Is it not real and true spirituality for each of us to ask humbly and honestly: Am I living my life in such a way that indeed I have the right to say for my sake the world was created?

If this is the meaning of spirituality then God’s being must be a continuing process of the creation, conservation and enhancement of value and personality; of the true and the good, the beautiful and the holy. God must be the ground for the creation of the world and life and mind and personality and spirit; the ever continuing creation of all that is of worth in existence. Such creation of values requires not just an orderly and intelligible universe, but also a universe that especially in life and personal life manifests values, which qualify and integrate and realize this universe.

When it comes to revelation we cannot be fundamentalists with their belief in a literal word by word revelation of an infallible scripture. We cannot believe that all comes from God and human beings contribute nothing to the divine word.

The revelation of God cannot be limited to one sphere or one person or one time. God must, I believe, continually reveal to all that are receptive in a variety of ways. Some speak of revelation as inspiration. Some see revelation as the manifestation of genius, as creativity in a variety of areas, music, art, and literature. I think Slonimsky was right when he said the greatest creativity was ethical creativity and all of us can share in this in the way we live our lives.

Oman put it best for me when he said that a person is a “prophet because more than others, he is intensely awake to life and duty. His equipment is loyalty and moral insight, and his call the sense of great tasks imposed upon him by the challenge of grave and terrible events. Had he been only a passive vehicle for a direct utterance of omniscience, the abiding value of his word would have depended upon proofs of absolute accuracy and guaranteed authorship. But, by actively interpreting God’s purpose for his own life among men, his word remains its own evidence by continuing to interpret God’s purpose for our lives and society” (John Oman Grace and Personality p148)

Our task today is to increase the truth and righteousness all the great sages of the Jewish people discovered. The last way to honor them is to unthinkingly accept them as a dogmatic revealed tradition, which is unquestioned and unchanging.

With respect to God obviously, we did not create the world or ourselves or our values. God is the ground for the being order and value in reality. But God is even more. God is the ground for hope.

The belief in God is the faith that the world and all there is will not dissipate into nothingness. It is the belief that the yearnings of the mind and heart for the True and the Good and the Beautiful and the Divine will not be disappointed but as Montague well states the belief in God in an ultimate and final sense means “that the things that matter most will not be at the mercy of the things that matter least.” (Belief Unbound p.7)

In all of the above we have the teachings of Judaism. The best in Judaism and the Jewish people have taken the high road, very often the heroic road. A road that continually seeks the divine in one’s life, in society and in the world. Should we let this disintegrate into a narrow self serving Judaism, an unthinking ritually obsessed Judaism.

Do we really want form without substance and words without meaning and rituals without effect and issues without results and life without causes that demand the best from us?

Wordsworth in his sonnet series on the River Duddon
Points to something that I feel is true of every heir of the Prophets, of every Jew- of the Jewish People.

“As I cast my eyes, I see what was, and is, and will abide;
Still glides the Stream, and shall forever glide;
The form remains, the Function never dies;
While we, the brave, the mighty, and the wise
We men, who in our morn of youth defied
The elements, must vanish; -- be it so!
Enough, if something from our hands has power
To live, and act, and serve the future hour;
And if, as toward the silent tomb we go,
Through love, through hope, and faiths transcendent
Dower
We feel that we are greater than we know.”

JOB

By Rabbi Jack Bemporad

The Book of Job is universally recognized as one of the great literary and religious pieces of all literature—it is a poetic drama. Beginning with a prose prologue (chapters 1 and 2), it continues through three cycles of speeches between Job and his three friends, Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar (Chapters 3-31); Elihu’s speech (Chapters 32-37), God’s interrogation and Job’s response (Chapters 38-42:6) and closes with an epilogue (Chapter 42:7 to the end).

There is considerable controversy as to how genuine the various parts of the book are. Some scholars believe that the only genuine features of the book are the cycles of speeches, God’s interrogation and Job’s response. These scholars maintain that the Prologue and Epilogue, Chapter 28, Elihu’s speech, and much of the divine speech were added later. These scholars take an extreme view. Most scholars grant that the prologue and the epilogue (with the exception of Chapter 42:12-16) are original parts of the book, and most scholars reject Chapter 28, Elihu’s speech and the references to Behemoth (Chapters 40:15-24) and Leviathan (Chapter 41:1-end) as later interpolations.
HERE A FOOTNOTE AS FOLLOWS SHOULD BE INSERTED
( put in as footnote 1
a still helpful analysis of the elements of the book of Job may be found in Moses Buttenwieser The Book of Job Macmillan 1922. a more recent discussion may be found in Matitiahu Tsevat The Meaning of the Book of Job and other Biblical Studies Ktav 1980)

The Prologue (Chapters 1 and 2) sets the stage for the problem of the book. Job is “blameless and upright,” a man who “fears God and turns away from evil.” He is exceedingly prosperous and blessed in full measure in every way.

When the “sons of God” present themselves before the Lord and Satan, who has gone to and fro on the earth, God asks Satan the accuser, “Have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil?” Satan responds to God, by asking Him why shouldn’t Job be righteous, since God has blessed him in everything? But if God were to face him with adversity, He would see that Job would turn against Him and curse him.

The issue at stake between God and Satan is this: Is there such a thing as virtue for its own sake? Will Job remain virtuous when the rewards of virtue are not praise and prosperity, but irreparable loss and intense suffering? The Prologue only introduces the issue and informs the reader that Job is innocent and that his sufferings are in no sense deserved.

God places Job in Satan’s power and in one fell swoop, everything, except his wife—who Satan uses as his ally (Chapter2:9)—is taken from him. His children, his property and his servants are destroyed. Instead of cursing God, Job proclaims “Naked I came from mother’s womb and naked shall I return; the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord (Chapter 1:21).”

Satan appears before God again, and again God speaks of His servant who is unique in his righteousness. Satan claims, “All that a man has he will give for his life, but put forth this hand now and touch his bone and flesh and he will curse thee to thy face.” God puts Job into Satan’s power once again—but he is not permitted to let him die.

Job is afflicted with sores all over his body and is in intense pain. His wife pleads with him to curse God and die as a relief. But Job maintains his faith and asks, “Shall we receive good at the hand of God and not evil?”

“In all this Job did not sin with his lips.”

Job’s three friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar hear of Job’s affliction and come to visit him. When they see him from afar, he is so disfigured, they cannot recognize him. They weep over his fate, tear their clothing and “throw dust in the air.” They sit with him for seven days and seven nights without saying a word * Excursus 1]
THIS IS WHERE THERE SHOULD BE A NOTE SEE EXCURSUS ONE
. Finally, Job breaks the silence and initiates the conversation by cursing the day of his birth and longing for death.

“Why did I not die at birth, come forth from the womb and expire? Why did the knees receive me? Or why the breasts, that I should suck? For then I should have lain down and been quiet; I should have slept; then I should have been at rest,” (Chapter 3:11-13) and “Why was I not as a hidden untimely birth, as infants that never see the light? There the wicked cease from troubling, and there the weary are at rest. There the prisoners are at ease together: they hear not the voice of the taskmaster. The small and the great are there, and the slave is free from his master” (Chapter 3:16-19).

Death is the great leveler. All achieve equality in death. Job longs for death. “Why is light given to him that is in misery and life to the bitter in soul, who longs for death?” (Chapter 3:20-21)

Eliphaz responds to Job’s lament. His discourse is well-organized, coherent and well-tempered. He first says that Job “instructed many” and “strengthened the weak hands” when others were in trouble. “Your words have upheld him who was stumbling and you have made firm the feeble knees. But now it has come to you and you are impatient; it touches you, and you are dismayed. Is not your fear of God your confidence and the integrity of your ways your hope?”

Eliphaz exhorts Job not to make an exception of himself. He tells him to heed the very advice he gave others in trouble—to trust in God, who will save him. Secondly, Eliphaz states, “Think now, who that was innocent ever perished? Or where were the upright cut off?”

Does Job really believe that evil can afflict the innocent? It would mean that God is not just. On the contrary, Job himself knows very well that “those who plan iniquity and sow trouble reap the same.” (Chapter 4:8)

Thirdly, Eliphaz claims that in a vision at night, the truth was revealed to him. “Can mortal man be righteous before God? Can a man be pure before his Maker? Even in his servants he puts no trust, and his angels he charges with error; how much more those who dwell in houses of clay.” (Chapter 4:17ff.) That is, man is too puny to question God. If even the angels are imperfect, how much more so is man?

Finally, Eliphaz maintains that God guides all things, including natural phenomena, according to justice and this is the foundation for man’s hope.

“As for me, I would seek God, and to God would I commit my cause; who does great things and unsearchable, marvelous things without number: He gives rain upon the earth and sends waters upon the fields; He sets on high those who are lowly, and those who mourn are lifted to safety. He frustrates the devices of the crafty, so that their hands achieve no success. He takes the wise in their own craftiness; and the schemes of the wily are brought to a quick end. They meet with darkness in the daytime, grope at noonday as in the night. But He saves the fatherless from their mouth, the needy from the hand of the mighty. So the poor have hope, and injustice shuts her mouth.

“Behold, happy is the man whom God reproves; therefore despise not the chastening of the Almighty. For He wounds but He binds up; He smites, but His hands heal. He will deliver you from six troubles; in seven there shall no evil touch you. In famine He will redeem you from death, and in war from the power of the sword. You shall be hid from the scourge of the tongue, and shall not fear destruction when it comes. At destruction and famine you shall laugh, and shall not fear the beasts of the earth. For you shall be in league with the beasts of the field, and the beasts of the field shall be at peace with you. You shall know that your tent is safe, and you shall inspect your fold and miss nothing. You shall know also that your descendants shall be many, and your offspring as the grass of the earth. You shall come to your grave in ripe old age, as a shock of grain comes up to the threshing floor in its season. Lo, this we have searched out; it is true. Hear, and know it for your good.” (Chapter 5:8-27)

Eliphaz’s speech is an overpowering theological display. What is more, he speaks to Job as a prophet stating a divine teaching. Everything that happens is due to God’s justice; the wicked will be punished and the righteous will be rewarded. If only Job will trust in God, he will be saved from his suffering.[

Job’s response is that Eliphaz’s speech is beside the point. First of all he does not need reproof, he needs sympathy. They are indeed not his friends. “He who withholds kindness from a friend forsakes the fear of the Almighty. My brethren are treacherous as a torrent bed, as freshets that pass away, which are dark with ice, and where the snow hides itself” (Chapter 6:14-17).

But the essence of Job’s response is simple. Wherein has he done wrong? What is his sin? He states, “Teach me and I will be silent; make me understand how I have erred. How forceful are honest words! But what does reproof from you reprove?” (Chapter 6:24-25).

Finally, it is easy for others to talk of hope and trust. Job asks, “What is my strength that I should wait…Is my strength the strength of stones or is my flesh bronze…?” (Chapter 6:11-13) Bildad the Shuhite now responds to Job bluntly: “Does God pervert justice? Or does the Almighty pervert the right?” (Chapter 8:3) He also refers to the death of Job’s children, “If your children have sinned against him, he has delivered them into the power of their transgres-sion,” (Chapter 8:4) and Bildad argues, “God will not reject a blameless man but will reward you in the end” (Chapter 8:20a).”

Job now raises a different issue which foreshadows the confrontation later on in the book. How can man contend with God? There is no match between man and God. How can man maintain his innocence against God? God can easily overpower him. Job states, “For He crushes me with a tempest, and multiplies my wounds without cause; He will not let me get my breath, but fills me with bitterness. If it is a contest of strength, behold him! If it is a matter of justice, who can summon him? Though I am innocent, my own mouth would condemn me; though I am blameless, he would prove me perverse” (Chapter 9:17-20).

God can overpower Job and persuade him against himself and in spite of himself. Despite this, Job maintains his blamelessness. But since God has all the power on his side, Job understands that in spite of his innocence he will be condemned. He states, “If I say, I will forget my complaint, I will put off my sad countenance, and be of good cheer, I become afraid of all my suffering, for I know thou wilt not hold me innocent. I shall be condemned; why then do I labor in vain? I wash myself with snow, and cleanse my hands with lye, yet thou wilt plunge me into a pit, and my own clothes will abhor me. For He is not a man, as I am, that I might answer him, that we should come to trial together. There is no umpire between us, who might lay his hand upon us both. Let him take his rod away from me, and let not dread of him terrify me. Then I would speak without fear of him, for I am not so in myself” (Chapter 9:27-35).

If Job could find an umpire who could be objective with respect to his claim of innocence, he could plead his case. If Job could plead his own case before God, if only God would not terrify him and would grant him some respite from his suffering, Job would say to God: “Do not condemn me; let me know why thou dost contend against me. Does it seem good to thee to oppress, to despise the work of thy hands and favor the designs of the wicked? Hast thou eyes of flesh? Dost thou see as man sees? Are thy days as the days of man, or thy years as man’s years, that thou dost seek out my iniquity and search for my sin, although thou knowest that I am not guilty, and there is none to deliver out of thy hand? Thy hands fashioned and made me; and now thou dost turn about and destroy me. Remember that thou has made me of clay; and wilt thou turn me to dust again?” (Chapter 10:2-9).

Job draws a logical conclusion from his innocence and suffering. It must be that God destroys both the blameless and the wicked. When disaster brings sudden death, He mocks the innocent as they fail. The earth is given into the hands of the wicked; He covers the faces of its judges—and if it is not He, then who else could it be? (Chapter 9:22-24) Here is where Job raises the question that the experience of his excruciating suffering and the recognition of his own innocence force to the fore: There is no justice in the world; both the blameless and the wicked are destroyed. Zophar the Na’amathite joins the dialogue and states explicitly what the others have so far only implied. “For you say, ‘My doctrine is pure, and I am clean in God’s eyes,’ But oh, that God would speak...” (Chapter 11:4-5a). …What you would learn is that “God exacts of you less than your guilt deserves.” (Chapter 11:6b) Zophar also argues that Job should “set your heart aright” (Chapter 11:13) and thereby be secure. Job’s responses become increasingly bitter. First he condemns his friends. They are at ease and all they can do is condemn those whom misfortune overtakes. (Chapter 12:5a) He tells them, “As for you, you whitewash with lies; worthless physicians are you all” (Chapter 13:4).

The irony is that when God does finally speak, He condemns the friends for not speaking rightly as His servant Job has.

What Job is seeking is a confrontation with God. Job calls God to judgment as in a lawsuit. Lawsuits can be conducted in two ways—by asking a series of questions or by being asked a series of questions. Job is prepared for both. “Call, and I will answer; or let me speak, and do Thou reply to me.” (Chapter 13:22)

“I would speak to the Almighty and I desire to argue my case with God… (Chapter 13:3a) Let me have silence, and I will speak, and let come on me what may. I will take my flesh in my teeth, and put my life in my hand. Behold, He will slay me; I have no hope; yet I will defend my ways to his face. This will be my salvation—that a godless man shall not come before him. Listen carefully to my words, and let my declaration be in your ears. Behold, I have prepared my case; I know that I shall be vindicated. Who is there that will contend with me? For then I would be silent and die. Only grant two things to me, then I will not hide myself from thy face: withdraw thy hand far from me, and let not dread of thee terrify me. Then call, and I will answer; or let me speak and do thou reply to me. …” (Chapter 13: 13-22a)

Eliphaz is alarmed at Job’s utterances. He accuses Job of forsaking his religion and indicates that his own words have condemned him. “But you are doing away with the fear of God…(Chapter15:4a) For your iniquity teaches your mouth, and you choose the tongue of the crafty. Your own mouth condemns you, and not I; your own lips testify against you. (Chapter 15:5-6) Why does your heart carry you away, and why do your eyes flash, that you turn your spirit against God, and let such words go out of your mouth?” (Chapter 15:12-13)

In opposition to the accusations of the friends, Job stands firm. They are “miserable comforters.” (Chapter 16:2a) But God is his witness. He will vindicate him. (Chapter 16:19) Job knows that he will be redeemed (Chapter 19:25a) “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at last He will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been thus destroyed, (then from my flesh I shall sec God, whom I shall see on my side. . .” (Chapter 10:25-27a)
Both Bildad and Zophar are disturbed at Job’s rejection of justice in the world. Bildad wants to know why Job considers his friends brutes, why he regards them as stupid. He asks, “If light of the wicked is put out” (Chapter 18:5) and in Chapter 20, Zophar asks Job, “Do you not know this from the days of old, since man was placed upon earth, that the exulting of the wicked is short, and the joy of the godless but for a moment?” (Chapter 20:4-5).

Job now directly confronts this oft repeated doctrine of the friends that the righteous prosper and the wicked perish. In the most explicit terms, he rejects it completely. He states, “When I think of it I am dismayed, and shuddering seizes my flesh. Why do the wicked live, reach old age, and grow mighty in power? Their children are established in their presence, and their offspring before their eyes. Their houses are safe from fear, and no rod of God is upon them. Their bull breed without fail; their cow calves, and does not cast her calf.

“They send forth their little ones like a flock, and their children dance. They sing to the tambourine and the lyre, and rejoice to the sound of the pipe. They spend their days in prosperity, and in peace they go down to Sheol. They say to God, ‘Depart from us! We do not desire the knowledge of thy ways. What is the Almighty that we should serve him? And what profit do we get if we pray to him?’

“Behold, is not their prosperity in their hand? The counsel of the wicked is far from me. How often is it that the lamp of the wicked is put out? That their calamity comes upon them? That God distributes pains in his anger? That they are like straw before the wind, and like chaff that the storm carries away?

“You say God stores up their iniquity for their sons. Let Him recompense it to themselves, that they may know it. Let their own eyes see their destruction, let them drink of the wrath of the Almighty. For what do they care for their houses after them, when the number of their months is cut off? Will any teach God knowledge, seeing that He judges those that are on high? One dies in full prosperity, being wholly at ease and secure, his body full of fat and the marrow of his bones moist. Another dies in bitterness of soul, never having tasted of good. They lie down alike in the dust, and the worms cover them.

“Behold, I know your thought, and your schemes to wrong me. For you say. Where is the house of the prince? Where is the tent in which the wicked dwelt? Have you not asked those who travel the roads, and do you not accept their testimony that the wicked man is spared in the day of calamity, that he is rescued in the day of wrath? Who declares his way to his face, and who requites him for what he has done? When he is borne to the grave, watch is kept over his tomb. The clods of the valley are sweet to him; all men follow after him, and those who go before him are innumerable. How then will you comfort me with empty nothings? There is nothing left of your answers but falsehood.” (Chapter 21:6-34) *[Excursus 2]

Job defends his integrity and innocence (Chapter 27:5-6) against the explicit attack of Eliphaz (Chapter 22:4ff) and his friends.

Job speaks of his past, when he was honored and God’s care watched over him. These verses are some of the most beautiful and touching in the whole Bible.

“Oh that things were as of old, when the Almighty was yet with me, when my children were about me; when my steps were washed with milk, and the rock poured out for me streams of oil! When I went out to the gate of the city, when I prepared my seat in the square, the young men saw me and withdrew, and the aged rose and stood; the princes refrained from talking, and laid their hand on their mouth; the voice of the nobles was hushed, and their tongue cleaved to the roof of their mouth. When the ear heard, it called me blessed, and when the eye saw, it approved; because I delivered the poor who cried, and the fatherless who had none to help him. The blessing of him who was about to perish came upon me, and I caused the widow’s heart to sing for joy. I put on righteousness, and it clothed me; my justice was like a robe and a turban. I was eyes to the blind, and feet to the lame. I was a father to the poor, and I searched out the cause of him whom I did not know. I broke the fangs of the unrighteous, and made him drop his prey from his teeth (Chapter 29:5-17).

“Men listened to me, and waited, and kept silence for my counsel, After I spoke they did not speak again, and my word dropped upon them. They waited for me as for the rain; and they opened their mouths as for the spring rain. I smiled on them when they had no confidence; and the light of my countenance they did not cast down. I chose their way, and sat as chief, and I dwelt like a king among his troops, like one who comforts mourners” (Chapter 29:21-25).

But what a reversal! What a contrast between then and now. Job continues: “But now they make sport of me, men who are younger than I, whose fathers I would have disdained to set with the dogs of my flock. (Chapter 30:1) They abhor me, they keep aloof from me; they do not hesitate to spit at the sight of me. Because God has loosed my cord and humbled me, they have cast off restraint in my presence. On my right hand the rabble rise, they drive me forth, they cast up against me their ways of destruction. They break up my path, they promote my calamity; no one restrains them. As through a wide breach they come; amid the crash they roll on.

“Terrors are turned upon me; my honor is pursued as by the wind, and my prosperity has passed away like a cloud. And now my soul is poured out within me; days of affliction have taken hold of me. The night racks my bones, and the pain that gnaws me takes no rest. With violence it seizes my garment; it binds me Job about like the collar of my tunic.

“God has cast me into the mire, and I have become like dust and ashes. I cry to Thee and Thou dost not answer me; I stand, and Thou dost not heed me. Thou has turned cruel to me; with the might of Thy hand thou dost persecute me. Thou liftest me up on the wind, Thou makest me ride on it, and Thou tossest me about in the roar of the storm.

“Yea, I know that Thou wilt bring me to death, and to the house appointed for all living. Yet does not one in a heap of ruins stretch out his hand, and in his disaster cry for help? Did not I weep for him whose day was hard? Was not my soul grieved for the poor?

“But when I looked for good, evil came; and when I waited for light, darkness came. My heart is in turmoil, and is never still; days of affliction come to meet me. I go about blackened, but not by the sun; I stand up in the assembly, and cry for help. I am a brother of jackals, and a companion of ostriches. My skin turns black and falls from me, and by bones burn with heat. My lyre is turned to mourning, and my pipe to the voice of those who weep” (Chapter 30:10-31).

The friends are arguing, first, that God is just and thus no innocent person ever perished and no wicked person ever triumphed. Second, Job must have sinned or God would not be punishing him. The only alternative is that God is unjust and this would be blasphemy! Although at first it may seem otherwise, if one persists, he will discover that God’s justice does indeed operate in this world as it does in all His doings in the natural and human realm. Third, the friends affirm that man is finite and of necessity imperfect and therefore is in no condition to challenge God or to question God’s ways.

The issue between Job and his friends is that they are judging him without in any way taking into consideration the agony of his suffering. They refuse to put themselves in his place. They immediately judge his suffering as the consequence of sin, indeed of blasphemy. They are con-vinced that there is no suffering without sin and that all who suffer must be sinful.

Job is arguing, first, that he is innocent and even if God were to slay him, he would still defiantly proclaim his integrity. He states, “I will defend my ways to His face.” Second, he challenges their basic proposition and maintains that often the wicked do prosper and the righteous do suffer and that God does not seem to hearken to the prayers of the oppressed. Third, he states that the Friends are whitewashers and liars and speak falsely for God but that God will vindicate him.

Two completely alien positions are expressed here. Implicit in the friends’ arguments and the refrain that runs through their speeches is that justice is a fact and to deny it is to blaspheme God. They affirm that God’s goodness completely depends on the duality of reward and punishment in this world.

Job accuses them of lying (Chapter 13:4) and speaking deceitfully for God. He defends his integrity in the face of all. Job can no longer converse with his friends, bewail his former glory or lament his degradation. Finally, he turns to God to vindicate him and resolve his perplexity. Why do the good suffer? We are aware that in Job’s case it is the best man, the most righteous man who suffering the worst fate, (1:8, 11-12: 2:3-6) so how do we reconcile the reality of ideal justice with the fact of injustice? What is the role of God and man in all this? Job confronts God, as if in a lawsuit, but God is silent (19:7) and so Job asks in a crescendo of questions (31:5ff) “If I have walked with falsehood, if my step had turned aside from the way and my heart had gone after my eyes, my heart had been enticed by a woman?”

After vindicating his personal morality, Job turns to his relationship with his fellow man. “If I have rejected the cause of my man servant; if I have withheld anything that the poor desired or have eaten my morsel alone… If I have seen anyone perish for lack of clothing?” and then turns to his own values and ideals: “If I made gold my trust…if I have rejoiced because my wealth was great…If I had rejoiced in the ruin of him that hated me?”

This crescendo of questions addressed to God by Job plainly demonstrates his integrity and innocence. If he had done any of these things, then his punishment would be just. But he is innocent and God must declare to him wherein he had done wrong.

. Now it is God’s turn. As in a lawsuit, God must either answer for Himself or pose questions for Job to answer. [*EXCURSUS 3]

Finally God’s voice issues forth from the whirlwind, asking questions concerning the laws operating in nature. “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? … Who determined its measurements?... Have you walked in the recesses of the deep?... Have the gates of death been revealed to you? …Who has cleft a channel for the torrents of rain … to bring rain in a land where no man is, on the desert where there is no man to satisfy the waste and desolate land.”

He then turns to the order of the animal world. “Can you hunt the prey for the lion and satisfy the appetite of the young lion? … Who provides for the fallen prey? …Who has let the wild ass go free?”

Nature and animal life is so diversified and vast that the mere listing of these questions undercut man’s belief that the whole universe and everything in it functions for the sake of man and is created expressly for his needs. On the contrary, nature and animal life have their own laws which are separate and unrelated to man’s needs.

But even more, nature is indifferent to the morality so central to man. “The wings of the ostrich wave proudly but are they the pinions and plumage of love? She leaves her eggs on the ground forgetting that a foot may crush them. … She deals cruelly with her young. …And the eagle, he spies out his prey and the young ones suck up blood.”

The brunt of these questions is to show overwhelmingly both the variety and diversity of existence and also its amoral character. Nature and animal life do not function morally. The culmination comes when God confronts Job directly: “Will you condemn me that you may be justified? Deck yourself with majesty and dignity, clothe yourself with glory and splendor, look on everyone that is proud and abase him, look on everyone that is proud and bring him low and tread down the wicked where they stand. Hide them all in the dust together, bind their faces in the world below then will I also acknowledge to you that your own right hand can give you victory.”

Job responds. He says he now understands and that he repents. What does Job now understand? First, he understands that man is not the center of the world. Second, the world is essentially amoral. Third, God has placed upon man the task of “treading the wicked.” Man must do the work on earth. He must realize that it is his “own hand that will give him victory.” It is not up to God to do man’s work. Fourth, the world is unfinished and that man must strive to make it whole. It is only in an unfinished universe, one that is in the making, one that is not yet won for God and man, that man has a task and a function.

Yet, the good suffer and the best suffer most because it is the just and true and righteous that take upon themselves the task of bringing justice and truth in the world. When man has achieved his task, only then will a new heaven and a new earth appear together with a new heart and a new covenant, then the whole earth will be full of the knowledge of God and the lion will eat straw like the ox, then none shall be afraid, then God shall be one and His name shall be one.

In the Epilogue God announces that the friends have not spoken correctly of God, whereas Job has (Chapter 42:7-9). They must therefore offer up a burnt offering for their sin. What constitutes their sin? It is three-fold: First, they affirmed that man is at the center of the universe and thus assumed that the natural and moral are one.

In fact, as we have seen. Job’s protest and God’s answer demonstrate that they are not in fact one, but must be made one. Second, they deny the very nature of man’s task. For them man has no self-transcending, nature transforming historical task. They thus deny what is at the heart of the prophetic concept of man—that he is the instrument for the realization of the Messianic goal. Third, they make trivial the suffering and agony, the tragic pathos endured by the just man who is the agent for the realization of the good. The friends want God to do man’s work.

Thus they have not spoken correctly, while Job recognizes injustice yet sticks to his task and to his ideal despite the utmost agony and the most intense suffering. Job is the servant of God par excellence, and he symbolizes to us the historic transformations that nature and man must accomplish if God’s world is to emerge, to be brought into being.

Job is called the servant of the Lord and is symbolic of the suffering Israel who has a mission which can only involve suffering. The concept of the servant of God comes to completion in the heroic and terrifying servant passages in Second Isaiah. There God states: “Hearken to me you who know righteousness, the people in whose heart is My law. Fear not the reproach of men.” Israel the servant of God is to be a light unto the nations that God’s salvation may reach to the ends of the earth. (Is. 49:6) In these servant passages the promise that was made to Abraham is transmuted into the broadest and most universal context. Now a law will go forth from God and His justice for a light unto the people. The servant of God is to carry God’s law, he is to declare God’s kingdom. His mouth is like a sharp sword. (Chapter 49:2) He has the tongue of them that are taught (50:4). God’s servant, Israel, must affirm God in the world, must bear witness undismayed to the ideal goal of brotherhood and peace. *[Excursus 4]

The great merit of the Book of Job is to conclusively demonstrate that there is no mechanical connection between suffering and sin; on the contrary, there may be great suffering as the result of doing good. The Prophets testify to this, for Justice is not a fact It is an accomplishment that human beings must take upon themselves. That is why God, when speaking directly to Job, goes from the Interrogative to the Imperative and says that he must take upon himself the burden of making the world better—a historical burden human beings must bear.

Slominsky said it best in his essay on the Midrash.

“The core of Jewish belief is that Israel must bear the Torah from God to the world, but the world is unwilling and resists all three; God, Torah, and Israel. And the protagonist who does the actual bearing must also bear the brunt of the suffering...the Torah stands for goodness, for the vision, and ideals, and values, or light of God in which we see light.

God, besides being this light and vision which we behold, is also such power, such real actual power in the universe as is committed and has already been marshaled for the victory of the good. This power must be increased, the ideal must be translated into the real, and the active agent in this crucial event is man, who is thus destined for tragic heroism by the very nature of his situation. Israel, of course, stands for the ideal Israel, and is paradigmatic of the good and brave man everywhere.

That the best must suffer the most, must assume the burdens and sorrows of the world, constitutes the most awesome phenomenon and paradox of the whole spiritual life. God in the full meaning of the term is seen to stand at the end, not at the beginning; on that day He shall be one and His name shall be one. He must be made one, man is the agent in whose hands it is left to make or mar that supreme integration. The assertion of God in a Godless world is the supreme act of religion.” (Slonimsky, page 14)

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*****Excursus 1: In chapter 2:12, when Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar came to see Job, they could not recognize him “and they broke into a loud weeping; each one tore his robe and threw dust in the air onto his head.”

It is fairly clear that the friends are assuming that Job has blasphemed, or they would not have “thrown dust in the air,” an act that has been associated with being in the presence of a blasphemer. Moses Buttenwieser explains this passage in an orginal and penetration manner:


The stricken Job is bewildered at God’s visitation, but not so the friends. They are not for a moment at a loss how to account for his affliction. For them, there in only one conclusion possible in accordance with the doctrine of retributive justice. Of a certainty, he has offended God! Adversity in Job’s day was the sure proof of guilt—this must be remembered. The more crushing a man’s calamity, the plainer it was that he was suffering the Divine wrath incurred by his sins.

This is the light in which the friends view Job’s misfortunes, not only in the Dialogues, but also in the Prologue. In the Prologue, indeed, they express their verdict more effectively than they do by their tirades later—their silence is far more eloquent than words. They come with the avowed intention of offering consolation to Job, but when they behold his “most terrible affliction,” when they find him smitten with leprosy, they see the unmistakable proof of God’s displeasure and instead of showing sympathy,” they rend their garments,” before they venture into his presence, “and sprinkle dust over their heads by casting it heavenward.” By this strange performance they mean to express, not grief on Job’s account, but rather solicitude on their own; they seek to ward off the danger of becoming affected themselves by the curse that has been visited upon Job.

That this is the significance of the rites performed by the friends may be deduced from various sources which supplement one another, notably Acts 22. 22f. These verses tell how, when Paul by his own confession had been proved guilty of apostasy, the people, demanding that he be put to death, cried, and rent their garments, and threw dust into the air.”

The customary explanation that this behavior on the part of the people was merely the expression of wild fanaticism is far afield. The people were in reality performing the rites customary under such circumstances. This follows from the Talmudic law in Mishna Sanhedrin 7.5 pertaining to the related case of blasphemy. The law specifies that in a trial when the witnesses testify that the offense was committed, the court and the bystander must rend their garments. The Gemara 60a significantly adds that the reason that the witnesses are not required to do likewise is that they naturally performed these rites at the time the offense happened.

On the question, why these rites are performed both by those that have been witnesses of the act of apostasy or blasphemy and by the friends before venturing into Job’s presence, light is shed by the precept attributed to Mohammed by Abdallah b. Umar: “The prophet said, “Do not enter these places that have been visited with punishment, except you weep. If you do not weep, you shall not enter them lest that which has befallen them befall you also.’’’

J. Pedersen correctly remarks in explanation: “The places visited with punishment are those upon which a curse rests. If any person were to enter there, he would become affected by the curse. He, however, who puts himself in a state as of one accursed will not be harmed by the curse, having made himself immune against it.”

It is safe to deduce that the rending of his garments by the person witnessing an act of blasphemy, or as in the case of Paul’s apostasy, the rending of his garments accompanied by crying and the throwing of dust into the air, was meant to serve as a safeguard against the NOT CLEAR
which, it was believed, would be visited on the offender. This deduction is further established by the fact that the law applying to blasphemy in Sanhedrin is supplemented in Nedarim Babli 7b by the regulation that “he who hears his fellowman commit blasphemy must put him under the ban else he himself shall be put under the ban.”

In the light of these facts, the real meaning of Job’s reproach to his friends, “When ye saw the terror, ye were seized with fear,” (6.21) is at once plain. His words are a clear reference to their behavior when they first behold Job’s terrible visitation. They are shocked, not by the extent of his misery or by the sight of his horrible suffering, but by the certainty that he is under a curse. They fear for their own safety, and seek to divert God’s wrath by the rites which they perform. This without a doubt is the significance of the friend’s demonstration and their ensuing silence. Job knows this well, and the knowledge cuts him to the quick. He understands the friends. They believe him guilty and accursed. He will receive no sympathy from them.

WE SHOULD EITHER PUT IN A FOOTNOTE OR GIVE THE REFERENCE IE PAGE NUMBER ETC

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Excursus 2: In these verses Job raises a question similar to that raised by Jeremiah (12) and the Psalmist (Psalm 73). All three texts question the prosperity of the wicked and why God allows this to happen. Jeremiah states it and answers it without significant elaboration. The wicked prosper but their loss is that they are remote from God whereas Jeremiah experiences a profound closeness to the divine.

QUOTE 12 VERSES 1 TO 3 A
“RIGHTIOUS ART THOU O LORD, WHEN I COMPLAIN TO THEE, YET I WOULD PLEAD MY CASE BEFORE THEE
I WILL GIVE YOU A COPY OF THE REVISED STANDARD VERSION WHICH IS THE ONE I LIKE TO USE AS I THINK IT IS THE BEST OVER ALL TRANSLATION
“Why does the way of the wicked prosper? Why DO ALL WHO are treacherous THRIVE?...You are present in their mouths and far from their thoughts, Yet You Lord, have noted and observed me, you have tested my heart and found it with You.”

In raising this question, the Psalmist is more elaborate and has produced one of the great gems of religious literature. His answer is similar to Jeremiah’s.

In Psalm 73 the Psalmist confesses that the prosperity of the wicked, of which he was so jealous, almost caused him to abandon his religion. The prosperity he is referring to is more than money; he envies their attitude, their nonchalance; their lack of conscience. He writes: “But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled, my steps had well nigh slipped. For I was envious of the arrogant, when I saw the prosperity of the wicked, for they have no pangs; their bodies are sound and sleek. They are not in trouble as other men are; they are not stricken like other men. Therefore pride is their necklace; violence covers them as a garment. Their eyes swell out with fatness, their hearts overflow with follies. They scoff and speak with malice; loftily they threaten oppression. They set their mouths against the heavens, and their tongue struts through the earth. Therefore the people turn and praise them, and find no fault in them.” They have no inhibitions or a concern for honesty and justice. They make of themselves a means to achieve their own Selfish ends and will do whatever it takes to “get the job done,” especially at the expense of others.

They have no fear of punishment or any kind of judgment. People honor them for their raw power and praise them. They fear nothing.

However the psalmist realizes that they lack what he has, the nearness to God. He states having thee in heaven I desire none else upon earth. It is the closeness to God that opened his eyes to the fact that they can never be close to God and thus in spite of their arrogance miss the whole purpose of life.




Job raises the more troublesome question which is “Why should God cause his servants to be
the very ones to suffer?” Therefore it is both the prosperity of the wicked and the suffering of the righteous that raises the question of justice in the world.

*EXCURSUS 3
It seems that one can make the argument that Job is acting towards God in a similar manner as the friends are acting toward Job. Job complains that the friends judge him without having any idea of his condition, not being aware of his predicament, not really understanding his profound suffering. But is not Job doing a similar thing with respect to God. He is challenging God without in any knowing what is involved in creating this vast universe. What God is in effect asking : “When was the last time that you created a world? You seem to know how I should have done it” furthermore recognize your purpose in the world which is only a part of the purpose of creation.

*Excursus 4
The suffering of the righteous is the central question of the book of Job. This question appears in a poignant form in prophetic literature.

There seems to be an inner contradiction between the teaching of the prophets: that if the people will act righteously then they will prosper and if they act wickedly they will suffer. quote Amos 5: 14; Jeremiah7: 1-15;. Isaiah 1: 16-20. The problem arises in that the prophets and many servants of God act righteously, they proclaim the word of God, but as a result, they suffer.

It therefore dawns upon us that suffering also takes place not simply from doing evil but from doing good. The very people that take on the burden of ascent, of rectifying the wrongs in the world suffer. It is for this reason that Jeremiah in responding to God’s demand says “I am a lad (inexperienced)” (Jeremiah 1:6); Moses says send someone else, (Exodus 4:13) and Amos, (3:8; 7:15) describes it as an overpowering experience over which he has no control. Jeremiah clearly shows the agony of the prophet (Jeremiah 20:7-9).

The midrash in confronting the suffering of the righteous specifically affirm that the righteous MUST suffer. Because it is only by the righteous taking upon themselves the burden of ascent, that the Messianic age can be ushered in. It is the great merit of Slominsky in his brilliant essay, the Philosophy Implicit in the Midrash that these DOCTRINES are CAREFULLY explORED: THE MIDRASH STATES:

R. Jonathan said: “A potter does not test defective vessels, because he cannot give them a single blow without breaking them. Similarly God does not test the wicked but only the righteous, thus the Lord trieth the righteous.” R. Jose b. R. Hanina said: “When a flax-worker knows that his flax is of good quality, the more he pounds it the more it improves and the more it glistens; but if it is of inferior quality he cannot beat it at all without its splitting. Similarly the Lord does not test the wicked but only the righteous, as it says The Lord trieth the righteous.” R. Eleazer said: “When a man possesses two cows, one strong and the other feeble, upon which does he put the yoke’ Surely upon the strong one. Similarly the Lord tests none but the righteous; hence The Lord trieth the righteous.”

As Slonimsky CONCLUDES: “A final set of phrases must be considered in which the rabbinic mind enshrined an answer without parable or argument. Such are the great lapidary utterances “sufferings are a mark of God’s love” and “sufferings are precious.” They are question-begging, that is, in default of argument they are answers by fiat and decree, they are answers by heroism. The answer to the question why the good must suffer for the inadequacies of the world would be the fact that the world is growing, developing, and therefore inevitably defective, and there must be someone noble enough to assume the burden, as exemplification of a new insight, namely that nobility obligates, noblesse oblige.”

“The sentiment gradually established itself that it is a mark of the grandeur of man to be asked to bear more than his share of the burden; and by the same token that the supreme degradation of the low and the base is to be thought not worthy of being ennobled through bearing the sins and sorrows of others.” [Slonimsky, Essays, Pg38]

Thus, Slonimsky notes that these sufferings bring us closer to God when we do His work, by taking on that which goes beyond our own personal world. “…The great tragedy of those who will not take that upon themselves this burden is that “in a growing world like ours, only when the old self is crushed and broken can a higher self emerge, and only if we transcend and forget the petty arithmetic of our private life and go on to include and assume the burdens of others do we rise to a higher life.” (op.cit. p.38)

A Rational Approach to God
Jack Bemporad
Rationality as a Method

In our seminar, when we turned to the relationship between reason and religion, I have called attention to a fundamental difference between early modem views of rationality as the attempt to mathematize nature and rationality as the demand for coherence in our beliefs. Reason in the first sense views mathematics as the paradigm for true rational discourse, so that logic should find its fulfillment in abstract formal relationships. Reason in the second sense is the requirement that whatever one says should be coherent, comprehensive, and applicable to reality. The coherence view of reason endeavors to make sure that what one affirms is intrinsically coherent, i.e., that it is not self-contradictory. It calls on us to make sure that what we affirm is comprehensive in the sense that it encompasses everything that should be taken into consideration in discussing a particular subject matter. Finally, it endeavors to make sure that our assertions relate to experience: not simply experience in the narrow sense of what is discoverable through sense perception, but experience in its broadest and widest dimensions, the whole range of human awareness.
Any attempt to deal rationally with the question of God may use the instruments available in formal logic but also should appeal to experience. Its methodology must be open-minded and not such as to pre-decide the truth of religion in advance. By this I mean that one's methodological procedures for getting at the truth must not define reason and rationality a priori so as to rule out the possible truth of religion. For example, the Logical Positivism of the 1930s limited reason to tautologies and empirical observations obtained through sense experience. If that was what rationality means, then there is no conceivable way to elicit from it metaphysical statements which are, after all, what are usually made, explicitly or implicitly, when dealing with the question of God. You cannot load the gun with ammunition that could not possibly reach the target. We need a methodology that takes religion seriously and that rejects any reductionist methodology—such as Logical Positivism, Freudianism, or Marxism—that holds that statements about God are not to be explained but to be explained away.
Actually, Freudian and Marxian assumptions that all forms of thinking are ideologies or false consciousness themselves end in self-contradiction. Are these assertions about ideology not themselves ideological? When Freudians or Marxians claim truth for what they say, they admit that rational statements cannot merely be ideological reflexes of unconscious drives or materialist forces. If all reasoning is the projection of repressed instincts or of a classes aspirations to hegemony, is not reason itself reduced to an infantile need or a class representation with no inherent validity? These systems, therefore, self-destruct.
Much of deconstructionist and postmodernist thinking face this conundrum. Neo-Nietzschean thought is really a form of neo-Darwinism. Just as claws and fangs are means to the tiger's survival, so rationality is a means for human survival. Once rationality is labeled as only a means, there is no basis on which we can rationally establish ends, a main goal of philosophical thinking since Plato. If reason is only a mechanism for control, we have undermined any ability to talk rationally about anything, including any doctrine as to the nature of God.
Anthropomorphism, Symbolism, and the Holy
In approaching the question of God, I concede that there is no escaping anthropomorphism. Whether or not you claim that God is, in any sense, personal, some anthropomorphism cannot be avoided. The issue is whether we have a sophisticated anthropomorphism or a crude anthropomorphism, a self-conscious anthropomorphism or an unconscious anthropomorphism. Does the so-called primitive individual who employs anthropomorphic imagery know that he or she is bemg anthropomorphic, or do they realize that a symbol is being used metaphorically or analogically? Anthropomorphic statements taken literally I call pre-systematic. It is the function of systematic statements to criticize these myths rationally. Post-systematic anthropomorphism is the reformulation of a symbol, metaphor, or category after its having been purified by systematic analysis. I know of no way to abjure all anthropomorphism, because there is unavoidable subjectivity in how we try to understand the nature of reality. One of the main functions of treating biblical terms in the first part ofMaimonides5 Guide is to salvage the systematic use of those terms by purifying them of their gross anthropomorphic quality.
John Kelly, a mathematician at Tulane with whom I studied, used to put certain equations on the board and then exclaim: "Now isn't that beautiful?" It was certainly anthropomorphic to call these statements beautiful, but they were indeed such. The rabbis to a large extent understood that anthropomorphism was unavoidable. They would insert after certain analogies terms like lehavdel (all necessary differences being understood) or kivyakhol (were it possible to say so). Anthropomorphism in this sense is symbolism, metaphor, or analogy. The classic philosophers use the concept of analogia entis (an analogy of being) to indicate that terms applicable to one thing may be applied to another in a related though not identical fashion.
A belief about God is an analogy that points to something that transcends the human. While seemingly a projection onto the divine realm, it can be just the opposite when affirming that the higher explains the lower, meaning that we extrapolate from the highest that we know in order to speak of the Divine. It is the divine as an extrapolation of the best that we know that becomes the norm for the best that we can become. Thus we strive to see ourselves in God's image as our potentiality and in following the middot (the attributes of God) we then take on the divine likeness. This traditional Jewish interpretation of the attributes of God in Exodus 34:6-7 is a profound one indeed.
I hold that human beings have an intrinsic capacity for awe, an intuition of the holy. That quality is not necessarily monotheistic; it may even be idolatrous, defined as reverence for things that are anything but worthy of supreme worship. In the recent Heaven's Gate mass suicide in California, these people killed themselves out of a misguided sense of a sacred mission. It was a manifestation of counterfeit religion, a misplaced sense of the sacred. Khruschev, pounding on the desk, insisted that Communism was a sacred task, even thought he would have denied that he was religious in any way.
Theology, Language, and History
In a recently published posthumous work issued as Volume Four of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forws, Ernst Cassirer remarked that "science is directed as much against language as it is against myth." This recalls Maimonides's effort in the Guide for the Perplexed'to strip such biblical terms as t^ekm (image) of their sensuous, therefore anthropomorphic, nature to constitute a purified vocabulary for dealing with the question of God. Only after doing this in Part One, does Maimonides, in the Second Part of the Guide, try to develop proofs for God's existence and related theological matters.
I have tried to maintain that whatever definition you have of God, you have to start with a terminology that admits God's possible existence. Besides logical consistency and a purified vocabulary, there must be an appeal to human experience, especially the experience of the holy. But any claim to a special revelation must be consonant with universal reason and human experience. Thus, teachings that are specifically Jewish have somehow to fit into our universally human experience. The Jewishly human and the universally human reinforce each other. Otherwise you will find yourself, like Tertullian or Kierkegaard, asserting a belief primarily because it is absurd, on the grounds that faith cannot be what is rational, only a leap to that which is irrational. I am arguing that we always have to ask for the reasons why we believe something and that it is indispensable in justifying a claim to appeal to the general experience of all human beings.
Just as we cannot escape the question of rationality by claiming that a belief is based on faith, we cannot escape a contextual, that is, a historical, understanding of our particular beliefs. There is no way to separate a doctrine or religious dogma from the context in which it arose. In Religion in the Making Alfred North Whitehead wrote: "You cannot claim absolute finality for a dogma without claiming a commensurate finality for the sphere of thought within which it arose." Since we cannot do the latter, we cannot do the former either. Because the historical context is always changing, there is no way that you can decontextualize an abstract formulation and make it into a statement with absolute validity. Similarly, Paul Tillich in his Systematic Theology said of the fundamentalists the following:
[They] confuse eternal truth with a temporal expression of this truth. The theological truth of yesterday is defended as an unchangeable message against the theological truth of today and tomorrow. It elevates something finite and transitory to infinite and eternal validity. Modem systematic rationality does not permit this elevation of finite language to timeless, absolute truth.
The Rationality of Belief in God
Whenever we make a universal claim, we have to be clear what kind of claim it is. Given this constraint, what could constitute an answer to the question of the meaning of God?
I propose that God is, first of all, an answer to the metaphysical nature and possibility of being and order. There is sufficient order evident in the connections within and between the various structures in the world, that make it difficult to believe that the world as a whole is a chaos. Just as we are not responsible for our own existence, we are not responsible for there being order, meaning, and value in the world. Perhaps the world contains that which organizes and integrates the whole; perhaps the various elements of the world constitute a whole which transcends the parts and is responsible for its order. In either case, without a universal ordering principle there is no world. Whitehead said that it was not the case that there was a world that happened to have an order: no order, no world.
Charles Hartshome points out that a chaotic world would be a situation where each element of the world has an equal capacity to affect and be affected by any other element. This would be a world where there is no prime ordering entity—but then it would not be possible to speak of a world at all. Our logic, language, and experience do not correspond to that possibility. We must presuppose that there is order, just as we must presuppose that there is value. These are what Cassirer calls "basis-phenomena/' concepts without which you cannot think rationally at all. Just as God is an answer to various forms of human need and to the meaning of life, God is an answer to the question of ultimate reality and an intelligible world. When we talk about God, we are talking about all these answers and their connection to goodness, creativity, power, existence, universal being. We are pointing to cosmic variables in contrast to local variables, to eternity in contrast to finitude, to order in contrast to chaos.
The classic philosophical and theological tradition that defines God as that ultimate Being which does not depend on anything else for its existence is correct, insofar as God is that Being upon which everything else in some sense depends. However you define God further, God has somehow to be prior, before as well as with and after. There must be a divine self-sufficiency: God cannot be contingent in the sense that God can come to be and pass away, because God is the ultimate ground and foundation for everything else. But what is the relation between God and "everything else?" Views of a finite God, like that of William James, are attractive, but at the cost of eliminating the dimension of absoluteness and infinity from the divine.
In discussing the question of God, one would have to start by asking, what is it in my experience that gives an awareness of something that has true endurance, that is before my experience, mth my experience, and continues afterme? In Whitehead's and Harthome's views, God is a continuing creativity that operates through the finite, so that everything that comes to be and passes away is infused by it and integrated into it. Mordecai Kaplan also pointed to creativity as a central aspect of the divine, but Kaplan was primarily concerned with the sociological and pragmatic, not the ontological aspects of theological speculation. It is possible to revise Kaplan so as to make explicit the theological dimensions of his often brilliant insights, and so doing would make the reality of God more apparent.
Admittedly, one cannot really prove the existence of God. All one can do is say, "Look, here is the evidence; these are the conclusions; take your pick. If you make certain presuppositions, you will arrive at certain conclusions." First, we must ask if a certain definition of God is coherent. Some of the most famous of them turn out to be problematic. The great medieval thinker Anselm stated that because one has an idea of a being than which there is none greater, such a perfect being must certainly exist. Centuries later Leibniz noted that if he says there is a number N for which there is none greater, he can always add one number to N to get an even greater number. Many of the traditional rationalistic arguments seek to prove an idea of God that is intrinsically incoherent.
The Coherence of God
The first question we should ask is, therefore, not whether such and such an argument proves the existence of God, but whether the concept of God is in itself coherent. Second, we should not demand for God what we do not demand for anything else. Do we really believe that only that exists or is true which is provable? What we aspire to is a doctrine of God that satisfies the critical imagination, not just the scientific mind. The concept of God must be connected to all of our experiences, in which are included music, art, poetry—and religion.
I referred earlier to Cassirer's "basis-phenomena" that are implied in a discussion of anything whatsoever, including the self, action, the other, the world, and the whole that incorporates them all. These are ontological presuppositions for any comprehensive discussion whatsoever. Cassirer, of course, was strongly influenced by the Neo-Kantians, such as his teacher Hermann Cohen, as well as by Kant himself. Articulating these basic concepts is what Kant sought to do in the transcendental deduction by delineating the factors in any possible experience. The philosophical tradition going back to ancient times tried to deal with this, as when Aristotle refers to categories that any discussion of ultimates would have to presuppose. To the categories of the true, the good, the beautiful, the self, the other, and so forth, I would add the category of the sacred to which I referred earlier. Even the atheist has to deal with the question of what is sacred.
I believe we all have a sense of what is ultimately holy. In religion, we either believe in God or, to use the biblical term, in an idol. Idolatry is absolutizing the finite, giving absolute value to the finite. Even metaphysicians can absolutize a finite variable, when God as the ultimate is replaced by the self in philosophical idealism or the concept of matter in philosophical materialism.
How does the rabbinic tradition distinguish between the divine and the idolatrous? Useful in this regard is the rabbinic distinction between the^et^er tov (the good inclination) and ^\tyet^erha-ra (the bad inclination). The good inclination is that part of the psychological makeup which strives to orient the individual to the true, the good, and the holy, so that the individual seeks these qualities for himself or herself and for others. The bad inclination is that competitive drive, valuable in itself, that all too often wants good at the expense of the other, that seeks to control and convert others into objects of use. The broadly conceived individuality of \htyet^er tov is universal, not tribal. TheJet^er ha-ra is narrowly individualized, lacking in true universalism. The deity of theJ^yr tov is the God who wants good for all creatures; the deity of \he Jester ha-m is an idol, a vengeful figure that Whitehead labels the "cosmic despot." Therefore, a sense of the holy is a first step, but conceptions of the holy must be universally coherent to be convincing.
Logical and Ontological Coherence
If the concept of God must be coherent in a universal sense, it should also be ontologically applicable to reality as we know it. Ontology deals with the metaphysical structure of reality.
Both Maimonides and Aquinas deal at length with the question of the rational nature of God. Thus the concept of God cannot be logically contradictory. Some assertions are logically incoherent, such as God's committing suicide. If God is all powerful, can God create a stone that is so heavy that God cannot lift it? Can God square a triangle? The answer is, of course, no. Why not? Because these involve logical contradictions and God cannot do contradictory things. The important point is that there are not only logical but also ontological limits on what God can do.
If God created the universe, God cannot act as if there were no created world. God creates creators, that is, agents that have independent being and power. If God has all possible power, then nothing else has any. Hans Jonas, Charles Hartshome, and others have repeatedly pointed out that power is a relational term. Even the ideal or perfect divine agent will only enjoy the optimal concentration of efficacy compatible with there being other efficacious agents. In other words, if the world is made up of creatures that have being and power on their own such that there is a realm of decision-making in which those creatures can somehow make a decisive difference, then it is illogical to view God as making all decisions whatsoever. If the world contains many creative agents, it is impossible to speak of God as if those creative agents simply did not exist. Omnipotence in any intelligible sense must make room for the reality and being of the creatures. We have to aver at least this crucial ontological limitation on God's power.
Similarly, it is incoherent to speak of God as omniscient in the way that traditional theism does, that is, to assert that God knows everything at the beginning. If the difference between past and future is such that the past is actual and definite and the future is possible and indefinite, then God's knowledge is inherently incomplete. Were God to know the future as past. God would know it as it is not, not as it is. If I do not know what I am going to do, say, in the next twenty minutes, then even God does not know what I am going to do. If, at the moment of creation God knew everything that would take place for all time, then God knows as past that which God's creatures have not yet done. But the present and the future are not definite, complete, decided. God created a open universe.
God and Evil
We have seen that the notion of an all-powerful God as omniscient and omnipotent must be redefined so as to take account of the ontological reality of creation.
This is especially true with respect to the problem of evil. If at the moment of creation God knew all that would take place, then there is no way of exempting God from the responsibility for evil. Only if there are logical limits and ontological limits to what God can do—only if what God does takes into consideration the reality and creativity of the creatures—can the evil in the world not be attributed to God.
There is no way for evil to exist if there were no finite sentient entities. Evil is part and parcel of finitude. But so is good. If one were to do away with everything that makes for evil, one would also eliminate everything that makes for good.
First, all value is finite and all realization is finite. All values cannot be realized at once. Every time we achieve a certain goal, we exclude others. Finite goals can conflict because they may be mutually exclusive.
Second, the finite can be increased and decreased; therefore, the idea of perfection as containing the realization of all values at the same time is incoherent. Even God cannot actualize all goods at once. In that respect, the venerable Aristotelian definition of God as pure actuality is incoherent. God needs time and the created world to proceed toward any divine end.
If one were to ask how does God act in the world—the most fundamental theological issue that we face—1 would answer that God can only act by accepting the conditions of finite existence, which means accepting the reality of space, time, and process. For anything to take place, three ingredients must be inherent in it: a causal past; a set of ideals to be actualized; decisions made by entities from a range of possibilities.
First, the past functions as a system of causes to which any event must conform. Without such an "efficient cause/' to use the Aristotlean term, there would be no uniformity or continuity in the world. I know that I will not turn into an elephant in the next few minutes because there is continuous structure and a natural order extending from past to present to future. In setting the ground for an order of nature. God limits the range of possibilities to be actualized in the present. Also God offers to each event a set of ideals to be realized. God works in the world by giving us an opportunity to choose the best within the range of possibilities offered to us. The actual event itself is a moment of self-definition in which the possibilities presented are actualized as a past for some new present moment.
If all the decisions were clear "at the beginning," God would be responsible for all evil. Instead, God functions as the ground for the order of things and as the persuasive factor which strives to elicit the best in each occasion. Ultimately, it is agents such as us, embedded in an actual present, that make the decisions, which then becomes the past for the next level of events.
Many have criticized God, or denied God's existence entirely, on the grounds that, even granting the refinements as to the concept of God we have outlined, there still is an excessive amount of evil in the world. But what is the logical alternative? Recently the wife of a friend, a woman with neurological problems, was advised by her doctor not to drive. Tired of staying at home, she decided to go out for a drive and had an accident. Should God have intervened at the moment that she went into the car, causing the engine not to function or inserting into her mind that she really want to do something else? Then the only decision would have been God's, not hers. Furthermore where should one draw the line? Should God intervene in every situation wherein someone is going to act in a less than ideal way? God functions universally through the order of nature and through eliciting the best from all of us. To insist that God intervene decisively in any event is to reduce God as one finite entity among others. When people make decisions, they (and, all too often, many others) have to bear the consequences.
There would no longer be a distinction between good and evil if, whenever we made a decision damaging to ourselves or to others, God would intervene to turn it into something right and good. There would not be an organized nature. Has there not been such grievous evil that, despite everything, we would want that intervention to occur? This is the stuff of tragedy. We might turn to the book of Job.
When Job asks God why he is suffering and why is there no justice in the world, one can characterize the answer of the Voice from the Whirlwind as asking: When was the last time you created a world? Do you have any idea what is involved in creating a world? Did it ever occur to you that you are not the center of the universe and that you have a role to play in bringing forth justice? In other words, it is not the case that God decides for any possibility at any time—that anything at all can happen. There is the causality of the past and there are the actors in the present. Events occur within a context of order, structure, mutual interaction, decision-making out of potentialities that are indefinite and indeterminate before they are realized. Human beings are co-creators in shaping the human future.
I know that many would like to believe in a God that could always be counted on to intervene and deliver us, a God that would provide us with everything we need or we think we need. Some prayers consist of asking that exceptions be made for us that we know are not being made in other cases. "Just this instance: save me, take care of me, do good for me." This view of God's action in a historical world makes no sense to me. God does take care of us by providing a world for us wherein we can function, inspiring us through persuasion to do our best. As Whitehead says. God works through the worship he inspires and salvages the best out of our decisions for the presentation of future possibilities. God^s actions have to be understood in this sense if we are to have a conception of God in our day and age.
In the last analysis, we cannot do without a concept of God, but it should be a rational one. I have tried to delineate the parameters of that concept as well as I can.
From the discussion
Question: You insist on the necessity of anthropomorphism. Why can't we just avoid anthropomorphism and speak of God impersonally?
JB: I just don't know any way of talking about anything without introducing some elements of anthropomorphism. Even talking about things in a strictly mathematical way involves anthropomorphism. Whitehead says that we should seek simplicity but mistrust it. Why should we want to seek simplicity? Why follow Ockam's razor ("Entities are not to be multiplied with necessity" or "What can be done with fewer [assumptions] is done in vain with more")? Is it not for anthropomorphic reasons that we would like to have explanations of reality as simple as possible? Also, to refer to God as Mind or, as Aristotle does, as "Thought Thinking Thought," is very anthropomorphic, since thinking is something that we experience as human beings. The value that Aristotle placed on thinking is very anthropomorphic. As we all know, the Bible commands us not to make any graven images, yet does not hesitate to claim that human beings are made in the image of God. Maimonides claims that "image" here refers to reason. Some have interpreted Aimage to mean creator." In both cases one is using words that are anthropomorphic.
Question: But language is not always anthropomorphic.
JB: I don't know any other way of talking except by using terms that make sense to human beings. When Xenophanes said that if horses would develop ideas of the gods they would be in the form of horses, in his own religious philosophy he did not hesitate to attribute positive qualities to the divine, such as omnipresent knowing and rational guidance of the world. The use of "rational" and "guidance" are obviously extrapolated from human activity. Plato coined the term "theology" to mew correct speech about the divine. His goal, as that of all Greek philosophical theology, was to reject the crude anthropomorphism of the Greek myths. It was an effort to purify speech about the gods. Here I think we must recognize that, unless we understand these statements contextually, in terms of the historical problems and assumptions of fifth-century BCE Greek thought, we fail to understand them. Similarly, to read the first chapter of Genesis apart from the rejection of the gods as deified forces in nature is to misread it.
The attack on anthropomorphism in the seventeenth century must be seen in the light of the new physics ofGalileo and of Descartes' rejection of Aristotelian physics, especially the concept of final causes. As Stephen Toulmin has demonstrated in his book Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity', the rise of the new physics was a twofold attempt to safeguard science from Church control and a desperate attempt to search for certainty in trying to overcome the type of relativism and anarchy produced by the Thirty Years War. If the alternative to anthropomorphism is the mechanistic models of Newtonian physics, are we really better ofP Is not Whitehead correct in describing this view of science as "matter blindly running"? Mechanical explanation may have some role in certain areas, but to extrapolate from these areas to all of reality is a highly questionable procedure.
Whatever one may think about the equations of Einstein's special and general theories of relativity, I find it hard to believe that the very imaginative thought-experiments that led to his doctrine ofinvariance in special relativity or of equivalence in the general theory could have been done without a mind like Einstein's. It is amusing to think that what Einstein called his greatest blunder, the introduction of the cosmological constant to offset the clear implications from his theory of general relativity that ours is an expanding universe, was introduced because he could not believe that the universe was not unchanging and eternal. In the Einstein-Bohr controversy on the completeness of quantum mechanics an interesting question is which is less or more anthropomorphic, Einstein's commitment to an objective world that is causally interrelated or Bohr's insistence on the rejection of causal space-time. The latter, in fact, results not in a theory of nature but only information brought about through an observer (not necessarily a human observer) placed in the position to observe through the intervention of human beings.
Insofar as we're human, there will always be a subject-object distinction and correlation. I am a Kantian in that I agree that one cannot describe things-in-themselves, i.e., reality as it is apart from our experience of it and the categories we use to understand it. A degree of subjectivity is always present in the framing of the categories by which a relationship with any object is conceptualized, whatever that object might be. If we eliminated all anthropomorphism, we would not be able to talk about anything at all. Through philosophical analysis, however, we clear the ground for a post-systematic symbolism that provides us with a God we can speak about in a way that rejects crude and unethical attributes and sets logical and ontological conditions for truth.
Question: In a concentration camp in 1942 I spoke with a rabbi who was experiencing moral agony about God's absence. He had decided it was not God who created the world but humankind that created God. God is not a being, but a concept.
JB: God creates an ordered reality, which contains beings whom he does not control. God is not a mere subjective idea but part of the subject-object correlation. Reality is not only a subjective idea. We do not create God; we come to a relationship with God using certain categories of thought and feeling. We didn't create the universe. The universe is a continual process of creation, including creatures that have the power to frame ideas, especially ideas of God. Question: What does God do? Is God present in prayer if God does not listen to an individual's prayers?
JB: God works through the worship he inspires. God inspires individuals to choose within a range of options. In the Holocaust, it is hard to believe that people who were about to be killed didn't pray for deliverance. A God who could have intervened and didn't is a demonic God.
Question: How is yours a Jewish concept of God?
JB: For a rational view of God I draw much from Jewish thinkers such as Henry Slonimsky, Mordecai Kaplan, Hans Jonas, and Leo Baeck. I want to give a philosophical, an ontological foundation for their view of a God who is affected by what happens in the world.
Question: What about the covenant?
JB: The problem is how to interpret the concept of covenant. In the Bible, the covenant involves a limit on God, as when God says to Noah that he won't destroy the world again or when Moses tells God that he can't destroy this people. God has to keep his promises. Leo Baeck, in This People Israel, interprets the covenant as referring, first of all, to the reliability of the laws of nature. Mordecai Kaplan has great difficulties with the idea of covenant. Rejecting the idea of a chosen people, he views the Jewish people as having a Avocation." In Fackenheim's Holocaust theology, the idea that we will continue to fulfill our part of the covenant even though God could have intervened and didn't leads, as I said, to a demonic view of God. The crucial problem is the existence of tragedy in the world and the inadequacy of explaining it as the result only of the people's sins.
Comment: Kaplan's predicate theology deliberately skirts theoretical ontology in favor of more practical concerns about how to deal with tragedy. I need to know how to incorporate the divine qualities in the world, such as justice, into my life, so that God helps me deal with the worst that can befall me.
JB: I believe that predicate theology is incomplete. Kaplan uses it as an element in his view of God but does not limit his concept of God to predicates. For example, he speaks of God as "the power that makes for salvation." Predicates alone and in themselves seem to be suspended in thin air. Certainly, ideals and values are necessary and must be ontologically grounded. If they are similar to Platonic Ideas, that raises the question of what kind of existence they have. Plato's ideas have a causal character. Do the divine predicates function as causes? Morality is concerned with action, but what kind of action do predicates have? What makes certain predicates divine, unless you have a divine being to which they apply? One cannot speak of human predicates without a human being to which they apply. What is the ontological status of these predicates? What is their interconnection? Is there an order of divine predicates so that they form some kind of unity? Are they infinite and eternal? If they are part of nature, will they come to be and pass away like all natural beings? If they are not Platonic Forms but rather ideas in the mind, how do they differ from all other ideas? It is instructive to point out that Plato struggled with many of these questions, for example in the first part of the Parmenides and in the cosmology of the Timaeus, ending up with the need for a demiurgos, a divine craftsman to answer the question ofAnaxagoras as to the nature of the mind that is the basic principle of all things.
Question: Does formal, organized worship have any importance other than communal affirmation?
JB: The Jewish people is to bear witness to certain values. Worship is a means by which we are transfigured according to these values. The liturgy challenges one to act. The Jewish community should be made^rthe image of God, creating a certain awareness of God outside the community.
Question: Why is our monotheism superior to religions that have more than one god, such as Hinduism? Isn't it just smug to assert that monotheism is a higher stage of religious development?
JB: Monotheism in Judaism is ethical monotheism. In ancient times, the many gods were usually identified with different forces of nature that had to be propitiated. A transcendent God makes it possible to understand nature and history in a different way. Biblical monotheism was the ancient religion that attacked the blind worship of power. The idea of a world without war—a future entirely peaceful—was unique to biblical prophecy and a result of biblical monotheism. As long as one believed in a plurality of deities fighting one another, there was no foundation for the concept of a world at peace. Furthermore, because these deities were anything but moral, they embodied the worst elements of what we see in nationalism. Psalm 82 has God rendering judgment on the gods because of their immorality. Even Plato in the Republic, where he describes the ideal or best state, says that a class of warriors is essential. In the Timaeus it is a given that the most characteristic element of a state is war.
By the way, Hinduism does not necessarily involve a multiplicity of deities; it is a religion of unity, of one God, Brahman. But it is not an ethical monotheism.
Question: Hinduism is similar to process theology, but how is monotheism connected to process theology?
JB: The only Hindu whose thought is truly compatible with process theology is Sri Aurobindo, who was influenced by English neo-idealist philosophers. For Shankara, Ramakrishna, and other traditional Hindus, the individual is merely an illusion. This is monism, not ethical monotheism.
I think the Bible takes history seriously and God is seen historically. I also think that Buber's is a legitimate translation ofEhyeh'^sher'Ehyeh (Exodus 3:14) as <<! will be that I will be." Buber has a number of perceptive things to say about the turn to the future in his Prophetic Faith,
Question: Judaism is not universalistic only; it is also particularistic, which makes Judaism vulnerable to sophisticated anti-Semitism in that it portrays the Jewish idea ofchosenness as national egoism.
JB: The classic Jewish response is to point to the Bible where chosenness is not egoism but being a light unto the peoples.
Question: If the Jewish people is to be a light to the nations, what is the source of the Jewish decision not to proselytize?
Response: There was no Jewish "decision" not to proselytize, apart from specific historical pressures that made proselytizing dangerous for many centuries. Of course, Judaism does not say that non-Jews are not saved, and it therefore lacked the special pressure to missionize found in Christianity.
Question: Why do Christians insist on giving such priority to conversion of the Jews?
JB: For the last thirty years, the Catholic Church has not been concerned with converting the Jews, because it feels that the Jews have an important role to play in the world today. The Southern Baptists support the "Jews for Jesus," and it was this group that pressed the Baptist convention to approve a resolution calling for active missionizing among Jews.
Question: Even though all religions represent a groping toward a spiritual understanding of reality, is it not possible to say that Judaism has avoided irrational dogmas and is particularly amenable to rational analysis?
JB: EvenJudah ha-Levi, who made the distinction between the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob, still said: "God forbid thatwe should accept anything contrary to reason.7'
JB: A further clarification of the meaning of "anthropomorphism" and the nature of religion.
All of us are objects before we become subjects: living entities prior to becoming feeling, thinking persons. I would not deny that we have feelings and that we experience a sense of self, of others, and of a world from our very first encounter with the light of day. Rather, the world that welcomes us in the forms of parents, grandparents, and our earliest environment is decisive for the structuring of our awareness of our selves, of others, and of the larger world of which we are increasingly conscious of being a part. We can only become persons through the intervention and nurturing of other persons. As we grow up, we are aware of a growing sense of self that comes from introspection and is not derivative from any prior or more ultimate experiences of others and of the world that encompasses us. We also recognize thatwe have a will, we have desire and yearnings, and that our will is connected to other people and to things outside us and within us. Finally, we are aware that we have within us the capacity to relate to our own selves in a manner that is distinguishable from how we relate to everyone and to everything else. We are connected to our self-relatedness in ways that make our selves unique and in which our being both subjects and objects makes us distinct from all that we encounter in the world, including the other subject-objects we meet in our social and cultural worlds.
As selves, we are the object of such sciences as biology, which associates us with all other types of living being. As emotional and thinking beings who feel, think, and create, we are the object of psychological investigations. As members of society, we are the objects of sociology, economics, and anthropology. As creative beings, we are producers of art, literature, music, etc. Most of all, we are essentially historical beings. IfR. G. Collingwood is correct in characterizing history as not merely the listing of successive events but reflective understanding, then history is a basic category for human self-understanding. Ernst Cassirer points out that the historical character of reality involves individual motivation. The decision, for example, of Julius Caesar to cross the Rubicon was the result of one person's choices and considerations, but another individual, a different Caesar had there been one, might have done differently. Without this perspective, the significance of history cannot be grasped.
Strangest of all, we are also the beings who are not merely the objects of investigation but are doing the investigating as well. This reflexivity is prominent not only in the epistemological realm but also in the realm of action. What we do not only affects others but affects ourselves too.
First, what we do will affect our future selves. We engage in self-making or soul-making. What I mean by anthropomorphism is that our languages and conceptional schemes are mediated through personal reflexivity. Furthermore, the very process with which we engage in the investigation of these objective realms is language. As Cassirer has pointed out, the study of language becomes the foundational element in any philosophy of culture and must be the foundation for all the other sciences as well. All sciences elaborate categorical schemes which are in effect purified languages.
There seem to be other "basis-phenomena" which are constitutive of being a human being. There is the eerieness of knowing that we once were literally nothing and the recognition of the eventual non-being that we will become at death. We are also conscious of ourselves and we cannot only feel but can symbolize. We human beings traffic in symbols and can envision the true, the good, the beautiful—and the dreadful. We not only feel pain but contemplate our being in pain and recoil from the possibility of that experience. We not only die and experience death, but, unlike other animals, we can conceptualize dying and we experience the terror of dying and develop strategies to strive to do our best to overcome death. We not only experience life but are also aware that we live. We are aware that we have been born, that we live our lives and die. We ask ourselves the meaning of our existence. It may be that the essential meaning of religion is what we do to make sense of our existence, either consciously or unconsciously. Our religion is how we deal with that question.
The problem is that we are both finite and infinite or, at least, that we transcend our finitude insofar as we are aware of our finitude. We project symbols, structures, and meanings that transcend our animal existence. Humans are the only animals who want to live beyond their dying, that devise the concept of living forever or at least yearn for a significance that outlasts their finite temporal lives. Humans do not merely instinctively fear extinction but do so self-consciously and thus create stones, myths, philosophies, or religions that help explain the meaning of life. That is why history and culture is so significant.
Culture provides symbols that transcend our individualities. Can we control life? Ritual was an attempt to control things. Some feel most in control of their lives when they have absolute control over the lives of others, that even though they may not really have power over themselves they can rule over others. As Ernest Becker in states, "Ritual raised them over decay and death." Becker's writings, especially The Denial of Death, are to be taken seriously as an attempt to deal with overcoming the certainty of mortality. The attempt to find a place in the scheme of things is the beginning of religious striving. Religion is a realm that seeks to connect human beings not merely with all the objects of science which are below man (below in the sense of less complex and therefore subordinate to human reality). As Martin Buber has argued, religion connects humans to that which is on the inter-human level. Religion also connects us to what is above the human level. We not only look within and without, but beyond.

JEWISH RESPONSE TO PONTIFICAL STATEMENT ON THE BIBLE

Biblical document

The pontifical Biblical document is an important step in the direction of better understanding between Catholics and Jews. In some respects it makes new, significant and positive affirmations as to Catholic appreciation of Judaism. In other respects it is problematic and I will deal with these in detail, but even here the document is both important and helpful since it tries in an honest and comprehensive manner to clearly present a Catholic understanding of the place of the Jewish people and its scriptures in the New Testament. The document places its findings in the inter religious context both in its preface and in more detail in the concluding sections.
First of all I want to express my appreciation to the Pontifical Biblical commission for such a difficult and valiant effort. The problem it addresses has haunted Jews and Christians for centuries. What is the real and binding connection between our two faiths. Even the most superficial view of the New Testament immediately impresses the reader with its indissoluble connection to the Hebrew Bible and if one is cognizant of Rabbinic texts and institutions with the Rabbinic context within which it emerged.
I think it took daring for the Pontifical Commission to present its results when so much of the material it covers is in the process of intense scrutiny and changing scholarly opinions. This uncertainty is not just in the study of early Rabbinic Judaism but also in New Testament research, both in the scholarly work on the historical Jesus, and even more so in the intense debate over the Apostle Paul.
One of the many merits of this document is that it is viewed as part of an ongoing process embodying the results of current work, which is subject to revision.
The leitmotif of the document is announced in Cardinal Ratzinger’s introduction where he quotes section 84:
“Without the Old testament the New Testament would be an incomprehensible book, a plant deprived of its roots and destined to dry up and wither.”
Hence any attempt to view the N.T as self-sufficient or in a Marcionite context is again repudiated but in a much more vigorous form.
The document clearly reaffirms the past statements of the Church in the section on pastoral orientations.
The Second Vatican Council, in its recommendation that there be
"understanding and mutual esteem" between Christians and Jews, declared that these will be "born especially from biblical and theological study, as well as from fraternal dialogue". 347 The present Document has been composed in this spirit; it hopes to make a positive contribution to it, and encourages
in the Church of Christ the love towards Jews that Pope Paul VI emphasized on the day of the promulgation of the conciliar document Nostra Aetate. 348
With this text, Vatican Two laid the foundations for a new understanding of our relations with Jews when it said that "according to the apostle (Paul), the Jews, because of their ancestors, still remain very dear to God, whose gifts and calling are irrevocable (Rm 11:29)". 349

Through his teaching, John Paul II has, on many occasions, taken the initiative in developing this Declaration. During a visit to the synagogue of Mainz (1980) he said: "The encounter between the people of God of the Old Covenant, which has never been abrogated by God (cf. Rm 11:29), and that of the New Covenant is also an internal dialogue in our Church, similar to that between the first and second part of its Bible". 350
Later, addressing the Jewish communities of Italy during a visit to the synagogue of Rome (1986), he declared: "The Church of Christ discovers its 'links' with Judaism 'by If the pondering its own mystery' (cf. Nostra Aetate). The Jewish religion is not
'extrinsic' to us, but in a certain manner, it is 'intrinsic' to our
religion. We have therefore a relationship with it, which we do not
have with any other religion. You are our favored brothers and, in a certain sense, one can say our elder brothers". 351
An attitude of respect, esteem and love for the Jewish people is the only truly Christian attitude in a situation, which is mysteriously part of the beneficent and positive plan of God. Dialogue is possible, since Jews and Christians share a rich common patrimony that unites them. It is greatly to
be desired that prejudice and misunderstanding be gradually eliminated on both sides, in favor of a better understanding of the patrimony they share and to strengthen the links that bind them.
Never before as far as I am aware has as unequivocal an affirmation as the following been made by a pontifical commission.
“The New Testament recognizes the divine authority of the Jewish Scriptures and supports itself on this authority. When the New Testament speaks of the "Scriptures" and refers to "that which is written", it is to the Jewish Scriptures that it refers.”
Cardinal Ratzinger believes that the Hebrew Bible can become a common ground for the fostering of positive relations between Christians and Jews.(6)
Another very positive affirmation of this document that Cardinal Ratzinger alludes to is in section #22.
Here what is affirmed is that: Christians can and ought to admit that the Jewish reading of the Bible is a possible one, in continuity with the Jewish Sacred Scriptures from the Second Temple period, a reading analogous to the Christian reading which developed in parallel fashion. Both readings are bound up with the vision of their respective faiths, of which the readings are the result and expression. Consequently, both are irreducible”(23)
In clarifying what this twofold reading entails, and in clearing the ground for a “possible “Jewish reading, the text states:
It would be wrong to consider the prophecies of the O.T. as some kind of photographic anticipations of future events. All the texts, including those which later were read as Messianic prophecies, already had an immediate import and meaning for their contemporaries before attaining a fuller meaning for future hearers. The messiah-ship of Jesus has a meaning that is new and original…it is therefore better not to excessively insist … on the probative value attributable to the fulfillment of prophecy (which) must be discarded.”(22)
This is all very positive since it clearly maintains separate readings of the Biblical foundations of Judaism and Christianity and also makes room for a reading for the Biblical prophecies in non fulfillment terms. It also perceptively affirms that what happened in Jesus from a Christian point of view was “new and original.”
And again later:
“When the Christian reader perceives that the internal dynamism of the O.T. finds its goal in Jesus, this is a retrospective perception whose point of departure is not in the text as such, but in the events of the N.T. proclaimed by the apostolic preaching. It cannot be said, therefore that Jews do not see what has been proclaimed in the text, but the Christians, in the light of Christ and in the Spirit, discovers in the text further meaning that was hidden there.”(22)
What is left hanging is what exactly is the difference between Jewish and Christian Messianic expectations? The obvious answer from a Jewish perspective is that the Messiah is seen in the Hebrew Bible as ushering in a Messianic age of Justice and peace for all. Here the Jewish communities view of the very texts used by the Church in a Christological manner are viewed very differently in Judaism.
Recognizing this divergence a remarkable and welcome affirmation follows: The Jewish expectation for a Messiah is not in vain. It can become for us Christians a strong stimulus to maintain alive the eschatological dimension of our faith. We also, like them, live in expectation. The difference lies in the fact that for us He who will come will have the attributes of that Jesus that has already come and is already active and present in us.”(22)
From a theological point of view this is a most important step forward in recognizing the legitimacy of a Jewish understanding of the Messiah not merely by rejecting the long standing belief that Jewish Messianic hopes are vain but even more that traditional Jewish expectations can become a powerful stimulus to keep alive the eschatological understanding of the Christian faith. What this accomplishes is the identifying of Jewish expectations of the coming of the Messiah with the second coming of Jesus and in this sense we both share this anticipation.
One caution however is necessary. The concept of the Messiah in Jewish thought has not the same centrality as it does in Christianity. I think our great teacher Leo Baeck expressed this accurately when he states:
“the hope is no longer for one man who will renew the world but for the new world that is to arise upon the earth. For it is inconsistent with the way of Judaism that one man should be lifted above humanity to be its destiny. The conception of the one man retired into the background on favor of the conception of the one time; the Messiah gives way to the “days of the Messiah” and side by side with it the more definite expression of the Kingdom of God.”
There is much that could be said about the documents detailed analysis of the relationship between the O.T and the Jewish environment that accompanied the N.T and the N.T. itself. Much as I have noted is very positive. The long descriptions of Paul’s teaching on pages 36 and 37 ending with the words:
“Paul is convinced that at the end, God, in his inscrutable wisdom, will graft all Israel back onto their own olive tree, ‘all Israel will be saved’ is very positive indeed.
Also at the conclusion of each section there are a number of positive assertions about Judaism and the Jewish people.
If the parallel development from the Hebrew Bible as the original foundational covenant would be traced in two directions with the Christian emerging out of its early Rabbinic context then a more incisive connection between our two faiths would ensue. |However in the detailed comparison I find the discussion somewhat wooden, mechanical, and not properly valanced. It is all presented on the same level without clarifying what is essential and what is peripherals.
Its chief defect can be simply stated. The document evinces little awareness of the great debt the authors of the N.T. owe to Rabbinic Judaism and the almost complete lack of appreciation for what early Rabbinic Judaism contributed.
The clearest example is pooftexting, a rabbinic contribution which lies at the whole foundation of the Gospels and Paul. It is not simply the use of hermeneutic principles but the whole innovation of using Biblical verses as prooftexts that is Pharisaic and fundamental to the way the early Rabbinic sages, and after them Jesus and Paul established their authority, This is clearly seen in Jesus’ controversy with the Sadducees in Mathew 22:23-32. This is very important for understanding the controversies in the N.T.
The New Testament clearly identifies Jesus as a Jew. The religious terminology he used came from Judaism. When asked, “What is the chief one of all the commandments? Jesus replied, ‘The chief one is: Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord, and you must love the Lord your God with your whole heart, with your whole soul and with your whole mind, and with your whole strength. The second is this. You must love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:32FF)
In affirming the central teachings of religion, Jesus responded much as Hillel or Rabbi Akiba responded when asked similar questions. When a pagan challenged Hillel to summarize the whole of the Torah while he stood on one foot, Hillel answered, “what is hateful to you do not unto your fellow human being, this is the whole of the Torah the rest is commentary, go and learn,” (Shabbat 31A) and Akiba affirmed that the central principle of the Torah is ‘you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Bereshit Rabbah 24)

The selection of the passage from Deuteronomy is Rabbinic and completely accepted by Jesus, and incidentally by the earliest Christian prayer communities. The conflicts relating to Sabbath Observance and the dietary laws are in principle no different than the disagreements between the various schools of Judaism of that time. They resemble the type of differences that took place between the schools of Hillel and Shammai, (incidentally neither Hillel nor Shammai were rabbis), between the Sadducee and Pharisees, and are really not such as to separate Jesus from Judaism.
Y. Kaufmann points out that “no controversy concerning the ‘Son of God’ concept as such is reported in the New Testament.” (p.24) If I am not mistaken there is no debate between Jesus and his Jewish antagonist over whether Jesus is the Messiah or not, no debate on the virgin births or incarnation or any “dogma that may have separated the Christian sectarians from Judaism” (Ibid)
On the critical question of authority many spoke with authority and indeed their own authority basing it in one form or another on the received tradition. Luke 16:31 clearly endorses the authority of Moses and the prophets, and as Kaufmann points out “Jesus never cites a prophetic word which was revealed to him or claims ‘authority’ to alter Pentateuchal statutes. He either explicates the texts according to the expository system of the Pharisees or cites the intent and spirit of the law” so in his discussion with the Pharisees in Mark 2:23-28 (and parallels Matthew 12:1-4; Luke 6:1-5), Jesus quotes a well known rabinnic dictum, the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath, but what is more important he then bases the legitimacy of what his disciples did through an interpretation of scripture and not on his own authority and the interpretation is a typical rabbinic hermeneutical method of inferring from minor to major. Perhaps, as I have noted above, the clearest example of the Pharisaic manner of Jesus’ exegesis is in his teaching the Doctrine of the Resurrection of the dead. The Sadduccees rejected any form of resurrection and immortality as being not based on the Pentateuch. The Pharisees and Jesus defend both and defend their position using the same Hermeneutical principles. Jesus does not teach the Doctrines of Immortality and Resurrection as a prophet proclaiming the word of God nor on the basis of his own authority but rather on scriptural exegesis. Thus, Kaufmann after a careful analysis points out that on the issue of oaths and vows “the difference of opinions concerned Halachic niceties; and Jesus’ reasoning is definitely Pharisaic.” (670) Let me make this as clear as possible. The ancient prayer of the synagogue emphasizing resurrection clearly connects Rabbinic Judaism and the N.T. It states “He sustains life with His grace, revives the dead with His boundless mercy, supports the falling, heals the sick, loosens the bounds, and keeps his faith with those who sleep in the dust. Who is like unto Thee master of mighty acts, and who bears resemblance unto Thee, O King, Who deadens and enlivens and causes salvation to flower? And Thou art indeed utterly trustworthy to resurrect the dead. Praised be Thou, O Lord, Who causes the dead to come to life.” This is foundational and must be recognized for a proper understanding of Judaism and its relation to the N.T.
A related, for me, disconcerting aspect of this document is the constant quotes from texts that the Jewish community never accepted as important for a description of Judaism such as the Dead Sea Scroll. To use such tests in explicating what the Jews believed is the equivalent, in a reconstruction of Christianity for one to quote all the non- canonical gospels like the Gospel of Thomas as an appropriate description of early Christianity, while ignoring the texts of the N.T.
I do not in any way wish to minimize the importance of the summary statements in each section, which are all positive and affirmative of Judaism and the Jewish people, but in the comparisons in the intermediate sections the fundamental question is not clearly addressed. This question can be stated in its sharpest form in the following manner: what is unique to Christianity if all Jewish elements that contributed to it were deleted?
In an endeavor to answer this question, I am reminded of a statement by Raymond Brown, who, in a lecture on the book of Acts asked why Jesus as founder of Christianity did not establish laws and institutions like Moses and Mohammed? His answer was that he did not have to, since he accepted the fundamental teachings and institutions of Judaism. The synagogue was a foundational institution. Judaism was the only religion prior to Christianity and Islam that made religion central in one’s life and put one’s faith in God before all else.
The belief in Monotheism is the foundation stone without which the whole revolutionary faith of Judaism would be impossible as well as Christianity. Monotheism is not just the belief in one God as one element among other elements in the Hebrew Bible. It integrates and transforms all the basic elements that makes for the very possibility of their being a Judaism as well as a Christianity and Islam. There is no need for me to elaborate on this before this group except to say that the distinction between faith and works is a distinction, which is alien to Judaism. One fulfills one’s faith through one’s works and one’s works establishes and reinforces one’s faith.
Herman Cohen has pointed out that the “idea of humanity” came from the Hebrew Bible and we can add so much more, most especially the ideal of a society of Justice and peace for all the world. Almost in passing the text makes many very significant points that are helpful for Christian Jewish relations.
At the bottom of page 28 it states “God was never resigned to leaving his people in wretchedness. He always reinstates them in the path of true greatness, for the benefit of the whole of humanity.” What a wonderful affirmation of the nature and role of the Jewish people. The text introduces contextual language to interpret the troublesome text for many non Christians of Acts4:12
In commenting on a servant passage in second Isaiah it clearly recognizes the servant as the People Israel, which is destined to be a light to the nations (34). While there seems to be some hesitation in interpreting Paul in Romans as I indicated above the long section on pages 36 and 37 is very positive. What is especially helpful is the documents claim that the unconditional promises given to Abraham includes the “gift of the land” on (38) “to your descendants I give this land” on page 39 again it states “the Lord commits himself to the gift of the land”.
All of the above is positive. There is, however, unfortunately, much that from a Jewish perspective is troublesome.
First is the treatment of Paul, and especially Galatians and Romans. I personally believe that the work of Stendhal and Gager that Paul was indeed the apostle to the gentiles and that the strictures as to those under the law were strictures against Judaizers is convincing. The careful analysis of both Galatians and Romans in Gager’s book Reinventing Paul makes it clear that the disputes Paul alludes to were disputes “within the Jesus –movement, not with Jews or Judaism outside” (Gager 69) Building on the ground breaking work of Krister Stendahl, Gager summarizes his two books on Paul as follows:
“128 “When Paul summarizes his gospel in 8.1f (“There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus…For the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me free from the law of sin and death), he does so using language characteristic of Gentiles throughout the letter. When he speaks unambiguously of the law and Israel, he never uses terms like condemnation and death. Moreover, there is a strong thematic continuity between Chapters 1-4, which emphasizes the disobedience, the sins, and redemption of the Gentiles, and Chapters 5-8, which speak of their new life in Christ. Any other reading goes against the grain not just of the entire letter but of every Jewish understanding of the law. Little wonder that older Jewish readers of Paul spoke with dismay of his profound distortion of Judaism. But if, as more recent readers have discovered, Paul is not speaking of the law and Israel, that issue disappears. Still, the damage has been done. “I believe it a great tragedy that generations of Christians have seen Jews through these dark lenses.”81
Apropos this position the words of Stendahl are central
“To me the climax of Romans is actually chapters 9-11. i.e., his reflections on the relation between church and synagogue, the church and the Jewish people- not “Christianity” and “Judaism,” not the attitudes of the gospel versus the attitudes of the law. The question is the relation between two communities and their coexistence in the mysterious plan of God. It should be noted that Paul does not say that when the time of God’s kingdom, the consummation, comes Israel will accept Jesus as the Messiah. He says only that the time will come when “all Israel will be saved” (11.26). It is stunning to note that Paul writes this whole section of Romans (10:18-11:36) without using the name of Jesus Christ. This includes the final doxology (11:33-36), the only such doxology in his writings without any christologial element.”
I am not claiming that such a revisionist view of Paul is conclusive. What I am saying is that its claims must be carefully weighed and dealt with. The text does mention Judaizers so that it is at least aware of its importance.
A second issue that needs clarification is the identification of the prophets condemnation of Israelites society with Jesus’ s condemnation of the Jewish leadership. What is involved are the kind of controversies mentioned above not what is stated in the text. The Prophetic criticism in the Hebrew Bible evinces a concern for two issues, idolatry and social justice. Kaufmann points out that the classical prophets believe that it is not only idolatry but also injustice, the oppression of the poor and needy, the exploitation and social corruption of the ruling classes that would lead to exile.
Their condemnation is accompanied with a broken heart for the great tragedy that is befalling their people. Moses plea has a parallel in Paul in Romans chapter 9 but to claim that the leadership of the Jewish people were intent on killing Jesus and destroying Christianity is totally unwarranted as is evidenced by the compelling scholarship both Jewish and non Jewish for the last 100 years. It was the Roman government and Pontius Pilate who were doing the oppressing, not the Pharasaic leadership. We know that the high priest was the appointee of the Procurator and functioned as his henchman. The oppressive nature of the Roman government can be seen by the numerous revolts against Rome.
I do not want these criticisms in any way to take away from what I can only view as a most important step forward in Catholic Jewish relations. There is no question that the intent and in the main the execution of this document is motivated by a sincere desire for genuinely warm and loving relations between our two faiths. No more fitting conclusion can be the whole hearted agreement on my part with the hope expressed in the texts conclusion “that prejudice and misunderstanding be gradually eliminated” for both of us “ in favor of a better understanding of the patrimony” we share so as to strengthen the links that bind us.

Jew in Europe: Co- Hosts or Guests?
Jack Bemporad

If one were to look at Jewish European History it would be difficult to find a time when one could describe the Jews as hosts, keeping in mind the sense of hosts as being those who are in possession of their domiciles. Such hosts invite their guests from a sense of friendship or solidarity for the benefit of the guests and who in large measure view the guests to be on an equal status.

In this sense I do not think that the Jews were ever hosts in the full sense of the word.. They never had the same influence with the ruling powers in Europe that Christians had.
This does not mean, however that they were not often very welcome guests in the sense of being welcomed and received with a degree and variety of rights in many countries in Europe.

In spite of these welcomes which usually took place when Jews were fleeing persecution elsewhere, the welcome often changed to viewing Jews as strangers, or aliens or parvenues, at times pariahs

Jews did there best to contribute to the societies of which they were a part, participating in the social, economic, and intellectual life of the countries in which they lived, often making significant contributions in a number of endeavors.

When we met Pope JPII he spoke highly of the contribution of the Jews in Poland. He said that in Warsaw 10 percent of the population was Jewish and that they contributed to the intellectual life of Poland in an unparalleled way.

This can also be said of other European countries where Jews had a lower percentage of the population.

Certainly the rise of Hitler and the Second World War was a disastrous reality for Europeans and no one should minimize this.

I personally had a sense of this when as a teenager I returned to Italy with my family immediately after the war to see who was still alive of those who we left behind.
We took the very first boat the Vulcania that sailed to Italy from the U.S. I have no words and cannot convey to you the shock that I felt when docking at Palermo.
Not one house was left standing.
The devastation was overwhelming.

Children with bloated bellies were going through Garbage to find scraps of food.
Here in Poland the suffering was horrendous, the devastation enormous. I feel a great kinship with the profound suffering of the Polish people, whose suffering has unfortunately not been given proper recognition.

But the Jews suffered in the unique sense by being singled out for extermination. The first to be destroyed.

Of course Hitler had every intention of making slaves and killing the Balkan population after he exterminated the Jews.

No one in the Jewish community could believe this could happen and it clearly separates Hitler’s anti semitism from that of all prior ante Judaism and anti Semitism.
Pope Benedict in his talk at the Cologne Synagogue pointed this out clearly.
“The Jewish community in Cologne can truly feel "at home" in this city. Cologne is, in fact, the oldest site of a Jewish community on German soil, dating back to the Colonia of
Roman times. The history of relations between the Jewish and Christian communities has been complex and often painful. There were times when the two lived together peacefully, but there was also the expulsion of the Jews from Cologne in the year 1424. And in the 20th century, in the darkest period of German and European history, an insane racist ideology, born of neo-paganism, gave rise to the attempt, planned and systematically carried out by the regime, to exterminate European Jewry.”
There is little question that in spite of the Jews having gained civil rights in Europe, these rights were not sufficient to protect them against the waves of antisemitism.

First of all there was too much subterranean anti Judaism in European society.

I would like to give two examples.
The great mathematician Frege in his diary entry of 1924 states:
“One can acknowledge that there are Jews of the highest respectability, and yet regard it is a misfortune that there are so many Jews in Germany, (parenthentatically let me Just add that the German historian Treitschke had called the Jews ‘our misfortune’) and that they have complete equality of political rights with citizens of Aryan descent; but how little is achieved by the wish that the Jews in Germany should lose their political rights or better yet vanish from Germany. If one wanted laws passed to remedy these evils, the first question to be answered would be: how can one distinguish Jews from non-Jews for certain? That may have been relatively easy 60 years ago. Now, it appears to me to be quite difficult. Perhaps one must be satisfied with fighting the ways of thinking which show up in the activities of the Jews and are so harmful, and to punish exactly these activities with the loss of civil rights and to make the achievement of civil rights more difficult.”

The Lexicon fur Theologie und kirche published in the 30’s under the heading Antisemitism states: “The parameters here expressed guaranty to a good Catholic a perfectly clear conscience in deciding in favor of abolishing civil rights for Jews” (quoted in Torre p.2 4)

I could multiply these types of statements.

The basic point with respect to the granting and forfeiting civil rights however, was best made by Hermann Cohen. He said: “Neither the Enlightenment nor modern legislation has succeeded in removing from the Jews the burden placed upon them by the prejudice that they represent nothing but a foreign race. This prejudice can and will disappear only when the inherent worth of their religion is fully recognized.”

The point that Cohen has made is that whatever civil rights the Jewish people may have achieved they have always been held hostage to their receiving religious rights. The civil rights have had a precarious history as long as contemptuous teachings were repeated and their religion was seen as a dead superseded, in fact vile religion.

The greatness of the Church’s changed attitude is that they have in fact granted to the Jewish people, religious rights and the challenge is to fully and finally complete this. This will happen when the Church comes forth with an authoritative document of a theological nature which clearly answers the question: what is the place of Jews and Judaism in a Christian self understanding. Then perhaps the Jews will be perceived as co hosts

The beginnings were made with Vatican II.

The task of reviewing its history to determine its relation to other world religions and especially to the Jewish People was a task that was self imposed by the church on itself in order to be true to itself, and did not require any response on the Jewish side.
On the whole the framers of the various documents have worked autonomously and this for very good reason; so that it cannot be said that they were influenced by, or pressured to take specific positions. The documents had to be autonomous if they were to be legitimate.

It is however a source of regret for me that in all the years of Catholic opening to the Jewish community with all of its documents and especially the initiatives of Pope John Paul II that the Authoritative body of the Jewish Community IJCIC has not seen fit to issue its own statement on the place of Christians and Christianity within a Jewish self understanding.

Let me offer not an excuse but rather an explanation.

The Holocaust was a devastating experience for the Jewish people. Almost 40 percent of the Jews were killed. More Jews than live in the United States, more than all of those who live in the land of Israel. Also it was not a matter of sheer numbers but that the greatest and most important centers of Jewish learning perished with them.
The great learning in the Rabbinical schools and the great contribution to Jewish and European culture that the Jews made was a devastating loss.
Imagine in Catholic terms, if of the Billion Catholics 400 million were killed in a period of a few years. The Vatican demolished and its great universities devastated. Think what this would mean to you.

Trust is very hard to establish and any pronouncements that the church must missionize makes Jews very uncomfortable. I personally am convinced that the Catholic Church has no intention of launching a mission to the Jews. But this is not true of all Christians and for those who still want to engage in converting Jews I can only ask them:
would it be so terrible if the Jewish people, an ancient people would continue to exist.

Why not let Jews continue to study their sacred texts and be nourished by them, continue to renew and deepen their understanding of their tradition, as it were an enlarged autobiography of the Jewish people. When Goethe said “he who cannot give account to himself of three thousand years- may he stay in darkness, inexperienced may he live from day to day”

We have our own biography of more than three thousand years. What would be the benefit to anyone for this heroic, tragic and sublime biography which has nourished so many to end.

Is it not possible that Judaism should continue to be a significant voice in the orchestra of humankind and certainly if the documents since Vatican II mean what they say then this is certainly what the Church wants also.

Now the great change it seems to me took place 40 years ago with the Declaration Nostra Aetate.

This was the beginning of granting religious rights to Jews, and will be completed as I said when an official document will affirm the acknowledged living reality and worth of Judaism as a religion.

Then indeed we can be co hosts and not precarious guests.

Such a document would present an official position with a view of Judaism which is not open to the shifts of acceptance and rejection which occurred throughout Jewish history. A theology that can be counted on to be the same in good and bad times.
What is needed is a religious foundation that will hold against the destructive forces in society. I will say more about this presently.

The sad fact is that the Jews of Europe after the Shoah are more truly to be seen as ghosts, remnants of a great Jewish culture with great institutions of learning which are no more.

The great majority of Jewish thinkers and teachers in the 20 th century came from Europe. The most distinguished teachers when I attended Rabbinical school were European refugees who brought to America great learning and distinguished service. This is also true of Israel.

We Jews are haunted by these ghosts. The gassed victims annihilated just for being Jews. They are in the words of JPII “ a saving warning... He said this is your mission in the contemporary world.

Unfortunately the Shoah has led to a lack of healthy mindedness in the Jewish people of today. An overwhelming anxiety and paranoia and fear and mistrust.

But I believe that these ghosts also affect Europe and the Christian community of Europe.
This raises the whole issue of memory. How shall we remember the past
let me make this clear. Europe has had a great struggle with its memory of the Hitler years. In spite of its great Christian heritage and truly splendid Christian culture yet it was unable to resist Hitler.

I had a vivid sense of the failure of religion when I read a powerful statement about Heideggar.

Jorge Semprun in his book Evil and Modernity states:
“The most scandalous thing is not that Heidegger was inscribed in the Nazi party. The most scandalous thing is that an original and profound thinker whose influence in one way or the other extended throughout the world could consider Naziism as a spiritual counter movement historically able to oppose itself to the presumed decline of a mercantile and mass society.”

Can one imagine Nazism taking the place of the spiritual heritage of Christianity?

My friend Dr John Rodden who has written three books on post ww2 Germany testifies to this. He states “Germany's(has an) intense, ambivalent relation to modern history. More than any other country, Germany is a nation still viscerally connected —indeed hostage —to its past ..... in numerous respects, modern German history is still freighted by its onerous past.”


The real task is not to view ourselves as co hosts better rather in a more religious manner as champions of religious values that today are in jeopardy

These religious values are the heritage of Judaism and Christianity and we must find a way of making these values the dominant values in Europe today, indeed in the world.
We are living in a society that is confused about the relationship between religion and society.

Jointly we must reaffirm the religious foundations for a civilization that will not endorse a secularism that is alien to religious values.
We must also be honest as the Catholic Church uniquely has been honest in endeavoring to look into its past and admit its errors and change. The Catholic church has opened the way for spiritual renewal.

This looking into one’s own past should be engaged in by all religions. It is the only way that we can speak honestly in the modern world.
Such an investigation was clearly made explicit in a conference held in Rome on Spiritual resources for peace.

The concluding statement of that conference said:
Dedicated efforts are needed to examine how, in a world that is increasingly interconnected we can find new ways to respect our religious differences while forging peaceful bonds based on our common humanity. Our scriptures and traditions are the most important spiritual resources each of us possesses. We believe that the scriptures of each religion teach the path to peace, but we acknowledge that our various sacred writings have often been and continue to be used to justify violence, war, and exclusion of others. Our various communities cannot ignore such passages, which have often been misinterpreted or manipulated for unworthy goals such as power, wealth, or revenge; but we must all recognize the need for new contextual studies and a deeper understanding of our various scriptures that clearly enunciates the message and value of peace for all humanity.

Believers need to examine those scriptural passages that depict people of other religions in ways that conflict with their own self-understanding. This requires a renewed effort to educate properly our own adherents on the values and beliefs of others. Interreligious education that takes seriously the self-understanding of other religious traditions is essential for communicating the message of peace to new generations. The challenge is to remain true to our own faith without disparaging or distorting that of others.”

Let me make it clear that secularism within its own sphere is perfectly legitimate and as such leaves open and is compatible with all that is genuine and true in religion.
Secular studies are needed so that the pursuit of truth should in principle remain free and unhindered by external constraints

Secularity on the other hand, the view that only the secular is real and that all religion must be rejected, this we must resist with all our might.

Such secularity insists on a radical separation of Church and state relegating religion strictly to the private sphere and deligitimizing any public expression.

Such secularity impoverishes our inner life and makes technology and its impact the supreme form of salvation.

Marcel says: “Does not the invasion of our life by techniques today tend to substitute satisfaction on a material level for spiritual joy? Dissatisfaction on the material level for spiritual disquiet. And do not the satisfied and the unsatisfied tend to come together in a common mediocrity? The fact is that to the average man today, whose inner life tends to be a rather dim affair in any case, technological progress seems the infallible method by which he can achieve a sort of generalized comfort apart from which he finds it impossible to imagine happiness.” He continues: “Technological achievements tend to seem more and more the chief, if not the only mark of man’s superiority to the animals.”

It is the religious understanding of what it means to be a person that gives us a true sense of self. The true self, the religious self is not a biological, psychological, social, self but a soul. The religious self is in correlation with the divine.
It is religion that safeguards or should safeguard the sacred character of all human beings.

We Christians and Jews must do a job of making religion a vital and intelligible part of life.

we can only be co hosts by working together for the values that were established in our sacred scriptures
indeed the ideal goal is where the distinction between hosts and guests is overcome and we are all children of God.

It is only belief in the One Unique God that can unite us.

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The world is not self complete and requires a transcendent ground and a transcendent end to make it intelligible. However the great mistake of secularity is to reject this and act as if the world were self complete and did not need God or we can function in the world completely divorced from God.

No It is the world with God that we operate in and live in and struggle and strive in.

The belief in creation is an essential element of our Joint faiths
God is the source of power working through us if we but let him, for good.
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Faith in God provides us with a source of confidence so that even defeats will not defeat it.

When we face the bitter experience of evil, the sense of the senselessness of events, a world not of value but of disvalue,
what is needed is the “mobilizing again of the resources of confidence and of value which seem to have been eclipsed”

Our faith in God and creation enables us to face the experience of suffering such that that particular suffering does not embitter all our experience.
Our faith teaches us that the best way to face our own suffering is to engage in some unselfish action revealing the confidence that the world could be made better through our own action for good.

Thus the belief in creation is that in spite of all the sin and evil there is a sense of the pervading value of the world, the ultimate worthwhile-fullness of life.
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Religion must reaffirm its ethical essence. But here again that essence must be based on the ethics of the prophets with the realization that ethics does not stand by itself.

In the words of Bosanquet :“Religion annuls in Morality nothing but its failures
the ideal goal of ethics.the demand for justice requires a transcendent source and guarentee.

Only religion can provide us with an ultimate ground for hope.

Today we are witnessing a renewed search for spirituality especially among our youth. There are many different ways of trying to understand this phenomena, but I think it cannot be separated from the sense of alienation that is being felt everywhere. There is a need for being connected to something abiding and valuable in the nature of things. Today we are experiencing among many individuals and not just Jews a search for security, certainty, and reassurance that one’s life embodies something of meaning and significance. It is both a personal search and a search for community. It is a search for something more profound in myself, and a way of connecting that element of profundity in myself to that sense in others and which is of ultimate meaning in the scheme of things.



God must be the ground for the creation of the world and life and mind and personality and spirit; the ever continuing creation of all that is of worth in existence. Such creation of values requires not just an orderly and intelligible universe, but also a universe that especially in life and personal life manifests values, which qualify and integrate and realize this universe.

With respect to God obviously, we did not create the world or ourselves or our values. God is the ground for the being order and value in reality. But God is even more. God is the ground for hope.

The belief in God is the faith that the world and all there is will not dissipate into nothingness. It is the belief that the yearnings of the mind and heart for the True and the Good and the Beautiful and the Divine will not be disappointed but as Montague well states the belief in God in an ultimate and final sense means “that the things that matter most will not be at the mercy of the things that matter least.” (Belief Unbound p.7)


Wordsworth in his sonnet series on the River Duddon
Points to something that I feel is true of every heir of the Prophets, of every truly religious person.

“As I cast my eyes, I see what was, and is, and will abide;
Still glides the Stream, and shall forever glide;
The form remains, the Function never dies;
While we, the brave, the mighty, and the wise
We men, who in our morn of youth defied
The elements, must vanish; -- be it so!
Enough, if something from our hands has power
To live, and act, and serve the future hour;
And if, as toward the silent tomb we go,
Through love, through hope, and faiths transcendent
Dower
We feel that we are greater than we know.”


monotheism
ethics
the future

Dedicated efforts are needed to examine how, in a world that is increasingly , we can find new ways to respect our religious differences while forging peaceful bonds based on our common humanity. Our scriptures and traditions are the most important spiritual resources each of us possesses. We believe that the scriptures of each religion teach the path to peace, but we acknowledge that our various sacred writings have often been and continue to be used to justify violence, war, and exclusion of others. Our various communities cannot ignore such passages, which have often been misinterpreted or manipulated for unworthy goals such as power, wealth, or revenge; but we must all recognize the need for new contextual studies and a deeper understanding of our various scriptures that clearly enunciates the message and value of peace for all humanity.
Believers need to examine those scriptural passages that depict people of other religions in ways that conflict with their own self-understanding. This requires a renewed effort to ecudate properly our own adherents on the values and beliefs of others. Interreligious education that takes seriously the self-understanding of other religious traditions is essential for communicating the message of peace to new generations. The challenge is to remain true to our own faith without disparaging or distorting that of others.

john rodden
These ambiguous anniversaries underscore Germany's intense, ambivalent relation to modern history. More than any other country, Germany is a nation still viscerally connected —indeed hostage —to its past. These anniversary dates —all of which have received headline attention in the German media since 1990 —suggest further how, in numerous respects, modern German history is still freighted by its onerous past.


Judaism and secularism

Secular studies are needed so that the pursuit of truth should in principle remain free and unhindered by external constraints.
1- This is subject to strains from ideological financial constraints as well as the “ common wisdom” which all too often is not open to new paradeigms. Collingwood and scientific revolutions.
2- By financial needs. Example here is the op ed piece of Columbia university’ pres.
3- Religious institutions must be able to separate religious studies and secular studies. Difficult to do especially in Biblical studies.

The study of tradition.
Why a fundamentalist approach cannot be pursued by a modern Jew or for that matter a modern Christian or Muslim or any other religion.
1- a modern individual cannot reject the investigation of these textual tools linguistic etc which are needed to understand every other field of investigation
2- the alternative is to justify everything in the tradition simply because it is there, or
3- if not justify it ignore it while at the same time saying that it is equally revealed and has the same authority simply because its authority is based on an infallible revelation which cannot be questioned.
4- In the past the way this has been dealt with in Judaism is with the Midrshic method case in point Schorch on women in the tradition. It basically falsifies what really were the forces that led to the halachic view and as a result HELPS US UNDERSTAND BETTER WHEN IT IS VIEWED CONTEXTUALLY AND HISTORICALLY. This is also true of such things as slavery and monarchy
5- Historical critical studies free us to understand the text itself better than a strictly traditional approach. This is illustrated clearly by Whitedhead and Tillich.
6- We see the reason for its limitedness in relation to the contemporary period, the mentality of the times and the power constraints that may have led to the formulation which indeed took place. A very good example of this is the canonization itself and the establishment of the text itself. That Persia ruled through priests led to the eventual Aaronide dominance and the canonized Pentateuch. That all kinship was suspect made it impossible to put prophetic ideas of messianism into the Torah. If one understands that Isaiah chapters 40 to 55 cannot be by Isaiah but can only be seen as Duetero or second Isaiah then one can place these chapters in the Persian period can understand why these chapters have no reference to a messianic king in the line of David and can claim that it is Cyrus who is the Messiah.

All of the above refers to external factors but there are also internal factors.
We now can understand that texts that may have been written under the constraint of political and historical reasons can now as it were be purified of those limitations
Since
1- the past may have had a limited vocabulary or even words in that language to state fundamental concepts but which other languages and modes of investigation could expand them it actually help them realize their essential significance. A good example of this is the idea of creation. Undoubtedly a basic Biblical idea but the Bible has a reason for stating it in this way and also because there is no Hebrew word for cosmos.
2- MOST IMPORTANT SUCH HISTORICAL UNDERSTANDING CAN HELP US DISTINGUISH WHAT IS MOST IMPORTANT FOR RELIGIOUS PROGRESS—THE TRUE FROM THE FALSE HOLY.
3- A careful study of what was once viewed as holy and which was at once time seen as an abomination.
4- Or to see what were the penalties inflicted on those who transgressed. A good example is desecration of the Sabbath. Whatever one may believe about this the penalty seems excessive or the penalties for homosexuality barabarous.
5- Thus one can refine one’s sense of the Holy which is the province of religion.

WHAT CAN WE JEWS AFFIRM ABOUT GOD AFTER THE HOLOCAUST?

By Rabbi Jack Bemporad


I would like to address myself today to the theological aspect of the problem of evil and, in a narrower sense. to the problem of the Holocaust. I do so, not because I am foolhardy enough to believe that I have any definitive answers to these problems, but because I believe that it is only through groping together with the questions they raise that we can begin to pave the way for a viable Jewish theology.

If we maintain a belief in a God who creates and sustains the world, we come up against one of the most fundamental enigmas of religion--the problem of evil.

The path that many medieval theologians have taken in dealing with the problem of evil is quite simply to say that it is not real. They say evil is privation. Now, I think all of us , especially after Auschwitz, will recognize the limitations of this view. If evil is not real, but just a privation, then it is nothing to avoid. Or, if we say that evil is necessary to the perfection of good, then why combat it, or replace it, if good would be diminished and not increased through rejection of the evil?

Those theories that define evil as negation or privation or unreal must themselves be rejected. Evil may be defined as irreparable loss, as Thomas Aquinas and Whitehead define it, the absence of that which should have been. And evil, it seems to me, has to be seen as the irreparable loss of the good. Evil is that which is, but ought not be. But then we ask, of course, what is good? And this is the crucial question, since whether a good God could have created this world depends in large measure on what we take to be good in the highest sense.

The most common doctrine of the nature of the good is hedonism, which maintains that pleasure is the highest good and pain is the worst evil. But I don't think I need to refute the doctrine of hedonism before this group. I can challenge it in the form of a question. Can one say that insofar as a life fails in pleasure, it also fails in worth? Obviously it is conceivable for us to think of an individual whose life is eminently worth living, but whose quantity of pleasure in that life was minimal. An example of this kind of life was that of the great Jewish theologian, Rosenzweig, who for years suffered from multiple sclerosis, and gradually died. He was only capable, at the end, of blinking his eyes, and his wife, through some kind of extraordinary method of communication, was able to write down his books while he was in this state. He certainly had little pleasure, but can one say that Rosenzweig's life had no worth? The simple identification of pleasure with worth simply won't hold. Furthermore, can one really believe that pain as such is evil? Isn't this, as Harris has stated,

"as questionable as the converse that pleasure is good? At least we should say that neither all pleasures are good nor all pains evil. Biologically pain serves the function of warning an animal of danger, and stimulating it to avoidance. The burnt child shuns the fire and so is protected from greater harm. Without pain we should be continually in danger of serious injury, and even of destruction against which we have not learned to take precaution. It cannot, therefore, be maintained without qualification that pain is evil, for it often serves a beneficent function. Things are evil, not because they are painful, but because they frustrate our efforts to obtain the ends we most value".

And what are the ends that we most value? We don't really have the time here to go into all the various ends that people value, so let me dogmatically assert what I take the good to be in the highest sense. The highest good is the free act of virtue for its own sake. It requires individual who are free to act virtuously, that is, free to choose good or evil. Similarly, the ideal that the good is chosen for its own sake must be viewed as diametrically opposed to the doctrine which says that the good can only be chosen through coercion. A moral agent cannot do the good naturally, but must do it by an act of self-transcendence. As Tennant says, "character is made, not born; it is not given, nor ready-made." What I am saying is that the highest good obtains where each individual will do the good for its own sake, and through doing the good for its own sake will realize, as Kant said, " a kingdom of ends" where each individual is treated as an end, and not a means to someone else's end.

The doctrine of the good as the free act of virtue for its own sake implies not merely free agents, but also the recognition of the dignity and sanctity of each individual. It is this view that is implicit even in the hedonistic doctrine and underlies whatever value the concept of justice has.

The hedonists have no satisfactory way of explaining why, if the goal of life is simply the greatest amount or sum of pleasure, it is wrong for a few to have extreme pleasure and many none, if the total sum of pleasure is the same. Benthan's motto, "Each one to count for one and no one to count for more than one," illegitimately introduces a principle of equality which cannot be deduced from the sum of pleasure as such.

However, as we shall see, even the doctrine of equality or justice itself presupposes for its very possibility the higher doctrine of virtue for its own sake, for it seems to me that we must make a basic distinction between justice as paying due respect or obligation to one another, and the attitude of the saint, of a person who gives, who cares, who loves, not for reward, but for its own sake.

If we consider justice, namely, the doctrine that justice is the arrangement wherein the good are rewarded and the evil are punished, one finds oneself in continual difficulty. Not that I deny the relationship between good and reward, or evil and punishment, but rather that the only way that statement can be defended is negatively, and not positively. Because, as a matter of act, justice originated as a negative concept. The doctrine of 'an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,' which is a great doctrine and a great improvement on any prior ethics of the ancient world, is basically a negative concept. It says that for the damage done to this individual we must somehow recognize that a like damage should be done to the perpetrator of the damage. In other words, if a person is hurt, that person or his family should not destroy the whole clan or society of the person who perpetrated the damage. There must be some kind of balance between the hurt and the restitution.

In this instance justice's main purpose is to suppress evil rather than create good. It can be seen also that strict justice does not allow for the remaking of man, for repentance and self-transformation. However, when one says a person should be punished, does one really mean only that he should be punished, or does he mean that the individual should recognize the evil he has done, and repent and change? Similarly, if by justice we mean rewarding the virtuous, then we confront the strangest paradox of all. Virtue, if genuine, is done for its own sake; a genuinely virtuous person feels embarrassed by praise or thanks. And in the religious realm, the best take on the heaviest burdens, as exemplified in the concept of 'noblesse oblige'. In the religious world, man is privileged to bear the burden of ascent, and here self-sacrifice and devotion are most significant. As Jonas has indicated,

"we must, in other words, distinguish between moral obligation and the much larger sphere or moral value. (This, incidentally, shows up the error in the widely-held view of value theory that the higher a value, the stronger its claim and the greater the duty to realize it. The highest are in a region beyond duty and claim. ) The ethical dimension far exceeds that of the moral law and reaches into the sublime solitude of dedication and ultimate commitment, away from all reckoning and rule--in short, into the sphere of the holy. From there alone can the offer of self-sacrifice genuinely spring, and this-- its source--must be honored religiously."

So I repeat, the highest good, the good that should be realized , is the good where the individual can freely choose the virtuous as opposed to the selfish, self-centered task.

Now, two questions face us: First, what is required so that this goodness can be achieved, and second, is the world that we know one that is consistent with such an idea of goodness? Rather than deal with these two questions separately, I would rather phrase the question negatively and ask, what are the factors that make for evil in the world, and ask ourselves, would we relinquish any of them? Would we choose rather not to have these factors even though these are the factors that make for evil, or would we say, yes, we insist that these factors are necessary in any world that we could conceivably accept?

The first factor that makes for evil is the law-abiding nature of the universe, which will not vary to save anyone. The universe is a cosmos, not a chaos; it is law-abiding, not whimsical; it expresses natural order. The question that arises is the status of the contingent. The contingent is that which appears to be simply determined by law and cannot be brought within the scope of any rational or beneficent purpose. But once brought under some moral purpose, would we then wish the law-abidingness to cease?

Let's take the example of disease and cure, which require law and order. Would we wish that disease not be rational or lawful? Only if disease has a certain lawful structure can it be understood and abolished. If it were chaotic can it be understood and abolished. If it were chaotic, if it were whimsical, if it were not subject to law and order, then we could in no sense understand it or control it. Whitedhead correctly stated “ it is not that there is a world that happens to have an order; no order , no world.”

The second basic factor that makes for evil in the universe is that the universe is a place where the possible is realized and in which it can only be realized in time. If we were to have a perfect universe, we would have a static universe, one that would be completely immobile and finished. But in a universe that is completely finished, all the things that give us joy would be eliminated. When we see a mother look at her child grow and develop and prosper, and see both her joy and apprehension the first time he goes to school, or the first time he has a birthday, or the first time that the child smiles at her, we recognize that over the years people grow through the sorrows and joys to achieve a bond, a sense of joy and mutual affection. This isn't possible in a static universe. It is only possible where there is realization, where time and process are real.

Furthermore, all realization is finite; thus, the actualization of one set of events precludes the actualization of an alternative set of events.

Thirdly, the universe is unfinished and, therefore, has an open future, and the openness of the future gives man a task, for something is at stake. The rabbis spoke of this in the Doctrine of Tikkun Ha Olam--the world is unfinished; it needs man to freely complete it. But, if it is genuine freedom that man has, then it means that man can complete it for good or for evil. Nothing takes place morally that does not take place through self-determination. It is this that converts a mere occasion into an action. The concept of man as a moral being requires that man make choices, and that these choices be available to him. Thus, he must exist in a world where evil is possible and can be actualized, but also where it can be avoided. It then follows that if man has the liberty to choose the worst, he cannot be compelled to choose the best. How can we conceive of man's character or moral nature at all, except as that element of his being which is created in the crucible of crisis and temptation? If we had a choice, would we really prefer not to be free and that man act mechanically? Would we really prefer that God had created the kind of a universe where any action, however evilly motivated, would, without any loss to anyone, turn out in every way so that it is good and all right for all? If we really had that kind of a universe, the ultimate distinction between good and evil would have disappeared.

Finally, the world must be such that our intermeshing relationships will affect others, too. The influences of the will that chooses the evil in preference to the good cannot fail to affect others in a world of free wills, freely interacting. But could we wish the reverse, that there be no interaction, that there be no influence of one person on another, could we really wish that? Could we wish that there be no freedom, or realization? Could we wish that there be no law in nature or no possibility of fulfillment?

The essence of what I have been trying to say is that the world order is such that if all that makes evil possible is eliminated, than all that makes good possible is eliminated as well, because law, realization, freedom, and interaction make both for evil and for good.

Now, the answer that I have offered is one that is intrinsically at odds with two other traditional solutions to the problem of evil. The first one, quite simply, says that there is no undeserved human suffering, that is, that all people who suffer are guilty of sin. This was a position that was refuted with the book of Job and needs no refutation today. Can anyone imagine that the million children who died at Auschwitz were in any way guilty of any sin deserving such punishment? The second doctrine, which tries to deal with the problem of evil, is the doctrine of immortality. It says that all evil is made good in the future life, in the world to come. But Hans Jonas has clearly criticized the view in his Ingersoll Lecture on Immortality in which he maintains that

"True justice would consist not in another life, but in a new chance at the same life, on the same terms".

He states that

"Missed fulfillment could only be made up for in its original terms, that is, in the terms of effort and obstacles, and uncertainty, and fallibility, and unique occasion, and limited time--in short, in terms of non guaranteed attainment and possible miss. These are the very terms of self-fulfillment, and they are precisely the terms of the world."

If immortality is to have a value at all, it is not because of the compensatory claim of justice, but because it is a consequence of the realization of the highest value, and being highest, has the greatest claim to eternal endurance. But then, immortality must be seen as something separate from its traditional relation to evil in this world.

Underlying the question of evil is a basic misunderstanding that one must explore carefully as to the nature of God and how God works in the world. And this is the question of the power and purpose of God, as well as the kind of universe we have.

God is the creator of creators. In creating the world, God brings into being wills that are distinct from His own. A concept of God which allows free beings to exist besides Him is a much worthier concept than that of a God who is the cause of everything that happens.

God as creator has traditionally been conceived as a great architect, mechanic, or watchmaker who produces a mechanical model. On the contrary, a much worthier concept of God is one who allows free beings to act in such a way as to realize His purposes, or to frustrate them, a God who does not , indeed cannot make all the decision if a universe with being order , value and freedom is to come into being. In creating the world God gives full significance to creation so that He acts not through coercion or manipulation but through persuasion, appeal and revelation.

God would be responsible for evil if He were the sole agent of all that happens, and all other beings merely instruments or vessels of His will. But in a world where there is genuine freedom, which means personal discovery and production of values, in such a world God can only work as a persuasive being, and not as a coercive being.

Professor Howison puts it very well:

"The divine love is a love which holds the individuality, the personal initiative of its object sacred. The father of spirits will have its image brought forth in every one of his offspring by the thought and conviction of each soul itself. Therefore, the moral government of God, springing from the divine love, is a government by moral agencies purely, leaving aside all the juridical engineering of reward and punishment. It lets His sun shine and His rain fall alike on the just and the unjust, that the cause of God may everywhere win simply upon its merits."

The divine purpose can only be realized by human beings freely making God's purpose their own. From this comes both the possibility of cooperating with God, or estrangement from God's purpose or sin. It means that the future is not given, it means that not everything is already determined, it means, as William James said,

"If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will, but it feels like a real fight, as if there was something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealizations and faithfulness, are indeed to redeem."

Or, as Sorely has stated,

"If there were no possibility of missing the mark, there would be no value in taking aim."

In a world that is open, where human beings are free, where they can frustrate or realize God's will, and where a person can only gain the ultimate good through inner growth and moral action, such a world, I say to you, is the world we live in. Of course. there is evil, great evil; but it is the task of human beings to transcend and transform that evil. Of course, man is not in the center of the universe; it is man's task to reorder the universe so that man can indeed be at its center.

And so we finally reach the problem which all of us are haunted with today, and that is the problem of the Holocaust. Let us review several recent attempts which deal with this issue and contrast them with the view presented above. Professor Fackenheim, in his book, "God's Presence in History," has said that from Auschwitz there emerged a divine commandment and that the divine commandment was to deny Hitler a posthumous victory; that we Jews should do everything we can to preserve Judaism, and thus insure that Hitler does not ultimately win. "The Religious Jew who has heard the voice of Sinai," Professor Fackenheim asserts, "must continue to listen as he hears the commanding voice of Auschwitz." He prefaces his chapter entitled, The Commanding Voice of Auschwitz, with an interesting, if somewhat bitter tale by Elie Wiesel. It is a tale of a madman, a pious Jew, who comes back to a little synagogue in Nazi-occupied Europe, and during services suddenly says to the Jews, "Don't pray so loud, God will hear you. Then he will know that there are still Jews left alive in Europe and you, too, will be destroyed."
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What Professor Fackenheim has postulated is a demonic God and, in fact, he says that the religious Jew today must be revolutionary, for there is no previous Jewish protest like his protest. Continuing to hear the voice of Sinai as he hears the voice of Auschwitz, may require him to cite God against God in ways even more extreme than the challenges of Abraham, Jeremiah, Job or Rabbi Levi Yitzhak. And here are the forms which Fackenheim says this must take:
"You have abandoned the covenant--(namely, God has abandoned the covenant)--we shall not abandon it, you no longer want Jews to survive--(namely, God no longer wants Jews to survive)-and we shall survive, as better, more faithful, more pious Jews. You have destroyed all grounds for hope. We shall obey the commandments of hope which you yourself have given. Nor is there any previous Jewish compassion with divine powerlessness like the compassion required by such powerlessness. The fear of God is dead among the nations; we shall keep it alive and be its witness. The times are too late for the coming of the Messiah; we shall persist without hope and recreate hope and, as it were, divine power by our persistence. For the religious Jew who remains within the Midrashic framework, the voice of Auschwitz manifests a divine presence which, as it were, is shown of all except commanding power. This power however, is inescapable."

Now, it seems to me that Fackenheim's proposed solution to the spiritual dilemma of the Holocaust is inadequate. If Sinai is genuine, then we don't need Auschwitz to learn that Hitler should not win, We don't need six million people to suffer and die for us; one doesn't need an experience like that to get the special commandment that Hitler should not succeed. If Sinai is genuine, than God could not be demonic. The God of Abraham, who could be challenged to fulfill his obligations, to whom Abraham said, "Shall not the judge of all the earth do justice?" , could not be demonic. Abraham proclaimed that God was just. Fackenheim seems to be saying that we are just, but God is demonic. He is holding God responsible for the evil men do, a view I cannot share. God is a persuasive, not a coercive being, as I have already discussed. He has created a world from which man emerged as the last stage of evolution, but man must bring about justice in the earth; God does not take on the task of man. Man must take on his own task with God's help. It seems to me that the real issue the Holocaust raises is not whether Hitler should win, but should Abraham, and Akiba, and Jeremiah lose. Those truths which they stood for and which many died for, the truth which completely revolutionized the world, necessitates that we bear witness to them, for if we don't carry on for them, then the gift that the Jews gave to mankind may perish. If any truth comes from this, it is not that Hitler shouldn't win--we knew that Hitler should not win-but that Abraham and Isaac and Jeremiah should not lose. There have been , however, several other ways of dealing with the Holocaust, two of which I would like to briefly analyze.

The first is the view of one of the great leaders and teachers of the Reform movement in Judaism, Professor Henry Slonimsky. In his brilliant paper, "The Philosophy Implicit in the Midrash," he states the following:

"The core of Jewish belief is that Israel must bear the Torah from God to the world, but the world is unwilling and resists all three; God, Torah, and Israel. And the protagonist who does the actual bearing must also bear the brunt of the suffering...the Torah stands for goodness, for the vision, and ideals, and values, or light of God in which we see light. God, besides being this light and vision which we behold, is also such power, such real actual power in the universe as is committed and has already been marshalled for the victory of the good. This power must be increased, the ideal must be translated into the real, and the active agent in this crucial event is man, who is thus destined for tragic heroism by the very nature of his situation. Israel, of course, stands for the ideal Israel, and is paradigmatic of the good and brave man everywhere. That the best must suffer the most, must assume the burdens and sorrows of the world, constitutes the most awesome phenomenon and paradox of the whole spiritual life. God in the full meaning of the term is seen to stand at the end, not at the beginning; on that day He shall be one and His name shall be one. He must be made one, man is the agent in whose hands it is left to make or mar that supreme integration. The assertion of God in a Godless world is the supreme act of religion."

For Slonimsky, this task is the true meaning of the covenant. It embodies the principle of noblesse oblige, which requires those who have witnessed to the unity of God to bear witness and stand for God in a Godless world, to stand for justice in a world that denies justice, to stand for truth where truth is despised. In this way, Slonimsky accounts for the Jews’ countless suffering. I believe Slonimsky is essentially correct in this evaluation. Yet, as impressive and brilliant as this view is, it seems to me to be defective insofar as it leads to an ultimate dualism between the universe and God. God is characterized only as an ideal which must be actualized and therefore, as a growing god, who either emerges or is held back by man's action. Evil, according to Slonimsky, can be explained as a concomitant of the unfinished character of the universe, which I believe is correct, and as a result of a God who does the best he can, but without man's help, is not strong enough to overcome evil, a view I hold to be incorrect.

For Slonimsky, God is not a creator, but is that aspect of reality that is good and holy and which must overcome the other aspects of reality which are recalcitrant. His view of God is coupled with a belief in progress, but which is in fact alien to it. Here he was true to his great teacher Herman Cohen, and true to that Biblical phrase which he so often quoted, "on that day He shall be one and His name one." According to Slonimsky, the demand of the heart that God be one and that man succeed in making him one overrides whatever rational doubts one may have as to the success of this end.

Unless, as I have indicated, God is in some sense the creator, then there are no guarantees about God's emergence. Rather than emerge, he may be defeated. What turned Slonimsky away from the concept of a creator God was the reigning view that a creator God not only is responsible for all that happens and, therefore, must be responsible for evil, but also that such a God denies man's freedom. But if we conceive creation as an act wherein God allows other beings full power to act for good or ill, then we can conceive of a God who is a creator and revealer, yet not responsible for evil. God, in my view, respects the integrity and freedom of man and thus works though persuasion and revelation, and not coercion. Tennant expressed this well when he stated that God, "in revealing himself...will respect the moral personality of the persons who he would enlighten." This is the ethical condition of revelation to man.

Professor Hans Jonas has developed a position that in many ways is similar to Slonimsky's but differs from it in certain crucial respects. Jonas has devised a staggering myth in which he describes a God who, for reasons known only to Himself, allowed the universe to come into being, and in doing so, divested Himself of all power to direct, correct, or ultimately guarantee the devious working out of creation.

"God renounced His own being, divesting Himself of His deity--to receive it back from the Odyssey of time weighted with the chance harvest of unforeseeable temporal experience; transfigured or possibly even disfigured by it.. Man was created 'for' the image of God, rather than 'in' His image" and "our lives become lives in the divine countenance..Our impact on eternity is for good and for evil--we can build and we can destroy, we can heal and we can hurt, we can nourish and we can starve divinity, we can perfect and we can disfigure its image-and the scars of one are as enduring as the lustre of the other."

Addressing the question of Auschwitz, he continued:

"What about those who never could inscribe themselves in the Book of Life with deeds either good or evil, great or small, because their lives were cut off before they had their chance, or their humanity was destroyed in degradations most cruel and most thorough such as no humanity can survive? I am thinking of the gassed and burnt children of Auschwitz, of the defaced, dehumanized phantoms of the camps, and of all the other numberless victims of the other man-made holocausts of our time. Among men, their sufferings will soon be forgotten, and their names even sooner. Another chance is not given them.. are they, then, debarred from an immortality which even their tormentors and murderers obtain...leaving their sinister mark on eternity's face? This I refuse to believe. And this I like to believe: that there was weeping in the heights at the waste and despoilment of humanity; that a groan answered the rising shout of ignoble suffering, and wrath - the terrible wrong done to the reality and possibility of each life thus wantonly victimized, each one a thwarted attempt of God. 'The voice of thy brother's blood cries unto me from the ground': Should we not believe that the immense chorus of such cries that has risen up in our lifetime now hangs over our world as a dark, mournful, and accusing cloud? That eternity looks down upon us with a frown, wounded itself and perturbed in its depths? The image of God is in danger as never before...An eternal issue is at stake together with the temporal one-this aspect of our responsibility can be our guard against the temptation of fatalistic acquiescence or the worse treason of 'apres nous le deluge,' We literally hold in our faltering hands the future of the divine adventure and must not fail Him, even if we would fail ourselves."

When Jonas discusses the philosophical consequence of his myth, he postulates a suffering God, A God affected by man's action, which implies a becoming God. He is also a caring God, and finally, He is not, for Jonas, an omnipotent God.

The similarity between Jonas' and Slonimsky's views is obvious. Both Slonimsky and Jonas seem to argue for a doctrine of a God who risks something, and that what God risks entails His very being. The being of God is itself dependent on man's action. Jonas sees this as a direct result of the existence of a universe, and thus, as one of the effects of creation, which makes it, in my opinion, more satisfactory than the dualism proposed by Slonimsky. I would accept the doctrine that in creating the world, God did take a risk, in the sense that the world is open, and thus, contingency, temporality, and freedom are real. I would not, however, go so far as to say that man can create or annihilate God. He can, however, annihilate and destroy himself. Here his freedom is clear.

Fackenheim, Slonimsky, and Jonas all seem to agree that there is a kind of drastic limitation of God's activity in the world. Or rather a redefinition of how God acts in the world. In this I also agree. However, this limitation is not such as to render the divine powerless or impotent. This does not mean that God is finite, for the limitation of God's power is not, as Slonimsky states, due to man or any other external cause. Rather it is a necessary condition of there being a world at all.

The old theism is no longer meaningful today. A God who creates a finished universe, down to its last detail, who is the creator of all, the evil as well as the good, who knows all, so that man's actions are merely a reenactment of what is eternally in God's mind - such a view makes a mockery of the agony and tragic heroism of man. By making God the cause of all, it makes Him directly responsible for the evil in the world and, therefore, makes God either demonic, or denies the reality of evil. In either case, man is denied any significance. Man really makes no difference in a universe where God's whim could at any point make everything different, or in which God could have worked everything out at the beginning for the best. Such a view simply cannot account for the reality of time, process, novelty, and risk.

We must affirm the creation of a cosmos but one that is unfinished, incomplete in the making. Creation must be the "creation of creators." There is both order and chance in the world, both being and process, law and freedom. But novelty makes risk as well as loss and evil real.

God creates continually the universe with possibilities for life, mind and value. Now the good, the true, and the beautiful become goals to be achieved, ends to be realized.

It is due to God that there is something rather than nothing, order rather than chaos, the primacy of good and not the primacy of evil. Neither being, nor order, nor aim at value is intelligible without some reference to God as Creator, an impetus to greater differentiation, organization, and harmony. However, it is a mistake to assume that order is all of a type. There is logical, natural, and moral order. There is no moral order apart from logic, pattern, and value. Moral order is a goal to be achieved, and not a fact. This presupposes man's task. God must be such as to allow for man's task. In creating the world, God decided on the side of having man be the decider of his fate, and not fate the cajoler of man.



It is a mistake to see creation as a finished product. Creation is a process with an open future. It is not the case that God creates a finished universe. God has created and is creating with his creatures a basically unfinished universe. The goal of creation is the actualization of an ideal order of things.

The positive fact of evil is the conclusive proof that there is an unfinished character to reality. Science deals with an ideally closed world. The laws of nature are there to be discovered. Religion deals with an essentially unfinished world. Religion is concerned with what needs completion, with a universe in the making. It must actualize the truths it stands for. The ultimate resolution of the problem of evil is the affirmation that being, with its risks and possibilities of irreparable loss, is more valuable than non-being and nothingness; that time and temporality are real and not merely appearance. A perfect universe is an is an impossibility, everything realized at once. Here realization is impossible.

God creates the formative elements and acts as the divine inspiration to man's task, but God does not take on man's task. It is man that is to help and continue the process of creation and be a co-creator with God.

God is the basis and ground of the novelty of the World. God is necessary for the universe and man to be intelligible. Only through belief in God as Creator and sustainor, as the ground of being and order, as the source of inspiration in worship, as the ground for the values man must realize-only through such a belief in God can man find meaning and value to his existence.

So, perhaps we may summarize by saying that evil is the irreparable loss of good, that man's greatest good is not pleasure or justice but soul-making, the realizing of the good, and that man himself must take upon himself that task, that burden of ascent. The rabbis taught this in a splendid Midrash in which they say, "Those who are persecuted and do not persecute in return, those who listen to contemptuous insults and do not reply, those who act out of love and are glad of suffering, concerning them, Scripture says, they that love God are like the sun going forth in his strength."
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Article published in: Volume II, The Foundations of Ethics and Its Relationship to Science. KNOWLEDGE VALUS & BELIEF, Edited by H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. and Daniel Callahan.

Commentary

Morality and Religion Jack Bemporad

In this essay, I am concerned with delineating the interrelation-ship between ethics, science, and theology, This is .in old and well-worn topic. However, what I shall endeavor to do here is to indicate where moral issues transcend those of ethics proper and constrain us to introduce religious questions. In particular I will he concerned with four issues

I. The relationship of ethical questions to the development of a concept of an ideal self,
II. The significance of repentance.
III. The relationship between the good and the holy.
IV. The sense in which ethics and science demand a backdrop that more properly can he delineated as religious or theological.

I. Ethics and the Self

When we consider action, we cannot avoid questions of mo-tives, goals, and results. We arc immediately aware that reality is not homogeneous in ail respects, or one dimensional. We recognize that some actions or goals are better than others; we dis-tinguish what is from what ought to be, and we recognize that our moral values are conceived independently of their actual concrete instances. They even seem to claim a certain preemi-nence over what actually is.

We continuously decide what is good or bad, right or wrong. This process is reflexive, for it affects not merely how we influence others (and we can never avoid influencing others by who we are and by what we do) but makes a difference to ourselves. Our acts contribute to our future selves. We, as it were, make ourselves in the sense that what we do will help to determine the self that will be, whether we want to be that self or not.

Every moral act not merely has its own intrinsic value but also directs us beyond the present act toward the horizon of something else, something larger and not fully exhausted in the particular act. This is true even in any plausible hedonistic ethic which must take account of at least short-term consequences of actions. It is not enough just to seek pleasure since the particular experi-ence of pleasure has to be seen in the context of a total life. We are forced to ask how any particular experience fits into the context or nexus of experiences which will determine the kind of self we want to be. There is a context to any act that forms a backdrop to it. Thus one can always ask: With respect to what total or whole sell does this act or series of ads contribute?

Social mores and the teachings of our traditions offer guidelines for judging our particular acts through portrayals of what the whole self should be like. Such are the functions of taboos, rules, regulations, and moral codes. Yet there is always sufficient ambiguity in these that the individual must decide for himself what his overall unified self is, and how each act and experience applies to this unity. The less traditions constrain a society, the greater will be the ambiguity and the role of indi-vidual responsibility.

Now, for two reasons, I submit that what kind of self 1 want to be or produce through my actions is not simply a moral or ethical question. First, the search for the whole of the self requires categories that are not reducible to purely moral notions. They involve questions of hope and despair, of the purpose and significance of one’s life, of self-realization and self-sacrifice. Second, when these issues are introduced, the ideal around which the self organizes itself becomes universal and all-encompassing. My point is that ethics may claim certain actions to be right or wrong. It may evaluate or order a hierarchy of values or goods. Yet when one asks the more radical questions of hope and faith, of the meaning of it all and the meaning of one’s life, then one transcends the strictly ethical and scientific pursuits. That is, one moves to a concept of an ideal in terms of which one judges particular actions.

The more one attempts to take familial and social considera-tions into account in one’s actions, the more one is brought to judge one’s actions in terms of an ideal self, and thus in terms of more than immediate satisfactions insofar as one judges in terms of overarching considerations. This ideal self gives a consistency to one’s life and one’s actions. Which is to say, one internalizes the surrounding mores.

But beyond that, one creates a portrait of oneself as a moral agent that can come into conflict with the moral ambience that inspired it, insofar as the mores one draws upon are not fully self-consistent. Such incompatibilities can culminate or display themselves as conflicts between one’s view of oneself as a moral agent and one’s generally accepted mores. This engenders what some have seen as the core of the genuine ethical dilemma, in distinction from a moral dilemma. Vivas, for example, claims that a genuine ethical dilemma does not consist of knowing what is right and wrong, but in lacking courage and willpower to choose the right.1 In a genuine ethical dilemma a person docs not know the right thing to do. For if he knew the right thing to do, but did not have the courage to do it, it is not a genuine ethical perplexity; it is rather a matter of failure of courage or will. A genuine ethical perplexity lies in a situation where an individual is undergoing stresses and strains in the organization of his inner values. It is one in which he must reconstitute those values through a radical decision involving a choice favorable not to our idea of our actual moral personality, hut to our ideal moral personality. My contention is that there arc situations in which he does not know what the right choice is, and where he has to refashion his moral decisions through a struggle and a creative act. Through an inward search for our essential moral personality we create an ideal person. We may act toward this ideal person as though he were real. A genuine moral perplexity invites a descent into the depths of our very being, a painful inquiry into our actual, rather than our ostensible, motivations and values. And since the formulation is constitutive of an ideal not yet fully formed, this is an act of self-creation.
The monotheistic vision of one God, one mankind, and one universal history, with a concomitant belief in the intrinsic dig-nity of every person as made in God’s image, is an ideal which has furnished the means of judging and changing more parochial and limited ideals. It has been the corrective to various idolatries, chief among which are nationalism and the excessive use of power.

This insight should be seen in the context of the broadest and most universal ideals, and historically has led us to various religious visions. Isaiah was the first to give us a vision of international morality. It is not enough for Isaiah, for example, to have the sword forbidden to individuals. Isaiah claims it is in-credible that murder is a crime but war is not. “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation neither shall they learn war any-more.”2 Isaiah’s view of morality transcends nationalism—our class, our clan, our tribe—and is seen to be universal and ap-plicable to all. In this fashion, monotheism provides grounds for universal values and functions as a corrective to narrower visions.

II. The Significance of Repentance

The attempt to fulfill ethical demands inevitably fails. And man’s failure, his feelings of guilt and remorse at not having fulfilled his ethical goals, leads to contrition, repentance, and endeavors at self-transcendence and self-transformation. It often leads as well lo a search for spiritual cleansing, purification, and forgiveness for one’s sins.

This search for forgiveness and spiritual cleansing is not sim-ply an ethical need but has numerous religious overtones. This is clear in the context of the self’s awareness that ethically he has done wrong, and that yet there must be room for a new begin-ning, another chance, and not simply condemnation. Still, the more moral faults involve injury to persons generally, the more it becomes impossible to set aside moral debts within the ethical order. Especially as one comes to judge one’s moral actions in terms of an ideal self, and the more that ideal self reflects a commitment to general goals of moral conduct, guilt for moral failure requires repentance and forgiveness in terms of that ideal self.
What comes to the lore is the consciousness of the connection of ethics with the self-transcendent aspect of man, his spiritual generation. It is here, as Hermann Cohen points out, that the correlation with God emerges.3 The Psalmist phrases, “He re-storeth my soul,” or “Create in me a clean heart and restore a steadfast spirit within me,” testify to man’s need for spiritual healing and regeneration. One cannot refer to this need simply in ethical terms in the sense that ethics seeks general rules of correct behavior and does not give grounds for the very singular act of forgiveness—especially when the offences involve justice gener-ally, not simply particular individuals who could forgive the offence to them. What ethics does not fully confront, and here the religious clement comes to, the fore, is, as Hermann Cohen has indicated, the self-recognition of sin and failure and the need for repentance and self-transcendence. Repentance makes it possi-ble to redeem the past. As Max Scheler states, “... there is no part of our past life which—while its component natural reality is of course less freely alterable than the future—might not still be genuinely altered in its meaning and worth, through entering our life’s total significance as a constituent of thy self-revision which is always possible,”4 Scheler continues,
Repenting is equivalent to re-appraising part of one’s past life and shaping for it a mint-new worth and significance. People tell us that Repentance is a senseless attempt to drive out something ‘unalterable’. But nothing in this life is ‘unalterable’ in the sense of this argument. Even this ‘senseless’ attempt alters the ‘unalterable’ and places the regretted conduct or attitude in a new relation within the totality of one’s life. setting it to work in a new direction.5

Thus Max Scheler sees repentance as the way in which one can “totally kill and extinguish the reactive effect of the deed within the human soul, and with it the root of an eternity of renewed guilt and evil,” Repentance seeks “forgiveness of sin” and “an infusion of new strength from the center of things.”6

The need for forgiveness and the recognition that we can be regenerated, start anew as it were, is the heart of repentance. It is an appeal to a transcendent source of power to give us .strength, hope, and faith to continue. That is, it is an appeal beyond the ethical order for reinstatement within that order. The possibility for ethical failure, (he reality of guilt, the lack of a ground for forgiveness for genera) moral failures signal beyond the ethical order. Forgiveness, as a general moral category, transcends the ethical in requiring a locus for the giving of forgiveness. One is returned thus to the concept of an ideal self, but now in correla-tion to the source of forgiveness—God.

III. The Relationship Between the Good and the Holy

There is another aspect of the ethical which, when fully ampli-fied transcends ethics and makes it enter the domain of the religious; the feeling of reverence and awe that is related to certain ethical acts, such as self-sacrifice. In such acts the indi-vidual often feels llial his whole life and the meaning of his life are at stake. Here one has intimations of the holy and (he sacred. This point has been raised by MacInlyre with regard to the motivations requisite for self-sacrifice. Even if one recognizes that one can only acl coherently if one obeys the categorical imperative, still one may choose to act incoherently— especially if one’s own life is at stake. How can the ethical order give adequate motivations for ethical action, especially when these are at the cost of self-sacrifice? Self-sacrifice requires an appeal to something of absolute value.
John Oman has argued that we cannot by building up natural. mundane values arrive al anything of absolute worth.7 He claims that only in the experience of the holy does one stand in the presence of a reality before which one cannot simply seek one’s own pleasure. What Oman distinguishes is the natural and super-natural; he indicates (hat it is in the recognition of absolute worth or of the holy thai an intuition of the supernatural appears.

Hans Jonas also reinforces this concept when he states:

We must, in other words, distinguish between moral obligation and (he much larger sphere of moral value. (This, incidentally, shows up the error in the widely-held view of value theory that the higher a value the stronger its claim and the greater the duty to realize it. The highest are in a region beyond duty and claim.) The ethical dimension far exceeds that of the moral law and reaches into the sublime solitude of dedication and ultimate com-mitment, away from all reckoning and rule—in short, into the sphere of the holy. From there alone can the offer of self-sacrifice genuinely spring, and this—its source—must be honored religiously.8

In short, the search for an ideal focus in terms of which one’s particular acts can be judged and given coherence, and the need for a source of forgiveness, coincide with tlie holy—the adequate ground for ultimate dedication and self-sacrifice. Reflection upon the ethical leads one beyond the ethical in order that coherence in the ethical life, repentance and forgiveness, and ultimate dedica-tion and self-sacrifice can make sense. The argument is clearly not a strict one. It is rather an ascent from lesser to greater coherence of moral vision. The argument turns on an appeal to an interest in a moral life of greater compass and intensity. Thus, as Henry Slonimsky puts it, the religious man is:

… one who is willing to bear the burdens—and on a higher and more difficult plane, the sorrows—and on the highest and most difficult and almost superhuman plane, the sins of the world. A religious person is one who feels responsible for every one else.9

This feeling of general responsibility and moral interest is one to which monotheism gives purpose and coherence,. If God is one, then there is one moral history—grounded in that God. Moreover, this one God, as the God of all creation, suggests that there is one account or story of the world which is, in principle, a general story. Cosmology and moral history come to coincide in an appeal to universality and generality.

IV. Ethics, Science and Theology

Ethics makes a demand that the universe be such as to enable ethics to succeed. This is similar to the Kantian postulates in the Critique of Practical Reason. It is the task of theology to seek to determine the kind of universe wherein the presuppositions and demands of both science and ethics can be realized and fulfilled. That is, religion gives a view in terms of which the kingdom of nature and the kingdom of grace can be reconciled—in terms of which (he otherwise senseless suffering of the innocent can have enduring meaning. Which is to say, religion makes a claim that morality at best can only leave as a postulate—that reality is, in fact,, susceptible to morality—that being and goodness are not irreconcilable or opposed, but rather that at least in the Divine Being they are united in a supreme form.

Religion thus forwards an ideal of coherence that extends beyond that of giving unity to particular moral actions. It comes to include giving unity to both our descriptive and normative interests, both our interests in science and ethics. While science is primarily concerned with what is (i.e., with an accurate or true description of the stale of things as they are), science as such is not concerned with that aspect of reality that needs changing and transformation. In this respect, science is concerned with what is, morality with what ought to be, and theology is concerned with the interrelationship of these two through an attempt to under-stand the structure of things as making possible both science and morality. As Montague has argued:

Religion as we shall conceive it is the acceptance neither of a primitive absurdity nor of a sophisticated truism, but of a momen-tous possibility—the possibility namely that what is highest in spirit is also deepest in nature, that the ideal and the real arc at least ti) some extent identified, not merely evanescently in our own lives but enduringly in the universe itself. It this possibility were an actuality, it there truly were at the heart of nature .something akin to us, a conserver and increaser of values, and if we could not only know this and act upon it, but really feel it, life would suddenly become radiant. For no longer should we be alien accidents in an indifferent world, uncharacterized by-products of the blindly whirling atoms; and no longer would the things that matter most be at the mercy of the things that matter least.10

Implicit in Montague’s characterization of religion are three concepts: meaning, order, and value. Religion is the assurance or reassurance that life and the universe have meaning and that meaning is impossible without order attuned to values.

Religion as the quest for meaning is not an abstract or intellectual pursuit hut lies at the very depths of the human self. The quest for religion begins when man searches for the meaning of his existence, when he seeks the purpose and significance of his life, and when he Judges himself by terms that transcend his finite self. This religious quest does not begin in wonder or amazement or in the ineffable, but in the self-questioning of the meaning and purpose of one’s existence, and from questioning one’s own existence to the existence of all that is. The question man ultimately asks himself is: Why is there something rather than nothing? What is the reason and meaning of the being that is? This question of meaning is never a question of fact. It is not raised by asking what is, but rather by asking the why for the why.

It is necessary to point out that science makes certain presup-positions which are neither intelligible in themselves nor self-contained, but which require a metaphysical and theological con-text for their intelligibility. All science presupposes being and order, tl takes them for granted and does not discuss the more radical question of (he ground for the being and order of what is. But we are still inescapably aware of our contingency and of the contingency of all that is. We are still struck with the question: What is the ground of the being that is? Why is there order and not chaos? What is (he ground of the order that is? No attempt at juggling theories of chance and randomness can successfully address itself to these questions. Being cannot come from non-being by chance. The laws of chance could intelligibly answer the question as to the probability of coming to be of a certain pattern with respect to a range of actualities. But they could never ask or answer the question about (lie universe, its coming into being. This question transcends the range and scope of science.

This religious quest for meaning, though, does not contradict science or ethics. After all, it stems from a concern to put science and ethics into a more encompassing framework. Re-ligion in this sense affords a truly interdisciplinary, in fact, trans-disciplinary perspective within which ultimate Justifications are sought for both ethics and science, for both honoring obligations and having confidence in predictions. Religion offers a coinci-dence of the termini ad quos of our interests in an ideal vantage point for judging our particular moral actions, in a source of forgiveness, in a justification for moral self-sacrifice, and in grounds for confidence regarding our place as moral agents and knowers. A final authentication of ourselves as doers and knowers is to be found, if anywhere, only in religion. To quote Schubert Ogden:

Religious questions, do not ask either about particular phenomena as do scientific questions, or about particular courses of action as do moral questions; they ask, rather, about the fundamental condi-tions that everything particular presupposes. Thus what gives rise to religious questions is the common experience of the apparent unreality and final meaninglessness of all that is and is done. . . . religion is a matter of enabling us so to understand our inalienable confidence in the worth of life that it may be reasonably affirmed.11

When one looks for foundations of ethics that also underlie science, I believe one finds them in religion. It is only in terms of a transcendent ground, a universal rationale underlying both the world of experience and the world of moral action, that the domains of ethics and science are assured of integration. Again, this is similar to Kant’s suggestion—that only by presuming the existence of God does it become possible to be assured that the kingdoms of Grace and of Nature, of autonomous action and scientific investigation, can be reconciled. The religious view-point looks beyond particular vantage points, which give frag-mentary portrayals of the human condition, to affirm in one God a unity to being, and a unification to the diverse elements of human existence.


NOTES
1. Eliseo Vivas. The Moral and inv Ethical Life (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1963).
2. Isaiah 2:4b.
3. Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason (New York: Linger Pub. Co.. 1972), p. 16S.
4. Max Sheler. On the Eternal in Man (London: SCM Press Ltd., 1960), p. 40.
5. Ibid., p. 41.
6. Ibid., p. 55.
7. John Oman, The Natural and the Supernatural (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931), p. 310.
8. Hans Jonas, Philosophical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall. 1974).
9. Henry Slonimsky, Essays (Chicago: Quadrangle Press, 1967), p. 115
10. W. P. Montague, Belief Unbound (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930), pp. 6-7.
11. Schubert Ogden, personal communication.