Perfect Goodness and the God of the Jews: A Contemporary Jewish Theology 9781644691373

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Perfect Goodness and the God of the Jews A Contemporary Jewish Theology

Emunot: Jewish Philosophy and Kabbalah Series Editor Dov Schwartz (Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan) Editorial Board Ada Rapoport Albert (University College, London) Gad Freudenthal (CNRS, Paris) Gideon Freudenthal (Tel Aviv University, Ramat Aviv) Moshe Idel (Hebrew University, Jerusalem) Raphael Jospe (Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan) Ephraim Kanarfogel (Yeshiva University, New York) Menachem Kellner (Haifa University, Haifa) Daniel Lasker (Ben-Gurion University, Beer Sheva

Perfect Goodness and the God of the Jews A Contemporary Jewish Theology

Jerome Yehuda GELLMAN

Boston 2019

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gellman, Jerome I. author. Title: Perfect goodness and the God of the Jews : a contemporary Jewish theology / Jerome Yehuda Gellman. Emeritus, Ben-Gurion University. Description: Boston : Academic Studies Press, 2019. | Series: Emunot: Jewish philosophy and kabbalah | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019028716 | ISBN 9781618118387 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781644691373 (adobe pdf) Subjects: LCSH: God (Judaism) | Orthodox Judaism--Doctrines. Classification: LCC BM610 .G45 2019 | DDC 296.3/11--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019028716 Copyright © Academic Studies Press, 2019 ISBN 9781618118387 (hardback) ISBN 9781644691373 (electronic) Book design by Lapiz Digital Services Cover design by Ivan Grave Published by Academic Studies Press 1577 Beacon Street Brookline, MA 02446, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

. . . ‫והערב נא ה׳ אלוקינו את דברי תורתך בפינו‬ Make sweet, O God, the words of your Torah in our mouths . . .  (Morning Prayer)

Contents

Acknowledgements 

ix

Forward 

xi

Introduction 

xii

1.  My Theological Method 

1

2.  A Perfectly Good Being 

21

3.  The God Of The Jews 

26

4.  The Ideological Critique 

37

5.  The Argument From Evil 

55

6.  The Humility Response 

59

7.  A Response to the Present-Day Ideological Critique— The God of the Jews and a Jewish God

77

8.  Hasidic Panpsychism: “A Portion Of God From Above” 

118

9.  The Multiverse: A Possible Theodicy 

145

Backward171 Bibliography172 Index180

Acknowledgements

This is the third book I am publishing with Academic Studies Press. I am grateful to Dov Schwartz for accepting my books to his series Emunot: Jewish Philosophy and Kabbalah, of which he is chief editor. The Press is a most valued venue for my books. The staff of Academic Studies Press has been exemplary in editing and producing these three books. I thank them for their excellent work. I thank especially Stuart Allen for greatly enhancing this book with his welcome editing. I am indebted to the Van Leer Institute for allowing me to be a library fellow at their Polansky Library, where I wrote most of this book. Bayla Pasikov, the chief librarian, and the library staff have created a perfect environment for me to write with concentration (and with cups of tea). Their contribution to the writing of this book has been fundamental to the enterprise. Shirley Zauer edited footnotes and constructed the bibliography for this book. I thank her for her superb, meticulous work. Many people have been helpful and encouraging to me during the writing of this book. My longtime friend, Jonathan Malino read much of the book and made many important comments that I had to deal with in a serious way. He saved me from some confusions and instances of vagueness, and sometime nonsense. At one point when I thought of giving up, Jonathan put me back on track. His input was invaluable. Cass Fisher graciously read several chapters with care. With his wide knowledge and keen interest in Jewish theology he offered several significant corrections that I have adopted or that made me understand the need to clarify and tighten what I had written. His input was vital to my project. Steven Kepnes gave very good feedback on parts of the book. His support was valuable to me. Menachem Kellner read parts of the manuscript and was especially helpful to me in what I wrote about Maimonides. I appreciate his support and expertise immensely.

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A study partner, Eliot Sacks, served as a loyal opposition all along the way. He didn’t agree with some of my chapters and kindly wrote extensive explanations of his position. For some of his points I made important changes. My dear son, Uriel (the greatest scholar in the world on modern Polish Jewry!), was very effective in tracking down Hasidic texts which I remembered but had forgotten where I had seen them. He also recommended some Hasidic sources of which I was not aware, which I incorporated in this book. The people at the Yakar Synagogue in Jerusalem, the director, Rabbanit Gila Rosen, and her son, Rabbi Shlomo Dov Rosen, were not involved in my project. Nonetheless, the prayerful atmosphere that Yakar has provided for me has been a deeply appreciated spiritual facilitator of my book. (I make no claims for their agreement with what I have written here.) My gratitude to them is great. Tamar Ross has been an inspiration to me for many years on several levels. Her formidable work in contemporary Jewish theology has set much of the agenda for Modern Orthodox Jewish theologians. Although we have our differences, she more than anyone else has determined the issues that I have become convinced require serious engagement, and she has advanced the discussion to new levels. I am indebted to the late David Hartman for the many conversations we had on moral issues in Judaism. While we did not necessarily agree on all matters, his intense concern for the truth persuaded me to face the moral issues head-on and with honesty. I want to express my deep gratitude to the many wonderful people who have taught me Judaism and who have taught me philosophy. It is with special gratitude that I mention my teacher of long ago, of philosophy of religion, Alvin Plantinga, with whom I have maintained contact over the years. The teaching of this devout Reform Christian has had a strong influence on the life of this religious Jew. Edie, my joyous wife, was always lovingly encouraging me to write and publish this book, although she might not agree with everything I write here. I thank her deeply for her love, understanding, and constant support in all the years of our married life. May she be blessed with many years of good health and happiness. Parts of chapter eight are reprinted from the European Journal for Philosophy of Religion, with the permission of the editor.1 1 Jerome Gellman, “On God, Suffering, and Theodical Individualism,” European Journal of Philosophy of Religion 1 (2010): 187–191.

Forward

The Buddha once spoke of the right and wrong ways to grasp his teachings. He compared them to the right and wrong ways of catching a snake. He said that catching a snake by the tail is the wrong way to catch a snake. It will turn and bite you. You must catch a snake by the head so that it cannot turn and bite you. Even if it winds its tail around your arm it will not hurt you. The Buddha continued, if you grasp my teachings by the tail they will turn on you and hurt you. You must grasp my teachings from the head where they will benefit you (Arittha Sutra). In talking about catching a snake by the tail, the Buddha was referring to those who take up his teachings without realizing that the teachings point beyond themselves. When someone points to the moon, such people stare at the person’s finger, rather than look at the moon. Those who grasp the teachings by the head, glance at the finger but know to look to the moon. Truly, it was not until I began reading Hasidic texts that I knew that all along I had been clutching my Judaism by the tail. I had failed to understand that my Judaism was turning around and biting me. From the Hasidim I have learned to try not to be afraid to grasp my Judaism by the head, so that rather than hurt me it helps me go forward on this winding, uneven, uncharted trail called life. And so, this book is informed by a broadly Hasidic way of thinking on topics in Jewish theology. I am grateful to the One who reads my heart for having provided me a way to understand that I was not to keep staring at the finger of my Judaism but was to go forward from there—all the way to the moon. I dedicate this book to my grandchildren and great-grandchildren with a prayer that they will not be afraid to grab hold of the snake by its head.

Introduction

This is a book of apologetics for traditional Judaism. The term “apologetics” has a bad name for some because they are thinking of what I call “rejectionist apologetics”—that is, the defense of a faith by refusing at all costs to accept what would require modification of one’s religion. While rejectionist apologetics can be honest and noble, it can also become infected with blatant dishonesty, a lack (sometimes intentional) of information, obvious fallacies, or a reasoning so convoluted as to be transparently ad hoc. There are other forms of apologetics. There is “forfeiting apologetics,” as I will call it, which is eager to characterize the Jewish tradition as being identical—or almost identical—with current ideas hurled as challenges at that tradition. This happens, for example, when Jews allow “Judaism” to become another name for liberal, democratic values of freedom, equality, and ecology: Passover becomes a holiday of political freedom; Hanukah one of national self-determination; Sukkot and the fifteenth of Shevat are celebrations of nature; etc. “Forfeiting apologetics” succeeds by smoothly declaring that when the faith is properly cast, it looks exactly like its purportedly superior secular alternatives. Both rejectionist and identical apologists solve all problems for their devotees, each in its own way. My apologetics for traditional Judaism is neither rejectionist nor forfeiting. I start with an acceptance of traditional Judaism, and judiciously inspect supposed threats or problems. When an apparent concern turns out to be merely speculative, for example, is primarily accepted for its innovative (perhaps rebellious) appeal, or is a popular fad, it can be dismissed as not being a proper threat in my apologetics. If the difficulty turns out to oppose the tradition arbitrarily, with little to back it up, or lack hard evidence or solid argumentation, it can also be rejected. However, when a supposed danger is found to be supported by rigorous thinking, strong moral judgment, persuasive concrete evidence, and/or exposes real internal difficulties to the faith, then it must be weighed as a reason for adjusting the

Introduction

tradition in its light, and to be ready to make the changes, albeit cautiously and perhaps reluctantly. In this case, I do what I call “vulnerable apologetics.” It begins with the recognition that there can be places where apologetics might not succeed, and that the tradition requires review. However, a vulnerable apologetics will yield only when compelled by the power of evidence and argumentation. It will not yield to any of the other forms of criticism I list above—not to ideas because they are politically correct, merely popular, ill-argued, faddish, or simply based on a worldview at odds with traditional Judaism from the very start. My book addresses, in the first instance, traditional Jewish devotees for whom the challenges I present are a test of their emunah, faith, and trust in God. They believe in the truth of traditional Judaism, or perhaps more commonly, believe that traditional Judaism is true enough to deserve their loyalty and devotion. Yet the issues of this book should be important for any Jew who believes in God, and for any theistic believer. My vulnerable apologetics deals with real difficulties for traditional Judaism in one of two ways: it either solves the issue by modifying the tradition, when necessary, and to the minimum possible extent; or it reduces the power of the problem to the point where its force will be diminished by the strength of a person’s emunah, and faith can live with it, without a full solution, and in hope for better days. With my vulnerable apologetics, in previous books, I found it necessary to offer a new conception of the Jews as the Chosen People.1 I also found myself having to accept the widely held scholarly view that the Torah can no longer be thought to report historical events accurately, at least in the details. And so I proposed a theology of Torah and history that accounts for that fact, while retaining as much as possible of the tradition.2 The subject of this book is God—or more precisely, “the God of the Jews,” YHVH of the Hebrew Bible and the rabbinic literature. My aim is to demonstrate that it is perfectly possible to be a devotee of traditional Judaism who, at the same time, accepts a moderate form of newly emerging Western morality. A devotee such as myself, who believes that God is a perfectly good being. My opening chapter explains the basis of the theological method of the book, so the reader will know where I stand on matters of the “right” to believe in traditional Judaism and the “right” to make objective truth-claims. 1 Jerome Gellman, God’s Kindness Has Overwhelmed Us, A Contemporary Doctrine of the Jews as God’s Chosen People (Brighton: Academic Studies Press, 2012). 2 Jerome Gellman, This Was from God, A Contemporary Theology of Torah and History (Brighton: Academic Studies Press, 2016).

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In particular, I articulate why I do not accept a postmodernist conception of truth. This is crucial for the methodology of my project, and will help avoid later misunderstandings. Chapter two elucidates what I mean by a “perfectly good being.” I argue that to be perfectly good one must have maximal goodness, perfect power, perfect knowledge, exist always, be creator and sovereign of the world, and be in active relationship with the creation. As I will explain, what I mean by “perfect” does not include being omnipotent, omniscient, or unchanging. Chapter three gathers selected sources from the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic writings that support, or point in the direction of, God’s perfect goodness. These writings reveal a desire to see the God of the Jews, YHVH, as a perfectly good being. A major argument I present for God’s perfect goodness is the biblical command to love Him unconditionally and absolutely. I propose that this command is religiously justified only if God is a perfectly good being. In the following two chapters I take up two challenges to the idea that God is a perfectly good being. The first is the “ideological critique” of God’s shortcomings, especially moral, as they are portrayed in the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic literature. In these texts, it seems that the God of the Jews is not perfectly good. The second challenge is the classic “argument from evil” that aims to show that no perfectly good being exists. If no perfectly good being exists, then the God of the Jews is not perfectly good. The purpose of my book is to offer the person of faith support in the face of both the ideological critique of God and the argument of evil against the possibility that God is perfectly good. Do not expect from me solutions where none seem available. But I do hope that, for the kind of traditional Jew I am addressing, the scale is tipped toward belief in the perfect goodness of God. Chapter four addresses the ideological critique of God—a critique that rests on how God appears in the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic literature. The ideological critique alleges that God has moral faults and other limitations. There are two issues involved in the ideological critique. One is a practical issue: how a contemporary Jew could live a traditional Jewish life in the present, while not seriously violating her contemporary moral sensibilities. Let us call this the “ideological critique of the present-day,” or for short, the “present-day critique.” The second is what I call the “ideological critique of history,” or for short, the “history-critique.” Even if the present-day critique is softened, the history-critique forcefully questions how a contemporary, traditional Jew can come to terms with the fact that, so long ago, the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic literature depicted God with apparent moral flaws. Only some of these flaws have been considered over time, gradually, while others

Introduction

have only become an issue now. How to account for why God has allowed this to happen if God is supposed to be perfectly good? Chapter five presents the second moral challenge—the argument from evil. This argument wishes to conclude that the amount, and variety, of evil in our world precludes the possibility of the existence of a perfectly good being. The evil in question includes the evil pointed out by the history-critique concerning the representation of God in traditional Jewish texts. This is a problem that remains in full force even if we fully solve the present-day critique. Chapter six is a response to the argument from evil, with what I call the “humility response.” This response gives several reasons why we are not in a position to judge God morally. According to the humility response, both the argument from evil and the ideological critique cannot get off the ground. However, I contend that we must supplement the humility response with further considerations if we are to tip the balance away from the argument from evil to have sufficient faith to carry on, if belief in a perfectly good God is to remain true, or true enough for the believer. The chapter concludes with the first of my supplements to the humility response, the emphasis in traditional Judaism on gratitude to God for the good we experience in our lives. Chapter seven offers a second supplement to the humility response by countering the present-day ideological critique. (I deal with the history-critique in a later chapter) In Jewish tradition, two major movements have radically reshaped the God of the Jews. These are found in Medieval Jewish philosophy and Hasidic thought as loosely based on the kabbalah. The former is particularly interested in making the God of the Jews a perfect God, per se. The latter, as I see it, wants to make the God of the Jews perfectly good. In the process of this reception within traditional Judaism of the God of the Jews, a specifically Jewish God emerges—one fashioned by the Jews. A believer should recognize the Hand of God in this development of Judaism, for the process of appropriation takes place with Divine guidance. (See chapter eight for my conception of Divine Providence.) Coinciding with our Jewish appropriation, God reveals more of the Divine to us. We must take care, however, to advance in this endeavor with humility and respect. The past modifications of God fall short of what we need today. In this chapter, then, I propose the Hasidic way as a prototype for a contemporary, and continuing, Jewish appropriation of a perfectly good God. This type of modification promises further developments that have the potential to meet the present-day ideological critique with a suitable Jewish God.

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Chapter eight picks up where the previous chapter leaves off and explores the Hasidic notion of “a portion of God from above,” and its connection to the Hasidic idea of a perfectly good God. I call this Hasidic view “theological panpsychism,” in allusion to the panpsychic principle that the mental pervades all created reality. Important philosophers and scientists have defended panpsychism, and I find instructive parallels between it and Hasidic doctrine. The chapter concludes by connecting the theme of “portion of God from above” to the earlier response to the present-day ideological critique. Chapter nine introduces a further supplemental element to the humility response. This is a “possible theodicy” for much (but not all) of the world’s evils which has application as well to the ideological history-critique. A theodicy tells a putatively true story justifying why a perfectly good God allows evils, while a possible theodicy tells a story only about why a perfect God might possibly allow evils. The purpose of a plain old theodicy is to give actual rationales for evil in a world where there is a perfect being. The purpose of a possible theodicy is to oppose the feeling that there could not possibly be any acceptable reason why a perfect God would allow the evil that we know. Given the humility response, any possible theodicy must be partial and humble in its claims. The chapter finishes by applying my possible theodicy to a response to the history-critique of God. By the end of the book, I hope to have shown that a traditional Jew touched by modern moral sensibilities can believe in a perfectly good God, if: 1. She accepts that to a large degree God is beyond our ability to judge; 2. She accepts that an ongoing project of modifying the God of the Jews into a perfectly good Jewish God is an obligation to both God and ourselves; 3. She can picture to herself a reason why God might allow at least a good deal of the world’s evil; 4. She is able to invoke her faith and trust in God for the problems that remain in diminished form.

Chapter One

My Theological Method My mode of argumentation in this book goes back to when I completed high school at an Orthodox yeshiva school in Detroit, Michigan, and enrolled in a local university in the 1950s. The implicit message coming from high school was that I should study neither psychology or philosophy, as they are contrary to their Judaism. (Biblical studies were not even in the realm of possibility then.) So, naturally, I chose an undergraduate double major in psychology and philosophy, and went on to do a master’s degree in philosophy with a secondary concentration in psychology. Finally, I got a doctorate and career in philosophy. There I was in an undergraduate philosophy course and we were reading a 1952 edition of A. J. Ayer’s big hit, Language, Truth, and Logic.1 This work had become a leading text of logical positivism, a movement that preceded Ayer by many years. According to Ayer, and logical positivism, the words “God exists” were not only not true, but not even false. They were literally meaningless, like a bunch of squiggles on a paper. This view became so philosophically dominant that even some theologians began to embrace it and give up the belief that it was true that God exists. In time, some Christian theologians who abandoned God in that spirit—John Robertson, for example—became wildly popular.2 I was in the middle of all of this and extremely worried about my religious future. Without God, there was no religion for me. What was I to do? The power of philosophy was so strong on me as an undergraduate student, in my rebellion against the very idea that I should not be studying philosophy, that I saw no way out. One day, however, I suddenly realized that I had everything inside out. I had confused my epistemological “inside” with my epistemological 1 A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (New York: Dover, 1952). 2 John Robertson, Honest to God (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1963).

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“outside.” I had been thinking of my religious belief as my epistemological outside, in need of an inside evaluator, waiting to be invited in, and of my class on logical positivism as part of that inside. I thought my identity as a philosophy student was the vantage point from which to judge my identity as an Orthodox Jew. I realized that this did not have to be the case and, indeed, should not be the case. I was more certain of the core basics of my religion than I was of the argumentative solidity of the book before me.3 I saw that my Judaism was the vantage point from which to judge the credentials of various outsides, including components of the philosophical enterprise. When I looked at Ayer’s book in that way, I discovered that it had nothing solid to back it up and nothing to even begin to challenge God’s existence. I correctly saw it to be no more than a current philosophical fashion—excitingly novel and rebellious, but little else. I came to understand that a requirement of any successful theory of semantic meaning ought to be that the words “God exists” be semantically meaningful. “God exists,” that is, ought to be either true or false. My decision to make my religion the arbiter of philosophy, however, put me in great danger. It invited pure dogmatism and could easily ensure that nothing in philosophy could ever overrule, or even help refine, any element of my religious belief. My stance could encourage defensive strategies invented solely for keeping the outside at arm’s length—the worst of rejectionist apologetics. That is why I saw how important it was to adopt a consciously vulnerable apologetics, open from the start to the real possibility that components of my religious belief might be significantly weakened. Yet, at the same time, an apologetics that would not succumb to the merely popular or the thrill of rebellion against old values. As a result, the theological method of this book is what I call “epistemological-framework conservatism.” Just plain “epistemological conservatism” (without “framework”) posits that if a person already holds a belief, then she is allowed to continue to hold that belief if she has no good reason to stop believing it. The idea behind this is that a person should not have to relinquish a belief she holds unless she finds a good reason to give it up. This is regardless of what grounds she has for her present belief. 3

Ludwig Wittgenstein comments on G. E. Moore’s certainty that he has two hands, saying that this is not Moore’s own certainty, but is a sign that Moore holds to the broad social belief that two hands are basic to life. Given that, it might be argued that my sureness here is not my own, but a function of the basic framework of my religious identification. However, that a certainty begins with a socially determined assumption need not imply that this does not also create an individual certainty or at least private confidence. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979), inter alia.

My Theological Method

Quite simply, plain epistemological conservatism is too permissive. Here is a good example of why it does not work: Suppose you flip a coin, and it lands out of my sight. Without going over to look, I decide that it has landed “tails” up. I do not believe the coin to be biased, nor do I believe myself telepathic. . .  . I simply believe that the coin has landed “tails” up. Now, it seems to me that the fact that I now believe that it landed “tails” up does not justify me—in any measure at all—in maintaining my belief that it landed “tails” up. No belief about the orientation of the coin is justified in my present evidential situation.4

This is surely correct. That I happen in such a situation to already believe in “tails,” is hardly a good reason to merit my continuing to have that belief. If I were to form the belief that it was true that the coin landed on tails, I would not be OK for even a moment in that belief. However, epistemological-framework conservatism does not have that failing. This kind of conservatism applies only to beliefs that occur within a more or less demarcated structure or framework of intertwined beliefs, of which religious beliefs are an example. In the words of Kevin McCain, this type of epistemological conservatism accounts for a common intuition that when the need to revise our beliefs occurs we should try to revise our set of beliefs piece by piece instead of in totality. So, when we attempt to eliminate inconsistencies that arise in our set of beliefs as we come to form new beliefs we try to hold on to as many of our original beliefs as possible. . .  . We are hesitant to do away with our beliefs because intuitively we think that holding a belief, while it does not count as evidence/ reasons in favor of the belief, merits our retaining the belief until we have reasons to abandon it.5

The idea is that, if a belief is embedded in an extended structure of related beliefs, one is justified in continuing to maintain that belief until one has a good reason to reject it or suspend it.6 The deeper a belief has penetrated 4 David Christensen, “Conservatism in Epistemology,” Nous 28 (1994): 74. 5 Kevin McCain, “The Virtues of Epistemic Conservatism,” Synthese 164 (2008): 187–188. McCain does not put his view in the same terms I do here, as epistemologicalframework conservatism. Nevertheless, his reference to “sets of beliefs,” and his later appeal to the “coherence” of one’s beliefs, comes close to the view I am proposing. 6 For decades, philosophers have been fighting like mad about what should happen when you realize that others who are as smart, well-informed, and seemingly honest as you think you are, have religious belief-frameworks inconsistent with yours. On the one side,

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the structure, the stronger a critique will have to be to dislodge it. In other words, the more other beliefs in the structure must be given up because of giving up some one belief, the greater the role played by that one belief in the belief structure. In that case, epistemological-framework conservatism mandates stronger counterargument before being obligated to give up that one belief. Beliefs at the edges of a structure of beliefs are more easily given up and so require weaker counterargument to dislodge them. In other words, we are not required to give up belief structures we already hold and start all over again from an epistemological limbo. (It is not even clear how this would be possible). Instead, my theological stance assumes the correctness of epistemological-framework conservatism. It follows from epistemological-framework conservatism that engaging in a self-protective strategy is not sinful when it aims to maintain a wider framework that is already in place. We should not dismiss self-protective strategies simply because they are defensive, but should judge them by how reasonable or unreasonable they are for the purpose at hand. Such judgments are hard to make. If one is unsympathetic to start with, one will tend to find a given self-protective strategy unreasonable or irrational. If one is sympathetic from the start, then one might be overeager to validate a given defensive strategy. Balanced judgment is called for, and even then, the possibility of disagreement is great. This is why one should present one’s self-protective strategies to readers, as I do in the pages that follow. Reader reactions enable one to see oneself from the point of view of others. Such exposure helps us to get closer, over time, to the truth. The development of competing defensive strategies is the most effective way to approach truth. Each strategist will, given her personal commitment, represent her standpoint as forcefully as she can, and through fierce competition truth has a chance to advance. This there are those philosophers who argue that this counts as a good reason to suspend your religious framework of belief or at least to keep it only tentatively; on the other are those who deny this is a good reason at all for making such changes in your beliefs. I belong to the latter group and have defended the position in a number of publications. Unfortunately, entry into this overgrown thicket lies beyond the scope of this volume. See my “Religious Diversity and the Epistemic Justification of Religious Belief,” Faith and Philosophy 10, no. 3 (1993): 345–364, reprinted in Philosophy of Religion, The Big Questions, eds. Michael J. Murray and Eleonore Stump (Oxford, Blackwell: 1999), 441–453; “Epistemic Peer Conflict and Religious Belief,” Faith and Philosophy 15 (1998): 229–235; “In Defense of a Contented Exclusivist,” Religious Studies 36 (2000): 401–17; and “Jewish Chosenness and Religious Diversity—A Contemporary Approach,” in Religious Perspectives on Religious Diversity, ed. Robert McKim (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 21–36.

My Theological Method

is especially true for the standpoints of those at the periphery of society or of “proper” disciplines— which includes not only women and people of color, with which we are familiar, but all those ignored in mainstream epistemologies. Among these positions are those of traditional Jews whose religious views are hardly paradigms of what a theory of epistemology aims to preserve or legitimize. Traditional Jews’ views can help serve as a corrective to narrowly construed populist epistemological biases. Finally, and indeed most crucially, I take into account my personal relationship with God. I pray to God, and at times feel God’s presence in my life. My theology is not merely between me and the reader. At its best, it must be consciously produced for God and with God. It would be a serious violation of my relationship with God to overlook the relationship in which my theology is embedded. I owe it to my relationship with God to be extra cautious. Augustine wrote of this caution in an extreme form when he said, “I will rather not be inquisitive than be separated from God.”7 I strive for what is called in Hebrew, tmimut. This word is hard to translate into English. It has the following meanings: being simple; uncomplicated; innocent; trusting; faithful, loyal; being whole; perfect without blemish; and being devoted. The concept of tmimut relates to one’s personal relationship with God, as in Deuteronomy 18:13: “You shall be tamim with the Lord your God” (“tamim” being the adjectival form of “tmimut”). Granted this, a theistic believer should undertake any theological task in a prayerful mode—much as Anselm of Canterbury prayed to God for guidance when setting out to prove the existence of a being than which none greater could be conceived, namely, God. *** From my epistemological-framework conservatism, one might be tempted to conclude that since I say that different people are entitled to maintain different frameworks, I therefore must be giving up on truth. “It’s all relative,” one might say. That would be a mistake. Epistemological conservatism pertains only to what one is entitled to believe at any given time. It does not forfeit that a person may intend that what he believes is true, in an objective, metaphysical sense. What he is entitled to believe, then, is that what he already believes is true, unless shown otherwise. My theology asserts the truth of God’s existence, as well as of other components of traditional Judaism. In asserting the truth of God’s existence, 7 Augustine, The Morals of the Catholic Church, trans. Richard Stothert (Seattle: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015).

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I mean to say that to the statement “God exists” there corresponds a state of affairs that exists objectively and independently of the ways we might think about it or describe it. God is real. The meaning of “truth” when I ascribe it to the statement “God exists” means the same as when I ascribe “truth” to the statement “I am now sitting at my computer”. In both cases, the truth is due to each statement faithfully recording something corresponding to reality. Of course, in the two cases the nature of the asserted reality is very different—God versus me and my computer—but the nature of the truth is the same: namely, correspondence-truth. Now, there are three philosophical positions that challenge my conservative framework-epistemology and my correspondence-approach to truth that I feel the need to address here. These positions have somewhat of a broad following in certain intellectual circles, as well as some influence beyond those circles. These three are what I will call: the “expressionist objection”; the “nativity objection”; and the “postmodernist objection.” I conclude that these, separately or together, do not give sufficient reason for me to change my mind about correspondence-truth and epistemological-framework conservatism.

The Expressionist Objection The expressionist objects to the very idea that in endorsing religious beliefs one intends to make factual claims. A classic statement of this position was given by R. B. Braithwaite and is worth looking at in detail.8 Braithwaite based his position on a general philosophical view (the “verification principle,” beloved by Ayer) which almost all philosophers have since abandoned. That need not interest us here since I am more interested in the viability of expressionism itself than in its historical roots. Here are sample quotations from Braithwaite to give you the gist of his expressionism: 1. “[A] religious assertion is used to express an attitude. . . . It is not used to assert the proposition that [one] has the attitude; it is used to show forth or evince [an] attitude.” (78) 2. “[Religious assertions are] primarily declarations of adherence to a policy of action, declarations of commitment to a way of life.” (80) 8 R. B. Braithwaite, “An Empiricist’s View of the Nature of Religious Belief,” in The Philosophy of Religion, ed. Basil Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1971), 72–91.

My Theological Method

3. “I myself take the typical meaning of the body of Christian assertions as being given by their proclaiming intentions to follow an agapeistic way of life.” (81) 4. “There must be some more important difference between an agapeistically policied9 Christian and an agapeistically policied Jew than that the former attends a church and the latter a synagogue. . . . The really important difference, I think, is to be found in the fact that the intentions to pursue the behavior policies, which may be the same for different religions, are associated with thinking of different stories (or sets of stories).” (84) 5. It is not necessary, on my view, for the asserter of a religious assertion to believe in the truth of the story involved in the assertions.10 According to Braithwaite, then, saying that “God exists” or that “God gave the Torah to the Jewish people” does not assert any truth. It expresses, rather, a positive attitude toward a way of life associated with those sentences or a commitment to an associated way of life. It endorses the values of the religious life in question. Further, what distinguishes a religious Jew from a Christian are the dissimilar stories they tell in their respective ways of life, even if they otherwise describe their two ways of life in roughly similar ways. If Braithwaite is right, my assertion of my religious beliefs has nothing to do with truth and is only a symptom of my liking a specific brand of religion. To utter the words “God exists,” in short, is more like saying, “Wow!”, about a delicious ice cream rather than like saying, “I am sitting at my computer.” Expressionism has found its way into the views of some contemporary traditional Jewish philosophers. For example, Avi Sagi emphatically writes: Truth claims about the world, about God, and about crucial events such as the Sinai theophany, are religiously irrelevant. In other words, religion is a value system that neither relies upon nor reflects metaphysical assumptions or factual data that could be translated into truth claims.”11

9 That means: having a policy to aim for acting in pure, unconditional love. 10 Braithwaite, “An Empiricist’s View,” 85–86. 11 Avi Sagi, Jewish Religion after Theology, trans. Batya Stein (Brighton: Academic Studies Press, 2009), 27.

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“Religion,” then, is not indebted to any truth-claims, but is only a system of values to which people express commitment, or in which folk express the appropriate values. These cannot be factual or true (or false), by nature. Tamar Ross also has endorsed an expressionist-type position.12 She writes: When an Orthodox Jew says, “I believe in Torah from Heaven,” her primary concern is not to discuss facts or establish history. . . . It reflects her wish to establish a much stronger claim that will regulate her entire life. (Ross, 194) The purpose of the assertion [that the Torah is Divine] is to affirm the ultimate meaning and value of a way of life and worldview. (Ross, 194) The main purpose of religious doctrine is indeed to grant meaning to the “form of life” through which we live. (Ross, 196) Belief in Divine revelation for traditional Jews simply means loyalty to the Torah and the way of life that it propagates. (Ross, 196)

Now, let me say at the outset that, since it is “a free country,” everybody is free to intend talk about God in any way they want. They might mean “nature” by God or “my ultimate concern,” or use talk about God as a secret code known to no one save the code users. People can use any words the way they want. What is not free is to project one’s own position on everyone else. It is one thing to proclaim one’s personal intentions when talking about God, but quite another to make a factual claim about what everyone else is doing when they seem to be making religious truth-claims. From my own experience with my coreligionists (and at times also with myself), I concur that an expressivist purpose does exist for devotees in their religious language. That is, I agree that statements like “God chose the Jews” and “God gave the Torah” are often used to express an intention to follow Jewish religious practice. I also agree that such statements are sometimes a means of signaling one’s being part of “the group” by saying just what traditional Jews say. Traditional Jews observe Shabbat, eat kosher and utter sentences like “God chose the Jews” and “God gave the Torah.” In saying such things, often they are simply saying what traditional Jews are accustomed to say. This empirical fact is surely far from the religious ideal. Traditional Judaism demands devotion to God, a sense of being in the presence of God, 12 Tamar Ross, Expanding the Palace of Torah: Orthodoxy and Feminism, HBI Series on Women (Boston: Brandeis, 2004).

My Theological Method

not to sin either in public or in private, to observe a myriad of sometimes annoying laws, and in the extreme to be willing to sacrifice one’s life for the sake of God. None of these should be reduced to mere talk one engages in to express one’s desire to being part of a way of life. And if they are only talk, we might wonder if it is rational to take seriously the demands of traditional Judaism. But that is precisely the religious ideal. Accordingly, there are, and have always been, a great number of people for whom metaphysical truth-assertions are crucial to the religious life. To deny this is to go against plain facts. Most important here is to recognize that if people sometimes do use a sentence to express an attitude or a commitment, it does not follow that they are not at the same time making truth-claims. Using a sentence expressively is wholly consistent with at the same time intending to make a truth-claim with the same utterance. Making a truth claim might even be essential for the success of the expressive function. For example, suppose it is raining hard outside and I see you open the door to leave the house without your umbrella. I call out to you in alarm, “It’s raining hard outside!” Now, clearly, I am using that sentence to express a warning, to alert you, that you better not leave the house without an umbrella. A pure warning (think of “Be careful!”) is appropriate or inappropriate, but neither true nor false. Yet, when I say, “It’s raining hard outside!”, not only am I issuing a warning, I also want to make a truth-claim: that it is raining hard outside. That truth-claim is essential to the achievement of the expressive function of the utterance. The warning comes to be because of the fact that I assert. That an utterance has an expressivist function, then, does not imply in the least that the same utterance is not making a truth-claim. Similarly, there is every reason to think that statements like “God exists” are often more than solely expressivist. Clearly, as in my umbrella warning, “God exists” sometimes expresses an attitude to a way of life precisely because of the truth-claim being made in my saying that God exists. It is, among other things, because one believes that God exists that one commits oneself to, or wishes to be part of, a theistic religious practice. In these cases, one intends such utterances to be correspondence truth-claims. Expressivism gives no reason to think otherwise. Finally, expressivism fails to account for all religious assertions, gaining whatever plausibility it might have from considering only categorical statements, such as simply “God exists” or “The Torah is from Heaven.” When we widen our perspective to include non-categorical religious statements we immediately see that expressivism does not do justice to the nature of religious language. Consider: the words “God

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exists” can appear in complex statements where there is obviously no expressive function of the sort expressivists have in mind—no execution of an expression of loyalty to, or of a set of values. Here are some examples: “If God exists, then I am in trouble”; “I hope it is false that God exists”; “God exists only in people’s minds.” In the first example, one is not asserting that God exists. One is only speaking conditionally. One cannot express loyalty with such a condition. Clearly, the second and third statements do not commit oneself to a way of life or express a positive attitude. In the above complex sentences, the words “God exists,” for all appearances, have the same meaning that those words have in the simple sentence “God exists.” To explain this, consider that the following is a valid piece of reasoning: 1. If God exists, then I am in trouble. 2. God exists. 3. So, I am in trouble. The above reasoning is valid only if the words “God exists” mean the same in both 1 and 2. But it cannot be the case if 2 has only an expressive function and makes no factual claim. This is because the “if ” part of “God exists” in 1 occurs in a conditional context. It cannot serve the purpose of expressing a commitment or loyalty to a way of life. But then the reasoning would be invalid, which is certainly not the case. So, the expressive function of using the words “God exists,” cannot exhaust the meaning of those words. The way is clear to recognize a claim of a matter of fact in (2). I conclude that an expressivist analysis of my religious statements does not have what it takes to cause me to abandon my truth-correspondence epistemological conservatism.

The Nativity Objection This objection goes back at least to John Stuart Mill, and relies on the claim that where and when a person is born is an accidental fact about that person. This includes the religious context of their place and time of birth. Had that person been born otherwise, she would have ended up with a very different set of religious beliefs. Here is how Mill put it: The world, to each individual, means the part of it with which he comes in contact; his party, his sect, his church, his class of society. . . . [I]t never

My Theological Method

troubles him that mere accident has decided which of these numerous worlds is the object of his reliance, and that the same causes which make him a Churchman in London, would have made him a Buddhist or a Confucian in Pekin.13

And John Hick states it this way: It is evident that in some ninety-nine percent of cases the religion which an individual professes and to which he or she adheres depends upon the accidents of birth. Someone born to Buddhist parents in Thailand is very likely to be a Buddhist, someone born to Muslim parents in Saudi Arabia to be a Muslim, someone born to Christian parents in Mexico to be a Christian, and so on.14

And Philip Kitcher: Most Christians have adopted their doctrines much as polytheists and the ancestor-worshippers have acquired theirs: through early teaching and socialization. Had the Christians been born among the aboriginal Australians, they would believe, in just the same ways, on just the same bases, and with just the same convictions, doctrines about Dreamtime instead of about the Resurrection. The symmetry is complete. . . . Given that they are all on a par, we should trust none of them.15

Nahum Glatzer, I have discovered, quotes the Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig with a similar motif. Rosenzweig wrote this at the age of twenty-three, in defense of a cousin who had converted to Christianity: “Can a man who searches for abiding values and enduring loyalties be satisfied to be a Jew merely by the accident of birth?”16 The nativity objector concludes that there is something defective about my assuming my religious beliefs to be actually true, in a correspondence sense. There is something arbitrary about such beliefs and they are for that reason epistemically defective. The Nativity Objection does not conclude John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1913), 10–11. John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989), 2. Philip Kitcher, “Challenges for Secularism,” in The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now, ed. George Levine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 26. 16 Nahum Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought (New York: Schocken, 1953), 18. 13 14 15

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that the belief in question is false, only that one has little warrant in holding that belief. The argument seems to go like this: You, Gellman, believe in traditional Judaism only because you were born Jewish and were raised and educated in a religious Jewish milieu. However, it was a pure accident that you were so born and so educated. You could have been born, instead and for example, a hundred and fifty years ago in India to Hindu parents. Then you would have turned out to be a Hindu yourself. Hence, your belief in your Judaism is dependent purely on an accident of your history. So, your belief is epistemically defective. You should disown it or think of it as much less substantive than involving correspondence truth-claims.

There are several problems with the Nativity Objection. One is that I do not accept the idea that it is purely accidental that I was born Jewish. Every morning, I thank God for having made me a Jew. That is, I believe that my being born a Jew was due to God’s intent and was no accident.17 It could not have been otherwise. Yes, had I been born in long-ago Tibet, instead of being born a Jew, I would not have my present religious beliefs. But I could not have been born then in Tibet instead of when and where I was born. To claim that my being born Jewish and receiving a traditional education was purely accidental is simply to reject my religious belief from the very start. Why should I pay attention? Now, the objector might reply that had I not been born Jewish, neither would I have believed that God made me a Jew—and that it was only accidental that I was born a Jew. So, my belief that God made me a Jew is similarly accidental and therefore epistemically defective. Here we meet an impasse. For my reply would be, as before, that I thank God for having brought me to understand that God had made me a Jew. The upshot is that the nativity argument might convince the objector but slides off my back because it depends on a false premise. But even the objector should not be convinced by the present objection. The argument casts too wide a net, snaring the objector within it. It is likely that the objector believes in democracy, in equality for all humans, and in civil rights. Now, had the objector been born seven hundred years ago on the Rhine River—and she proposes that it is purely accidental that she was not—she would have supported none of these political views. 17 Problem: In chapter nine I am going to endorse the occurrence of chance events in this world. However, I endorse the existence of instances of Divine action that are not accidental.

My Theological Method

Had she heard of them and understood them, she would have dismissed them as deranged ideas. By the same token, having been born and raised in Rhine River culture, the objector would never have thought that the circumstances of her birth were a reason for her not to believe in her Christianity. The nativity objection is epistemically defective, as it is has a fundamentally arbitrary foundation: the accident of birth of its endorser. I assume, though, that the objector is as unwilling to give up her convictions because of such “arbitrariness” as I am to give up mine. The objector must admit, then, that something is wrong with her argument. I conclude that, like the Expressivist Objection, the Nativity Objection should not deter me from my religious epistemological conservatism, with its correspondence truth-claims.

Postmodernism By “postmodernism,” I do not include such phenomena as children not obeying their parents, the breakdown of an old social order, or the degree to which youth leave religion as they mature into adult life.18 These are social phenomena beyond my competence. I am interested, instead, in the various philosophical positions postmodernism takes towards truth and apparent truth-claims. I am particularly interested in considering how postmodernism might challenge my fondness for making real religious truth-claims— claims that, I argue, correspond to reality. Alvin Goldman, a leading epistemologist, has identified the elements of postmodernist thought. Here are three that seem the most important to me (the titles are mine):

18 Rabbi Shimon Gershon (known as Rabbi Shagar) identifies these phenomena as belonging to postmodernism. See, for example, his essay in English translation, “Judaism and Postmodernity,” in Shimon Gershon Rosenberg Luhot ve Shivrei Luhut [Tablets and Broken Tablets: Jewish Thought in the Age of Post-Modernism], trans. Moshe Simkovich (Tel Aviv: Yediot Aharonot, Sifrei Hemed, 2013), 428–40. Hebrew. https:// kavvanah.wordpress.com/2016/10/26/judaism-and-postmodernity-rabbi-shagar-inenglish-translation/, accessed January 18, 2018.

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1. Constructivism: There is no such thing as truth. What we call “true” is simply what we consensually agree with. So-called “truths” or “facts” are merely negotiated beliefs, the products of social construction and fabrication, not “objective” or “external” features of the world. 2. Repressionism: Appeals to truth are merely instruments of domination or repression and should be replaced by practices with progressive social value. 3. Biasism: Truth cannot be attained because all putatively truth-oriented practices are compromised by politics or self-serving interests. I will discuss each of these below, but first I want to point out an objectionable ploy that postmodernist philosophers sometimes use to short-circuit opposition to their philosophical convictions—the (dogmatic and unreflective) assertion that “We live in a postmodernist world.” This succumbs to the fallacy of argumentum ad populum. One commits this fallacy when invoking the very popularity of an idea as a reason for another person to accept the idea as well: “Everyone, just everyone, believes it! What’s the matter with you?” In other words, a postmodernist will tell you that if you do not subscribe to their “herd mentality” you are erroneously out of step with what everybody else already knows to be true. If you’re not a postmodernist, you are both wrong and suspiciously anti-social! Besides an appeal to popularity being a fallacious way to argue, it simply is not true that we live in a postmodernist world. According to the Pew Research Center in 2010,19 there were two billion Christians in the world, including hundreds of millions of evangelicals, one and a half billion Muslims, one billion Hindus, 500 million Buddhists, 400 million native or folk religionists in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere, and another fifty-eight million devotees of the Baha’i faith, Jainism, Sikhism, Shintoism, Taoism, Tenrikyo, Wicca, Zoroastrianism, and other religions lesser known in the West. Surely the vast majority of these are not postmodern. As for the world’s fourteen million Jews, I imagine that only a distinct minority can be called postmodern. Religious devotees do not typically ascribe to postmodernist thought. We do not live in a postmodernist “world” at all, it seems.

19 See Pew Research Center, “The Global Religious Landscape” (2018), http://www. pewforum.org/2012/12/18/global-religious-landscape-exec/.

My Theological Method

But perhaps the idea is that we live in a northern hemisphere, Western, intellectual, postmodernist “world.” But even that is false, given the large number of specifically Christian intellectuals in that “world,” including the huge number of devout Catholic and Protestant intellectuals outside of the postmodernist camp. There are many Christian, northern hemisphere, Western, intellectual societies and groupings that reject postmodernism in all its variations. Communities of philosophers and theologians in the Thomist tradition, evangelical thinkers, and just straightforward Christian philosophers are going strong with their journals, conferences, and many followers. And, of course, the bulk of Orthodox Jewish believers, especially the more religiously right-wing, are not remotely postmodernist in outlook. Finally, a reading of the variety of views in the philosophy literature reveals nothing even vaguely suggestive of a “world” of Western intellectual postmodernism. For sure, notable parts of that literature display allegiance to the postmodernist agenda, but broad swaths do not. So, we do not live in that postmodernist world either. The premise of this approach is false and sometimes inference-fallacious. Some traditional Jewish theorists have embraced postmodernist theological thinking. This includes Tamar Ross, whom I mentioned earlier.20 A most articulate Orthodox Jewish thinker of a postmodernist persuasion is Miriam Feldmann Kaye. In her writings she wishes to offer to people “who take postmodernism to be inherently problematic or merely inconsequential,” the opportunity to rethink their assumptions.21 Alvin Goldman, whose list I referred to above—a leading, northern hemisphere, Western, epistemologist—has convinced me that postmodernism is not a sustainable position. I record here my own restatement of Goldman’s convincing arguments against the three postmodernist positions I have already listed, supplemented with some additional thoughts of my own.22 To discuss the problems with postmodernism, first I introduce the concept of “pragmatic contradiction.” A simple contradiction consists of 20 See Tamar Ross, “The Meaning of Religious Statements in a Postmodern Age,” in Jewish Culture in the Eye of the Storm: A Jubilee Book in Honor of Yosef Ahituv, ed. Avi Sagi and Nahem Ilan (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuhad, 2002), 459–83. Hebrew. 21 See Miriam Feldmann Kaye’s introduction to her Jewish Theology in a Postmodern Age (Liverpool: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2019). I have given an endorsement for this book because, even though I disagree with its thesis, I am very impressed by how the position is presented. 22 For a different sort of critique of postmodernism, see Alvin Plantinga, “Postmodernism and Pluralism,” in Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 422–457.

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both a statement and something inconsistent with it. For example: “It is raining and it is not raining.” A pragmatic contradiction does not state a contradiction: its content is not internally inconsistent. Instead, the contradiction arises between the content of the statement and the act of making the statement. Consider this statement: “It is raining and I do not believe that it is raining.” There is no internal contradiction in this statement. We can easily imagine when it might be true—when it is raining outside and I do not notice that it is raining. In this case, I do not have a belief that it is raining. No problem. A problem comes when it is I who declares both that it is raining and that I do not believe that it is raining. That is because my act of declaring that it is raining implies that I believe it is raining. The second part of what I say contradicts my saying of the first part. This is a pragmatic contradiction. Another example is: “I cannot speak.” There is no inconsistent content in this statement. You can well imagine me, along with others, not able to speak. But there is a pragmatic contradiction here, since it is not possible for both the sentence to be true and for me to speak it. When I speak the sentence, I contradict its content. There is no internal contradiction, but a pragmatic one. This idea of pragmatic contradiction plays a part in the critique of postmodernism, to which I now turn. Goldman has convinced me that postmodernism has serious problems. For the full discussion, I refer you to Goldman’s ample critique.23 Constructivism (“C”): There is no such thing as truth. What we call “true” is simply what we consensually agree with. So-called truths or facts are merely negotiated beliefs, the products of social construction and fabrication, not “objective” or “external” features of the world.24

Goldman asks: “Wherein consists the truth that there is a consensual belief in a statement?” In other words, what warrants our asserting that “we” are in agreement about a given statement—“X,” for instance? Goldman replies that according to what “C” itself says, the warrant for believing that there is agreement about X must come from yet another level of our agreement; namely, a consensual belief in a second statement that says that we have 23 Alvin I. Goldman, Knowledge in a Social World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 24 Tamar Ross espouses what is close to a constructivist postmodernist view for Judaism in Hava Tirosh Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes, eds., Tamar Ross: Constructing Faith (Leiden: Brill, 2016).

My Theological Method

a consensual belief about X. That is because according to “C” itself, that we agree about X cannot be a bare, objective, external fact, but can reflect only that we agree that we agree on X. But then, once again, the warrant for the second statement, which declares the existence of an agreement on the agreement on X, is also not an objective fact but can only depend on a third statement that says that we agree that we agree that we agree about X. In this way, an infinite regress is generated of levels of consensual belief. We have social construction all the way down. But, since no such infinite regress of consensual beliefs exists, or could possibly exist, constructivism cannot coherently be asserted. (A woman once told Bertrand Russell she believed the earth rested on the back of a turtle. When he asked her, what was holding up the turtle, she answered, “It’s turtles all the way down.”) The same argument applies to “C” itself, when it is the statement under discussion. By its own lights, “C” should reflect only what “we” agree on. It states no objective fact. But the same impossible, infinite regress will ensue regarding “C” as it does for any other X. “C” cannot be asserted with the intention that it be accepted, without generating an impossible infinite regress. The assertion of “C” as warranted, then, lands one in a pragmatic contradiction. Now, constructivists might maintain, in response, that “consensus beliefs” about statements are an exception to “C,” as they are exempt from any further consensus (and this would apply as well to a consensus belief about constructivism). Consensus about statements are brute facts, needing no further agreement, they might say. This includes agreement about “C.” The infinite regress stops right there—at the objective fact of agreement about “C.” But why should anyone agree to such a position? Why should social/ psychological statements, reporting our agreements about statements, not require further agreement to authorize them, while everything else depends on our agreement in order to be authorized? This is grossly ad hoc as a metaphysical or epistemological position. In particular, why should a traditional Jew who believes in a real world and a real God, with or without a consensus, be drawn into agreeing with this postmodernist doctrine? I see no good reason to do so, and so I return to the conclusion that the constructionist version of postmodernism generates an impossible infinite regress. Another way of raising the problem with “C” is to look at the status of stating that “There is no such thing as truth.” If true to his own assertion, the person who says this must admit that this assertion itself is also not

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possessed of real truth. Otherwise, he is involved in performing a pragmatic contradiction. He would be asserting a truth to the effect that there is no truth. He would be making a truth-claim that there were no truths. If he is going to be free of pragmatic contradiction, then “C” must simply be part of his and his friends’ own “narrative,” with no claims beyond that. It is just the way they like to talk. In that case, though, I could counter his statement simply by making the rejection of it with reference to my own “narrative.” In my narrative there are real truths. If any narrative is as good as any other, since there is no question of truth—and if enough people agree about it— my narrative is just as good as the constructivist’s. In short: I have plenty of people who agree with my narrative; I reserve my right to my own narrative (if that is what it is). Repressionism (“R”): Appeals to truth are merely instruments of domination or repression and should be replaced by practices with progressive social value.

Unless we are to take this as a dogmatic position, which a person like me might choose to ignore, we need to have a reason for accepting “R”. And such a reason surely must be because of known facts/truths about the way appeals to truth in the real world are wielded as instruments of domination and repression. The most natural way to understand one who asserts “R” is that she means to imply that “R” is supported by evidence, studies, and observations. Foucault, for example, when arguing this about the sciences did not mean to make up a fictional story.25 He meant to advance a true report, true facts about the real world. He meant to provide real evidence about the connection between power and claims to knowledge. We now know that appeals to truth are really sinister attempts to control. This approach generates a new pragmatic contradiction. For asserting “R” as a truth implies that this appeal to truth neither dominates nor represses. That there is such a truth, however, contradicts the content of “R.” If Foucault, and those like him, did not mean to tell us anything true, but were just telling us their “narrative,” I have a right to my own alternative narrative. And if they did mean to tell us something true, without themselves having any thoughts of repression or domination in doing so, then we have reason to reject “R,” which tells us that appeals to truth are attempts at domination and repression. It follows that we have no reason to accept repressionism. 25 See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), especially 178–198.

My Theological Method

For some postmodernists, the “repressionism” stance might signal a sense of moral superiority. That is, some postmodernists who put forward “R” are declaring their own freedom from the desire to dominate and repress. They then would believe that malevolent desires motivate everyone, other than postmodernists, to repress, dominate, crush, and enslave. If that is the view, I wonder why, if postmodernists can achieve freedom from sinister desires for control, others cannot do so as well? Why should postmodernists be the only saintly ones in the world and everyone else power driven? Does the alleged fact that postmodernists are good at uncovering attempts at repression, where others do not see it, make them automatically morally superior to all others? I can begin to understand that people who are good at sniffing out others’ intentions to control and dominate might be in a better position to see their own desires of the same kind. But that would be at most a necessary condition for overcoming such desires. That this is not a sufficient condition is clear, both in theory and in practice. In theory, the proclivity of people doing what they know is wrong is both a fact and a moral problem going back to Socrates. It takes great moral training and practice to overcome such inclinations. Just knowing you are doing something wrong is not sufficient. (Think of those academic departments where postmodernism is wielded as a bludgeon to keep junior faculty in line, and is used as a rock-hard criterion to make hires and decide promotions). Recall my protest at the motto “We live in a postmodern world”—which is sometimes used to control and dominate in the name of an allegedly saintly worldview. I conclude that repressionism does not have enough to it to make me change my mind. Biasism (“B”): Truth cannot be attained, because all putatively truth-oriented practices are corrupted and biased by politics or self-serving interests.

“B” implies that biases drive all belief, and that there is always a conflict between biases and the pursuit of truth. The implication is that that, since the pursuit of truth is greatly defective, it should be abandoned. With the abandonment of truth comes the desertion of a Grand Narrative in favor of more modest competing narratives. Goldman argues extensively against the view that all belief is driven by biases and corruption, and argues against thinking that biases always interfere with the pursuit of truth. I wish to take a different tack here, though. If truth-practices are contaminated, why not hold that biases and corruption will contaminate whatever takes the place of truth? Corruption

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comes from people, not from truth. So why should we expect people who are oriented toward something other than truth to suddenly escape biases? In both cases, the biases are the same: that is, the biases involved in trying to convince yourself and others that one is entitled to what one asserts and that others should agree with you. Since that is the case, “B” is simply another statement infected by politics and self-interest. Why bother with it? Why should I abandon my biases for the biases of the follower of “B”? We have here another pragmatic contradiction: one is saying something against biases that implies that what one is saying is itself biased. This is like saying something and also saying that one does not believe it. Lest a postmodernist fan of “B” takes the high ground and claims to be above human biases in putting “B” forward, I again see no reason to grant the postmodernist the status of moral and epistemic superiority over the rest of humanity. Surely, whether consciously or not, your everyday postmodernist is susceptible to any number of collective and personal biases. Just because a person is well trained to sniff out biases where others don’t notice them, there is very little reason to think that he fully understands, and entirely disowns, his own biases. Postmodernism is not the same as training for sainthood. To reply to “B” head-on, we must distinguish between kosher “biases” and non-kosher biases. The kosher “biases” are those one starts with when spinning out defensive strategies for what one already believes. They are kosher under the strict supervision of epistemological structure-conservatism. It is good and healthy for competing defensive strategies to be developed in the presence of one another, so that the truth, or whatever comes in its place, can be advanced through serious intellectual engagement. These are “biases,” not biases, as far as that term is a disapproving one. It follows, then, that not all “biases” are reasons to give up on truth. Non-kosher biases can pop up as unreasonable or irrational positions, either in the process of articulating a defensive strategy or in unwarranted responses to other defensive strategies. But here, as I have claimed above, it is not all that easy to make such determinations. Nevertheless, with good intentions, a healthy sense of self-vulnerability, and respect for others with whom one disagrees, with any luck we can creep forward toward meaningful progress. That is my methodological philosophy, and hopefully it contains as little desire to repress, dominate, or distort, as my capabilities allow. This ends my justification of my realist theology, that talk about God is talk about a real being that exists independently of there being anyone who conceives of it in one way or another, and my commitment to truth, facilitated by my epistemological framework conservatism.

Chapter Two

A Perfectly Good Being To believe in a perfectly good being is not simply to believe that the statement A perfectly good being exists is true. It is also to relate to the world in an ultimately optimistic way, despite sadness, pain, and suffering. To believe that one who is perfectly good exists is to be convinced that good is more ontologically basic to reality than evil, and that good wins out over evil. This conviction was behind the Medieval characterization of evil as a lack of reality—a privation or corruption of good. Good was ontologically basic; evil was derivative. To believe in a perfectly good being is to acknowledge evil fully while placing it within a frame of reference in which it does not defeat you but is taken up into the ultimate optimism warranted by belief in a perfectly good being. For me to believe that there is a perfectly good being is for me to make the best sense I can of the world, given my personal religious experiences and my knowledge of what has been taught and lived by others who were, I am convinced, able to know or able to get closest to the truth. In this chapter I elucidate what I mean by “a perfectly good being”. Richard Swinburne defines what he calls “perfect moral goodness” as “doing both the obligatory and supererogatory, and doing nothing wrong or bad in other ways.”1 Obligatory good actions are ones a person is obligated to perform, while supererogatory good actions are those that go beyond obligation. These latter include Divine acts of grace that a situation does not morally demand. Swinburne’s way of characterizing moral goodness is deficient, however, because a being who always acts in a perfectly good way might lack 1 Richard Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism (Clarendon Press, Oxford 1993), 185

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the proper moral sentiments that we require of one having a perfectly good character. A being might only do good acts, and so qualify as having a perfectly good character, for Swinburne, yet at times act only out of self-interest rather than for the sake of the good for others. It just might turn out that on those occasions what the person takes to be in his self-interest is also coincidentally the good thing to do. I might grab a knife away from a man who is about to stab somebody on the street, thereby saving the victim’s life. I have done a “morally good act.” But suppose I grab the knife from the assailant because I recognize that it is my knife and simply want it back. I really don’t care whether or not I saved the poor guy. All that concerns me is getting back my favorite, pearl-handled, engraved knife. An act motivated by self-regarding interest in this way is not be the act of a perfectly good character, even if it is a good act. For one to have a perfectly good character one must act always for the greatest possible good and do so always for out of no self-regarding motives, acting only from the desire to do good for others. Among other possible motives, a being with a perfectly good character never acts for a self-need to do so, but does so only for the good of others, from love and concern for them. To have a perfectly good character, then, requires always acting in a good manner and doing so for the good of others rather than in self-interest. Having a perfectly good character does not yet count as what I mean by a “perfectly good being”. By a “perfectly good being” I do not mean only one perfect in goodness qua a being, which might come to no more than having a perfectly good character. I mean a being who is perfect as can be qua one having a perfectly good character. In my sense, a being with a perfectly good character will not yet be who is perfect qua one having a perfectly good character if, for example, he or she is a rather hapless and helpless sort of person. In such a case, the perfectly good character would be rather useless. Having the appropriate character is not sufficient for the idea of perfect goodness. To be perfectly good there must be no limitations on one’s ability to bring one’s perfectly good character to realization. One perfectly good, consequently, must have perfect power, which I define as having all the possible power needed to fully exercise his or her perfectly good character. Don’t confuse perfect power with omnipotence. Having perfect power does not mean that a being can do everything conceivable—as, roughly, omnipotence does. It means only that it has the power to fully exercise its perfectly good character. This might be less than omnipotence, as there might be possible powers not needed in any possible world for actualizing a perfectly good character. Such powers need not be included in what I am

A Perfectly Good Being

calling “perfect power,” as they would for omnipotence. I think we have no way of knowing whether or not there are such powers to be left out of perfect goodness. I submit that we should not think of omnipotence as necessarily an attribute of a perfectly good being. Omnipotence might make one overwhelmingly impressive as a cosmic acrobat, but not thereby necessary for being perfectly good. Think of a cyclist who has the ability to sing arias during a tight race. While extremely impressive, let us assume that her musical talent does not contribute to her being a more perfect competitor. That has nothing to do with her ability to win races. It is a remarkable sideshow. Just so, omnipotence might give us a big “Wow! Look at that!”, but might not need to be a perfection for a being with a perfectly good character. If my perfect power happens to turn out to be equivalent to omnipotence, because there is no possible power never needed in any possible world for doing good, the value of omnipotence will be due to its being perfect power in the service of a perfectly good character. That a being has perfect power does not mean that it uses its power always and everywhere to determine what is to be. Having perfect power is consistent with creating creatures with free will whose choices are up to them, or with allowing events to develop in a random fashion. In such cases, a perfectly powerful being refrains from utilizing its power to control events if it is better to so refrain. Some feminists have maintained that we should not include massive power in the idea of God. Great power is implicitly masculine, they say. To think that God is great in power is to endorse a masculine model of domination, which includes the right of men to rule over women.2 This objection errs by supposing that sheer power is assumed to be a “perfection” all by itself, in isolation from God’s other perfections. When considering power in isolation, indeed, we should not think of it as a perfection. Power can be used for evil as well as for good. Instead, we should consider great power to be a perfection only in tandem with perfect goodness. When we marry power to goodness, the Divine model for humans—both male and female—would be the use of whatever power one has in a maximal way only for the good. The abuse of another cannot be the result of modeling oneself after a perfectly good God with perfect power for the good.3 2 See, Daphna Hampson, “On Power and Gender,” Modern Theology 4 (1988): 239ff., and Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), 20. 3 Substantially, Peter Byrne replied in this way to a feminist critique of omnipotence. See Peter Byrne, “Omnipotence, Feminism and God,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 37, no. 3 (1995): 145–65.

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Further, one who is perfectly good must have all the knowledge needed for perfect use of its goodness and power. Let us call this “perfect knowledge.” This may include omniscience—knowing all the truths there are to know. Or it might not. Perhaps there are truths a perfectly good being never needs to know in any possible world to fully activate its perfect goodness. In that case, what I am calling “perfect knowledge” will be less than omniscience. I am including in perfect knowledge what philosophers call “middle knowledge.” This refers to knowing for every person one creates what that person would do, if left to choose, in any possible situation. This is the case with middle knowledge: one who is perfectly good decides what people to create with free will. It knows, for example, that if it creates me and puts me in a specific situation in which there is a temptation to steal a million dollars, whether I will take the bait or not. Such knowledge helps that being decide whom to create and in what sort of world.4 Middle knowledge should be an attribute of one who is perfectly good because it enhances the possibilities of doing good. Perfect knowledge should also include intimate knowledge of what it is like for something conscious to be in various psychological states. With perfect knowledge, one knows from the “inside,” as it were, concerning sentient beings what it is like to be a being of that kind, as well as knows what it is like to be this sentient being. So, one who is perfectly good knows from the inside what it is like to be me and what it is like to be you. If the perfectly good being is never itself afraid, it should know what being afraid is like. This enhances empathy when acting for the sake of creatures. In short, my contention is that being perfectly good, in this sense, is the appropriate concept for talking about God. God need be neither omnipotent nor omniscient to rightfully have our fullest love, obedience, and devotion. Finally, a being that is perfectly good will be more potently good the more/longer it exists. It should exist forever. Accordingly, I propose that one perfectly good exists forever. Some will think such a being will exist everlastingly in time, others that it must exist eternally out of time. In either case, there will be no time at which it is true to say that it does not exist. Since one who is perfectly good has all the power and knowledge needed to use its perfect goodness, such a being will create and be sovereign over what it creates, thereby producing a reality toward which to be 4 The possibility of “Middle knowledge” is controversial in philosophy, but this is not the place to recount or enter the bloody battles. See John D. Laing, “Middle Knowledge.” In The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Accessed 13 April 2019. http://www.iep.utm. edu/middlekn/.

A Perfectly Good Being

perfectly good. In other words, a perfectly good being will be a creator and sovereign of the world. It makes sense to believe that a perfectly good being must be in active relationship with the creatures it creates. Some have argued that such a being would have to exist in time for that to be the case. Others hold that a being who is above, or out of, time can maintain active relations with the world.5 Fortunately, to adopt relationality we need not decide between a being exclusively in time or exclusively out of time. There is also the possibility that it be out of time and enters into time in the act of creation and, subsequently, in relating to the creation. I will assume, then, that one perfectly good is in active relation with the creation and leave it open whether it is in or out of time. That said, my inclination is toward the hybrid attribute of being both in and out of time. For the rest of this book, unless the context clearly suggests otherwise, when I write of a perfectly good being I mean the following: a being with a perfectly good character, with perfect power, and perfect knowledge, existing always, being the creator and sovereign of the world, and in active relationships with creation. And in a “perfectly good character” I include admirable moral sentiments, such as love and the desire to good for others with no self-interest. Also, in what follows, unless otherwise clear from the context, I will be referring by “God” to the God of the Jews, to YHVH, in the way YHVH is depicted in traditional Jewish texts, primarily in the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic writings. My concern is whether a traditional Jew who has been impressed in a moderate way by new developments in Western morality can accept that the God of the Jews is perfectly good.

5 A careful defense of this position is in Eleonore Stump, The God of the Bible and the God of the Philosophers (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2016).

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The God Of The Jews In this chapter, I gather sources from the Hebrew Bible, the rabbinic literature, and the traditional Jewish liturgy to support my contention that the God of the Jews was one largely conceived of as perfectly good or that God is, at least, close to what I have characterized as a perfectly good being. In the next chapter, I engage with the counterargument—what I call the ideological critique of the God of the Jews. The Hebrew Bible contains numberless proclamations of the greatness of God. While greatness does not yet equal perfect goodness, the extreme degree of greatness it ascribes to God points naturally in that direction. And there are clear instances of ascriptions of perfections to God that should be components of a perfectly good being, as I have defined it. God’s supreme greatness and goodness appear at the very start of the Pentateuch with God as the creator of heaven and earth. God has the power to create and rule over the world, and creates what is “very good.” In Genesis 18:14, God’s power comes to the forefront with the rhetorical question, “Is anything impossible for God [to do]?” God is a god of righteousness and justice—God charges Abraham with acts of “righteousness and justice” (Genesis 18:19) and repeats the call for righteousness and justice several times, as in Isaiah 5:7 and Jeremiah 23:5.1 Exodus 15 tells us that God rules forever; Exodus 34 says that God is “merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth.”2 Deuteronomy 32:4 says, “He is the Rock, His works are flawless [perfect], and all His ways are just. A faithful 1 For a thorough study of the terminology of “justice and righteousness,” see Moshe Weinfeld, ‘Justice and Righteousness’ in Ancient Israel against the Background of Social Reforms in the Ancient Near East (Jerusalem: Institute for Advanced Studies of the Hebrew University, 1979). 2 For a more complex take on this, see the following chapter.

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god who does no wrong, upright and just is He.” This description ascribes to God moral perfection. Proverbs 19:21 tells us of God’s sovereignty over our lives: “Many plans occupy the mind of a man, and God’s purposes will prevail.” The Psalms are a storehouse of superlative Divine praises. For example, “How abundant are the good things that you have stored up for those who fear you” (Psalm 31:19). Psalm 106:2 celebrates God’s power by asking rhetorically, “Who can utter the mighty deeds of God, or declare all His praise?”, indicating that God has perfect power, beyond imagination. “Give thanks to God, for He is good; His love endures forever” (Psalm 107:1). “You are good, and what you do is good” (Psalm 119:68). Psalm 115:4 tells us how all other gods are creations of human hands, whereas God made the heavens. Chronicles 1:16, lines 25–26, tell us that God is awesome above all gods, who are but idols, false gods. To continue: in Psalm 145, we read that “I will tell of your greatness.” “His greatness is unfathomable.” Also, the Divine goodness is maximal: “God is good to all, and His compassion extends to all His works.” “God is righteous in all His ways, and kind in all He does.” “God is great in loving kindness.” Isaiah 44:6 proclaims of God: “I am the first and I am the last”; while Isaiah 40:28 tells us that no one can “fathom His understanding.” Job 9:10: “He performs great deeds that cannot be fathomed, wonders that cannot be counted”; and in a slightly different version, Job 5:9, “He performs wonders that cannot be fathomed, miracles that cannot be counted.” The Hebrew Bible declares God’s omnipresence—that God is everywhere. In Jeremiah 23:24, God declares that He fills “heaven and earth.” Somewhat more cautiously, 4:39 tells us that God is in heaven above and on the earth below. This hints at omnipresence. To say that God is present everywhere does not contradict that God has no body. The Divine can be present everywhere in the sense of being able to act at any place directly, without an intermediate act. Philosophers distinguish between basic actions and non-basic actions. A basic action is one for which you do not need to perform some other action to perform it. So, ordinarily, moving your finger is a basic act. You do not have to do anything else to move your finger. You just move it. A non-basic act is one you can do only by way of some mediating act. For example, to turn on the light you must first move your finger to touch the switch and then move the switch. God is everywhere, then, in the sense that God can act at any place with a basic action—directly. There is no spatial distance between God and any physical location.

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An especially noteworthy basis for deeming God to be perfectly good occurs in passages at the very front of Jewish religious consciousness. These are Biblical and rabbinic passages that obligate loving, unrestrained, total devotion to God as an expression of love of God. Deuteronomy 6:5 says, “Love God your god with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.” And Deuteronomy 11:13, “If you heed my commandments which I command you today, to love God your god and worship Him with all your heart and with all your soul.” Both verses appear in the daily Shema prayer, so dear to Judaism. Such language occurs several more times in Deuteronomy—in 4:29, “From there you will seek God your god, and you will find him if you search after him with all your heart and soul;” in 10:12—“So now, O Israel, what does God your god require of you? Only to fear God your god, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve God your god with all your heart and with all your soul;” in 26:16—“This very day God your god is commanding you to observe these statutes and ordinances; so observe them diligently with all your heart and with all your soul;” in 30:2—“Return to God your god, and you and your children obey him with all your heart and with all your soul, just as I am commanding you today;” in 30:6—“Moreover, God your god will circumcise your heart and the heart of your descendants, so that you will love God your god with all your heart and with all your soul, in order that you may live;” and in 30:10—“[W]hen you obey God your god by observing his commandments and decrees that are written in this book of the law, because you turn to God with all your heart and with all your soul.” Some of these verses, as in Deuteronomy 11:13, are followed by promises of rewards of prosperity and happiness, implying a devotion to the Divine for practical reasons of self-gain, which contravenes devotion to God because of God’s intrinsic worthiness. However, the Jewish tradition, to an impressive degree, long ago accepted the dictum of Rabbi Simeon the Righteous: “Do not be like servants who serve the master to receive an award but be like those servants who serve the master in order not to receive a reward (Avot, 1:3). Maimonides, in Mishneh Torah, the Laws of Repentance, records this principle and it is the foundation of much Jewish thinking. Thus, according to this strong component of the tradition, uninhibited total devotional love of God is called for not for the sake of receiving a reward, but because of the intrinsic nature of God. The reference to prosperity and worldly happiness here is not a reward but a side effect of unconstrained total devotion to God, such as granting the material conditions to be able to worship in the full.

The God Of The Jews

Rabbinic literature extends ultimate devotion to the Divine further by legislating three situations in which one must give up one’s life rather than be forced to sin. These are when one is being forced to murder, engage in illicit sexual acts, or commit idolatry. As the Mishnah Brakhot 9:5 says, and as codified by Maimonides (Laws of Idolatry 5:7), one is to be devoted “even if God takes away your soul.” It is notable that this follows from the degree of maximal love we are to have of God, and not from fear of God. Now, unconstrained total devotion from a love of God with all our heart and soul is appropriate only to a being who is perfectly good.3 Unrestrained total devotion is not appropriate if God is not the greatest possible good being.4 For if one is not perfectly good it would be theoretically possible for a different being to be, or have been, greater in goodness than it. In that case, if that other being had existed, then it, and not God, would have been the appropriate object of our unreserved total love. Knowing that there could have been one greater in goodness than God, it might still be appropriate to give God a great deal of loving devotion, but unconstrained, total devotion, with all the implied unreserved attitudes, would not be appropriate. God would not merit the absolute maximum of devotion. Such devotion would be appropriate only for a being greater in goodness. If God is less than perfectly good, something important would be missing from the goodness of God, from God’s absolutely maximal goodness. If the Torah command to give God unreserved total devotion, from love of God, even to the point of death, is to be appropriate and warranted, we should conclude that God is the being than which there could possibly be no greater in goodness—a perfectly good being. The command would not be morally justified, for example, were it based on the commander’s sheer menacing power, and to be obeyed because of what bad might happen to you if you disobeyed. Traditional Jews accept that the Torah command of unreserved total devotion is not based on God’s sheer power to crush those who do not obey. It is based on God being worthy of such fidelity. Traditional Jews accept that the Torah command of unreserved total devotion is fully appropriate and justified. In this way, traditional Jews have a strong reason to believe that God is perfectly good. 3 The reasoning that follows is a modification of an argument in William Wainwright, “Two (or Maybe One and a Half Cheers) for Perfect Being Theology,” Philo: A Journal of Philosophy 12 (2009): 228–51. 4 This is consistent with giving up one’s life to save another person. This is also consistent with a soldier being willing to die for the sake of the safety of others. Here we are talking only about doing the will of another, because it is their will.

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During the rabbinic period, there were a great number of value enrichments to God, beyond those which the Hebrew Bible states or lingers over. In his study of the rabbinic text the Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael, Cass Fisher shows how this work was centrally motivated by the desire to endorse the belief that God has “maximal greatness,” a desire that Fisher says “permeates” the entire work.5 Fisher means by “maximal greatness” being greater than any other existing being6. That is different from what I have been calling a “perfectly good being,” who is greater in goodness not only than all actual beings but than all possible beings. In any case, Fisher succeeds in showing that Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael aims at clearly amplifying Divine greatness beyond what is biblical. The number of amplifying passages in the rabbinic literature serves as a broad basis for heightened superlatives, beyond the biblical record. Here I give a selection of some of the significant attributes that received rabbinic upgrading or special emphasis.7 These are attributes that should be included in the attributes of one who is perfectly good, who is also a mystery beyond our ken.

God’s Greatness Beyond Human Conception Many rabbinic statements stress and further elaborate biblical verses in which God’s greatness is asserted to be beyond human conception. The Talmud (b. Brakhot 33b) tells of a man who was standing in the presence of Rabbi Hanina and in prayer was assigning a great number of adjectives of greatness to God beyond the set ones. Rabbi Hanina admonished him for doing so because it was forbidden to praise beyond what had been already declared permissible. That was because no matter how many adjectives of praise we use, the result would be as though we had praised a king for having silver when in fact he had gold. God’s greatness is in a category apart. It is different in kind from what we can grasp, and not only in extent. So too,

5 Cass Fisher, A Contemplative Nation: A Philosophical Account of Jewish Theological Language (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011). See ibid., 104 for the last quote. 6 Ibid., 250n8. 7 For this section, I depend on a combination of sources, in addition to my own study, including Marmorstein’s pioneering work in The Old Rabbinic Doctrine of God (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1968); Cass Fisher, A Contemplative Nation; Ephraim E. Urbach, The Sages:—Their Concepts and Beliefs, 6th ed. (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew University, 1986–87). Hebrew; The Bar-Ilan Responsa Project, and Prof. S. E. Google.

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the Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael, amplifying biblical verses, stresses that no matter how much we praise, God is greater than what the praise implies.8

Omnipresence Omnipresence is likely the point of the well-known saying of Rabbi Akiva that “All is seen, and freedom of choice is given” (Avot 3:15–16). This dictum is often taken to assert that God knows the future in advance, but that when we act we are still exercising our free will. However, Ephraim Urbach has argued persuasively that Rabbi Akiva’s saying most plausibly means not that God knows in advance what we will do, but that in real time God witnesses what we do.9 Several commentators on the Mishnah similarly understand this saying of Rabbi Akiva, including Ha-me’iri and R. Ovadiah Bartenura. The same idea is presented by Rabbi in the Mishnah, Avot 2:1: “Know what is above you—a seeing eye.” Indeed, Proverbs 15:3 said it long before: “The eyes of God are everywhere, keeping watch upon the evil and the good.” Rabbi Akiva enlarges on this by stating that, although God sees us, we are allowed to choose as we wish and also choose the bad.

God’s Knowledge Rabbinic literature stresses and magnifies the scope of God’s spectacular knowledge. Rabbi Joshua asserted that God knows the future (Sanhedrin 90b); God knows people’s thoughts even before the thoughts are formed (Midrash Psalms 45:4); before people are born God knows all their thoughts (Exodus Rabbah 9:3). Rabbi Shimon ben Lakhish teaches that, in one glance, God saw all of this world and the World to Come (Gen. Rabbah 9:3). From the start of creation, God foresaw the goodness of Moses, saw that Korah would rebel, that the Jews would accept the Torah, and that the time would come when the Jews would anger God.10 These all are amplifications of God’s knowledge as in the Bible. Rabbinic literature is on the lookout to reinterpret biblical verses that seem to imply restrictions on Divine knowledge or greatness. One tack was to reinterpret the verses as coming to teach people how to behave by 8 See Urbach, The Sages, 75. 9 See ibid., 1, Chapter 11. 10 See Marmorstein, The Old Rabbinic Doctrine of God, 157.

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ascribing such behavior to God. The restriction of knowledge is not to be taken literally. Below are some examples. We read in Genesis 3:9: “God the god called to the man, ‘Where are you?’” This clearly implies a limitation on knowledge. God does not know where Adam is. Chapter five of the minor Tractate, Derekh Erez Rabbah, with origins in the early rabbinic period, digs the verse out of its plain meaning: Never shall a man enter the house of his neighbor without permission, and this conduct may be learned, from the Holy One, blessed be He, who stood at the gate of the garden, and called to Adam [Gen. 3:9]: “And God called unto the man, and said unto him, Where art thou?”

So read, Adam’s whereabouts were known all along. The call to Adam does not imply a lack of Divine knowledge of Adam’s whereabouts, according to this understanding, but portrays an act of respect to Adam, telling him of God’s presence before coming close to Adam. We are taught a lesson and God’s knowledge of events is preserved. Genesis 11:5 has God descend to earth to see for himself the city and tower that humans had built in a rebellion. This implies clear limitations on knowledge and omnipresence. God cannot know what is transpiring without going down there and looking. Midrash Tanhuma expresses astonishment: Does He have to descend to see? Everything is seen and revealed to him! [This verse comes] only to teach people not to make judgments and not to assert something that they do not verify [literally, see] themselves.”

Again, the text comes only to teach us a lesson, and is not a true description of God. The Torah wishes only to teach us a way to act. Thus is God’s greatness preserved. When at the Akedah, the angel tells Abraham in the name of God, “Now I know that you are a fearer of the god.” Midrash Rabbah lifts the plain meaning away from its implication of a lack of Divine foreknowledge, as though God did not know this until now or needed an overt act of Abraham to come to know it. The Midrash says instead that the angel was announcing that God had what to “make known” to the other nations about Abraham’s pure devotion (Midrash Rabbah Genesis 56:7). Like this, the rabbis protected and expanded God’s knowledge beyond what we find in the biblical sources when taken at their word.

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God’s Power and Goodness I take these together because the references to power are integral to proclamations of goodness. Rabbinic literature abounds with declarations that humans are unable to fathom the power and might of God. These are generally in connection with God’s excessive goodness. Appropriately, a name for God in rabbinic literature is gvurah—“power.” In magnifying power, Bar Kapra asserts that God makes the invisible visible, the deaf hear, and the mute speak (Midrash Samuel 9). The Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael lists many things that God can do that idols cannot, even though the latter have hands and legs, and God does not. God created the world, can speak two words at the same time, hear the prayers of all people simultaneously, and grant the desires of everyone. The theme of unlimited multitasking is elaborated in Midrash Rabbah Exodus (28:4–5): God does all things together .  .  . if there is a woman giving birth, people going down to the sea, people traveling through deserts, or who are in prison, though one is in the east and another in the west, one in the north, and another in the south, he hears them all at the same time. A mortal king cannot wage war and at the same time be a scribe and a teacher of little children, but God can do all these. On the sea, he was a man of war . . . and today at the revelation, he came down to teach Torah to his children.

Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael emphasizes God’s independent existence. For example, it states that the sacrificial ritual does not exist for the sake of the Divine. This includes the purpose of making a sanctuary in Exodus 25:8—“Have them make me a sanctuary, so that I may dwell among them.” This is not for God’s sake. This does not sit well with God’s filling the entire heavens and earth, as in Jeremiah 23:24. And this contravenes biblical passages in which God enjoys the fragrance of sacrifices, for instance, apparently for His own sake. This rabbinic work asserts that God has no need of human gifts, for God is not dependent on others. The rabbis had a strong penchant to enhance God’s power by multiplying miracles, and elaborating biblical miracles with details of wonder far beyond the biblical writings. Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael states that when the Sea of Reeds divided all the waters of the world divided too. And in the same Midrash, the rabbis vie with one another to multiply the number of plagues suffered by the Egyptians, both in Egypt and at the Sea. R. Yossi of the Galil says there were fifty plagues at the sea; R. Eliezer says there were

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forty plagues in Egypt and 200 at the Sea; and R. Akiva has fifty plagues in Egypt and 250 at the sea. The Passover Haggadah, in telling the Exodus story, includes such magnifications and says that the more we tell of the miracles the better it is. The Talmud recounts hundreds of miracles beyond those in the Hebrew Bible. Midrash Rabbah revels in adding miracles and enhancing the scope and wonder of biblical miracles. I have personally cataloged well over a hundred new or grandly embellished miracles in Midrash Rabbah on the Torah. My Following examples fall under the category of magnifying biblical deeds, with a direct extolling of God‘s goodness. In Exodus Rabbah, Moses miraculously killed the Egyptian who had smitten an Israelite, by pronouncing the secret, full Hebrew name of God (1:29). When Pharaoh’s executioner put the sword to Moses, the sword turned into marble and killed the executioner (Deuteronomy Rabbah 2:25). In one of the more fanciful new miracles in this text, we read that Moses escaped from Egypt, after killing an Egyptian, only because God created an angel that was a perfect double of Moses in order to throw the Egyptians off his trail (1:31). In the plague of frogs, drops of water turned into frogs (Exodus Rabbah 10:3). In the episode of Marah, when Moses hits the rock to bring water to the people in the desert, Exodus Rabbah says that at first the rock exuded blood, and only after that, water (3: 13). When in the desert, God leveled the land for the Israelites so that they would not have to scale mountains or descend into deep drops in the landscape (Numbers Rabbah 19:16). When a woman has a baby by a man who is not her husband, God arranges the features of the baby to look just like the adulterous man (Leviticus Rabbah 23:12). This assures that justice is done. When the lots decide the division of the Holy Land, the lots themselves speak the results out loud (Numbers Rabbah 21:5). Similarly, the Talmud elaborates biblical miracles with the category of “a miracle within a miracle.” (This is found also in Midrash.) For example, the staff of Aaron became a crocodile and swallowed the staffs of the Egyptian magicians, whose staffs too had turned into crocodiles. The staff of Aaron, however, swallowed the other staffs after Aaron’s staff had already turned back into wood. This was a miracle within a miracle. Not only did Aaron’s staff become an animal and devour the others, but it was Aaron’s staff that swallowed the other staffs (Shabbat 97a). Miracles are multiplied: ten occurred to the Israelites at the Sea (Avot:5); six miracles were done for Phineas when he killed Zimri (Sanhedrin 82b); six miracles occurred on the day that Nebuchadnezzar threw Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah into the fiery furnace; and there were twelve regular miracles in the [first]

The God Of The Jews

Temple (Yoma 21a). A good example of a new, benevolent miracle involving remarkable results is the Talmudic saying of Rabbi Levi (Bava Mezia, 87a) that when Isaac was born people doubted that Abraham could be the real father at such an advanced age. Consequently, God changed Isaac’s features to match exactly Abraham’s face. When Isaac grew up, people could not tell the difference between father and son. These and many more sources celebrate the outstanding power and goodness of God.

Justice In the Talmud and Midrashic literature there is a notable strand of rabbis who greatly emphasized God’s love for righteousness and justice, beyond biblical sources. Isaiah had denounced insincere animal sacrifices. The Jerusalem Talmud and a Midrash go further, telling us that God loves righteousness and justice more than all the animal sacrifices brought into the Temple, perhaps even when brought sincerely (Jerusalem Talmud, Brakhot 2:1; Rosh Hashanah 1:1; Midrash Rabati, Toldot). A favorite rabbinic way of emphasizing Divine justice is by way of the principle of “measure for measure,” that justice “fits the form of the punishment to the form of the sin” (Sanhedrin 90a). While this principle is often implicit in the Bible (Exodus 22:22–24; Judges 1:5–7; Obadiah 1:15), the rabbis applied this principle to an array of Divine punishments. The generation of the flood sinned with multitudinous. As it says, “And God saw the evil of humans was multitudinous” (Gen 6:5), so God punished them with multitudinous, as it says that God opened all the “multitudinous” subterranean waters on them. The Egyptians, who drowned Israelite male babies in water, “were cooked in the same pot in which they had cooked,” so were they too drowned in the water of the Sea (Sotah 11a). On the assumption that what was called “leprosy” was punishment for speaking evil against people, we learn that a person with the disease must sit alone outside the desert camp. That is because that person, by speaking evil, caused separation between husband and wife and between friends—so now shall that person be made to be alone (Arakhin 16b). The sin of the generation of the flood was “great,” so their punishment was “great” (Sanhedrin 108a). The Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael was concerned to show that God‘s justice extends even to the horses that drowned in the Sea of Reeds! God acts with perfect justice towards every creature.11 11 Fisher, A Contemplative Nation, 129–130

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An ironic instance of this principle of perfect justice occurs in Genesis Rabbah 26:6, where Rabbi Meir is bothered by the injustice of punishment in hell. He concludes that, with the imposition of hell, justice is done by doing an injustice! Says God, “If they did not perform justice below, I am also not going to perform justice above.” Just as victims of hell perpetrated injustices in their life, so God punishes them unjustly as well, by the justice of measure for measure (So Jewish!) The principle of measure for measure applied as well to reward. The way Abraham cared for the visiting three angels was matched by the way God cared for Abraham’s descendants. What Abraham did for the angels, God did for the Israelites when they left Egypt; what Abraham did through a servant, God also did through a servant. According to a second statement, for three acts of kindness that Abraham did for the angels, the Israelites received three gifts—the Manna, the pillar of cloud, and the well of Miriam—which accompanied them in the desert (Talmud, Bava Mezia 86b). We have seen a sample of biblical and rabbinic sources that strongly support that God has what I have defined as perfect goodness. They do so either by directly treating of God’s goodness or by treating of God’s great power, knowledge, and the like, which are components of what I mean by “perfect goodness.” The traditional Jewish liturgy continues along this track. The prayers of the New Year and Yom Kippur proclaim that God sees all generations in advance, knows our thoughts, and knows all our actions. Nothing is hidden from God. God is completely just and merciful. “All believe that He is all-powerful,” and “All believe that His acts are perfect.” These and many other liturgical sources complement previous sources that direct us toward the perfect goodness of God. I conclude, then, that within classical Judaic texts there is a basis for thinking of God as a perfectly good being.

Chapter Four

The Ideological Critique The topic that occupies me here is whether a traditional Jew who has internalized contemporary Western moral values can accept, or continue to accept, that the God of the Jews, the God of the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic literature, is perfectly good. A traditional Jew need not champion every faddish invention of new morality. We have our holy values and legal, halachic, ways. I write for a traditional Jew who is cautious and moderate in the degree to which she internalizes the new morality and believes or wants to believe that God is perfectly good. I write from inside a moderate, developing, Western moral sense, that has made inroads into traditional Jewish circles. A person with such a moral sense is moderate and careful in his pronouncements while being deeply affected by a new moral sense. Nonetheless, this moral sense includes radical departures from the past. Can such a person indeed believe that the God of the Jews is perfectly good? There is a long history of moral, and other, critiques of the God of the Jews. Long ago, the Christian heretic, Marcion (second century), made a sharp distinction between the God of the Jews, YHVH of the Old Testament, and the Christian God of the New Testament.1 For Marcion, YHVH was an inferior god, whom he rejected along with the whole of the Old Testament in favor of what was for him the true God of the New Testament. The Christian God was perfect. The God of the Jews was far 1 Most of what we know about Marcion is from the writings of Tertullian (c. 160). See Tertullian, Anti-Marcion in Latin Christianity: Its Founder, Tertullian (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman’s Publishing Company) (Christian Classics Ethereal Library). http://www. ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf03.toc.html). Accessed July 24, 2017. Similar views of the God of the Hebrew Bible were put forward by some Christian Gnostics. See Henry Bettenson and Chris Maunder, eds., Documents of the Christian Church, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 37ff.

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from being so. Marcionism, although declared a Christian heresy, lasted hundreds of years as a self-defined Christian grouping. In our time, the Christian philosopher, Peter van Inwagen, thinks of the way God appears in the Old Testament as projecting an inferior morality. Van Inwagen asserts that the events in the Old Testament could never have occurred and that God could not have endorsed moral standards of the Old Testament.2 God inspired the writing of the Old Testament only to record the low level of morality at that point in history, to show the contrast with the later mature, true morality of the New Testament. Further, so-called “new atheists” have rejected the God of Judaism and Christianity as being far less than perfect on moral grounds. 3 In response, various Christian thinkers have attempted to reply to the critique of the moral status of the God of the Old Testament.4 And, of course, nontraditional movements in Judaism have introduced ways to radically morally reshape the God of the Jews. There is also the recent forthright critique of the morality of Jewish tradition by David Hartman.5 Among more traditional Jews, though, insufficient attention has been given to these problems. In this chapter, I present a sketch of this “ideological critique,” aimed at the God of the Jews, the God of the Hebrew Bible, and rabbinic literature. This “ideological critique” maintains that there are many instances in these sources in which God acts or commands in a grossly unjust or otherwise immoral way, or is otherwise less than perfectly good. It tells us that we cannot think of God as worthy of incomparable profuse devotion, as being a perfectly good being.

2 Peter van Inwagen, “Comments on “The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” in Divine Evil? The Moral Character of the God of Abraham, ed. Michael Bergmann, Michael J. Murray, and Michael C. Rea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 79–84. This volume consists of attempts to defend the moral goodness of YHVH in the Hebrew Bible and responses by those who think that this cannot be defended. 3 See Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve, Hachette Book Group USA, 2007); Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York: Norton, 2004); and Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 31. 4 See: Michael Bergmann, Michael J. Murray, and Michael C. Rea, eds., Divine Evil? The Moral Character of the God of Abraham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) and Paul Copan, Is God a Moral Monster? Making Sense of the Old Testament God (Grand Rapids: Baker Books. 2011). See my review of these two books in International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 70 (2011): 161–166. 5 David Hartman, The God Who Hates Lies, Confronting and Rethinking Jewish Tradition (Woodstock: Jewish Lights, 2011).

The Ideological Critique

A major contemporary ideological critique of God of the Hebrew Bible is the pervasive, severely androcentric character of traditional texts and their implications for the place of women in traditional Judaism today. We should not rush to wholly condemn “patriarchy” in days of old without understanding its historical context. Another matter is our present-day socioeconomic context, with its conception of women’s role in society. A traditional Jew need not rush to accept uncritically whatever society decides is supremely moral concerning women. Nonetheless, even moderate agreement with the new morality challenges the systematically severe androcentrism of the Jewish tradition for our days. In Genesis, there are two accounts of the creation of the first man and woman. Genesis 1:27 tells us that male and female were created, apparently, together. This may be taken as implying equality between man and woman. In the second story, Genesis 2–3, a severe androcentric perspective exists full-blown from the very start of the lives of Adam and Eve. I cannot enter here into the reason for the differences of the two accounts. One might take the position, which is quite plausible, that the two differ in their views of the relationship between a man and a woman. Or, one might say, with the commentary of Rashi, that Genesis 1:27 does not mean to imply anything different from the Genesis 2–3 account. Genesis 1:27, on this view, is only a brief statement of the fact of the creation of man and woman, while Genesis 2–3 elaborates on just how that creation came about (this view presents many problems). In either case, there is no doubt that the patriarchal, androcentric slant of Genesis 2–3 dominates both the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic literature. It is therefore to that account that I give the most weight and to which I turn. Leading feminists have taken the story of Genesis 2–3 to be the heart of the misogyny running through the Hebrew Bible.6 Other feminists— Mieke Bal, Phyllis Bird, Carol Meyers, and (most importantly) Phyllis Trible—have produced revisionist readings of the story.7 Trible, as representative of this trend, aims to establish that “Rather than legitimating the patriarchal culture from which it comes, the myth places that culture under See, for example, Elisabeth Schlusser Fiorenza, In Memory of Her (New York: Crossroad, 1986); Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1970); Eva Figes, Patriarchal Attitudes (Greenwich: Fawcett, 1970). 7 Mieke Bal, Lethal Love, Feminist Readings of Biblical Love Stories (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Phyllis A. Bird, “Bone of My Bone and Flesh of My Flesh,” Theology Today 50, no. 4 (1993): 521–34; Carol Meyers, Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Phyllis Trible, “Eve and Adam: Genesis 2–3 Reread,” Andover Newton Quarterly 13 (1973): 251–58. 6

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judgment.”8 Trible’s thesis is that, at the very outset in Eden, the woman and the man enjoyed an egalitarian relationship. Only when this relationship was corrupted, due to events involving the Tree of Knowledge, did a patriarchal configuration replace equality, by way of a curse on Eve. This was Eve’s punishment, not an original plan for humanity. Hence, this story does not revere androcentrism, but regards it instead as an unfortunate aberration away from the ideal. Alas, such an understanding does not conform to the details of the story. In accordance with the relevant contemporary standards, the story of the Garden of Eden is severely androcentric from the very start. 9 Adam is created alone. Only to Adam does God give the task of caring for the Garden. Eve is an afterthought in the order of things. Eve is not created from the earth as is Adam. God creates her from Adam. Adam is Eve’s mother, and he is happy to have her since she was part of him. Declares Adam: “This, at last, is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Genesis 2:23). Eve lives only because Adam lives. The subsequent relationship of Adam to Eve is fixed by his sense of Eve having been made from his body—his sense that she is subject to him. While God named Adam, Adam—not God—names Eve, just as he named the animals. Adam, in fact, calls her “woman,” ishah, thereby putting at the front of her consciousness that she is derived from the man, ish (Genesis 2:23). When a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife (Genesis 2:24), then, he clings to part of himself that belongs to him. The Torah immediately says that “Adam and his wife were both naked,” not that Adam and the woman were both naked. She belongs to him from the very beginning. The reference to a woman as “the wife of ” so-and-so becomes standard in the Torah, and should have occurred, according to Trible, only after androcentrism kicks in. But it is here from the start. God gives the command not to eat from the tree to Adam alone (Genesis 2:16–17). Although the Torah never records God repeating the command to Eve, she tells the serpent that she must not eat from the tree. We do not know how or why Eve came to know of this prohibition. It stands to reason that she learned of it from Adam. Presumably, Adam thought that the prohibition of eating of the forbidden fruit applied to Eve as well. After all, she was fashioned from his body. She was still a part of him. Perhaps, though, Adam was mistaken about this and the prohibition to eat the fruit applied only to him and not to Eve. In what follows in the story, as we will 8 Ibid., 258. 9 For a fuller presentation of what follows see Jerome Gellman, “Gender and Sexuality in the Garden of Eden,” Theology and Sexuality 12 (2006): 319–35.

The Ideological Critique

see shortly, this seems to be the case. In any event, notice that it might well have been Adam who determined how Eve was to behave when telling her not to eat from the tree. All of this is prior to the sin of eating from the tree and before Eve receives what Trible takes to be the “punishment” of subordination to Adam. After both humans eat from the fruit of the tree, Eve and Adam hide from before God, who is walking in the Garden. The couple is not described as “Adam and Eve,” but again as “Adam and his wife.” God does not call out to ask where both Adam and Eve are hiding, but calls out only to Adam, asking only where he is hiding—“Where are you?” “You” here is singular, male, in the Hebrew. Eve did not really have to hide. She was already invisible. There ensues a conversation solely between God and Adam. Adam explains why he hid with no reference either by Adam or by God to Eve’s hiding. God asks whether he, Adam, has eaten from the forbidden tree. No mention of Eve. Adam replies that Eve gave him to eat from the tree, and he then ate. Adam says nothing about Eve also having eaten from the tree. When God turns to address Eve sternly, there is no reference at all to her having eaten from the tree. In the context of the story, God is supposed to know this only if someone informs God about it. Nobody has said anything about Eve eating from the forbidden true. Indeed, God does not express anger with the woman because she ate from the forbidden fruit, but solely because she had done “this thing.” God exclaims: “What is this thing that you have done!” The reference to “this thing” can be only to what was just said about Eve—that she had given the fruit to Adam to eat when the fruit was forbidden to him. Eve then implicates the serpent and adds, parenthetically, that she too ate from the tree. God does not react at all to this last admission, doesn’t say something like, “What?? You also ate from the fruit!?” That issue does not appear in God’s interaction with Eve. Apparently, the fruit is not forbidden to Eve. This divide between the man and the woman occurs before God gives the “punishment” to Eve. The impression formed is that this entire story is between God and Adam only, with Eve as a prop, as is the serpent. Together, Eve and the serpent have caused Adam’s downfall. The dictate to the woman that she will have a desire for her husband and he will rule over her is not a punitive beginning of patriarchy. Patriarchy has been there from the start. Only now does God put in place what hopefully will ensure patriarchal society. Since the woman from now on will have a strong desire for her man, she will heed his word and do what he desires, lest he reject her. Hence, it will be that he will rule over her not only de jure but also de facto. Afraid she will not find

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favor in his eyes, she will obey him. She will want to do what he tells her, including not giving him fruit forbidden to him. The strong degree of her desire for her man is illustrated by the fact that she will even be willing to endure painful childbirth. God never reprimands Eve for eating the fruit, although he gives Adam an earful for having done so. Afterwards, God is worried only about Adam’s eating from the Tree of Life, not a word about Eve’s (Genesis 3:22). And, as written, only Adam goes into exile from the Garden. No mention is made of Eve having to leave, or leaving, the Garden. Eve remains invisible as before (Genesis 3: 22–24). We know that Eve has left only because, in what comes next, Adam and Eve are together. Eve leaves the Garden only because Adam does and she is to be with him. The conclusion one reaches from a careful reading of the story is that this is an androcentric tale from the very beginning—about Adam and God. Eve is only in a supporting role. The story cannot carry the message of original equality subverted. This understanding is underlined by the frequent rabbinic reference to “the sin of Adam the first” as the root of many later troubles (although Eve is not ignored altogether in rabbinic teachings).10 From a contemporary point of view, biblical texts that follow the story of Adam are heavily androcentric. Consider the early chapters of Genesis, where women are passive objects of men’s actions or act only for the sake of men. In Genesis 4, both Adam and Cain are described as “knowing” their wives, and Lemekh “takes” two wives. The listed contributors to civilization—with their new inventions—are all men (Genesis 4:19–22). In Genesis 5, the genealogy of the children of Adam and Eve is limited to men and ascribed to Adam only; in Genesis 6, extra-human beings “take” human women from “whomever they choose”; in Genesis 7, the names of Noah and his sons are given, but no names are given for any of the women—and we are told that each pair of animals who entered the ark were a “man and his wife;” in Genesis 8, again we have the anonymous reference to Noah’s wife and daughters; in Genesis 9, the blessing of multiplying is given only to Noah and his sons, not to the women; in Genesis 10, the genealogy is allmale. Every nation gets its name from an ancient patriarch, not a matriarch. In Genesis 11, we again have an all-male genealogy, and, while Abram’s birth is recorded, Sarai’s is not. She is introduced to the reader derivatively as the daughter-in-law of Terah and as the wife of Abram. In Genesis 12, 10 In Leviticus Rabbah 29:1, Rabbi Elazar recounts hour-by-hour the first day of the creation of Adam and Eve. Rabbi Elazar refers only to Adam eating from the tree and only Adam repenting. No mention is made of Eve eating from the fruit of the tree, and there is no reference to Eve repenting. Eve becomes invisible.

The Ideological Critique

Abram “takes his wife Sarai” to Canaan, then to Egypt, and passes her off as his sister; in Genesis 13, it is Abram who departs from Egypt, his wife and all his possessions simply “going along” with him; in Genesis 14, Abram returns “the women and the people” to Lot after a battle; in Genesis 15, God promises children to Abraham only, not to Sarai; in Genesis 16, Sarai is described as not yet having given birth “for Abraham”—she simply “gives” Hagar to Abram as wife, Hagar is sent out, and later bears a child “for Abram”; in Genesis 17, when God changes Sarai’s name to Sarah and gives her a blessing—that she will bear a son “to Abraham”—God reveals both the name and the blessing to Abraham, and does not say a word to Sarah. (This prompts a rabbinic statement in Genesis Rabbah 20:6 that God does not generally speak to women); In Genesis 18, angels come to reveal that Sarah will have a son, but they only inform Abraham and not Sarah; in Genesis 19, the messengers tell Lot to “take” his wife out of Sodom. It is then Lot’s wife, but not Lot, who cannot contain herself and looks back. Also, in that chapter, Lot’s daughters are concerned to provide a seed “for their father”; and in Genesis 20, we have the story of Abraham’s descent with Sarah to Grar, where once again Abraham passes her off as his sister. I have said enough to establish a line of demarcation between men and women that follows throughout the Torah narratives. Woman are characteristically passive or subservient to men. Yes, at times woman do important things, and some are even prophetesses, but these are anomalies swallowed up by the myriad number of androcentric texts in the Torah and the Hebrew Bible. Androcentrism applies to the legal part of the Torah as well. I have counted a great many commandments, as listed by the anonymous Sefer Hahinukh, out of the proverbial 613, that are androcentric in wording or content, and that contain only a moderate concern for the status of women. The androcentrism depends either on the plain meaning of the texts or on the rabbinic interpretations of those texts. Just to have a peek, note laws where a husband can nullify his wife’s vows, can bring his wife to a test in the Temple on suspicion, and can divorce her. While she has no power to do any of this. Note how the laws of sexual violation, as well as many other laws, including the last of the Ten Commandments, are addressed solely to men, although equally applying to women as well. Priests and functioning Levites are men only. Note that in contrast to popular apologetics, in rabbinic literature a man marrying a woman is sometimes considered literally to have acquired the woman as his property. This shows itself in the law that the wife of a priest may eat from his sanctified terumah gifts, which would be forbidden

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to her were she not his wife. The Sifra bases this law on the verse in Leviticus 22:11 that a priest may feed his terumah gifts to “his monetary acquisitions.” According to the Sifra, “monetary acquisitions” refers to both non-Jewish slaves and to a wife. A second ideological critique of the God of the Jews in the Hebrew Bible pertains to unjust actions of a different nature. God kills innocent people, directly or by command, or causes them unjust suffering. At least, people who should be counted as innocent. The great flood wipes out innumerous men, women, and children, as well as bringing death to countless animals, in a global water chamber. This is because “humankind” has become corrupt. God destroys all of Sodom and Gomorrah, men, women, and children—save for a very few righteous—because of their grievous sins (Genesis 18). God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son, stopping the slaughter only at the very last moment. And, allegedly, “the Voice is still at work” in contemporary religions.11 The Akedah represents to some contemporaries the instrumentalizing of Isaac, treating him only as “the son of Abraham” and not as a person in his own right—a theme to be found elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible.12 (In 1990, in California, one Cristos Valenti murdered his favorite child, a girl, because he was certain God had commanded him to do so. At his trial, he pleaded innocence by comparing his act to Abraham at the Akedah. The jury pronounced Valenti not guilty, in virtue of insanity.) God brings death and incalculable suffering upon great numbers of innocent Egyptians—with ten plagues—because of the obstinacy of their king. All of Egypt’s first-born men are killed because their king will not free the Israelites. God orders the destruction of every Amalekite: noncombatants, men, women, and children. Because the Israelites sinned with the women of Midian, God commands Moses to take revenge on the Midianite nation, the guilty as well as innocent. “And they warred against Midian as God had commanded Moses, and they slew all the males” (Number 31). Subsequently, Moses commands that all Midianite baby males, and non-virgin women too, are to be killed, evidently with God’s approval, saving only the young virgin girls. Numbers 21 and Deuteronomy 2 record how Sihon and his people came out to fight the Israelites and the Israelites destroyed all the people 11 Richard Holloway, “Sacrificial Wham,” The Guardian, April 24, 2004, as quoted in R. W. L. Moberly, The Theology of The Book of Genesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), xx. 12 For this theme, see Marcia Bunge, Terence E. Frethheim, and Beverly Roberts Gaventa, eds, The Child in the Bible (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008).

The Ideological Critique

of Sihon—men, women, and children. Similarly, for the people of Bashan, God kills all, save for King Og of Bashan. While in these cases the Bible does not record an implicit command to slaughter every person, the acts clearly occur with God’s approval. In Deuteronomy 7, God commands the “utter destruction” of seven nations inhabiting the Land of Canaan, showing no mercy. The conquest of the Land begins with the slaughter “by the sword” of every human and animal in Jericho, “from the men to the women, from the youth to the elders, until the oxen, sheep, and donkeys—by the sword” (Joshua 6:21). Each of these stories involves suffering and premature death of huge numbers of noncombatant innocent people, which appears to be grossly unjust on the part of God. In the very place where God self-describes as merciful and gracious, God also self-describes as visiting “the sins of the fathers on the children and the children’s children to the third and the fourth generations (Exodus 34:7; see also Numbers 14:18). Yet in Deuteronomy 24:16, it says that a person will be put to death only for his own sins, not for those of his father. This might apply to court justice and not to a Divine policy. The Talmud supposes, however, a contradiction between the two verses and resolves it by saying that the verse in Exodus that children will suffer punishment for the sins of their father applies only when the children continue with the sins of the father (Sanhedrin 27b). To make plausible sense, this can only mean that the children remain at some disadvantage regarding punishment for their sins because of their father’s sins. So, Rashi, for example, interprets the Talmud to be saying that when a son commits the same sin as the father, the son receives double punishment—once for his own sin and once for his father’s. Ibn Ezra, on Exodus 20:5, thinks it means that God is quick to punish the children, not giving them the usual chance to repent. In any case, this exhibits a morality in which children are extensions of their parents and not entirely separate individuals. God commands Moses not to conduct a direct count of the Israelite nation lest a plague ensues (Exodus 30: 11–16); and in the days of King David, in a chapter with interpretational difficulties (2 Samuel), God is angry at David for taking a census of the people (or men of arms). In this case, God in retribution proceeds to kill 70,000 innocent men.13 We are not given an explanation why a census was forbidden. In Talmud Yoma 22:b Rabbi Yitzchak maintains that a census can be conducted only indirectly, by counting something other than the person directly. Rabbi Elazar and 13 See a different version of the story in 1 Chronicles 27.

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Rabbi Nakhman bar Yitzchak proceed, respectively, to cite one or two prohibitions on direct counting of the Jewish people. Neither are we told why a sin that David committed required the death of 70,000 innocent people. When in 2 Samuel:6 David brings the Holy Ark back to the Israelites on a cart driven by oxen, we read: And David and all the house of Israel were celebrating before the Lord, with songs and lyres and harps and tambourines and castanets and cymbals. And when they came to the threshing floor of Nakhon, Uzzah put out his hand to the ark of God and took hold of it, for the oxen stumbled.7 And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah, and God struck him down there because of his error, and he died there beside the ark of God.

No warning, no appreciation of the good motive—death for touching a holy ark. Then there are laws prescribing what are increasingly thought of as excessive punishment, or punishment for acts that seem to deserve no punishment at all. Numbers 4 tells us that the Levite family of Kehat is to carry the Tabernacle appurtenances when moving the Tabernacle from place to place. The Torah tells us that the men of Kehat will die if they touch any of the objects without an intervening cover and will die if they watch when the objects are being covered. There are the witches who are to be put to death (Exodus 22:8) and for homosexual acts the death penalty (Leviticus, 20:11). If a man charges that he found his new bride not to be a virgin (Deuteronomy 22), If the thing is true, and evidence of virginity is not found for the young woman, then they shall bring out the young woman to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death with stones, because she has done a disgraceful thing in Israel, to play the harlot in her father’s house.

It seems excessive today that the woman is put to death because she dishonored her father.14 Then there are times that God just ignores unjust, evil acts, afterwards even shows favor to the perpetrators. In Samuel 18, David kills 200 Philistines and brings their foreskins to Saul. This is to receive permission to marry Saul’s daughter. The killing of 200 men, not necessarily combatants, as a gift to marry does not sit well with contemporary ideas of justice. 14 The Talmud (Sanhedrin 51a) discusses restrictions on this law.

The Ideological Critique

God overlooks this act. In 2 Samuel 2:23–25, Elisha curses young boys for mocking him, bringing on two bears from the forest who then tear forty-two children to shreds. This story is followed by one in which God is angry with Jehoshaphat for his evil ways. God is silent over Elisha’s behavior. Elisha continues on his way, no rebuke by God, having murdered forty-two children.15 The above ideological critiques are compounded by various portrayals of God in the rabbinic literature. The rabbis deepened the androcentric predicament of Jewish normativity, although there are also rabbinic comments to the contrary. Contemporary sensibilities concerning the place of women in society will be bothered by what the rabbis built on the verse, Psalms 45:14, that reads: “The glory of the daughter of the king is within: her clothing is of wrought gold.” A plausible reading of this verse in context says that the daughter of the king is dressed in gold in her chambers (“within”) before being presented in public in gold clothing. However, typical is the comment of Abraham Ibn Ezra that the glory of the daughter of the bride is that she stays “within” the palace and is not seen by others. This reflects the earlier rabbinic interest in turning the “glory” into the principle that a woman’s place is in the home.16 My database shows me tens of instances in which the rabbinical literature employs this principle in interpreting scriptural verses in forming or approving women’s’ practices of modesty. This is carried over to post-rabbinic commentators who continue to apply and widen the principle. The call to modesty is well taken. It is the extreme hiding of women that becomes problematic. The point here is that by so interpreting Psalm 45:14, the rabbis wished to attribute this principle to the will of God.17 The rabbinic literature compounds the critique of God’s apparent injustice in other ways. Although there are several rabbinic statements about God’s sublime justice, we cannot overlook the great number of rabbinic endorsements of what might well be taken nowadays as unjust acts or policies. God judges Jews more lightly than when judging non-Jews (Genesis Rabbah, 50:3). A Mishnah (Chapter 4, Mishnah 3) states that when the ox 15 However, a rabbinic statement says that sickness was visited on Elisha as punishment for this act (Talmud Sanhedrin 107b). 16 However, there is at least one rabbinic source deploring the situation of women after the Garden of Eden. Rabbi Dimi compares the plight of women to people confined to a jail. And Rashi attributes this to the glory of the women of Israel being within (Eruvin 102a). 17 This rabbinic view was shared by Paul, who wrote that “Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak but must be in submission” (1 Corinthians 14:34). And “I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet” (1 Timothy 2:12). New American Standard Bible.

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of a non-Jew gores that of a Jew, the non-Jewish owner must pay for the damages, while if an ox of a Jew gores that of a non-Jew, the Jewish owner is not culpable for damages. The Talmud there (38a) deduces this from a verse that since non-Jews do not obey the seven commandments pertaining to them, they cannot collect for such damages. Similarly, a Jew is ordinarily not obligated to return a lost article to its non-Jewish owner. The Talmud (Bava Kama 113a) attributes this to the command to return lost articles to “your brother” (Deuteronomy 22), excluding the non-Jew who is not your “brother.” While a Jew may not deceive another Jew in business, a Jew is permitted to deceive a non-Jew—because the latter is not “your brother” (Talmud Bekhorot 13b)—while others say that a Jew may not deceive a non-Jew, but only need not inform a non-Jew if the latter has made a mistake of some sort, as in the amount to be paid, to the advantage of the Jew.18 God, according to one source, provides no afterlife for non-Jews (Leviticus Rabbah 13:2).19 There is a genre of rabbinic stories where, because of an offense by one or a few people, God kills them as well as/or their close ones who are innocent. Here are two examples. A story in Numbers Rabbah (4:20) tells of a father who, over a few days in synagogue, does not hush his young son when the boy responds to prayers calling for pious responses with silly (or perhaps heretical) words. The man defends his son as being a very young, playful, child. Within three years, the man dies, together with fifteen members of his household. Only two people are left in his home—one lame and blind, and one who is a madman and wicked. Another story: When a renter finishes renting a home from a Jew, he is to leave the mezuzah parchment on the doorpost. One renter takes the mezuzah away with him when he finishes his rental period. God punishes him with the death of his wife and two sons (Bava Mezia 102a). A Talmudic passage tells us that a man who gives false testimony draws punishment not only on himself but also on his family. And not only on his family but on the whole world (Shevuot 39a)! This is problematic even if it is meant only to scare and not state a fact. Then there are punishments that otherwise seem grossly disproportionate to the offense. Talmud (Bava Batra 75a, Sanhedrin 100a) tells us, approvingly, that when a disciple doubted the words of Rabbi Yohanan until the disciple saw with his own eyes what Rabbi Yohanan had predicted, the Rabbi “stared at him and he became a pile of bones.” The same 18 However, the laws of this paragraph might not apply today but only to pagan non-Jews. 19 I must point out that there are several rabbinic statements of respect and even admiration for non-Jews. Yet the present citations appear enough times to create a problem for God’s goodness.

The Ideological Critique

Rabbi Yohanan turned another student to bones for telling the rabbi that the student had observed for himself something the rabbi had said, and so had confirmed the rabbi’s saying (Bava Batra, 75a). In both cases, the death punishment was for not accepting the words of the sages without verification. Similarly, Rabbi Sheshet kills a heretic by staring at him and reducing him to a pile of bones (Berakhot 58a). The term “he became a pile of bones” occurs sometimes as the result of a direct act of God (see Jerusalem Talmud, Shviit 10, Law 1). Perhaps these expressions are meant metaphorically, but there is little indication of such in the texts themselves. We have here a theology that assumes God’s approval of such punishments, with nothing more to be said. In none of these cases is there a word of reprimand. Furthermore, some rabbinic principles of justice would not pass the bar of approval for even moderate contemporary morality. A case in point is the rule of justice I noted in the previous chapter—that the punishment fits the crime, or “measure for measure.” An example is the flood. Because the sins of the people were multitudinous” (Gen 6:5), God punished them with a multitudinous punishment: God opened the “multitudinous” subterranean waters on them. And because the Egyptians drowned Israelite male babies in water, so they “were cooked in the same pot in which they had cooked.” The Egyptian army was drowned in the water of the Sea (Sotah 11a). This principle of measure for measure, as we see it, was used to match the formal properties of the sin, not the sin’s substantive properties. It is the form of the sin that is to match the punishment. Multitudinous in form matches multitudinous in form. Water in form matches water in form. This ignores the justice of the substance of the punishments. That would require justice regarding the extent of the punishment, and that justice be done regarding those who are punished. For example, in the flood, children and animals did not sin, so the substance of the punishment is called into question. Referring to the example of the justice of hell, remember that God acts justly, “measure for measure,” by sending people to hell. Because those people acted unjustly, it is just for God to act unjustly toward them as well, by sending them to hell. Again, this is a formal conception of justice, which ignores the substantive issue of justice—that is, whether it is ever justified to act in an unjustified manner, even if justice is served in a purely formal way only. Further examples are available for the ideological critique I have raised, but I have written enough to make the point. The ways the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic literature present God appear at various points to clash with

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even moderate contemporary moral standards. That God is perfectly good is called into question, then. So far, I have been recounting an external ideological criticism of the God of the Jews, criticism looking in on traditional texts from the outside. Significantly, we find internal ideological criticism in traditional Jewish texts themselves, including in the Hebrew Bible. I am quite aware of rabbinic and post-rabbinic endeavors to diminish or neutralize the moral sting of some of the following verses of the Bible. Nonetheless, my focus, for now, is on the internal critique as it is, without response. A paradigm example of an extended internal ideological critique in the Bible is in Psalm 44. After noting God’s past acts on behalf of the Israelites, the Psalm continues with this: Yet now you have thrust us aside and disgraced us; you don’t march out with our armies. You make us retreat from the adversary and those who hate us plunder us at will. You have handed us over like sheep to be eaten and scattered us among the nations. You sell your people for a pittance, you don’t even profit on the sale. You make us an object for our neighbors to mock, one of scorn and derision to those around us. You make us a byword among the nations; the peoples jeer at us, shaking their heads. All day long my disgrace is on my mind, and shame has covered my face at the sound of those who revile and insult, at the sight of the enemy bent on revenge. Though all this came on us, we did not forget you; we have not been false to your covenant; Our hearts have not turned back, and our steps did not turn away from your path, though you pressed us into a lair of jackals and covered us with deathdark gloom. If we had forgotten the name of our Elohim or spread out our hands to a foreign god, wouldn’t Elohim have discovered this, since he knows the secrets of the heart? For your sake we are put to death all day long, we are considered sheep to be slaughtered. Wake up, Adonai! Why are you asleep? Rouse yourself! Don’t thrust us off forever. Why are you turning your face away, forgetting our pain and misery? For we are lying flat in the dust, our bodies cling to the ground. Get up, and come to help us! For the sake of your grace, redeem us!

This is an extended protest of anger against God for failing to keep promises. The people are innocent of idol worship, are faithful to the covenant, yet God does not save them from the cruelty they are suffering from other nations. God has abandoned them to their harsh fate. The people have kept the covenant. God has not.

The Ideological Critique

An earlier internal ideological critique occurs in Genesis 18:16–33, where Abraham pleads against God’s decision to destroy all the people of Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham protests, “Shall the judge of the whole earth not do justice?” A passage of rabbinic literature (Genesis Rabbah, 49:9) strengthens Abraham’s position, when it explains Abraham’s thinking thus: for the decree of every court, a person can appeal to a higher court for redress, except for the decree of the highest court. From there, no appeal to a higher court is possible. So, Abraham is warning that God must be especially careful in his decisions, since as judge of the entire world there is no higher appeal. In Exodus 5:22, Moses complains to God that God is acting badly toward the Israelites in Egypt. Ever since Moses began to confront Pharaoh at God’s bidding things have only gotten worse for the Israelites, and God does not help them. This is more than a plea for help. It is a formal accusation of God by Moses. Another example is the story of the daughters of Zelofhad in Numbers 27. The five daughters of Zelafhad complain of injustice, in that their father has died without sons and they will not inherit any part of the Land of Canaan. Why should their father’s name be forgotten just because he has no son to receive an inheritance of the land? The inheritance should go to the five sisters. Moses takes counsel with God who agrees with the women, and then fixes the law so that if a man dies without a son his daughters shall receive the inheritance. In this story, God issues an unjust edict, but takes it back when faced with protest (Talmud Makot 24a). More than once, God wants to destroy the entire Israelite nation, and Moses acts against that decision. Moses protests God’s intention to destroy the Israelite nation after the worship of the Golden Calf (Exodus 32:10). Moses argues that to do so would be wrong for, among other reasons, it would break God’s promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, that God “make your offspring as numerous as the stars in heaven” and give to them the land of Canaan (Exodus 32:13). To break a promise is immoral. This is more than a prayer: it is a critique of God. As a result, God changes his mind and allows the nation to live.20 Because the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron, God decides to kill them all. God brings a plague on them and 14,700 people die before Moses can send Aaron to stop the plague by running through the camp with incense (Numbers 17:6–15). Moses acts against the Divine desire to kill them all. 20 Here we find a good example of rabbinic softening of a text that seems to display an unjust Divine intent. See Exodus Rabbah 42:9, that God did not want to destroy the Israelites, but wanted only that Moses pray on their behalf and they would be forgiven.

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In the prophetic literature, we need to be careful to distinguish between protests against God’s injustice, and, on the other hand, prayers for the rectification of evil that do not necessarily accuse God of wrongdoing. A rather clear case of protest at injustice, though, is in Jeremiah’s bewildered address to God (Jeremiah 12:1–3): I will reason these points of justice with You: Why does the way of the wicked prosper? Why are they all happy that deal very treacherously? You have planted them, they have taken root. They grow, they bring forth fruit. You are near in their mouth and far from their inner consciousness.

The questions appear to be rhetorical protests rather than mere requests for help. My final examples of biblical internal ideological critique pertain to prophets, speaking in the name of God, rescinding earlier Divine decrees apparently now thought to be too harsh or otherwise unjust.21 And so, when God begins to inflict severe punishments on Israel, Amos protests and repeatedly tells us that God repented and says “This shall not be.” (Amos 7). We saw the biblical declaration of children being punished for their father’s sins. Later, Ezekiel came and declared as a Divine policy (Ezekiel 18:4), “The one who sins is the one who will die,” and, “I will judge each of you according to your own ways” (18:30).22 That God changes positions on these issues might raise suspicions as to God’s settled values, as well doubts as to the morality of God’s original positions. These examples of internal ideological critique from the Bible do not sit well with God assumingly always acting and commanding justly. The same rabbinic literature that we saw praising God profusely also knows how to level ideological critiques on moral grounds.23 Dov Weiss has shown that the Talmudic rabbis were divided between the supporters of protesting against God and the anti-protest rabbis, with Rabbi Akiva the leading figure of the anti-protestors.24 Weiss shows that critiques of the Divine proliferated especially in the late rabbinic period. What concerns me here, however, is not who supported, and who rejected, ideological 21 This paragraph I base on the saying of Rabbi Jose ben Hanina, Makot 24a. 22 On the issue of intergenerational punishment, see Michael Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 333–345. 23 I have been helped in this section by Dov Weiss, Pious Irreverence: Confronting God in Rabbinic Judaism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), and chapters two to four of Anson Laytner, Arguing with God, A Jewish Tradition (Northvale: Jason Aronson, Inc., 1990). 24 Weiss, Pious Irreverence, 25–27.

The Ideological Critique

critique among the rabbis. The fact that such a critique appears plentifully in rabbinic literature stands as a counterweight to the preceding chapter where I depicted the rabbis as amplifying Divine greatness and goodness. Concerning Abraham arguing about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Rabbi Aha puts into Abraham’s mouth these severe words: “There is a profanation of The Name [in your doing this]!” (Genesis Rabbah 49:9). This goes further than what can be read from the biblical text alone. Regarding God’s creation of the Evil Inclination that seduces people into sin, God is depicted as regretting having created it. For had God not done so, people would not have rebelled. God also regrets having created certain nations25 We could see this as a moral defect in God, but more appropriately as a defect of having failed to realize the consequences of these disastrous acts. Rabbinic literature elaborates on the injustice of punishing children for the sins of the parents, by putting the following into the mouth of Moses: Terah worshipped idols and Abraham his son was righteous. And also Hezekiah is righteous, and his father Ahaz is a wicked man. And Josiah is righteous, and his father Amon is a wicked man. Is it appropriate that righteous people should be punished for the sins of their parents?26

Consequently, the edict is withdrawn. Another protest of injustice by Moses occurs when he argues against the destruction of the Israelite nation after the episode of the Golden calf: They broke the beginning of the commandment, “You shall have no other gods,” . . . but you want to break the end of the commandment, “showing loving kindness for thousands of my beloved. . . . [There have been seven generations since Abraham.] If you cannot show loving kindness to seven generations, how are you going to show kindness for thousands of generations?

Moses here accuses God of breaking his word in an unjust fashion.27 Concerning rabbinic current events, Rabbi Levi proclaimed a fast day when there was no rain. When rain still did not come, Rabbi Levi complained bitterly, “Ruler of the world, you have ascended and sat down on high, and you do not show mercy to your children.” This is not merely a 25 See Jerusalem Talmud Ta’anit 3:3 and Genesis Rabbah 27:6, as quoted in ibid., 265. 26 Numbers Rabbah II 19:33, as translated, with minor changes in ibid., 173. 27 Exodus Rabbah 44:9, as translated, with minor changes, in Laytner, Arguing with God, 55.

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prayer for rain, but an accusation against God for unjustly ignoring his children who need rain urgently (Ta’nit 25a). A good example of God failing to issue a just law until being urged to do so by others, as cited by Dov Weiss, is the creation of cities of refuge to protect inadvertent murderers from blood avengers from the family of the person murdered. Deuteronomy Rabbah has the Israelites protest the permission of blood avengers by saying, “Is this an example of prolongation of days? A man kills another unwittingly and the avenger of blood pursues him to kill him, and both die before their time!” At that, God tells Moses that the Israelites are right, and so, instructs Moses to set aside cities of refuge. God acts justly not on his own but only in response to being put in judgment by the people.28 We find in Amoraic literature the idea that God has sinned and requires periodic atonement for the sin. Said by Rabbi Shimon ben Azzai, this was when the moon protested that there could not be “two kings,” the moon and the sun equal in light. So, God shrunk the moon to be smaller than the sun. The moon protests that the result is unjust, until God confesses that an atonement should be brought for his making the moon smaller (Hullin, 60b). Rabbi Shimon ben Lakhish then states that, appropriately, the sin-offering of every New Moon day is an atonement for God having made the moon smaller than it was at the start. The sin offering is atonement for God. While at times an angelic ideological critique is turned back by God, so too there are times when God must retreat in the face of angelic protest. This happens in Rabbi Hanina bar Papa’s teaching that God was intending to restrict the boundaries of Jerusalem to a small area. God backs down from this plan when the angels protest that this has not been done for Gentile cities. (Bava Batra 75b). The injustice is avoided. In my footnotes, I have referred the reader to Dov Weiss and Anson Laytner in whose works will be found many more examples of a rabbinic internal ideological critique of God. The conclusion to be reached is that the rabbis at times thought of God as exhibiting moral shortcomings and moral unreliability. In summing up, late rabbinic literature, Dov Weiss concludes that it “should move scholars to modify their assumption that the sages always imagined God to be morally perfect” (182). Given the external ideological critique and the internal ideological critique of the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic literature, we have clear challenges to the perfect goodness of the God of the Jews.

28 Weiss, Pious Irreverence, 179–80.

Chapter Five

The Argument From Evil The argument from evil is a second challenge to the perfect goodness of the God of the Jews. Recall that a perfectly good being has maximal possible goodness, which includes perfect power and perfect knowledge, exists always, is the creator and sovereign of the world, and is in active relationship with the created world. The argument from evil claims that the massive extent and horrendous nature of the world’s evils show that no perfectly good being could exist. If no perfectly good being exists, then the God of the Jews is not perfectly good. For a traditional Jew, the ideological critique of God examined in the previous chapter is but a particular example of the argument from evil. There are two categories of the world’s evils. One is natural evils— earthquakes, tsunamis, forest fires, extreme weather, famine, illness, and floods, that bring death, suffering, mourning, and severe monetary loss to an immeasurable number of people. God creates such evils either directly or, indirectly, by creating their suitable conditions—such as laws of nature that God—assuming His perfect knowledge—knows will result in natural evils. God causes or at least allows these natural evils, then. Here is what Voltaire wrote about a natural evil, the 1755 Lisbon earthquake and the resultant tsunami that killed an estimated 100,000 people: What crime, what sin, had those young hearts conceived That lie, bleeding and torn, on mother’s breast? Did fallen Lisbon deeper drink of vice than London, Paris, or sunlit Madrid? In these, men dance; at Lisbon yawns the abyss.1 1

From Voltaire, Poem on the Lisbon Disaster, trans. Joseph McCabe, https://en.wikisource. org/wiki/Toleration_and_other_essays/Poem_on_the_Lisbon_Disaster. Accessed January 3, 2017.

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This well expresses a sense of the injustice about the massive amounts of natural evil that affects humanity in our world. This evil visits death and suffering on a vast scale without discrimination—on innocent and guilty, young and old. A second category is moral evils, initiated immorality, that people perpetrate on others and on themselves, causing injustice, damage, suffering, and death. Included here are such things as war, genocide, tyranny, murder, robbery, rape, brutality, and torture. If a perfectly good being existed, it would be aware of both types of evils, would be able to prevent them, and would want to eliminate at least a great deal, if not all, of them. So goes the argument. Hence, massive and horrendous moral evils should not exist. But they do. Hence, the argument of evil concludes, a perfectly good being does not exist. To give the argument from evil its full due, we need to grasp the profusion of evil in the world beyond the sensational cases that draw wide sympathy or outrage (like floods, war, plagues, murder, rape, and torture). We must acknowledge the profusion of evils in people’s everyday lives, out of public sight, and sometimes out of sight of everyone but those who suffer. Think of the everyday anguish, pain, and, sometimes, paralyzing frustration of just ordinary people trying to go about life. Think of the psychological torment of a person trapped in a destructive relationship, or of the child of a crazed parent; consider lives crushed and defeated by circumstances, not of a person’s making, left empty and hopeless, dying, rather than living, each day. We must not miss the deep disappointment of a life derailed, sensed as without value, felt not worth living except for the fear of death. We mustn’t miss the gloom of utter loneliness—of a woman whose only close companion is her silent cane or metal walker; a man psychologically incapable of living in society, living at the edge, seeing only the grocer and the doctor; and a child so emotionally withdrawn from life that her only contacts are with her imaginary friends with whom she shares adventures with the king and queen of an imaginary country. True, there are many people who gain from everyday disappointments and setbacks, becoming stronger and learning to advance soundly into the future. But how many people do not? Think of the myriad people who suffer and never recover from the damage done to them, people resigned to a life of torment or of utter helplessness. People crumpled, deranged, and confounded. Victims of encompassing social and governmental structures from which they suffer and from which there is no escape. People who lose all faith because of the life they have been forced to live. So many people,

The Argument From Evil

so many people, in the words of Henry David Thoreau, “lead lives of quiet desperation.” This is not a matter of “bad things happening to good people.” The pain and suffering do not intrude into an otherwise jolly life. The pain and suffering are programmed into our lives. We are programmed to lose our loved ones. We are programmed to decline in old age. Our bodies are programmed to give out, slowly or quickly. We are programmed to be different from others in important ways and to grasp for our own well-being, inevitably giving rise to clashes and suffering. We are programmed by our DNA to be susceptible to a failure to cope, to be inept, or to be psychopaths without restraint. The fragility and unpredictability of the earth’s surface make hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, drought, failed crops, and all the rest, not intrusions into the natural order, but the natural order itself. No jolly summer ruined is life, but crushing winter snow, influenza, skidding car accidents, monsoon rains, and chronic drought, as certain as the mild sun at a faraway island with evening cocktails on the beach. Our world is saturated with pain, suffering, and disappointment. This is the argument from evil. Hovering above the argument from evil is the sense of utter injustice in the distribution of these evils. The more affluent are sometimes the most morally debased or criminal; the poor, sometimes the most upright and trustworthy. The sickest are sometimes the sweetest; the healthiest sometimes hard and huffy. Those who are loved are sometimes not as worthy as others who are lonely and distraught. Sometimes the most admired are in truth evil human beings, while the worthiest ones go unnoticed. The argument from evil asks, therefore, how could there be a perfectly good being overseeing the world when our world has so much evil and such horrendous evil? The argument from evil comes down hard on the history of the Jewish people’s long and persistent suffering, as far back as we can remember. Restrictions on professions Jews could follow and on areas in which Jews could live; ghettos, pogroms, the Crusades, the Catholic Church’s tortures, murders, and expulsions, and widespread severe racial prejudice. Above all, there is the Nazi murder of six million Jews, which left the Jewish people traumatized and millions of other Jews emotionally disfigured for life. Traditional Jews believe in a covenant between God and the Jews, a covenant of the Jews’ faithful devotion to God and God’s faithful loyalty to the Jewish people. If God were perfectly good, could we not have expected a different history?

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True enough, in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28, the Israelites are showered with promised horrendous curses if they “break” the covenant and abandon the laws of God. And the rabbinic tradition predicts various additional calamities for sinfulness and unfaithfulness to the covenant. One might be tempted to say that Jewish history simply lives the curses for the Jews’ failure to honor their part of the covenant. Jewish history, then, would be one long punishment for lack of proper religious practice and devotion to God. However, one might question whether the severe curses in the Torah themselves are morally justified punishment for forsaking the covenant, as they involve much more misery and suffering than might be morally warranted. Even if one thinks that some Jewish suffering in the past was punishment for our collective sins, the Nazi Final Solution in its barbaric and inconceivably evil consequences is unimaginable as appropriate payment for sins. One million murdered children did not sin, and others murdered could not have committed such horrendous sins to deserve such hideous compensation. Were the babies (and the mothers who smothered them to death in their arms to keep them from crying and giving away a hiding place to the Nazis) champion sinners? In any case, justification from sinfulness does nothing to explain how it is, to take an example, that the sins of the hundreds of thousands of Jews murdered in the path of the Crusaders were so much more severe than those of Jews living elsewhere who were spared. Nor does it explain why the sins of European Jews were more deserving of Nazi executions than the Jews of the United States, for example, who at the same time in history massively forsook Jewish observance in the “Golden Country” for a life free of such encumbrances. The argument from evil challenges prayers in our traditional Jewish prayer book: “God is good to all, and His mercy is on all of his creatures,” we say in praying. Really? God “saves the poor person from one stronger than he,” which we know is not ordinarily true. God “supports all the fallen,” and “makes upright all who are bent over.” What could these words mean in the real world? If a perfectly good being existed, the world’s evils, in their quantity and quality, would not exist, says the argument from evil. But they do. So a perfectly good being does not exist. The God of the Jews cannot be perfectly good. Included in this charge is the ideological critique that if the God of the Jews were perfectly good, moral imperfections in God would not appear in traditional Jewish texts. But they do.

Chapter Six

The Humility Response Given God’s perfect goodness, the best philosophical response to the argument from evil, including the problem of the ideological critique, is what I will call the “Humility Response,” the subject of this chapter. However, I will argue that while it has merit, the Humility Response has some problems and consequently has restricted usefulness. It must be supplemented by further considerations. Evil is so inherent in the whole scheme of things—often what seems just one damn thing after another—that for a religious person evil simply must have a proper explanation in the mind of God. That would be too big of a fault in a God they could possibly believe in. Paradoxically, the structural presence of evil in our world should give a traditionally religious person a reason (not a decisive reason, granted) to trust that for some reason or other this must be God’s doing. There are at least two types of people worth mentioning that I do not hope to reach easily with my presentation. The first is people who have had what they take to be a direct experience of utterly irredeemable evil. The second is people who choose to restrict the scope of their thinking about evil to what is, as it were, close by and observable, who accordingly refrain from thinking about the bigger picture needed for the very possibility of dealing positively with the argument from evil. I take up these cases one at a time. I do not hope to easily impress a person who has had such scorching experiences of evil that he takes himself to have perceived in the evil its very moral irredeemability. Such a person just sees the depravity of the evil to be so base that it is utterly irredeemable. Not a conclusion from an experience but experiential content is involved here, non-inferential content embedded in the experienced sense-content.

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Consider my late cousin Binyamin, who was a prisoner of the Nazis work camp of Auschwitz. He told this story, one of many, about a time he perceived the sheer irredeemability of evils he encountered. It was the eve of December 25, 1943. The Nazis assembled all the inmates in the camp yard. There was a huge, tall Christmas tree in the yard and a festive stage on which the Nazi officers stood stiffly in their dress uniforms. A band was playing enchanting Christmas carols. The prisoners were made to stand there for a time listening to the music. Then the Nazis hanged ten Jews on the Christmas tree. The prisoners were forced to stay there at attention until the last hanging Jew stopped moving. All the while, the band played the lovely Christmas carols. One can claim just to see that an evil is irredeemable, as my cousin Binyamin did, in the way one can be said simply to see that someone is angry, immediately and non-inferentially. I look at a person and see that he is angry, inside, although I am seeing only his demeanor and behavior. I do not conclude that he is angry. I see his anger. That a painting is beautiful, for another example, need not be inferred from its perceptible qualities. Its beauty can be directly manifest within the visual experience. I remember visiting the Ronald Lauder Neue Gallerie in Manhattan and entering a small room dominated by the large painting by Gustave Klimt, “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I,” also known as “The Woman in Gold.” I visually took in the painting and immediately, non-inferentially, saw its beauty, holistically, as it were. I did not judge that it was beautiful. The beauty of the painting was for me inherent in the perceptual content. In seeing the painting, I was directly aware of its beauty. Like these examples, a person can experience evil and just see its irredeemability right there in the evil. That it is irredeemable is embedded within the experience of the evil. A person need not merely judge that it is irredeemable; he sees that it is so, and his belief is a perceptual belief. In seeing irredeemable evil, he sees that the world is without a perfectly good God.1 I hesitate trying to convince people who have had such experiences of evil that God might be justified in allowing the evil they have known. I address them with respect. I acknowledge, in addition, that their inarguable experience of irredeemable evil counts against my belief in the perfection of God’s goodness. Of course, saying that does not mean that their experiences count decisively against the perfect goodness of God. Only that their 1 For a fuller presentation of the experience of irredeemability, see Jerome Gellman, “A Surviving Non-Inferential Argument from Evil,” Faith and Philosophy 34 (2017): 82–92.

The Humility Response

experiences do have some force and must be reckoned with when considering the overall experiential situation concerning the nature of God.2 The second kind of person I hesitate to address restricts his field of vision in principle to the empirical world in which he lives. He draws his conclusions from looking only at what takes place there and does not recognize the possibility of a wider, or deeper, or different perspective. Perhaps such a person has been heavily influenced by a common take on scientific method—“I believe only what is based on what is available to our empirical experience. In our experience, there is great evil.” End of debate. Such a person is not open to the existence of God. That non-openness leads to an insoluble argument from evil which then loops back to the conclusion that God does not exist. A religious person is open to there being different perspectives than that—wider and deeper or just different. That is because she has a belief in God, which makes perspectives other than those available to humans a live option. So, if a person of restricted vision thinks of the believer in God as irrational, because of the argument from evil, we should understand that they are not playing in the same “game” as the religious person. There are two different playing fields involved and, therefore, different games. One playing field is larger than the other. The religious person is not playing the same game and need not fear a charge of irrationality from someone playing a different game. I do not know how to convince people here to broaden their perspectives, especially those that promote a scientism which no religious person needs to follow. I leave this second type of person aside, therefore, because they are not part of the audience to whom I am here speaking. As I will be arguing down the road, to say that there must be an explanation for evil does not imply that every instance of evil plays a specific local role in a detailed grand Divine plan. On the contrary, in the next chapter, I will present a possible theodicy the sole purpose of which is to give only a possible comprehensive reason why God might create the kind of world we live in, without implying that in that world every instance of suffering must serve a specific, local purpose, or trying to justify all evils. This leads me to the Humility Response to the argument from evil.

2 Elsewhere I have argued for there also being experiential evidence favoring God’s existence. See my Experience of God and the Rationality of Theistic Belief (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997) and Mystical Experience of God: A Philosophical Inquiry (Farnham: Ashgate Publishers, 2001).

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The Humility Response What I am calling the “Humility Response” begins with a principle that Daniel Howard-Snyder has formulated: “That we cannot see an x justifies believing there is no x only if we have no good reason to be in doubt about whether we would very likely see an x, if there were one.”3 Let us call this the “principle of justification,” or simply “PJ.” An example of its negative application would be my diligently visually examining my pen in good light to see if any enterococcus faecalis microbes are on the pen. I find no such microbes on the pen. “PJ” would block my ability to conclude that there are no enterococcus faecalis microbes on the pen. That is because I have good reason to doubt, to put it mildly, that if there are such microbes on the pen I would see them visually in good light. And my reason would be that microbes are not visible in ordinary vision even in the best light. So, even if they covered the pen from top to bottom I would fail to see them. Hence, the absence of microbes in my visual scan does not merit my concluding that they are not present. A somewhat different example. A convict has escaped from the state penitentiary. I am one of the police officers tasked with finding her. I enter a house to which she might have run and make a brief check to see if she is there, as I am anxious to get home in time to watch the big game. “PJ” will not allow me to conclude that she is not in that house. Unlike the microbe example, I might have discovered her there in a quick search. I might have caught her lounging there watching TV in a bedroom. However, I have good reason to doubt that had she been there I would have discovered her in my quick check. This is because I have good reason to suspect she would be on the alert for the arrival of police and cautious enough to have hidden properly. Most probably, she would be hiding from the police in a place harder to discover than with a superficial scan. I cannot justifiably report to the captain that the house is empty, since my evidence is minimal and inadequate. Now consider that if a perfectly good God exists, and has good reasons for allowing the world’s evils, then in most cases we would have strong reasons to doubt that we would know what these reasons were. We are not, then, in a position based on our experience to conclude that there are no good reasons for the evil. This follows from the application of the Principle 3 Daniel Howard-Snyder, “The Argument from Inscrutable Evil,” in The Evidential Argument from Evil, ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 299–300.

The Humility Response

of Justification. The legitimate doubt prevents me from thinking that if God has reasons for evil we would know what they are. We are more like the person who fails to see microbes on a pen than like a person who fails to see a pen in a drawer of junk. There are good reasons to doubt that in most cases we can know God’s reasons for allowing evil. I once heard the philosopher Richard Gale forcefully object that if God did have good reasons for allowing evil, “we should be the first to know” what they were. I take it that Gale wished us to conclude that either God has no good reasons or that God is morally culpable for failing to divulge His reasons to us so that we could be assured that we do not suffer for naught. Nevertheless, as we will see shortly, there is good reason to believe that if God did tell us the reason for an evil we would not be able to understand it and grasp its full meaning. In many cases, this would then be an otiose act by God. More than that, though, people might hastily think they understood the explanation and judge it to be inadequate. The most direct answer to Gale is that our not being able to know the reasons why a perfectly good God allows evil, includes that we could not know why God seems to do us an injustice by not telling us the reasons for their being evil. Gale has simply pointed out another seeming instance of unjustified evil to which applies the retort that we cannot know why it occurs. It appears that we are back to the original position of wanting reasons why God allows evil. In addition, we should say to Gale that, regarding any given evil, we have no way of knowing that our coming to know its purpose would not defeat that or some other purpose God wishes to implement. And given God’s abilities, we should think this quite possible. There are purposes the divulging of which would defeat some purpose at hand. To take an example, it is a good thing for a soldier to learn to carry out legal orders from her commanding officers without her knowing the reasons for those orders. Learning that habit serves the purpose of quick obedience in war situations. In most cases, this purpose would be defeated were the commander expected to explain the reasons for commands. Just so, we have no way of knowing, for any evil, whether God’s revealing its purpose would not defeat that or some other purpose, perhaps some more important one. This reasoning can apply after the fact, as well. For knowing why God allowed some evils in the past can affect my choices in the future. For example, I might be allured into perpetrating an evil because I know that in the past God had a good reason for allowing the same kind of evil. I conclude that we cannot know that God is unjustified in not telling us the reasons for evil.

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We cannot be so sure, then, that God not revealing God’s reasons must be unjustified.4 Getting back to the main point, though, we are looking for reasons why, left on our own, we should doubt that we could know why God allows the evils that exist. William Alston has expounded an instructive list of reasons why we should doubt that we could know why God allows the world’s evils.5 Here I will briefly present five of the most significant ones. The first limitation on us is in our woeful lack of relevant data. God has perfect knowledge that includes knowing all that God needs to know in order to maximize God’s goodness. We are far too limited in our capacities to collect facts to discern reasons for the evils that occur. In most cases, it is very probably way beyond our abilities. I suspect that one of the contemporary pushes, for many people, behind the argument from evil comes from an inflated sense of our ability to know things because of the stupendous success of science. However, a jump from our success in science to the conclusion that whatever in principle we cannot find out is not there is a profound act of hubris. No person with religious inclinations need follow that way of thinking. A second reason for doubting we can know God’s justifications for evil exists even if we were to know all the relevant facts. This is because the body of knowledge would be so vast in scale and so complex in structure that reliable value judgments would likely be beyond our ability. We are limited in how many facts we can appraise at once. We would need to compare between the vastly complex world in which we live and other vastly complex worlds that we think would be better. We might be able to say that everything else being equal a world in which I do not have a severe backache is better than one in which I do. But we cannot say categorically that any world in which I have no backache would be better than one that includes my aching back. To make a comparative judgment we would have to step back and compare vast complexes of the two worlds and all of what is connected to my backache in one world and the same for my pain-free back in the other world. We should have good reason to doubt that we pint-size knowers are capable of judging God on such a grand scale. Thirdly, we should acknowledge that surely our ability to think up possibilities that God might put into practice is restricted. We are very much 4 Of course, when we are looking at our own behavior and motivations we must act and think in accordance with what we know and think is correct. We should not use the Humility Response for quietistic purposes. 5 William P. Alston, “The Inductive Argument from Evil and the Human Cognitive Condition,” Philosophical Perspectives 5 (1991): 29–67.

The Humility Response

limited by our human experiences and our limited conceptual capacities. There must be possibilities galore out there that are beyond our ken. Our restricted ability to think up possibilities for God to maneuver greatly limits our ability to think that God is ultimately unjustified in what God has allowed or brought about. Fourth, we have reason to doubt that we can be secure enough in our judgments about states of affairs that we cognize as possible or necessary to judge God. Think of judgments of this nature that we make. Some are intuitively obvious to us, but at times we have divergent intuitions on whether something is possible or impossible and we have no way to settle the matter. That should give us good reason to doubt that our judgments will be strong enough to put God down. God has a clear knowledge of possibilities and necessities when God goes about picturing a world to create. Finally, we have reason to doubt that our moral sense, as much as we must rely on it, is reliable enough to make a final judgment of God on moral terms. Just think of how our human moral sense has developed over time and continues to change as we go forward to the future. We give changing weight to relevant moral factors. This gives us good reason to be quite tentative in judging God who has infallible moral knowledge. While this consideration might not apply so strongly to horrendous evils, together with the limitations on our factual knowledge this should lead us to caution and humility in judging God confidently in many other cases. In sum, the Humility Response tells us that we simply cannot understand why God allows the evils we find in the world. Since we cannot understand, we are in no position to judge God. We, humans, have limitations on our intuitions and cognitive capacities. We have a limited number of senses with which to input information and we have a bounded intelligence capacity to process information, to produce knowledge and probability outputs. Within these handicaps, humanity has advanced phenomenally in its understanding of our earth and of aspects of the cosmos. And we have learned how to put that understanding to good use, as well as to bad use. Imagine a creature some light years away from us with input capacities far more sophisticated and efficient in kind than ours. And imagine they are so smart that Einstein is a middling compared to them. And that they know how to make artifacts to help them that are way beyond our comprehension. Their cognitive outputs would give them far superior knowledge to ours, both in breadth and clarity. Surely, they would have a much greater capacity to know the world than we do. They will have solved problems on which we are spending millennia. Even if such creatures might not actually exist, the imaginary picture drives home the point of our human limitations, even

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after we have noted all our extraordinary successes. How much humbler we should be, when we compare ourselves not to hypothetical, cognitively superior creatures, but to God, whose cognitive powers and ability to affect the world belong to an entirely different dimension than ours. The Humility Response surfaces at several points in traditional Jewish texts.6 In the Hebrew Bible, these are the words of Isaiah (55:8–9): For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts.

In a Mishnah, Rabbi Yanai says that we are not able to understand “the peacefulness of the wicked or the suffering of the righteous” (Mishnah, Avot. 4:15). And the Talmud takes a similar position when presenting Moses, experiencing the future, after hearing Rabbi Akiva give a lecture. Moses says of Rabbi Akiva’s greatness as a teacher, “Master of the world, you’ve shown me His teaching. Show me His reward.” God said to him, “Turn around.” When Moses turned around he saw that they were weighing Rabbi Akiva’s flesh in the market, after he had been skinned alive by the Romans. Moses said to God: “Master of the world, this is his Torah teaching, and this is his reward?!” God said back to him, ‘Silence! This is what I decided’” (Menahot 29b).7 This reply echoes God’s response to Job’s suffering, in an extensive Divine speech that begins with these words: “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me if you have an understanding” (Job 38:4). Neither Moses nor Job can be capable of understanding God’s ways. A religious belief in God, as opposed to a purely factual belief that God exists, includes an attitude of humility toward God. To have humility before God is part of what it means to believe in God, as opposed to merely believing “that God exists.” When the Humility Response meets the ideological critique, it tells us to retreat from the critique because we are not able to judge that God 6 In what follows, I have been assisted for sources and for basic translations by Tyron Goldschmidt, “Jewish Responses to the Argument from Evil: Traditional Texts in Contemporary Categories,” Philosophy Compass 9, no. 12 (2014): 894–905. 7 In a variant on this, the angels complain to God, “This is his Torah teaching, and this is his reward?!” But God gives a different answer to the angels than the one to Moses. God tells the angels that Rabbi Akiva is suffering so as to receive an additional portion in the afterlife, taken from the wicked ones who tortured him. (Talmud, Berachot 61b). This is a theodicy for the evil in question, rather than a conversation stopper.

The Humility Response

is not perfectly good. We cannot possibly know, so it goes, why a perfectly good God would command the Israelites to destroy the entire people of Amalek, non-combatants, combatants, men, women, and babies. So, for all we know God is perfectly justified in so commanding. Similarly, for the other charges of the ideological critique.

Problems with The Humility Response There are those for whom the Humility Response suffices to quieten doubts. I write for those of us for whom the Humility Response is not sufficient. There is obviously an important truth in the Humility Response. We truly are very limited in our abilities to judge why God allows evil. There is something to the claim that we are not able to judge God badly for allowing the evil God allows in the world or to judge God by the ideological critique. Yet, as a solution to the argument from evil all by itself, the Humility Response is wanting. There are several problems with it. There is a problem with the prohibition on judging God’s goodness. Suppose all human history was unrelieved pain and suffering for all sentient beings, with no redeeming features. No redeeming love, beauty, creativity, religious inspiration, or sense of God—only constant annoyance, pain, and suffering from beginning to end. And suppose the Hebrew Bible was simply one long list of God’s doings that appear to be terribly immoral, with no redeeming features. No good relations with humans, no inspiration for good, no redemption, only human misery at the hands of God from start to finish. The Humility Response is just as valid for such situations as it purports to be in others. After all, in a world full only of pain and without happiness, as in the world of the Holocaust in real time for its victims, survivors, and others, the Humility Response would tell us with complete confidence that we are not able to judge God badly! After all, for all we know God has very acceptable reasons for having created a world that up to now is full of suffering and devoid of redeeming qualities. And if the Hebrew Bible were exclusively a record of God’s apparently nasty doings against humans and animals the Humility Response would still bar us from concluding anything bad about God. For all we would know, God has very acceptable reasons for having inspired a holy book that has such content. Since we cannot know that this is not true, we are not able to judge God badly. The Humility Response tells us that God’s ways are not our ways, that we lack knowledge of the relevant facts, are limited in sizing up vastly complex situations, and so on. Even with

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such a dismal imaginary Bible, we would have to abandon the ideological critique. But this cannot be the whole story. The Humility Response, even if accepted, might perhaps succeed in preventing us from concluding that a perfectly good being does not exist, but it does not have what it takes to prevent our justifiably withholding belief that such a being exists. While surely there is a place for surrendering our moral judgments in the presence of God’s perfect goodness, our belief in God just as surely cannot get off the ground in the first place, and be sustained in future, unless we are permitted to employ our deepest moral sensibilities at the core of our belief. This includes our moral judgments about the activities of God in traditional Jewish canonical texts. We have no choice but to start from our central moral convictions. The demand to relinquish our moral convictions can be justified only when we have already enough of a moral basis to start with to trust in God and thus to believe that God’s moral life is otherwise largely beyond our judgment. We would have no moral basis for giving credence to there being a God whom we can trust to be doing the right thing even when appearances are to the contrary. Remember, our imaginary world has no love, no beauty, no creativity, no religious inspiration, no sense of God, only constant annoyances, pain, and suffering from beginning to end. In that world, the Hebrew Bible would simply be a catalogue of God doing what appears to be terribly immoral things, without redeeming features. When judging the rationality of believing in God in such a gloomy situation we would have no choice but to access our moral sense. And our moral sense would give us reason to refrain from such belief. Here is a different way of putting this problem with the Humility Response. I concede that we might be wrong in our moral assessment of a passage in the Jewish tradition about God, that there is certainly a need for great humility. However, there is good reason not to conclude that we might be wrong about all our moral judgments about God. We need to realize that, ordinarily, no being can be perfectly good for us without our having our own sense of that being’s imposing goodness. Such a conviction will then serve to give us the trust we need at other times to downgrade our own moral sensibilities in deference to that being’s sublimity. We cannot deny our moral sense from the very start, on peril of ending up with a thorough skepticism about who might and who might not be God. For us to believe that God of the Hebrew Bible is perfectly good we must have enough to go on to recognize that and not enough to make us doubt. The ideological critique means to put that requirement in question,

The Humility Response

by pointing out the morally ambiguous nature of God, including what seem to be morally horrendous behaviors. The mass killing of innocent people is morally wrong, and seems so even when God does it. We cannot simply disregard our starting moral convictions. This might help account for Abraham’s willingness to engage God with a moral critique of God’s plan to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. Famously, Abraham once asked God how Abraham could be sure that he could trust God. Abraham said, “God, how shall I know that I will inherit it?” (Genesis 15:8). Abraham was still in the process of building a relationship with God in which God’s goodness had to be established as the basis for trust. He had to verify that God’s goodness made sense at a basic moral level.8 I urge that we adopt the Humility Response, with the limitations I recognize. After the close of the Talmud, the idea of being able to criticize God was almost entirely abandoned. Biblical texts to the contrary were increasingly explained as not meant literally. This has become a Jewish God, a God of the later Jewish tradition rather than the original “God of the Jews.” Keep in mind here that, in terms of my direct audience of this book, I do not imagine that we are in an original, neutral situation in which we are trying to decide whether God is perfectly good. If that were the case, we would now want to compare weights, qualities, and the distribution of good and evil in order to come to an informed conclusion on the subject. Rather, the orientation from which I write is framework epistemic conservatism in which one finds oneself, justifiably (see chapter one), believing or inclined to believe in God as a perfectly good being. Then the ideological critique and the argument from evil are challenges to dislodge one from that original, non-neutral position. So, my present issue with the Humility Response is that while it might block the conclusion that God does not exist, it may well leave one with less than adequate confidence in what one already believes. For many, the Humility Response will require supplementation to overcome a pull to refrain from accepting what one has accepted as true until now—the existence of a perfectly good God. A second problem with the Humility Response pertains to our inability to judge with our limited knowledge God who has perfect knowledge. Once again, the Humility Response makes a good point. God has perfect knowledge and we are limited in what we can know. Yet, it fails for several instances of the ideological critique. In such instances, God informs 8 Alas, the same reasoning does not fit well the moral critiques of God I have cited in an earlier chapter, by Moses and other figures, including Talmudic ones. By then, those figures should have been past the stage of having to verify for themselves God’s basic decency.

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us explicitly and clearly of the factual justification for God’s behavior and decisions. Since God informs us of these facts so that we will know God is justified in what God does, these facts must constitute a sufficient condition for justification. The knowledge gap is closed. We should need no more information than God has provided to be able to judge whether the facts adequately ground God’s moral decision. In several cases, however, after learning of God’s knowledge-base the ideological critique overcomes the Humility Response. Let us look at a few examples. When God visits a flood on the earth, God tells Noah, “The end of all flesh has come before Me, for the earth is filled with violence through them; and behold, I will destroy them with the earth” (Genesis 6:13). God gives Noah the reason for the flood, a reason God deems sufficient justification for the flood punishment. Here, we can compare the stated reason for the flood with the effects of the flood itself. And here the ideological critique weighs in, questioning whether widespread violence warrants destruction of humankind—man, woman, and child, and all animal life. Another example. When it comes to visiting the ten plagues on the people of Egypt, God tells Moses that God will harden Pharaoh’s heart and says, “When Pharaoh does not listen to you, I will lay my hand upon Egypt” (Exodus 4:7). Here, God gives as a sufficient justification for visiting the plagues on the Egyptian people that their king will not do God’s will. We need know no more facts to judge God on factual grounds. The issue is whether an entire people must suffer as greatly as they do because of their leader. Another example. Concerning God’s commandment that if a man charges that he has found his bride not to be a virgin, then (Deuteronomy 22): If the thing is true, and evidence of virginity are not found for the young woman, then they shall bring out the young woman to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death with stones, because she has done a disgraceful thing in Israel, to play the harlot in her father’s house.

Once again, we are given the sufficient reason for putting this woman to death: she has shamed her father by playing the harlot while under his supervision. We are given enough information to judge the appropriateness of the punishment. The ideological critique calls into question whether shaming her father is a sufficient reason to stone the woman to death. And so on for many more cases of the ideological critique.

The Humility Response

I cannot rule out God having additional, unsaid, reasons for these punishments. However, God revealed to Noah the violence on earth as a sufficient reason for the flood. This cannot be denied. So, whether there were additional reasons, the revealed reason must stand up to the judgment of the ideological critique as to whether it was indeed sufficient. To insist that God must have had further reasons for the flood goes against the claimed sufficiency of the reason revealed to Noah. Indeed, this attempt to defend God really accepts the ideological critique in that it implicitly acknowledges that to be perfectly good, God must undergo extrapolative change beyond how we find God in the Bible. Hence, the ideological critique stands. A third problem with the Humility Response is that it rejects most of the aims of traditional Jewish theology. Traditional Jewish theologians try to do the best they can to make good sense of God, God’s relation to the world, and to the Jewish people. Jewish theologians propose ways to understand God in history, ways to understand what God might have in store for the future, offering constructive theologies, without consulting with God. From Saadia Gaon to Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, traditional Jewish theologians have fashioned notions of God and God’s relation to the world and to the Jewish people without knowing God’s mind. The Humility Response counts against our trying to understand God beyond what has been given in revelation. If God’s motivations and actions are too far beyond our ken for the argument of evil to succeed they are equally beyond our ability to say anything informative about God’s plans for the good. Jewish theology serves an important role in religious life. It presents to the believer live possibilities for dealing with intellectual and emotional religious problems. It helps inspire believers in new situations so that the religious life remains supremely important. It can provide religious stability by supplying a wide framework in which to put in place discrete elements of the religious life. A good way to summarize this problem with the Humility Response is to quote the words of R. Yisrael Salanter (1809–1883), who encouraged his readers “to prepare in advance ideas and tactics how to conduct oneself and others, to moderate the problem, to lighten the challenge . . . until the awe of God overcomes.”9 This sets the aim of “moderating” religious problems so that faith might prevail as a religious mandate. An aim of traditional Jewish theology, then, should be to moderate living challenges and lighten the test of faith. We must, then, constrain the Humility Response so that we can do the best we can, from a human standpoint, to make good sense 9 Yisrael Salanter, The Writings of Rabbi Yisrael Salanter (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, Sifriat Dorot, 1989–90), 203. Hebrew. My translation.

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of our religious belief in God and in the Torah, even when we do not know God’s mind. We should explore ameliorating possibilities for the ideological critique and the argument from evil. The coherence of a worldview and its power to organize the world beyond itself strengthens its credibility and enhances faith. We should engage in theology, however, with the Humility Response in sight. We should humbly acknowledge that our theologizing must be both cautious and designed for the pragmatic purpose of sustaining and enriching our closeness to God. Our theologies, most importantly, should be inspirational to the purpose at hand, with full awareness of our limitations before God. I conclude that the Humility Response encapsulates an important religious outlook, but that it cannot stand alone. In what follows, though, we must always keep the required humility in mind. The ideological critique and the argument from evil require, simultaneously, a philosophical and existential response. A philosophical response attempts to defuse in the abstract the allegation that the world’s evils give us reason to conclude that God is not perfect. Even if a philosophical response succeeds, there remains the real-life challenge to live a life of religious devotion alongside a consciousness of the world’s suffering, pain, and immoral behavior (our own and that of others), and to grow in one’s devotion to and trust in God. The truly religious traditional Jew lives in the presence of God, understanding her life and the world with God. The argument from evil is not a matter only of “justifying” evil in the abstract but of coping with the threat of being so crushed or sidelined by the evil as to abandon God. Purely philosophical solutions leave intact the deeply personal, existential core of the problem—namely, how a religious Jew who believes in God’s perfect goodness maintains her emunah—faith—and continues onward in the face of the world’s dark evils. This requires an existential response. In what follows here and in the following chapters, I offer a mixture of philosophical and existential supplements to the Humility Response for the ideological critique of the God of the Jews and the argument from evil. Taken together these should strengthen the conviction that traditional Judaism is true enough to want to remain devoted to it.

Traditional Judaism and Gratitude To live in the face of the world’s evils, it is essential to keep in mind the mandate to live by the motto: “Take nothing for granted!” Often, we who pose the

The Humility Response

problem of evil mostly live in a continuous flow of God’s goodness, and yet at times pay little attention to so much of the good until it becomes too great to not notice. Traditional Judaism tells us, on the contrary, to live mindfully of the good we receive from God. And our mindfulness enjoins us to express gratitude to God on each occasion of goodness. We are to express thanks to God for the good even when we are in the presence of evil. Admittedly, life can be so harsh for a person that the defeat of living can bar them from recognizing or thanking God for whatever good might also be present. But even then traditional Judaism asks for gratitude for the good. A life of gratitude lightens the oppressive weight of the evils in our world. However, such gratitude does not lighten the seriousness of evil. That would be sinful, against the strongest ethos of the Jewish people. On the contrary, the more I acknowledge the variety and power of God’s goodness to me and my love ones, the more I become conscious of, and concerned about, those less fortunate than I am. This gratitude should motivate me to act and pray for the good of all others who are in need. Gratitude can help lighten the problem of evil. I can put the problem into a proper religious perspective by not letting it rule over my life or allowing it to distract me from God. Gratitude is a direct relationship between a person and God, one that both acknowledges God’s presence and reaches for God, beyond the vagaries of daily life and its rewards. Those who live or have lived in wholly unhappy circumstances will find it difficult to properly appreciate the ordinary, daily goodness that is part of life. For them, gratitude will be a poor way to lighten the problem of evil. I stand before them in silence. Here I am reminded of a guided meditation by the Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh in which one smiles to various things, one after the other. The meditation ends with “Smile to your smile.” The greatest saintly Hasidic masters were overjoyed to give gratitude to God for the opportunity—to give gratitude to God. Such are the saintly. My Judaism tells me that when I awake in the morning my first response to waking up should be to thank God for having “returned my soul to me” with compassion. Take nothing for granted! That you went to sleep last night is no guarantee that you would wake up this morning. Of course, it is unlikely that your soul will not return to you on the morrow, but take a few seconds to note that you are still alive and that it could have been otherwise. How many people have this sense of gratitude to God at the very start of the day? We praise God for having given us a heart to discern the difference between day and night, especially between the day and night of good and

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bad, in the world and inside us.10 One thanks God for having created her or him a Jew, a free person, and a man or woman (according to one version). These mark the facticity of our lives with which we are to aim to love God and to love others. When I open my eyes, I thank God for giving my sight back to me in the morning. When I reach for my clothes and they are there near me I express gratitude to God for clothing the unclothed. When I sit up in bed, I praise God for freeing those who are scrunched up from sleep. Being able to become straight and having solid ground on which to stand call for further praise. It is the same for having shoes and for being able to walk from place to place. Think of waking up in the morning and thanking God that you own shoes! When I leave the bathroom, I am to thank God that my inner plumbing is in order. If there was a blockage or some other disorder, I could not stand before God for even a moment. Ordinarily, such appreciation recedes into the background if we are preoccupied with getting to work on time or making it to the gym before our exercise class starts. The good is left aside. Before I say my morning prayers, thanking God for the good and imploring God against the evil, I am told to accept the commandment to love another as myself (Leviticus 19). You dare not pray only for yourself and your loved ones. Be on guard against allowing the gratitude that you feel to obfuscate the suffering of others not as fortunate as you. Only then can I recite the morning prayer of profound thanks to God for what many of us will take as trivial and not worth lingering over. When I drink a glass of water (just plain water!) I acknowledge God as the source of all. How wondrous! I turn on a faucet in my kitchen and water comes out, plenty of water, right here in my home! And I can drink it! And so many others share this blessing. (But I mustn’t forget those who lack water or must walk far to bring limited amounts of water back home.) When I eat anything, even as commonplace as a single peanut, I am to express gratitude to God. When I sense a good scent—I am to thank God. When I see newly blossoming fruit trees—I am to thank God. On seeing one of the world’s great scholars—I am to bless God for them. On seeing a great Torah scholar—I am to thank God. When I experience wonders of nature—I am to 10 The blessings that follow are mostly part of the daily morning prayers. Some are be said on appropriate occasions as they arise. My interpretation of this blessing referring to the heart, and not to a rooster, as sometimes read, follows the view Rabeinu Asher. The expansion of the blessing beyond literal day and night is due Hasidic interpretations.

to as of to

The Humility Response

bless God. For a joyful occurrence, I am to thank God for bringing me to this very day. There is a special blessing for hearing news good for you and for others. There is a formula for thanking God for rain. One blesses God when seeing a friend with whom there has been no contact for thirty days, and another blessing if the lack of contact was a year. In our day, there are new blessings of gratitude for women’s experiences, for which there were no blessings previously. And so it goes. My gratitude must not be confined to the good that visits me. It must encompass all the Jewish people and all of humankind. When another is blessed, I should feel blessed. When God graces another, I should feel that grace in me. A Mishnah (Berackhot 9:5), codified into law, tells us that “A person has an obligation to bless God when something bad happens just as the person blesses God when something good happens.” The Talmud formulates the blessing in the words, “Blessed is the one who judges truly”—meaning that this blessing should be said in joyfulness, “the same” as when rejoicing in good (Berackhot 60b). Some early commentators take the reference to God as “judge” to indicate that in this blessing a person accepts the bad that happens to him as an atonement for sin.11 The supreme “judge” has decreed the bad occurrence as proper punishment for your sins. Hence, the evil is justified evil. If we take the Humility Response seriously we would want to be careful when assigning any true explanation for why God brought a bad event to us. We would want to be cautious in attributing an evil happening to our sins—except as a useful moral motivator. True, our holy writings tell us that evil events can befall us because of sinfulness. And at any time, after all, the bad that happens could be punishment for sin. Wisdom (and the Talmud Brakhot 5a) tells us, then, to examine our behavior when enduring suffering in order to be aware of our ongoing transgressions and repent of them. But it is not plausible to think that all or even most bad that happens is punishment for sin. In any case, there is no direct line from the proof text of the Mishnah to the blessing “over evil” as pious acquiescence in punishment for sin. The proof text is Deuteronomy 6:5: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” This verse makes no reference to punishment nor provides any other explanation for the evil. True enough, the wording of the blessing itself for when evil happens speaks of God as a true “judge,” which might suggest a trial judge handing 11 Rabbi Yonah ben Abraham Gerondi (1180–1263) on Talmud Berackhot 44b.

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down a punishment to a transgressor. Yet the proof text makes possible a different understanding of the “Judge,” namely, that God has judged/ decided/decreed that a person should endure this evil—for whatever reason God might have. This allows us to understand the Talmudic blessing as consistent with any explanation of the present suffering. Given the implausibility of most evils being punishments for our sins, we should be reticent to accept that explanation of the Mishnah. More attractive is the way Maimonides codifies this law in his Mishneh Torah: One who hears bad news says, “Blessed is the one who judges truly.” And a person must bless [God] for the bad with the same positive feeling when blessing [God] for the good—in joy. As it says, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” Included in the excessive love [of God] commanded of us is to thank and praise [God] even when God hurts you.12

No explanation of the bad here, for Maimonides. Instead, in pronouncing the blessing over evil, one is proclaiming love of God regardless of the evil that visits us, in an expression of unconditional love of God. When we thus understand it, the blessing tells you to love God even, as Maimonides says, when things are not going well. In saying the blessing, you are not to think about what the reason might be why you endure pain or disappointment. No. You are asked to maintain a stance, not in relation to the bad, but in relation to God. When bad comes, keep on proclaiming your love of God. To be sure, such a positive reaction to the bad is beyond the capacity of most of us. Such an attitude can come only from an internalization of the category of “God” and from knowing how to react to that category. The category of “the perfectly good being” serves this attitude well. When one is saturated with this idea of God one can love God when bad happens with the same joy in God as when good happens. Gratitude for the good has the power to enable us to love God even when God hurts us.

12 Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Laws of Blessings, chap. 10, law 3. My emphasis.

Chapter Seven

A Response to the Present-Day Ideological Critique—The God of the Jews and a Jewish God The ideological critique, as we have seen, maintains that in the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic literature there are moral flaws in the God of the Jews. God might deserve a high degree of admiration, in one respect, but that admiration is diminished, the reasoning goes, by morally problematic aspects of God’s character. This line of reasoning poses a serious problem for a contemporary traditional Jew who accepts even a modest version of modern Western morality. There are two issues in the ideological critique. One is a practical issue, which questions how a contemporary Jew presently could live a traditional Jewish life without seriously violating her new moral sensibilities. Let us call this the “present-day “ or “present” ideological critique. The present-critique can be alleviated, for example, by re-interpreting texts in keeping with developing moral attitudes. Then a contemporary person could live according to a new interpretation instead of an old one. What I am calling the “critique of history” or the “history-critique” questions how a contemporary traditional Jew could come to terms with the fact that, for so long, in the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic literature a supposedly perfectly good God appears with apparently moral flaws. Some of these flaws were addressed only as time went on, while others were never raised as an issue until now. How to account for the times in the past when God allowed this to happen?

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Solving the present-critique will not help with regard to the history critique. A contemporary person might adopt new interpretations, but that would not relieve the problem of how, in the past, the tradition as-it-was-then, could have had the approval of a perfectly good God. In this chapter, I advance a supplement to the Humility Response by addressing the present-critique, explaining how a contemporary Jew with “moderate” contemporary moral convictions might live the life of traditional Judaism. In a later chapter, I will address the history-critique. A “solution” to the ideological critique is a long-range project. My aim here is more modest— to help reduce the scope of the problem so that a traditionally religious person can continue her religious life with honesty. I hope here only to make a shift in the balance that favors one’s faith over the problems outlined above, so that one’s faith is strong enough to support its burden. When I am finished, problems will remain, but in a hopefully reduced way. There is no reason why a traditional Jew should expect to live without any religious difficulties. No area of life is without complications, and religion is no different. In fact, since religion demands growth and change in a person, conflicts of belief and trust will inevitably emerge, some even causing discouragement or disillusionment. God is aware of this too. Living with problems, then, is a fundamental feature of the religious life and part of what it means to live with emunah—loyalty, faith, trust—in God. My approach to the present-day ideological critique hinges on declaring that Jews have had to modify, and will have to continue to modify, the God of the Jews to make God fit their ideas of perfect goodness. Over a long period of time, and in stages, movements in Judaism have labored to modify God to conform to their conceptions of what God should be, in their response to the demand to worship God with the fullest love, gratitude, and awe. We carry on this project with the help and guidance of God.1 Thus, within the tradition, and over time, God becomes a Jewish God—one Jews restructure, believe in, and worship. The God of the Jews becomes a Jewish God. Past progress in revising the God of the Jews has fallen short of what is now required. Past work has dealt with an array of issues that were relevant then. Today, we have a whole new batch of issues to deal with that historical figures did not, or could not, entertain or address. Some previous attempts to modify notions of God went too far; others did not go far enough. Some 1 In chapter eight, I provide a conception of Divine Providence, called “moderate providence,” in which such guidance can take place.

A Response to the Present-Day Ideological Critique

almost removed God entirely from the view of the devotee, while others could not have anticipated the augmented present-day ideological critique. We will now continue the task of making the God of the Jews into a Jewish God. My task here is to retain a Jewish God who is perfectly good. For a long time, Jews have not taken the God of the Scriptures at face value—the Bible says that God possesses a body and has spatial location. God speaks in the Bible; God walks in the garden (Genesis 3:8); and God descends to earth from heaven (Genesis 11:7, Exodus 19:18, Deuteronomy 5:4). God has eyes (Deuteronomy 11:12) and legs (Exodus 24:10) and, in some verses, becomes visible to view (Deuteronomy 24:10–11); God whiffs the fragrance of sacrifices (Leviticus, 1:9, and more); and so on. For a long time now, almost nobody has taken these references as true. These texts have been given systematic reinterpretations to avoid attributing a body or bodily actions to the Divine. Why? Because having a body is unbecoming to God. Jews divested God of a body in order to remold the God of the Jews into a Jewish God. My desire to further the reimaging of God comes from the conviction that Divine Providence is guiding us to continue organic theological development within our tradition, all the time casting God as suitable to the total devotion demanded of us. One chief indication of a new phase of God’s relationship with the Jews is a providential undermining of the historical accuracy of the Torah narratives. Divine Providence has been moving us steadily in the direction of an understanding of the Divine Word free of a commitment to the historical accuracy of Torah narratives. It was Divine accommodation when, at the very outset, God embodied revelation in historical narratives. That was a supreme instance in which the Torah was written in the way that people speak (“in the language of the masses”)—that is, in the mode of historical narrative. And it was an act of Divine accommodation when the Torah made use of narratives that people believed or could be persuaded were true historical narratives. All of this took place under guiding Divine Providence. In days of old, humankind’s abstract thinking was not sufficiently developed for the Word of God to be expressed in anything but historical terms. The Torah made the Word concrete and pictorial. Increasingly, we are called upon to pass beyond literal historical understanding to reach a different kind of religious understanding.2 We are now at the point of having to accentuate a nonhistorical overlay to the Torah narratives, of developing new religiously serious understandings that do not depend on historical 2 For a full explication and defense of the present thesis, see my This Was from God, A Contemporary Theology of Torah and History (Brighton: Academic Studies Press, 2016).

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fact. I have suggested one way of doing so elsewhere: adopt and further develop an Hasidic style of Torah commentary.3 This is because Hassidic masters regularly divorced what they wanted to say about a text from the historical cast of the text, instead transferring its meaning to the interior life of present devotees and their relationship to God. A second, simultaneous, indication of the change in God’s relationship to us through the Torah is the moral evolution taking place in the West, and increasingly in the East as well. While traditional Jews should not embrace every moral fad that floats across universities and the popular media as the Gospel Truth, it is now clear to many traditional Jews that central elements of moral developments represent a justice and goodness that are not usually to be found in the Torah narratives. As shown in the previous chapter, the Torah at times contravenes these core emerging values. As a traditional Jew with emunah, with trust in and loyalty to God, it is beyond belief to me that the new phase of moral awareness is disconnected from God. I urge the reader to consider that Divine Providence, just as in the case of history, is behind the new awareness; that it is quietly developing a morality that does not entirely coincide with the Torah narratives and some of the commandments. These changes are just as much from God as are criticisms of ahistorical readings of Torah narratives.4 In this way a traditional Jew who appreciates the moral evolution of the past few hundred years can conduct an authentic religious life and have a true relationship with God. There is a place for “forcing” oneself to remain devout later down the line once one has achieved a settled, initially convincing emunah, from which one can be justified to go beyond what exceeds one’s own understanding. The alternative of simply continuing one’s religious life and setting aside one’s moral problems with it represents precisely the kind of religious life that this book wishes to contest. I wish to help establish real belief, in a real God with whom we can have real relationships. That can be so only if God’s own self is implicated in the changes taking hold of us. Then, when we turn to God we do so as whole persons standing before the whole of God who has guided these changes—in God’s majestic glory, and not as fragmented individuals before a false God. I recommend, consequently, that a demand that a Jew stick as is with the God of the Hebrew Bible, acknowledged to be imperfect in goodness, as advocated by some recent Jewish thinkers is out of sync with the bulk of

3 See, ibid. 4 For how this providence might work, see ibid., chap. 5.

A Response to the Present-Day Ideological Critique

the history of traditional Judaism.5 I suppose one can make God as appearing in the Bible his top-ranking being, but I see no basis in the history of Judaism for that being an authoritative religious demand or for it to be the default value of how traditional Jews are to think of God. Lovers of an imperfect God must be very careful not to feed inadvertently into the current popular mood of people in wanting to get out from under authority and be relatively free of command so as to do what they like. After all, if God is imperfect, God’s authority is weakened and cannot tell us to do whatever God wants us to do. Above all, one should not view one’s situation as that of a person, isolated from God, facing the problem of how to stay with the Torah’s God. We do best to see the situation as between a prayerful Jew and God, together, seeking to make God’s Torah “sweet [once more] in my mouth and in the mouths of Your people Israel.” Prayerful perplexity before God is very different from being all alone, stranded, cornered on a peak, trying to decide on one’s own, which way to jump. I take up, in turn, the present-day ideological critique of narratives and of law. I offer suggestions together with a reminder that we are to proceed with humility and care. ***

Narratives Today, we are called upon to offer new understandings of Torah narratives, in ways that prevent troublesome moral issues. The current undermining of the history, at least in the details of Torah narratives, helps this task along because we need no longer assume the historical truth of the putatively morally difficult behaviors of God in the Bible as actual historical events. They are now to be reinterpreted in acceptable religious and moral terms. To begin. In opposition to common contemporary attitudes in rightwing, traditionalist, groups, many of our great authorities maintain that a religious Jew is not obligated to accept the nonlegal—aggadic—components of the rabbinic literature. Only legal decisions are binding. Historically, 5 For two examples see Howard Wettstein, The Significance of Religious Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) and Yoram Hazony, “An Imperfect God,” The New York Times, November 25, 2012. See also Yoram Hazony, “The Question of God’s Perfection,” Yoram Hazony. http://jerusalemletters.com/the-question-of-godsperfection/. Accessed April, 24, 2018.

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many important Jewish rabbis declared that the aggadic literature was not binding, in the sense that a Jew was not obligated to believe its truth. Saadia Gaon (882–942), Samuel ben Hofni (d. 1034), Sherira Gaon (906–1006), Hai Gaon (939–1038), Abraham Ibn Ezra (1092–1167), Maimonides (1138–1204), Abraham son of Maimonides (1186–1237), Nachmanides (1194–1270), David Kimchi (1160–1235), and others, held this view of the aggadah. Accepting this position, the aggadic literature serves as the starting point from which Jewish thought is to proceed. However, in times such as ours, with its developing moral consciousness, the rabbis may be the starting point, but they cannot always be the end point. We are called to walk a thin line between loyalty to the community of traditional Jews and an independence of thought and action that diverges from what that community might deem normative. For sure, the grand ethos of the rabbinic haggadic literature has shaped the Jewish religion and typical Jewish attitudes, but this does not bind us to aggadic content that now represent moral problems. Hence, we can put aside, with caution and with due modesty, a good number of the aggadic texts that contravene a moderate contemporary morality. Others we might be able to preserve by freely reworking them into a contemporary theology. Hence, many of the rabbinic texts I referenced in the ideological critique can be neutralized for a traditional Jew facing the present-day ideological critique. In the history of traditional Judaism, several major movements have modified YHVH, the God of the Jews, into the image of a Jewish God. Two such projects stand out. Medieval Jewish philosophy wanted a Jewish God to be a perfect being, per se. Major strands of Hasidic literature were mostly interested, as I see it, in a Jewish God being perfectly good in accordance with their radical conception of what that should be.

Medieval Jewish Philosophy In Medieval Jewish philosophy there occurred among many thinkers a radical reconstruction of the God of the Jews. This was motivated by the conviction that God will be worthy of unreserved devotion only if a perfect being. The term “perfect” and the then typically preferred variant of a perfect being (eternal, ontologically independent, non-corporeal, simple, unchanging, all-knowing, all-powerful, rational, and maximally good) might have been suggested to the Jewish philosophers by Greek and Islamic sources. However, the crucial idea was that God of the Jews, YHVH as

A Response to the Present-Day Ideological Critique

appearing in the Bible, was for them an inadequate object of unreserved devotion, which, we have seen, is a central biblical mandate. This required modifying God into a form which, for them at that time, would be worthy of unreserved devotion. The major figure here was Maimonides. Maimonides’ theology is tougher to get right than a Rubik’s Cube, so it is hard to say anything categorically about Maimonides (1135–1204) without being defeated by a quotation of a different color. Notoriously, Maimonides taught one thing for the masses and another for the philosophically erudite, and it is not always easy to tell which is which. I note that in the first of his thirteen principles of faith, Maimonides writes of an existent “perfect in all manner of existence.” And in the Guide of the Perplexed Maimonides writes of God’s purpose in creating the world: Even if the universe exists for the sake of man, and the final end of man is, as has been said, to worship God, a question remains to be asked regarding the final end of his worship. For He, may He be exalted, would not acquire greater perfection if He were worshipped by all that He has created . . . , nor would He be attained by a deficiency if whatever existed except Him.6

The clear implication is that nothing can add or detract from God since God is perfect. That Maimonides really thought of God as perfect, rather than advancing this merely as a useful belief to teach the masses, is consistent with Maimonides eventually declaring in the Guide that we must remain silent about God. That is because, I suggest, when Maimonides says we cannot ascribe any attribute to God he is thinking only of descriptive predications. “Perfection” would be for Maimonides a nondescriptive value term applied to God. Value terms for Maimonides, I suggest, are second-order ascriptions, supervenient upon descriptive attributions. I say that because Maimonides addresses God, saying: “To You is silence praise” (Psalms 65:1). On the face of it, this involves a pragmatic contradiction, for that verse says that we must be silent about God yet also implies that God should be praised, is worthy of praise. But, to say that God is worthy of praise is a way of praising God, in words and not in silence. For Maimonides’ demand for silence about God to be consistent with saying that God is worthy of praise, we must make the above distinction between descriptive and non-descriptive attributions. That God is worthy of praise is not to ascribe an “attribute” 6 Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, vol. 1, trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1965), 3:13 (451).

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but is to make a second-order valuation. What we must be silent about are descriptive attributes. “God is perfect” shares the feature of being “about” God only as a value-term of high abstraction without ascribing descriptive content. Returning to Maimonides, his Guide of the Perplexed is a grand redoing of the God of the Jews. Maimonides wrote the Guide with his philosophical idea of God as a given, and the biblical idea of God as problematic. God becomes a supremely rational being, and one upon in some sense the world depends. Remember that for all appearances, in the Hebrew Bible God has a body, and we have testimony that in Maimonides’ times there were people who held that to be factual.7 Maimonides robs God not only of His body and bodily behavior, but also of all emotions, reinterpreting ubiquitous biblical appearances to the contrary. Maimonides recasts, or at least raises a modifying cloud around, the notions of creation, prophecy, and providence. He also insists on rendering all commandments as rational, leaving none as prima facie arbitrary or irrational.8 For Maimonides, only a wholly rational being could be perfect. His God is unchanging, simple (without complexity), and perfectly rational. For Maimonides, what appear to be commandments dear to God sometimes turn into Divine concessions that God would have liked to do without. Famously, this includes the entire sacrificial apparatus, but also a great number of other commandments designed to contrast with idolatrous practices then current. Maimonides also fashions moral intentions in God in places where they are not visible in the Bible, such as in Maimonides’ high moralizing of the commandment concerning the beautiful captive woman whom a man may take in war,9 or in the law of the breaking of the heifer’s neck when a murdered body is discovered out in the countryside (Deuteronomy 21).10 While the medieval way of recasting of God as perfect might have some present-day advocates, the bald conception of the highest ideal as internally simple, unchanging, and without emotion, is not likely to be a live option for many religious people today. In any case, with all its redoing, the Medievals are rather far from meeting the moderate moral demands of the emerging contemporary morality. So, while medieval Jewish philosophy gives us a prime example of the redoing of the God of the Jews, we cannot rest there. 7 For more on this, see Jerome Gellman, “The Philosophical Hasagot of Rabad on Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah,” The New Scholasticism 58 (1984): 145–69. 8 Maimonides leaves only two commandments as beyond his ability to explain rationally. 9 Maimonides, Guide, 3:41. 10 Ibid., 3:41.

A Response to the Present-Day Ideological Critique

Hasidic Judaism What I want to propose as a promising direction in dealing with the present-day ideological critique is the thinking we find in much Hasidic literature. To be sure, there are precedents in the Bible, the rabbinic literature, and in the liturgy for the Hasidic material of interest here. However, the Hasidim stand out for their collective determination to reshape their idea of God as central to their teaching. They also stand out in their dedication to boldly refashioning material in conflict with what they required, as they saw it, to an extent nobody did before them. The result is a serious alleviation of the ideological critique of biblical narratives and of rabbinic literature. The direction these Hasidim took is congenial to contemporary concerns rather than that of their medieval predecessors,11 for the Hasidim were strongly driven principally by their emerging notion of how a perfectly good God would act and relate to them. The Hasidim were in this regard a portend of modernity (in the words of Gershom Scholem, in a slightly different context). There is a complication when referring to “God” in Hasidic literature, since for them the usual name for God, “YHVH,” does not always denote the highest reality. That is because they based themselves largely on Lurianic Kabbalah where “YHVH” names realms or levels of reality that are not the highest in nature. The “Infinite” or the “Nothing” more readily denotes the highest. Nonetheless, what they had to say we can easily transfer to our term “God” for the present-day ideological critique. Inspired by Israel Baal Shem-Tov (1700–1760) (“the Baal Shem Tov” or for short “the Besht”) the Hasidic movement arose principally on the backs of the Book of the Zohar and the Kabbalah of the Rabbi Isaac Lurie (sixteenth century). Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi (1745–1812), an early Hasidic luminary, spoke for the movement when he wrote that “the Infinite is perfection without any deficiency.”12 A pivotal principle involved in their notion of God is found in a wide band of Hasidic literature—moving the valuational center of Judaism from religious study to prayer. While study remained important, prayer took first place for the Hasidic Rebbes about

11 Often, Hasidic masters had hostile attitudes to non-Jews and less than an adequate conception of women by today’s lights. Yet, Hasidism can provide the fundament of a contemporary traditional conception of a perfectly good God, with its ideas updated. See more below. 12 Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Likutei Torah (Brooklyn: Kehot Publication Society, 1984), Ekev 16a.

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whom I write.13 The study of Torah was not self-transformational for these Hasidim in the way prayer was to be. And self-transformation before a loving God was uppermost. The centrality of prayer was not merely a ritual relocation for the Hasid. Prayer, being at the center, became, for much of the Hasidic teaching, the place where the Hasid met his ideal reality. The God of the Hasidim was the One the Hasid addressed and experienced in prayer, the one to whom he was to be in constant attachment, dvekut, not the indirectly given, for them, God of the Bible, rabbinic literature, or of books of Jewish law. And so, the God of the Jews had to be made over in the image of the Hasidic God, the one acknowledged and intended in prayer. In what follows, I want first to indicate the valuational shift from study to prayer at the heart of this type of Hasidic theology. Then I turn to the way these Hasidim modified their image of the God of the Jews to what for them was a Jewish God. The enhanced valuation of prayer occurs often in Hasidic literature.14 Regarding the Baal Shem-Tov, we find the following revealing report: The soul declared to the rabbi [the Baal Shem-Tov] that the reason supernal matters were revealed to him was not because he had studied many Talmudic tractates and legal decisions, but because of his prayer. For he always prayed with great concentration. It was a result of this that he attained to an elevated state.15

The key to transcendent accomplishments was prayer, not the study of extant texts. R. Dov Ber of Mezritch, the Great Magid (c. 1704?–1772?), endorsed the study of the holy texts, yet clearly ranked study below praying: When one studies, one is to rest a bit from time to time to attach himself to God. Nonetheless, he should study. Even though while studying one cannot attach oneself to God, still one must study.16 13 Truth to tell, for others in the history of Hasidism there was a greater emphasis on classical study than in those who appear in the following presentation. See, David Biale, et al., Hasidism: A New History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), chap. 12, inter alia. 14 I am greatly indebted in what follows for some sources and translations to Louis Jacobs, Hasidic Prayer (Oxford: Littman Library, 2006). 15 Jacobs, Hasidic Prayer, 1 gives Keter Shem Tov (Jerusalem: n.p., 1968), 22b, as the source. I have adjusted the translation in conformity with a variant, in Likutim Yikarim (Jerusalem: n.p, 1981–82), 5a. 16 My translation. This saying appears in several places including in Zavaat Harivash (Brooklyn: Kehot Publication Society, 1991), 8. Because the same sayings were

A Response to the Present-Day Ideological Critique

When studying holy texts, it may be presumed that one is unattached to God for the moment, as the content of the texts holds one’s attention. Hence, you must interrupt your learning to reattach yourself to God, from time to time, to maintain the proper stance vis a vis God. “Nonetheless, you should study!” This last exhortation to study is exceptionally limp, however, compared to the demand of attaching oneself to God that is foremost in prayer. Commonly, Hasidic masters write of the ta’anug (pleasure) and simhah (joy) of prayer. R. Moshe Haim Ephraim of Sudilkov (1748–1800), grandson of the Besht, writes in the name of his grandfather that when one prays for his needs he should accept with love that his prayer might not be answered. Yet there is a higher level of prayer—the level at which one actively desires that one’s supplications are unanswered! A parable illustrates the idea: A man is possessed of a powerful desire and his heart is burning to speak with the king. The king decreed that whoever presents his requests to him will have them answered. This man, whose desire and longing it is to converse with the king, is apprehensive that, when he comes to present his request, the king will grant it and he will then have no reason for conversing with the king. So, he prefers that the king should not grant his request so that he will have something with which to come before the king again and speak with him.17

Praying for one’s needs becomes an excuse for coming back to speak to God, to enjoy being with God. One is to hope that the supplications are never answered. This tells us of the supreme intrinsic value these masters placed on being in the presence of God. This was because of the overwhelming goodness of God. Rabbi Kalonymous Kalman Epstein (1754–1823), a great Polish master, claims for prayer greater power than that of sincere Torah study: There is no doubt that a man who studies the Torah for its own sake can attain to great sanctity, provided always that he studies for its own sake and attaches all his vitality, spirit and soul to the letters of the Torah. Nevertheless, the only way he can attain to real fear and love of God, to the longing for the

sometimes attributed to the Besht and at other times to a disciple, especially R. Dov Ber of Mezritch, the Great Magid, and at other times recorded without attribution, it is sometimes difficult to make a clear attribution of a saying. 17 Based on Jacobs, Hasidic Prayer, 25.

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worship of God, and to comprehension of His divinity, is through prayer offered with self-sacrifice and burning enthusiasm.18

“Fear” here refers to the sense of awe and of one’s minuteness before God’s greatness. Prayer is the only path to “real” fear and love of God. The rabbi illustrates this principle with an innovative comment on what happened to Jacob after he had the dream of the angels on the ladder. “He awoke from his sleep” (Genesis 28:16). Redirecting a Midrashic play on words on the Hebrew “mishenato,” “from his sleep,” and “mimishnato,” “from his learning,” Rabbi Kalonymous Kalman writes that Jacob “woke up from his learning”—meaning that Jacob woke up from the “sleep” of study, as he now realized that study was not the highest service. Prayer was. It was then, therefore, according to tradition, that Jacob inaugurated the evening prayer. He had “woken up” and prayed as a result. Jacob had come “to the makom,” place (Genesis 28:11), makom being a name of God in rabbinic literature. In prayer, Jacob met God, something he had failed to achieve in study. Another approach to the superiority of prayer over religious study is in the thought of Reb Nahman of Breslov (1772—1810), great-grandson of the Besht, and Reb Nahman’s main disciple, Reb Natan (1780–1844). Reb Nahman is quoted as having said that “Prayer is very very high, and higher than study of Torah,” where “Torah” refers to any religious text or discourse.19 Reb Natan writes that his master repeated many times that one was to turn into a prayer what one had studied or a discourse one had heard. One was “to make of Torah a prayer,” again in the wide sense of “Torah.”20 Reb Natan himself wrote prayers based on the discourses of his teacher, which illustrates what it might mean to make a prayer out of a Torah discourse. In these prayers, Reb Natan prays that God help us to bring the lofty content of his master’s discourses into active realities in our lives. In addition, says Reb Natan, the main pull to repentance is when making Torah into a prayer. It emerges that for Reb Natan, the Torah has the power to affect a person’s behavior and life by being turned into a prayer. Until becoming a prayer, Torah has only a latent power to impact our lives. Prayer, then, is the active fulfillment of the power in Torah study. So, prayer is superior to Torah in the sense of being superior to Torah alone. When 18 Kalonymous Kalman Epstein, Ma’or V’Shemesh (Tel Aviv: n.p., 1965). Translation by Jacobs in Hasidic Prayer, 20. What Jacobs translates as “comprehension” of Divinity, can also be translated as “reaching” Divinity. 19 Sikhot Haran (Jerusalem: Keren Israel Dov Odeser, n.d.), 174. Hebrew. 20 Reb Natan (Sternhartz) writes a long discourse on this motto in his Likutei Halachot (Jerusalem: Keren Israel Dov Odeser, n.d.), part 3, Laws of the New Year, law 5. Hebrew.

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Torah is made into a prayer the final purpose of Torah is accomplished. So, it is prayer that stands at the peak of the religious life, not Torah. A statement reported in the name of R. Yisrael of Ruzhyn (1796–1850) goes as follows: I could be on an island for a hundred years [in another version, a thousand years] without a page of a holy book and not forget God for a moment and serve Him without a moment’s interruption.21

The study of the holy books was not needed for the Hasid to be with God! This is one of the most radical departures from the rabbinic ethos of study that can be found in Hasidic writings.22 The Hasidic masters’ God of prayer was an accessible God of love, a God of forgiveness, a God who wanted your heart above all else, even more than your actions; a God who brought every Jew (for me—every person. See chapter nine) to ultimate salvation in closeness to Him. A God who cherished the sincerest, deepest, simple good deeds over a host of deeds done without the proper intention of coming close to God. A God who always gave a second chance. A God with the power, knowledge, and goodness to guide the devotee wisely through the ups and downs of the religious life. A God who changed apparent harshness into goodness and sweetness. A God who could be trusted. Admittedly, for the Hasidim, all this love and goodness was almost always restricted to God’s relation to the Jews alone. However, I present the Hasidim here not as an authority to which we should bind ourselves, but as a prototype for how we might progress in our situation further than they did. Today, we need not bind ourselves to the restrictiveness of much of Hasidism to God’s relationship to the Jews.23 21 Irin Kadishin (Jerusalem: Machon Siftei Tzadikim, 2009), 1:500. Hebrew. 22 Some critics of the Hasidim accused the latter of giving a heretical interpretation of Psalms 40:9: “I desire to do your will, O my God, your Torah is within my innards.” They alleged that Hasidim read this verse as follows: “I wanted to do your will, God, but I cannot because your Torah is in my innards and blocking my desire.” This would express an extreme rejection of study as an impediment to doing God’s will. Uriel Gellman has informed me, though, that this interpretation most likely is not to be found in the Hasidic literature. However, the very fact that this could be put forward against the Hasidim reflects the actual relative ranking of prayer and study. It is not attributed to any non-Hasidic figure. 23 This requires an updated version of the notion of the Jews as the Chosen People. For a version of such, see Jerome Gellman, God’s Kindness Has Overwhelmed Us, A Contemporary Doctrine of the Jews as God’s Chosen People (Brighton: Academic Studies Press, 2012)

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The God of the Hasidim was the creator and Infinite-One of the kabbalistic literature, become a personal God descended into the real life of individuals, internalized and personalized at times simply by pure devotional purity. The (in principle) experiential God was the object of their devotion. They surely cherished the Torah and the commandments as God’s Torah and God’s commandments, but only after clarifying the true nature of both God and the Torah. It was said that when Baal Shem Tov taught his disciples, fire would flare around them, ministering angels would gather, and devotees would hear thunder, lightning, and the words “I am God your Elohim” from the mouth of the blessed Name.24 This was a Sinaitic experience, this time with the Baal Shem Tov, now based on the new teachings of the master. Experientially, there was a bypassing of the Old Sinai for a present, direct relationship with God.25 Famously, the Hasidim quoted the Baal Shem Tov, the inspiration of the Hasidic movement, as saying that You should know the secret of God’s unity: that wherever I hold on to an edge or part of the unity I am holding on to all of it. Now since the Torah and the commandments emanated from the essence of God, which is a true unity, then when one fulfills one commandment properly and with love, which is dvekut in him, and thus holds on via this mitzvah to part of the unity, then all [of the unity] is in his hand. It is as though he had fulfilled all the commandments.26

This idea has close precedents before the Baal Shem, notably in the Zohar. But this passage puts a decidedly Hasidic stamp on the idea. The Baal Shem is saying that when a person fulfills any commandment with dvekut, pure loving attachment to God, that person makes contact with the unitive essence of God from which that commandment emanated, and thus it is as though he fulfilled all the commandments. This is because all the commandments are unified in God’s essence and because dvekut is the purpose of all the commandments. So, achieving dvekut through one 24 Baal Shem Tov al ha-Torah (np.: n.d), vol. 2, Yitro, section 56. See note 61 there for different versions of the motif. 25 Unfortunately, I have not been able to find a text of Chabad Hasidim that I once read. It says that while it used to be that a person had to begin in fear of God and pass through that eventually to love of God, that was no longer the case. Now a person should proceed directly to love of God without having to pass first through fear of God. Readers are invited to locate this text for me. 26 Keter Shem Tov, section 111, 29. See also section 250. My translation. Jerusalem, 1968.

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commandment is to have fulfilled the purpose of them all. This is a radical departure from the standard position that one’s close relationship to God must depend on the degree to which a person fulfills all the commandments binding upon him or her. (This is not to say that the Hasidim denied that a person must observe the commandments, but the way to attach to God could be by the proper performance of just one single commandment.) Jacob Isaac Horowitz, the “Hoizeh” (seer) of Lublin, movingly appropriated the theme of keeping a single commandment with purity of heart. He begins by referring to the following Mishnaic saying: Said Rabbi Hananya son of Akashia: The Holy One Blessed be He wanted to benefit the people of Israel, so He multiplied for them [a great amount of] Torah and commandments. (Makot 23b)

The Hasidim regularly interpreted the word “l’zakhot,” which I have translated as “to benefit,” to mean instead “to refine,” to “cleanse” as the purpose of the commandments, to enable attachment to God. The Rabbi then goes on to say that one might complain that having given the Jews many commandments was no favor to them at all. After all, the more commandments they have, the more the opportunity for sinning and falling away from God. He then, in response to this complaint, cites the view that if one observes just one commandment with a total purity of heart, then he or she merits the World to Come. His response then continues: since different people have such different personalities and tastes, God gave a great array of commandments so that every person could find at least one commandment fitting his character and interests that he could observe with a total purity of heart. In this way, every person will merit the World to Come.27 A similar sentiment was expressed by the Hasidic Master Rabbi David Shlomo Eibschitz when he writes that it is an act of kindness for God to give many commands. It means that there are many ways to receive reward and acquire human perfection.28 It would be hard to find a distinction as persuasive as this between the Hasidic “Leiber Got” (“beloved God”) and the commanding presence of the God of the Jews in the Bible.29 Another indication of the Hasidic special engagement with the God of prayer as their defining persona was the Hasidic endorsement of violating certain laws for the sake of experiencing love of God in prayer. An early 27 Zikhron Zot (Munkatch: n.p., 1883), 71. 28 David Shlomo Eibschitz, Arvei Nahal (Jerusalem: Yerid Hahasidut, 2017), 3:30. 29 Indeed, this approach finds precedent in Maimonides’ commentary to the Mishnah in Tractate Makot.

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classic example of this is by Jacob Isaac Horowitz, the the earlier mentioned Hoizeh. He writes of the priority of love of God (the Hasidic “Lieber Got”) over “fear” of God, the latter demanding duty to the laws. I quote the following from the Hoizeh in full, concerning the laws determining the latest hour of the morning at which a person must read the morning Shema and pray the Amidah prayer: There are fools who do not wish to budge from fear [of God] because love [of God] sometimes is not punctilious with stringencies, and the like. . . . But that is not the way. For Hasidism it is love, with all of one’s soul, even if He takes your soul, literally speaking. So, one need not worry about saying the Shema and the [Amidah] prayer on time. Suppose it happens that one is being tardy [with the times for Shema and the Amidah] for love of the Creator, occupied with attaching to God or to praises, or if it appears to him that he will create more pleasure for God by not saying Shema and the Amidah prayer. Although the Evil Inclination [!] rebukes him for this, he should fear no punishment, because of his love of the Creator, in doing more of His will. In truth, God wants one’s heart, and great is a sin for God’s sake, and this is the meaning of “All your acts shall be for the sake of Heaven.”30

The rabbi is referring to when one has reached a rapture in the early section of the prayers, prior to the Shema and Amidah, and he is urging one to stay in that state rather than move on to the later prayers. Ironically, for this rabbi, it is the Evil Inclination itself that rebukes our friend for disobeying the law! The Evil Inclination wishes to trap a person in the fear mode of God and close off the opportunity for love of God. It is the Good Inclination urging the person onward to love of God by urging her to transgress the law! The Good Inclination wants to maximize both our love of God and God’s pleasure in His creatures. The focus on passing beyond the Torah to God comes out clearly with Rabbi Naftali Zvi Horowitz of Ropshitz (d. 1815), in the name of his teacher, Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Rymanov (d. 1815).31 “The Ropshitzer” writes that the “face” of God consisted in the shape of the aleph, ‫א‬, thought of 30 Zikhron Zot, 123–124. Once I bought a new printing of this book that claimed to be the “complete” version. To my great surprise, I discovered that this quotation, as well as other radical ones, was expunged from this “complete” version. The only thing complete about that book was its being a complete lie. 31 For more on this topic see Jerome Gellman, “Wellhausen and the Hasidim,” Modern Judaism 26 (2006): 193–207, and Jerome Gellman, “Conservative Judaism and Biblical Criticism,” Conservative Judaism 59 (2007): 50–67.

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as graphically representing two eyes and a nose, together with the vowel kamatz, shaped like a “T” with a shorter stem, and being the “beard” that rounds out the face.32 Referring to what the Israelites heard at the Sinai revelation, he writes: It could be that we heard from God only the letter aleph [the first letter of anohi [the first word of the Decalogue] from which we grasped all of the Ten Commandments. And this is how we explained, “Face to Face God spoke to you (Deuteronomy 5:4).” For a face is in the shape of an aleph with the vowel kamatz.33

He then goes further to say that the Israelites grasped all six hundred and thirteen of the commandments that Jewish tradition recognizes: “From that, we grasped the 248 positive commandments and the 365 prohibitions.” In this teaching, the Hasidic rabbi determines to locate the telos of the Torah laws in dvekut, the experiential, conscious “cleaving” or “attachment” of the Hasid to God.34 As we have seen, the supreme interest of Hasidism was to bring about a unity of religious behavior with an enduring consciousness of the presence of God. The enemy of Hasidism is religious behaviorism, alienated from the consciousness of God’s immediate presence in the world.35 Against this background, we can understand quite easily the desire of the Ropshitzer to locate all the commandments within the aleph, the opening letter of the Decalogue. His purpose was to condense all the commandments into the first letter of the word “anokhi,” “I,” spoken by the God who appeared then to the Israelites. By condensing the laws into this letter, the Hasidic master expresses the motif of the inseparability of the laws from the experiential awareness of God’s presence. The laws, the Ropshitzer is saying, cannot be separated from the immediate experience of God, and must find their telos in a return to dvekut. This dvekut, however, is an experience of an ineffable God, hence the compacting of the experience into the aleph/kamatz sound that has no cognitive content. It was important for the Ropshitzer that the specific commandments be thought of as having been 32 Naftali Zvi Horowitz, Zera Kodesh (Jerusalem: n.p., 1971–2), 1:72a and 2p:40b. 33 Ibid., 1:72a. 34 For the concept of dvekut, see Gershom Scholem, “Dvekut or Communion with God,” in Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, and other Essays in Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 203–227. 35 On this, see Abraham Joshua Heschel, “Hasidism as a New Approach to Torah,” in Abraham Joshua Heschel, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, ed. Susannah Heschel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux Noonday Press, 1996), 33–39.

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communicated (non-verbally) by God at Sinai, so as to stress the ontological ground of these very commandments that the Hasid is fulfilling in the original, Sinai dvekut experience. The unknowable essence of God is represented by the letter aleph that begins but does not express the Divine “I.” And the condensation of all commandments into the aleph expresses the unity of all commandments in the essence of God and in our experience of dvekut. For this reason, the performance of any commandment transports us back to the source, where all commandments unify into one. In sum, we find in the Ropshitzer a conception of revelation in which specific content pours out of the ineffable point of the aleph with the vowel kamatz. The commandments directly flow from God. This is a model of attachment to God outdoing study of the commandments from books or discursively from Moses. An instructive example of this Hasidic ethos is in a teaching that I believe has been widely misunderstood as being more radical than it is. Many Orthodox modernists, including myself in the past, have been very excited about the writings of Rabbi Joseph Mordechai Leiner, the Hasidic master in the town of Izbica, in Poland (1802–1854).36 The “Izbicer” tells a person to listen to the voice of God directed to that person alone, at a specific time and place, even if God’s voice conflicts with the obligation a person otherwise bears to the standing network of Torah and rabbinic legislation. Rabbi Leiner thus justifies a person sinning for God. The Izbicer returns repeatedly to the idea of being prepared to act in accordance with God’s special, present, address to you, even if this means transgressing the laws of the Torah. Rabbi Leiner writes of the person who looks for God to “illuminate him and reveal to him anew God’s will” although “this sometimes may require acting against the law, “for it is time to act for God, etc.’”37 How wonderful! I can sin and still be a very pious Jew! But, think about: What could account for this Hasidic Rabbi’s fascination with severe transgressions that God might desire of you? Why was a pious Eastern European Hasidic Rabbi so involved in the idea of extreme sinning for God? I suggest that the key lies in the Izbica Rebbe’s commentary 36 See Morris M. Faierstein, All Is in the Hands of Heaven: The Teachings of Rabbi Mordecai Joseph Leiner of Izbica (New York: Ktav, 1989); Morris M. Faierstein, All Is in the Hands of Heaven: The Teachings of Rabbi Mordecai Joseph Leiner of Izbica, 2nd ed. (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2005); Shaul Magid, Hasidism on the Margin, Modern Jewish Philosophy and Religion: Translations and Critical Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 2003); Jerome Gellman, The Fear, the Trembling, and the Fire: Kierkegaard and Hasidic Masters on the Binding of Isaac (Lanham: University Press of America, 1994). 37 Mordechai Joseph Leiner, Mei Hashiloah (Brooklyn: Rabbi M. J. Lainer, 1973), Part 1, Parashat Va’yeshev, 14b. All translations from this work are mine.

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on the following verse in Exodus: “You shall not make with me, for yourselves, gods of silver and gold” (Exodus 20:20). The Rabbi comments that this comes to teach us not to make our service of God something rigid, an unmoving statue of silver or gold.38 Rather we are to be open at every moment to the possibility that we might have to act differently, even contrary, to what we have been obligated to do in the past and will be so in the future. The choice is between making your ultimate commitment to be to God or to an elaborate system that stands between you and God. Now, often overlooked is that the Izbicer repeatedly warns of extreme caution to determine that what might strike you as God’s special transgressive will for you/now really is such and not a demonic voice or an internal egocentric desire. Thus, the Izbicer Rabbi writes of the need to scrutinize yourself many times over before acting on what you take to be God’s will for you here and now if it contradicts the laws of the Torah. A person must first make every effort to resist the desire to transgress the Torah from what appears to be God’s present directive to you. If all efforts to repress come to naught, and “that desire still remains, then he will know for sure that [the desire] is from God.”39 Here, I propose, is why the Izbicer Rebbe is so possessed with the idea of sinning for God: I propose that the Rebbe was not urging actual transgressions. Had a disciple of the Rebbe come telling him that God wanted him now to eat a ham sandwich, I am convinced the Rebbe would have told the disciple not to do it, because the Hasid cannot know the true source inside him of this feeling. The whole point, I suggest, of the Izbicer’s stress on sacral transgression is this: there is all the difference between a person who is convinced she knows for sure and in advance what God will want of her, at every minute and in every situation, as dictated by the law of God and His rabbis, and a person who is sincerely and devoutly open to the very possibility of hearing God’s voice anew and so having to follow that voice, and not the law. The person who thinks she knows for sure, and in advance, what God wants, holds a primary commitment to a system, set out in the Torah and elaborated by the rabbis. The person who can even imagine such a thing as sinning against the system, at God’s willing, and for God’s sake, displays a primary commitment to God, and not to the system. Even if never sinning in fact at God’s behest, such a person’s relationship is directly to God, not exclusively through the law, and so is prepared to shift away from her set ideas about what the system requires. 38 Ibid., part 2, 32. 39 Leiner, Mei Hashiloah, 1, page 54.

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I suggest, then, that when writing about sinning at God’s behest, the Izbicer would never have envisioned anybody (“God forbid!”) engaging in pious transgression. Rather, what was important to the Izbicer was that a person be able to imagine herself sinning for God. In R. Mordecai Joseph’s mind, the person who cannot imagine the sheer possibility of God’s wanting her to sin against the “system” is found out to hold a primary commitment to the system, and not to God. In contrast, one who recognizes the sheer possibility of her sinning at God’s directive will always keep in mind that God is the source and the telos of the “system.” Thus, she will be nurturing an ultimate relationship to God, and not to the system itself. While some of the themes I record here were present prior to the Hasidic revolution, the Hasidic modification of God did not stop there. It only started there, for what the Hasidim undertook was an enormous, detailed reinterpretation of biblical and rabbinic texts to make God of the tradition conform to their concept of a good God. In the first Hasidic book ever published, R. Yaakov Yosef of Polnoyye laid down a principle, attributed to the Baal Shem Tov, that I call “The Principle of Eternal Mutability.”40 This principle states that the Torah is eternal, and therefore must apply in every age and to every person. The idea is not only that people are to take the literal/historical content and see how that might be relevant to their lives. For R. Yaakov Yosef this could also mean that the on-the-surface linguistic meaning itself of the Torah might vary from one period to another, or a new meaning could be insinuated from the plain meaning of a verse. He writes that the purpose of his book is to explain how every commandment “pertains to every person and to every time.”41 The eternity of the Torah means that, in addition to its old meaning, the Torah must be read anew for every generation. The Torah is eternally variable. It can have mutability of linguistic meaning. Thus, the Hasidim took quite a wide latitude semantically and syntactically: they permitted the association of ideas and allowed letters to be interchanged in refiguring meaning, as was, in their view, fitting for the age. This was what they believed would emerge in the meeting between the pious reader and the text. The project was to be carried on by the masters, in the main, who had the proper holy intentions and understanding of the mission. For the Hasidim, successive linguistic contents did not nullify or replace former meanings but were added on to former ones as a supplementary layer, an interpretation more relevant to the generation in question than that of the 40 Yaakov Yosef Hakohen, Toldot Yaakov Yosef (Jerusalem: Agudat Bet Vialifali, 1973), 8. 41 Ibid., Introduction, 8.

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previous one. The Hasidim dared not recast applicable Jewish laws. They might recast no longer applicable laws by spiritualizing them or replacing them with alternative routes of implementation. In addition, they certainly reshaped many of the applicable laws, with added practices and meanings. The Hasidim regularly took narratives out of their traditional meaning in order to translate them into their contemporary context and range of concerns. The kabbalistic literature served as a precedent for departing from the historical, but the Hasidim brought such teachings to greater awareness and wider importance, both in their Yiddish discourses and in their Hebrew publications. I do not claim that the Hasidim intended to deny the historical veracity of the Torah. Rather, what occupied them was the new meaning of the text for them. They were less interested in what had happened in the past. Given our contemporary subversion of the historical, at least in much of its details, we today can adopt the Hasidic nonhistorical way as a primary reading of the Torah, with the historical reading in the background. I cite below a few examples of Hasidic softenings of Torah texts, in accordance with their Hasidic understanding of God. A paradigmatic example of Hasidic revision of the God of the Jews relates to two extended passages of the Torah called the tokhaha, or “rebuke.” Based on the Book of the Zohar, the Hasidic masters were inclined to read these passages not as curses but as blessings! There are several Talmudic sources that find blessings within curses (v. T’anit 20), but the clearest case of actually converting curses into blessings is this story in Moed Katan 9b. Rabbi Eliezer asked a group of scholars for a blessing. They said this to him: May it be [Heaven’s] pleasure that you sow and mow not; that what you bring in go not out; that what goes out you bring not in; that your house be desolate and your inn be inhabited; that your board [table] be disturbed and you behold not a new year. When he came home to his father, he said to him: “So far were they from blessing me that they [even] distressed me sorely. His father asked him: “What did they say to you?”—They said thus and thus. Said the father to him: “Those are all blessings. That ‘you sow and mow not’ [means], that you beget children and they do not die. That ‘what you bring in go not out’ [means], that you bring home daughters-in-law and your sons do not die, so that their wives need not leave again. ‘What goes out you bring not in’ [means], that you give your daughters [in marriage] and their husbands do not die so that your daughters need not come back. ‘That your house be desolate and your inn be inhabited’ [means], that this world is your inn and the other world is a home, as it is written, Their grave is their house forever,

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reading not ‘their inward thought”’ [Kirbam] but ‘their grave (Kibram] is their house forever, and their dwelling places be for generations.’ ‘That your board [table] be disturbed’ [that is]; by sons and daughters and ‘that you behold not a new year [means] that your wife will not die, and you have not to take you a new wife.’”

Similarly, the Hasidic Master, R. Shneur Zalman of Liadi (1745–1813), rendered the curses said by God into blessings, with the sweeping declaration that: “It is known that even though as it appears these words of rebuke are curses, nevertheless according to the truth they are only blessings.”42 Indeed, blessings that appear as curses are, to this rabbi, the greatest blessings there are. Because of the great power of the blessing the blessing must be covered to operate fully in this broken world. R. Shneur Zalman then reinterprets the words of one of the curses, for illustration, so that accordingly the entire curses text turns into blessings, whose purposes are to help remove impediments to coming close to God. Leviticus 26:26 says that as a punishment “ten women shall bake your bread in a single oven,” meaning that so little food will be available that just one oven will hold all the bread that ten women will be able to bake. Clearly a curse. Rabbi Shneur Zalman makes the ten women to be ten aspects of a person’s soul, based on the kabbalah. The bread symbolizes Torah, so essential to life. And the one stove refers to the One Above who furnishes us with the fervent desire (the fire of the stove) to cling to Torah. The blessing is that the provision of this fire will be so abundant that many will be able to receive it from the One Oven. Thus will the Jewish people be returned to God from their sinfulness. Thus is God with curses transmuted into the loving God of the Hasidim.43 (This is a bit of an exaggeration, for the God of the Hasidim was not beyond anger, just much less so than for most who came before.) Many more texts relevant to our topic were reread to reshape the God of the Hasidim. Another example is the way some Hasidic masters took the sting out of the near-sacrifice of Isaac. R. Elimelech of Lizhensk (1717– 1787) writes that both Abraham and Isaac knew in advance that God did not want the sacrifice.44 The entire episode was playacting in which both Abraham and Isaac imagined and pretended they were going to a real sacrifice. The purpose of the play was to create the “fire” of loyalty to God that was to remain with Abraham and Isaac after the playacting was over. When 42 Zalman, Likutei Torah, 48a. 43 Ibid., 48a-b. 44 R. Elimelech of Lizhensk, Noam Elimelech (Jerusalem: n.p., 1992/3), 45. My translation.

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Abraham lifted the knife, he knew that this was the end of the play and that the curtain was now to come down. All of this was a cooperative effort by God and Abraham to teach us that The Creator, blessed is He and his Name, has no need for the actual performance of His commandment (mitzvah) . . . . What matters to Him is the intention of the heart. The main will of God is that a person has a full and perfect desire to do His (may He be blessed) will. God then considers it as though the deed has already been performed.45

For the Rebbe Elimelech, the performance of a commanded deed is required only so the performer can verify for herself that she has the required degree of inner “fire” for God. God, though, sees the fire in our hearts in real time without any need for our performance as verification. In cases where we are prevented from doing a good act God will count our inner fire k’ilu, as though we had done the act. Because, after all, the inner state is only what God wants in any situation. In the case of Abraham, God never wanted the act to go through. God wanted Abraham to teach the lesson that intense intention alone was what God wants from us. So, after Abraham reached the required intensity of purpose, God informed Abraham that he had reached the desired level of dedication and ecstasy, and in that way had passed the test. It was k’ilu, equivalent to Abraham having actually sacrificed “his son, his only son, that he loved the most.” All of this, mind you, when Abraham knew in advance that God did not want the sacrifice, and when, therefore, the “inner fire” was essentially a method actor’s performance! God, and Abraham, succeeded in teaching the lesson of the relative value of the heart and action. This rabbi, then, could advise that when lying in bed waiting to fall to sleep one could still fulfill a Divine commandment. One could vividly imagine that a great, horrible fire is burning in front of him up to the sky. And he breaks his nature and throws himself into the fire to [die for] the sanctification of the Name [of God]. And God considers this good thought as though the action had been done. In this way will one have fulfilled the biblical commandment to [die for] the sanctification of God’s Name.46 45 Ibid., 46. My translation. 46 Ibid., in the “Small Notebook,” appearing before the main text of the book. My translation.

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A person is to imagine idolaters forcing her to convert from Judaism to idol worship, on threat of their burning her alive. In short, a person is to demonstrate her love for God by imagining throwing herself into the awaiting fire. In this way, one fulfills the biblical commandment of dying for the Sanctity of the Name. (All the while, of course, she is lying motionless in bed.) Once again, the inner intention counts as though the act had been carried out. The Hasidic remaking of God was applied to rabbinic literature, as well. Here is a good example. The Babylonian and the Palestinian Talmud, respectively, tell the story of Elisha ben Abuya, the teacher of Rabbi Meir, who became an apostate, and to whom the rabbis then referred to not by name but as “Aher,” “the other,” “the outsider.” Rabbi Meir continued to study Torah with Aher, after his apostasy. One time, Aher was riding on a horse on the Sabbath47 and Rabbi Meir was walking after him so that he could learn Torah from Aher. Aher said to him, “Meir, turn back, as I determined from the steps of the horse that until here is the end of the permissible distance to leave from town on the Sabbath.48 Rabbi Meir answered: “You, too, return” (Babylonian Talmud, Chagigah 15a).

This was a poignant plea by Meir for his teacher not only to turn back to town, but to return to the faith. Aher then answered: “I already told you that I heard from beyond the veil, ‘Return, my children, return, except for Aher.’” Aher kept on riding away, while Rabbi Meir turned back home. In a fuller version of the story, the Palestinian Talmud (Chagigah 2) ends with this declaration by Aher: Once I was passing before the Holy of Holies riding a horse on Yom Kippur that was also the Sabbath, and I heard a heavenly voice come from the Holy of Holies, saying: Return my children, except for Elisha ben Avaya, who knew my power and rebelled against me.

“Beyond the veil” of the first version apparently refers to the veil of the Holy of Holies in the second version. Aher is telling Rabbi Akiva that he understood from the heavenly voice that he was barred from repenting because of his wickedness. He was beyond hope. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1748–1825), the illustrious Hasidic Rebbe of Apt (Opatov), an ancestor of the twentieth century Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, differs from this 47 It is an infraction of Rabbinic law to ride a horse on the Sabbath. 48 This would be a violation of a law according to most authorities. According to others, a Rabbinic law. See Talmud Shabbat, 153b.

A Response to the Present-Day Ideological Critique

accepted interpretation of the commentators. This Hasidic rabbi, using a proof text from the Palestinian Talmud that nothing stands in the way of teshuvah, repentance, reinterpreted this text as follows: I believe that it does not mean that had he repented the holy one blessed be He would not have accepted him. Far be it for God to do such a thing. From God’s great mercy on His creatures, including those that sin against him, and because God thinks of ways that nobody will be rejected, God sends daily thoughts of repentance to their hearts, which is the call to return, “Return children!” . . . For God himself opens for them the gates of repentance and pleads with each one to repent.49

There is a standing call from God to sinners to repent of their sins. This “call” is in the form of thoughts of regret that God puts directly into their hearts. The rabbi goes on to say that there are people who have sinned so severely that they must come to God without any call, only on their own initiative. They must feel the degree of their depravity so strongly that they turn to God for repentance of their own choice—without God calling to them to repent. While there was no call from God to Aher, God was hoping, waiting, that Aher would turn to God and begin the process of return of his own volition. And then God would surely aid him and accept his repentance. What the heavenly voice really meant was that the call was to everyone except Aher. But the voice did not mean that Aher was excluded from repentance, only that he had to begin on the path on his own; and had he done so, God would have welcomed him fully. Aher (willfully?) misconstrued the voice and judged himself excluded from the possibility of repentance.50 This was the tragedy of Aher and the sorrow of God. Another example of a Hasidic softening of a rabbinic text is in the treatment of a Midrash stating the lack of choice the Israelites had in being God’s people and in accepting the Torah. Rabbi Haninah has God declaring to the Israelites “Against your will shall you be my people” (Numbers Rabbah 2:16). This theme receives a stark formulation in the following Talmudic passage, concerning the giving of the Ten Commandments: “Said Rabbi Dimi: [At Mt. Sinai] God turned the mountain over above them like a bowl and said to them: ‘If you accept the Torah, fine. But if not, there 49 Abraham Joshua Heschel, Ohev Yisrael (Jerusalem: n.p., 1962–63), 245. 50 Note that in the version of the Palestinian Talmud, the voice refers to Aher by his real name, “Elisha ben Avuyah,” recognizing the person inside Aher, as it were, who was a righteous scholar and fit for repentance.

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you will be buried’” (Avodah Zarah 2:2).51 This looks like raw coercion. A Hasidic interpretation of this saying changes its harshness and pulls it in the direction of contemporary application. That interpretation turns the hovering “mountain” from a coercive threat into an overwhelming act of love. I quote, once again, Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi: God’s love for us is greater than our love [for God]. The rabbis said, “God turned the mountain over above them like a bowl.” This means that because of the intensity of God’s love for us [the Jewish people] He acts to arouse in us love of Him so that we should not want to separate ourselves from Him. It is like a person who hugs a person [from behind] and turns him around face-to-face and won’t let him go, because the love of the hugger is greater than that of the hugged, and so that the hugged will not forget the love of the hugger.52

According to this interpretation, God is not threatening the Israelites. Rather, God is concerned that the Israelites will not carry with them away from the mountain a sufficiently lasting love for God. If that were to happen, they would end up spiritually “dead” (“there”—later, “elsewhere”—will be your “burial” place). So, God effusively displays God’s love for them and summons them to respond to God in kind. God hugs them tightly (the “bowl”) so that the feeling of God’s love will stay with them forever after. True enough, the Israelites later rebelled repeatedly. But God was not making it easy for them to resist. God was making resistance a perverse response to His manifest love. As a foundational experience, God’s embrace at Sinai is to imbue all later Jewish understanding of God and the Jews with a strong sense of God’s overwhelming love. The “new atheist” Christopher Hitchens criticizes religions for, among many other reasons, creating in their followers a sense of constant guilt. He asks rhetorically, “How much self-respect must be sacrificed in order that one may squirm continually in an awareness of one’s sins?”53 While guilt over sinning plays an important role in the history of Judaism, the Hasidim of which I write recognized sin and its consequences but were not quite in 51 Dan Baras has pointed out to me that this motif enters the Qur’an as an apparently real historical event (Qur’an 2:63). 52 Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Maamarei Ha-Admor Ha-Zaken (Hebrew), sections 195–196. My translation. I am indebted to Yehuda Zirkind for leading me to this text. 53 Hitchens, God is not Great, 7.

A Response to the Present-Day Ideological Critique

favor of “squirming” in guilt. Their motto might have been, “You Sinned? Don’t take it too much to heart!” Of course, we are to regret our sins and of course we must make amends to anyone we hurt, but we are not to wallow in our guilt and, instead, must move beyond it. A good part of the Hasidic movement worked mightily to lighten the guilt of sinning. This theology was a devaluation of the seriousness of sin but without being quietistic.54 This Hasidic theology was at odds with much traditional rabbinic Judaism, and with other contemporary mystical ascetic groups, who often had a very grim view of sin. This Hasidic approach to sin was in strong contrast to the Christian emphasis on the centrality of sin and atonement. The most important event of all Christian history cannot be understood unless sin is of the gravest possible weightiness: requiring the sacrifice of the Son of God for atonement. One of the central tenets of the Besht was that we are to serve God with joy and happiness. This tenet had for him specific practical implications. In the time of Baal Shem Tov, there were small groups of super-pious men who practiced austere regimens of fasting and bodily torment, such as rolling naked in the snow, to atone for their sins. Baal Shem Tov was strongly against such practices because they were causes of morose, guilt, and agitation.55 These practices defeat the religious life, leaving a person with little or no hope of changing. The only way to progress in the service of God was not to concentrate on one’s sins and instead to be joyful at being able to serve God in the present. As a result, frequent fasting and severe self-castigation were out. The annual Ten Days of Penitence are the most solemn in the Jewish calendar. Beginning with the Jewish New Year and ending with the gravest day of the year—Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The kabbalist Isaac Luria (1534 –1572) had said that if one did not cry during this period then one would not merit atonement. To this, Baal Shem Tov reportedly remarked that this refers not to crying in sadness, but to crying from happiness. We should be full of happiness that on this day we have the opportunity to stand in God’s presence before the heavenly throne.56 54 Rivka Shatz Uffenheimer thought to see quietist elements in eighteenth-century Hasidism. See Rivka Shatz Uffenheimer, Hasidism as Mysticism, Quietist Elements in Eighteenth-Century Hasidic Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). I have argued that in the main the movement was not quietist at all. See Jerome Gellman, “Hasidism as an Activism,” Religious Studies 42 (2006): 343–49. 55 For more on the centrality of this teaching for the Baal Shem Tov, see Moshe Rosman, Founder of Hasidism, A Quest for the Historical Ba’al Shem Tov (Oakland: University of California Press, 1996). 56 See Keter Shem Tov (Brooklyn: Kehot Publishing Society, 2011), 206.

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Much later, a major Hasidic Master, Rabbi Isaac Meir Alter (1798– 1866) carried this attitude to repentance further: If someone concentrates on leave-taking of his sins, he will be thinking of the bad things he did. What a person is thinking is where that person is. So, with all his soul he will be absorbed with bad things. So, for sure he will not repent, because his mind will become gross and from that he will become sad, God forbid. It is not worthwhile to dwell on your sins. Dig around in garbage, in the end it is garbage [if you obsess about what you have done]. “Yes a sin, not a sin,” what does God get from that? At the same time, you could have spoken pearls, from which God would gain something. Yes, leave the sins [sur mera]. Go far away from thinking about them. Don’t think about it. Instead, do good! If you did a bundle of sins, now do a bundle of good deeds. Therefore, the day before Yom Kippur (the Day of Judgment) you must feel the leaving of sins in a calm manner and from deep in the heart and be in joy. Say the confession in a great hurry. Don’t be absorbed in it. Think only of God alone being king.57

In this striking passage, the master has pulled the rug out from under the holiest day of the year as standardly practiced. On that day, also called the “Day of Judgment,” religious Jews spend almost the entire day in prayer at the synagogue. The confession of sins punctuates the service more than a dozen times, and petitions for forgiveness occur many times. The confessions air a litany of sins that people have committed during the past year. Among the more pious, crying and open contrition are on display with an intensity not met with on any other day of the Jewish calendar. The confessions of sin are recited in a demonstratively slow manner. In my yeshiva training, on this day I was to imagine myself with a noose around my neck, my fate in the balance! Then this Hasidic master comes along, teaching that when confession is said it should be said very quickly. We should not dwell on our sins at all. Sur mera, “depart from sin”: “Don’t dwell on your sins, leave them behind. Instead, dedicate yourself to proclaiming God as king and resolving to serve God in the coming year.” This is a Hasidic transvaluation of values, to use Nietzsche’s term, from moroseness to optimism, from sadness to happiness—a transvaluation of values in keeping with a Hasidic conception of God.

57 Likut Yehuda, 125.

A Response to the Present-Day Ideological Critique

In addition to their teachings about guilt, the Hasidim also taught the great value of a devotional stance toward God, even if fleeting, and even if that devotion to God is accompanied with feelings of rebellion against God. The value of our good thoughts not being cancelled by sinful ones was an important message of the Hasidim. The great-grandson of Baal Shem Tov, Rabbi Nahman of Breslov (1772–1810), taught this: Regarding people who are close to serving God and afterward go away, nonetheless the coming close itself is dear to God even if it was only for a short time. And even if what happened afterward happened. . . . A Midrash says that when the Israelites received the Ten Commandments they were [as it were] looking at God with one eye only. With the other eye, they were already looking forward to the Golden Calf. So, it turns out that they were already planning to separate from God. Nonetheless, the coming close to God at that time was very dear to God. For that itself is very dear to God.58

The clear intent of the mentioned Midrashic passage is to condemn the Israelites for not having complete loyalty to God even when they were experiencing the theophany of the giving of the Ten Commandments. Far in advance of the sin of the Golden Calf, the Israelites were planning that reprehensible sin. Their pious declarations were sullied by their impure sinful thoughts. Rabbi Nahman of Breslov turns this passage completely around. For him, it is not meant to convey a condemnation, but a comfort. To paraphrase: “Don’t think that when you have mixed feelings about your relationship to God the sinful thoughts cancel out the holy thoughts. Be assured that God values whatever holy thoughts you have, even when they are combined with unholy ones. The bad does not sully the good. And be assured that any movement toward God is never canceled out by whatever else you might do. Take consolation in the times that you felt close to God. Despite the bad, the good is ‘very dear to God.’” Down the line of Hasidic masters, Rabbi Zadok ha-Kohen Rabinowitz of Lublin (1823–1900) carried this idea to its logical conclusion. The Talmud writes of a man who at the moment he marries a woman stipulates that the marriage be valid on condition that he is a totally pious person. The Talmud says that we assume the marriage to be valid even if the man is known as an openly impious person. That is because we assume that he

58 Nahman of Breslav, Sihot Haran (Jerusalem: Keren Israel Dov Odeser, n.d.), 301–02.

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repented in his heart at the very moment that he uttered the condition. If so, at that moment he is indeed thoroughly pious59. Rabbi Zadok ha-Kohen goes further than what is written in the Talmud to declare that even when immediately after the marriage act we observe the man openly sinning, we should still assume the marriage is valid because of the possibility of full repentance in his heart for just the moment of the marriage act. The sinning we observe immediately afterward does not nullify the genuineness and worth of that fleeting moment of repentance. A moment of closeness to God stands on its own, with independent value.60 Even though repentance is not valid unless God can testify that the person will never return to commit the same sin,61 says R. Zadok, it can still be valid, paradoxically, even if the person immediately does return to the sin. That is because all that is required, says this rabbi, is that at the moment of repentance one sincerely intends that one will never return to the sin. This can remain true even when said sincere state of mind gives way to other thoughts and actions. It still would be true that at that moment in that repentant state of mind, the person would never have returned to the sin. To such an extent did R. Zadok protect the good in people from being erased by the bad that they do. Hasidic masters engaged in reinterpreting a central event in Jewish consciousness, the destruction of the Temple. Jewish tradition attributes the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem to the sinfulness of the people. This is reflected in the holiday liturgy with the prayer that begins, “Because of our sins we were exiled from our country and distanced from our land, and we cannot come to appear before you in the Temple.” The grave sense of sinfulness and guilt in this liturgical theology could not stand its ground against the Hasidic reduction of feelings of guilt for having sinned. Instead, Hasidic masters turned history around by finding positive benefit in the disappearance of the Temple. Thus, the great disciple of Baal Shem Tov, R. Dov Ber of Mezeritch (c. 1700–1772), could write: Today in the time of exile it is easier to receive the Holy Spirit than it was at the time of the Temple. It is like the parable of the king. When he is in his

59 But see Maimonides who states that we only suspect that the man was at that moment pious. So we cannot say the marriage is definite. The marriage counts as valid in that the man must now give the woman a divorce. Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Laws of Marriage, 1:5. 60 Zadok Hakohen Rabinowitz, Pri Zadik (Jerusalem: n.p., 1972/73), 3:123.? 61 Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Laws of Repentance 2:2.

A Response to the Present-Day Ideological Critique

palace it is not possible to get so close to him as it is when he is traveling on the road. Because then whoever wants to can come close to him. Even a farmer, who is not fit to come before the king when the king is in his palace, can come before the king and speak to him when the king is at an inn. Just so, today in the exile when a person thinks of clinging to God, then immediately God comes to him and dwells with him.62

This passage is based on the Talmudic dictum that when the Jewish people go into exile the Divine presence, the Shekhinah, goes with them. When the Temple stood, the king was ensconced inside the Holy of Holies. The “king” is now outside the palace, no longer contained within the Temple, and is therefore now more easily accessible to everyone. The destruction of the Temple, then, signifies a new era of religious development, where there is a turn to private, direct engagement with God. God’s presence is no longer mediated by a certain geographical place, nor filtered through a priestly bureaucracy. The king is out in the “field,” where anyone can approach him directly. Again, we see the contrast between direct engagement with God and the engagement brokered by an elaborate, intervening, system in the Hasidic concept of God. A few generations later, Rabbi Hanokh Heynekh Levin (1798–1870) of Aleksandrow, Poland, the leader with a large Hasidic following, goes further to see the destruction of the Temple as providing for salvation: After the destruction [of the Temple] came the great salvation. For as long as the Temple existed the people relied on the holiness of the Temple. As it says (Jeremiah 7:4): “Trust not in lying words, saying, the temple of God, the temple of God, the temple of God, are these.” There was no proper submission to God. . . . However, after the destruction when all the levels of holiness were taken from them, they opened their eyes to realize that they had nothing of their own . . . and they had no one to rely on but their father in heaven. For no act or thought was theirs. All was a gift from heaven. Then surely was the main salvation and joy.63

The extent of the departure of this passage from traditional Jewish thinking of the destruction of the Temple is astounding. This could have been written in 1 Corinthians 3, according to which “you yourselves” are God’s 62 Dov Ber of Mezeritch, Magid D’varav L’Yaakov, ed. Rivka Shatz-Uffenheimer (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1990), 70. Hebrew. 63 Hanokh Heynekh Levin, Hashavah L’Tovah (Jerusalem: Mosad Harim Levin, 2010), 58.

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Temple. In this passage, the rabbi refers to Jeremiah admonishing the people that they thought they could steal and lie, and then could depend on the availability of the Temple to absolve their sins. They took God’s presence for granted, thinking that all they had to do was bring sacrifices and get away with it. When the Temple was destroyed, they were suddenly without recourse. They were being taught that they needed God’s help for anything good they could do. There were no longer automatic rituals for them to absolve their sins. And that lesson was to create a new spiritual understanding from then on. They were on their way to salvation. The sense of guilt over the loss of the Temple is replaced by a sense of release from a constricting state of affairs. (These Hasidic rabbis prayed for the rebuilding of the Temple, but surely prayed for its having a different character than in the past. See below on Rabbi Yitzchak of Radvil.) A radical erasure of guilt occurs in a comment on Genesis 2:16–17 by Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Leiner of Izbica, whom we have met above. The New Standard Revised Edition translates the relevant part of these verses as follows: “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat” (my emphasis). The word translated as “but” can just as easily be translated as “and.” So we would get instead: “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; and from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil you shall not eat.” The good Rabbi writes that the present reading, in which Eve and Adam sin by eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, applies only to our present understanding. However, in Future Times we will read the segment quite differently, as follows: “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden and [also] of the tree of the knowledge of good. And evil you will not eat.” The interpretation of this reading is as follows: “God will make clear that Adam ate only of the good of the tree, and the sin was only in Adam’s subjective understanding, which was as thin as the peel of garlic.”64 Adam thought he had sinned and was treated accordingly by God. But the sin existed only in Adam’s mind. In fact, there was no sin. Adam had never eaten from the bad, only from the good. The perception of sin, now generalizing beyond Adam, will be dissipated when God makes known the true nature of the human being. In the meantime, for the rabbi, for sure we must live as though we are sinning, in keeping with our present subjective misperception of our behavior. How seriously can we take sinning knowing what this rabbi knows about the future? 64 Leiner, Mei Hashiloah, part 1, 4a.

A Response to the Present-Day Ideological Critique

The Hasidic masters I have quoted did, of course, take sin seriously before a sin, but they were comforting to their followers after they might have sinned, on the basis of their conception of their perfectly good God, who is not quite the same as the God of the Jews, the God of the Hebrew Bible. To conclude this section, I propose that in the Hasidic literature we find a mood and a method that we can develop and widen in order to get what it takes to alleviate much of the weightiness of the present-day ideological critique. Radical reinterpretation suitable for our times, continuing beyond what the Hasidim managed to accomplish, will lighten the burden of moral and theological negative implications from the perspective of a moderate identification with the emerging morality of the West. Of course, this call for reinterpretation is not new. But often such a call involves departures from tradition that are far more radical than those issuing from Hasidic sources. (Think of the call for the “reconstruction” of Jewish tradition, by Mordecai Kaplan. Kaplan abandons a great deal of traditional Jewish doctrines and laws.)65 What might be somewhat new is my recommendation to follow the method of Hasidic masters and to go forward from there. A traditional Jew need not adopt every element of the newly emerging Western morality, strongly biased as it is toward an extreme liberal agenda. But if, like me, you are convinced by some central strands of contemporary Western morality, and are attached in one’s soul to traditional Judaism and to a moral God, you would do well to continue the track of the Hasidim of old.

Laws What follows are some possibilities for going forward in Jewish law toward new moral sensibilities. In presenting these possibilities I always keep in mind the need for humility and caution. A defining feature of traditional Judaism has always been to affirm the understanding of biblical and rabbinic law as rather straightforward injunctions. Yes, we are to circumcise our hearts, but we are also to circumcise our eight-day-old sons. We believe that God commands that we fulfill corporeal directives in our lives. Accordingly, in this section, I want to record three reflections concerning the present-day ideological critique of biblical and rabbinic law. The present-day issue is whether a contemporary traditional Jew, impressed by aspects of the new morality, could continue his or her 65 See, most prominently, Mordecai M. Kaplan, The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995).

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observance of laws objectionable by the new standards. Since I am neither proficient in Jewish law nor in the details of its decision-making processes, I must refrain from making specific proposals. My thoughts pertain more to the meta-legal rather than to laws themselves. And I offer possibilities for consideration rather than concrete proposals. In any case, other people are applying themselves diligently to the task of making the law conform to new situations and new moral intuitions.66 My first line of thought notes that with the destruction of the Temple most of the morally problematic laws, when viewed from the perspective of today’s moderate new moral consciousness, are no longer meant to be observed. Present-day observance of Judaism proceeds without most of the 613 commandments. We no longer put people to death for severe transgressions. We do not put the daughter of a priest to death for shaming her father by sexual misconduct. We no longer have the trial of the suspected wife. We are no longer called to put witches to death. As I proposed earlier in this chapter, we might well believe that with the destruction of the Temple God brought into existence a new reality regarding Torah and morality. Accordingly, these laws will never again have legitimacy. This might not square with a longing for the rebuilding of the Temple; but we can side with the spirit of some Hasidic masters and pray for a spiritual Temple, rather than a physical one, and deny that it is necessary to restore laws long dormant. When the spiritual Temple is built, such laws might become operative again; but they will shed their outer garments of observance and be reinstated, instead, in spiritual forms. In line with this way of thinking, R. Yaakov Yoseph of Polnoyye, an enthusiastic follower of the Baal Shem Tov, taught that the Torah that will be observed in the End of Days will be a purely spiritual Torah: Had Adam not sinned, he would have observed the positive and negative commandments in the Garden of Eden . . . in a spiritual way. Whereas after the sin, [it] became material and we observe the commandments physically with actions and spiritually [only] in thought, which is hidden. . . . Which will not be so in the Future . . . when the commandments will be observed spiritually as they were by Adam in the Garden of Eden before his sin.67

The Maggid of Mezerich is of the same mind: 66 For a particularly bold effort in this regard see Nathan Lopes Cardozo, Jewish Law as Rebellion: A Plea for Religious Authenticity and Halachic Courage (Jerusalem: Urim Publications, 2018) 67 My translation. Yaakov Yoseph, Toldot Yaakov Yoseph (Jerusalem: n.p., 1972/3), Introduction, 7.

A Response to the Present-Day Ideological Critique

The Eternal Torah was purely spiritual and undifferentiated in the sefirah of Wisdom (Hohma), and it can be retrieved by ascending back to the sefirah of Wisdom. . . . This is what it means [when it says that] in time to come the Holy One, Blessed be He, will remove the sun from its covering, meaning that [the Torah] will be understood [or: be attained] as is, without a cover.68

This idea is sometimes framed thus: in Future Times there will be a “new Torah,” very different from the present one. The Hasid, Rabbi Yitzchak of Radvil (1744–1832), connects this to animal sacrifices: From this Torah there is destined to be a new Torah. That is what it means when we say [in the prayers] referring to the restoration of sacrifices in future times, that “the additional offering of this day of the holiday we will sacrifice before you. . . .” Meaning that [this day] itself will be the sacrifice. . . . Likewise, for all other sacrifices, the speaking will be the sacrifice.”69

The commandments of sacrifices are a permanent aspect of the Torah, but animal sacrifices will be replaced by “sacrificial” speech and appropriate inner thoughts. In this way, the entire corpus of Temple-time law will be transmuted into a new, internal, Torah. My second thought pertains to adopting the position that extant Jewish law is to a significant extent not what it was originally meant to be. It is the result of deteriorating circumstances and the consequent “freezing” of a great deal of law meant to have had more fluidity. Here is what I have in mind. The Mishnah, Eduyot 1:5, legislates that a court cannot nullify the decision of a prior court unless the former is greater than the latter “in wisdom and in number.” In his commentary, Maimonides defines “greater in wisdom” as meaning that the head of the later court must be greater in stature as a judge than was the head of the earlier court. Later, in his Mishneh Torah, Maimonides writes that a later court is greater than an earlier one “in number” when the number of wise men at the time who agree with the decision of the later court exceeds the corresponding number for the earlier court. In his Mishneh Torah, regarding “principles of exegesis,” Maimonides records the law of the Mishnah quite differently:70 When using one of the principles of exegesis, if a supreme court derived a law as they understand it and applied the law accordingly, and afterwards, 68 Dov Ber, Magid D’varav L’Yaakov, 234. My translation. 69 Yitzchak of Radvil, Or Yitzchak (Brooklyn: Machon Or Yitzchak Radvil, 2009), 254 70 Sifra Leviticus, Introduction, chap. 1.

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another court arose and they understood the matter differently, which understanding nullifies the previous decision, they are permitted to revoke the previous ruling, and rule according to their own understanding.71

Maimonides has dropped the requirement that the later court be greater than the earlier one in “wisdom and number.” His proof text is Deuteronomy 17:9, which enjoins to seek legal decisions from “ the judge who will be in that age.” This indicates that a person is obligated to follow the court of his own generation, regardless of its comparative stature. With regard to the need for a greater court to annul previous acts, Maimonides severely restricts the ruling of the Mishnah in Eduyot to when the court issues a decree (gzerah) or an ordinance (takanah) or initiated a custom and the court’s act spread to all of Israel [the Jewish people], then a later court may nullify the earlier act only if it is greater than it in wisdom and number.72

Elsewhere, Maimonides defines the difference between a decree and an ordinance.73 The rabbis proclaim a decree (gzerah) as a “fence” to the Torah, which helps to prevent a person from overstepping the boundaries of a law. Maimonides cites the decree forbidding eating fowl with milk, as a fence to the biblical law forbidding eating animal meat with milk. If allowed to eat fowl with milk one might come to eat animal meat with milk, as well. On the other hand, an ordinance (takanah) is when the rabbis establish a procedure for advancing a well-regulated society. (Maimonides includes here what he calls “customs.) One of the examples is Hillel’s decree of the practice of prozbul, which circumvents the inability of lenders to collect a debt because of the rule that all debts are canceled in the shmittah year, which comes every seven years. In Mishneh Torah, Maimonides writes that if a decree has already spread to all communities no court can nullify it, even if it is greater in wisdom and number. The spread of a law to “all of Israel” plays a crucial role in the authority of the Babylonian Talmud for Maimonides. In his introduction to his Mishneh Torah, he writes:

71 Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Laws of the Rebellious, 2:1. 72 Ibid., 2:2. 73 Maimonides, Introduction to the Commentary on the Mishnah, trans. from Arabic into Hebrew by Rabbi Yoseph David Qafih (Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 1976), 1:12.

A Response to the Present-Day Ideological Critique

All of Israel is obligated to follow everything in the Babylonian Talmud and every city and every country is to be forced to behave in accordance with all the ways of the wise men of the Talmud . . . since all Israel accepted the content of the Talmud.

After the time of the Talmud, Maimonides tells us, Jewish communities became too spread out for sufficient communication to establish pan-community law. Rulings could only have local status. The Babylonian Talmud remained the sole pan-community authority. R. Yosef Caro (1488–1575), in his commentary to Maimonides’ legal work, Kesef Mishneh, takes Maimonides’ ruling that a later court can contradict an earlier one, even if not greater in wisdom and number, as a general principle of Jewish law—and not only with regard to courts.74 Thus, R. Yosef Caro affirms that later figures in the Mishnah should have every right to argue with figures from an earlier generation. This requires no possession of greater wisdom and numbers, and applies well beyond courts and the utilization of the thirteen principles of derivation. That is why, according to R. Caro, Maimonides restricted the requirement of “wisdom and numbers” only to legislative edicts and ordinances. R. Caro then asks: Why, if this is so, cannot rabbis of the Talmud rule differently from the rabbis of the earlier Mishnaic period? R. Caro replies to this difficulty by saying that from the day the Mishnah was completed it was decided that later generations would agree with the Mishnah. Likewise, with the completion of the Talmud, it was decided that from that day on it would be forbidden for any person to rule against the Talmud. This reply echoes Maimonides’ distinction between the possibility of having universal legislation versus the possibility of only local legislation. The Talmudic and later times endured the increasing dilution of the geographical centrality of the Jewish people. As a consequence, the Talmud’s authority became hypostatized as the last possible universal legislation. For Maimonides, then, Jewish law has large bands that originally were not meant to be fixed. Later generations should have been able to disagree with the Mishnah and with the Talmud, even though lesser in wisdom and in numbers, however defined. Our halachah, then, is in various details an ex post facto set of laws in many respects. Of course, the Halachah continues to develop after Talmudic times, but it must start with the Babylonian Talmud, and it is with the Babylonian Talmud that one must take efforts to square one’s later rulings. 74 Kesef Mishneh, on Laws of the Rebellious, 2:1.

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A situation in which later generations can no longer overrule the Talmudic, or earlier post-Talmudic periods, results in constraining creativity and novelty in Halachah to a relatively narrow spectrum. This situation is compounded by the wide dissemination of books that have an aura of authority as well as by corresponding ubiquitous Internet material. As a result, much of Halachah consists of rulings piled on rulings, adding details and applying old rules to new situations. The Halachah becomes mired in details because there is nowhere else to go with it creatively. The most “innovative” ruling must be shown to follow from or at least be consistent with the Talmud, as much as possible, in one way or another.75 Or a reason must be provided for departing from the Talmud. Rabbi Meir Simhah of Dvinsk (1843–1926), a great Talmudist, saw in extant Halachah a serious drawback for creative, inventive minds: Were [the Jewish people] in the Land of Israel, as formerly, they could legislate for the good of the nation for their generation—the supreme court could have nullified the decisions of the previous court. Even regarding laws derived from the thirteen principles of derivation, a court less great could have taught what seemed right to them.76

Here the rabbi is adopting Maimonides position, that a court need not be greater than an earlier court to nullify the latter’s decisions. Rabbi Meir Simhah then continues: Not so in the exile, where there is a diminishing of concentration of Torah study, so that no court can invent its decisions, as Maimonides writes. . . . A generation does not have the power to add anything to legislate against their ancestors, what can a person do with his desire to legislate and create?77

There is a natural desire to create on one’s own, to legitimize one’s opinions over those who preceded. Alas, in many ways, the fixed Halachah blocks this desire for innovation. What happens, says Rabbi Meir Simhah, is that people who are more creative will tend to leave the Jewish religion for less restrictive areas of study and practice; areas in which they can innovate and 75 This includes adopting a legal decision that depends on a minority opinion in the Talmud that failed to become law, when a decisor deems this necessary because of special circumstances. Ordinarily, there should be a minority opinion there in the Talmud on which to depend. 76 Meir Simcha Hakohen of Dvinsk, Meshekh Hokhmah, with commentary by R. Yehuda Cooperman, 4th ed. (Jerusalem: n.p., 2002–03), 2:519. 77 Ibid., 2:520.

A Response to the Present-Day Ideological Critique

advance their own understanding, rather than merely bow to previous generations. Just think of the revolutions in physics, biology, and astronomy in the past hundred years in contrast to the restrictive halachic way. A creative person, in Rabbi Meir Simhah’s words, “will think that Berlin is Jerusalem.” (Ibid. 520) Looking ahead, rather than back, there is now a radical change in the circumstances of the Jewish people. There are great concentrations of Jews within the global village, with Israel serving as primary center. Furthermore, travel, wide publishing distribution, and instant communication now connect all Jewish communities. We are no longer a string of partially isolated communities. If a legal ruling is made in Jerusalem, within minutes it can appear not only in Moscow, Paris, New York, and Mexico City, but also in Anchorage (Alaska), the Shetland Islands, and Vladivostok. We have returned to days of old by way of this “virtual” Jewish concentration. In addition, the creation of the country of Israel and the radically new reality it presents for its Jewish citizens regarding the exigencies of Jewish law makes for unprecedented challenges in Jewish law since the closure of the Talmud. In the Times to Come, the Talmud will no longer be binding and the framework of Jewish law reopened to conform to the views of the legal experts at that time.78 Today, the radical divide between our contemporary conditions and those of the times of the Talmud suggests the possibility of our moving toward a new era, in a quasi-Future-to-Come mode before the actual Future to Come is upon us. This entails halachic innovations and reinterpretations not requiring we be greater than the Talmudists, or any earlier generations for that matter, in either number or wisdom. Moving carefully, with utmost seriousness, and guided by great rabbinic figures, we would be free to move into the future with responsibility for making each of us whole in religion and moral sensibilities. My third, and final, observation about Jewish law pertains to the categories of gzerot and takanot, decrees and ordinances, and their validity today. Maimonides, we saw, maintained that once the rabbis proclaimed regulations they were irrevocable. However, there are other views among authorities in this regard.79 Rabbi Abraham ben David,80 the “Rabad,” objects that there are precedents for a later authority to abolish at least some 78 On this, see Abraham Isaac Kook, L’Nivukhei Hador (Tel Aviv: Yediot Aharonoth, 2014), chap. 13. 79 For the following information, I am indebted to Rabbi Ehud Ficsler, “If the Reason No Longer Holds, Does the Edict No Longer Hold?” www.etzion.org.il/he/-‫הטעם‬-‫בטל‬ ‫התקנה‬-‫בטלה‬. Hebrew. Accessed May 8, 2017. 80 Abraham ben David on Laws of The Rebellious, 2:2.

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takanot (decrees) when the reason for the decree is no longer valid, even if not greater than the ones who issued the takanah. Many authorities agree with Maimonides’ position. What stands out for me, though, is the view of Rabbi David ibn Zimra (1479?—1589?). The “Radbaz,” as he was known, believed that Maimonides would have distinguished between a “time-bound edict” (which Radbaz calls “mitutelet”) and a “permanent edict” (see Radbaz on the Laws of the Rebellious, 2:2). A timebound edict is only valid while the reason for the edict is valid. No court is needed, greater or not, to annul such an edict. Only time-unrestricted edicts remain after the reasons for their enactment fall away. Earlier, Rabbi Asher ben Yehiel (d. 1327), the “Rosh,” made a similar distinction: “If they set a time to the decree and the time has passed, the decree is void [of itself] and does not require to be rescinded,” and he distinguishes between a decree the reason for which is well known, and one whose reason is not.81 He says that when the reason for a decree of the former kind no longer applies the decree simply disappears. The issues here are far more complex than I have presented them, yet there is one point that I want to emphasize, and that is the definition of time-bound decrees and takanot. In many cases, I suggest that rabbinic decrees and ordinances should be considered implicitly time-bound. The reason I say this is that the rabbis of long ago could never have imagined a world like the one we live in today. To take just a few examples, they thought of a town as consisting of a main road, with pathways leading off to a yard shared by several houses of, at most, two stories. This model of a town determined laws of carrying on Shabbat. They could not have imagined a modern city with superhighways, multistory apartment buildings, and modern city streets. They had no idea of the changes that would occur in the perception of the public square. They could never have imagined the world’s technological immersion and subtle, and not so subtle, changes in the psychology of modern people. They could never have envisioned a modern woman or a contemporary economy. They had no idea of scientific knowledge that would reveal the flimsiness of an appreciable number of their factual beliefs about the world. The Halachah is marked in numerous places by mistaken assumptions about the world. The legislators could not have known how to weigh the present-day negative consequences of a decree against its present positive features. They could not have envisioned the modern country of Israel

81 Rabbi Asher, Commentary to Tractate Beizah, 1:3.

A Response to the Present-Day Ideological Critique

with its radical difference from the conditions of Jewish life when Jewish law flourished. Our world is far beyond their imagination. I propose for consideration, then, that many rabbinic edicts could be considered implicitly timebound, and that they could now fall into oblivion. The same could apply to some Talmudic legal precedents and laws that have become uncritically accepted. This attitude toward many of the old decrees should help revive a willingness to fashion new decrees for our times. The tool of takanot was used in the Middle Ages and was tried in Israel in certain areas of Jewish law soon after the establishment of the state. Since then it has largely been ignored except when promulgating harsh decrees against a person or a group. Once we acknowledge the inappropriateness of many old decrees, we should be motivated to make our own, admittedly time-bound, decrees. The tool of new takanot would help alleviate some of the morally problematic features I, and others, see in the Halachah.82 These three thoughts on contemporary Jewish law suggest general ways to ameliorate many of the moral problematics in our present-day religious life. Laws no longer in effect are fading from consciousness, except when willfully sought out. That much of our law today is ex post facto is not a reason to abandon it wholesale: it should enable a more flexible attitude when necessary. Indeed, new decrees could help ameliorate moral quandaries. I do not for a moment imagine that I have solved these problems; but hopefully I have suggested ways to establish a healthier obligation to God and Torah. So here we have some tools that will enable us to come closer to a solution to the present-day ideological critique against the God of the Jews. That solution includes the transformation of the God of the Jews into a Jewish God of perfect goodness. In this chapter I have addressed the present-day ideological critique. My consideration of the history-critique will follow the coming chapter which expands on the Hasidic idea of a perfectly good God.

82 I am indebted to Rabbi Michael Graetz who first made me aware of the possibility of takanot as a corrective.

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Hasidic Panpsychism: “A Portion Of God From Above” The Hasidic conception of God I have presented pairs closely with a Hasidic ontology of a person as “a portion from God above.” In this chapter, I elucidate this ontology of a person, partly by assimilating it to the concept of “panpsychism.” I then explain how this ontology helps account for the Hasidic understanding of a perfectly good God. Finally, I will double back to explain how this ontology further helps in the response to the present-day ideological critique of the God of the Jews inspired by the Hasidim. The Zohar, a central kabbalistic work, warns us to look deeper than the historical “clothing” of the Torah to see what is underneath, namely the body and the soul of the Torah (Zohar 3:152. My translations): The Torah stories are the clothing of the Torah. A person who thinks that the clothing is the Torah itself and there is nothing more, will be destroyed and not merit the World to Come. The fools look only at the clothing, which are the stories in the Torah. . . . Those who know more do not look at the clothing but at the body beneath the clothing. Woe to the wicked who say the Torah is no more than prosaic stories. They look only at the clothing and no more. Happy are the saintly that look at and ponder the Torah as is fitting. Wine needs a flask to hold it. In the

Hasidic Panpsychism: “A Portion Of God From Above”

same way, the Torah is contained in this clothing [of the stories]. Therefore, there is no need to look at anything other than what is below the clothing.

Many centuries later, Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), a logician, mathematician, scientist, and philosopher wrote the following concerning the scientific enterprise: Science can find no aim in nature: Science can find no creativity in nature; it finds mere rules of succession. These negations are true of Natural Science. They are inherent in its methodology. The reason for this blindness of Physical Science lies in the fact that such Science only deals with half the evidence provided by human experience. It examines the coat, which is superficial, and neglects the body which is fundamental.1

The Zohar’s statement is motivated by its foundational principle that everything in the Torah is really a story about the Infinite in its successive contractions until reaching our physical world, and about the process of ultimate reabsorption into the unconstricted Infinite. Thus, the stories of the Torah about people and worldly historical events are but the clothing of what is hidden underneath. Alfred North Whitehead is motivated by his version of a view that has been held in various forms for thousands of years, including by prominent philosophers and physical scientists—panpsychism. Panpsychism comes in many forms and is more of an overlapping chain of ideas rather than a single idea. This is what Whitehead wrote: “There are two routes of creative passage from a physical occasion. . . . The physical route links together physical occasions as successive incidents in the life of a body. The other route links this bodily life with a correlative mental life.”2 Whitehead means to ascribe a mental life, however adumbrated, to just about every material. I propose the following characterization of a common version of panpsychism: Panpsychicism: (1) the mental is an original element of the universe; (2) the mental adheres to everything physical; and (3) the mental exists in different degrees and forms.3 1 Alfred North Whitehead, “Nature Alive,” in Modes of Thought (New York: Macmillan, 1938), 211. 2 Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926), 89. 3 There are by now several collections dealing with panpsychism. See the following: Anthony Freeman, ed., Consciousness and Its Place in Nature, Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism? (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2006); Pierfrancesco Basile, Julian Kiverstein,

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To say that “the mental is an original element of the universe,” as in (1), is to say that the mind is as original a constituent of the universe as the physical. If we think in terms of the Big Bang, panpsychists would say that just as there was an unfathomable concentration of the physical prior to the Big Bang, there was also an unimaginable concentration of the mental. When the Big Bang occurred, then, both the physical and the mental exploded into a universe. Regarding (2), panpsychists often hold that all physical things, including atomic and subatomic particles, have accompanying mental features. The mental is fragmented in the same way as is the physical. Wherever there is physical reality, there is an accompanying mental one. (This does not mean, however, that the mental cannot exist independently from an affiliated physical reality.) When (3) states that “the mental exists in different degrees and forms,” it means that the universe’s mental phenomenology is on a continuum from a highly developed, complex, consciousness down to a very weak, dim awareness, or feeling, or sense of experience. Let us speak, then, of varying degrees of “diminished consciousness,” in relation to human consciousness (which need not be the most advanced that exists), and of the smallest degree of diminished mentality as “minimal consciousness.” Panpsychists do not ordinarily suggest that the chair you are sitting on is now saying to itself: “This person is so heavy. When will he get up already?” A few panpsychists might say that a rock has its own rock-level mental life, something like a very dim rock mind. However, generally, panpsychists would say that a rock has no rock-level mental reality, but that it does contain varying levels of diminished mentality—in its molecules, atoms, and so forth. The enhancement of the level of mentality, for the panpsychist, depends in some degree or other on the material organizational structure. Higher levels of consciousness match this. So, a rock, lacking said organizational character, would have no higher mental level than that found in its molecules and downward, where organized structure obtains. A plant, in virtue of having some degree of organizational structure, will have both component-level mentalities as well as a plant-level higher mentality. Therefore, for panpsychists like Whitehead, to look only at the physical nature of the physical world is to look only at the “coat” of reality. It fails to see what is “beneath” the coat. and Pauline Phemister, eds., The Metaphysics of Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Godehard Bruntrup and Ludwig Jaskolla, eds., Panpsychism: Contemporary Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

Hasidic Panpsychism: “A Portion Of God From Above”

Panpsychism has been held in some form or other by prominent Western philosophers. Spinoza is often considered a panpsychist since for him mind and matter permeate reality as matching attributes of God. Leibniz held that everything material had a mind-like companion, which he called a “monad,” that perceived its surroundings. Schopenhauer and Henri Bergson thought that there was a “will” in everything material; and, of course, Nietzsche wrote that “the will to power” is the fundamental force in the world. William James, at least at one point in his life, as we will see below, held a panpsychist view of evolution. At one time, at least, Bertrand Russell endorsed the idea that there were degrees of mental throughout the world, including in the inanimate in an elementary form.4 The philosophers Charles Hartshorne,5 David Griffin,6 and William Seager7 are advocates of variants of Whitehead’s Process Philosophy, which proposes a pan-experience philosophy of nature.8 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a panpsychist who believed that increasing material complexity, “exteriority,” caused increasing mental “interiority.”9 Thomas Nagel’s view that mind could never emerge from matter has encouraged others to pin a panpsychic label on him.10 Likewise, the philosopher Galen Strawson endorses a panpsychist conception of physical objects.11 Strawson is a “materialist,” in the sense of believing that everything that exists is a physical substance. Yet, he also believes that every physical substance also has mental properties of one grade or another. Scientists who are panpsychists include, famously, the physicist Arthur Eddington (1882–1944), who wrote the following about the atom:

4 Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1921). 5 Charles Hartshorne, “Panpsychism: Mind as Sole Reality,” Ultimate Reality and Meaning 1, no. 2 (1978): 242–55. 6 David R. Griffin, Unsnarling the World Knot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Griffin’s term is “panexperientialism,” not “panpsychism.” 7 William E. Seager, “Consciousness, Information, and Panpsychism,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 2 (1995): 272–88. 8 My understanding of the history of panpsychism has been helped greatly by David Skrbina, Panpsychism in the West (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005). See also David Skrbina, ed., Mind that Abides: Panpsychism in the New Millennium (Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2009). 9 See Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (New York: Perennial Library, 2002). 10 See Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 11 Galen Strawson, “Realistic Monism,” in Galen Strawson, Realistic Materialism: and other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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Why not then attach it to something of a spiritual (i.e. mental) nature of which a prominent characteristic is thought (experience, consciousness). It seems rather silly to prefer to attach it to something of a so-called “concrete” nature inconsistent with thought, and then to wonder where the thought comes from. We have dismissed all preconception as to the background of our pointer readings, and for the most part, can discover nothing as to its nature. But in one case—namely, for the pointer readings of my own brain—I have an insight which is not limited to the evidence of the pointer readings. That insight shows that they are attached to a background of consciousness. . . . I may expect that the background of other pointer readings in physics is of a nature continuous with that revealed to me in this way.12

The physicist Andrew Cochran has claimed that [t]he known facts of quantum physics and biology strongly suggest the following hypotheses: atoms and the fundamental particles have a rudimentary degree of consciousness, volition, or self-activity; the basic features of quantum mechanics are a result of this fact; the quantum mechanical wave properties of matter are actually the conscious properties of matter; and living organisms are a direct result of these properties of matter.13

The physicist David Bohm presents an intricate notion of panpsychism based on quantum physics. He notes that quantum theory challenges a mechanistic order in various ways, including that at the quantum level movement is discontinuous, entities can show opposing properties, such as, being wave-like or particle-like. He continues to note particle entanglement, when for example entangled electrons having broken apart, can causally affect one another from vast instances faster than the speed of light. In a long discussion, Bohm posits a higher level of reality than either matter or consciousness, from which there exist mind and matter at all levels of our world: That which we experience as mind will in a natural way ultimately reach the level of the wave function and of the “dance” of the particles. There is no unbridgeable gap or barrier between any of these levels. It is implied that, 12 A. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (New York: Macmillan, 1928), 258–260. Quoted in Strawson, ““Realistic Monism,” 59. 13 Andrew A. Cochran, “Relationships between Quantum Physics and Biology,” Foundations of Physics 1, no. 3 (1971): 235–250.

Hasidic Panpsychism: “A Portion Of God From Above”

in some sense, a rudimentary consciousness is present even at the level of particle physics.14

These physicists contend that a proper understanding of physics requires taking “mind,” in some form or other, all the way down to the most elementary particles. Whitehead argued from quantum physics to panpsychism on the grounds that, at the quantum level, there are only probabilities of location, until there is a quantum collapse (at least in one interpretation). This overturns the dogma of natural determinism since determinism is now replaced with probability. What partially determines the location of a particle at collapse is, for Whitehead, a freedom of the rudimentary mental at the quantum level. Finally, there is the argument that when we go down the chain of being, from human consciousness down to plants and further, we see a continuum of weaker and weaker manifestations of what seems to involve mentality. By analogy, we should assume some form of mentality all the way down to minimal mentality. I quote these supporters of panpsychism not to try to show how widely held panpsychism is. It is not. These arguments are controversial, and I cannot judge their merits, except to say that the argument for the original presence of mind in a material world should have force for a committed nonmaterialist. Rather, I want to give you to understand that this view is held by some serious philosophers and physicists in an unapologetic way, as it is by some important philosophers. In fact, there is now a serious revival of interest in panpsychism. There were three sessions on panpsychism at the April 2016 University of Arizona Center for Consciousness Studies conference, The Science of Consciousness. The Center, by its self-description, runs “the largest and longest-running interdisciplinary conferences emphasizing broad and rigorous approaches to the study of conscious awareness, probing fundamental questions related to conscious experience.”15 In the East, there are near variations of panpsychism. In the teachings of the Indian philosophy of Advaita Vedanta, there are two selves. One is the empirical self, the jiva, which is our ordinary self, thinking and acting in the world, with phenomenal experiences. Ātman is the higher self and is identical with Brahman, in one version a transcendent consciousness common to everything in the world. The difference between this and standard Western panpsychism is that here Brahman is the only true reality, all the rest being a quasi-illusionary existence that covers over the one true reality. 14 David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Routledge, 1980), 174. 15 https://www.quantumconsciousness.org/content/center-consciousness-studies, accessed May 7, 2019.

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This is panpsychism in virtue of a transcendent consciousness that is the only true reality.16 Dogen, the great Buddhist master, proclaimed for Mahayana Buddhism that all beings, both sentient and non-sentient, have the Buddha nature as their essential self. The Buddha nature is not the potential to become a Buddha but the actual, present, foundational Buddha nature within everything that exists. It is not like seeds that need to be watered to become grass. The Buddha nature does not have to be developed, cultivated, or attained. It need be only allowed to express itself openly as it already is.17 Hence, a type of meditation in which there is no purpose but to sit and do nothing, for nothing must be done to realize the Buddha nature. One main motivation for the panpsychist position is a rejection of a materialist conception of evolution. A central problem of evolutionary science is in accounting for how consciousness could have emerged at some point from a “dead” material world. The difference between mind and matter is so profound and categorically distinct that it seems impossible that dead matter could have produced live mentality.18 Materialists, who insist that only matter exists have been forced to meet this challenge by identifying the mind as physical.19 For those who vehemently reject the mind as something physical (and justifiably so), there remains a serious problem for the evolutionary science of how the mental evolved. Here is how a contemporary philosopher, Galen Strawson, puts the ruling view of the supposed “emergence” of the experiential from the material:

16 For my knowledge of Advaita Vedanta, I depend upon my reading, years ago, of Brahmasutras with the commentary of Shankara, and more recently on Eliot Deutsch, Advaita Vedanta: A Philosophical Reconstruction (Honolulu: East-West Center Press, 1969). 17 On Dogen’s doctrine of Buddha Nature, see Masao Abe, A Study of Dogen, His Philosophy and Religion, ed. Steven Heine (Albany: State University of New York, 1992), chap. 2. 18 Objection: Compare the creation of liquid water out of the two gases, oxygen and hydrogen. Is there not an equal categorical jump in the making here? Yet it happens. Reply: The difference between this and the panpsychist argument is this: The liquidity of the water is explainable by the base properties of the mixture of oxygen and hydrogen. Namely, the resulting molecules are not tightly packed together but are loose enough to roll over one another, resulting in liquidity. On the other hand, there are no plausible base properties of matter which can explain how and why matter creates non-material mentality. 19 For classic statements of a physical theory of mind, see David M. Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of the Mind (London: Routledge, 1968) and J. J. C. Smart, “Sensations and Brain Processes,” Philosophical Review 68 (1959): 141–156.

Hasidic Panpsychism: “A Portion Of God From Above”

Experiential phenomena are emergent phenomena. Consciousness properties, experience properties, are emergent properties of wholly and utterly non-conscious, non-experiential phenomena. Physical stuff in itself, in its basic nature, is indeed a wholly non-conscious, non-experiential phenomenon. Nevertheless, when parts of it combine in certain ways, experiential phenomena “emerge.” Ultimates in themselves are wholly nonconscious, non-experiential phenomena. Nevertheless, when they combine in certain ways, experiential phenomena “emerge.”20

Strawson replies to this view with philosophical scorn: I think that it is very, very hard to understand what it is supposed to involve. I think that it is incoherent, in fact, and that this general way of talking about emergence has acquired an air of plausibility (or at least possibility) for some simply because it has been appealed to many times in the face of a seeming mystery.21

So, there came along panpsychists, such as William James, who saved evolutionary science from a materialist dogma. James wrote: If evolution is to work smoothly, consciousness in some shape must have been present at the very origin of things. Each atom of the nebula must have had an aboriginal atom of consciousness linked with it. . . . Some such doctrine .  .  . is an indispensable part of a thorough-going philosophy of evolution.22

In other words: panpsychism. The panpsychist does not have to account for the sudden appearance of the mental in a physical universe. The mental, in some form or other, has been there right from the start, all the way down. The mental is as much a given as is the material. Animal and human consciousness is a smooth development out of increasing, ever-present, original mental components into higher forms. This includes from plant life down.23 Problem solved, so says the panpsychist. 20 Strawson, “Realistic Monism,” 60. 21 Ibid., p. 61. 22 William James, Principles of Psychology (Mineola: Dover, 1950), 149, as quoted in Skrbina, Panpsychism in the West, 145. 23 Monica Gagliano, Vladyslav V. Vyazovskiy, Alexander A. Borbély, Mavra Grimonprez, and Martial Depczynski, in “Learning by Association in Plants,” Scientific Reports 6:38427 (2016), claim to have successfully demonstrated classical animal conditioning in plants, influencing the directions in which they grow. Chauncey Maher has collected a large amount of data pointing to plants’ capacities to sense their environments,

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A traditionally religious person might want to solve the problem of the presence of the mental in humans by citing a special act of God for a sudden, original occurrence of the mental in the world. After all, does Genesis 2:7 not say that God formed a man from the soil of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life? And does that not include the insertion of consciousness into the man? However, it is no longer very easy for many of us to take that verse literally. We should take that verse, rather, to be pointing to God bringing into existence the human soul with its enhanced consciousness, where the manner of doing so, as much else, was by a natural process guided by Divine top-down holistic providence. Panpsychism is concerned to provide just such a naturalist (but not a materialist) account of the existence of the mental and does not contravene God’s guiding providence any more than does any other natural process. The arguments against panpsychism are equally controversial. The main objections are these: (1) panpsychism is “absurd” or “crazy,”24 (2) panpsychism cannot be scientifically confirmed, (3) panpsychism serves no scientific purpose, and (4) the “composition” problem. As far as the first objection, it simply gives strong expression to the dogma of materialism. The panpsychist realizes she is rejecting pan-materialism and need not feel shamed by the epithet. What we have here are two competing worlds of discourse, in which for the dedicated materialist panpsychism is crazy. So be it. In addition, that a number of respected philosophers and scientists support panpsychism shows that the judgment of absurdity is a bit overdone. I also should point out that panpsychism is no less absurd than some of the content put forth by mainstream scientists (the phenomenon of disentangled particles and quantum tunneling being good examples). As far as (2) is concerned, it is a correct observation, if it is direct confirmation we want. How could we possibly directly confirm that molecules have a rudimentary self-awareness? Panpsychism cannot be confirmed by the scientific method, which requires observations. However, pan-materialism cannot be confirmed by science either. How can we possibly confirm that a molecule does not have rudimentary awareness? Neither position can be verified. In this regard, then, panpsychism is no worse off than is pan-materialism. communicate with each other, and respond to events in ways that copy memory. Maher offers a sophisticated philosophical defense of the thesis that all life has a mind, even if only minimal in nature. In particular, plants have feelings. See Chauncey Maher, Plant Minds: A Philosophical Defense (London: Routledge, 2017). Maher’s arguments give prima facie support for a panpsychist view of plant life. Charles Darwin hypothesized that plants had sense organs (see ibid., 12). 24 This is said by, among others, John Searle in John Searle, Mind: A Brief Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 149–50.

Hasidic Panpsychism: “A Portion Of God From Above”

Our acceptance of (3) depends on denying any role in particle physics for the mental; and it also depends on a materialist view of consciousness. Otherwise, panpsychism might propose scientific uses, or at least explanations, for quantum physics and evolutionary science. More may be discovered in a panpsychist research program. It would be best to say that panpsychism has a limited scientific use, so far. However, (3) contains an implicit warning, of much importance. A panpsychist might be tempted at times to replace a materialist explanation with a psychic one: “Why did the landslide occur? Because the molecules in the rocks got together and decided to pull off a landslide.” Since scientific explanation relies on observable confirmation, allowing panpsychism into science might take us back in the direction of turning to angels and demons as explanations of natural events instead of observable variables. Consequently, apart from its possible application to evolution and particle physics, panpsychism must be carefully monitored in the scientific enterprise. Yet, there is no reason to think this cannot be achieved. The biggest problem with panpsychism is the “composition” or “aggregate” problem.25 Let’s say we assume minimal psychic character at the lowest level. And suppose there develops a gradual increment of mental powers as we go up the evolutionary scale. How do discrete mental particulars at any level manage to ever produce a higher form of the mental? How do molecules ever get together to produce human consciousness? Take an aggregate of a billion molecules. You have nothing more than a billion separate instances of greatly diminished mentality. How can they get together to form a higher mental form from the more diminished ones? Panpsychists will tell you that it depends on the molecules being organized in a certain material way, with certain material complex relations, but that still does not explain how mental advance happens in such situations. After all, the structures are nothing more than molecules. How do the lower mentalities get to amplify the mental level at a higher level of an organism? How do we get from micro-minds, as it were, to macro-minds? The panpsychist needs to explain how higher mental forms “emerge” from a collection of lower mental forms. This parallels the challenge to the materialist to explain how the mental “emerges” from the physical. Panpsychists have been hard at work to meet the challenge posed by the composition problem. These include various possibilities ranging from dismissing the problem as not real—micro-minds combine into macro-minds just as atoms (somehow) combine into molecules—to advocating “new 25 Ibid., 150.

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laws” that govern the passage from lesser forms of experience to greater ones, to a so-called doctrine of “phenomenal holism.” It is hard for me to say how successful this enterprise of explaining combination has been. But, I must say, it is easier to see how higher mental states could emerge from lower mental states than to see how anything mental could emerge from the physical alone. I leave the scientific credentials of panpsychism aside, for my main interest lies in panpsychism as a theological/metaphysical position, not as a scientific theory. I am interested in the possibility of adopting panpsychism as a theologically ultimate account of the presence of the mental in the world as well to provide a theological ground for appropriate attitudes to God and God’s relationship to the world. As a result, I offer a theological interpretation of panpsychism of the nature of world reality and its relation to God, one I fashion after a Hasidic ontology. In this version of panpsychism, the mind of God infuses the universe and attaches to all material existence. With the creation of the world, there was a contraction from God’s mind, a gradual fragmentation and diminution of the Divine Mind, in addition to the original pristine mind of God that remains transcendent. The mind of God is diminished to varying degrees, from enhanced consciousness down to humans, animals and plants, to rudimentary mental presence. The difference between our consciousness and that of a particle is significantly smaller than the immense difference between our diminished mentality and God’s original mentality. As God says, “My thoughts are not your thoughts” (Isaiah 25:8). When matter was created from nothing, for every material entity there was an associated fragment of the uncreated Divine Mind that diminished and attached to the entity. To speak of “fragments” of the Divine mind is to speak of localized mental centers on somewhat of an analogy with the phenomenon of multiple consciousness. Imagine that multiple centers of consciousness could come together in a single awareness of the multiple channels. We could then think of each channel as having been a fragment of the comprehensive mind of which they are a “part,” as it were. Given this, the problem of composition or aggregation of lower discrete centers of consciousness receives a ready metaphysical resolution. All of mental reality belongs to the one Divine Mind. Hence, there will be no problem to “account” for how different localities of experience “fuse” together into a higher consciousness, because there is no fusion. An appropriate level of material organization simply removes the imposed separations of the Divine Mind, allowing the experiential fragments to rest in

Hasidic Panpsychism: “A Portion Of God From Above”

their original unity, at a higher level of amplified awareness. The diminished mind of God becomes augmented as organic unity proceeds upward in the chain of being. Organic unity points to the unity of God and the ultimate unity of the Divine mind. No additional cause is required to account for this unity. Only removing the impediments to unity need take place. If there will ever be a scientific solution to the aggregation problem, it would not contradict this metaphysical fact. It would only show how the unity comes about in empirical terms. What I offer is a theological account meant to be consistent with any particular scientific view of how mental composition comes about. It just might be (and now I can hear some howling in outrage) that all fundamental laws of nature are mental laws, relating mental states to other mental states. Since there are no ironclad laws of nature—simply higher probabilities of what will happen—the high probabilities might just be grounded in the mental companions of matter. Then the physical behaves as it does in accordance with the mental dispositions with which it is associated. In that case, the regularities in nature really exist in the mind of God, while the material world becomes an external expression of the Divine Mind. A fragment of God’s mind, as it were, is so demarcated as to “want” its oxygen atom to combine with hydrogen atoms in certain ways, with particular results. The same for the hydrogen atom. Hence, physically, we can depend on oxygen and hydrogen, in the right conditions, to combine, and for the molecules to slide over one another to be liquid in form. We can determine the high probability levels of physical nature without inquiring into the mental associates because the physical parallels the mental and thus the nature of the mental has regularity discoverable materially. This metaphysical assumption need not interfere with the scientific enterprise, since, on this assumption, science faithfully records the material results of panpsychism. A theological variant of panpsychism exists in the writings of some of the greatest of Hasidic masters, this in their use of the term ‫ה ממעל‬-‫“—חלק אלו‬a portion of God from above.” (As we will soon see, often Hasidic masters applied this phrase only to the Jew, while others made no such restriction. It is the latter stance that I wish to adopt.) This concept ontologically anchors the corresponding conception of God. The root of the idea of “a portion of God from above” for the Hasidim comes from kabbalistic sources. The Kabbalist R. Shabtai Halevi Horowitz (d. 1619) dedicated an entire book to the defense of the doctrine that the Jewish soul is a portion

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of God from above, Sefer Nishmat Shabtai Halevi. In this book, Horowitz bases his thesis on the verse ‘For the portion of the Lord is His people” (Deuteronomy 32:9), interpreted to mean that a Jew is a portion of God from above.26 The kabbalistic doctrine walks a careful line between saying that the Jewish soul is literally the Infinite, which is to be denied, and saying that the soul is separated from the Infinite, also to be denied. The doctrine comes down to, for example, comparing the soul to the flame of the coal, which is neither identical with the coal nor separated from it. Writes R. Horowitz, “Souls are strings of fire that are extended from above downward.”27 Speaking with the Kabbalah, the Jewish soul is the result of the diminution of the Divine light as it passes through the creation of lesser and lesser worlds until it hits the lowest of the worlds, which Jews inhabit. “A portion of God from above” refers to the innermost essence of a Jew, whose worldly nature wraps him or her with a superficial consciousness. The portion of God from above within is to become the center of one’s consciousness. A portion of God from above, then, includes the character of one’s most basic mentality. I am not competent to comprehend the subtleties and mysteries involved in this kabbalistic notion of “a portion of God from above,” and I cannot claim to understand it adequately. However, the idea provides us with a picture of how to see ourselves, a picture the Hasidim were convinced points to a profound fact about our nature. My focus is on how the Hasidim treated this notion. There are considerable examples where Hasidic masters followed the earlier kabbalistic writings in reserving the term “a portion of God from above” exclusively for Jewish folk. There are examples of this restriction in early Hasidic writings, especially linking this Jewish privilege to the holiness of the Jewish people above all others. Here is a small sample. R. Yaakov Yoseph of Polnoyyi (1710–1784) writes that “the soul of a Jewish person is a portion of God above. That is why it is written, ‘Your people are all righteous,’ for they all can be righteous” by virtue of having a portion of God from above in them.28 R. Menachem Nohum of Chernobyl (1730—1787) writes that the Jews, God’s close nation, have an “advantage [over the Gentiles] that they have a soul that is a portion of God

26 For an extended study of this kabbalist, see Bracha Zak, Shomer Hapardes: Hamikubal Rabbi Shabtai Sheftel Horowitz me-Prag (Beer Sheba: Ben-Gurion University, 2002). 27 Shabtai Sheftel Horowitz Sefer Nishmat Shabtai Halevi (Rishon Lizion: n.p., 2015), 67. 28 Yaakov Yoseph of Polnoyyi, Toldot Yaakov Yosef (Jerusalem: Agudat Bet Vialifali, 1973/4), 2: 513.

Hasidic Panpsychism: “A Portion Of God From Above”

from above, literally.”29 R. Elimelech of Lizhensk (1717–1787) writes in a similar way that “the holy Jewish nation cannot stay at one level but must always be advancing in the service of God because they possess a portion of God from above.”30 The idea presumably is that the Divine portion of the Jew drives her upward in the service of God unless overpowered by the obstacles from her material side. R. Shneur Zalman of Liadi, head of the Chabad Hasidic movement, made one of his major themes the uniqueness of the Jewish people as possessing a portion of God from above. The Jew has two souls, one from which all evil inclinations derive, and a second soul, a portion of God from above.31 R. Nahman of Breslov (1772–1810) is quoted to have said that “The Jewish people are a holy nation, and every individual Jew has a portion of God from above in them.” R. Abraham Joshua Heschel (1748–1825) writes on the verse, “You shall be holy for I your God am holy” (Leviticus 19:2) that “I am your God, and your souls are a portion of God from above. For that reason, there is the capacity of every Jewish person to come to a state of holiness.”32 I believe this Rabbi is reading this verse not only as a command, but also as a promise: “You will be holy, for your ‘I’ is your God”—that is, your souls are a portion of God from above, therefore it is inevitable that you be holy. The “I,” the inner nature of the Jew, is God Himself, brought down to a human level.33 Often the Hasidim will write simply that a “person” has a portion of God from above, but from the context it is almost always clear that this is shorthand for a “Jewish person.” One cannot conclude from such language that every person possesses a portion of God from above. The dominantly occurring reference in the Hasidic literature restricts a portion of God from above to the Jews. Nonetheless, I have been able to discover in my databases, quite a different approach to the Hasidic treatment of the theme of “a portion of God from above.” In this approach, everything has a portion of God from above. And I mean everything—from the human being all the way down to the inanimate. According to this view, God sustains everything that exists in the world not from the outside, as it were, but from a Divine portion

29 Menachem Nohum of Chernobyl, Meor Einayim (Jerusalem: Yeshivat Meor Enaim, 1989/1990), 108. 30 Elimelech of Lizhensk, Noam Elimelech (Jerusalem: n.p., 1992): 150. 31 Zalman Likutei Amarim Tanya, chap. 2. 32 Abraham Joshua Heschel, Ohev Yisrael (Jerusalem: n.p., 1962–3), 163. 33 Ibid., 164.

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embedded within the innermost being of all things that exist. And this I call “Hasidic panpsychism”: 1. An early work of Hasidism contains aphorisms most of which attributed to the Maggid, R. Dov Ber of Mezritch (d. 1772). There we find the following different view on the subject:  lso, in the inanimate there is life, for we see that the inanimate has A existence and staying power, so there is everywhere life from God above. .  .  . And God, as it were, constricted Himself down to the lowest levels, and placed a portion of God from above within the darkness of matter.

And: Matter is the dregs, and its beauty and form come from the spiritual, which is likewise a portion of God from above. For in everything there is a portion of God from above. For there is in matter as well a portion of God from above.34

In these statements, we see an equation between the portion from God from above of a material entity and its “life.” The portion of God from above is the result of a constriction and diminution in God’s self from above to place God’s life within inorganic entities. 2. At a later stage of the movement, we find R. Klonimus Kalmish Epstein (1751–1823) repeating some of the earlier words, with an addition: God, as it were, constricted Himself down to the lowest levels, and placed a portion of God above within the darkness of matter. In all the inanimate, the vegetative, the animal, and the human, until the depths of the earth, there is nothing without life [of the portion of God from above.]

3. Still, later, R. Zadok of Lublin who often stressed the Jewish soul is a portion of God from above, also writes that “In truth, everything is a portion of God from above, for You give life to everything.”35 34 Israel Baal Shem Tov and Dov Ber of Mezritch, Zava’at Harivash (Brooklyn: Kehot Publication Society, 1991), 90:31 35 Zadok of Lublin, Pri Zadik, Kedushat Shabbat (Jerusalem: n.p., 1972–73), essay 7, p. 37.

Hasidic Panpsychism: “A Portion Of God From Above”

4. This understanding informs the following segment from an essay on “Inner Education” by the contemporary Hasidic Rabbi, Avraham Mordechai Gottlieb. “Inner education,” as opposed to “external education,” goes beyond education for proper behavior to shape the inner attitudes and feelings of a person so as to selftransform away from egoistic dispositions and attitudes. Rabbi Gottlieb writes: Inner Education means education that inspires recognition of the other. The “other” includes the inanimate, the vegetative, the animal, and the human. That is because inner education reveals that the inmost reality of all that exists is the presence of God. So, any ignoring of, or disrespect to, the honor of God is illegitimate. The presence of God is what gives life to the inanimate, the vegetative, the animal, and the human. Our great task in the world is to create a connection with the creator of all and to live in a way that relates to God’s presence to the maximum. When one lives in that way, emotions of respect and love are fashioned to all that exists: inanimate, vegetative, animal, and human. A person may make use of [the inanimate, vegetative, animal, and human] according to the laws of nature that God has created, but not to kill them according to the dictates of one’s egoistic desires. Inner education will prevent first of all an ecological holocaust, the destruction of the vegetative for money, and avoid the extinction of animals for monetary greed and for entertainment.

Accordingly, I adopt universally what R. Levi Yitzchak of Berdichev, wrote in a restricted way about the Jews: The word “I” refers to something that belongs to the person, and this life [in a person] is a portion of God from above. So, since his life force is from God the person cannot say “I,” for were the life force to be nullified, the person is nothing. . . . Only God can say “I” of Himself.36

The, as it were, substantive existence of anything depends on having a portion of God from above. As Whitehead put it, science deals only with the behavior of material objects and not with their substantive existence.

36 Levi Yitzchak of Berdichev, Kedushat Levi (Warsaw, Yitzchak Galdman, 1865/66), 66.

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This Hasidic ontology of a person helps explain why one of the great Hasidic masters, Jacob Isaac Horowitz of Lublin (1745?–1815), the “Seer” or “Hoizeh” of Lublin, would reportedly refer affectionately to the biblical Korah as “der zyde Korah,” “Grandpa Korah.” Recall the story of Korah in Numbers 16. Korah leads a band of people in rebellion against the leadership of Moses and Aaron. For this, God puts Korah and his followers to death. How could a Hasidic master think lovingly of this evil man as his beloved grandpa!? Perhaps this rabbi was identifying Korah’s rebellion against Moses and Aaron with the Hasidic rebellion against the extant rabbinic establishment of his time. I offer another explanation for this surprising attitude, based on what Korah says in Numbers 16:3. He challenges Moses with this declaration: “The entire community is holy, every one of them, and God is among them.” The word translated, as “among”—bitokham— is equally translatable as “within” or “inside.” That is the way the same root is uniformly translated at Exodus 14:16, when the Israelites are to go “into” the sea. So, the Hoizeh, I suggest, read the verse as follows: “The entire community is holy, every one of them, and God is inside them.” Korah got it right. He exclaimed for all time that a person is a portion of God above. He is the beloved “Grandpa Korah.” Similarly, R. Zadok Hakohen writes that “when Korah said that the people were holy and God was within them, that is true. For otherwise the Torah would not have written such false nonsense of Korah.37 I use this universal conception of the human soul to present a Hasidic inspired interpretation of the story of the Sinai Revelation, basing it on selections from the writings of Rabbi Yitzchak of Radvil (c. 1743). This Hasidic Rabbi’s construal rests on the view that the portion of God above applies to Jews alone.38 I re-present the idea altered for a universal Hasidic panpsychism: The life of a person is a portion of God from above. . . . How can a person not be embarrassed to take the Divine life within him and do a sin in it? It says, “You shall be afraid of your God” (Leviticus 19:14), meaning of the divinity within you. Also, “You shall not have within you a foreign god” (Psalms 81:10). “Within you,” exactly. And that is the same meaning of “And the wrath of God will burn in you.” That refers to the divinity that you truly

37 Zadok Hakohen, Pri Zadik, 19. 38 There is one place in R. Yitzchak’s presentation that he seems to intimate that non-Jews also have a portion of God above. But that small passage clashes with the rest of the large commentary. I, therefore, leave it aside for our purposes.

Hasidic Panpsychism: “A Portion Of God From Above”

have in you. And this is a good which is in no other created creatures, God has given us [the Jews] a portion of his self. (all emphases are mine)39

All the quoted verses are addressed to the Jewish nation in the Bible, and the interpretation of each involves a novel reading, referring to the inner life of the Jew rather than to an external state of affairs. For example, the verse from Psalms translates more directly as, “You shall not have among you [b’kha] a foreign god.” The Rabbi changes that to “inside you,” a meaning that b’kha can take. In each case, the verse bears the novel reading. The commentary continues: And that was the revelation of the Divine that God revealed to us at Mt. Sinai. And that is the meaning of “I [anokhi] am the Lord your God,” that is, your “I” is your God, inside you. Until the Sinai theophany, our Fathers did not know this secret, and even our father Abraham said, “I am soil and ashes.” . . . However, at Mt. Sinai it became known to us that God is, as it were, inside us really. When a person becomes free from the material, then the holy soul, which is the self of God, the anokhi, is able to see the self of God [within itself]. And so, at Mt. Sinai, when they became only souls, they saw themselves for what they were, the very self of the God of Israel. That was what they could see.40

The core revelation at Sinai, then, is the disclosure that the “I” [anokhi] (of the Jew) is a portion of God from above. R. Yitzchak does not elaborate on how this connects with the continuation of the verse, that presumably this “I” has taken you out of Egypt.” Hasidim were notorious for taking parts of a verse out of context while paying no attention to the rest of the verse, so R. Yitzchak might have had no thought for the continuation of the verse. Alternatively, R. Yitzchak might have read the verse as continuing to say that the portion of God from above within you has the power to extract you from your own personal Egypt, your own exile, and estrangement from God. This would be in keeping with the Hasidic penchant for looking inside the soul of the individual. R. Yitzchak does not elaborate on the connection, if any, between the revelation of the true self as a portion of God from above, and receiving the Ten Commandments. Yet, I have an idea that there might have been for 39 Yitzchak of Radvil, Or Yitzchak (Brooklyn: Mechon Or Yitzchok, 2009), 249. 40 This follows the Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 146, that at Mt. Sinai the “impurities” of the Jews were released.

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this Hasid and for others an essential connection between the revelation of the true self and the commandments that follow. In the name of Israel Baal Shem Tov, it is said that “You know what is above—from within you” (Mishnah Avot 2:1).41 You should know that a person is a portion of God from above, and when he attaches his thoughts up above he can know what is happening up above, for [then] everything that is happening above will pass through his mind.42

Now, given this idea, we can say that the Sinai revelation could be entirely a revelation of a person to herself, to her true self, her portion of God from above. It is this inner part of God that is revealed at Sinai A person is raised to such a high awareness of the nature of her true being that she then can know the rest of what “is happening,” so to speak, above, and so “hear” the commandments from within herself. She “hears” them from within her own soul. Hence, the entirety of the active revelation would be only the disclosure to each person, at such a level of being, of their having a portion of God above, so that the ensuing actual content of the revelation came of itself, automatically, from each person’s portion of God from above. God does not come down on a mountain. The awareness of being a portion of God from above comes down to the mountain. The people’s awareness is drawn up to a mountain level. God does not speak external speech. The portion of God from above within each person “speaks” for itself. There is no shaking of the mountain and no thunder and lightning, except within the souls shocked by the sublime revelation they are enduring, that each of them is a portion of God from above. There is another aspect to this way of seeing the revelation, and that is that when a person is exposed to his innermost being as a portion of God above, that person also comes to know that all Israelites are part of one mind—the mind of God. The portion of God from above knows this, so this is revealed at Sinai within the soul of every Israelite. This understanding of Sinai depends on the exclusivity of the portion of God from above for the Jewish people. This brings me to stage two of my interpretation, widening the scope of the Sinai revelation regarding who and what have a portion of God from above. First, we have a Talmudic passage (BT Shabbat 88b) that tells us that 41 The Hebrew is ‫ ״דע מה למעלה ממך״‬which translates straightforwardly as “Know what is above you,” what to keep always in mind so as not to sin. The reading of Baal Shem Tov is idiosyncratic, as in much of Hasidic literature. 42 Mendel, Book of Baal Shem Tov, Miketz, 12.

Hasidic Panpsychism: “A Portion Of God From Above”

A pupil of R. Yishmael taught: [The word of God] is like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces. Just as a hammer breaks a rock into many pieces, so did each [of the Ten Commandments] break up into seventy languages.43

The seventy languages represent all the other nations of the world, implying that the Ten Commandments were relayed to the nations of the world. More than that is this Midrashic passage (Shmot Rabbah 29:9): Said Rabbi Avahu in the name of Rabbi Yohanan: When God gave the Torah, no bird screeched, no bird alighted, no ox bellowed, the Ofen angels did not fly, the Seraphim angels did not say “Holy, Holy.” The sea was not distressed. Nobody spoke. The world was quiet and still. And the voice went out [and declared] I am the Lord your God.” Said Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish, when God spoke on Sinai, God silenced the entire world so that creatures would know that there was nobody except [literally: outside] of [God]. And God said, “I am the Lord your God.” And with regard to the Time to Come it is written, “I [anokhi], I, will comfort you” (Isaiah 51).

I would add that, as it were, all molecules stopped their activity, all electrons stopped spinning, and all quantum collapses ceased. Everything, just everything, was open to hearing that its “I” was a portion of God from above. On the exclusivist version of the doctrine of a portion of God from above, the reader would most likely take these passages as proclaiming to the world that only the “I” of the Jews is a portion of God from above, and not anyone else’s “I.” The world was hearing God speak to the Jews, God letting the world know that the Jews alone were a portion of God from above. However, according to the universal approach to the doctrine, which I am advocating here, these events meant something very different. For then we would understand that every entity in the world experienced a revelation that its own, individual “I,” its innermost substantial being, is a portion of God from above. God is speaking to every member of humankind about themselves, telling everyone that their innermost core is Divine. In Times to Come, the consciousness of being a portion of God from above again will rise to the surface and be a redeeming, liberating event in the life of all. If we assume that the Israelites came to know all of the Ten Commandments by coming to know that they were a portion of God from 43 My translation follows Rashi. The Tosephot say that it is the hammer itself that breaks, because of hitting the solid rock.

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above, we ought not to conclude that everything else in the world discovered the Ten Commandments because they too came to know that they too were a portion of God. There is a corresponding relationship between the level of diminished mentality and the degree to which an entity can grasp that it is a portion of God from above. A Midrash (Shmot Rabbah 5:9) says that the ability to know what was “being said” at Sinai was graded: Each person heard the voice according to his ability44 [to understand]. The elders heard according to their ability, the young men according to their ability, the children according to their ability, babies according to theirs, and women according to theirs.45 Even Moses heard only according to his own ability.

At Sinai, there were gradations in how much each entity could hear God’s voice. Notice that babies too were capable of hearing on their level. Granting our universal Hasidic panpsychism, I want to propose that everything “heard God’s voice” at its own level, from humans to quarks. All nations heard it at the same level, as humans—Jews as well as Hittites, accounting for the universal nature of the Ten Commandments. The human level is itself a diminished mentality, and so our understanding of the Ten Commandments is limited by our mental impoverishment. Lesser beings heard less, presumably only the first commandment, that their “I” was a portion of God, but they were not developed enough to conceive of any more. The world was quiet and still, said the Midrash, when God uttered the Ten Commandments. When the winds blustered again and the oceans heaved; when the electrons returned to their wearisome spin and quantum probabilities began busily collapsing; when the hawks were again circling overhead, and the birds flew to their young; when the lions became hungry, and the zebras fled; and when we got trapped once again in our ego-driven lives, this momentous knowledge was largely forgotten. But in Time to Come this consciousness will return, and we will be comforted by the “I” of God Himself as the “I” of the portion of God within everything in existence. As Israel Baal-Shem says of Isaiah 11:9, “The world will be full of the knowledge of God”. He continues: “Also domestic animals and wild 44 Literally, “power.” 45 The reference to women as a separate category reflects a Talmudic attitude that women are “light-minded,” and so will understand differently (more weakly) than men. (Talmud Kidushin 80b, Shabbat 30b, and inter alia in rabbinic literature.)

Hasidic Panpsychism: “A Portion Of God From Above”

animals, all of them will know God.”46 He further writes, “And regarding the Time to Come it is written, ‘I, I, will comfort you’” (Isaiah 51). In short: your knowledge that your “I” is my “I” will comfort you. It was through Jewish consciousness that knowledge of being a portion of God from above broke through, from the highest to the lowest levels of mentality. Why the Jews? Because it was the Jews that God chose to be the paradigm of God’s love for all of humankind.47 Ordinarily, God is not accessible to the consciousness of the world. God’s presence in the world has been less manifest ever since God “rested” on the seventh day. The Jews’ observance of the seventh day as Shabbat reminds the world that God is entirely present and has not left. I am suggesting that God did grant this profound insight into God’s presence in everything, and then prepared the world to discover it again at a future time. Nowadays, some will want to take this story about Sinai as pointing to an ahistorical fact—namely, that the Jews are live carriers of the deep knowledge of everything being a portion of God above, even if that knowledge does not often surface to explicit consciousness. The Hasidic Rabbi Yaakov Leiner makes note of the verse in Deuteronomy 5:1848 about the revelation of the Ten Commandments, that God spoke with a loud voice “and added no more.” The medieval commentator, Rashi, interprets the Hebrew words ‫ ״ולא יסף״‬at the end of the verse to be saying that God’s voice at Sinai never stopped. It keeps going on forever. The Rabbi asked that if God continues loudly to proclaim, “I am the Lord your God,” then why doesn’t anybody hear it? He answers that nobody hears it because the world is not quiet. The world is too full of noise. In fact, the rabbi says, God’s voice had been speaking the Ten Commandments from the moment of Creation. But the world was always too noisy to hear the mighty voice of God. All that happened at Sinai was that for just a moment the world was quiet. Stillness. Unsurprisingly, then, the world heard the voice that it always could have heard. In the meantime, there are times when a person can glimpse her portion of God from above, even if not aware of what she is experiencing. It should be possible for a person to experience the portion of God from above within her when her world gets absolutely quiet. Then she can experience 46 Menachem Mendel, Book of Baal Shem Tov, Miketz, section 12. 47 I offer no explanation for why God did not choose the Hittites. I am concerned here why God chose just one nation, which happened to be the Jews. 48 Christian Bibles do not match the Hebrew Bible on the number of this verse. There, it is verse 22.

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her true self. This can happen, for example, in contemplative prayer, properly focused study of holy texts, in meditative practice, in meaningful contact with another person, and in aesthetic experiences. Silvia Jonas has argued that in ineffable mystical experiences one experiences one’s true self.49 I would add that for the Hasidim the true self is ineffable because it is a portion of God from above. One can also experience the portion of God within at times of solitude. Whitehead once said that if you have never experienced solitude, you have never been religious. Solitude has the power to quieten the world for the individual even if the world out there is as noisy as an entertaining circus act. In solitude, you can create a world in which cows do not bellow, dogs do not bark, and people do not interfere with your self-disclosure. Yet, there can also be a collective experience of the world becoming quiet. In Judaism, collective experience is not the sum of individuals, but of each person in the collective experiencing the quiet of the collective as one unit, the collective of the Jewish people in the miniature or as a whole. A pristine Jewish moment of a collective experience of profound quiet, replete with history and saturated with religious solemnity, is the anticipatory moment in the synagogue on Rosh Hashanah between the end of the blessing on the shofar and the first sound of the shofar. For the Hasidim, this is a time to discover one’s true nature. The time has come to tie the ontology of a person as “a portion of God from above” to what we saw in the previous chapter on the conception of sinning and one’s relationship to God of this group of Hasidic masters. For these Hasidim, to sin is to succumb to a deceptive superficial consciousness. To be without sin is to be in the consciousness of one’s Divine essence. When one is good and pure it is one’s divinity that is good and pure. On its mystical side, Hasidism tended to envision a person to be able to abandon the superficial consciousness and become wholly absorbed into the Divine light. (This experience, though, could be only for a time. Life was a cycle of going up to this mystical awareness and coming down again to the superficial consciousness.) The Baal Shem Tov’s dichotomy between joy and sadness that we saw in the previous chapter, follows the fault line between the ontology of a portion of God above and the overlay. One could be sad only if absorbed into a self-awareness that hides her true reality. To experience one’s divinity, on 49 Silvia Jonas, Ineffability and Its Metaphysics: The Unspeakable in Art, Religion, and Philosophy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

Hasidic Panpsychism: “A Portion Of God From Above”

the other hand, is the greatest source of joy that a person could know. The instruction to serve God in joy, then, amounts to directing us to cultivate an awareness of our true selves as part of God. This was Baal Shem Tov’s interest in joy and against sadness. The directive to be in joy becomes most crucial during the annual period of penance. For it is then that a person is in danger of falling into an abject sense of self-damnation—of feeling beset by sin, corrupt to the core. Such a self-evaluation denies the true nature of the person and blocks one’s personal light from joining openly and experientially with the light above. Do not cry during this period, Baal Shem Tov tells us, unless you are crying from joy. Since there is a period of penance, that means that we can be extricated from our sinful selves. And that is only because of our true Divine nature. In other words, you must cry, but cry tears of joy. From time to time in Talmudic stories, the Prophet Elijah (who according to the Bible never died) appears suddenly to a rabbi to converse with him. One story tells of Elijah appearing to Rabbi Beroka Hoza’ah in the marketplace.50 The rabbi asked Elijah if there was anybody in the marketplace that would be going to heaven. At first, Elijah said no. Then he spotted one man and later two brothers who he said would be going to heaven. Wanting to learn why the brothers deserved to go to heaven, Rabbi Beroka approached the two brothers to ask them what they occupied themselves with. They answered, “We are jesters. When we see people sad, we cheer them up. When we see people quarreling we try to make peace between them with our jokes.” Baal Shem explained this story to be saying that when people are sad they cannot connect their own Divine light with the Divine light above. Sadness imprisons them in their outward consciousness. When the two jesters amuse the sad and make them happy people can then, possibly, access their deep and true selves. Similarly, anger toward another is purely a product of one’s “exterior” consciousness. For helping people to overcome an obstacle to their deeper selves, these two merited going to heaven.51 As we have seen, then, a Hasidic master could urge his followers on the Holy Day of Atonement to say the confession quickly and not get bogged down in it. Do not take sinning too much to heart, he is imploring, otherwise you will be in danger of seeing yourself as at one with your empirical self, shutting yourself off from knowing yourself as a portion of God from above. 50 Ta’anit 22a. 51 Keter Shem Tov, section 272.

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Some Hasidic masters took the notion of being a portion of God so seriously that they had difficulty entering the Day of Judgment, Yom Kippur. How can I stand in judgment before a God of whom I am a part? To submit myself to be judged I must believe that the judge is someone other than myself. So, Rabbi Dov Ber of Mezeritch, quoted earlier, prayed on the day of Yom Kippur for God to remove from him his self-consciousness of being a portion of God from above. Only in that way would he get the benefit of really thinking he was standing before an external judge, and so feel the need to change for the better. We saw that Reb Nahman taught that in mixed thoughts, directed at once to God and to the Golden Calf, the latter does not nullify the value of the former. Now we can see why. The two thoughts mixed together do not come from the same place. Thoughts directed to God come from the inner source of the portion of God from above. Thoughts of the Golden Calf come from the outer consciousness that envelops the inner consciousness unless we break through it to the deeper level. The superficial level of consciousness cannot nullify the value of the rising of the inner light to the surface. This is a victory for the portion of God within us. The same applies to a moment of repentance surrounded by sin, both before and after, as Rabbi Zadok maintains. A solitary moment in repentance is a breakthrough to the deeper consciousness of self, not erasable by what happens before or after. We saw the teaching that if a person could fulfill one commandment with a purity of heart, that person would merit going to heaven. Note that this is said irrespective of what other good and bad a person might do. That is because having done one commandment with purity of heart opens the inner Divine portion to connect with the higher Divine light. To merit going to heaven here is not a reward for the act. Instead, it follows from the ontology of a person in relation to God. One act in purity of heart has the power to save a person from the false, superficial perception of the self and to bind one to the upper Divine light. We saw two views on the destruction of the Temple. The first view emphasizes the greater accessibility to God after the Temple was destroyed. This accessibility is inherent in the ontological makeup of a person given that a person is a portion of God from above. It was the outer Temple, with its ceremony and majesty, which had come to interfere with that natural accessibility. The king outside the palace symbolizes how God is now naturally accessible to the “lowly peasant,” who in reality is not lowly at all. The second view of the Temple emphasizes the benefit of increased direct dependence upon God when the intermediating Temple ritual had fallen away. To feel dependent upon God is to recognize one’s closeness to God

Hasidic Panpsychism: “A Portion Of God From Above”

and ultimately to discover just how close to God one is, as a portion of God from above. The radical teaching of Rabbi Leiner in which we saw that there really is no sin, could come only from the conviction that no entity that is a portion of God above could possibly sin, any more than God himself could sin. It simply must be the case that what looks like sinning is a thin illusion, that what we see now in a glass darkly will be revealed, face-to-face, to have been the workings of the Divine, within us and outside us. For Rabbi Leiner, it is unthinkable, that a superficial consciousness could defeat the Divine within us and commit a sin. So we have this Hasidic master, and others, saying that there really is no sin. There could not be any such thing. The perception of sin in a being who is part of God from above is a misperception, the superficial consciousness masking the true being of a person. But that consciousness cannot be stronger than the portion of God that is a person. I add here a striking Hasidic interpretation of the importance of fervor and elation in prayer. Rabbi Klonimus Kalmish Shapira observes that when we have an experience devoid of emotion our awareness is, as a rule, entirely, or almost entirely, of what is outside of us. We have little or no awareness of ourselves. However, when we have an emotionally colored experience, as with fear or love, we are strongly aware of our own selves along with the external object of our emotion. From this, he declares that when we become filled with emotion in prayer, and thus arouse a full awareness of ourselves, given the context we are well placed to discover then that our true self is a portion of God from above. And this is for many Hasidim the purpose of prayer—to dissolve our sense of a truly separate self in favor of experiencing ourselves as a portion of God from above.52 Given this Hasidic view, what could these Hasidim do to try to prevent their followers from sinning? After all, they must surely have been against their followers going out and sinning, their teaching on sinning being only after the fact. There is a Hasidic saying that when Baal Shem Tov was born, Hell was burned to the ground (!) and is no more. Another Hasidic saying is that when Baal Shem Tov was born, the need to serve God in fear was abolished. Since then there remains only love of God. These Hasidic masters taught against sinning, by preaching love, not fear. People were to be made aware of their being a portion of God from above, to cherish that ontological condition and honor it through their thoughts and actions. No 52 R. Klonimus Kalmish Shapira, Hakhsharat Haavreikhim (Jerusalem: Vaad Hasidei Piesezna, 1966–67), chap. 2.

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harsh sermon by Father Arnall, the rector of A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man could have crossed their lips.53 The Hasidim vigorously taught the message of being a portion of God from above. They created new religious forms of joy and ecstasy. Dancing and drinking alcoholic beverages were to stimulate passing into a different consciousness of the self. They instructed in both energetic and meditative prayer, in which light was to meet light. And they encouraged traveling to visit the “Rebbe,” the Hasidic master, as a means of enriching awareness of their true selves. The master was said to have a special, “inclusive soul,” one that was attached to the souls of all his followers. More than one story tells of how a Hasid visited the master and came back home to report that at the master’s court he had come to a new self-energy, a new self-discovery. They say that the Baal Shem Tov was the rabbi of the horse thieves. The horse thieves would come to Baal Shem Tov to ask him to pray for their success in stealing horses. And he did. This might be an apocryphal story. However, note that such a story is not told about anybody else. . . . The Hasidic ontology of a person rests centrally in their conception of God. I offer this metaphysical stance as a fitting element for helping to blunt the present-day ideological critique toward preserving God’s perfect goodness. God is closer to us than our own breath. The Hegelian condemnation of Judaism for having a god alienated from a person’s deepest self54 is overturned and the path is open to a Hasidic treatment of the present-day ideological critique. If you are not prepared to go so far as to adopt such an ontology, please take the Hasidic ontology as a representative example of the possibilities of meeting the present-day ideological critique, reshaping the image of the God of the Jews of the Torah to conform to a perfectly good God.

53 James Joyce, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, Limited, 2001), 83ff. 54 See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, On Christianity, trans. T. M. Knox (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961).

Chapter Nine

The Multiverse: A Possible Theodicy In this chapter, I turn to the theological task of lightening the force of both the argument from evil and the ideological history-critique of God. The argument from evil wishes to conclude that a perfectly good being does not exist. The ideological history-critique argues that even if a traditional devotee can avoid the present-day ideological critique by making required adjustments in the present-day religion, that person will still find it almost impossible to explain how in the past a perfectly good God allowed morally problematic texts to exist and have powerful influence. Here I present a possible theodicy for at least a relatively good part of the evil in our world and then apply that possible theodicy to the moral problematics of the history-critique. A “theodicy” is an explanation for why God allows the evil of this world. However, except in a very limited way (due to what God might have revealed about God’s purposes or what can be reliably deduced) we cannot know why God has created a world just like ours. My theodicy, then, is only a possible theodicy, a possible explanation for why God would create a world like ours. The purpose of my providing a possible theodicy is to counter an impression that one could not possibly imagine any reason why God might allow the evils God does allow and why God might allow morally problematic texts in the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic literature. If you cannot imagine any possible reason at all why God might allow a world like ours, that could well impede your ability to live in accordance with a belief in the perfect goodness of God; and it might interfere with a proper devotional stance toward God. A possible, imaginable, theodicy, though not designed to give the true reason why God allows the evil that we know,

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would show that a justification for evil is at least imaginable, even if the explanation of the possible theodicy might not be the real one. Its being imaginable will make there being other explanations, beyond our grasp, also possible to us. My possible theodicy will not solve the problems of the evil we know. My hope is more modest than that—to help lighten the problems for the sake of the religious life. Given my previous strictures about not being able to understand God’s reasons for allowing evil, you should understand that what I am doing here is an attempt to soften resistance rather than give a full possible explanation. My purpose is to provide not only an abstractly possible justification for evil but to offer a live explanation of evil. A live explanation of evil, in our context, is one that will utilize traditional Jewish texts as well as basic religious motifs to appeal to the traditional Jewish mind. My possible theodicy does that, yet does require a bit of a stretch to somewhat nonstandard thinking but thinking that is still broadly consistent with important motifs within the Jewish tradition. My possible theodicy is a modification and expansion of the “soul-making” theodicy of John Hick. Put simply, Hick maintains that people in this world are in a process of development: being far from God (morally undeveloped) to being close to God (morally refined). However, this world is not the final stop of development, since moral development continues beyond this lifetime.1 I take up this basic direction of Hick to develop my own version of this complex possible theodicy. For this purpose, I must make the following theological assumptions, which I believe are all true. But you need not agree with me. For my purposes you need agree only that they could possibly be true. Hence, a possible theodicy. 1. I assume that God has what philosophers call “middle knowledge.” God having middle knowledge means that God knows not only what will happen, but also knows for every possible individual that God would create or could have created, what that person would do of his or her own free will in each situation in which God would create them. Based on such knowledge, God can decide whom God wants to create and not create, depending on

1 See John Hick, Evil and the God of Love, 2nd. ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and John Hick, Death and Eternal Life (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1994).

The Multiverse: A Possible Theodicy

the free actions God knows they would choose if created.2 Middle knowledge is required for God’s perfect goodness. Since God with middle knowledge is more able to implement God’s goodness than without middle knowledge, middle knowledge must be part of perfect knowledge. And perfect knowledge is part of God’s perfect goodness.3 2. The greatest possible good God can give to others is their being close to God, who is perfectly good. Being close to God means approximating God, specifically regarding God’s goodness. Just as God is good, so shall you be good. Of course, goodness in the created order is finite as opposed to God’s infinite goodness. To be good like God in my sense, is to radiate all and only good to others, doing so only for the sake of others, not for one’s own sake, to the extent that is possible within one’s creaturely status and individual capacity. So, for example, one who does good to others for the self-satisfaction of being good is not like God. That goodness comes from a desire for one’s own well-being. And one who is good to enjoy—for one’s own sake—the Divine beatitude everlasting is, in that regard, not like God. To be like God one must desire to do good for the sake of others. This includes wanting to be like God not for one’s own sake, but for God’s sake, that is because that is what God, who is perfectly good, wants you to be. That amounts closely to doing the good for the sake of the good. If one wants to be like God for one’s own sake, then one falls short of wanting to be like God. That is because there is nothing God wants for God’s own sake. 3. There are two kinds of values in goodness. One is the value of having goodness. The second is the value of obtaining goodness. Overcoming a lack of goodness is itself a value, in addition to the resultant good. When one cannot walk because of injury and she, her family, and her medical caretakers persevere until she walks, 2 I leave aside the classic quandary about free will and God’s foreknowledge. The traditional Jew is asked to juggle both, as simultaneous operative pictures in her mind. In any case, my purpose here is not to deal with all theological problems that might trouble a believer. 3 Middle knowledge is controversial among philosophers of religion, but here is not the place to slug it out with the opponents. A major criticism is in Robert Merrihew Adams’ “Middle Knowledge and the Problem of Evil,” American Philosophical Quarterly 14 (1977): 109–117. For a technical book-length defense, see Thomas P. Flint, Divine Providence, The Molinist Account (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998.)

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the resultant good is twofold: the good of now having the ability to walk, and the good of having achieved the ability to walk, to have overcome adversity and discouragement. Developing a good character possesses value above the value of having a good character from the start. So, when God creates persons who have to develop into being close to God, God gains the value of one’s becoming like God, in addition to the goodness of being like God. God will do this, though, in the best cost/benefit way possible. (Note: I am not going to offer a simplistic view that evil exists merely to give us the chance to bring good out of evil. Things will be far more complicated than that.) 4. God might be able to create some individuals that from the very first are of highly righteous character. Various religions claim to have known such creatures. But, I posit, God also creates others, who God knows will become perfected of character only through a process of becoming that way. God does so because God is good and wishes to confer upon them the superlative good of being close to God, as explained. In creating persons who must undergo a process of growth to become close to God in holiness, God produces extra value over creating only ones who are ready-made good. 5. Obviously, the justification of evil for the sake of achieving a good has its limitations. There are constraints on which creatures God will create so that they will come close to God. God creates only those about whom God knows that if God creates them they would in fact freely fulfill God’s goal of becoming God-like. Also, God creates only those about whom God knows that the process of their becoming like God will be justified, in terms of the cost/benefit of good and bad. Universal salvation is a worthy goal for God to have in creating, and God guarantees this from the start while honoring creaturely freedom, consistent with Divine assistance. By selecting whom he creates, by way of middle knowledge, God secures the outcome. God creates no persons who will not ultimately be redeemed into harmony with God.4 Obviously, taken together, these theological assumptions are severely discordant with life in our world. There are children who die young never 4 It is difficult to entertain the possibility that the likes of Hitler will be fully redeemed. To think otherwise violates my principle of universal redemption, that God creates only those who will eventually come to be close to God.

The Multiverse: A Possible Theodicy

having had a chance to develop beyond their first years. There are people who suffer lives of pain and suffering, their consciousness so filled with difficulty that no room remains to think about much else. There are those crushed by life, dying in sadness and defeat. Then there are those whose entire life is a grasping for self-advantage, until the very end. There are those who predicate their lives on harming other people in criminal and immoral behavior, and succeed; and those who have been so wronged and so hurt by life that hate and fear are their mottoes until death. None of these fulfill God’s desire that they become closer to God. And then there is the great bulk of humanity who achieve some degree of goodness in their lives but who we cannot by any means think of as having become God-like. If my possible theodicy depends on the above theological assumptions, our universe seems clearly to defeat it. The world we know dooms my theological premises, however, only if our universe is the only universe God creates. Then we need look only at our universe to calculate the good and the bad. Yet, there is no reason for a theist to assume that ours is the only universe. This assumption would be a narrowness of vision without justification. God’s goodness is perfect. God’s creative abilities are vast. It follows that plausibly God would create multiple universes, the better to multiply good. Accordingly, my theodicy posits a multitude of universes, a “multiverse.” The multiverse has leaked into the quantum physics of Hugh Everett5 and is central to some string theory.6 Given God’s perfect power, multiple universes should be a live option for traditional Jews and all theists. Multiple universes are not accessible from one to another. This is either because they exist in different dimensions or because they are each in their own “universe bubble,” with no physical way to get from one to the other. In accordance with God’s creative abilities, the multiverse will include universes different from one another in their laws of nature, including the possibility of no enduring fixed laws, in their natural elements and in their material composition. They can also be different in the kinds of objects that inhabit them and in the nature of minds. Two universes could differ also if they have the same laws of nature and the same components but have different initial conditions. Then the two universes will branch out in different directions from their starting conditions, with very different results. The possibilities are as wide as God’s perfect goodness. 5 See Peter Byrne, “The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett,” Scientific American 299 (2008). 6 See Alexander Vilenkin and Max Tegmark, “The Case for Parallel Universes,” Scientific American 305 (2011).

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In addition to multiple universes besides our own, I acknowledge the possibility of multiple locations of life beyond our earth, in one form or other, within our own universe. In what follows, therefore, my references to a multiverse and multiple universes implicitly include this possibility. Presumably, all intra-universe locations will be governed by the same natural laws that exist here on earth and will have basically the same elements as our earth. Multiple universes beyond ours, though, offer realities very different from our universe. There are approximate precedents in traditional Jewish sources for my multiverse hypothesis. Gersonides (1288–1344) considered the possibility of plural “worlds.” Gersonides’ “worlds” are not the same as my “universes,” however. Gersonides was thinking of worlds with space between them. My universes include those inaccessible to one another—possibly because they are in different dimensions. His worlds would be more like different parts of what would be a single universe, in my sense. Yet both a multi-world and a multiverse suggest the existence of realities different from what we know in this “world” or “universe.” Gersonides rejected the possibility of multiple worlds only because he thought there would have to be a vacuum between the worlds. He rejected the possibility of a vacuum and so with it multiple worlds, a reasoning that need not deter us.7 Hasdai Crescas (c. 1340–1411) seriously considered the existence of simultaneous multiple worlds. As with Gersonides, Crescas’ “worlds” are not the same as my “universes,” and for similar reasons. Yet, Crescas’ arguments for the multiplicity of worlds are equally valid for there being multiple universes. Crescas has two arguments favoring the existence of multiple worlds. His first argument is that God has the power to create multiple worlds since God is unlimited in power. His second argument follows from God’s goodness: Inasmuch as it has been established that the coming into existence of the world was by will and in the manner of beneficence and grace and it is clear that there is [in the Creator] no stinginess or reluctance to bestow good, the more He increases worlds the more He increases goodness; and thus it seems possible that there exist many worlds.8 7 See T. M. Rudavsky, “The Impact of Scholasticism upon Jewish Philosophy in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Jewish Philosophy, ed. Daniel H. Frank and Oliver Leaman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 345–70. 8 Translation into English based on Warren Harvey, “Nicole Oresme and Hasdai Crescas,” Studies in the History of Culture and Science 30 (2011): 347–59.

The Multiverse: A Possible Theodicy

Because God is perfectly good, God will want to create more than one world, to increase Divine beneficence. Now, from this it follows not only that it is possible that there is a plurality of worlds, but that in fact there is such a plurality. Since God is perfectly powerful, then God can create multiple worlds, and since God is perfectly good, then God should create more than one world. Yet, Crescas halts with the mere possibility of many worlds, not their actuality. The reason for this is that he is in a quandary over how many worlds God would create: If God had to create a plurality [of worlds] they would have to be either finite or infinite in number. However, it is impossible for them to be finite in number, for then whatever number of worlds we posit, God could have created more goodness. It is also impossible [for the worlds] to be infinite in number, for that would entail an infinite number of physical objects.9

Crescas means to say that if God created only a finite number of worlds, then God would not be perfectly good. God could have bestowed more beneficence than God granted, simply by having created more worlds. God could not create an infinite number of worlds either, according to Crescas, because, like many philosophers all the way back to Aristotle, he denied the possibility of actual, concrete infinity, as opposed to abstract or potential infinity. Hence, both possibilities are ruled out. Thus, a plurality of worlds should be eliminated from the equation. However, Crescas concludes that a plurality of worlds still might be because it is possible that Divine knowledge decreed that reality should be finite, and we have no conception of why there is no more than there is. That is, given that the number of worlds must be finite, God could have reasons, inscrutable to us as to why God created the finite number of worlds God created. As a consequence, a live possibility of multiple worlds remains. Crescas’ arguments for the multiplicity of worlds are equally valid for multiple universes. God’s power and goodness should make it a serious option for there to be a multiverse, indeed even make it a plausible assumption. As for Crescas’ indecision about there being a finite or infinite number of worlds, for my possible theodicy I posit a finite number of universes. The number of universes God creates will be fixed precisely by how many universes God needs so as to bring all persons God creates to their ultimate spiritual-ethical fulfillment. This stance will remain somewhat mysterious 9 My translation.

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until I introduce the next component of my possible theodicy: reincarnation across multiple universes. Reincarnation involves an individual ceasing to live (however that happens) and then “coming back to life,” possibly by assuming a new form. My idea of reincarnation proposes that an individual can pass serially from one universe to another. My theodicy holds that when an individual comes back to life it need not be a return to the same universe: the individual can return to a different universe, and perhaps to one radically different from the previous one or ones. The difference between one existence and the other might include a person existing in another universe from ours in a form very different from the human form with which we are familiar, including forms unimaginable to us. Jewish tradition contains a belief in life after death. One variant of that belief is personal reincarnation after death. While belief in reincarnation is not exactly one of the principles of faith, it has a rather long history within traditional Judaism.10 It is ubiquitous in kabbalistic and Hasidic literature, especially in the thought of R. Isaac Lurie. Here is what Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel (1604–1657), one of its leading proponent, wrote about reincarnation: The belief in reincarnation is a firm belief for our entire congregation, and none are to be found disputing it, except Rabbi Saadia Gaon and [Yedaiah] Bedersi. . . . And thus wrote Rabbi Levi ibn Habib. . . . “But there is a much greater portion of the sages of Israel who believe [in it], and they wrote that it is a true belief and one of the fundamental principles of the Torah that solves the problem of a righteous person who suffers. We are obligated to heed the word of these authorities, and have this belief without any doubt or wavering whatsoever.”11

This passage significantly overstates the support for reincarnation in Judaism and understates the opposition to reincarnation among learned authorities. Furthermore, it ties reincarnation securely to a punishment theology—one that assumes a new life as punishment for sins in a previous life. While a punishment theology has some use in an incarnational theodicy, I wish to extend the purpose of reincarnation far beyond punishment 10 For what follows, I have been greatly aided by Tyron Goldschmidt and Beth Seacord, “Judaism, Reincarnation, and Theodicy,” Faith and Philosophy 30 (2013): 393–417. They too suggest reincarnation as a component of a soul-making theodicy. 11 Menashe ben Israel, Nishmat Hayim (Amsterdam: Sh. A. Su’ero, 1651), 154b, as quoted and translated by Tyron Goldschmidt and Beth Seacord in “Judaism, Reincarnation, and Theodicy,” Faith and Philosophy 30 (2013): 393–417.

The Multiverse: A Possible Theodicy

for sin, for a soul-making purpose. I quote Rabbi Moshe Haim Luzzatto (1707–1746), who introduces the motif of teleological character building into reincarnation theology: The highest wisdom arranged, to further increase success . . . that one soul would enter this world at different times in different bodies, and in this way, would be able to rectify at one time that which it ruined at another time, or perfect that which it did not perfect. Then, at the end of all incarnations, when appearing before the final judgment, the verdict will accord with everything that occurred throughout the incarnations and the circumstances faced.12

The emphasis here is not on punishment but on moving forward in the direction of greater and greater perfection. For my possible theodicy this is what I envision, except that reincarnations will not necessarily occur in the same universe as before. A person will, rather, pass between universes that are constituted in very different ways. Likewise, the nature of the person can radically change. Returning now to Crescas’ problem, now it is for us to determine how limited a number of universes God might create without having had to create yet more to be perfectly good. My answer is that the number of universes God chooses to create will be the number of universes God needs in order to see to it that everyone created will pass through enough universes for them to freely reach God’s goal of becoming close to God. Assuming that each person fulfills God’s purposes by passing through a finite number of universes and that there is not an infinite number of individuals who will reach that purpose if created, the total number of universes will be finite. And the number of finite universes that God’s creates will be the exact number of universes needed for all created individuals to pass through to reach the goal. With this we have a solution to Crescas’s quandary. A modern-day traditional Jew might feel that reincarnation theology is “weird” and that in any case it is not exactly an agreed doctrine of traditional Judaism. Please remember that my theodicy is only a possible one and that it does not assert the actuality of reincarnation. All we need to acknowledge for there to be a possible theodicy is that God has the power to bring reincarnation into being, and that for all we know God would make use of it for the ultimate good of those God creates. This would be motivated by what God’s goodness could involve beyond what we know of the present world in which we live. In addition, please keep in mind that in 12 The translation is based on one given in ibid., 416.

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citing positive texts about reincarnation in the tradition I am not intending to appeal to authority as a defense. Instead, I mean only to show that reincarnation is familiar from legitimate elements in the history of Jewish tradition: it is not alien to that history. The second objection to reincarnation might be that it is commonly associated with a punishment theodicy—suffering in this lifetime is punishment for sins in a previous lifetime. A reason to balk at this would be a refusal to acknowledge that a person’s sins could merit the amounts and kinds of suffering we find in this world. This is a good objection. However, my reincarnation theology does not rest on a punishment motif. Instead, I am suggesting that quite centrally the passing from one incarnation to another is motivated by what it takes for a given person to freely grow in self-hood to his or her ultimate redeemed self.13 Punishment can also be a factor, but an emphasis on that as the reason for reincarnation will not help progress with dealing with the problems. The greatest discomfort people, in general, will have with reincarnation is because of a materialist conception of a human being.14 A materialist conception comes in two major forms. One is that a human being is a material substance having material properties only. Sensations, feelings, and the like are no more than physical states of the organism, brain-states being the favorite kind. A second form is that a human being is a material substance possessing both material and mental properties. For the second type of materialist, the mental has no independent existence: it is only an attribute of a material substance. Either way, when a material substance that is the human being exists no longer, he or she no longer exists. In that case, the material and mental properties (if any) that it has will disappear along with the material substance in which they inhere. Given materialism, there is no way to account for the identity of a person throughout serial reincarnations, for there is no material crossover from one universe to another, and so no continuity from one incarnation to another. A traditional Jew need not trouble herself too much over this difficulty since she has every reason to reject a materialist conception of a human being. She already believes in a non-material God and will believe in a non-material “something” or “soul,” whatever that might be, that survives 13 By referring to a person by “his” and “her” I mean to refer to them only as they are in one universe. The same person who is male in one universe, for example, might be female in another universe or might arrive in a universe where such distinctions do not exist. 14 A classic and enduring statement of materialism is David M. Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of the Mind (London: Routledge, 1993).

The Multiverse: A Possible Theodicy

this life, however attenuated it might be in her thinking. Sure, secular philosophers have highly advanced materialist conceptions of human identity, but these theories need not worry a religious believer. That is because philosophers have largely fashioned their theories according to their own rubrics, which are usually secular. It is rarely required for a theory to take reincarnation into account or make sense of life after death. A religious believer is within her rights to continue to wait for a model of personal identity that will make sense of non-material existence. I have been carrying on about the same person existing in successive universes until reaching an endpoint of becoming like God. But what sense can be given to the sameness of individual identity through these universes? If we consider the role of memory in individual identity, one possibility would be universes in which a person lives with full memories of previous lives in other universes. This would fix individual identity across universes. Still, there will be other universes in which such memories are absent. To pin down individual identity through such universes we can think of living through a universe as somewhat like being absorbed in a film. I will have no self-awareness; my consciousness will be filled with what transpires on the screen. Memories will be suppressed. However, when coming out of my absorption in the film I will once again connect with my memories. I will remember having come to the cinema, having started to watch the film, and so forth, and then know that it was I who was totally absorbed in the film and who then came out of the immersion and is here this very moment. My individual identity runs through from beginning to end. In my possible theodicy, when we are alive in a universe we could be totally absorbed in this universe with no memory of any previous universes. At that time, we are not aware of our overarching self-identity outside of our existence in the present universe. When an individual dies, or otherwise exits to another universe,15 she will then have an occurrent memory of life in the universe she has left and of previous universes she has inhabited. She knows them as her life and her memories and is thus able to integrate the latest universe into her accumulated trans-universe memories. She looks to the future with these memories in place. But more than this happens in my possible theodicy. One is now able to look back on that life and hopefully draw lessons for the future. God will have created only people who will in fact freely draw conclusions from the way life was back then in a lately exited universe or in a series of previous universes. Taking it all to heart, an individual is now placed in another 15 We cannot assume that people will leave a universe only by dying. There will plausibly be a variety of ways of exiting, including instant disappearance.

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universe with inclinations consequently somewhat different from those of the previous universe to the extent of having been able to learn from the past lives as remembered. One might start out in a new universe closer to God than before or it might take several universes to start to become closer to God. The idea of individual identity across universes makes perfect sense, though, if we posit that a person has a “soul,” a unique “thisness,” that passes from universe to universe. Along the way it is molded to reach its eventual redeemed state. Then one’s character inheres somehow in the soul substrate which accounts for fundamental identity—who the person is. But what if we adopt the Hasidic notion of the previous chapter that a person is a “portion of God from above”? In that understanding, the innermost being of a person is a “part” of the Divine reality, divided from other “parts” not by anything real but only by an illusionary cognition that divides the one Divine substance into “parts.” What identifies a person as the same from universe to universe will not be that chunk of the Divine being that is their inner “portion.” This is because there is nothing intrinsically distinguishable from one Divine portion and another. They are not really portions at all, but mere manifestations of our limited perceptions of the Divine. In that case what will determine individual identity might be a specific complex of individual personality traits and inclinations that serve as the crust covering over and surrounding the inner portion of God from above.16 These inclinations include a self-awareness (not necessarily exclusive) of the person one is in terms of the “outer crust” of that individual. I leave open what the multiverse endpoint would be for each created person, on this conception of a person as a portion of God from above. One possibility for the endpoint is a state most resembling God in God’s goodness, given one’s creaturely necessary limitation and one’s personal boundaries. The individual remaining with a sense of self-distinction from God. Another possibility would be an endpoint where the individual “crust,” covering over the portion of God dissolves, leaving the portion of God to manifest in God’s self once again, with no longer any alienation from its source. This would happen when an individual has achieved a pure desire to give to others—God and all creatures—without any self-interest, and without distinguishing between herself and the substance of the Divine goodness. 16 This would not be too unlike the notion of personal identity common in Buddhism which endorses successive reincarnations but rejects individual substantive identity. The identity of a person from incarnation to incarnation depends on karmic causation of the next cluster of characteristics necessitated by the earlier life.

The Multiverse: A Possible Theodicy

This would posit as an eschatological multiverse goal the Hasidic aim of “self-nullification,” obtainable by few right here in our universe. One progresses toward God, in my scheme, by passing from universe to universe. Two people do not have to go through the same universes. It all depends on which universes they need to go through in order to freely draw close to God. There will be those who will never appear in our present universe, their trajectory needing them to go through other universes. They do not need our universe to succeed in reaching the endpoint. Others that exist in our universe might appear here more than once. Some might appear in one universe, then in another, and then return to the first. You and I might cross in several universes during our journeys toward God. Otherwise, we might occupy very different kinds of universes. Now, God might be able to create some creatures that from the very first moment are like God. But God creates others as well, those God knows will be close to God only through a process of becoming close to God. God does so because God is good and wishes to confer the good of being close to God on as many creatures as possible. Persons can exist in a universe without having a human form. Varying by universe, once created, God helps individuals along in the process by providing environments and Divine assistance that God knows will help lead to success. God creates only those God knows will become like God and who are such that the process of their becoming like God will be morally justified, in terms of the cost/benefit of good and bad. God, then, creates only those creatures that fulfill these requirements, to increase the good of creation as far as possible. There are two manifestations of person-goodness. The first is the goodness an individual exhibits toward others. You ask me to help you apply a bandage to a cut in your arm, and I do so. The second is the goodness a society displays in its structure and functioning, the result of a cumulative and cooperative effort by a collective. We, as a society, collectively build and run hospitals to treat people when they get severe cuts in their arms. God has created us as socio-political beings to increase the kinds of goodness that will result from our being like God. The end result will be both individual and collective goodness. As a result, there are further constraints on what universes a person can inhabit. That is because the goodness of the will to give will not be restricted to a willingness to do only private good. It will have to find expression also in the will to give through participation in the creation and functioning of, and allegiance to, just and compassionate societal structures. Hence, to an extent, individuals must be selected for universes where at their stage of

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development they can progress in tandem with the societal goodness that matches them. God, in His great wisdom, knows how to choreograph the whole so as to achieve a God-worthy degree of goodness in the end. For everyone, the end will consist of a universe in which one is like God in both one’s personal life and in one’s contribution to a God-reflecting society. The endpoint, then, cannot be only that a private individual become like God by emptying out her self-concern and replacing it with love for others. The endpoint must include others also participating in an overarching social structure without self-concern, in a supreme expression of individual and collective goodness. Taken together, the “final” universes (there is no reason to suppose only one) will be the “Messianic Age,” where (on the hypothesis that persons remain distinct from God) all persons will abide in a Messianic universe-canopy of societal perfection—as much as it is possible for created beings—in close companionship with God. (If we abide by the Hasidic ethos, the “Messianic Age” will then be absorbed into the Divine.) Our present universe might not be one of those final universes that will be part of this “Messianic Age,” although it contributes toward the collectivity of the Messianic Age. The Messianic Age will be of such great value that all the journeys of all the individuals through the universes will be understood for what they were and will be appreciated for having been worth the effort. (Assuming, in a moment of hyperbole, which I do not advance, that a multiverse theodicy solves all problems.) In the final worlds, the words of our siddur (prayer book) will be vindicated as true when God will have “cured the sick” (in the sense of morally and spiritually), will have “freed all who are imprisoned” (morally and spiritually), and will keep faith with those who have died and (to our eyes) are “asleep in the soil.” The diversity of universes means that parallel universes are serving parallel tracks for successive universe-progressions for individuals “all the time.” Two individuals can occupy the same universe while being at different stages in their careers of developing a likeness to God. And two persons can be at the same stage of development-towards-God yet be in different universes. God the creator and redeemer knows which universe suits each one in their journey to God and places them accordingly. God creates only those whom God knows will reach the desired goal and be given cost/benefit justification. God will create such persons at a level from which they will succeed eventually to reach the goal of becoming like God. Some might be such that if God creates them with a high degree of self-centeredness, say, they will not reach the goal no matter what assistance they are given. So, God will create each one from the start at a level from which they will eventually turn out to be close to God.

The Multiverse: A Possible Theodicy

In my theodicy, one does not go from one universe to the next because of having “failed” in the previous universe. One does not continue to go from universe to universe because of having been unsuccessful in extricating oneself from the chain of universes. One goes from universe to universe in an educational process that has not yet fulfilled itself. In the end, the educational process is complete. The chain of universes is not an evil, but a good that God has created for our benefit. We need not think of a wild number of successive universes that one must inhabit in order to overcome self-centeredness. We can be assured that God would not allow more suffering than necessary. The number of universes a given individual must live through might be quite small. God, Ruler of the Universes, gives life to the dead. God, Ruler of the Universes, brings death (or its equivalent exit strategy for a given world)— the condition of our entering into new universes in which we will come yet closer to God. This would be the deep meaning of the Resurrection of the Dead of which religions speak. We are to praise God for “putting to death and giving life,” for in this universe death is the condition for the following life, for most of us. My theodicy does not require that matters having religious import in our universe be replicated in other universes. In my theodicy, the Jewish people need not exist in more than our universe, and I leave it open whether there might be a metaphysical principle instantiated here by the Jewish people and exemplified in other ways in other universes. Universes can differ in many and broad ways, including in this. Alternatively, the role the Jewish people play on earth in our universe might not exist in other universes at all. Considering the above, how do I propose to understand the nature and purpose of our present universe in the scheme of things? How does my multiverse theodicy scale down to a theodicy of this universe? A theodicy can be either an event-theodicy or a universe-theodicy, or a combination of both. An event-theodicy for a universe offers justifying explanations, in principle, for every individual evil in that universe. For example, in an event-theodicy one might propose that some bad things are punishment for a sin committed in this life or in previous lives, that others are meant to provide opportunities for doing good, and that others still are not really bad. Or one might propose that natural evil—earthquakes, floods, plagues, and the like—in a given universe is due to the willful rebellion of angels. Their freewill overbalances the bad results. Or, more broadly, an event-theodicy would say that every evil that exists causally contributes to the emergence

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of a specific good or several goods that it is its purpose to produce. Without that particular evil, the good in question would not come to be. In a universe-theodicy, in contrast, one explains why God is justified in creating the kind of universe in question with the overall nature that it has, without attempting to explain, even in principle, specific evils in that universe. Once we understand that a universe of that nature is justified, we can more easily accept the possibility that the evils of that universe follow from its justified nature and accept that God has calibrated the universe in question to achieve the ultimate good. This would be without claiming that each evil in that universe is required to help cause a particular good. One major consequence of the difference between an event-theodicy and a universe-theodicy is the possibility of justifying God creating a universe in which chance events are the rule, or at least occur. In an event-theodicy this must be mostly ruled out since every evil must be designed to bring about some good that would not be obtainable otherwise. This cannot be left to chance. In a universe-theodicy, on the other hand, in principle, one might argue for the justification of God creating one or more universes in which chance dominates or occurs. The theodicy then will focus on the advantage of having chance events in a universe, to one extent or another. The theodicy I present here for our universe is a universe-theodicy, with only a secondary appeal to an event-theodicy. This comes from the acknowledgment that chance events occur in our universe. The theodicy devotes itself to advancing possible reasons why God would create universes in the multiverse in which chance plays an important part. At the same time, I reserve the possibility to explain events in terms of limited, direct Divine intervention beyond the occurrence of chance events. Our universe certainly appears to be one in which individuals and societies are subject to chance events. Indeed, several Jewish philosophers of the Middle Ages thought of our existence as heavily “governed” by chance. In The Guide of the Perplexed, Maimonides wrote: I do not by any means believe that this particular leaf has fallen because of a providence watching over it; nor that this spider has devoured this fly because God has now decreed and willed something concerning individuals. . . . For all of this is in my opinion due to pure chance (3:17).

And: Divine Providence for human beings is graded according to the degree of human perfection: Accordingly, Divine Providence does not watch in an equal manner over all the individuals of the human species, but providence

The Multiverse: A Possible Theodicy

is graded as their human perfection is graded. . . . As for the ignorant and disobedient, their state is despicable. . . . and they have been relegated to the rank of the individuals of all other species of animals (3:18).

Nachmanides (1194–1270) took an even more restrictive view of Divine Providence, restricting it to the “saintly” only: God’s knowledge, which is His Providence in the lowly world, pertains to the preservation of species. And also, human beings are given over in [the world] to chance, until their time of judgment. However, to His saintly ones, He gives attention to know him as an individual, to have His protection cling to him always. (Nachmanides on Genesis 18:19. My translation.)17

Similarly, Bahya ben Asher (thirteenth century) writes that The providence to save one from chance events does not exist for all humans, even in Israel, except for the saintly among them, whom God saves from chance events, to which other people are given over. (Bahya bar Asher, n.d. on Genesis 18:19. My translation and my emphasis.)18

Gersonides (1288–1344), is commonly understood to hold a view of providence akin to that of Maimonides, namely, that providence does not hold for most individual persons, but holds only to the extent to which rare persons “unite with God,” by reaching appropriate intellectual levels of understanding. Thus, in discussing the book of Job, Gersonides gives as the correct view of providence that Providence extended to the intellectual man is primarily because of his individual capacity to bring his potential power of conception into actuality. . . . and since wickedness prevents men from conceiving exalted ideas, as was stated by Job himself, it follows that no providence is extended to the wicked, but they are left to the evil fate destined for them.19

Considering these respectable sources on providence and chance, there is no doctrinal reason to stick with a strong version of Divine Providence 17 Moshe ben Nachman, Commentaries to the Torah (Hebrew) Volume One (Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 1959/60), 110. However, elsewhere Nachmanides says otherwise, implying strict providence. 18 Bahya bar Asher, Midrash on the Five Books of the Torah (n.d.: n.p.), Vol.1, 67. 19 Abraham L. Lassen, ed. and trans., The Commentary of Levi ben Gerson (Gersonides) on the Book of Job (New York: Bloch Publishing Company, 1946), 232–33, as quoted by Menachem Kellner, “Gersonides, Providence, and the Rabbinic Tradition,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 42 (1974): 677.

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that extends to all particular events and to all individuals. So, I will allow appearances to undergird the assumption that our universe has a good amount of chance driving it. Accordingly, I will advocate what I have called elsewhere moderate providence in which chance prevails, on one level, while a guiding Divine Providence exists on a higher level in a holistic fashion.20 In moderate providence, God determines broad outcomes without necessarily determining the details that comprise that outcome. One way this can happen is by what is called “top-down” or “downward” causation. Top-down causation transpires when higher level organizing principles influence elements at a lower level, in such a way that the resulting state of affairs cannot be attributed to the cumulative properties of the lower elements themselves. This means chance and randomness at the level of components, while the higher level imposes an overall broad organization on the chance events, in a holistic constraining and directing process. This is somewhat like when I pour sugar into a bowl through a funnel. I do not determine the micro-path of any granule, and I do not fix the place where the granule will land in the bowl. Yet, by pouring into the funnel I determine that the granules will end up somewhere inside the bowl, and not somewhere else. I will have provided a constraining framework for where the sugar will be, namely in the bowl, while not determining for any grain of sugar the spot it will be when I finish pouring. A good example of a high-level constraint of this kind in nature on chance events is in the notion of theistically directed evolution. In theistically directed evolution, the changes in the genetic profile of an organism can be due to chance, in there being no laws or regularity under which the changes can be subsumed at the empirical level. At the same time, the genetic chance events and accompanying environmental chance variations can, at a high level of guiding Divine Providence, be constrained into a corridor of possibilities (the “bowl,” having its own shape and size) that will direct evolutionary history in a general direction that providence determines.21 Divine Providence lets chance prevail at the micro-level while seeing to it that all ends in the right way at the macro-level. Our universe, then, is one of the universes in which chance abounds, while other universes will be of a different nature, by degrees or entirely. 20 For a fuller presentation of moderate providence see Jerome Gellman, This Was from God: A Contemporary Theology of Torah and History (Brighton: Academic Studies Press, 2016). 21 For a version of directed evolution see Arthur Peacocke, Evolution, The Disguised Friend of Faith? (West Conshohocken: Templeton Foundation Press, 2004).

The Multiverse: A Possible Theodicy

And in this universe of ours, chance prevails within generally recognizable regularities of nature. It is a universe much characterized by a top-down Divine, guiding, holistic causality. Universes also will differ regarding the degree to which God is accessible to the creatures of the universe. In some universes God might not be accessible at all. In others, God will be open to view, as it were, for all to see. In others, God will be accessible to a degree, in moments of revelation, within individual souls, or as detectable behind the scenes. Our universe is one, at least in our little sector of it, that has appearances of God, including revelational moments, in experiences of God’s presence, and in other intimations of his presence. Now, my theodicy says that the persons who exist in this universe are ones whose free spiritual progress depends on their visiting this kind of universe, at least once, but perhaps several times, perhaps intermittently over the course of their multiverse travels. The justification of their being in this kind of universe consists in their needing to live for a time in a chance-dominated universe in order to progress, especially in a kind of universe where sometimes it seems to be just one damn thing after another. (More on this below.) So here is my universe-theodicy for the sector of our universe that we know—life on earth. Elsewhere in this universe, matters might be different. People on earth are the result of a long evolutionary process the key to which is survival and reproduction. Hence, on earth they typically are at a stage in their interworld journeys where they have a very strong drive for satisfying their self-centered needs. They have a dominant, self-serving drive which in turn gives rise to secondary drives for security, status, livelihood, and strong identity within one’s family, city, country, and the like. While the degree of self-centeredness lies on a continuum, the continuum is, alas, quite bottom heavy on earth. True, our evolutionary past has also endowed us with what biologists call “reciprocal altruism,” which they define behaviorally, not by motivation. That is, in reciprocal altruism I behave altruistically toward others so as to enhance the probability that they, in turn, will act in the same way toward me. So reciprocal altruism remains consistent with our “selfish genes.” Yet, scattered throughout the earth (past, present, and future) are also highly other-centered characters who float far above the landscape that extends from self-survival to self-indulgence. And then there are just plain ordinary folk like you and me who can be caught sometimes acting from genuine altruism when motivated to act purely for the sake of others. Self-centeredness is a fundamental aspect of personhood on earth and as such is the cause of suffering in two ways. First, persons cause

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suffering to others because of (what they take to be) their own self-interest. Thoughtlessness, indifference, greed, cruelty, anger, and more, are all symptoms of self-absorption when acting without concern for others. Wars and social upheavals are the same on a large scale. Governments and societies tend to expand one’s self-centeredness to encompass my state, my people, and my culture. Economic and political institutions, even when designed not to, inflict great sorrow and unhappiness, not to speak of deliberate abuses of economic and political power, as further consequences of self-absorption. For too many people on earth, as Sartre writes, “Hell is other people.”22 As we pass through multiple universes, we learn to advance in our love of others, in our love of all creatures, and through that and other means in our love of God. Love of God curls back to motivate more love of all else, since God has perfect goodness, and love of God, if nothing else, is to motivate us to be as perfectly good as we can be. The second way self-centeredness causes suffering is in the way individuals endure the vicissitudes of life. Ordinarily, we react to events from the perspective of our self-centered absorption. When things do not go our way, we react in disappointment or in a mixture of sadness and defeat. When experiencing pain, we respond by wanting only to escape the pain— often futilely. We suffer from pain. The phenomenology of pain is distinct from that of suffering—suffering being an overlay on pain. Pain need not entail suffering. Think of the child who has some pain in her finger and truly suffers, and we adults think the pain is hardly strong enough for that degree of fuss. Or, think of when, sitting in meditation my legs become full of pain because of their unmoving position for an extended period, sometimes strong pain, and yet I do not suffer from the pain. I remain in a passive state of equanimity.23 And yet we standardly do take pain in as suffering. Sickness, floods, storms, earthquakes, and all the rest can bring chaos to human lives, and are experienced almost exclusively by suffering and defeat. Now, I am not about to advocate looking with sanguinity on human suffering, nor am I about to suggest blaming people for the way they react to such occurrences in their life. Suffering is real, and we must do all we can to alleviate it. But it is the suffering-response that obligates us, not the pain as such. My point is that human reactions to adversity could, in principle, 22 Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays (New York: Vintage Books, 1989). 23 “Grin and bear it” is different from what I am describing. When you grin and bear you are trying to hide the fact that you are suffering.

The Multiverse: A Possible Theodicy

be very different from what they are in fact. We are not generally capable of different reactions than suffering because of our level of self-absorption. Examples of different possible reactions to pain are sprinkled throughout history. Prime examples are religious martyrs. The Jerusalem Talmud (Brakhot 14b) tells the story of first century Rabbi Akiva, who was being tortured to death by the Roman Officer Rufus. The latter saw that Rabbi Akiva was reciting the Shema prayer, a prayer saying we must love God with all our soul, while Rabbi Akiva was for all appearances oblivious to his pain. Rufus thought Rabbi Akiva a magician who could nullify pain, simply make it disappear, or that Rabbi Akiva was somehow simply immune to pain. I propose, however, that what Rabbi Akiva was displaying was not magical nor biological. Rabbi Akiva was not experiencing pain in the way we usually do. He was experiencing extreme pain, but had overcome a self-absorbed response to pain, to offer his life to God at that very moment. Rabbi Akiva was in full pain but did not suffer. Whether the story is true or only a legend is not the point. Rather, the point is that the Talmud holds up this story as an ideal in response to pain, an ideal, to be sure, demanding a lot in this world. Early Christian martyrs also displayed victory over self-absorbed reactions to pain. Cast to wild animals, put on the rack, burned alive, roasted, beheaded, or stoned, they chose severe torture and death rather than renounce their Christian faith. I believe they surely experienced pain, but were not suffering from the pain at least to the degree we would expect. Later, many Jews were to display similar religious attitudes to pain when facing the Catholic Inquisition. In these special cases, humans have developed, or at least have recognized as an ideal, overcoming suffering when enduring pain. And, in principle, to the extent possible for created beings, human suffering could be diminished were we to be less self-absorbed than we are. In this universe, though, except for those souls spread here and there who are far ahead of the rest of us, we are a mixture of first-time stream-enterers and others not too far ahead of those. We suffer as a matter of course. On earth, we learn what it is like to live dominated by chance while being ourselves equipped with a robust measure of self-concern and self-indulgence. We come to know what it is to experience pain as suffering. We become acquainted up close with how it is to respond to events as disappointments and as causes of paralyzing sadness. We understand what it is to be driven by an inborn need to survive and reproduce. And we know all too well the anxiety, fear, and anger when we feel that these are threatened. Many of us discover what it is to experience an entire life of defeat.

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Our lives include radically immoral persons, on their own trek to God, who image for us the horror of immorality we are much more able to detect in others than in ourselves. From them, we learn the price of severe self-absorption. But we also experience intimations of a different way, one which turns aside from egotism. Reciprocal altruism (although not yet a genuine concern for others) opens a window onto the genuine love of others. God provides human models of true altruism so that the rest of us can witness what God desires for us. Genuine love of mothers and fathers for their children semblances for us both the love of God for us and the love we are destined to have for God and for all others. We ourselves rise above the mundane to perform acts of true altruism, acts that hold a mirror before us of what we will look like in a future life. And we are blessed with many gifts from God, from “the daily miracles with us” to the special moments of God’s graciousness to us. These are windows onto Messianic futures where these will be the norms of existence. Our life on earth is one, most often among many, in which we are shown both the consequences of self-absorption and the ideal of self-giving. It is one in a series of universes from which, looking back at it from the vantage point of what follows, we gain a measure of appreciation as to what extent our suffering is in our hands, both as perpetrators and objects of evil. With the new understanding as our starting point, we proceed to the next universe station, where we might do more good and less evil, and where natural evils are lessened to the degree we have learned our lesson in the previous universes we have inhabited. Some universes along the way will be brimming over with goodness and closeness to God, with only small amounts of evil. Such universes will be so in part because of their inhabitants having a greater inclination for the good from having lived in earlier universes. The amount of good and freedom from suffering that accumulates at an accelerated rate through the universes we occupy, together with the rich goodness of the future Messianic Age universes, justifies the journey in the best way possible. This possible theodicy aims to lighten to a degree the force of the argument from evil without lightening the seriousness of evil itself. My possible theodicy does not make light of the evils of the multiverse. On the contrary, the purpose of the multiverse in the first place is to overcome evil by the formation of a giving self in the place of a taking self. My possible theodicy demands wanting and acting to prevent evil in any universe in which persons find themselves. One cannot protest that we should not aim to eliminate evil, since God wants us to experience a world of chance, involving evil and suffering. If we

The Multiverse: A Possible Theodicy

eliminate evil, the thinking would go, we will be acting against God’s plans. So, we should just allow evil to run its course. That protest does not work because my theodicy includes God’s middle knowledge. So, God knows for every universe God creates what will be the degree of freely chosen good in that universe and God knows concerning each universe how much evil our human actions will avert. God factors in the evil that individuals will avert when God decides what universes to create. Then, progress in world travel is measured by the degree of love for God and for others and the consequent degree of good done for the sake of God and for others’ sakes. We are measured by our determination to avoid creating evil and by our determination to remove evil. In this theodicy, God in God’s perfect goodness calibrates worlds and matches them to those who will come to ultimate fulfillment. My theodicy suggests how this is possible when persons choose to want to become close to God—just as God is loving and giving, so shall we be loving and giving. Every person God creates will reach this goal in each one’s Messianic Universe in a society which sanctifies God’s Name. My theodicy has not explained animal suffering. One possibility would be to maintain that animals have human souls and so their suffering is absorbed into human suffering. While it is strange to imagine an animal with a human soul, there is a way around this difficulty. The souls that humans possess are not human in essence, only human by accident. Think of souls as generic entities, neither human nor animal in themselves, that can inhabit, indifferently, human beings, animals, or whatever forms exist for them to inhabit in this or other universes. For an animal to have a “human soul,” then, would mean no more than that they have souls the likes of which humans also have. Run through my earlier script for personal identity and think of animals—generally—as having yet a fuller dose of self-absorption than human beings. The result: a theodicy for animal suffering. Another solution to the problem of animal suffering would be to relinquish an ontology of discrete individuals altogether, in favor of the “portionof-God” ontology of the Hasidim. Portion-of-God souls would be from a unitary entity that has—for the time being—a divided consciousness in discrete physical entities. While presently separated in consciousness, all souls later will become a unified consciousness absorbed into God. This would be as though we could disconnect the right and left lobes of the brain and result in parallel consciousnesses, and then recombining the two to found a single consciousness. What we take to be ontologically separate human souls would be phases of one single expansive soul, of the Divine. Then, we can think of animals as suffering pain qua segments of one soul. Then

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we can think of that segment as passing into other physical forms in other universes. Then animals will be integrated into my possible theodicy. Many, no doubt, will laugh at this suggestion because convinced we are obviously unlike animals and obviously do not share souls with them. “I am obviously a fundamentally discrete, independent, and enduring entity. Nobody is going to take that away from me!” It might be the case, nevertheless, if you think about it, that our attachment to an ontology of individuals and our resistance to sharing souls with animals have no more grounds than a self-centered need to feel that each of us is autonomous as a separate, exclusively human self. I will not dare address here the hell of horrors brought upon the world and upon the Jewish people in the first half of the twentieth century. Dare I say that millions of Jews, including my grandmother’s entire family that remained in Opatov, Poland, murdered at Treblinka in November 1943, had to know mass barbaric suffering and cruel murder for the sake of a multiverse process of soul-making? I fear to think so, and will pass over this in silence. The Shoah is a black hole in my theodicy from which no light can escape. This is one good reason why I present my theodicy as only a partial one. After all has been said there remains the utter inscrutability of God. Do all these universes and rotating souls really exist? Are there really Messianic Universes? Again, I do not know. But I do advocate that it would be fitting for God to have created them, within the parameters I have articulated earlier in this chapter. And granting that God is “circled by a cloud and darkness,” their existence is consistent with everything we know. And their existence is coherent with theism. Hence, a possible theodicy. With this scenario, I hope to have presented a possible candidate for explaining at least a good part of the evil in this world of us. And with that, I hope I have contributed to lightening to a degree the problem of evil for a person of faith. What remains is to apply this possible theodicy to the problem of the ideological critique of history. Recall that the ideological critique of history protests the way many narratives and laws of the Bible and rabbinic literature were understood and practiced in the past. As such, they embody morally problematic content. This problem remains even if we succeeded in alleviating the sting of the present-day ideological critique. It is not enough to refashion narratives in line with a Hasidic ethos, as I have favored in an earlier chapter, or to declare that many laws deemed morally problematic no longer are operative and will not be so at any future time. For that leaves us with the troubling question how, if God is perfectly good, God allowed such morally problematic content to exist untouched in the past.

The Multiverse: A Possible Theodicy

My theodicy would say that we live in a universe in which moderate providence predominates, in which Divine influence is generally a high-level, top-down holistic influence upon lower levels of chance and free, human choice. Other worlds need not be this way. There might very well be universes with more direct Divine intervention than in this one or universes with less holistic Divine control than in ours, and so on. The individuals who appear in this universe need to be here to progress in the grand project of their soul-making. In this soul-making “bowl” of ours, filled with sugar, and with salt and pepper, we live with chance taking place inside broad boundaries set by high-level providence, in every area of life. At times we might experience the Hand of God directly in our lives, but in this universe this is not the standard scenario. The moderate providence of the Divine broadly shaping of the world— imposed upon lower level chance events—applies as well to the content of the Torah and Jewish texts. Moderate providence need not filter down to all the details of the content. For that reason, as I have argued elsewhere, the Torah need not necessarily report true historical events. And that reasoning applies here as well. That means that while the overall moral ethos and direction of Jewish tradition are providential, this need not descend to the level of all details. On the one hand, the Torah is God’s Torah because Divine Providence governs its overall direction and ethos, in what we can call “macro-management.” At the same time, it is built from components that are not necessarily “micromanaged.” At the macro level, chance and human choice join in as well. That is the way things are in our universe and the way God has planned it for those of us who need to experience life in that kind of universe. We are tested and must make our way through. Thus, the ideological critique of history is of a piece with the nature of this universe as constituted, while other universes will be different than ours, in various ways. In practical terms, this means that in this universe one is destined to experience injustices and wrongs, both in the world at large and within his or her religion. This is what it means to be situated in the kind of world this is. Here, we are challenged and tested by the world’s evils and by the moral lacunae of our own religions. In the process of soul-making we are to learn to assess properly the moral issues concerning the history of our traditions. On the one hand, we are to learn to avoid hardness of heart, antipathy, and just plain allegiance to a system, when faced with moral wrongs; but, on the other hand, we must learn to avoid being carried along with the crowd on moral issues because of our personal or group fears to be left out or not to belong. We are to face moral issues with honesty and humility and not

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be roped in by the latest rage in moral innovations all because they are the latest rage. Moral issues are not to be related to on a par with fads. For this reason, my theodicy ventures that we are given moral shortcomings in our religions, so that we learn to face God honestly with ultimate allegiance to God and to the good, and, as I have argued in the name of some of my Hasidim, and not invest our ultimate allegiance in a system, one that threatens to stand between us and God. My possible theodicy takes us beyond the constricted vision of a single universe to contextualize our situation within a large array of universes. And my theodicy does not insist that our universe is one of the Messianic universes. My possible theodicy hopefully does at least a good deal of justice to God’s power, knowledge, and goodness, as a perfectly good being. God revives the dead so they can live again in another universe; and at the end of their journeys through multiple universes, God will have healed the sick (at heart), led the tormented to victory, and saved the poor from the desires, fears, and hatreds which defeat them in our universe. A traditional Jew, then, can continue to believe in a perfectly good God if she accepts the Humility Response—that to a large degree God is beyond our ability to judge; if she accepts that the project of making God of the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic literature over into the image of a Jewish God is an ongoing obligation to God and to ourselves; and if she can imagine the possibility of God having a good reason for allowing at least a good deal of the world’s evil. At the least, that there is a perfectly good God can be true enough for her to want to stay the course.

Backward I have presented here theological approaches to the problems for a contemporary traditional Jew touched by modern moral sensibilities to believe in a perfectly good God. There are some for whom this theological approach will be superfluous, for when you love something it is true enough for you as it is. You are willing to carry its problems on your back, while muddling your way, step-by-step, through the maze called “life.” There is no grand plan—just you, spontaneously and intuitively, doing your best to avoid sudden craters and looming cliffs as they appear along the way. No theology. Life.

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Index 1 Corithians, 47n17, 107 Aaron, 34, 51, 134 Abraham ben David, also Rabad, 115 Abraham ibn Ezra, 45, 47, 82 Abraham, also Abram, 26, 32, 35–36, 42–44, 47, 51, 53, 69, 98–99, 135 Adam, 32, 39–42, 108, 110 Advaita Vedanta, 123 Aggadah, 81–82 Aha, Rabbi, 53 Ahaz, 53 Akedah, 32, 44 Akiva, Rabbi, 31, 34, 52, 66, 100, 165 Alston, William, 63 Alter, Isaac Meir, 104 Amalekites, 44, 67 Amidah, 92 Amoraim, 54 Anchorage, 115 androcentrism, 39–40, 42–43, 47 Anselm of Canterbury, 5 apologetics, xii–xiii, 2, 43, 123, Aquinas, Thomas, 15 Aristotle, 151 Arittha Sutra, xi Asher ben Yehiel, also Rosh, 116 atheism, 38, 102 Augustine, 5 Auschwitz, 60 Australia, 11 Avahu, Rabbi, 137 Ayer, Alfred Jules, 1–2, 6 Language, Truth, and Logic, 1–2 Azariah, 34 Baal Shem Tov, Israel, also Besht, 85, 87–88, 103, 136, 138, 140–141, 143–144 Baha’i, 14 Bahya ben Asher, 161 Bal, Mieke, 39 Bar Kapra, 33 Bartenura, Ovadiah, 31 Bashan, 45 Bergson, Henri, 121

Beroka Hoza’ah, 141 Big Bang, 120 Bird, Phyllis, 39 Bohm, David, 122 Braithwaite, Richard Bevan, 6–7 Buddha, xi, 124 Buddhism, 11, 14, 124, 156n16 Mahayana, 124 Cain, 42 California, 44 Canaan, 43, 45, 51 Caro, Yosef, 113 Kesef Mishneh, 113 Chabad, 90n25, 131 Christianity, 1, 7, 11, 13–15, 37–38, 103, 165 Catholic, 15, 57, 165 evangelical, 14–15 Protestant, 15 Christmas, 60 Cochran, Andrew, 122 Commandments, 28, 43, 48, 53, 70, 74, 80, 84, 90–91, 93–94, 96, 99–101, 105, 110–111, 135–139, 142 Confucianism, 11 Crusades, 57–58 David ibn Zimra, also Radbaz, 116 David, 45–46 Derekh Erez Rabbah, 32 Detroit, 1 Dimi, Rabbi, 47n16 Dogen, 124 Dov Ber of Mezeritch, 86, 87n16, 132, 142 dvekut, 86, 90, 93–94, Eddington, Arthur, 121 Eden, Gardern of, 32, 40–42, 47n16, 79, 108, 110 Egypt, 33–36, 43–44, 49, 51, 70, 135 Eibschitz, David Shlomo, 91 Einstein, Albert, 65 Elazar, Rabbi, 42n10, 45 Eliezer, Rabbi, 33, 97 Elijah, 141 Elimelech of Lizhensk, 98–99, 131

Index

Elisha ben Abuya, also Aher, 100–101 Elisha, 47 epistemology, 1–6, 10–13, 15, 17, 20, 63, 69 Epstein, Kalonymous Kalman, 87–88, 132 Europe, 58, 94 Eve, 39–42, 108 Everett, Hugh, 149 expressionism, 6–10 Feldmann Kaye, Miriam, 15 feminism, 23, 39 Fisher, Cass, 30 Foucault, Michel, 18 Gale, Richard, 63 Gellman, Jerome Yehuda, 12 Gershon, Shimon, 13n18 “Judaism and Postmodernity,” 13n18 Gersonides, 150, 161 Glatzer, Nahum, 11 Golden Calf, 51, 53, 105, 142 Goldman, Alvin, 13, 15–16, 19 Gomorrah, 44, 51, 53, 69 Gottlieb, Avraham Mordechai, 133 Grar, 43 Great Flood, 35, 44, 49, 70–71 Greece, 82 Griffin, David, 121 gzerah, 112, 115 Hai Gaon, 82 Halachah, 37, 113–117 Hame’iri, Menachem ben Solomon, 31 Hananiah, 34 Hanina bar Papa, 54 Hanina, Rabbi, 30, 54, 101 Hanukah, xii Hartman, David, 38 Hartshorne, Charles, 121 Hasdai Crescas, 150–151, 153 Hasidism, xi, xv–xvi, 73–74, 80, 82, 85–144, 152, 156–158, 167–168, 170 Hebrew Bible, xiii–xiv, 1, 25–27, 30–31, 34–35, 37–39, 43–45, 49–50, 52, 54, 66–68, 71, 77, 79–81, 83–86, 91, 109, 135, 139, 141, 145, 168, 170 Torah, xiii, 7–9, 26, 29, 31–34, 40, 43, 46, 58, 66, 72, 74, 79–81, 86–98, 100–101, 110–112, 114, 117–119, 134, 137, 144, 152, 169 Genesis, 26, 32, 35, 39–40, 42–44, 47, 49, 51, 69–70, 79, 88, 108, 126, 161 Exodus, 26, 33–35, 45–46, 51, 70, 79, 95, 134

Leviticus, 44, 46, 58, 74, 79, 98, 131, 134 Numbers, 44–46, 51, 134 Deuteronomy, 5, 26, 28, 34, 44–46, 48, 58, 70, 75, 79, 84, 93, 112, 130, 139 Nevi’im, 52 Former Prophets (Nevi’im Rishonim) Joshua, 45 Judges, 35 2 Samuel, 45–47 Latter Prophets (Nevi’im Aharonim) Isaiah, 26–27, 35, 66, 128, 137, 138–139 Jeremiah, 26–27, 33, 52, 107–108 Ezekiel, 52 Twelve Minor Prophets (Trei ʻAsar) Amos, 52 Obadiah, 35 Ketuvim Psalms, 27, 47, 83, 89n22, 134–135 Proverbs, 27, 31 Job, 27, 66, 161 Chronicles, 27, 45n13 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 144 Heschel, Abraham Joshua of Apt, 100, 131 Heschel, Abraham Joshua, 100 Hezekiah, 53 Hick, John, 11, 146 Hillel, 112 Hinduism, 12, 14 Hitchens, Christopher, 102–103 Hittites, 138, 139n47 Holocaust, 57–58, 67, 133, 168 Holy Ark, 46 Horowitz, Jacob Isaac, also Hoizeh, 91–92, 134 Horowitz, Naftali Zvi, also Ropshitzer, 92–94 Horowitz, Shabtai Halevi, 129–130 Sefer Nishmat Shabtai Halevi, 130 Howard-Snyder, Daniel, 62 India, 12, 123 Inquisition, 165 Internet, 114 Inwagen, Peter, van, 38 Isaac, 35, 44, 51, 98 Islam, 11, 14, 83 Israelites, 34–36, 39, 44–46, 49–51, 53–54, 58, 67, 93, 101–102, 105, 134, 136–137 Jacob, 51, 88 Jainism, 14 James, William, 121, 125

181

182

Index

Jehoshaphat, 47 Jericho, 45 Jerusalem, 54, 106, 114–115 Jonas, Silvia, 140 Joshua, Rabbi, 31 Joyce, James, 144 A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, 144 Judaism, passim Orthodox, xii–xvi, 1–2, 5, 7–9, 12, 15, 17, 25–26, 29, 36–39, 50, 55, 57–59, 66, 68, 71–73, 77–78, 80–82, 85, 94, 97, 103, 107, 109, 126, 145–146, 147n2, 149–150, 152–154, 170–171 Kabbalah, xv, 85, 90, 97–98, 103, 118, 129–130, 152 Kaplan, Mordecai, 109 kashrut, also kosher, 8, 20 Kehat, 46 Kimchi, David, 82 Kitcher, Philip, 11 Klimt, Gustave, 60 Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 60 Korah, 31, 134 Laytner, Anson, 54 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 121 Leiner, Mordechai Joseph, also Izbicer, 94–96, 108, 143 Leiner, Yaakov, 139 Lemekh, 42 Levi ibn Habib, 152 Levi Yitzchak of Berdichev, 133 Levi, Rabbi, 35, 53 Levin, Hanokh Heynekh, 107 Levites, 43, 46 Lisbon, 55 London, 11, 55 Luria, Isaac, 85, 103, 152 Luzzatto, Moshe Haim, 153 Madrid, 55 Maimonides, 28–29, 76, 82–84, 91n29, 106n59, 111–116, 160–161 Guide of the Perplexed, 83–84, 160 Mishneh Torah, 28–29, 76, 106n59, 111–112 Maimonides, Abraham, 82 Manhattan, 60 Marcion, 37–38 materialism, 121, 124, 154–155 McCain, Kevin, 3 Meir Simhah of Dvinsk, 114–115 Meir, Rabbi, 36, 100 Menachem Mendel of Rymanov, 92

Menachem Nohum of Chernobyl, 130 Menasseh ben Israel, 152 Messiah, 158, 166, 170 metaphysics, 5, 7, 9, 17, 128–129, 144, 159 Mexico, 11, 115 Meyers, Carol, 39 mezuzah, 48 Middle Ages, xv, 21, 82, 84–85, 117, 139, 160 Midian, 44 Midrash, 32, 35, 88, 101, 105, 138 Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael, 30–31, 33, 35 Midrash Rabbah, 32–35 Genesis Rabbah, 31–32, 34–36, 43, 47, 51, 53 Exodus Rabbah, also Shmot Rabbah, 31, 33–34, 51n20, 53n27, 137–138 Leviticus Rabbah, 34, 42n10, 48 Numbers Rabbah, 34, 48, 53n26, 101 Deuteronomy Rabbah, 34, 54 Midrash Psalms, 31 Midrash Rabati, 35 Midrash Samuel, 33 Midrash Tanhuma, 32 Sifra, 43 Mill, John Stuart, 10–11 Miriam, 36 Mishael, 34 Mishnah, 31, 75–76, 91, 111–113 Moscow, 115 Moses, 31, 34, 44–45, 51, 53–54, 66, 69n8, 70, 94, 134, 138 Moshe Haim Ephraim of Sudilkov, 87 Nachmanides, 82, 161 Nagel, Thomas, 121 Nahman of Breslov, 88, 105, 131, 142 Nakhman bar Yitzchak, 46 Nakhon, 46 Natan, Reb, 88 nativity, 6, 10–13 Nazis, 57–58, 60 Nebuchadnezzar, 34 New Testament, 37–38 New York, 115 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 104, 121 Noah, 42, 70–71 Og, 45 panpsychism, xvi, 118–144 Paris, 55, 115 Passover Haggadah, 34 Passover, xii patriarchy, 39–42 Paul, 47n17

Index

Pekin, 11 Pew Research Center, 14 Pharaoh, 34, 51, 70 Philistines, 46 Phineas, 34 Poland, 87, 94, 107, 168 positivism, logical, 1–2 postmodernism, xiv, 6, 13–20 post-rabbinic literature, 47, 50, 114 Priests, also kohanim, 43–44, 110 prozbul, 112 rabbinic literature, xiii–xiv, 25–26, 28–33, 36–39, 42–43, 47–54, 58, 77, 81, 82, 85–86, 88–89, 94, 96, 100, 101, 103, 109, 115–117, 138, 145, 168, 170 Rabinowitz, Zadok ha-Kohen of Lublin, 105–106, 132, 134, 142 Rashi, 39, 45, 47n16, 137n43, 139 Rhine, 12–13 Robertson, John, 1 Romans, 66, 165 Ronald Lauder Neue Gallerie, 60 Rosenzweig, Franz, 11 Rosh Hashanah, also New Year, 36, 103, 140 Ross, Tamar, 8, 15–16 Russel, Bertrand, 17, 121 Saadia Gaon, 71, 82, 152 Sagi, Avi, 7 Salanter, Yisrael, 71 Samuel ben Hofni, 82 Sarah, also Sarai, 42–43 Sartre, Jean Paul, 164 Saudi Arabia, 11 Saul, 46 Scholem, Gershom, 85 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 121 Sea of Reeds, 33–35, 49, 134 Seager, William, 121 Sefer Hahinukh, 43 Shabbat, also Sabbath, 8, 100, 116, 139 Shapira, Klonimus Kalmish, 143 Shekhinah, 107 Shema Yisrael, 28, 92, 165 Sherira Gaon, 82 Sheshet, Rabbi, 49 Shetland Islands, 115 Shimon ben Azzai, 54 Shimon ben Lakhish, 31, 54 Shintoism, 14 shmittah, 112 Shneur Zalman of Liadi, 85, 98, 102, 131 siddur, 158 Sihon, 44–45

Sikhism, 14 Simeon the Righteous, 28 Sinai, 7, 90, 93–94, 101–102, 134–139 Socrates, 19 Sodom, 43–44, 51, 53, 69 Soloveitchik, Joseph B., 71 Spinoza, Baruch, 121 Strawson, Galen, 121, 124–125 Sukkot, xii Swinburne, Richard, 21–22 Tabernacle, 46 takanah, 112, 115–117 Talmud, 30, 34–35, 45, 48, 52, 66, 69, 75–76, 86, 97, 105–107, 113–115, 117, 136, 138n45, 141 Babylonian Talmud, 100, 112–113 Jerusalem Talmud, also Palestinian Talmud, 35, 49, 53, 100–101, 165 Zeraim Brakhot, 29–30, 35, 66, 75, 165 Shviit, 49 Moed Shabbat, 34, 100n48, 135n40, 136, 138n45 Eruvin, 47n16, 48n16 Yoma, 35, 45 Rosh Hashanah, 35 Ta’anit, 53n25, 54, 97, 141n50 Moed Katan, 97 Hagigah, 100 Nashim Sota, 35, 49 Kidushin, 138n45 Nezikin Bava Kama, 48 Bava Mezia, 35–36, 48 Bava Batra, 48–49, 54 Sanhedrin, 31, 34–35, 45, 46n14, 47n15, 48 Makot, 51, 52n21, 91 Shevuot, 48 Avodah Zarah, 102 Avot, 28, 31, 34, 66, 136 Kodashim Menakhot, 66 Ḥullin, 54 Bekhorot, 48 Arakhin, 35 Taoism, 14 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 121 Temple, 35, 43, 100, 106–108, 110–111, 142 Tenrikyo, 14

183

184

Index

Terah, 42, 53 terumah, 43–44 teshuvah, 101 Thailand, 11 theodicy, xvi, 21–25, 61, 66, 145–170 theology, xiii, xvi, 1–20, 49, 71–72, 79, 82–83, 86, 103, 106, 109, 128–129, 145–149, 152–154, 171 Thich Nhat Hanh, 73 Thoreau, Henry David, 57 Tibet, 12 tmimut, 5 tokhaha, 97 Treblinka, 168 Tree of Knowledge, 40–42, 108 Trible, Phyllis, 39–41 Tu BiShvat, xii Tyrannus Rufus, 165 United States, 58 University of Arizona Center for Consciousness Studies, 123 Urbach, Ephraim, 31 Uzzah, 46

Valenti, Cristos, 44 Vladivostok, 115 Voltaire, 55 Weiss, Dov, 52, 54 Whitehead, Alfred North, 119–120, 123, 133, 140 Wicca, 14 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 2n3 Yaakov Yosef of Polnoyye, 96, 110, 130 Yanai, Rabbi, 66 Yedaiah Bedersi, 152 Yishmael, Rabbi, 137 Yisrael of Ruzhyn, 89 Yitzchak of Radvil, 108, 111, 134–135 Yitzchak, Rabbi, 45 Yohanan, Rabbi, 48–49, 137 Yom Kippur, 36, 100, 103–104, 141–142 Yossi of the Galil, 33 Zelofhad, 51 Zen, 73 Zimri, 34 Zohar, 85, 90, 97, 118–119 Zoroastrianism, 14