The People, the Torah, the God: A Neo-Traditional Jewish Theology [1 ed.] 9798887191935

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THE PEOPLE, THE TORAH, THE GOD A NEO-TRADITIONAL JEWISH THEOLOGY

Emunot: Jewish Philosophy and Kabbalah Series Editor: Dov Schwartz (Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan) Editorial Board: Ada Rapoport Albert, University College, London (d. 2020) Idit Dobbs-Weinstein, Vanderbilt University 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

THE PEOPLE, THE TORAH, THE GOD A NEO-TRADITIONAL JEWISH THEOLOGY J erome Yehuda GELLMAN

BOSTON 2023

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gellman, Jerome I., author. Title: The people, the Torah, the God : a Neo-traditional Jewish theology / Jerome Yehuda Gellman. Description: Boston, MA : Academic Studies Press, 2023. | Series: Emunot: Jewish philosophy and kabbalah | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2023005154 (print) | LCCN 2023005155 (ebook) | ISBN 9798887191935 (hardback) | ISBN 9798887191942 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9798887191959 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Jews--Election, Doctrine of. | Bible--Evidences, authority, etc. | God ( Judaism) | Judaism--Doctrines. Classification: LCC BM613 .G46 2023 (print) | LCC BM613 (ebook) | DDC 296.3--dc23/ eng/20230213 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023005154 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023005155 Copyright © Academic Studies Press, 2023 ISBN 9798887191935 (hardback) ISBN 9798887191942 (adobe pdf) ISBN 9798887191959 (epub) 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

Contents

Introductionvii Part 1: The People 1. A Designated People I: A Figurational View 2. A Designated People II: Figuration and Racism 3. A Designated People III: Michael Wyschogrod

1 3 18 32

Part 2: The Torah 4. A Critique of Torah History 5. On a Failed Argument for Torah History 6. Moderate Divine Providence

43 45 54 83

Part 3: The God 7. A Perfectly Good God 8. The Autobiographical Problem of Evil 9. A Conceivable, Partial, Soul-Making Theodicy for the Autobiographical Problem of Evil

95 97 104 109

Bibliography134 Index141

Introduction

This book is “neo-traditional” in that, on the one hand, it preserves three doctrines found in traditional Judaism: that the Jews are God’s chosen people, that Torah is from Heaven, and that God is a perfectly good being. On the other hand, it is a book for our times because it provides a new concept of the Jews as God’s chosen people; gives a new way of thinking about the Torah being from Heaven, despite the undermining of Torah history, at least down to its details; and puts forward a conceivable way of squaring, God’s perfect goodness with a good deal of the evil in God’s world. No more than that. Hence, “neo-traditional.” This book is a new treatment of some of the main themes of the previous three books I have published with Academic Studies Press. In the first, And God’s Love Has Overwhelmed Us, I offered a revised conception of the Jews as God’s chosen people. The second, This Was from God, offered a theology acknowledging the undermining of confidence in the history of the Torah while maintaining the divine nature of the Torah. And the third, Perfect Goodness and the God of the Jews, was a theological discussion of God and evil. All three were attempts to demonstrate how to acknowledge the challenges of modernity and, at the same time, to retain a deeply felt faith in God and in God’s Torah. Each of the three themes in this book has undergone refinement, clarification, and correction, both because of critical replies to the earlier books and also

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because my ideas have taken a different shape and their formulation has improved. The theses remain basically the same, however. Accordingly, the three parts of this book correspond, respectively, to the three earlier books. Part one, “The People,” is a tighter presentation of my defense, in the first book, of what I now call a “figurational view” of the Jews as God’s chosen people. It also contains an addition to the topic: a critique of Michael Wyschogrod’s view of God’s choice of the Jews. Part two, “The Torah,” includes an extensive revision of my reasons for rejecting the Kuzari Argument for the truth of Torah history, as well as corrections to other content. Part three, “The God,” deals with the problem of evil and the existence of God. I do not pretend for a moment to solve the problem for a believer or a would-be believer; I only want to suggest some ways in which one might be able to live with the problem until one sees a better day. This book is written by a traditional Jew who lives his religious life within the Orthodox community. And my primary audience is people who are traditionminded, as I am, or are attracted to tradition, and for whom the topics in this book are of importance. Others are invited to peek over our shoulders and hopefully gain something from what I have written. My method is to retain, religious belief as innocent until proven guilty, through solid reasons. Only then will I modify the belief, if possible, or, if not possible, I will simply abandon it or put it aside for now. In deference to the tradition, I make only the minimal changes needed to solve the problem in a satisfactory way. No more. And there are changes to be made. Accordingly, in this book, as in the previous three, I address the three basic principles of traditional Judaism: the Jews are God’s chosen people, the Torah is divine, and God is perfectly good. I defend the belief that in an important sense the Jews are God’s chosen; that in an important sense the Torah is divine; and that God is perfectly good and that we can still envision justification for at least a good measure of evil in the world. In each case, I depart from standard understandings of these three principles in order to meet contemporary challenges that cannot be ignored. There are several people to whom I am thankful for their help in various ways. Cass Fisher has been very encouraging and helpful. Tyron Goldschmidt and Samuel Lebens graciously corresponded with me on their views of the Kuzari Argument. I wish to thank Michael Harris for his published criticisms of my view of Jewish chosenness; they prompted me to reformulate my position more tightly. Andrew Gluck challenged my view straight on and prompted me to carefully weigh his critique. Steven Kepnes has been a moral support for me for some time. Alon Goshen-Gottstein has played an important part in my

Introduction

theological development. Samuel Lebens has published critical comments on my rejection of the Kuzari Argument, which have caused me to restate my view in a better way. Jon Levenson wrote a review of This Was from God, as a result of which I augmented my argument.1 Jonathan Malino read several of the chapters in this book. His corrections and spot-on questions have improved my work immeasurably. Eliot Sacks read several chapters and offered keen comments and corrections, which helped me very much. David Shatz corresponded with me on my concept of a perfectly good being, which was very helpful. Tamar Ross has been a pioneer in several of the topics with which I have been engaged, and I remain indebted to her for her thought and wisdom. I thank the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem and Bayla Pasikov and her staff for providing me with a library environment better than I could have imagined. It is there that I wrote this book. I am most thankful to my study partners— Eliot Sacks, Rabbi Levi Lauer, Rabbi Michael Graetz, Moshe Avraham, Yosef Mendelsohn, and Zev Wrotslavsky—who continue to enrich my religious life and have contributed to my ability and desire to write about these important topics. I wish to thank the staff of Academic Studies Press for their sterling work in preparing this volume. Kate Yanduganova did a marvelous job of editing which much improved what I had written. Kira Nemirovsky did a wonderful job with the production, and Alessandra Anzani, as always, was there to help whenever needed. I want to express my deepest gratitude and admiration for my teacher of philosophy, Alvin Plantinga, of the Christian Reformed Church. His teaching and personal example have been crucial in my life-long engagement with philosophy of religion and Jewish theology. I am greatly appreciative of Edie, without whom I would be wandering all alone by now, confused, in a dark forest, trying to find my way out, in pouring rain, and freezing cold. I owe so much to her. In so many ways this is our book.

The Chapters Part one of the book is called “The People.” The first chapter presents a view of Jewish chosenness that is figurational, in the sense that God’s love of the 1 Jon Levenson, “Divine Revelation and Historical Criticism: A Review Essay,” review of This Was from God: A Contemporary Theology of Torah and History, by Jerome Yehuda Gellman, Modern Judaism 37 (2017): 392–402.

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Jews is a figure of God’s love for all of humanity. Because of the figurational view it would be clearer to say that the Jews have been “designated” by God rather than “chosen.” Chapter two presents a characterization of what it is for a person to hold a racist opinion and measures the figurational view against racist vulnerabilities. I then defend the figurational view from critiques by Michael Harris and Andrew Gluck, respectively. Chapter three examines the influential version of Jewish chosenness by the late Michael Wyschogrod. I argue that Wyschogrod’s reasoning for his view is non-convincing. So, I remain with my figurational view. Part two is on the Torah. Chapter four briefly surveys the reasons why the history of the Torah has been put into doubt by modern research. This requires a new faith-approach to the sense in which the Torah is from God. Chapter five examines the so-called “Kuzari Argument” for the truth of Torah history. I examine this argument because in recent times it has become popular in some Orthodox circles as a way of convincing Jews to become Orthodox. I am all in favor of people becoming some sort of Orthodox, but believe the argument fails, leaving us with the problem of history. While there is something right about the Kuzari Argument, on examination it proves to lack what it takes to reinstate Torah history in any serious way. Chapter six puts forward the thesis that a person of faith should think of God as being behind the historical process of bringing to light of the problems with Torah history, so as to lead us to a new reading of the stories of the Torah. So, when we fashion new approaches, we are not acting independently of God but as God’s servants. I recommend Hasidic literature as a prototype for a non-historical approach to the stories of the Torah. I introduce the concept of divine moderate providence to portray the Torah as God’s Torah, in consistency with modern findings. Part three is about God. This part follows the portion of my book Perfect Goodness and the God of the Jews that deals with the problems of evil and God’s perfect goodness. The seventh chapter lays out what I call “the autobiographical problem of evil.” This problem does not emerge from philosophical reflection about God and evil but due to a person’s inability or difficulty of accepting God in the face of the evil she knows. Chapter eight explicates what I propose we should mean by calling God “a perfectly good being,” a notion without which the autobiographical problem of evil might not start. The final chapter of the book provides what I call a possible, partial theodicy, a proposal for why God might allow much of the evil we find in this world. The purpose is to open the sufferer of the autobiographical problem to the possibility of being able to imagine a reason why God might allow much of the world’s evils. The theodicy is partial, for I am not prepared to advance it for some of the horrendous evils the world and the Jewish people are made to endure.

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A Designated People I: A Figurational View

In this chapter I offer a revised conception of the Jews as God’s chosen people. In our Westernized societies, especially, many of us have become highly sensitive to the enormous potential for racist judgments to create untold human suffering. The twentieth century has had horrendous genocides and racist wars, and the continued thriving of anti-Jewism. This has brought many to the realization that we must take great care not to allow racism to flourish. For that we cannot allow racism a place in our hearts, or in public (and private) discourse and activity. Yet, the idea of the Jews as God’s chosen people exposes Jews to the possible charge of racism. Deuteronomy 7:7–8 says: Of all the peoples on earth God chose you to be His treasured people. . . . Because the LORD loved you, and because He would keep the oath that He swore unto your fathers, has the LORD brought you out with a mighty hand, and redeemed you out of the house of bondage, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt. Deuteronomy 14:1–2 states: You are the children of the LORD your God: you shall not cut yourselves, nor make any baldness between your eyes for the

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dead. For you are a holy people unto the LORD your God, and the LORD has chosen you to be His own treasure out of all peoples that are upon the face of the earth. The rabbinic literature celebrates the Jews as the chosen people, as in this Talmudic passage: You have made me the sole object of your love,1 as it is written, “Hear Israel, the Lord Our God, The Lord is One . . . (Deuteronomy 6:4).” . . . And I make you the sole object of my love,2 as it is written, “Who is like your people Israel, one nation on earth” (1 Chronicles 17:21). (BT Chagigah, 3a–3b, all quotations from Talmud are given in my translation) The traditional Jewish prayer book returns again and again to the theme of Jewish chosenness. There is a daily prayer thanking God for choosing us. In traditional prayer books, a Jew blesses God for not making him or her a Gentile. Other versions thank God, instead, for making one a Jew. A prayer thanks God for lovingly “separating” the Jews from the “wayward” nations. The classically worded Aleinu prayer, appearing in the three daily prayers, declares that God has not, “made us like the nations of the world,” and has not made our “lot” like theirs. There is little doubt that the chosenness conviction has been taken to racist conclusions at times. For much of its history, the persecution of Jews by the surrounding cultures vindicated such attitudes in the eyes of Jews. After the Bible, there were the Roman persecutions, severe Jewish suffering at the hands of the Christian Gentiles in Medieval Europe as well as by repressive Muslim invasions into Spain and elsewhere. In Christendom, Jews were denied basic rights: for example, they were forbidden to join the guilds and professions and to own property. Jews were restricted to living in quarters reserved only for Jews, known as “ghettos.” In the eleventh and the twelfth centuries there were widespread Crusader attacks on Jews in the Rhineland, when several hundred thousand Jews were murdered by the Crusaders on their way to the Holy Land. Over history, there were numerous pogroms, collective local uprisings against the Jews, often led by the local priest.

1 Or “have singled me out.” 2 Or “I single you out.”

A Designated People I: A Fig urational View

There were many expulsions, from time to time, of all Jews from European countries, including from England, France, Germany, Spain, and Portugal, in the latter two countries of Jews who refused to convert to Catholicism. In addition, Jews were expelled from numerous specific localities in many other countries. (In Muslim countries of the time Jews did better, but still lived with restrictions.) No wonder that at times many Jews looked with utter disdain on the non-Jews in whose midst they found themselves. And if Jewish suffering was due to a Christian consciousness of superiority over the Jew, it was but a small step to respond with a Jewish affirmation of an immense superiority of the Jew over the Gentile. And yet, in our age, when the curse of racism has and continues to affect humanity for the worse, we could be careful to reinterpret Jewish election in a way that prevents racist understandings as much as possible, while retaining a core sense of Jewish chosenness. The concept of Jewish election by God is too entrenched in Jewish religious literature and prayer for a traditionalist to ignore or excise it from a theology of Judaism. Judaism is a religion of a people, a nation, a family, an ethnic group, whatever you wish to call it. Without a theological explanation for why Judaism should be for Jews only (including converts who become Jews), Judaism is in danger of being a mere elaborate folklore, a vehicle solely of ethnic identity, or simply what Jews happen to do. Saying simply that Judaism is for Jews and that other religions are for others misses the sense of Jewish singularity so deep in the tradition. On the other hand, a desideratum of traditional Judaism should be to change no more than what must be changed. So, unless absolutely necessary, a traditional Jew should not opt for liberal positions that abandon the idea of Jewish election altogether or water it down beyond recognition. That is not necessary. It is overkill. For that reason, I present here what I call a figurational conception of the Jews as chosen, a conception I judge acceptable. The first component in the presentation is to prepare for what comes by replacing the term “a chosen people” with the more neutral and less given to abuse “a designated people,” designated by God. At this point, of course this is only a cosmetic change, but will represent better the figurational view about to come. I offer no idea for why God chose or designated specifically the Jews, rather than the Hittites, or anybody else. My view accounts simply for why God would want to choose or designate any people to be God’s “chosen people,” and so God designates the Jews for God’s purposes. In this presentation, I cite various events in the Torah. In Part Two of this book I take up the question of the reliability of the history found in the Hebrew

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Bible. Even those of us who doubt that reliability will frame our thoughts through the images of the persons, events, and teachings of our Bible. These remain for us the language of Judaism, the cultural rock-bottom from which to begin. So, in what follows all biblical references are to be taken either as history or as the stories and images that have informed Jewish consciousness for more than two millennial, whether history or not.

Jewish Election as Figuration I present this concept of the Jews as a people designated by God in a list of points. 1. This concept of Jewish election should be taught and expounded to Jews and non-Jews alike as a viable contemporary doctrine of the chosen people to replace previous formulations. The figurational notion of Jewish election is to replace earlier notions in the popular mind, while keeping as much of the prior conceptions and language intact as possible. This is to retain the centrality of the role of the Jews, as newly envisaged. 2.  God loves all human beings equally. Here we must distinguish between two types of God’s love, one more and one less obviously recognizable as coming from God. In both cases, the divine love itself is the same, full and pervasive. God’s love is manifestly known when God openly reveals God’s love or the fact of God’s love to a person or group. This might be by a revealed message from God or by acts of God that openly and clearly demonstrate God’s love. God can love a person fully by informing them of God’s love and/or by manifesting God’s love in a clear and wholly convincing way. A theophany would be a direct knowledge of God’s loving us. God’s love is less than manifestly attributable to God when God acts in full love but as it were relatively behind the scenes. Here God might act in a way that leaves hints and traces that here it is God’s love behind events. Such love demands discernment and appropriation by the subject. God’s love can come in subtle ways, in ways that are not obvious. God can love a person or a group fully without that person or group fully realizing it. God can work lovingly through natural means, from a distance, putting into place a chain of events for the good. And God’s love can be inscrutable, beyond detection at

A Designated People I: A Fig urational View

least at a given time. Hebrew calls the world olam, which the mystical Kabbalah stresses as coming from the word for “hiddenness.” God is hidden yet detectable at the same time. In any case, whether transparent or not, the love that comes forth from God is by nature full and fullhearted for everyone. 3.  There is greatly more value in people coming close to God in freedom than in being coerced into relationship with God. So, generally God will not coerce people to come close to God. Here is a reason why God’s love is not regularly known to be God’s love. There is greatly more value in love we freely come to and to which we freely reciprocate than in love compelled or pressured into existence. One can question whether love coerced is genuine love at all. So, as part of God’s love for a person, God will want to withhold manifestly known love, which might overwhelm a person and would leave them with little or no self-will to come to God in freedom. So, generally God will refrain from coercive acts to create free, reciprocal love of God. Such love comes with a degree of ambiguity, allowing the person to choose to understand matters otherwise. Ordinarily, God’s love is more like an invitation of love from love. God creates the world in six days and then rests on the seventh day. For six days, God creates, pouring God’s creative energy into the world, the world directly impacted by God’s overbearing presence. It is all hands-on, manifest, intervention. God appears to Adam, ordering him not to eat from the tree of good and evil. God’s presence is obvious and visibly active in the affairs of the world. And on the seventh day God rests. On the seventh day, that is, God recedes from God’s obvious active presence in the world (except on rare occasions), thereby creating the space for God’s creatures to come to God freely, by choice, and not by overwhelming coercion. This is one reason why the seventh day is holy, for having provided for the long-range purpose of creation for people to come to God in freedom and self-motivation.3 Sefer ha-Chinukh enunciates this principle in the following explanation for the Biblical commandment to keep a fire burning constantly on the altar in the Tabernacle even though a fire from heaven descended daily onto the altar (mitzvah 132):

3 See chapter nine where I argue for universal “salvation,” meaning that every person eventually succeeds to come to God in freedom.

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We and every wise person knows that in great miracles, which God performs with His goodness to people, He will always do them in a way of hiddenness, so that it appears somewhat as though they are plainly natural, or nearly natural. Even with the miracle of the parting of the Red Sea, which was an explicit miracle, it is written that God moved the sea by way of an easterly wind the entire night, making the sea dry. For that reason, we are commanded to burn a fire on the altar, even though a fire would descend from heaven, in order to hide the miracle [of the fire descending from heaven], so that the fire that came from heaven would not be visible in its descent.4 The idea is that God does not want to overwhelm us with His miracles. To give us the space for choosing Him freely, God must hide miracles from view or give them enough of a naturalistic face to render them non-coercive. In his Philosophical Fragments, Søren Kierkegaard presents a poignant parable of a king who falls in love with a humble maiden. The king fears he will overwhelm the maiden with “all the pomp of his power,” thereby depriving her of her autonomy and sense of self-worth so necessary for mutual love. So, the king limits himself, and becomes a humble servant, so as to join with her in love freely given. Just so, says Kierkegaard, “God . . . picks his steps more carefully than if angels guided them, not to prevent his foot from stumbling against a stone, but lest he trample human beings in the dust.” God must limit his exposure so that people will come to him freely.5 4.  Yet, from God’s love of people, God wishes them to know of God’s love for them. Knowing of God’s love, they would be encouraged to turn to God in freedom, returning love to God. Ordinarily, God will not manifest God’s love to a degree that will rob people of their freely choosing to come to God. But God wishes them to know of God’s full love for them in a non-compulsive manner. So God decides to pick a people for whom God’s loving relationship will be fully manifestly known. Others will have in God’s relationship to this people a living figuration of God’s present love 4 Sefer ha-Chinukh ( Jerusalem: Or ha-Chaim, 2001), 161–162. The author of this work is in dispute. My translation. 5 See Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, trans. David W. Swenson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), 32–34. Kierkegaard carries the parable to a Christological teaching.

A Designated People I: A Fig urational View

of them and a prefiguration of God’s obvious love for them. Manifest love will emerge in freely coming to God. God’s so choosing a nation as a figuration need be only part of God’s invitation to creatures to come to God in freedom. God also will scatter special spiritual individuals throughout history and nations for the purpose of advertising God’s love for all. And God will provide ancillary manifestations of love in various religious and cultural contexts. However, the earliest and most long-lasting sign of God’s love will be to a people, a nation, toward whom God has fully revealed his love, in a theophany, to a nation that continues alive and vibrant through it all. That is so that God’s love will be manifest not only in the realm of one’s personal life, but in guiding national political-social structures. What is for Caesar is also for God. This manifestation is meant to be a figuration of God’s equal love for all. Out of love for all people, God partly fulfills God’s desire that people come to God in freedom, by designating a people as a figuration of God’s love for all. In that way God can demonstrate through this people, as prototype, the love God has for all. In time, religions other than Judaism and other than of the Jews arise to help fulfill God’s purposes. But the Jews, aye the Jews, are the ancient and constant touchstone for all.6 5.  This designated nation is the Jews. This designated nation is the Jews. God becomes visibly manifest to the Israelite nation almost compelling them to be a covenantal nation to God.7 God redeems the Israelite slaves with shattering, overwhelming violations of nature in the form of plagues upon the Egyptians. God spectacularly splits the sea to save the Israelites. It is only then that the Israelites “feared the Lord and put their trust in him and in Moses his servant.” God activated a raw, overpowering pyrotechnic display to bring the Israelites to this realization.

6 A religion that requires separate treatment is Buddhism, an atheistic religion. I have dealt with Judaism and Buddhism in Jerome Gellman, “Judaism and Buddhism: A Jewish Approach to a Godless Religion,” in Jewish Theology and World Religions, ed. Alon Goshen-Gottstein and Eugene Korn (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2012), 299–316. 7 There is a contrary tradition that the Israelites freely chose God and God’s Torah. Based on the declaration by the Israelites, “All that God says we will do and we will listen” (Exodus 24:6), the idea is that the people freely committed themselves in advance to “do” whatever they would afterward hear from God. In doing so, they acted as the angels, who are ready to perform whatever God will ask of them. However, there are sources in the rabbinic literature that demote and even reinterpret the status of this declaration.

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Most centrally, God makes Mount Sinai shake. Fire and thunder drive the fear of the Lord into the Israelite nation (Exodus 19–20). Then, God reveals the Ten Commandments not just to a leader who must then convince the people of their having been revealed by God. God sears the Ten Commandments into the consciousness of the Israelite people by revealing the commandments directly to the entire nation all at once in a shattering event.8 God leaves no room for doubt about the testimony of others or doubt about the authority of the leader. “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, here you will be buried’ (BT Avodah Zarah 2:2).” This is coercion. God is not letting the Israelites come to God “in freedom and joy.” God veritably “tramples them in the dust.” The Hasidic master Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi (1745–1812), however, softens this passage in a way more fitting to my figurational conception: 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.9 On this interpretation, God overwhelms the Israelites with love to make it difficult for them to resist. God hugs them tightly (the “bowl”), so that the memory of God’s love will stay with them for ever after. True enough, the Israelites then rebelled repeatedly. But God was not making it easy for them to resist. God was making resistance a perverse response to His manifest presence. God overwhelmed them time and time again.

8 The plain meaning of the text in Exodus 20 is that the people heard all ten of the commandments, although later tradition limits the number of the Ten Commandments the Israelites themselves heard. 9 Schneur Zalman of Liadi, “Sos Tasis” (1811), in Maamarei ha-Admor ha-Zaken, Chabad Library, accessed October 24, 2021, https://chabadlibrary.org/books/adhaz/ maamarei/572/39/196.htm?q=%D7%94%D7%A8%20%D7%9B%D7%92%D7%99%D7% 92%D7%99%D7%AA. Lest God here strike you as a stalker, please note that God’s hugs—as opposed to those of a stalker—are given in such a way that they are received with joy and love.

A Designated People I: A Fig urational View

The coercive nature of God’s overwhelmingly manifest love was well recognized in the rabbinic literature. Here is the full text of the above rabbinic statement: Said Rabbi Avdimi son of Hama son of Hasa: [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, here you will be buried.” Said Rabbi Aha son of Yaakov: This is a substantial protest against the Torah. Said Rava, Nonetheless, the people did accept the Torah again [freely] in the days of Ahashverosh. (BT Shabbat 88a) God wished also for the Jews to choose God in freedom. Only later, after the saga of Queen Esther, did the Israelite nation accept God’s Torah freely, as was God’s principle desire for responding to the divine love. The coercive nature of God’s original relationship to the Jews contrasts with God’s valuing freedom in all others is highlighted by this midrashic comment on the love God has for converts: Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish said: “The convert [to Judaism] is more beloved to God than those who stood at Mount Sinai. Why? Because all those had they not seen the sounds and the torches and lightening and the mountains shaking and the ram horns sounding, they would not have accepted upon themselves the kingdom of heaven. But this one [the convert] saw none of these and comes and attaches himself to God and accepted on himself the kingdom of heaven, is there anyone more beloved than that?10 Converts to Judaism come to God in joy and in full freedom. So, Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish declares, God loves converts more than God loves native Jews. Just so, God loves all who come to God and the Torah in freedom. We may expand this principle to all of humanity who come to God, for the value they bear of coming to God in freedom. Commandment is a central concept in Judaism to such an extent that the fear of God and the love of God are commands in Judaism! Ideally, the Jew is to feel commanded by God, not invited or cajoled. In rabbinic literature, God’s 10 Midrash Tanchuma, ed. Solomon Buber ( Jerusalem: Eshkol, 1971/72), 57. My translation.

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many commands to the Israelites are a sign of God’s great love of them. So attests the following rabbinic source: “Rabbi Hananya ben Akashia said: ‘God wished to confer merit on Israel. That’s why God gave them such an abundance of Torah and commandments’” (BT Makot 23b). God displays most vividly and powerfully His love of and desire for the Jewish people in the great many commandments God “bestows” on them. When addressing non-Jews, God does not overwhelm. Here, God issues a call to come to God in freedom, a call that can be accepted or rebuffed. “Rabbi Yochanan said, ‘Every word that God said [at Mt. Sinai] divided into seventy languages’” (BT Shabbat 88b). This statement declares that God proclaimed the Ten Commandments in the language of all nations of the world. The divine designation of the Jews simultaneously reverberates to all of humanity. And God’s call continues even today, as a rabbinic midrash says that daily God proclaims from Mt. Sinai, “I am the Lord your God.” It is because of the incessant cacophony of noises we raise in our lives that we creatures on earth don’t hear that booming Heavenly voice. If only we could be still for a moment, we could hear it. I take the seventy languages “at Sinai” to humanity in a metaphorical way. The cashing of the metaphor occurs in the intimations of the divine scattered throughout human history and throughout human reality. That includes the wonders of the natural world, historical teleology, great world spiritual figures who have opened people to the divine, private and public religious experiences, and in religions that carry that call forward. To term these intimations a “call” is to affirm the belief that God wishes to have an intimate, loving relationship with humanity, freely given and enjoyed. To dub it a call from “Sinai” is to indicate that the call to the other peoples of the world is an echo of God’s overwhelming embrace of the Jewish people at Mt. Sinai. To speak of it as coming from “Sinai” is also to point to God’s love of the Jews as a sign of God’s desire for all nations and all people. People can be aware of God’s love of them by way of the Jewish people as a picture of that love, and that love as a prefiguration of the manifest love available to all. If you doubt the historical truth of these stories, a topic I take up later in this book, please appreciate that these pictures represent the historical Jewish self-conception of their relationship to God. It is this self-consciousness that has shaped the Jewish receptivity to the account of God’s acts in history toward them. There are many rabbinic texts attesting to God’s unique and special love of the Jewish people, from which it follows that God has no comparable love for non-Jews. Some of those texts can be adopted by reinterpreting the distinction to be between manifestly known divine love of the Jews and the divine love of others, the lower degree of revealment of which leaves room for non-Jews

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coming to God in freedom. Other texts are to be passed over in silence, with respect for the circumstances in which they came to be. *** God’s revealed love of the Israelites seems to be opposed by a few biblical episodes. God tells Moses after the sin of the Golden Calf, ‘“I have seen these people,” God said to Moses, “and they are a stiff-necked people. Now leave me alone so that my anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them. Then I will make you into a great nation”’ (Exodus 32:9–10). In line with the principle of God’s fixed love, a midrash holds that God intended no such thing and wanted only to inspire Moses to pray on their behalf (Midrash Tanchumah, Ki Tisa, 22). This reflects a traditional Jewish conception of God’s love. In another striking verse that seems to contradict God’s enduring love, God says to Hosea (Hosea 1:9) concerning the Israelite people: “You are not My people, and I will not be for you.” A clear warning of love to be abandoned. Yet, here too, a midrash (Numbers Rabbah 2:16) turns the plain meaning of this text to mean quite its opposite: Said Rabba Haninah: Those are without wisdom who think that when God says, “I will not be for you,” it means that He is not your God. Not so. So, what does it mean “I will not be for you”? That even though [you say] that you are not my people, that you wish to separate from me, “I will not be for you” [means that] I will not agree with you, against your will you will be my people. As it says, (Ezekiel 20:32–33): “You say, We want to be like the nations all around us, who serve idols of wood and stone. But what you have in mind will never happen. As I live, declares God, with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm and with wrath poured out I will be king over you.”11 From the context in Ezekiel, it is clear that God will direct the outstretched arm and the divine wrath against the enemies of the Israelites, as God did with the plagues against Egypt. God will force enemies into defeat and save the nation, as God’s people. In the midrash, though, Rabbi Haninah sees God directing, figuratively, the “outstretched arm” and the “wrath” toward the Israelites. God will compel them to be God’s people, even if they do not wish to be, since against

11 Numbers Rabbah 2:16. My translation.

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your will you will be my people. (We must then take the “wrath” language with a grain, or maybe a teaspoon, of salt.) *** There is an obvious uneasiness about proclaiming God’s love of the Jews. If God loves the Jewish people so much how to justify the tragic history of the Jews over long time? Crusades. Pogroms. Inquisitions. Exiles. Antisemitism. Severe Restrictions. Exclusions. How to endure a Holocaust when God is supposed to love you? Do not the historical violence and abuse of the Jews count as evidence against God’s supposed love of the Jews? This worry is too serious to treat as a footnote, so to speak, of this chapter. Later in the book I will return to this topic. For now, I must say only that the Holocaust stands out as a black hole in every Jewish theology asserting God’s goodness and God’s irrevocable love of the Jews. I am not foolhardy enough to attempt a solution to this heaviness of heart and anguish. Yet, I am not one who sees being mad at God and leaving it at that as a viable theology. In a later chapter, I present hopefully what helps lighten, but not solve, the difficulty to a point where trust, emunah, might endure, without detracting from the gravity of the human suffering involved. After all to be said, the Holocaust stands as a warning to an overly confidant theological spinning of tales. With everything I say, I must keep in mind the refrain, “Yes, but . . .” Here in this chapter, now I address an aspect of Jewish election relating to the history of Jewish sufferings and horrific ordeals. This does not bear on the ultimate moral justification of those sufferings and ordeals, only on an implication of God’s having designated the Jews. 6  The Jews are a sacrificial people, a living demonstration that God’s undiminished love endures through it all. The Jews are a sacrificial people, enduring an array of cruel murders, suffering, degradation, and disappointment. A familiar maxim of East European Jews is “It is hard to be a Jew.”12 The Jewish people have been and continue to be a sacrifice for God, participating in all of the joy, and all of the tragedy, of being God’s designated people. Henry Slonimsky in a study of midrash and Jewish suffering put it this way: Israel is in the unique position of regarding itself as the chosen people, the beloved of God, and at the same time knowing itself 12 After the title of the Yiddish play, Shver tsu Zayn a Yid, by Sholom Aleichem.

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as the most afflicted people. . . . Suffering is involved in the very character of the career on which Israel was launched, is indeed the badge of Israel whenever true to his course. The world resists all three, God, Torah, and Israel, and the protagonist who does the actual bearing must also bear the brunt of the suffering. The whole drama is paradigmatic: it is a prelude or prefiguring or archetype of what must take place henceforth everywhere and by all men of good will if a new and higher order is to emerge as reality.13 The history of the Jewish people serves as a mirror for all of human existence. Life has a good share of loss and failure, of anguish and disappointment, of suffering and defeat. This truth about human existence is mirrored in the history of the Jewish people. Jewish history has been a long litany of persecution and suffering, restrictions and isolation. But through it all Jewish history has been punctuated by God’s grace shining through the tribulations of a people. Many waters: these are the nations of the world. Cannot quench love: the love which God bears to Israel, as it says, I have loved you (Malachi 1.2). Or, many waters cannot quench love: these are the idol­ators, for even if all the idolators were to assemble to quench the love between God and Israel, they would be powerless, as it says, Yet I loved Jacob (Malachi 1.2).14 The Jewish people continues to exist, to flourish, to make a lot of noise in the world, with its ancient religion extant. In this way, the Jewish people serve as a figuration for how to understand one’s life and how to maintain hope in the darkest of nights. For, when one looks into the mirror of the Jewish people, what one sees is that throughout the dire vicissitudes of life God’s covenant remains. We are here. We are not going away. Here is what Walker Percy, a non-Jew, wrote about us: Where are the Hittites? Why does no one find it remarkable that in most world cities today there are Jews but not one single Hittite, even though the Hittites had a great flourishing civilization while the Jews nearby were a weak and obscure

13 Henry Slonimsky, “The Philosophy Implicit in the Midrash,” Hebrew Union College Annual 27 (1956): 237. I thank Jonathan Malino for bringing Slonimsky to my attention. 14 Exodus Rabbah 79a, as quoted ibid., 253.

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people? When one meets a Jew in New York or New Orleans or Paris or Melbourne, it is remarkable that no one considers the event remarkable. What are they doing here? But it is even more remarkable to wonder, if there are Jews here, why are there not Hittites here? Where are the Hittites? Show me one Hittite in New York City.15 The controlling image here is of the burning bush, which burns but never is consumed. This image has served Jewish commentators at least since the time of the ancient Jewish philosopher Philo, who wrote: “For the bush was a symbol of those who suffer the flames of injustice, just as the fire symbolized those responsible for it; but that which burned did not burn up, and those who suffered injustice were not to be destroyed by their oppressors.”16 The Jewish role as God’s designated people implies a sacrificial existence that configures the fiery side of human existence with the promise of God’s redemption. Hence the Jews in their sacrificial mode are, as it were, “God’s suffering servant.” But the Jews are not a Christ figure of Paulinian atonement. Rather, the Jews are the Israelites who endure bitter enslavement only to be redeemed in an archetype of a divine promise of redemption for all of humankind. Jewish pain is a picture of the world’s pain. Our suffering, a figure of the suffering of Gentiles. Our sinning, a mirror of the sinning of others. And our goodness, a depiction of theirs. And our past redemption from the suffering of slavery, our continued existence despite all, and the promise of our future redemption are the hope held out to all of humanity. The sacrificial nature of Jewish existence is but one side of the Jewish experience, balanced with the joy and sublimity of being Jewish and following the Jewish religion. Yet, for a Jew the joy and freedom must come through and be the result of living the sacrificial mode of service to God. The phenomenology of Judaic religious consciousness is rooted in a sense of a sacrificial nation redeemed. Hence: 7  Jewish chosenness comes from God’s designating the Jews as a figure of God’s love for all and is a Jewish mission to make this love-option a live one both for the sake of God’s purposes and for love of all humankind. 15 Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1954), 6. 16 Philo, Life of Moses, 1:65–67, as quoted in James L. Kugel, How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now (New York: Free Press, 2007), 213.

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The seven days of creation in Genesis, as I have mentioned, attest to God’s subsequent relative self-removal from creation, enough to ensure sufficient freedom from an overpowering God. For six days, God is overwhelmingly active in and present to the world. On the seventh day, God rests. For God to “rest” is for God to withdraw God’s overpowering presence from the world so as to create the conditions for humanity to come to God in freedom. Herein lies one significance of the Jewish Sabbath, the seventh day of the week, for the Jewish people as the designated people. Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath, subverts the seventh day of rest of creation. “The Children of Israel shall keep the Sabbath for all their generations, as an everlasting covenant. For between me and the Children of Israel it is a sign forever” (Exodus 31:17). The Shabbat bears an inherent duality, being both the seventh day of the week and Shabbat. As the seventh day it is God’s relative withdrawal from an obvious presence to create freedom to come to God in joy. As Shabbat it is God’s command to the Jews to make of the seventh day a reminder that God’s love has not been withdrawn and is there to be known. Because God withdrew His obvious presence from the world on the seventh day, the Jews must proclaim on that day that God has not withdrawn God’s love. Precisely when God withdraws is the time to tell the world of God’s call to all humanity, so it is then that God’s loving relationship with the Jews is most important as a demonstration of God’s love for all. The Sabbath liturgy celebrates God’s gift of the Sabbath day to them: “For the Lord our God has not given it to the nations of the world . . . for [only] to your people Israel did you give it in love, to the descendants of Jacob, whom you have chosen” (my translation). It is because the nations of the world do not have Shabbat, that God gives Shabbat to the Jews. The intimacy of the Sabbath exhibits the intimacy promised to all who will come wholeheartedly to God in freedom. From the viewpoint of traditional Judaism, the mission of the Jewish people is to acknowledge God’s love by overcoming the coercive mode and to respond freely in kind with their love of God and God’s creatures. As such the Jews’ response to God becomes a figure for all who will come to God in freedom and joy. The Jewish mission of making God’s love known, of doing God’s will, of living moral excellence, and tikkun olam, mending the world, are all integrally related to responding to God’s love. They are not detachable from that context and motivation. To abandon Jewish tradition is to respond to God with unrequited love and to abandon our role as guides to God’s love. Yes, at times, God does not make it easy for us, and we are tested, called to come to God in freedom. This message has been picked up and carried on by others, but the Jews were the beginning and continue to serve as an enduring reference point for all.

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A Designated People II: Figuration and Racism

This chapter has two sections. The first section is a defense of the figurational view of Jewish election against possible racist objections. The second section is a discussion of two authors, Michael Harris and Andrew Gluck, who have separately critiqued an earlier formulation of my figurational view, in part because of its alleged possible racist drawbacks or of a dangerous sense of Jewish superiority which could end up in racist doctrines.

Section One To assess the figurational view’s possible implication with racism, we would do best to have a working definition of what it is for a person to hold a racist ideology. So, let’s say that people have a racist ideology when maintaining a morally reprehensible belief that they are superior, in toto, to other people, whom they take to be a race/ethnic group, solely in virtue of what they believe to be racial/ethnic characteristics that they believe the superior to possess and the inferior to lack. In addition, they maintain that therefore the superior/inferior people warrant treatment appropriate to their rank, relative to the inferior/superior people. So,

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an ideology is racist only when morally reprehensible, and a racist person, in what follows, is a person with a racist ideology.1 It would have been too narrow to tie the definition to actual races and racial characteristics, rather than to what people consider such. That would not conform to common usage. Accordingly, I have widened the definition by including ethnic groups and ethnic characteristics. Race and ethnicity often do go together, and in any case, ethnicity serves as much as does race to provide a visible target of those who are “different” or “do not belong.” As a result, racism easily leaks out into ethnicitism. From now on, when I write of “racism,” I mean to include “ethnicitism.” There are degrees of racism, depending on the strength of a racist position in a given person and the degree to which that person engages in activities motivated by a racist position. At one extreme end, a racist might believe that a certain race warrants distinct treatment but not take any steps in that direction. So, we have closet racists as well. Racism can possibly express itself in mercy and kindness toward a race, together with a deep devotion to improving their situation. This will be racist if issuing from deprecation, degradation, or ridicule of the race (the white man’s burden). It will not be racist if, for example, a loving effort to help others improve their life situation, with no diverting elements. To examine the possible racist import of figurational Jewish chosenness, we need to distinguish between three grades of racist ideology: explicit racism: the ideology fulfills the definition of racism; inevitable racism: while the ideology does not meet the definition of racism, its reception inevitably leads to widely held racist beliefs and attitudes; vulnerability to racism: while the ideology does not meet the definition of racism, and its reception will not inevitably lead to a widely held racist belief, still, its acceptance creates an unacceptable degree of vulnerability to racist belief. Chosenness of the Jews in our history has often been taken to confirm the racial superiority of the Jews and has led to unjustified expressions and actions by Jews against others. These, in turn, have aroused resentment among non-Jews and therefore inadvertently contributed their part to anti-Jewish racism throughout 1 We should also take note of a secondary notion of racism where a person does not hold a racist ideology but cooperates with racist political and social structures without resisting them.

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the ages. It is important to counter such a conception of chosenness to foster respect for others, whenever possible. However, we need not do more than what is required. We must proceed with both caution and a willingness to invent when needed but need not surrender to supercritical attacks. Figurational chosenness or designation does not advance an explicitly racist understanding of Jewish election. If an ideology of Jewish election is not explicitly racist but will lead inevitably to racist positions, then there are two possible reactions: One is to consider how the unavoidability might be softened, which might not be realistic to a satisfactory degree. Another is to adjust the doctrine to avoid the inevitability of racist understandings. Finally, if the belief is neither explicitly nor inevitably racist in reception but still vulnerable to it, we might not have to rush to tamper with it. We must make a value judgment as to the benefits and drawbacks, just what is an unacceptable degree of vulnerability balanced against the importance of the doctrine. We would have to be clear to what extent the vulnerability is unavoidable and is justified and to what extent the vulnerability comes from an exaggerated sense of self-entitlement and selffragility. And we should also recognize that what a person believes is given to misinterpretation and over-zealous criticism by those who would disagree. At some point we might just have to invoke the verse, “The ways of the Lord are right; the righteous walk in them, and the rebellious stumble in them” (Hosea 14:10). I have in mind the Talmudic passage concerning what leveling sticks may be used to level off grain in a container that has been measured for the sale of grain. Certain sticks will press the grain in too much and so require the seller then to add more than what is coming to the buyer. Certain other sticks will level off to the advantage of the seller. Therefore, such sticks must not be used. Then: “R. Johanan b. Zakkai said: Woe to me if I should speak; woe to me if I should not speak. Should I speak knaves might learn; and should I not speak, the knaves might say, the scholars are unacquainted with our practices.”2 If the rabbi would promulgate this law, the unscrupulous who did not know about these tricks will find out how to cheat. If he does not publicize this law, then those who are already using these tricks will feel safe in doing so, they assuming that the rabbis have not caught on to these tricks and so will not interfere with their practice. In the end, the rabbi publicizes the law, relying on the verse, “The ways of the Lord are right; the righteous walk in them, and the rebellious stumble in them.” Meaning, he had no choice but to make the law known, because it was a correct law to make known. He can only hope that the unrighteous will refrain from using the wrong leveling sticks, and if the bad people learn how to use the 2 BT Baba Batra 89b.

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illicit sticks to their own advantage, that will be their responsibility. R. Johanan cannot be responsible for all of the wrong choices of people. Just so, if a doctrine of election is vulnerable to racism, but not racist per se, we may have to simply maintain it and do our best to mitigate the vulnerability. This is not to say that resisters are rebellious or otherwise unscrupulous. But there are limits to accommodation. After all, from a traditional point of view the Jews and Judaism are meant to be a countercultural force in the world, surely accommodating for moral and human considerations, but we have values that are not negotiable after we have done the best we can to honor our moral sense. In all circumstances we must be vigilant to oppose unintended and not inevitable slides from the figurational view to racism.

Section Two In this section, I consider two other proposals on how we should think of Jewish election today, proposals including criticism of an earlier form of the figuration view. One is by Michael Harris and the other by Andrew Lee Gluck. Michael Harris writes for a Modern Orthodox Jewish audience and is keenly aware of the challenges to that religion from contemporary issues. He has much to contribute to the issues at hand, and I have learned to reformulate and clarify my figurational view because of him. Harris makes much of the declarations of Isaiah 42:6 and 49:6 saying that Israel is to be “a light unto the nations,” calling this a “solid biblical” source. I accept this, given my view of just in what that light consists, namely the light as serving as a figuration of God’s love of all. Harris’s objection comes down to seeing my view as leaking into a sense of Jewish superiority. Harris writes, “God had a special love for the Patriarchs, beginning with Abraham, who, according to well-known Jewish tradition, sought Him out from the midst of and despite an overwhelmingly idolatrous cultural backdrop.”3 In the Bible, Abraham, the “father” of the Jewish people was picked out by God with no prior indication of anything special about Abraham at that time. God’s addressing Abraham for the first time, appears with a surprising suddenness. Terah took his son Abram, his grandson Lot, son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law Sarai, the wife of his son Abram, and together

3 Michael J. Harris, Faith without Fear, Unresolved Issues in Modern Orthodoxy (Portland, OR: Valentine Mitchell, 2016), 263.

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they set out from Ur of the Chaldeans to go to Canaan. But when they came to Harran, they settled there. Terah lived 205 years, and he died in Harran. The  Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household  to the land I will show you. “I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” (Genesis 11:31–12:3) In the rabbinic literature, this passage gets filled in with accounts of Abraham coming singularly to know of God and rejecting idol worship.4 This would be the first known case of someone coming to God in freedom. I can accept this traditionally entrenched explanation of God’s love for Abraham, but do not insist on it. Even if we do think of Abraham in this way, it fails to provide an adequate reason why God should single out Abraham’s descendants for all time with a divine mission. This should not be obvious. Why a mission? Why a nation? Why for all times? anticipating answers that do not lead to racist attitudes. My view provides a reason why there should be a mission, what that mission is, a choice of a nation, any nation, and for all generations to come, no matter how the choice got started. The civilization of the Jews pertains not only to individual life in isolation, as though there were such a thing, but to the construction of a national economic-political structure of a just society. This is the obligation of the nation as a nation to which individuals are called to action. This is, or should be, the response of the Jewish people to God’s overt love, serving as a model for others. Harris provides a more familiar rationale for Jewish election: that God chose the Jews “as teachers about God to the world.” So, “God chose the Patriarchs and their descendants to continue to bear witness to Him in the world and to guide the world to His worship.” And Harris declares that the Jews have “the task of modelling an ethical and monotheistic way of life.” Harris attributes to me the view that God loves others less than the Jews and also that my idea will not work because non-Jews have in their faith no idea about what I am proposing.5 Gellman rejects the idea of the Jews as teachers about God to the world as a valid contemporary conception of chosenness on

4 See more in the following chapter on God choosing Abraham. 5 Ibid., 161.

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the grounds that the task is basically already complete. By now, the world knows about God, and letting the world know about Him has long been done more extensively by Christianity and Islam than by Judaism. But Gellman’s objection does not appear decisive. The work of exemplifying a monotheistic and ethical way of life can be ongoing. The world is very far from universal service of God. The collective task of the Jewish people is still far from accomplished.6 Harris has misunderstood me when claiming that I think the task is complete. Far from it. He is closer to the truth in what he then writes, since it obvious that today the task of teaching about God is far more being accomplished by others than by the Jews. Here there is a subtle but important difference between Harris and me. My objection is to be seeing the Jewish mission as “teaching” the world “about God.” That task is not complete. However, it has been much taken over by Christianity and Islam. Those two religions have spread awareness and fundamental teachings about God to vastly more people in the world than the Jews ever did or can do. And even if Christianity is not a pure monotheism by some lights, it has spread to all continents of the earth the idea of a supreme being, a conception that can serve as ground for future developments, as in some contemporary liberal Christianity.7 Where Harris and I differ is that for me the Jews’ task is to continue to picture God’s love for all. Others teach God’s love, while we are supposed to manifest God’s love in an historical and ongoing relationship with God, on the level of an identifiable people/ethnic entity. It is a realistic love, which is to say with real-life ups and downs, trials and rewards rather than a syrupy promise of bliss. (From the very beginning, God’s love of Abraham did not shield Abraham from disappointment, fear, and failures.) Yes, the Jews have the task of continuing to live an ethical monotheistic life, but now as a visible response of our love to God’s manifest love. So, Harris and I are closer on this than he would think on this. We agree that being God’s designated people is indeed a continuing world-historical responsibility, we differ only on exactly what that responsibility is. At one time

6 Ibid., 163. 7 For example, for a discussion of a liberal Christian view of the Trinity closer to Judaism than are classical Christologies, see Jerome Gellman, “Ward’s Trinity and the Stubborn Jews,” Philosophia Christi 18 (2016): 375–385.

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we were also teachers “about God” to the world, but now we no longer have that general task. The more specific, figurational, task remains. Here I turn to Harris’ main concern that my approach is unavoidably vulnerable to Jews adopting racist attitudes as a result. He writes on an earlier formulation of my view of Jewish election: [Gellman’s view] comes too close for comfort to violating one of Gellman’s own criteria for an acceptable notion of Jewish chosenness, namely that it must not imply Jewish superiority. A conception of chosenness that understands the Jewish people alone among peoples as current recipients of God’s overwhelming love inevitably suggests Jewish superiority and is moreover likely to lead, among Jews, to a sense of superiority. To constitute a model of belovedness by God to those who are not yet His beloved is to be superior in a meaningful sense.8 Harris says that if God’s overwhelming love is only for the Jewish people, even if only for the interim, that inevitably suggests superiority, and is likely to lead Jews to a sense of superiority over everyone else. Hence, Harris rejects my view, as he understands it. Partly because of Harris’s promptings and critiques, I have now made clear in the previous chapter what I had failed to make sufficiently explicit or where I was not quite correct in what I wrote in my formulation in my earlier book. First, I have made clear that I have no explanation for why God chose the Jews rather than, say, the Hittites. On this view, there was no prior superiority of the Jews. Secondly, I have now made more explicit the distinction between manifestly revealed love and less than manifestly revealed love. I can love two people perfectly equally, but for good reason reveal that love in a much more open and free manner to one rather than to the other, and for the good of the other. God loves all equally, all the time. God has made love of the Jews more explicit, overwhelming them at Mt. Sinai,9 while giving indications of love for all. The difference is that God’s love of the non-Jew is displayed in a non-coercive manner. God acts with love for all in a less perspicuous way. While distributing signs of universal love in human experience, God lets the non-Jews know of God’s love of them without, as with the Jews, coercing them to respond. It is not overwhelming love, but an overwhelming display of the love that is the issue. That God’s love is less manifest

8 Harris, Faith without Fear, 161. 9 See the section on “The Torah.”

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for some, but not less, is motivated by God’s love of them. This comes from God’s desire that they come to God in freedom, a requirement of any authentic love relationship. If anything, the Jews are disadvantaged by having to overcome the non-free imposition, which was not the ideal. Finally, in reply to Harris, my view includes as its important component that its concept of Jewish election is to be taught in its entirety, expounded to Jews and non-Jews alike as a viable contemporary doctrine of the Chosen People to replace previous formulations. This is a “replacement theology.” This is how Jews are to think of themselves now and “sell” themselves to non-Jews. Harris might be right that non-Jews might not internalize this view, yet, if at least more Jews would think this way, dayenu, that might be enough. I can better clarify now that believing your ethnic group superior to all or just some others is not necessarily in itself racism. That is because it is not morally reprehensible in itself to feel superior, and it must be morally reprehensible if it is to count as racist. Thinking your group superior ethically, say, to others need not be morally reprehensible. (This is merely an example, not a restating of my figurational view.) That belief could be laudable if based on verifiable facts, turned exclusively to the benefit of others, effecting ethical enhancement, if done with humility, and without untoward consequences or attitudes. Likewise for belief in the figurational understanding of Jews as the chosen people. A belief in Jewish superiority, if that it be, will fall within the definition of racism of the previous chapter only if the belief itself is morally reprehensible. It need not be so. It follows that the figurational view is neither racist in itself nor inevitably racist. The question remains whether it is vulnerable to racist attitudes, and if so to what extent. The answer to the question whether the view is vulnerable to racism, is yes. It is vulnerable. That is because Jews can still use it to feed xenophobic sentiments. It does have the power to move some Jews to a feeling of superiority over non-Jews and from there to sliding into reprehensible racist stances. Something strengthens this vulnerability to bigoted attitudes and actions. And that is that on occasion God’s acting for preserving God’s ongoing love of the Jews might take precedence over God’s less obvious love of others. There will be times when the specific reason for present acts of love clashes with the long-range need to preserve intact the Jews and their mission for the world. Then the short-range act to others might be of less value than that of preserving the Jews and their role in God’s world. God preserves the Jews as part of God’s loving invitation to the world to come to God in freedom, and this has relative priority over some other values. This follows from the great value held for

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coming to God freely in a manifest relationship of love. So, at times it will look like the interests of others are ignored for the good for the Jews. Equally so, however, matters can turn out quite in an opposite manner. There will be instances where the good for others on a particular occasion or trajectory will exceed the need to manifest God’s love for the Jews at that juncture. Then moral considerations will count in favor of advancing the love of others over the more explicit love of the Jews at that moment In addition, a danger of racism, aside from the election topic, many Jews, past and present, have had a sense of the Jews being special, what you might call “Jewish exceptionalism.” For our relatively tiny numbers and lack of national cohesion, our historical influence on Western religion and general culture has been wildly more than it should have been, our accomplishments truly laudable. Many Jews are convinced that as a group the Jews are smarter, or at least cleverer, than most others. These attitudes can seep into a figurational view of Jewish chosenness and assume racist sentiments. So, yes, my view is susceptible to racist adoption. It seems to me, though, that there likely is no view of Jewish Election that is not vulnerable to racist misuse. This includes Harris’s. A Jew might feel racially superior, for example, for having been given Harris’s world-historical task to teach all of humankind—from the North to the South Poles—about God. But our response should not be to forfeit Jewish election because of that. There are values in addition to avoiding the chance of racism, which should be pursued, but only with rigorous pushback to racist possibilities. So, I hereby attach to my figurational view the duty to accompany the teaching with careful exclusion of racist tendencies. Remember, I have no explanation for why God chose the Jews in particular, rather than why it was fitting for God to pick some nation or other, and it is no part of the figurational view that it was because of an innate Jewish superiority. I wholly agree with Harris when he writes of his view of Jewish election: “The many failures of Jews throughout history to live up to the task of modelling an ethical and monotheistic way of life, despite the undeniable successes, should prompt feelings of humility rather than superiority.”10 Failures to live up to reciprocating God’s love should make us pause when about to allow our sense of mission to spill over into racism. Furthermore, the welcome newly charged atmosphere of condemnation and actions against racism happily should help greatly to diminish the vulnerability of the figurational view to a racist construal.

10 Harris, Faith without Fear, XX.

A Designated People II: Fig uration and R aci sm

Will these considerations entirely erase the vulnerability of my view to racist construal? No, they will not. But we ought not reject a vital value, that of coming to love of God in freedom, with all of its spiritual and moral good, because of its vulnerability to bad results. It strikes me that some (not Harris!) who might reject even a figurational approach to Jewish chosenness because of its possible racist uses simply are not partners to an appreciation of the great value for which chosenness aims. Vulnerability (as distinct from inevitability) to racism should not veto all other values, just as the vulnerability to car accidents and deaths should not stop automobile travel. A proper response to that vulnerability is to increase diligence to countering possible racist consequences of a conception of the chosen people, with education and the sort of engagement with others that opposes the racist dangers. As for the rest, we should say, “The ways of the Lord are right; the righteous walk in them, and the rebellious stumble in them.”11 And pray to God for the best. Andrew Lee Gluck12 has appraised my earlier formulation of the figurational notion of Jewish Election and advanced his own conception. There is much wisdom in Gluck’s book on the subject and here I focus on Gluck’s discussion of my view of Jewish election. Gluck raises an objection to my having referred to the Jews as a nation, saying, “One might argue that the Jews are not a nation.”13 Yet, internal to the tradition, the Jews are a nation, mainly descendants of people who long ago constituted a family and grew to be a nation. A self-conception as a family continues among many Jews, and certainly traditional ones, today. Those who join the Jewish people have the status of Jews who count Abraham and Sarah as their forbearers, not simply followers of the Mosaic habit. They become embedded into the nation/family/peoplehood of the Jews. Their having adopted their Judaism will be a forgotten fact in coming generations. They will be Jews as everyone else. Once, I was riding the train from the (“new”) Hong Kong Airport to Hong Kong Island wearing my kippah, and a young man sat down across from me. He kept looking at me in the eyes, and so I at him, in the way that Jews are inclined to glance at one another when far from home, hoping to pick up some sign that the other person is indeed one of the family. When after a time I started to talk

11 See previous chapter. 12 Andrew Lee Gluck, Various Theories Explaining Why the Jewish People Are Special: A Response to Jerome Gellman, David Novak, and Michael Wyschogrod’s Understanding of the Chosen People (Lewiston, ME: Edwin Mellen Press, 2016). 13 Ibid., 47.

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with him, it turned out that he was a Jew far from home looking to me as a fellow Jew. A Jewish Polish philosopher has told me of his growing up in a home where his father was a high official in the Polish Communist Party, and where the home had no Jewish content or any sense of Jewish identity. Except for one thing. His father always made it a point to keep up with his knowing who within the upper echelons of the Polish Communist Party were also Jews. For when the day would come, as it surely would, his father would know who he could rely on and who to seek out for help. Gluck questioned my writing that God’s relationship with the Jewish people was “non-revocable”: “The notion of a nonrevocable relationship is a later interpretation and chosenness is at least consistent with a revocable relationship. For example, if the relationship were revocable but still in force, would the Jews not still be the chosen people?”14 Gluck is correct as far as the very idea of being “chosen” is concerned. A people need not be chosen forever in order to be chosen; any more than a chosen school class representative will be forever. Nonetheless, the tradition quite clearly makes the election of the Jews something irrevocable, where I am interpreting that not as a love that is forever exclusive in its manifest appearance, but one never withdrawn. The tradition expresses God’s love of the Jews in terms of the Jews being “children of God” (Deuteronomy 14:2) and “my first-born son” (Exodus 4:22). Being a child is a permanent status, and if love is given because of having that status then the love too should be permanent in nature. Biblical indications to the contrary, as when, after the incident of the golden calf, God tells Moses he will destroy the Israelite nation and make a new nation from Moses (Exodus 32:10), are explained by traditional commentaries so as to deflect away the literal intention of the destruction of God’s people.15 Aside from the tradition, on my approach there is an intrinsic reason to affirm the irrevocability of God’s love for the Jews. That love is a model for God’s love of all and everyone, a love that endures throughout the highs and lows of history and the trials and failures in the life of an individual. To model universal, enduring love, the manifest love of the Jews must be everlasting. What is revocable, however, is God having a uniquely manifest relationship of love

14 Ibid., 27. 15 Rashi indicates that God was meaning to encourage Moses to pray for the people and so then God could forgive them. There have been times when the people said that God has abandoned them (Isaiah 49:14), but again traditional sources block the reality of God’s abandonment of the Jews. See Rashi ad loc. that the people only felt God had left them, and BT Berakhot 32b has God resoundingly denying that possibility.

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with the Jewish people in the sense of such that such manifest love is destined to spread beyond the Jews to all of humanity. Gluck is put off by the idea of God having a relationship with a people, “A relationship seems to be between two individuals. Perhaps the word [“relationship”] can be stretched to include a relationship between God and a corporate entity, but there will be problems there.”16 Gluck raises the problematics, for him, of the connection, if any, between God’s relationship to the corporate entity, the Jewish People, and individual Jews. He ends up with the skeptical declaration, “In fact, I am not really sure what one means by a group having a relationship to God.”17 These are important questions, ones I had so far overlooked in my figurational theory of chosenness. What does it mean for God to have a loving relationship with a corporate entity, the Jewish people? And how does this loving relationship impinge on God’s love of individual Jews? God’s love of the Jewish people as a corporate entity means that God guards the Jewish people in existence and does not allow them to disappear from history as a people; that the relatively obvious presence of the Jews continues; God reveals a Torah to the collective of the Israelites; that God helps preserve Jewish identity and an historical sense of Jewish continuity and culture, including and especially Jewish religious identity; that God encourages the Jews to be a model for God’s love by reciprocating love to God.18 Individual Jews in that corporate entity reciprocate God’s love when their love is given in the name of the Jewish people, when they act for good as a community and not only as individuals, and when they act in accordance with the Torah teachings, given some latitude as to just what that means. As for God’s relationship with individual Jews, as such, here we meet varied options of divine providence regarding individuals. Elsewhere, and later in this book I present what I call “moderate providence,” so a full explanation will have to wait until later. For now, consider moderate providence to be a divine guiding of the world not necessarily bit by bit, although that too can happen, but primarily by a causally holistic top-down framework in place that governs the world or parts of it in only a general, guiding way. These guiding frameworks operate at a high-level vis-à-vis human choices and regularities of nature. To see

16 Gluck, Various Theories, 49. 17 Ibid., 52. 18 Please see the previous chapter where I raise the fact of the Holocaust, where millions of Jews were murdered, and millions of other Jews have suffered from their experiences and from the experiences of their parents and others. In recognition of this I admit that present-day theologies must always have in back of their mind, “Yes, but.”

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this, think of the way a person would pour sugar into a bowl. They would be acting “providentially” at a high level in setting the boundaries of the place to where the grains of sugar will fall. And by choosing the particular bowl, they would be setting the shape of the mass of sugar as a whole. But for all that, our sugar-pourer will not have determined for any grain the exact place it will end up in the bowl. The “providence” is holistic and guiding rather than always determining down to the details on the individual level. The idea of moderate providence is that God sets in place such high-level holistic frameworks to govern the world.19 One of those we might label the “chosenness-framework,” boundaries and shapes, as it were, in place to guide the history and fate of the Jewish People in a holistic way. In that way, some, at least, individual Jews will be restricted in their lives by the boundaries and shapes of the divine “bowl” to conform to God’s will, as embodied in the holistic “chosenness-framework.” Yes, this is a restraint on free will, but no more so, and generally less so, than restrictions of facticity on our free will, such as limits on our physical traits, the fact of our place of birth and childhood upbringing, where we live, who our closest relatives are, and more, all of which limit the choices open to us. Yet, being under a chosenness-framework means more than restrictions and constraints, for it also means opportunities and choices that may be possible only within that framework. In addition, there will be something corresponding to Hegel’s “cunning of Reason”: Reason is as cunning as it is powerful. Cunning may be said to lie in the intermediative action which, while it permits the objects to follow their own bent and act upon one another till they waste away, and does not itself directly interfere in the process, is nevertheless only working out its own aims.20 On that conception, “world-historical” individuals act from their own private motives and become historically great and influential. All the while, unbeknownst to them, an immanent divine reason behind the scenes is using them to advance the wanted direction of history. These individuals are the instruments of an ulterior design of which they themselves may not be conscious. We can adopt Hegel’s idea by positing such world-historical individuals in multiple holistic

19 For why God might do this, see below the chapter on God’s goodness. 20 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences: The Logic, part 1, The Shorter Logic, number 209.

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frameworks including in the chosenness-framework. In that way, in addition to other holistic frameworks Jews, and non-Jews, can play historic roles in the ongoing status of the Jews as the chosen people and in the furthering of making God’s love manifest to all. Gluck himself offers a notion of chosenness far from the concerns of people like Harris and me and of my intended readership. For Gluck, the present and future relationship of God and the Jews “is irrelevant.”21 That is because for Gluck the significance of Jewish election belongs to the past. For him “that the Jews are today the chosen people has more to do with “their history as a group and their self-identification with that group than with any particular traits or beliefs that they may now possess.” Gluck tells the reader, “When I speak of the Jews as the chosen people, I mean to say that their world-view (essentially the biblical world-view) has, by the will of God, permeated the entire universe (or at least most of it).”22 The world-view Gluck celebrates is, “Aside from the more obvious belief in a single God who has a hand in directing human history, this world-view brings man back to himself and negates the corrosive effects of cultures which conceal the essential human reality in pursuit of some ‘higher’ good.”23 And, “A deeper understanding of the biblical message reveals that God’s love for the beings that He created in His own image requires that they exercise a will of their own if they are to actualize their true nature.”24 Since the teaching of the Jewish world-view has been accomplished, so is a thing of the past, Gluck asks himself if the Jews must continue to exist as a distinct people. He concludes that the continuing existence of the Jew is to be a reminder to the world of the world-view to which they are to adhere, no more than that. I have found much wisdom in Gluck’s book, and I have reformed the figurational view in some ways as a result.25 Indeed, Gluck’s presentation has some merit for Jews who are not committed to traditional Judaism. However, it remains off the radar for a living conviction in the present and future import of Jewish election from a traditional Jewish stance.

21 Gluck, Various Theories, 51. 22 Ibid., 295, my emphasis. 23 Ibid., 310. 24 Ibid., 311. 25 For example, I have expunged from the earlier version references to the exclusive truth status of Judaism, as opposed to other religions. Reading Gluck convinced me that such matters need not be part of a robust figurational election.

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A Designated People III: Michael Wyschogrod1

Michael Wyschogrod, who was an Orthodox Jew, advanced a notion of Jewish election that has gotten much attention ever since its publication.2 In his exposition, Wyschogrod offered reasons why God loves the Jews in particular and why that love had to be unique and exclusive to the Jews. His reasoning, if acceptable, counts against the figurational view of Jewish election which I support. Wyschogrod was a far more important and creative theologian than I will ever be, yet I find deficiencies in his reasoning that should cause us to pause before accepting his doctrine of Jewish chosenness and before rejecting the figurational view because of it. Alas, I cannot deal with the rich complexity of Wyschogrod’s writings and will have to focus only on a skeleton of his argumentation. Wyschogrod addresses these questions: Why does God proceed by means of election, the choosing of one people among the nations as his people? Why is he not 1 Part of this chapter is an altered version of Jerome Gellman, “Halevi, Wyschogrod, and the Chosen People,” in Jewish Philosophy Past and Present: Contemporary Responses to Classical Sources, ed. A. Segal and D. Frank (Abingdon: Taylor and Francis/Routledge, 2017). Used with permission of Routledge. 2 Michael Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, Judaism as Corporeal Election (New York: Seabury Press, 1983). A Google search for “Michael Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith” yielded 83,500 hits.

A Designated People III: Michael Wyschogrod

the father of all nations, calling them to his obedience and offering his love to man, whom he created in his image? More fundamentally, why must the concept of nation intrude itself into the relation between God and man? Does not God address each individual human being as he stands alone before God?3 It is important to Wyschogrod that in answering these questions we do not make God have to adhere to a moral system, not only to our own moral sensibilities but to any moral system: Any answer that would demonstrate that what God did was the only thing he could have done or that it was the right thing to do would be too much of an answer. God must not be subject to necessity or to a good not of his own making. He is sovereign and his own master and must not be judged by standards external to him. . . . Having succeeded in providing the best possible reason for God’s actions, the apologist does not realize that he has subjected God to judgment by criteria other than his free and sovereign will . . . and is therefore no longer talking of the biblical God.4 And so, Wyschogrod proclaims that in his theory of the election of Israel he will dispense “with all claims of necessity or that this was the best possible course for God to take.”5 The idea, I take it, is that since God of the (Hebrew) Bible is sovereign and His own master, nothing external can limit God’s actions. But if God could do only what is morally good then God would be limited by something external to God. So, when God chose the Jews, God was not bound by what was the morally good thing to do. We are therefore free to attribute to God motives for choosing the Jews not determined by moral considerations. We should question Wyschogrod’s allegiance to the God of the Bible only. Jewish tradition knows of God in other ways than that. Accordingly, I disagree that God’s being obligated to do what is morally good would be a threat be a threat to God’s sovereignty. We can acknowledge that God always does the good without having to ascribe to God a sovereign-breaking attribute. There are two ways to reply to this charge. One is to deny that God’s conforming to a moral 3 Ibid., 53. 4 Ibid., 58. 5 Ibid., 59.

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standard of the good is in any way God’s being restrained by something external to God. That is because on a respectable theology God does what is good by God’s very inner nature.6 It is an esential part of God’s character that God does only the good and does no wrong. We are, therefore, not to see God as having to consult what is the morally good thing to do now before God acts, and then bow to the result. God is self-motivated to do the good independently of any obligation to do the good. That just what God is. So, when God acts, God is not limited by any external morality. When God acts God is true to himself. So then, God could have done what was a good thing to do when choosing the Jews, since by nature God can do only good. However, it would not be true that God was bound by a morality external to God. On this view of God’s goodness, God is free when acting for the good in the following sense: Nothing can interfere or prevent God from acting as God wishes. God is free from all external constraints on his decisions and actions. God is internally motivated by God’s very nature to do what is morally good, and in choosing well between moral alternatives. Nothing can interfere with that motivation.7 Another way to turn back Wyschogrod’s reasoning is by supposing that morality is not external to God because God has decreed the moral order. In addition, God has freely decided to act in self-limitation toward God’s creation in accordance with those moral standards. God freely chooses to act toward God’s creatures in the way God wants creatures to act, in accordance with divinely ordained morality. Since God chooses to conform to the morality God has decreed, no external moral standards are obligating God to choose the Jews although there was a moral standard according to which God acted. We need only believe that the valid moral standard in question is of God’s own making and that God had decided to act in accordance with it. Something somewhat like this we find in the Jerusalem Talmud: Said Rabbi Lazer [Elazar]: “The law does not obligate the king.”8 The way of the world is such that a human king makes a 6 For a contemporary formulation see Thomas V. Morris, Our Idea of God: An Introduction to Philosophical Theology (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1991), 51ff. 7 This conception of divine freedom matches the so-called “compatibilist” conception of human free will. On that conception, a person is said to act freely when there is nothing external forcing him or her so to act. Yet there can be causes internal to the person’s psyche that cause him or her so to act. This was the idea of human freedom of Hasdai Crescas (ca. 1340–1410/11). See Hasdai Crescas, Light of the Lord, transl. Roslyn Weiss (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 205–241. 8 This sentence is in Greek in the original. My translation follows Moshe Aryeh Mirkin, Vayikra Rabbah, part 2 (Tel Aviv: Yavneh Publishers, 1998), 180.

A Designated People III: Michael Wyschogrod

decree. If he wishes, he himself keeps it, or if he wishes, [only] others keep it. However, the Holy One Blessed be He is not like that. He makes a decree and He observes it before anyone. The reason is [that it says] (Leviticus 22:9), “You should observe my observances, I am God.” I am the first one to observe the Torah commandments. Rabbi Simon said: It is written, “Before the elderly you shall arise and honor the old ones and fear your Lord. I am God” (Leviticus 22:9): I am the one who first observed [the decree] standing before an old person.9 This passage is a riff on the reference to God speaking of “my observances,” indicating that God observes that which he commands to others. The example of standing for the elderly refers to Genesis 18:1, “And the Lord appeared unto him [Abraham] in the plains of Mamre: and he [Abraham] sat in the tent door in the heat of the day.” This midrash (Genesis Rabbah 48:7) comments that Abraham wanted to stand up before God, but God would not let him do so. Abraham remained seated while God stood before him. The present reply to Wyschogrod’s worries about God’s sovereignty widens God’s self-acceptance of God’s own decrees, including moral ones, to all of God’s chosen behavior with creatures, avoiding tying God to an external constraint. Each of these replies to Wyschogrod has served in traditional theology and must be considered seriously before agreeing with Wyschogrod that God need not act for the better good. So, what is the situation regarding using our moral standards when thinking about the reasons God had for choosing the Jews? There is a clear place in the religious life to defer to God’s sovereignty, and to be still before God’s inscrutable actions. Humility in the face of our vulnerability is in order. However, that can be expected of a person only if she is either a thorough fideist believer, whose devotion floats free from any justificatory considerations, or a believer who already has some reason to believe in and trust a sovereign God in the first place. Many of us will practice deference to God’s sovereign inscrutability only once we believe that at the core God is morally good and does not act capriciously. Only then will we trust God in those situations in which God appears to act in ways mysterious and beyond our moral understanding. Then we do so because we have faith in God’s goodness to carry us beyond what we can know or understand.

9 A slightly different version is in JT (Vilna) Rosh Hashanah 1.

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God’s having chosen the Jews is a fundamental, lasting act of God’s, determining the course of Jewish history, and having serious influence on world history. If we cannot give a morally acceptable account of such a central tenet of Judaism, then one’s faith in God’s goodness could suffer serious doubt. In applying our moral intuitions here, we are not trying to make God comply with our rules but are trying to ground for ourselves trust in God’s goodness, this trust serving us elsewhere where we cannot fathom God’s goodness. Yes, moral standards change, and yes, we must have humility when constructing our “insightful” theologies. But we must do the best we can to make our belief and trust in God as secure as we possibly can at any given time. That is what I am trying to do with my figurational view of Jewish election. Committed to God not being controlled by morality, Wyschogrod puts the question, “Why does God proceed by election rather than by being the impartial father of all peoples?”10 He implies from the start that God’s love of the Jews is greater than God’s love of others. Fundamental to his conception is Wyschogrod’s assertion that “God loves man in a human way.”11 and “The love with which God has chosen to love man is a love understandable to man.”12 This has crucial implications for Wyschogrod’s view of Jewish election. God’s love, says Wyschogrod, cannot be “undifferentiated”: Question: Should these 4 lines be separated as a block quotation? love that is dispensed equally to all must be love that does not meet the individual in his individuality but sees him as a member of a species, whether that species be the working class, the poor, those created in the image of God, or what not.”13 (191) Hence, “[The divine love] is a genuine encounter with man in his individuality and must therefore be exclusive.”14 Impartiality comes with a degree of remoteness, lacking in genuine intimacy. God’s love must be a true I-Thou relationship with the beloved. “Love that is in the realm of I-Thou is directed toward the other who is encountered in his being and on whom we do not impose our preconceptions.”15 Even if we were to grant to Wyschogrod that universal love would be cold and abstract, it does not follow that love must be exclusive. Between universal and exclusive there are many degrees of the width of love, from exclusive, to plural but low in number, all the way to universal. Not universal does not mean necessarily exclusive. 10 Gellman, “Halevi, Wyschogrod, and the Chosen People,” 190. 11 Ibid., 192. 12 Ibid., 193. 13 Ibid., 191. 14 Ibid., 192. 15 Ibid., 192.

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God chooses to provide a love understandable to humans, an I-Thou love, one directed to the individuality of the beloved. Now, for Wyschogrod, these categories cannot come from an obligation of God to do what is most valuable on account of such love being the most valuable. For then Wyschogrod would have compromised God’s independence and dominion once again, by making God subject to “external” values. So, such desirata must have come from love, God’s wanting to love God’s beloved in a way that would give the beloved the greatest kind of love possible. That is, God’s wanting to love in that way is from love, and nothing more. God wants the beloved to feel the genuineness of the love, to feel loved in an I-Thou love. And for that, Wyschogrod claims, the love must be exclusive. I wonder whether these thoughts about exclusive love really make much sense. Janusz Korczak famously headed a Jewish orphanage in pre-World War II Warsaw. His love of the children is legendary, and children who survived the Holocaust have testified to the great sense of love that Korczak imparted to them. He even wrote a popular work entitled, How to Love a Child.16 After the Nazis occupied Warsaw, Korczak refused several offers and opportunities to escape from the Nazis, because it would mean leaving his charges behind. In the ghetto, Korczak would spend much of his time searching for food for the children in his care. In the end, when ordered by the Nazis, Korczak marched with the children to the Warsaw train station from where they were taken to Treblinka and murdered. There had been about 100 orphans in the institution, and later grown men and women, who had left the orphanage earlier and survived, testified to the great and intimate love Korczak had for each of them. Am I to believe that, because each orphan saw that Korczak loved the other ninety-nine orphans equally, it in any way diminished the feelings they had of his love or diminished in any way their love for him? This defies reason. A genuine love need not be as exclusive as Wyschogrod thinks to be received as a deeply genuine and satisfactory expression of human love. The human heart has room for much love, to give and accept. How much more so should we doubt Wyschogrod’s argument that genuine love must be exclusive when we are talking about divine love. God, unlike a human, does not run out of love when loving many equally and God doesn’t weaken of love from lack of energy or boredom. God’s concentration is not disturbed by having to love many. Even if Wyschogrod were correct about human love having to be exclusive, this has no implications for the unlimited capacity of God to be in concrete love with every person, to love each equally, 16 Janusz Korczak, How to Love a Child and Other Selected Works, vol. 1, ed. Anna Maria Czernow (Elstree and Chicago, IL: Vallentine Mitchell, 2018).

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and for the love to be given in the aspect of I-Thou to the individuality of every single recipient of that love. And it should have no implications for God’s love to be so deep and sincere as to be perceived by each person as an intimate love for her or him than which there can be no greater. And it has no implications for God’s abilities, as opposed to human ones, for that love to be undiminished in its individual glory by the recipients knowing that God loves everybody else to the same extent. God can love every single person there is without that love being remote and abstract in the least. God’s love of humans can well be experienced as deep and in as personal a way as you like. God’s love of everyone is well “understandable” as precious Godly love that surpasses all human love. Wyschogrod’s reasoning here is influenced by a different idea of God than the one I have employed in my rebuttal. This way of thinking of Wyschogrod’s leans heavily on what he takes to be the character of the God of the Bible. This contention counts against reasons for the figurational view of chosenness. On the latter proposal, God would be expected to act in accordance with the highest moral standards and act for a great good that God judged not to be obtainable otherwise. So, God would not be seen as having racist values or acting in ways that encourage condemnable degrees of racist attitudes. But if Wyschogrod is correct, none of that stands to reason. For Wyschogrod believes in a humanized God: “We come up against the realization that God has a personality, is a person, has emotions and plans, makes calculations that sometimes succeed and sometimes fail. And if he has a personality, then this personality also has weaknesses, insecurities, neuroses.”17 And, “Hashem [God] is a biblical character whose motivations and actions require analysis, as do those of other biblical characters. But Hashem faces problems that no other character does. . . . Above all, he is desperately alone.”18 And further: “It is this very same humanization of God that introduces into his love for Israel a need for Israel’s response and leaves God deeply hurt when this response is not forthcoming. It is this divine vulnerability that makes real the relationship between God and man.”19 And: We cannot inquire into the physical appearance of Hashem; but we must not be misled by this into accepting as biblical the dogma of the noncorporeality of Hashem. Without rushing to the opposite conclusion and inferring that the Bible does

17 Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, 99. 18 Ibid., 110. 19 Ibid., 113.

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attribute corporeality to Hashem, we note, somewhat more cautiously, that Hashem is located in certain places at certain times and that men meet him in these places when Hashem so desires. . . . Just as man is a dweller in a space and his personality lives in a location, so there are locations in which Hashem dwells.20 A God who has weaknesses and is desperate, who is human (all too human), might not be able to love all equally and with the depth Wyschogrod wishes. So, this God, desperate as He is, falls in love the way a human desperately alone would fall in love. And so, God’s love is akin to human love in ways which drive Wyschogrod’s idea of Jewish election. Now, admittedly some are selectively literal about their God of the Torah. And some are similarly selectively literal about their God in the rabbinic literature. Indeed, as Dov Weiss has clearly shown, one finds in the latter an inflation of biblical humanization.21 I say “selectively,” because even if one believes that these descriptions of God are meant to be taken as a humanizing theology, hardly anybody today believes that can be localized so that God walks in a garden, dwells in heaven, descends to earth to snoop around to find out what is happening, and descends and ascends a mountain. And that selectivity opens the way to further discernment in not humanizing God. It is controversial among scholars whether humanizing descriptions in the Torah signal a theology of a vulnerable, pleading God, or are instead the Torah and the rabbis using a manner of speech to instill attitudes and emotions thought appropriate for the multitudes.22 “The Torah speaks in the language of people.” But does not mean to levitate upward to a theology of truth. Look at our liturgy. There, we proclaim God as creator and ruler of the universe in whose hands our fate depends. The overarching theme of the liturgy is God’s sovereignty.23 God’s sovereignty includes our asking rhetorically: “What [worth] are we? What [worth] is our life? What [worth] are our abilities?” We are the desperate and vulnerable, not God. The theme of our holiest days of the

20 Ibid., 100. 21 Dov Weiss, Pious Irreverence Confronting God in Rabbinic Judaism (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), especially chapter five. 22 On this see Dov Weiss, in, “The Rabbinic God and Medieval Judaism,” Currents in Biblical Research 2017 15, 369-390. 23 See Reuven Kimelman, “The Theology of the Daily Literature,” in The Cambridge Companion to Jewish Theology, ed. Steven Kepnes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 77–101.

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year is the vast contrast between our lives, comparable to a passing dream and to a withering flower, and the eternal dominion and power of God over us. We are as clay in the hands of the crafter. We are as glass in the hands of the glassmaker. We pray to God to guide us and help us to keep the commandments. We ask of God to help us to repent of our sins, to help us not to speak badly of others, and to open our hearts to His Torah. We plead to God to give us a new spirit, to do God’s will. We are the desperate and vulnerable in these prayers, not God. We praise God for God’s astounding power and miracles. God, according to this way of seeing things, is not vulnerable or dejected; rather, God has wanted the good of making the goals of creation be achieved through human cooperation. God is self-restricting, not frustrated, neurotic, and feeling alone. It should be clear that Wyschogrod’s idea of Jewish chosenness works, if at all, only for those who share his severe humanizing of God in the name of selectively reading the Torah. It is not broad enough to serve a wider range of well-entrenched traditional beliefs about God. There are many for whom Judaism is not a biblical religion. Wyschogrod’s idea of Jewish election loses those people entirely. Wyschogrod takes the exclusivity of God’s love to an unacceptable extreme. God, for Wyschogrod did not fall in love with a nation, or a family, or a husband and wife, but with one person and one person only, and that was Abraham. “God’s relationship with Abraham is truly a falling in love.”24 God’s love of the Jewish people, Abraham’s children, is but a continuation of God’s love of Abraham, In the Bible, it is not Abraham who turns toward God but God who turns to Abraham with an election that is not explained because it is an act of love that requires no explanation. If God continues to love the people of Israel. . . . It is because he sees the face of his beloved Abraham in each and every one of his [Abraham’s] children.25 So here we have a notion of Jewish election that is not explicitly racist nor supposedly a reason to think of the Jews as superior to others. Not racist, because a matter of pure love, which defies explanation. It does not have to be any more racist for God to fall in love with Abraham than it must be racist for a white woman to have fallen in love with a white man and not a black man, if everything else is equal. And for God to fall in love with Abraham presumably says no more

24 Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, 64. 25 Ibid., 193.

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about Abraham being superior to every other human being than does my loving my wife mean that I think she is the most superior being on the planet. Yet, it is only she I love and no other. Several problems lurk here. One is that whoever falls in love can also fall out of love. And whoever loves another’s descendants because of the love of their ancestor might come to give up the love of the descendants if they turn out, say, to be too burdensome and challenging. Even true love can have its stretching limits. Also, if God simply fell in love with Abraham, God might just as easily find a new love, a greater love, a human love, one that makes God fall out of love with Abraham. Maybe God falls madly in love with Jesus or Mohammad and grants a divorce to the children of Abraham, to now love the followers of Jesus or Mohammad. The Jewish sense of chosenness allows for no such events to come to be. The Jews are not only God’s bride, but God’s first-born. A bride and groom can decide on divorce. A child remains your child forever. Jews have a role to play as God’s chosen beloved that includes the idea that the Jews exemplify God’s love no matter what and no matter what suffering they endure and how much of a nuisance they make. This requires a steadfastness that survives all events and all challenges. To give up God’s love of the Jews at any time would be to unravel the meaning of all past history of God with the Jewish people. Another issue is whether Wyschogrod’s love story, while not overtly racist, might be too vulnerable to racist attitudes. It seems to be more susceptible to that than is my figurational view. If God loves your grandmother way more than my grandmother, even though supposedly there is no visible reason for this love, this can easily convert into a sense of special entitlement and attitudes of superiority going into racism. It is a natural human desire to want to believe that if God loves only my grandmother so much, there simply must be something superior about my grandmother that made God feel that way about her. There is, finally, an internal problem in Wyschogrod’s idea that God’s love of the Jewish people is really a love for Abraham. If this is so, then God does not love me for who I, Yehuda Gellman, am in my individuality and “thou-ness.” God loves me because God sees somebody else when God looks at me. God looks at me and sees Abraham in my Jewish face. True that somebody else, Abraham, has a close association to me, but this is not genuine love of me, but love only because I remind God of somebody else, who is my grandpa. God is loving Abraham through me. This is barely a genuine love that should be “understandable” to humans. To focus God’s love on Abraham alone carries too high a price for the flaws of genuine love for the Jewish people who follow. True, according to the figurational view, God manifestly loves me because I am

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a Jew, but if we follow the traditional view, my Jewishness is a foundational fact about me, not an incidental fact. My being Jewish, on the classic conception, permeates my being as oil permeates the olive through and through. Sometimes, a Jew must be squeezed for some of the oil to appear. And when God manifestly loves me because I am Jewish it is I whom God loves, genuinely and fully. And on the figurational view the same is true for every human being, Jewish or not. I conclude that Wyschogrod’s notion of the chosen people is wanting for the reasons I have listed, and end by repeating my plea for some version of figurational chosenness for future dissemination.

4

A Critique of Torah History1

The Torah has much content that is given as outright historical fact. This includes that God created the world in six days, in what works out to fewer than 6,000 years ago, that Adam and Eve were the first humans, and that multiple languages came to be as a result of the Tower of Babel. Abraham went to Canaan at God’s command; Jacob had twelve sons, who became the twelve tribes; Joseph was sold unto Egypt and became second to the Pharaoh; the children of Jacob came to Egypt, were enslaved and stayed there for a few hundred years, becoming a mighty nation of two or three million people; and that God liberated them by bringing ten plagues upon the Egyptians. The Israelites then wandered the desert for forty years, ate miraculous food, God gave them the Ten Commandments and the Torah in the desert through Moses, and the people subsequently stormed and defeated Canaan and settled in the Land of Israel. Every one of the above has been broadly challenged in the past two hundred years, and especially so in the second half of the twentieth century. Natural sciences, biblical studies, archeology, and the study of the history of ancient civilizations have together formed a broad, reasoned agreement among scholars that the Torah is not a dependable source of historical information. Some claim

1 I am indebted to Samuel Lebens and Tryon Goldschmidt for correspondence with them on this chapter.

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that there is nothing, or almost nothing, historical to the stories of the Torah. Most think that it is only details of the stories that are not reliable, and that at least some of the main stories have some basis in fact. Either way, these conclusions frontally contradict the traditional view of the historical inerrancy, or close to it, of the Torah. Here I will focus on the central events of the Israelites’ stay in Egypt in slavery, the Exodus from Egypt, the sojourn in the desert, and the entry into the Land.2 From the evidence it is difficult to continue to maintain the historical accuracy of the Torah, at the least down to its details, everything else being equal.3 The most sensitive of clashes between scholarly research and the alleged historicity of the Torah is with the story of the Israelite stay in Egypt, the Exodus, and the wandering in the desert. The Exodus story, including the giving of the Ten Commandments on Mt. Sinai, has been a defining one for Jewish history. In what follows, I give a summary of some of the main reasons to doubt, in the least, the details of the historical account of the Torah of these events. Some scholars reject any historical basis to these stories. So, William Dever has written, “there is neither place nor need for an Exodus from Egypt.”4 However, the scholarly agreement leans towards more careful pronouncements. Carol Redmount well represents this, when she writes that most of the Exodus material was composed or collected long after events, resulting in revisions that obscured the original stories.5 As a result, “The Exodus saga is neither pure history nor pure literature, but an inseparable amalgam of both.”6 So we can expect only some, perhaps general, historical truth in the Torah narrative, but not accuracy in the account of Egypt and the Exodus. Redmount writes: “Especially for documents that expressed deeper truths and fundamental values, facts as such were not always valued, consistency was not always a virtue, and specific historical particulars were often irrelevant and therefore variable.”7 Here are some of the reasons that scholars have given against the historical accuracy of the Egypt-Exodus-desert story, several of them recounted by Redmount. One of them is that the Egyptian setting in the early part of the book

2 For an examination of content other than the sojourn and Exodus from Egypt see my book This Was from God (Brookline, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2016). 3 In the next chapter I will turn to a counter-argument according to which not everything else is equal. 4 W. G. Dever, “Is there any Archaeological Evidence for the Exodus?,” in Exodus: The Egyptian Evidence, ed. Ernest S. Frerichs and Leonard H. Lesko (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1997), 67. 5 Carol A. Redmount, “Bitter Lives: Israel in and out of Egypt,” in the Oxford History of the Biblical World, ed. Michael D. Coogan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 58–89. 6 Ibid., 64. 7 Ibid., 63.

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of Exodus is quite generic. There are no names of kings and little local coloring, which we would expect if the stories were accurate accounts of actual historical events. This includes the absence of names of the Egyptian rulers and where they resided.8 The overall impression is one of general knowledge of Egyptian political-cultural and material life but with silence in supplying identifying marks. Yes, there are references in the Torah to circumstances and situations found independently to reflect actual ancient Egypt. These include archeological evidence of Semitic settlement in the area of the Northern Delta, stone depictions of Semitic populations making bricks, and extensive building projects in the Delta area. However, these show no more than a general familiarity with ancient Egypt and/or a borrowing of content from Egyptian writings. They do not testify to the authenticity of the events as recorded. This is especially so since we find no mention in Egyptian documents of the Israelites being in Egypt at the supposed time, whereas had they been there in such large numbers (two or three million), surely, they would merit wide reference. To be sure, Egyptian records usually refer to Semitic tribes as no more than such.9 However, here we are talking about two to three million people who lived there for many scores of years as an identifiable subculture of Egypt. Egyptian commercial, military, court, and royal records neither refer to the Israelites nor at any point reflect conditions that would have been achieved if the Israelites had been there in such large numbers, and if they departed, as the Torah relates. Scribes were one of the most important agents that kept the administration in order. The Israelite presence in such large numbers would have required massive economic programs and military domination. A departure of two or three million people/slaves would have left Egyptian society militarily, economically, and socially discombobulated. This would have to have been reflected in Egyptian documents, whether or not mentioning the Israelites by name. Had the plagues occurred as described in the Torah, the Egyptian economy would have been devastated and at least a few hundred thousand people (the first-born, for example) would have died. Perhaps we should not expect Egyptian records to include reference to a humiliating defeat, which according to the Torah the

8 Some scholars disagree with the need for names of the rulers. Nonetheless, most agree that the story is rather generic in terms of knowledge of Egyptian culture at the time. 9 This retort is made by Joshua Berman in Ani Maamin, Biblical Criticism, Historical Truth, and the Thirteen Principles of Faith ( Jerusalem: Maggid Books, 2020), chapter 3. Berman’s overall purpose of his chapter is to defend biblical history in the main. The book came to my attention too late to include a discussion in this book. It is worth reading.

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Egyptians suffered. However, the aftermath of what would have been enormous social and economic dislocations would have to have been reflected in the records of both Egypt and its neighbors concerning the economic and military effects, which would have been enormously of interest. Records are silent, both of Egypt and of other nations nearby. The Biblical story requires there to have been two or three million Israelites who escaped from Egypt and wandered together in the Sinai Desert for forty years, plus large numbers of livestock. To suppose that this number of people, with the elderly, children, belongings, and animals, could move smoothly through the Sinai at the pace reported in the Torah, is grossly unrealistic. It would have taken a few days just for everyone to pass the starting point on leaving Egypt, or when on a desert journey, in an orderly manner. The Sinai desert is mostly rocky and mountainous, restricting open areas for passage. It is just not possible. Moses could not seriously have asked of Pharaoh to allow the Israelites to go out to the desert for three days to worship their god (Exodus 3:18). They would have had to return as the last ones left the starting point. The Israelites could not have left Egypt “in a hurry,” to ensure their escape, as Deuteronomy 16:3 reports: “You shall eat no leavened bread with it. Seven days you shall eat it with unleavened bread, the bread of affliction—for you came out of the land of Egypt in haste—that all the days of your life you may remember the day when you came out of the land of Egypt” (my emphasis). It would have taken days for them to leave Egyptian rule. Pharaoh would not have become aware of the escape only after it happened (as per Exodus 14:5, where Pharaoh is informed that the “people have [already] fled”). He would have known of it happening long before. Also, when travelling in the desert, some destinations would have been reached before the last Israelites had even left the starting point. For sure, the Israelites could not have relocated from Shur to Marah in three days (Exodus 15:22), or to anywhere else in that time. Even if we suppose the Israelites walked, say, a hundred abreast, the line would have been many miles long and it would have taken at least a few days just to pass the starting point. Such a wide swath of walkers plus cattle makes little sense in much of the Sinai typography. A good part of the Sinai is rocks and mountains, quite impassable for ordinary folk, and some of the other parts are sandy. If there really were two or three million Israelites in Egypt, a number of anomalies arise. It could not be that two midwives cared for all Israelite women, as stated in Exodus 2. It would be inexplicable how the Egyptians were close enough for the Israelites to see and hear them in pursuit at the Sea of Reeds, yet two or three million Israelites were able to reach the other side of the sea

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before the Egyptians reached them at the seashore. The seventy date trees of Exodus 15:27 would hardly have helped relieve the Israelites’ complaints of lack of food. And if that number of people were in the desert, the Israelites would have crushed the tribal band of warriors of Amalek rather than struggle to defeat them. In addition, the Israelites could not have crossed the Jordan River into Canaan with Joshua as recorded in Joshua 4:10: “and the people hurried and crossed over.” It would have taken several days for them to cross the river.10 Studies of the population figures in ancient Egypt differ. Karl Butzer has made a thorough study and concluded that the population of Egyptians could have grown to as much as three million at its height. Others put it at less than that, and as low as one million.11 These figures set the generally accepted possibilities for ancient Egypt of the time. Accordingly, there could not have been two or three million Israelites in Egypt at the time. We would have to assume far many more Egyptians than the evidence can tolerate. The number had to be far smaller. Studies of the population after Israelite settlement in Canaan show that the Israelites could not have been resident there in such large numbers as they would have been according to the numbers who would be entering Canaan (Numbers 26).12 The size of the Israelite presence in Canaan is exaggerated in our minds by the standard translation of the Hebrew word ir as “city” for Canaan population centers against whom the Israelites fought. This suggests a large concentration of Canaanite people, which naturally would require large armies to overcome and destroy. It now appears that the translation as “city” is misleading, and that such “cities” were “pint-sized.”13 An ir was any population complex. The battles,

10 For an intriguing study arguing for a much smaller Israelite population than millions, see Colin J. Humphreys, “The Number of People in the Exodus from Egypt: Decoding Mathematically the Very Large Numbers in Numbers I and XXVI,” Vetus Testamentum 48, no. 2 (1998): 196–213. 11 For a thorough discussion of the ancient population of Egypt, see Eugen Strouhal, Life of the Ancient Egyptians (London: Opus, 1992), especially 134ff. Joshua Berman has contributed to the denial that all Biblical history is true down to its details with an extensive argument against taking the Israelite population figures as given. See note 72. 12 The figures are quite controversial, yet there is a general reasoned consensus for the conclusion stated here. On a minimalist account of the Israelite population of Canaan for the eighth century BCE, see Magen Broshi and Israel Finkelstein, “The Population of Palestine in Iron Age II,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 287 (1992): 47–60. They estimate the population then to have been no more than 400,000. Broshi claims that at its height at a much later period it was no more than one million. See Magen Broshi, “The Population of Western Palestine in the Roman-Byzantine Period,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 236 (1979): 7. 13 See Patrick O’Connor, “The Biblical Notion of the City,” in Construction of Space II: The Biblical City and other Imagined Spaces, ed. Jon Berquist and Claudia V. Camp (London: T &T Clark, 2008), 29–30.

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if so, must have been smaller to scale than we have imagined, fitting for a number far smaller than two or three million Israelites. There is no evidence of an Israelite wandering in the Sinai Desert, despite lengthy archeological surveys by Israeli archeologists. Indeed, as reported by the New York Times, on an extensive archeological survey of the Sinai Desert, “No supportive evidence of biblical accounts of the wandering of 12 tribes of Israel was found by the archeologists in their 12 years of exploring this majestic desert terrain.”14 There should be a strong expectation of finding remains of encampments and travels, if there really were two or three million people wandering the desert, including an extended encampment in the Kadesh Desert. As opposed to this absence, there is evidence of other, small, ancient encampments in the Sinai Desert. If the number of Israelites was very much smaller, this absence would not be significant. Now, of course, a lack of evidence is not always evidence against a factual claim. However, as in this case, lack of evidence counts as evidence against when the situation is such that if there were evidence, it would have been discovered after twelve years of intensive searching. Had two or three million people lived together in the desert for forty years, there would have to be at least some serious evidence of their presence there. Samuel Lebens protests that: “The encampment in the wilderness is reported to have been so miraculous that you might not expect any remains to have been left.”15 For this he quotes the Torah telling us that the clothes and shoes of the wanderers did not wear out (Deuteronomy 21:5). Even if that were true, there is plenty we should have expected to find, both from encampments and in travelling. Numbers 11 tells us that “The manna was like coriander seed and looked like resin. The people went around gathering it, and then ground it in a hand mill or crushed it in a mortar. They cooked it in a pot or made it into loaves.” There should be remains of pottery, ovens, signs of fires/cooking grounds, great numbers of forgotten and broken personal items, in camp or on the way, and many animal bone fossils.16 There should be massive burial grounds, since the entire generation of the Exodus from Egypt is said to have died in the desert. Despite the years of exploration, none such have been found. Samuel Lebens protests that actually finding such remains in the 60,000 square kilometers of the Sinai Desert is like finding “a needle in a haystack.” So,

14 “Israeli Archeologists End 12 Years of Work in Sinai,” New York Times, April 25, 1984, https:// www.nytimes.com/1982/04/25/us/israeli-archeologists-end-12-years-of-work-in-sinai. html. 15 Samuel Lebens, The Principles of Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 213. 16 On the subject of desert climates being ideal for fossil preservation, see Steve Parker and Nathaniel Harris, Atlas of the World’s Deserts (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1993).

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we cannot say that “none of it ever happened.”17 And in personal correspondence Tyron Goldshmidt enlists the sands of the Sinai as likely having buried all the evidence. So, it goes, it is not surprising that the great amount of evidence that is there has not been found. And we remain with no counter-evidence of the Israelite sojourn in the desert. In reply, I note that I totally agree with Lebens that we have no evidence that “none of it happened.” Instead, I am saying that the findings show it highly probable that it did not happen in the way recorded, down to its details. Also, we are not talking about a proverbial needle but of what should have been very large amounts of evidence scattered over the area that should not have escaped twelve years of searching. There should be remains of tens of thousands of ovens and massive numbers of personal items on the way by a few million people over forty years. As for the size of that area, good parts of the Sinai Desert are impassable mountains and rocky topography, and we are talking of an alleged two or three million people who spent forty years there. I have flown low deep into the Sinai from Tel-Aviv and back and can testify firsthand to the large expanses of mountains and highly rocky topography in the desert. It is only partially a Sahara Desert scene.  So, the area that counts as relevant is appreciably less than the whole Sinai and we are talking about a huge population, larger by far than at any time before or after. Also, as I have already noted, while we do not know the exact location of Kadesh Barnea where the Israelites had an extended stay, we do know the general area of the Kadesh Desert. There in particular there should have been confirming findings. They are not to be found. I leave it to the reader to decide between the needle and haystack response and the strong expectation that something should have shown up somewhere there. The latter view seems to be quite clearly the case. As for sand covering evidence that is really there, this is certainly a possibility. However, present-day archeologists can see through sand with technological devices, including ground-penetrating radar, that reveal what is hidden. We no longer have to find remains with the naked eye. In any case, if sand shifts to cover evidence, it can also shift to uncover evidence. As I have noted, small ancient encampments have been discovered as well as findings of nomadic tribes and other cultures pre-dating the Exodus era. These were not covered by sand. So only the Exodus evidence was covered by sand? That the sand shifted precisely to cover all the Exodus evidence until the last drop defies reason. Besides, as I have already noted, large parts of the Sinai Peninsula are not sandy at all but are 17 Lebens, The Principles of Judaism, 214.

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rocky and mountainous, with much limestone, not sand. The strong expectation that something should show up has not been realized.18 Here is how Ernest Frerichs states a common scholarly view, among toptiered participants of a conference on the Exodus: “Despite many differences between the perspectives of the conference participants, there is considerable agreement on the difficulties, and for some participants the impossibilities, of using Egyptian evidence to establish the historicity of the Exodus.”19 According to wide general agreement among scholars, if the sojourn and Exodus did take place the number of people involved must have been so small that no trace was likely to be found in the archeological record. Typical here is William Ward, who writes: “There are hints here and there to indicate that something like an exodus could have happened, though on a vastly smaller scale.”20 If there were such small numbers, several passages in the Torah become incomprehensible. For example, the Pharaoh could not have been afraid, as in Exodus 1, that the Israelites would become too many and too mighty and pose a military threat to his kingdom. The Pharaoh would not have adamantly refused to let go of a small number of Israelites in the face of the plagues, since their economic and social importance would have been too small to want to hold them at all costs. The Pharaoh himself would not have led a massive army of 600 chariots, as in Exodus 13, against a small band of people when he discovered their escape. Balak (Numbers 22–24) would not have been scared of the military might of a small Israelite band. He would not have described them as an ominous horde, as in Numbers 22. He would not have needed Balaam to curse them. These events would cease to make historical sense. The conclusion is that academic research of the sojourn in, and Exodus from, Egypt is strongly at odds with the traditional Jewish understanding of the historical Exodus. In addition, there are a host of historical difficulties in the earlier parts of the Torah. These include the origins of humans, the invention and spread of languages, the evolution of tools and instruments, the impossibility of the Flood Story as recorded, the chronological location of Abraham and others, 18 In so arguing, I am setting aside, as do archeologists in general, the possibility that the Sinai Desert of the Bible covered far more territory or was located somewhere other than our present “Sinai Desert.” I am also setting aside the little followed view that the Israelites’ travels took them to Saudi Arabia and from there north. It would be a thin rope indeed to hang onto these two views to raise doubts about the claims I am reporting here. 19 Ernest S. Frerichs, “Introduction,” in Exodus: The Egyptian Evidence, ed. Ernest S. Frerichs and Leonard H. Lesko (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1997), 13. 20 William A. Ward, “Summary and Conclusions,” in Exodus: The Egyptian Evidence, ed. Ernest S. Frerichs and Leonard H. Lesko (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1997), 106.

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anachronisms, the historicity of the Sodom and Gomorrah stories, and more. The convincing conclusion on the evidence alone is that there are elements of Torah history that have but a tenuous basis in actual historical fact. I want to make clear that it still can be rational for a person of faith, emunah, to invoke his or her faith to declare trust in the historical accurateness of these stories. They might then say they have no explanation for why the evidence speaks strongly against their emunah but that they trust in God’s inscrutability and there must be a good reason for this. Or, they might say things like these: “God, in His inscrutable wisdom, has made all the would-be evidence to disappear so as to test our emunah, faith.” “The people who are doing these researches are atheists, or goyim, or antisemites, so what they say can easily be dismissed.” And so on. That cannot be someone who simply invokes “faith” ad hoc to evade the issue. It must be a person whose religious mind-set otherwise encompasses his or her entire world-framework. Put another way, it would have to be a person whose “final vocabulary” was wholly in terms of a religious outlook warranting this appeal to faith. One’s final vocabulary is the system of words and ideas from which there is no further regress. That is the realm so deep in one’s thinking that it provides the terms where justification and explanation stop, people whose entire world-outlook and life as lived pose a systematic alternative to Western reliance on empirical evidence. Having a coherent, comprehensive religious way of thinking that does not fall trembling in face of scientific evidence, such people have a different concept of what is reasonable to believe. However, I do not write for them but for those who, like me, have that mindset and who have respect for empirical evidence, tempered by religious belief but not easily cancelled. On the other hand, the evidential situation too often leads people to conclude that the Torah is no longer relevant to their lives and no longer commands their allegiance. It is precisely this inference that I plan to deny. Before doing that, in the following chapter I examine an attempt to argue that a strong piece of reasoning exists in favor of the Egypt narratives in the Torah and that this evidence establishes the truth of the stay in Egypt, the sojourn in the desert, as well as the miracles the Torah mentions as having taken place in both locations.21 If this reasoning works, we will have to revise what is the accepted evidential situation.

21 Note that this position is inconsistent with a belief that God made all of the empirical evidence in Egypt and the desert to disappear, to test our faith in God and the Torah. For, if that were so, God would have had to see to it as well that no piece of reasoning would occur to us that successfully made the Egypt story probable in our eyes.

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On a Failed Argument for Torah History

In this chapter, I turn to a line of reasoning that attempts to establish the probability of the occurrence of the miracles of the Egypt and desert stories, principally the revelation at Mt. Sinai. This has come to be known as the “Kuzari Argument,” after its occurrence in Yehuda Halevi’s work known as The Kuzari.1 In recent years the argument has been advanced, with some variations, by Rabbi Dovid Gottlieb,2 Samuel Lebens,3 and Tyron Goldschmidt.4 As a result, the argument has become popular in circles dedicated to convincing Jews to become Orthodox religious. While I am all in favor of Jews becoming one sort of Orthodox Jew or another, I fear that the argument is not successful. In the Kuzari, the argument is rather truncated and goes like this: Is not our book full of the stories of Moses and the children of Israel? No one can deny what God did to Pharaoh, how He 1 Yehuda [ Judah] Halevi, The Kuzari: Kitab al Khazari: An Argument for the Faith of Israel, trans. Hartwig Hirschfeld (New York: Schocken, 1964), part 1, section 9. 2 Dovid Gottlieb, “The Kuzari Argument. An Introduction,” accessed September 18, 2022, https://www.dovidgottlieb.com/comments/Kuzari_Principle_Intro.htm. 3 Lebens, Principles, 189–198. 4 Tyron Goldschmidt, “A Proof of Exodus: Yehuda HaLevy and Jonathan Edwards Walk into a Bar,” in Jewish Philosophy in an Analytic Age, ed. Samuel Lebens, Dani Rabinowitz, and Aaron Segal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 222–242.

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divided the sea, saved those who enjoyed His favor, but drowned those who had aroused His wrath. Then came the manna and the quails for forty years, His speaking to Moses on the mountain, making the sun stand still for Joshua, and assisting him against the mighty. And what happened previously, the flood, the destruction of the people of Lot; is this not so well known that no suspicion of deceit and imagination is impossible? The reasoning seems to be that if these miraculous events had not really occurred, no one, making them up, would have been able to convince anyone to believe them. So, since these events are widely believed to have occurred, they must really have occurred. The argument had been given a more felicitous formulation predating Halevi, when Rabbi Saadia Gaon (882–942) had argued for the authenticity of Torah history on the grounds that: Now it is not likely that the forebears of the children of Israel should have been in agreement upon this matter if they had considered it a lie. Such [proof] suffices, then, as the requisite of every authentic tradition. Besides, if they had told their children: “We lived in the wilderness for forty years eating naught except manna,” and there had been no basis for that in fact, their children would have answered them: “Now you are telling us a lie. Thou, so and so, is not this thy field, and thou, so and so, is not this thy garden from which you have always derived your spread sustenance?” This is, then, something that the children would not have accepted by any manner of means.5 Here Saadia Gaon is arguing for the authenticity of the Jewish tradition, in particular the truth of the historical content of the Torah, including its miraculous events, such as the manna falling from heaven. In essence, the argument is that unless these things had happened there never could have been a tradition attesting to the authenticity of the stories. That is because if at any point someone would have made up the stories the children would have denied them as a “lie.” They would not have believed such stories, because they had never heard of them in the past. Hence, the fact that the tradition exists, that the stories were accepted 5 Saadia Gaon, The Book of Beliefs and Opinions, trans. Samuel Rosenblatt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), 30. I thank Samuel Lebens for this source. I am not aware of any earlier formulation of this argument.

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in each generation, attests to the events having really happened with no room for rejection on the grounds that they were made-up lies. Saadia adds to this the evidential power of the tradition over a long period of Jewish history. The American philosopher Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) penned an extensive defense of Torah history, including that Moses wrote the Torah.6 The book includes a complex argument for the authenticity of the Pentateuch/ Torah. The central argument to which others are ancillary is reproduced here, quoted from Edwards.7 1.  If any would palm this book containing the laws and history of facts, they must make the people believe that they always had those laws and this account of facts among them, and all those things in their state dependent on the laws and facts from the beginning, though the senses of the whole nation would contradict it, and all would know that it was now new, and that they never had heard of it before.8 2.  It would be natural to expect from hence that the history of these great miracles should all along be universally known among the people, and not that there should be any time when the account of ‘em should be new in the nations, the people in general not having received the account from their forefathers.9 3.  If there should be palmed upon a nation, or by any means subtly and gradually introduced, some false history of a nation, of great, public fact, respecting the whole nation’s cardinal and fundamental events, greatly affecting the whole state and constitution of the nation; and a series of such events having a direct aspect on their affairs in all succeeding generations; and the history of the nation be traced back, and the state of it examined in times prior to the first rise of the forged history: it will be said that a respect to, and connection with, and dependence on the

6 Jonathan Edwards, Defense of the Pentateuch as a Work of Moses, Yale University, Jonathan Edwards Center, accessed September 18, 2022, http://edwards.yale.edu/archive?path=aH R0cDovL2Vkd2FyZHMueWFsZS5lZHUvY2dpLWJpbi9uZXdwaGlsby9nZXRvYmplY3Qu cGw/Yy4yNzoxLndqZW8=. I am grateful to Ty Goldschmidt for leading me to this source. 7 Because of space limitations, I quote here only some of the passages in which Edwards makes this argument. 8 Edwards, Defense of the Pentateuch, 2. 9 Ibid., 2–3.

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pretended facts is wanting, and more and more evidently the further you go back.10 4. Recapitulation. A forgery of a great and wonderful fact pretended to be in sight of a whole nation, every man, woman, and child in it, is more easily detected than what is pretended to be seen only by a few; and a forgery published among that very nation, before whom the fact is pretended to be done, is more likely to be detected than that which was pretended to be before some other nation; and a forgery of such a fact pretended to be done on the spot where the forgery is first published, or in places in view, is more easily detected than of a fact pretended to be in some remote corner.11 The “Kuzari Argument,” as stated by contemporary thinkers, depends on some form of the “Kuzari Principle,” formulated prominently by Dovid Gottlieb as follows12: (KP) Suppose a person, A, invents a story about a  national unforgettable and tries to convince another person, B, that it happened. Suppose further that B and his nation do not remember the event, and A gives B no convincing explanation why the event would not be remembered. Then B will not believe the story.13 A “national unforgettable” is an event “so rare and so important in the history of the nation, it would surely be recorded and remembered” for the ages. If a given person and the nation does not remember the national unforgettable and is given no good explanation for why it does not remember it, then they will surely not be persuaded to believe the event had really happened. After all, if

10 Ibid., 16. 11 Ibid. 12 This argument has been skillfully formulated and its influence forcefully disseminated in our day principally by Dovid Gottlieb. See his website, https://www.dovidgottlieb.com, and his book, Reason to Believe ( Jerusalem: Mosaica Press, 2017). 13 This formulation is presented by Dovid Gottlieb, “The Credibility of Testimony,” accessed July 22, 2014, https://www.dovidgottlieb.com/comments/Credibility_Of_Testimony.htm. Gottlieb has offered other formulations, but my discussion of the present formulation will apply to the others as well.

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it happened “I would surely have known about it.”14 A paradigmatic such event would be the revelation at Mt. Sinai to the entire Israelite nation. The most easily understandable and yet sophisticated formulation I have seen is the creation of Tyron Goldschmidt who has augmented the principle as stated by Dovid Gottlieb. I present the principle based on Goldschmidt’s formulation and his accompanying comments15: The Kuzari Principle (KP): A tradition is likely true, absent evidence to the contrary, if: (1) it is accepted by a majority of a nation or a significant minority; and (2) describes an alleged national experience of a previous generation of that nation; and (3) the national experience would be expected to create a continuous memory on a wide enough scale until the tradition is in place; (4) is insulting to that nation; and (5) makes universal, difficult, and severe demands on that nation.16 The idea is that unless the principle were true, people would not accept a story about an alleged national experience of their people if they had never heard of it before. That is because they would protest, in light of the principle, that had it really taken place they surely would have known about it already. It would have been too entrenched and widely believed to have been forgotten. And they certainly would not accept a new story that portrays them in a bad light, for people have an inherent tendency to believing good, but not bad, about themselves. And even more so, if believing the story results in new, excessive demands made of them, people would not have wanted to accept the story if it was brand new. The conclusion is that the miraculous stories of the Bible, especially the Sinai revelation, could not have been just invented. The reasons are the following. (1) The stories are such that if true the people would surely already have known of the events from within their national tradition, so would not now accept the story if they had no such tradition. (2) People would have been strongly disinclined to believe the stories which tell of the Israelite sins, including idol worship, unless they had had solid reason to accept them. (3) People would not have been willing to accept a story demanding the great obligations the Torah 14 Ibid. 15 Goldschmidt calls this the “Jumbled Kuzari Principle.” For short I will call it the “Kuzari Principle.” See Goldschmidt, “A Proof of Exodus,” 233. 16 For a further formulation along similar lines, see Lebens, Principles, 189–198.

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puts on them unless they had already known the story from their tradition and therefore had already adopted the obligations on account of that. Hence, the fact that the stories are accepted, and the obligations accepted shows with high probability that the stories are true because they could not have been made up and be believed. This version of the principle omits the possibility, explicit in the earlier one, that people might have accepted the story even if fabricated, if they were given a convincing reason why they had no memory of it, despite the fulfillment of the five conditions outlined in the principle. We should keep open the possibility that one who tells the story might provide convincing reasons for why the listeners did not remember it. And these reasons need not be good evidence, or even true. They only have to be sufficiently convincing to those who need to be convinced. This will turn out to be important to our evaluation of the Kuzari Argument. So, a preferable version is this: The Kuzari Principle: A tradition is likely true, absent evidence to the contrary, if (1) it is accepted by a majority of a nation or a significant minority; and (2) describes an alleged national experience of a previous generation of that nation; and (3) the national experience would be expected to create a continuous memory on a wide enough scale until the tradition is in place; and (4) is insulting to that nation; and (5) makes universal, difficult, and severe demands on that nation; and (6) unless at any time in the past the telling of the traditional story was accompanied by the telling of a reason convincing to the listeners for why they had no memory of it. Kuzarians proceed to argue that: “The principle tells us that the National Experiential Tradition of the miracles of the Exodus is likely true, absent evidence to the contrary.” That is because “The tradition was accepted by all Jews until just three centuries ago. It is accepted by all Orthodox Jews today” (clause 1); “The tradition describes a[n alleged] national experience of a previous generation of Jews” (clause 2); and the experience would be expected to create a national memory, including because it would have caused massive changes in behavior and beliefs (clause 3). The tradition is in part insulting towards the Israelites. The Torah recounts in detail the sins of the whole nation, excepting a very few. The punishments are severe (clause 4). “As for difficulty, the [Torah] laws are restrictive and costly: prohibiting certain clothing, certain foods, sex for a period each month, work one day every week, and a complete

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cessation of agriculture one year of every seven—for an agrarian society. As for strictness, the laws are enforced with various punishments, commercial, corporal, and capital” (clause 5).17 Goldschmidt then goes on to give examples of how difficult it would be to convince people of the reality of the Exodus events had they not really happened (clause 6). To which Goldschmidt adds: Now imagine adding such aspects to the Jewish tradition: that e.g., God commanded them to give up work one day every week, to give up agricultural work one of every seven years, not to eat many foods, to refrain from physical contact with spouses for a period every month, that they must constantly retell the tradition and make literary and symbolic reminders of it, and that they did do this continuously, etc. What is the relevant difference between this story and the previous one? Nothing. Except that it happened. The Israelites did believe this. They would not have believed this unless it happened.18 In another version19: This story [about the Sinai revelation] describes an event that has never happened to anyone else, anywhere. No other nation even claims that its religion started with a public revelation. This story describes an event that would be absolutely unique in all human history. The fire, the shaking earth, and hearing the voice of G-d together are sure to make a deep impression. And the story says that the rules commanded by the voice became the foundation of a new religion. Such an event would radically change the life of the whole nation—its values, attitudes, perceptions, national organization and priorities. It would profoundly transform daily life. Surely there would be many records and memories of such an event. This is the story of a national unforgettable. Since it is a national unforgettable, it is not a story that can be made up. A deceiver will not succeed with a story like this. He will not succeed because the people whom he is trying to deceive will say: “If our ancestors really witnessed an event like that, our

17 Goldschmidt, “A Proof of Exodus,” 233. 18 Ibid. 19 Gottlieb, “The Kuzari Argument. An Introduction.”

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whole national life would show it. There would be holidays to celebrate the event, records of what the voice said, and a history of national decisions implementing the new rules. This is not the sort of event which a whole nation would forget. Of course, if the deceiver can explain how such an event could be forgotten, then perhaps his story may be believed. But here it will be extremely difficult to imagine such an explanation. What could cause a whole nation to forget a revelation that created their national religion? (My emphasis) So, the conclusion in this case should be. “Suppose a nation believes that its ancestors experienced a national revelation. Since such a story cannot be invented, we have good reason to accept the story as true. For, if it were not true, it would not be believed!”20

Our Total Evidence The Kuzari Argument does highlight an intuitive likelihood that something of utmost religious importance took place back then. I personally believe in that. It is hard to think that the whole account was made up from nothing. That it is all just fiction. There is significance in this story being the only one attesting to an entire nation experiencing a revelation. And it is telling that the Torah includes serious sins of the Israelite nation as a whole. These considerations do count in favor of at least some of the stories having a basis in history. But to agree to this is far from agreeing that we have here an adequate argument for the probability of the occurrence of the miracles and other aspects of the stories and just as they appear in the Torah. In reply to the Kuzarians, for a start, let’s suppose we do accept the Kuzari Argument and conclude from it that the truth of the biblical account of the miracles is most likely. For this to make a difference to our evidential collection, though, the Kuzari Argument needs to have what it takes to neutralize the considerable evidence against the truth of at least the details of the stories of the stay in Egypt and the sojourn in the desert. Recall that the principle makes its claim only pending the absence of “evidence to the contrary.” Thus, the Kuzari Argument could be correct as far as the evidence it cites is concerned, and be defeated by additional, available counter-evidence. And of course, as I have summarized it, there is much counter-evidence to the stories of 20 Ibid.

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Egypt and the desert in the detailed ways the Bible tells it. The counter-evidence is multifaceted, from history, archeology, Bible studies, and linguistics. Given the balance of evidence for and against the miracles having taken place it seems quite clear that the weight comes down against taking the Kuzari Argument as anything like decisive or convincing. This objection gains support from the following plausible principle: The “Expected Evidence Principle” (“EEP”): Let E be an alleged event which, had it really occurred, would have left behind an imposing body of relevant material evidence that would have come to the surface after extended massive efforts to find it. If little or no such evidence does surface after extensive efforts, then probably E never occurred. Skeptics argue that had stories of the Israelite stay in Egypt, the sojourn in the desert, and occupation of the Land of Canaan been true as the Bible reports, by now surely extensive scholarly research would have come up with far more material evidence than has ever been found, which is extremely little. That does not mean that there will never be such evidence but based on EEP and our present lack of expected evidence we should now refrain from believing that the Exodus and Sinai stories are true as recorded. This argument is evidentially on a par, at least, with the Kuzari Argument. The Kuzari Principle, as set out above, refers only to a consideration of possible contrary evidence. My point is that it we must also consider the absence of evidence where such evidence is to have been expected by now. If the Kuzari Argument is to succeed, we need good reasons across a wide range of issues why researchers should not have expected to find evidence of the stay in Egypt, the wandering in the desert, and the occupation of Canaan. Another factor in a negative assessment of the argument is what we are to say, if we join one side, to explain why the other side is wrong. The Kuzari Argument will have to explain why there is no evidence of the Israelites in Egypt or in the desert. Are we to say that God made a miracle and made all evidence disappear? Not a very inviting position. Perhaps the defenders of the argument would try to convince us that God wanted to hide evidence so as to test the genuineness of our faith without any evidence. This won’t work, though, since God did not hide the Kuzari reasoning from us, an allegedly good argument for Torah historical truth. So, in any case, God deprived us of our pure faith.21 On the other hand, if we accept the counter-evidence, we might be able to turn to various features of the ancient world, how narratives came to be, 21 I owe this observation to Dan Baras.

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and what people took to be convincing explanations for why they would not remember even very impressive national events. (This is what I propose to do a bit further on.) This would help explain why the Kuzari argument does not succeed. On this score, the Kuzari Argument is less compelling in explaining why the scientific evidence is not sufficiently valid, than the scientific findings are in explaining why the Kuzari Argument does not upset those findings.

Traditional Sources in Opposition to the Kuzari Argument There are counter-indications to the Kuzari Principle in highly respectable traditional sources, with traditional commentaries for Deuteronomy and the Book of Judges, and in the writings of Maimonides. For example, in Deuteronomy 4:9–11 we read: Only give heed to yourself and keep your soul diligently, so that you do not forget the things which your eyes have seen, and they do not depart from your heart all the days of your life; but make them known to your sons and your grandsons. Remember the day you stood before the Lord your God at Horeb, when the Lord said to me, “Assemble the people to Me, that I may let them hear My words so they may learn to fear Me all the days they live on the earth, and that they may  teach their children.”  You came near and stood at the foot of the mountain, and the mountain burned with fire to the very heart of the heavens: darkness, cloud and thick gloom. (My emphases) The Torah continues with the detailed description of the theophany at Sinai/ Horeb, in the presence of the entire nation. This selection is echoed elsewhere in the Torah, as in Deuteronomy 8 concerning the manna that the entire nation ate and saw fall from the sky, and the miraculous desert travels of the entire nation. The people are told to remember all those events, not to forget them, for wealth might lead them to forget. And Deuteronomy 25 regarding the miraculous defeat of Amalek in the desert before the entire nation, commands us not to forget the referred that event, but to remember it. Now, these are alleged stupendous one-of-a-kind miracles witnessed by the entire nation. So, according to the Kuzari Argument each of these events falls into the category of a “national unforgettable,” an event of a kind that should never be forgotten. Since this is so, it is difficult to understand why the Torah has to record admonitions not to forget a national unforgettable. We are commanded

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to remember and to pass the stories on to our children so that they too will not forget. Does it not follow that unless there were a proper heeding of these commandments not to forget that these events might well have been forgotten? It surely seems so from these selections. Furthermore, Deuteronomy 27 begins with this: Now Moses and the elders of Israel commanded the people, saying, “Keep the whole commandment that I command you today. And on the day you cross over the Jordan to the land that the Lord your God is giving you, you shall set up large stones and plaster them with plaster. And you shall write on them all the words of this law, when you cross over to enter the land that the Lord your God is giving you, a land flowing with milk and honey, as the Lord, the God of your fathers, has promised you. And when you have crossed over the Jordan, you shall set up these stones, concerning which I command you today,  on Mount Ebal, and you shall plaster them with plaster.” Now, why would the people have to erect such stones when entering the Land? Nachmanides offers this as a reason: “To be for you for a remembrance, so that when you enter the land and conquer it and inherit from all the nations, you will remember the Torah and keep all its commandments.”22 Note the fear that the Torah could be forgotten unless a special project of stones was in place to keep the memory alive. We may conclude, as opposed to the Kuzari Principle, that something will be a national unforgettable only if there was a mass concerted effort to remember it, keep it alive, and pass it on, driven by a divine command. Otherwise, it might be forgotten. And that there was in fact such an effort, such as the writing on huge stones (which have not been found), and such a command, is something the Kuzari defender cannot simply take for granted at this point. That would beg the question at issue. Similarly, in Deuteronomy 11:2, Moses addresses the people as those who actually witnessed all of the miracles that God had wrought and says he is not addressing “your children who did not know and did not see” those miracles. Rashi, the medieval commentator, comments on the significance of Moses not speaking to the children who did experience the miracles, as follows. He has

22 Nachmanides, Perush ha-Ramban al ha-Torah, with supercommentary by Haim Dov Chavell ( Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1994/95), 471.

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Moses explain: “I do not speak now to your children, who could say, ‘We did not know and did not see all of that.’” In other words, the children could question the claim of the “national unforgettables” that the Israelites had allegedly experienced firsthand. They would consequently not believe it. Again, we have a counter-indication to the Kuzari reasoning. This counter-understanding of these Torah selections is well affirmed in the Book of Judges where we read: And the people served the Lord all the days of Joshua, and all the days of the elders who outlived Joshua, who had seen all the great work that the Lord had done for Israel. And Joshua the son of Nun, the servant of the  Lord, died at the age of 110 years.  And they buried him within the boundaries of  his inheritance in Timnath-heres,  in the hill country of Ephraim, north of the mountain of Gaash. And all that generation also were gathered to their fathers. And there arose another generation after them who did not know the Lord or the work that He had done for Israel. And the people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord and served the Baals. And they abandoned the Lord, the God of their fathers, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt. They went after other gods, from among the gods of the peoples who were around them and bowed down to them. ( Judges 2:7–12, my emphasis) The straightforward meaning of this text is that the new generation did not retain memory of the miracles God had done for the people in liberating them from Egypt. They forgot them. The plain meaning of these verses is endorsed by some traditional commentaries. So, Rabbi  David Altschuler  (1687–1769) writes that they did not know of God’s acts because “they quickly forgot the acts of God and did evil after the death of Joshua and the Elders.”23 Others pass over this verse without protest from a Kuzarian consideration, apparently not bothered by the anti-Kuzarian implications. Accordingly, by the testimony of Scriptures, an entire people can experience great miracles and then forget, quite quickly in fact, that they ever occurred. But if so, then someone who wants to invent stories of miracles has only to point to the authority of these verses to explain how it could possibly be that their

23 David Altschuler, Mezudot David, in Mikraot Gedolot ( Jerusalem: A. Blum, n.d.), 17, on Judges 2:10.

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ancestors experienced those miracles and yet the miracles had been forgotten. Miraculous events witnessed by an entire people would not be a guarantee of truth for the future. So, someone could succeed to foist a false miraculous narrative on a people by pointing out that apparently not enough of an effort had been made to preserve its memory, or some such. Now let’s turn to Maimonides. In Guide of the Perplexed 3:50, Maimonides explains why the Torah saw fit to provide a detailed enumeration of the travel stations of the Children of Israel in the desert (Numbers 33). Now the need for this was very great. For all miracles are certain in the opinion of one who has seen them; however, at a future time their story becomes a mere traditional narrative, and there is a possibility for the hearer to deny [its miraculous nature]. It is well known that it is impossible and inconceivable that a miracle lasts permanently throughout the succession of generations so that all men can see it. Now one of the miracles of the Law, and one of the greatest among them, is the sojourn of Israel for forty years in the desert and the finding of the manna there every day. . . . Now God, may He be exalted, knew that in the future what happens to traditional narratives would happen to those miracles: People would think that [the Children of Israel] sojourned in a desert that was near to cultivated land and in which man can live, like the deserts inhabited at present by the Arabs, or that it consisted of places in which it was possible to till and to reap or to feed on plants that were to be found there, or that it was natural for the manna always to come down in those places, or that there were wells of water in those places. Therefore, all these fancies are rebutted and the traditional relation of all these miracles is confirmed through the enumeration of those stations, so that people to come could see them and thus know how great was the miracle constituted by the sojourn of the human species in those places for forty years.24 According to Maimonides, stories that begin as accounts of miraculous events tend in time to change to stories interpreting the same events as natural. So, avers Maimonides, for the generations after the Israelite survival in the desert, the

24 Moses Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1963), 616.

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story of the great miracle of the manna likely would become a mere naturalistic narrative. In order to support the authenticity of the miraculous, God provided the names of the places where the Israelites had been in the desert so that these places could be visited, and people could see for themselves the harsh desert conditions at these places in which the Israelites journeyed. People would be forced to conclude that the survival in those places could only have been due to a miracle. Although this reasoning lacks the force it once may have had, yet, today we can conjure up from it a scenario for how some true naturalistic stories could be reinvented as miraculous. Suppose there is a well-known story of the Israelites having once passed over a body of water to be saved from a pursuing enemy. But this story has no miraculous events and bears only vague similarity to the miraculous biblical account of the splitting of the sea. One day, an honored person comes along and invents a story about the Israelites having miraculously passed through the parted Sea of Reeds (“The sea split at twelve places, one for each Israelite tribe, just when Moses passed his staff over the waters, and so forth”) and miraculously escaped the drowned Egyptian army. The people would protest, as the Kuzari Argument envisions, that they vaguely know only a very modest, watered-down naturalistic version of the story. Had there been those miracles, they surely would have heard of them. Surely the miracles would have been recounted down through the ages. They refuse to believe there were any miracles. A good Maimonidean reply to them would be this: “You never heard of the stupendous miraculous features of this story, because, as typically happens, as time goes on, the miraculous became transformed into a naturalistic story. So, the miracles receded away into oblivion. You were left with only the naturalistic shell. Now I have come to restore the true miraculous account of the Sea of Reeds.” According to Maimonides, that would be a solid explanation for why the people lacked the appropriate memories, even if the story were invented. The people might or might not believe this honorable person about the miracles of which they never heard. But if they do disbelieve, they could not very well do so by invoking the Kuzari Principle if we follow Maimonides. So, as far as that goes, miracles can be invented on the backs of naturalistic stories.25 So, we have several traditional texts, biblical and medieval, that neutralize the Kuzari Argument for the Torah miracles. That is because the argument works only if there could not plausibly have been a convincing explanation of how the

25 There is a second problem here for the Kuzari Argument and that is that it would appear from Maimonides that the Kuzari evidence would not have been sufficient. Otherwise, these place names would not have been needed to anchor memory of the miraculous events.

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tradition started if it were not true. But we have here explanations or excuses that could easily circumvent the application, everything else being equal, to a story of miracles. The story could take hold by telling the people that it was natural for them simply to forget the story, as in the Book of Judges, or that in time the original miracle story as a matter of course became naturalized and the miracles lost to the past, or the events even forgotten entirely. Accordingly, we should not necessarily suppose that people will not believe in great, public miracles of the past if they had not heard of them until now.

Not an Entirely New Religion and Not All at Once The Kuzarians make much of the claim that the (alleged) experience of the miracles and revelation would have created a massive change in the lives of the people. Hence, if the people had not already heard of these events, they would hardly have wanted to accept the religion. To repeat the claim made above: “The tradition describes a[n alleged] national experience . . . expected to create a national memory [that] would have caused massive changes in behavior and beliefs.” And: “Such an event would radically change the life of the whole nation—its values, attitudes, perceptions, national organization and priorities. It would profoundly transform daily life. Surely there would be many records and memories of such an event.”26 This clause of the Kuzari principle strengthens the reliability of the biblical tradition, or so it is maintained. It is highly questionable, though, whether accepting a made-up story about the Torah miracles would have required a sudden adoption of a whole new way of life. We now know of the intricate connections between Torah stories and laws, on the one hand, and those of religions and legislations that came before. The Torah reshaped these to become directed to God and the Jewish people and away from idol worship. Some elements of the new Torah legislation were even more lenient than their forerunners in the Near East. We now have extensive records from the Ancient Near East documenting this. General collections of such records are presented in volumes by James Pritchard and Christopher Hays, respectively.27

26 Gottlieb, “The Kuzari Argument.” 27 James B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament with Supplement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), part 2, Legal Texts, 159–548; and Christopher B. Hays, ed., Hidden Riches, A Sourcebook for the Comparative Study of the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near East (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2014), chapter 7, “Law Collections.”

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Indeed, we have in the writings of Maimonides a theological proto-position for why the behavior of the new religion was not such a radical departure from the old, as the Kuzari Argument asserts. In Guide 3:32, Maimonides tells the reader that God acts in nature with gradual increments rather than with sudden, large changes. And therefore, God did not introduce to the Israelites an entirely new religion: Many things in our Law are due to something similar.28 A sudden transition from one opposite to another is impossible. And therefore man, according to his nature, is not capable of abandoning suddenly all to which he was accustomed. . . . At that time the way of life generally accepted and customary in the whole world and the universal service upon which we were brought up consisted in offering various species of living beings in the temples in which images were set up, in worshipping the latter, and in burning incense before them. . . . His wisdom, may He be exalted, and His gracious ruse, which is manifest in regard to all His creatures, did not require that He give us a Law prescribing the rejection, abandonment, and abolition of all these kinds of worship. For one could not then conceive the acceptance of [such a Law], considering the nature of man. Therefore He, may He be exalted, suffered the abovementioned kinds of worship to remain, but transferred them from created or imaginary and unreal things to His own name, may He be exalted, commanding us to practice them with regard to Him, may He be exalted. Through this divine ruse it came about that the memory of idolatry was effaced and that the grandest and true foundation of our belief—namely, the existence and oneness of the deity—was firmly established, while at the same time the souls had no feeling of repugnance and were not repelled because of the abolition of modes of worship to which they were accustomed and than which no other mode of worship was known at that time.29 In part three of the Guide, Maimonides explains the reasons for many commandments as reshapings of extant pagan practices with which the Israelites

28 My emphasis. 29 Moses Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed 2:525–526.

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had been familiar. So, we have here a reason why the Torah would borrow from extant laws and stories, in order to gradually earn the trust of the new religion. Various traditional Jewish Bible scholars have expanded Maimonides’s insight, having located broad historical connections between Torah and pagan narratives and laws. For examples, there is the well-known similarity between Torah civil law and the Babylonian civil Code of Hammurabi. And Samuel David Luzzatto (1800–1865) records the similarities and differences between the elaborate laws of “leprosy” in Leviticus, and ancient practices of isolation and rituals surrounding skin diseases perceived as from the anger of the gods. In ancient civilizations, he says, skin diseases were taken to mean that the gods were angry with the person, and so the person was excluded from the people. “Since all of this would help with belief in providence and reward and punishment from God, the Torah retained this belief.”30 The practice was taken over and turned, with appropriated changes and compassion, to the service of God. No radically new idea here. Umberto Cassuto has made extensive connections between Torah narratives and laws and those of the surrounding cultures, taking care to point out how the Torah aimed to reshape the stories and laws to conform them to its monotheistic and Israelite context. The method is illustrated in the Torah story of the flood that redirects the story from polytheistic themes to the justice and benevolence of the one God. For example, Cassuto contrasts the Babylonian flood story, which includes placing Utnapishtim in a boat while the Torah saga has Noah in an ark. A boat is navigable on the water, thus in the hands of a person. An ark is a box that floats freely on the water, thus in the hands of God alone.31 In his commentary on the Book of Exodus, Cassuto presents an elaborate comparison between the detailed laws of the Hammurabi code and Torah legislation.32 Again, Torah legislation does not represent a massive addition of civil laws and obligtions. On the contrary, many of the torah laws are more humane than those of the surrounding cultures. And then there are the well-known connections between elaborate ancient holiday rituals and the Torah recasting of them to worship of our God. There was not a sudden rush of laws and stories that would have been resisted if not known previously. In addition, regarding the stringencies of the Torah laws, we do not really know to what extent the laws

30 Shmuel David Luzzatto, Perush al Chamishah Chumshei Torah ( Jerusalem: Chorev Publishers, 1993), 409–410. 31 Umberto Cassuto, A Commentary on The Book of Genesis, part 2, From Noah to Abraham (Skokie, IL: Varda Books, 2005), 59–60. 32 Umberto Cassuto, A Commentary on The Book of Exodus ( Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1997), 254–309ff.

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were observed in the ancient history of the Israelites. In addition, a good deal of the stringencies of the Jewish law derive from rabbinical sources, which the Kuzarist cannot assume came with the written Torah. All in all, this entire piece of defense of the Kuzari Argument is wanting. We have seen that Kuzari defenders argue that it is not likely that people would have accepted such an arduous code of law as in the Torah unless they were convinced of the truth of the historical claims. Only if they had a collective memory of the events would they have been prepared to undertake such a difficult and cumbersome lifestyle. However, the Kuzari advocates should consider a growing literature in anthropology that shows that difficult, complicated obligations contribute to the formation and thriving of a religious community.33 Religious communities that make vigorous demands on their members tend to survive and thrive longer than movements that make few demands on their members. That is because people more invested in such communities by their behavior are less likely to defect, and there is less incentive for people to “fake” membership in such communities. The result is higher solidarity and mutual loyalty. Members of the community know they can more readily count on cooperation from those who undertake an arduous regimen.34 While I do not advocate this theory about the Torah, it does pose a challenge to the Kuzari Argument about the adoption of stringent and complex behaviors. In addition, we should not assume, as the Kuzari Argument would have us believe, that an invented “forgery” of the Torah stories would have to have arisen all at once, promulgating a brand-new religion. The Kuzari Argument must deal with the sort of scenario known to have been operative in the ancient world. In that scenario, we start with a variety of proto-stories in an oral tradition, for some time before it was written down. (Biblical scholarship devotes much thought to the topic of oral and written traditions, and oral traditions are central to form criticism of the Bible.35) Even when things were first written down, several researchers have held that oral culture continued to dominate. At first, written materials were not “texts” meant to be authoritative forms of narratives

33 For a good discussion see Ara Norenzayan, Big Gods (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), especially chapter 6. I thank Eliot Sacks for this source. 34 This theory can help explain a turn to fanaticism in groups that perceive themselves as threatened by the larger culture. By making excessive demands they help discern who is with them and who is not. Their attacks on the wider culture, then, are not meant to have any effect whatsoever on that culture but to solidify their own ranks. 35 For early form criticism see Hermann Gunkel, The Folktale in the Old Testament (Sheffield: Almond Press, 1987); and Hermann Gunkel, Genesis (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997). For contemporary form criticism see Martin John Buss, Biblical Form Criticism in Its Context (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1990).

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but functioned as ancillaries to orality, helping to remember but were not authoritative.36 They did not overrule oral versions. They merely reflected one oral version that someone wrote down to help memory. As such, they did not trump differing oral versions of a narrative but existed alongside them and could be modified if needed. Since our hypothetical story had been an oral proto-story at first, we can appreciate how the story could have grown bit by bit until it reached the colossal dimensions of the elaborate national unforgettable story. Oral transmission is given to errors of memory, deliberate embellishment, and slight modifications for the present audience. Stories are spliced together or are split apart so that each part goes its own way. For various reasons, stories shift from being about this person and that place to being about another person and another place. Folk stories develop. Bit by bit, the story could have changed with no change being so big as to raise the objection that had things occured that way the audience would have remembered it. In any given case, the present audience—the number might be small at any given hearing—could not be sure how it remembered the story from the last time they had heard it. In any case, they would be hearing the story from a priestly or otherwise authority, not to be argued with. Different versions are developed orally and in auxiliary writing before later finally being fixed as an authoritative text that everyone accepts, because authoritative. An elaborate “national unforgettable,” with only a kernel of truth, has been born without problems of an absence of memory of it.

On Convincing Explanations The most serious shortcoming of the Kuzari Argument is its insufficient appreciation of the possibilities for the fulfillment of clause (6): “Unless at any time in the past the telling of the traditional story was accompanied by the telling of a reason convincing to the listeners for why they had no memory of it.” The Kuzari Principle is operative only in the absence of a convincing explanation to the people who are being told of the miracles why they do not know of them already. In saying that “It will be extremely difficult to imagine such

36 See Susan Niditch, Oral World and Written Word, Ancient Israelite Literature (Louisville, KY: Westminster, 1996), especially chapter 3, “New Ways of Thinking of Orality and Literacy: Israelite Evidence,” 39–59. See also David Carr, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), chapters 4–8. I found this source in Benjamin D. Sommer, Revelation and Authority: Sinai in Jewish Scripture and Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 168.

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an explanation,” it depends on much too contracted an imagination of what it would take to be a convincing reason for why people had not heard of the stories earlier. Importantly, an explanation of the absence of memory by a people of a past event does not have to be convincing to us, contemporary, sophisticated, and knowledgeable folk. It need be convincing only to the relevant people to whom we are applying the Kuzari Principle. We must not assume that what would not convince us would not have convinced others in some distant past and in radically different circumstances. That is because knowing whether people of a particular time and culture would or would not have accepted a proposed explanation for why they did not remember an alleged nationally memorable event depends on our having attentive knowledge of that culture and of those times to determine the psychological, religious, superstitious, and social-political context and the needs and deep wishes of that people. The question, then, is not, as we have seen a Kuzarian ask, “What could cause a whole nation to forget a revelation that created their national religion?” but “What could convince people that their folk had forgotten such things?” And here the argument is absolutely not persuasive. To appreciate this, look at the kinds of examples Kuzarians give of how people would not likely believe that of which they were previously unaware: 1. Dwight Eisenhower baked meringues for your dad, how come you never heard of it? 2.  How come the Australians never heard that their ancestors all arrived 500 years ago by swimming from Durban to Perth? 3.  Florence Nightingale’s conquest of China. 4.  The Australian Civil War. 5.  The Axis victory of World War II. And this: 6.  Just imagine trying to convince the Nepalese that 300 years ago Napoleon visited their country for fifty years, and that everything he touched turned into gold. And also that: most everyone he visited tried to molest him, and so he put a curse on them—their enemies will enslave them unless they fast once a week and tell the story to their children every day. The Nepalese would not believe this unless it happened.37 37 These are from Goldschmidt, “A Proof of Exodus,” 234–235.

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And this: 7.  A volcanic eruption in the middle of Manhattan in 1975. If that had happened, that would have left behind enormous, easily available evidence to all of us in 1995. If a volcanic eruption had really occurred in 1975, there would be newspaper reports, books, there would be signs in New York of the lava under the concrete and so on. And I could say to myself: “If he is right that the volcanic eruption really happened, I should know about it already. I shouldn’t need him to tell me.” That is why we would not believe someone who tried to convince us that it happened.38 First of all, note that, in these examples, we are given no indication of who is the person telling the story. It could be just anybody, a person, just “someone”; and in example 6 it appears that the reader is to imagine her- or himself trying to convince people of the events. This choice of examples ignores cases in which the storyteller would not be a random stranger but a person or persons or an institution of very high special, influential, authoritarian, powerful standing. This factor could make a story acceptable in the eyes of those to be convinced, in the proper cultural context. Furthermore, none of the examples, except weakly in example 1, are about when there might be a strong independent incentive, desire, or fear leading the listeners to believe the story. What real temptation could there possibly be for the Nepalese to believe the story about Napoleon or for anyone to believe what they are told about Florence Nightingale? None. Suppose, instead, that the listeners had much to gain, either materially, psychologically, or communally from adopting the story as is. It is surely plausible, depending on times and cultures, that incentives to want to believe a story could give a start to a story with no truth to it. What traumas they have experienced, what disappointments visited them, what hardships they lived in, how desperate they are to believe, that would induce them to accept a brand-new story, even if had they no prior knowledge of them. Finally, the examples tend to appeal to the sensibilities and level of sophistication of the contemporary reader of English in an advanced Western society. No account is taken of cultures far from that in the past or present. No attention is given to less sophisticated, easily manipulatable, superstitious, or deeply stressed cultures, to give just a few examples. No account is taken of ancient

38 Dovid Gottlieb, Living Up to the Truth, 33, accessed May 3, 2021 https://www.dovidgottlieb. com/works/RabsbiGottliebLivingUpToTheTruth.pdf. My emphasis.

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cultures where communication was limited and where fragile, oral traditions were common. So, for example, to know what the Nepalese would or would not believe of stories told to them we would have to know a lot about their culture, level of sophistication, level of gullibility, their pressing needs and attitude to authority, history, and the like. Without that, what they would do with an alleged national unforgettable is mostly guess work. Other relevant factors to weigh would be the prevalence or scarcity of written texts; the accessibility of written texts; literacy levels; the ability to voice dissent without reprisal; and if you did voice dissent, would anyone listen to you or record your words for posterity?39 To see how these objections impact the Kuzari Argument for the biblical miracles, consider that, from what we know of the Ancient Near East, faith aside, the Torah stories and legislations might well have been advanced by persons and institutions of supreme authority, such as by the priestly cast. In those times, such forces had much power over the masses and criticism was hardly practical. Priests were go-betweens of the gods or God and the people, had special privileges with the holy, and were vital to the well-being of the community. Could it not have been such a powerful source, rather than just anybody or “someone,” from which there ensued mass acceptance of their word? This could include convincing the people, who lacked much of a critical sense, by the power of their status that these things had transpired to the whole nation and they should not listen to their evil inclination trying to mislead them with how come they did not know of it already. Apart from a priest, an authority behind a story could also be a king with military power. We know that in ancient times, not rarely, when a king conquered a new people, or a new king came to power, he would impose upon the population his favorite god or gods with their favored rituals and laws, all new to the people. And the people would embrace the new. Might the king be able to impose a false history as well, in favor of his gods, when the price of resisting was very high indeed? Witness the wicked kings of ancient Israel and Judah, who were able suddenly to introduce new idolatrous religions when they assumed power, including a revision of history. Instructive here is the case of King Jeroboam of Israel, who created a new cult based on an old discarded one, and proclaimed a radical revision of the past (or indeed, the story of the golden calf in the Torah itself!): After seeking advice, the king made two golden calves. He said to the people, “It is too much for you to go up to Jerusalem. Here are 39 I owe these last considerations to Eliot Sacks.

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your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.” One he set up in Bethel, and the other in Dan. And this thing became a sin; the people came to worship the one at Bethel and went as far as Dan to worship the other. Jeroboam built shrines  on high places and appointed priests from all sorts of people, even though they were not Levites. He instituted a festival on the fifteenth day of the eighth month, like the festival held in Judah, and offered sacrifices on the altar. This he did in Bethel, sacrificing to the calves he had made. And at Bethel he also installed priests at the high places he had made. On the fifteenth day of the eighth month, a month of his own choosing, he offered sacrifices on the altar he had built at Bethel. So, he instituted the festival for the Israelites and went up to the altar to make offerings. (Kings 1:28–33, my emphases) We may assume that few could have safely resisted on the grounds that they already knew a different version of the Exodus story, so would not accept the king’s decree. It is not incumbent upon the anti-Kuzarian to give reasons to believe that something like this probably does exist at the start of the stories of Torah miracles. Rather, the obligation lies squarely on the Kuzarian, who is advancing the proof, to give a reason why it would be “very difficult” to think of familiar scenarios in which tellers had power or other sufficient influence to overcome the Kuzari conclusion. Related to the above but more general is the question of incentives. There are good reasons why people would be lured into believing a false “national unforgettable” even when lacking an explanation for why they do not know about it already. We can imagine reasons why the very question of their lack of familiarity would not even occur to them. This would be because of strong incentives or wishes that the story be true. Spinoza writes that people have told how they themselves were under the sway of an invisible God, and narrated their miracles, trying to show that the God whom they worshipped arranged the whole of nature for their sole benefit: this idea was so pleasing to humanity that people go on to this day imagining miracles, so that they may believe themselves God’s favorites, and the final cause for which God created and directs all things.40 If Spinoza is right, then the desire to believe in one’s special relationship to God because of God’s miracles could be so strong that a story of miracles would

40 Benedict de Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise (Tractatus-Theologico-Politicus), trans. R. H. M. Elwes (London: Routledge, 1901), Kindle edition, location 1337.

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be accepted without hesitation. And this could be a stronger inducement if it is a miracle that allegedly appeared to your entire nation and to them only. We are not talking about a story with little at stake for the people addressed. People would make themselves believe the stories, in utter absence of a critical sense. Or so we might wonder.41 Then there is the fact that the Torah is rich in promises of God’s reward and protections if God is obeyed. This could account for the readiness of a down-trodden people to accept a promise of well-being and victory over their enemies, even if they had no explanation for why they had never heard of the miracles before. In addition, the miracle stories are wrapped in declarations that God created the world and took us out of Egypt, appealing to our sense of obligation to the maker of these miracles. Here again I turn to Maimonides. He writes that God used a ruse, a ploy, “declaring that He will procure to us benefits if we obey and will take vengeance on us if we disobey him. . . . For this too is a ruse used by Him with regard to us in order to achieve His first intention.”42 God’s first intention is to eliminate idol worship and form belief in God instead. For this purpose, God employs promises and threats to get the people to accept what God wants. The above suggestions of convincing explanations at some time in Jewish history depend to a large extent on known differences between ancient cultures and our Western culture. For example, the Torah tells how quickly the Israelites in the desert, who had experienced a catalogue of miracles including the theophany at Sinai, would turn away from God. From fear they rebel, from worry they indulge in idol worship, from desire for food they clamor to turn back and return to Egypt. These shifts are sudden and gigantic in both belief and behavior, but appropriate exigencies could have the power back then to motivate such drastic transitions much more plausibly than in today’s Western world. In addition, we are not to think of ancient cultures as having anywhere near the literary material culture of today. Given the wealth of such cultural artefacts around us we would surely know of earthshaking events. But think of ancient cultures where written culture was meagre and was contemporary with and intertwined with fragile oral culture so that memory props were not ready at hand.

41 In this connection, the biblical scholar Johanna W. H. Van Wijk-Bos writes of miracle-stories of a defeated people that they consist of “the mythical qualities that make up the memories of a defeated people who celebrate their past, with its mixture of the miraculous and the quotidian, the ideal and the real. . . .” Johanna W. H. Van Wijk-Bos, The End of the Beginning, Joshua and Judges (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2019). 42 Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, 2:528.

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From all of the above, the declaration that it would be very hard to imagine how people could have been convinced of a “national unforgettable” is overstated. I do not offer any of the counter-considerations I have listed as what I believe actually happened with the Torah. My own particular emunah will qualify them by a meta-theological overlay. Rather, my purpose is to undermine the evidential value of the Kuzari Argument itself.

The Kuzari Argument Is Too Good If the Kuzari Argument works to establish Torah miracles, it also works to establish the historical veracity of miracles in the scriptures of the world’s dominant Buddhism, Mahayana Buddhism: the Lotus Sutra. The Lotus Sutra is the most revered and influential text of Mahayana Buddhism. It has broadly shaped the religious lives of hundreds of millions of devotees over the centuries that have fervently believed in them, studied them, and chanted them. It recounts miracles performed before a vast public that put the Torah miracles in the shadows. If the Kuzari Argument works for the Torah miracles, then it also works for the Mahayana miracles. In fact, as I shall argue, the Argument seems to be as convincing there as with the Torah, if not more. So, if I am rationally obligated to accept the Torah miracles because of the Kuzari reasoning I should be obligated to believe in the Buddhist miracles. Perhaps I should examine further whether I might be rationally obligated to prefer the Buddhist writings over all others . . . if the Kuzari Argument works.

The Lotus Sutra Mahayana tradition teaches that this sutra was written at the time of the Buddha, then was hidden away for hundreds of years, and afterward appeared again to light. This claim is very relevant here. For, if we give credence to the Kuzari reasoning, Buddhists would certainly not have received the work and its miracles as readily as they did when it reappeared, had they no prior memory of its contents and its miracles. It would have been unforgettable. Yet, for close to two thousand years Mahayana devotees have believed that this treatise reports actual words and deeds of the Buddha on an auspicious occasion. What the Lotus Sutra relates is that the Buddha sat before a vast audience made up of people from many geographical areas of India. There were eighty thousand enlightened ones, the king of the Devas accompanied by 20,000

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people, and many holy ones, each surrounded by several hundreds of thousands of attendants. Four kings of the Kamaras were each attended by hundreds of thousands of people. There were four kings of the Kimnaras whose names were � Dharma, Sudharma, Mahādharma, and Dharmadhara, and each had several hundreds of thousands of attendants. The four kings of the Gandharvas were there. They were Manojña, Manojñasvara, Madhura, and Madhurasvara, each of them also with several hundreds of thousands of attendants. There, too, were four kings of the Asuras, called Badin, � Kharaskandha, Vemacitra, and Rahu, each with several hundreds of thousands of attendants. Mahātejas, Mahākāya, Mahāpūrna, � and Maharddhiprāpta, the four kings of the Garudas, � were there together with several hundreds of thousands of attendants each. Finally, King Ajātaśatru, Vaidehī’s son, was there with several hundreds of thousands of his attendants. In short, there were many millions of people in attendance, including those of great religious and political importance and influence. Here are some of the things that happened there: The Buddha made flowers rain down from the sky on all those in attendance. The entire world quaked. This was so unprecedented that all were filled with joy. Then the Buddha emitted a ray of light from the tuft of white hair between his eyebrows. The light illuminated all the eighteen thousand worlds in the east, down as far as the lowest hell, Avīci, and up as high as the Akanistdha Heaven. All the sentient beings in those worlds living in the �� six transmigratory states became visible from this world. The Buddhas in those worlds were also seen, and the Dharma they were teaching could be heard.43 And so, it goes on with lots more. All of this was said to take place before the attendants who had gathered. The events recounted in this sutra are of such a spectacular and cosmic magnitude as to make the Sinai story quite unimpressive by comparison. No other religion has ever made claims to miraculous cosmic events of such a grandiose degree. In addition, the amount of detail, with names of so many important people, surpasses the degree of details of the biblical story. Surely, these are long-time “religion unforgettables,” allegedly witnessed by many millions more than in the Torah miracles. Admittedly, the Lotus Sutra does not fit all of the clauses of the Kuzari Principle. There is nothing insulting to the people who are witnessing the miracles, as there is in the Torah stories. And there is no introduction of a new religion. So far, here the argument counts for less. However, we have seen reason not to conclude so quickly that the telling of the Torah stories must have implied a religion totally new to the people. Indeed, the sutra endorses

43 The Lotus Sutra, trans. Tsugunari Kubo and Akira Yuyama, 2009, chapter 1, https://www.bdk. or.jp/document/dgtl-dl/dBET_T0262_LotusSutra_2007.pdf.

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Mahayana Buddhism, which was a serious departure from the earlier Theravada Buddhism. This includes a new and life-changing teaching of the centrality to daily life of the Sutra itself, in cherishing, reading, copying, meditating on, and chanting. Much of one’s fate depended on it. And, as far as the wondrous extent of the miracles and the vast number of alleged witnesses, these far outweigh the alleged corresponding features of the Torah stories. How would so many Buddhists have come to believe these miracles ever really transpired if they had no previous awareness of them? And Mahayana Buddhists have believed in the miracles for ages. Phyllis Granoff, writing on magic and miracles in Buddhism, puts it this way: “It would appear from the evidence presented here that the Buddhist tradition had no difficulty either in defining a miracle (a miracle was anything that defied a natural law) or in affirming the existence of miracles”44 Takao Maruyama writes: “In the Lotus Sutra, the supernatural powers in early Buddhism are developed, and the profound doctrines are expounded attracting the audience by the performances of 16 miracles with the supernatural powers of the Buddha.45 And James Shields adds: “What the modern reader might take as pure fantasy or even science fiction is intended to unsettle one’s usual habits of perception and understanding and to alert one to the power of the Buddha and the significance of what he is about to say.”46 If these miracles had happened, surely Buddhists, who revel in telling stories about their founder, would have heard about them long before the Lotus Sutra was ever made known again. When the Lotus Sutra was rediscovered, if people had not known about it already, they would never have believed a word of it. Vast numbers of Buddhists would not have believed the historical truth of this text without a very good explanation for why they had never heard of its contents, if true. Unless we reject the doctrine that otherwise it would be very hard to explain their belief. Given all of the above, we can imagine not-implausible reasons why a “whole nation” like the Israelites at some time in their ancient past could have accepted stories of public miracles even if they were not aware of such stories until then. ***

44 Phyllis Granoff, “The Ambiguity of Miracles: Buddhist Understandings of Supernatural Power,” East and West 46, no. 1/2 ( June 1996): 87. 45 Takao Maruyama, “Buddha’s Supernatural Powers in The Lotus Sutra,” https://core.ac.uk/ download/pdf/148766201.pdf. 46 James Shields, “On the Miracles of the Lotus Sutra,” Bucknell Digital Commons Faculty Contributions to Books, Faculty Scholarship, Winter 2011, 3.

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R. Nissim of Marseilles, in the fourteenth century, was one of the naturalizing Jewish philosophers of the Middle Ages. He furnishes a naturalistic interpretation for all supernatural events in the Torah. In his Maase Nissim, he tells us that the heavenly voice heard at Sinai was none other than the amplification of Moses’ own voice, the result of Moses using a natural amplifying instrument that was with him up on the mountain.47 The people were convinced it was God speaking. Continuing past R. Nissim, in time, imagine the “nation” grows naturally, and outsiders join the group to be swallowed up into the native ethos. The story becomes entrenched for the centuries for a nation eventually numbering a few million. As for outsiders being swallowed up into the native ethos, just let me remind you that, for ages, converts to Judaism have become absorbed into the Jewish national ethos, praying to the “God of our fathers,” and celebrating God taking “us” out of Egypt. Eventually, their descendants are indistinguishable from native Jews who believe that their ancestors stood at Sinai and received the Ten Commandments. They have no idea of their roots and believe their biological ancestors stood at Sinai. Now, while I do not believe that things happened in the ways I have portrayed, the burden of proof is on the Kuzari Argument. To avoid this objection, it must show that such scenarios cannot occur or that at least the occurrence of such scenarios is significantly implausible. Perhaps the Kuzari defender might still want to say in the specific case of the Sinai story, taking all considerations into account, and judging the overall evidence, the best explanation for the very existence of the story is that it is true, because of the Kuzari Argument. I reply that an explanation may be the best around yet be less than plausible. The best explanation does not necessarily have to be a good one. A man has been found murdered. There are five suspects. Four suspects are quickly ruled out because it is just too far-fetched to think any one of them was the murderer. So, the police are left with one suspect. That she is the murderer is the best explanation the police have. But the police know better than to arrest her, since they find it not plausible enough that she was the murderer, even though she is the best suspect they have. They do not have sufficient evidence for what is the best explanation of the murder. So, the Sinai story being true can be more plausible than some other explanation, without the Sinai story being sufficiently plausible. That the Sinai story is true in its details, as the tradition demands,

47 On R. Nissim’s position see Haim Kreisel, “Philosophical Interpretations of the Bible,” in Cambridge History of Jewish Philosophy: From Antiquity through the Seventeenth Century, ed. S. Nadler and T. M. Rudavsky (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2008), 88–120.

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cannot be a good explanation without being able to neutralize the existing counter-evidence I have listed earlier. On the intuitive level the Kuzari Argument has some force. It is striking that these stories proclaiming majestic miracles for an entire people have been accepted and retained for so many centuries. There must be something true behind them that thrust them forward into history. However, the reasons I have raised against thinking the argument sound are too many, and the counterevidence to the details of these stories is too strong, to declare any other verdict than “not successful.”

6

Moderate Divine Providence

A compelling theology should be consistent with solidly confirmed facts and scientific conclusions at present, although sometimes the solidly confirmed until now may change in time. At the same time, we should relate to our theologies with humility, possibly having to change them by what is yet to come. Our theologies should also take account of the prevailing well-confirmed if not solid facts, and be calibrated accordingly. I proceed here on the conclusion that a good part of the undermining of Torah history is solidly confirmed, and that likely changes will be in the direction of additional evidence to that effect. And I proceed on the assumption that, short of invoking religious faith, counterconsiderations, while counting for something, do not change the reasonableness of that conclusion. I propose now that accepting the conclusion of the preceding two chapters of this section on Torah, can be made consistent with believing in Torah min ha-shamayim, the Torah being from Heaven, in a significant way. And that can be by what I offer as what I will call “moderate providence,” as defining God’s relationship to our Torah. In what I call moderate providence God can direct desired outcomes without needing to control all specific events down to their last details, leading up to those outcomes. That is because moderate providence is predominantly holistic or top-down causation, providing constraints from a higher level that can be unordered or even random on lower levels. God

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determines outcomes without necessarily determining the small details that produce that outcome. In addition, when necessary, in moderate providence in principle God can intervene into the natural order directly, within or by violating those constraints. Here is what I mean. In “top-down” causation, higher level organizing principles work causally to shape or guide lower levels events. This results in chance and randomness at lower levels, while the higher-level network is imposing an overarching character on the chance events, both constraining and directing. Top-down causation denies reductionism, which holds that the behavior of a whole is completely determined by the properties of its elements. That is down-top causation, with the character of the elements determining the overall result. In top-down causation, organizing networks that characterize the whole cause the overall, holistic, results at the level of the elements. Here is an example: The half-life decay of radioactive material is a good example of downward causation in nature. The half-life decay (at the “macro” level) is the time it takes for half of the material of the radioactive object to decay into nonradioactive material. There is no set arrangement (at the “micro” level) at the half-life point as to which atoms of radioactive material will decay and which will not or in which order atoms that decay will decay. Yet, the time it will take for half the amount of radioactive material to decay can be exactly predicted. A higher-level process, decay of the half-life, is imposing holistically a time frame for the halflife to be realized, without determining which specific atoms will decay and when, at the lower level of the decay. This is downward or top-down causation. Here is a statement of holistic, top-down causation by Roger Sperry, a longtime scientific reductionist who moved over to the top-down people: The atoms and molecules of our biosphere are moved around, not so much by atomic and molecular forces as by the higher forces of the varied organisms and other entities in which they are embedded. The atomic, molecular, and other micro forces are continuously active but at the same time they are enveloped, submerged, superseded, “hauled and pushed around” by, or “supervened” by an infinite variety of other higher molar properties of the systems and entities in which the microelements are embedded—without interfering with the physico-chemical activity of lower levels.1

1 Quoted by Eric Thomson, “Examples of Downward Causation?,” The Brains Blog, April 5, 2007, http://philosophyofbrains.com/2007/04/05/examples-of-downward-causation.aspx.

Moderate Divine Providence

Now, as luck would have it, there are many scientists, including very prominent ones, who refuse to recognize holistic downward causation. Some do so by insisting that in time, what some now take to require downward processes for explanation will be proven to be explained by your ordinary bottom-up processes. Others who reject the entire notion of downward causation do so because they cannot fathom how a top-down process might work. Top-down causation is downright “spooky,” they think. So, they refuse to accept there is any such thing as downward causation. However, whatever might be the truth about naturalist top-down causation in science is not directly relevant to my use of the idea. For I am touting top-down causation as a theological over-lay of scientific explanation, a level beyond the reach of science. I have cited examples of possible scientific holistic causation only to illustrate and explain the idea. You can reject holistic causation in science and willingly go along with theological holism. In moderate theological providence, God can bring about an aim without determining the exact details that will enable the reaching of the aim. God does this with high level frameworks that impose a broad, overarching shape to achieve a result. For example, one who believes in divinely directed evolution, as I do, can square God’s providence with the randomness of the evolutionary process by adopting God’s moderate providence of the evolutionary process. Here, random mutations on the ground will be the “micro level,” and the all-encompassing process of evolution the “macro level.” All we need to say is that genetic changes and natural conditions in which organisms live, which admittedly can be random, occur within the outer constraints within which they can occur. Indeed, we can assume a random micro level for just about everything that God does miraculously. If God splits the Red Sea, we do not have to assume that God is seeing to the exact location of every atom of water. Rather, there is a holistic high-level causation on the water that succeeds with random micro events at the atomic level. The randomness is shaped holistically by God. Arthur Peacocke was a principal proponent of top-down divine providence.2 Peacocke offered that God acts by “top-down” constraints upon the world. 2 See Arthur Peacocke’s books: Theology for a Scientific Age: Being and Becoming—Natural, Divine, and Human (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1993); Paths from Science towards God: The End of all Our Exploring (Oxford: Oneworld, 2001); Creation and the World of Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); and Evolution, the Disguised Friend of Faith? Selected Essays (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Foundation Press, 2004). I should note that Peacocke was a panentheist and not a standard theist. Others who take this position are Donald T. Campbell, “Downward Causation in Hierarchically Organized Systems,” in Studies in the Philosophy of Biology: Reduction and Related Problems, ed. F. J. Ayala and T. Dobzhansky (London: Macmillan, 1974), 179–186; and Philip Clayton, God and Contemporary Science (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998).

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Nature, on his view, is a hierarchy of increasingly complex systems in which lower-level structures are incorporated within higher levels of organization. Think of God, then, imposing scaffolded high-level frameworks in which individual events occur. Then, individual occurrences within the framework can occur only within the boundaries allowed for by the framework’s structure and, by organizing downward application, they can be directed along a path by the projected “curvatures” of the higher, divine grid. In that way, chance on a micro level will be consistent with macro providence. God’s providence can exist at a multiplicity of levels, from the highest level, encompassing all of nature’s structures, to lower levels, where it exerts downward causation. In God’s case, the lower level will include not only unprogrammed specific natural events in relation to God’s aims, but also free human choices. That is, higher-level holistic frames can allow a wide array of human choices, within outside framework-boundaries imposed from above. There will be a broad possibility of human choices together with limiting borders beyond which free choices cannot go. This kind of restriction on free will simply joins any number of other limitations on human free choices. For example, there is a limit beyond which a person cannot choose to jump, a person cannot choose to live until 150 years old, a person cannot choose to see microbes with the naked eye. And so on. Freedom of the will does not mean freedom utterly unconstrained. Top-down moderate providence suitably blurs the distinction between exclusively divine action and exclusively free-willed human action. When topdown moderate providence is at work, what we see with our physical senses is people making choices and carrying them out. And we see consequences of those choices. In addition to those choices, however, what we do not see directly is the operation of divinely ordained higher-level organizing principles that constrain within a wide range our free-willed and freely completed actions and organizes them so as carry forward God’s will. I have said that God might also intervene to determine at least some lower details, even if rarely. Now, the idea of God’s intervention in the natural order has been disparaged, mocked, and dismissed in the name of “naturalism.” But is this warranted? We can distinguish three types of naturalism. Let us call “metaphysical naturalism” the view that all that exists are processes and entities that in principle are knowable by humans by our senses and scientific theory. This is a wholly indefensible position. This makes whatever exists be beholden to our human epistemic possibilities. There is no reason at all to envisage this as true. A believer can calmly set metaphysical naturalism aside. Let us call “epistemic naturalism” the view that humans can know what exists only by means of scientific methods, based on the senses and logic. This is true, according to epistemic naturalism, even if there might exist matters

Moderate Divine Providence

beyond human ken. It is just that we will never know about them. The reason for accepting this version would be the spectacular success of science in explaining so many things that were unexplained or that were thought once to have solely a supernatural explanation. This creates confidence in some people that all matters that we want to know will come only through the scientific method. A religious believer need not accept epistemic naturalism. That we should believe only what science can establish is not itself a scientific pronouncement. It is not a matter here of conceding to science but of obeying sentiments added on to the scientific enterprise. Finally, a person who bases her religious outlook entirely on faith will be immune to the claims of epistemic naturalism. She will be able to readily admit that she knows nothing other than what can be determined by science. However, she has faith in matters beyond those methods. To the contrary of epistemic naturalism, Kai-Man Kwan has defended “holistic empiricism” (not to be confused with holistic causation), which takes account of a “rainbow” of human experiences, drawn from one’s sensory experiences, internal experiences of oneself, one’s existential experiences, the flavor of interpersonal experiences, moral experience, aesthetic experience, religious experience, and intellectual experience.3 Through all of these, humans experience meaning that transcends the level of scientific judgment. This assemblage of experiences rightly includes elements that go far beyond what epistemic naturalism recognizes. Epistemic naturalism should be distinguished from the weaker “methodological naturalism,” which limits only science to what is accessible to naturalistic methods—to our physical senses as the bases of reasoning and theorizing. Methodological naturalism per se allows the possibility of a nonscientific, religious way of accessing truth. Methodological naturalists invoke this conviction to argue, for example, that intelligent design explanations of alleged irrevocably complex biological structures and processes are in no way part of science.4 Thus, they conclude, intelligent design should not appear in a science curriculum in schools. A religious person could embrace methodological naturalism happily since it pertains only to how to do science. It does not limit us to science alone. Naturalism, I conclude, should not defeat moderate divine providence.

3 Kai-Man Kwan, The Rainbow of Experiences, Critical Trust, and God: A Defense of Holistic Empiricism (New York: Continuum, 2011). 4 For intelligent design see Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998)

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*** Perhaps divine intervention clashes with truths established within science? One might think that when God intervenes in the natural order, this implies input of additional energy into the world. This would clash with the law of the conservation of energy. So, from a scientific point of view, divine intervention of any kind seems not possible. It is far from clear, though, that divine intervention requires input of increased energy into the world. God does not expend energy in acting and God can arrange the world so that in intervening and creating new energy in the world there be no net increase of world energy. Even supposing that divine intervention does result in a net increase in world energy, Alvin Plantinga has pointed out that the law of conservation of energy is valid only when supposing the world to be a closed system. But this need not be the case. Here is an excerpt from Sears and Zemansky’s standard text University Physics on the law of conservation of energy. Alvin Plantinga cites it to make this point: This is the principle of conservation of linear momentum: When no resultant external force acts on a system, the total momentum of the system remains constant in magnitude and direction. . . . The internal energy of an isolated system remains constant. This is the most general statement of the principle of conservation of energy.5 Put in this way, the principle says nothing about conservation of energy in systems that are not closed or isolated. And, of course, when God intervenes in the natural order, the world system is not closed. To insist that it is closed is to outlaw divine intervention by fiat from the start. Perhaps, though, there still remains an objection to divine intervention. That would be that recognition of the very possibility of such intervention would be the ruin of science. When an event has not yet been explained by science, an advocate of intervention might just announce that it is to be explained by an intervention of God in the natural order. We would then not sufficiently seek scientific explanations. Science would be stunted, and we would be in danger of returning to prescientific times. This is not a strong objection. It is a good objection to the abuse of the possibility of divine interference. It is not an objection to responsible use of 5 Francis Weston Sears and Mark W. Zemansky, University Physics (Boston, MA: AddisonWesley, 1963), 186 and 415, respectively; quoted in Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 203.

Moderate Divine Providence

that possibility within an overall commitment to pursuing scientific accounts of events. That something so far has not been explained by science is indeed not a good reason to believe it is a result of a divine interference. Indeed, naturalistic explanations should be assumed in all cases, unless there is a rare, good, prior, theological reason—to be responsibly invoked—as an exception. A good theological reason would cohere with accepted broad theological beliefs. I should mention that some philosophers and theologians argue that God could intervene in nature at the quantum level.6 Their idea of “quantum providence” is (according to a main understanding) that laws as to the location of particles are only statistical, not absolute. That is to say, prior to measurement, a particle does not have a definite position, but has only a superposition determined by the probability of the particle being at any of a number of positions. These possibilities are spread out beyond any one given position. It is only when measured that there occurs a “quantum collapse,” that is, the particle assumes a particular location out of all the prior probabilities. It is “found” at one place. Given the statistical nature at this level of particles, a description of the world at any given time will not give you a description of the next moment at this level. Nature possesses an intrinsic indeterminacy. A different view of the collapse, the continuous spontaneous localization model, says that a quantum collapse takes place independently of measurement, millions of times per second. These collapses are spontaneous and not determinately caused.7 Given that, the claim is that God could bring about change by acting at the quantum level where doing so violates no laws of nature. What God wrought will be possibly very improbable, but not physically impossible, given the lack of relevant laws at the quantum level. Admittedly, quantum providence is controversial for physics.8 Those theologians, including some trained scientists, who endorse quantum providence depend on a particular, mainstream interpretation of the quantum 6 A collection of quantum providence approaches can be found in Robert John Russell et al., eds., Quantum Mechanics: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action (Rome: Vatican Observatory Publications and Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, 2002). See also F. LeRon Shults, Nancy Murphy, and Robert John Russell, Philosophy, Science, and Divine Action (Leiden: Brill, 2009), for a number of defenders of quantum providence. 7 See G. C. Ghirardi, “Collapse Theories,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, March 7, 2002, rev. May 15, 2020, accessed October 26, 2022. https://plato.stanford. edu/entries/qm-collapse. There are deterministic interpretations of quantum theory that are not linked to the notion of collapse. However, as I understand it, the collapse approach is the main one. 8 For a detailed analysis and critique of quantum providence, see Nicholas Saunders, Divine Action and Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Saunders also discusses other forms of providence.

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world. So, as a layperson, I can recommend quantum providence as a type of moderate providence only with great caution. *** Pondering the contemporary challenge to Torah history and given that I believe in the Torah being from God, I believe, and urge relevant others to believe, that moderate divine providence is now at work lifting the requirement to believe in the historical dependability of the Torah. The Jewish people, and with them humanity at large, is living in a transformational era. We are entering a new age, gradually, fragmentally, and, I hope, responsibly, being called upon, among many other things, to recognize that the undermining of the historical reliability of the Torah is the culmination of millennia of gradual divine guidance away from the centrality of historical content of the Torah as it appears. Over time, 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 those narratives. We are at the point of having to emphasize a non-historical overlay to the Torah narratives. Moderate divine providence has orchestrated the rise of serious problems with Torah as history so as to lead us through that threshold. We do not doubt God when we walk through that threshold. We follow God when we go forward: I am convinced that this was from God. It was divine accommodation when in the very first place God made revelation be embodied in historical narratives. That was a supreme instance in which the Torah wrote as people spoke (“in the language of the masses”), in the ways people would then relate to God and Torah. And it was an act of divine accommodation that the Torah consisted of those narratives that people strongly believed were true historical narratives. When we find recordings of different versions of the same event, sometimes intertwined with one another, it means that they reflect various visions of history as understood by different groups or populations. What people believed to have happened was often the outcome of actual historical events. When this was not the case, the narratives made their way into the Torah by other methods. All of this took place under the guiding providence of divine accommodation. Following the principle of moderate divine providence, which I have presented here, the “micro” level of historical events, where human choices and natural processes are to be found, is providentially funneled into a direction provided by a higher-level divine process. The direction need not be univocal, but even purposely multivocal: “Both these and these are the words of the living God” (BT Eruvin 13a). Moderate providence allows for human choices in the

Moderate Divine Providence

Torah content and for textual criticism of how human choices lead to alternative writings.9 There may be elements of the Torah added there by human choice, that is, by virtue of having been found inside the macro-level of a divine holistic organizing principle that is made specific only by human choices. Such elements will be there as “micro” elements within a second-order holistic, top-down providence. As such, they are holy because included in God’s Torah, Elsewhere, I have recommended Hasidic non-historical treatment of the Torah text as a paradigm for the current shift from the historical to the nonhistorical.10 Hasidic commentaries are like jazz riffs on the literal theme of a Torah selection, lifting them from an historical meaning to a light shined onto our hidden selves. So, Abraham is not Abraham, Canaan not Canaan, and Amalek not Amalek. With the Hasidim, we are taken from the historical to the interior of ourselves, to a place where we must look at ourselves in the mirror very closely and turn to a self-transformation to closeness to God. *** Moderate divine providence, I have said, functions in two ways: principally, in a holistic, top-down manner, and secondly, by divine intervention into the natural order. In neither case need we be thinking of God acting openly for all to see. Top-down causality works at a high level of generality, out of sight, giving broad shape to events by imposing skeletal structures and boundary conditions. Ordinarily, events as a whole come to approximate divine intentions. An intervention need not be an astonishing public extravaganza. A divine intervention can be discrete and unnoticed. For example, God could intervene in small, unnoticed ways that will have an eventual impact on human life. An intervention on the scale of a butterfly-like effect, is an example. In the butterfly effect, a very small change in initial conditions (for example, weather conditions) can result in a process that issues in a wide and large effect well down the line (for example, emerging tornadoes). God intervening in the natural order does not mean necessarily that God must intervene to make something happen directly and explicitly. God can intervene by causing a very small change, or a cluster of them, that result in a big change further down the line. For all we know, God is acting so on a regular basis, beyond our ken, influencing in this way far more than we know.

9 I am thankful to Jon Levenson for having raised for me the issue of textural criticism. See his “Divine Revelation and Historical Criticism.” 10 For a fuller presentation see Gellman, This Was from God.

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Since human reality is so made up of mutual influences and borrowings, divine providence can work through these in a broad way, slowly and ploddingly at times. I want to add that I believe in moderate divine providence over all humanity, and that we should expect an overlapping of higher providential levels and congruence between them rather than an isolated providence for Jewish history. The above approach points to the possibility of neo-Darwinian evolution being consistent with moderate divine providence. There are two main parts of the science of evolution. One is the assertion that all species have evolved from a common ancestor or ancestors, over hundreds of millions of years. The other is determining the means by virtue of which this evolution took place. The mechanisms that are included in the science of evolution are all naturalistic processes, as befitting a scientific enterprise. No reference to non-naturalistic overlays over the natural processes. This has led many to a mistaken conclusion. For example, Sahotra Sarkar, a biologist, argues not only that because of evolution one cannot prove design, but also that evolution proves that there was no design. Echoing other authors, Sarkar writes, “The theological and metaphysical force of the theory of evolution by natural selection comes from the blindness of variation.”11 Since evolution is blind, it is not the work of God, who should have directed all in a purposeful, rational way. Now, no scientific theory can establish that a series of events did not occur from divine guidance. The most it can establish is that regarding natural regularities and natural explanations the series was blind. Let’s call this “natural blindness.” But from natural blindness “metaphysical blindness” does not follow. What a theist should have learned by now from modern science, and especially from evolution, is that God does not, and often does not, act by an immediately realized biblical-type fiat, like, “Let there be light and there was light.” Only if we believe that X happens from divine guidance exclusively if X happens openly and immediately by God’s intervention, will we be stymied by gradual evolution. This lesson of modern science has made religious belief more sophisticated and readily compatible with divine action. And that is because natural blindness on the micro level is consistent with divine providence on the macro level. This is because we are talking here about moderate providence, which provides only

11 Sahotra Sarkar, Doubting Darwin? Creationist Designs on Evolution (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), 48. This is also the view of Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2006). I have replied to this position in Jerome Gellman, “Dawkins against God,” Philo 11 (2008): 193–202.

Moderate Divine Providence

a broad, higher framework within which micro events occur, and can occur randomly. The higher framework provides the outer contours the shape of which the processes must take. This is like pouring sugar through a funnel into a bowl. When pouring, I do not attend to the micro-path of any granule of sugar at any time, yet I see to it that the granules end up in the bowl. So, think of the micro components of evolution at the level of random mutations and of genetic drift as the sugar granules. And think of the higher-level divine providence as placing the funnel so as to determine the holistic result, without determining micro results. And compare this to the micro level of molecules of water when the Red Sea splits. In both cases, God need not determine the micro levels to achieve the macro level—here, surviving species, and there, the Sea split. Divine providence is holistic, top-down, and is compatible with natural blindness. If you ask me why God must use a long, messy evolutionary history to reach God’s aims, my answer is that the fact that God did do this does not mean that God had to do it that way. And the fact that the process is messy in our eyes has no bearing on how God thinks of it. For God there is no messiness. It is all the same. In any case, I have no idea why God acts in that way, and there is no reason why I should know, The verdict: One can accept contemporary science about biblical history and continue to believe that the Torah is from God, as long as one does not overthink what science is capable of validly asserting. Science cannot say that the Torah is not from God, as long as one accepts the theory of moderate divine providence as explaining what it means to say that Torah is from Heaven. The Torah remains the result of God’s holistic providential regard, and, so, being from God, is holy.12

12 For further reading see Gellman, This Was from God.

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A Perfectly Good God

There are many passages in the Hebrew Bible to the effect that God is perfectly good, or very nearly so. Exemplary in this regard is Deuteronomy 32:3–4: “I will proclaim the name of God. Oh, praise the greatness of our God. He is the Rock, His works are perfect, and all His ways are just. A faithful God who does no wrong, upright and just is He.” And Psalms 145 tells us that “Great is God and most worthy of praise,” “His greatness no one can fathom,” “God is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and rich in love,” “God is good to all, he has compassion on all his creatures,” “God is righteous in all his ways and faithful in all he does.” This psalm is a central part of the Jewish liturgy. And this concept of God is well reflected in other parts of the traditional liturgy as well. On the other hand, there are also many passages in the Hebrew Bible that seem to indicate, from the reader’s point of view, that God is not perfectly good.1 These include anthropomorphic depictions where God appears to be all too human. At other times, the texts describe acts of God that seem to be less than morally perfect. The rabbinic literature as well would appear to be a mixed bag on this account. There are there extreme praises of God’s goodness as well as bitter complaints of God’s behavior toward the Jews or the world.2 1 For a detailed presentation, see Jerome Gellman, Perfect Goodness and the God of the Jews (Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2019), chapter 4. 2 See Dov Weiss, Pious Irreverence: Confronting God in Rabbinic Judaism (Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia University Press, 2017).

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If one believes that God is perfectly good and one is also committed to the Hebrew Bible, one will have to recast the apparently counter passages as metaphor, as using common human language but not meaning it, as concessions to an earlier time, as intending only to create a certain mindset, or the like. If they do this, they will be in good company, since Jewish philosophy over the ages has tended strongly to endorse just those sorts of moves in honor of God’s perfect goodness. Most Jews do not take much of what the Torah tells us about God literally. The Jewish people for a long time have not been bound to take all descriptions of God as literal. That is the difference between the official “God of the Jews” of the Hebrew Bible, and the “Jewish God,” the one that, by and large, traditional Jews have believed in for ages. We should not be obligated by all the ways the Torah portrays God. Judaism is not a biblical religion, but a biblically informed religion, which continues along with traditions that shape and recast Torah, including in theological terms. Here I turn to a theologically compelling reason that is internal to the Torah for asserting that God is perfectly good. This reason should override the texts that would seem to indicate otherwise. It relies on a Torah passage that is so central to the tradition that wanting to retain the tradition as much as possible, as I wish to, compels us to make this passage a cornerstone of our Judaism. Note: If you yourself happen to reject that God is perfectly good, for whatever motive, it would not contradict there being a fundamental reason within Jewish tradition for accepting God’s perfect goodness. It would mean only that you must reject Jewish tradition. *** A quintessential verse of Jewish understanding throughout the ages has been Deuteronomy 6:5, which makes a part of the daily reading of the Shema. In that verse we are commanded as follows: “You shall love God your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.” Here we are commanded to love God with a wholeness of heart, without reservations, to the ultimate of our abilities.I will call this maximal love. Maximal love of God has two components. (1) Love of God is maximal when it is to be the greatest love a given person can possibly have. And (2) Love of God is maximal in being a love due from just everyone to God.3 It is maximal in this sense for being a claim on everybody. In the first component, maximality is to be measured not by some external standard, but by the maximal devotion and sincerity of which a given person is

3 I am greatly indebted to Jonathan Malino for having help to straighten me out on some confusions in this presentation of maximal love.

A Per fectly Good God

capable. One person’s love will be highly intensive while another’s will be less intensive. One person’s love will be noticeably demonstrative while another will be quite introverted. All of these will be maximal love in the first sense when each person is loving God with all of her heart, with all of her soul, and with all of her capacity. That is what makes love maximal, not some given standard at its highest. In the second sense, the love is maximal in that every person is to reach for the love of God in the first sense, that is, to aim for the maximum possible love of her own ability. Maximal love of God, in the sense I have described, is exclusively due to God and to no one else. A person might have a love for his or her child or for a spouse that is the maximum possible love that person is capable of having, even to the point of being prepared to die for them. However, that does not yet qualify as maximal love unless that degree of love is incumbent on everyone for that child or that spouse. But that is not the case. All cases of love, other than love of God, either will not be maximal in not being the greatest possible love of which the person is capable or will not be maximal in the sense of not being incumbent on everyone equally. Now, note that just every person is obligated to love humankind. So, this kind of love fulfills clause two of the definition of maximal love by obligating everyone equally (but not because it is to be directed to everyone; that is not part of the definition). However, it does not qualify as maximal love since not everyone is having to love humankind with all their heart and with all their soul and might. There is a moral limit to how far I am to go to love all of humankind. Love of God is sui generis in being maximal both in its quality and to its universal required application. A clarification is needed here. One cannot simply command another to love and expect results. God has not made us that way. In any case, as I have noted earlier, it is doubtful that this would be a genuine love. What God can do, though, is to expect us to undertake steps apt for nurturing love of God. Here is how Maimonides puts it: What is the path to love and fear of Him? When a person contemplates His creation great deeds and wondrous and great creatures and sees in them His infinite wisdom that surpasses all comparison, he will immediately love, praise, and glorify Him, yearning with tremendous desire to know God’s great name, as David said: “My soul thirsts for the Lord, for the living God” (Psalms 42:3). (Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Laws of the Foundations of the Torah 2)

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The passage continues as follows: When he [continues] to reflect on these same matters, he will immediately recoil in awe and fear, appreciating how he is a tiny, lowly, and dark creature, standing with his flimsy, limited, wisdom before He who is of perfect knowledge, as David stated: “When I see Your heavens, the work of Your fingers . . . [I wonder] what is man that You should recall Him” (Psalms 8:4–5). Leaving aside the question if the result will be immediate love as Maimonides thinks, or even successful, the passage reflects the command as pertaining to our undertaking steps to generate love of God, not love directly. (See below regarding fear of God.) *** Our tradition has regarded the command to cultivate maximal love of God as altogether fitting and proper. It is a cornerstone of all traditional theologies. We are not to love God because otherwise God will punish us or reward us nicely for our love of God. This is not a valid reason to love God maximally. That kind of love is rooted in fear of God and is not a genuine love. A genuine love of God, and a defensible ground for God desiring it from us, must be due to the very nature of God. Who God is. God must be deserving of our maximal love. That is the only possible ground for our maximal love to be appropriate to God. But since the tradition does take this command to be proper and fitting, the tradition must recognize that God deserves maximal love of which each one of us is capable. Recall that (1) love of God is maximal when it is to be the greatest love a given person can possibly have, and (2) love of God is maximal in being a love due from just everyone to God. Now, I contend, for God to be deserving of maximal love, God can be no other than a perfectly good being. God can be worthy of our maximal love only if God is perfectly good. Only if God is perfectly good can God justifiably ask of us to respond to God with our maximal love.4 We cannot be called to love God with the greatest possible love we are capable of unless God is perfectly good. It would not make sense. Hence, we have a theologically sound basis, internal in a fundamental way to the tradition, for God being perfectly good and consequently for recasting texts otherwise to conform to this fundamental theological principle. 4 I thank Jonathan Malino for helping me formulate this piece of reasoning.

A Per fectly Good God

With that in mind, I now turn to a proper concept of a perfectly good God, one sufficient and necessary to God being deserving of our maximal love. My conception of a “perfectly good God” begins with God having a perfectly good character. This means that God acts with perfect moral goodness, with full moral empathy, always doing what is of overriding moral importance. (If in a given situation there is more than one overriding way to act, God will act on one of them, perhaps for other reasons.) Also, God must act with appropriate intention, from sound moral sentiments, doing the good with no self-serving interests and acting only for the good of others. Such moral sentiments will include love, a sense of moral obligation, a sense of justice, tempered with mercy, and the like. (I leave working out the details for a later time.) Next, to be a perfectly good being God must be perfect in being able to actualize the good acts, intentions, and sentiments of God’s perfectly good character. A good God will not yet be perfectly good, in the sense I am after, unless God has all the power needed to actualize a perfectly good character. There must be no logical limitations on God’s ability to act on God’s perfectly good character. God must have, therefore, what I will call “perfect power for the good,” or for short, “perfect good-power.” Perfect good-power is the power to actualize to the fullest one’s perfectly good character. If God had a perfectly good character but was rather weak in showing it in action, that would not fit the bill for being a perfectly good God. A God possessed of a perfectly good character is not fully relevant to us unless having unlimited power to act from that good character. So, God must have perfect good-power. Next, God must have all the knowledge God needs for perfect use of his goodness and power for the good. Let us call this “perfect good-knowledge.” Perfect good-knowledge means knowing every proposition needed to fully actuate God’s perfectly good character and perfect good-power. Perfect goodknowledge will also include intimate perfect good-knowledge of what it is like for something conscious to be in various psychological states. With perfect good-knowledge God knows from the “inside,” as it were, concerning sentient beings, what it is like to be a being of that kind, and well as what it is like to be this sentient being. So, a God who is perfectly good knows from the inside what it is like to be me and what it is like to be you. Thus, even if God is never afraid, for example, God knows what being afraid is like. This ensures full moral empathy when acting for the good. Since God has all the power and knowledge needed to use a perfectly good character, God will create this world and plausibly many other worlds, and be sovereign over what God creates, thereby producing a reality toward which to be perfectly good. So, a perfectly good being will be creator and sovereign of our world.

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Next, a perfectly good God must be metaphysically secure to be reliably there for doing good, both now and into the future. So, God should exist forever to be perfectly good. Accordingly, I add that a perfectly good God exists forever. Some think such a being will be everlasting within time, others, that it must exist outside of time. In either case, we should insist that a perfectly good God be in active relationship with the world and its creatures. God must be responsive to the creation. Richard Swinburne and Keith Ward have argued that such a being would have to exist in time for that to be the case.5 Others, such as Eleonore Stump, have argued that a being who is above or out of time can still maintain active relations with the world.6 There is also the possibility that God be out of time and enter time in the act of creation and subsequently in relating to the creation. We need not decide between these views, only assume that God is in active relation with the creation. So, God as a perfectly good being possesses a perfectly good character, perfect good-power, and perfect good-knowledge, exists always, is creator and sovereign of the world, and is in active relationships with creation. It is an open question whether a perfectly good being must have necessary existence. By necessary existence I do not mean “necessary” for one purpose or another, but metaphysically necessary in the sense of existing in every possible world. (Please note that this use of the term differs from some of medieval philosophy.) And that is because while a perfectly good God might be a metaphysically necessary being, it is not clear that a perfectly good being need be. It would seem that God must be only metaphysically secure in this world, so I will know that God’s love will endure forever and ever. It would be required, however, that God be an essentially everlasting or eternal being, that is, that God must be everlasting or eternal in every possible world in which God does exist. This is compatible with there being possible worlds in which God does not exist. That would not detract from God’s perfect goodness in our, actual world. In our world God would be a permanent fixture, since if God exists in a world God is eternal in that world. There might be other reasons, though, for the necessary existence of God. So far, I do not count necessary existence as an attribute of a perfectly good being. Simplicity, the lack of internal complexity in God, of which Maimonides was fond, need not be an attribute of a perfectly good being qua perfectly good. To be so, simplicity would have to contribute to the goodness of God and complexity 5 Richard Swinburne, “God and Time,” in Reasoned Faith, ed. Eleonore Stump (Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 204–222; and Keith Ward, Christ and the Cosmos (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 6 Eleonore Stump, The God of the Bible and the God of the Philosophers (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2016).

A Per fectly Good God

not to do so, or not to the same extent. But it is hard to see how it would do that. Complexity in God does not threaten God’s perfect goodness. I can think of no good argument for simplicity as a requirement of being a perfectly good being. So, at least tentatively, I exclude simplicity from the catalogue of God’s attributes qua a perfectly good being. There might be other reasons for divine simplicity but they would not be germane to the present discussion. *** We must note that perfect good-power is different from omnipotence. Having perfect good-power, in my sense, does not mean that God can do everything possible, as, roughly, omnipotence means, but only that God has whatever power is needed to fully implement God’s perfectly good character. For all we know, this might be less than omnipotence. That is because there might be abilities or powers God does not need so as to actualize his perfectly good character. Conceptually, at least, a distinction exists between omnipotence and perfect good-power. Perfect good power allows for the possibility that God is less than omnipotent. Similarly for omniscience. Do not confuse the concept of perfect goodknowledge with knowing all truths whatsoever and having no false beliefs, which is what omniscience comes to. Having perfect good-knowledge does not require God to know every last true proposition there is, only that God has whatever knowledge it takes to fully actualize God’s perfectly good character. This may amount to 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 to fully activate its perfect goodness. Perhaps there are propositions that are not relevant to God doing any good in any world in which God exists. In that case, what I am calling “perfect knowledge” will be less than omniscience. If the perfectly good being must be omniscient that will not be because omniscience in itself is a perfection, but because that being must be omniscient to be perfectly good. To believe that God is a perfectly good being is to relate to the world in an ultimately optimistic way. To believe that one who is perfectly good exists is to be convinced that good is ontologically fundamental to reality and that evil is ontologically derivative, and that ultimately good will win out over evil. This conviction was behind the medieval characterization of evil as devoid of positive reality, a “privation” only, an absence or corruption of good. For the medieval thinkers, good was ontologically basic, and evil was a spinoff. To believe in a perfectly good being is to acknowledge evil fully while being able to put it within a frame of reference in which it does not defeat you but is taken up into ultimate optimism.

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The Autobiographical Problem of Evil

Life grants wondrous gifts of love and happiness. Yet, God’s world includes abundant suffering, sorrow, defeat, sickness, frustration, anguish, frailty, cruelty, duplicity, loneliness, and more of the same. These are not bad things that just “happen” to good people. They are installed in the very warp and woof of our normal lives. We endure anguish, pain, and, sometimes, paralyzing frustration just trying to go about living our lives. In God’s world, many are tormented by destructive relationships or are children of crazed, cruel parents; numerous lives are crushed and defeated by circumstances not of a person’s making, leaving them empty and hopeless, dying, rather than living, each day. Many are fated to a life of sickness and sorrow. Many are shunned and persecuted for who they are and the way they are. There is the deep malaise of a life derailed, sensed as being devoid of value, felt not worth living except for the fear of death. Then there is the gloom of utter loneliness—of a woman whose only close companion is her silent cane or metal walker; a man living on the edge, seeing only his grocer and doctor; a child so emotionally withdrawn from life that her only contacts are with her imaginary friends. We murder and are murdered, rape and are raped, torture and are tortured. All this part of the very rhythm of life. Part of life. Life itself. Day in and day out. Then, there are colossal evils that are part of our lives in God’s world: earthquakes, massacres, famines, hurricanes, epidemics, tsunamis, floods,

The Autobiographical Problem of Ev il

avalanches, collapsed buildings, wars, attacks by wild animals, climate warming, you name it. These too are all inherent in the permanent ways of human nature. There are also societal structures that are hurtful, crushing, and evil. The human record too often seems to be just one damn thing after another. And then there are the evil actions, desires, intentions, and wishes that belong to me and are in me. How could God have created me with such baseness? For some of us this can be the most painful consideration of all. True, there are many of us who gain immensely from everyday disappointments and setbacks, pain and suffering, becoming stronger, wiser, and compassionate, learning thereby to advance firmly and kindly into the future. But how many people do not? Think of the myriad of people in God’s world who suffer and never recover from it, people resigned to a life of torment or of utter helplessness. People crumpled, crazed, and confounded for life. 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, so many people, in the words of Henry David Thoreau, “lead lives of quiet desperation.”1 Hovering above this is the sense of the utter injustice in the way these evils are distributed in God’s world. The most morally debased or criminal are sometimes the most affluent, while the poor are sometimes the most upright and trustworthy. The sickest are sometimes the sweetest, the healthiest sometimes the hardest at heart. Those who are deeply loved are sometimes not as worthy as others who are abandoned and alone. Sometimes the most admired are unscrupulous human beings, while some of the worthiest go unnoticed. Think of this as being the world of a perfectly good being. This is the famous “problem of evil,” no lighter because famous: God and evil, God and so much evil, God and such horrendous evils. I distinguish three different forms of the problem of evil. One is that there would seem to be a logical contradiction between the existence of a perfectly good God and the amount and severe forms of evil in the world. This comes to the claim that the existence of God together with the amount of evil there is in the world is to be compared to there being a three-sided square. Both, this challenge says, are impossible in the strongest sense. The second form of the problem of evil has it is that there may be no contradiction here but, considering the amount and kinds of evil in the world, it is highly improbable that a perfectly good God exists. If such a God did exist, it is highly unlikely that such a great amount of evil and such types of horrendous evil

1 Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

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would exist. On either form of the problem, God, if existing, cannot perfectly good. There is a huge philosophical literature on these two versions of the problem of evil, and philosophical experts are divided on the issue. Most experts today are inclined to accept that there is no outright logical inconsistency between the existence of a perfectly good God and the actual evils in the world.2 In addition, there is wide divergence among philosophers concerning whether it is highly unlikely that God exists, even if no contradiction between God and the evil there is. Defenders of a perfectly good God will argue that God’s wisdom is so far beyond our capabilities of discovering what God has in mind with the evil allowed to exist, that even if God had perfectly good reasons for the evil, we could never discover them. Trying to discover God’s reasons for allowing evil is like trying to discover what kind of bacteria are on your arm just by looking with the naked eye.3 We are in a similar situation trying to discover God’s reasons for the evil God allows. I have become convinced that the charge of logical contradiction is mistaken. And while the argument from evil to its being improbable that God exists does have some merit that merit is overcome by counter-considerations. To defend this way of thinking is a long story, too long for this book. I have dealt with these issues in an earlier book of mine, and I refer you to there.4 In any event, I believe that neither of these problems of evil is paramount in people’s minds when experiencing “the” problem of evil. It is the following, third form of the problem of evil that I believe is the most poignant and heavy one. *** It is the third version of the problem of evil that seems to me far more on the minds of people whose faith is deeply challenged by the evil they experience or of which they are aware. This is when a person simply finds herself unable to believe, or finds it difficult to believe, that a perfectly good God would allow a particular evil/evils/such an amount of evil to exist in God’s world. These will

2 For a classic argument against there being a contradiction see Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002). 3 For an argument to the improbability of God’s perfect goodness see William L. Rowe, “The Empirical Argument from Evil,” in Rationality, Religious Belief, and Moral Commitment, ed. Robert Audi and William J. Wainwright (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 227– 247. For an argument against Rowe see Stephen J. Wykstra, “Rowe’s Noseeum Arguments from Evil,” in The Evidential Argument from Evil, ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), 126–150. 4 Jerome Gellman, Experience of God and the Rationality of Theistic Belief (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), chapter 7.

The Autobiographical Problem of Ev il

be evils out in the world as well as evil acts of mine and evil intentions in my heart. This problem of evil, unlike the other two, does not employ an argument, conjuring up some premises and reaching a troubling conclusion. It is not a claim of a contradiction or even a claim of improbability. It is rather a direct, visceral, emotional, reaction to evil (as such, or its amount, or its horrendous quality) experienced or known about. It would typically involve dismay or the weakening or outright rejection of faith. This problem can be expressed quite simply by a self-confession such as, “I just cannot believe that a perfectly good God would not intervene in the world to prevent so much suffering!” or “I find it hard to believe that a perfectly good God would allow my baby daughter to die.” This problem of evil consists of an autobiographical state of mind, not an argument. It acts to trigger a profound conviction of unbelief or a heavy doubt, or at best, to emerge as a heavy ball chained to your leg as you try to walk the life of belief in a perfectly good God. It is this autobiographical problem of evil that will occupy me here. This problem can be especially acute for a Jew confronting the extensive suffering of the Jewish people through its history. If God is so good and loves the Jewish people so much, how can the history of the Jews have been so full of suffering and repression? How could there be a destruction of two Temples, wide dispersion around the world, the Crusades in which hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered, pogroms from the Middle Ages until, and including in, the twentieth century, the Inquisition, expulsions at one time or another from entire countries or parts of them, including Spain and Portugal, France, Germany, Italy, England, Hungary, Austria, and Russia; widespread antisemitism and sundry forms of exclusion and restrictions on where to live, where to travel, and how to earn a living. The Holocaust, the Holocaust, the Holocaust. Do not the historical violence and abuse of the Jews prevent a person from believing in God’s perfect goodness and God’s supposed love of the Jews? Ideally, the goodness of God instills itself in the believer’s devotion within the religious life. God as creator and sustainer of the world, God as giver of life and goodness, God as the source of morality and beauty. God as source of the Torah. God as preserver of the Jewish people and their religious lives throughout their millennia of travails. God as the intimate One, a presence at times as real as one’s own hand. God whose presence makes sense of life. All of these support faith in God beyond a bare belief in God’s existence. These additional beliefs and experiences might protect a believer from the autobiographical problem of evil. Until, that is, experiences of evil and reflection on evil threatens these beliefs, attitudes, and experiences, daring to wear away at them and to ultimately overweigh the religious life with too heavy a burden of despair or doubt. This is the autobiographical problem of evil.

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Now, I am not going to try to solve this autobiographical difficulty. I have no magic wand or magic syllogism. In particular I am not going to attempt to win over the non-believer, the one who is closed to the prospect of a perfectly good God. My aim is far more modest. And that is to try to alleviate the problem somewhat for the believer or would-be believer, to the point that emunah, faith, might well prevail in face of the challenge. And that will be by way of advancing considerations that will add to the weight of belief in a perfectly good God, so that with faith, a tipping point can be achieved. I acknowledge and admit that this will not be enough of an alleviation of the autobiographical problem for those of us challenged by the methodological murder of Jews in the Holocaust and its haunting aftermath. As I have written above, the Holocaust is a black hole, emitting no light, in every theology since then. Every theology, when finished, must face the response, “Yes, but . . .” Still, I am just trying to do the best I can with what I can, for others, for myself.

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A Conceivable, Partial, Soul-Making Theodicy for the Autobiographical Problem of Evil

The persistence of the autobiographical problem of evil through the ages attests to the pervasive belief that God is perfectly good. If God were not perfectly good, the problem would be solved easily or not arise at all. An evil event would occur because God did not have a fully good character or God did not know that evil was coming or already existed, or did not have enough power to prevent it, or was no longer sovereign over the world, and the like. The persistence of the bewilderment over how God could have allowed this or that evil, or so much evil overall, attests to a prior expectation that God could have and should have prevented it. And the best explanation of that expectation is the belief that God is a perfectly good being and so things should have been different than they have been. *** Biblical and rabbinic writings, as well as a good deal of Jewish philosophical writings contain a clear strand, even if not exclusive, of God being a perfectly good being.1 Thus, in Jewish history various proposals exist responding to suffering and other evils consistent with God being a perfectly good being.2 1 For a fuller survey see Gellman, Perfect Goodness and The God of the Jews, 26–36. 2 For this section I have consulted David Kraemer, Responses to Suffering in Classical Rabbinic Literature (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

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A major response is the skeptical response that, roughly, we mortals are in no position to be able to judge or even know or understand God’s reasons for allowing evils.3 Elsewhere I call this the “humility response,” which has much merit and which I endorse. For the autobiographical problem of evil, however, the problem is liable to persist after a plea for humility. The pain is too strong. Something more is needed. In biblical writings evil often befalls a person and a nation as punishment for sins. This theme carries forward to rabbinic times. The punishment theme is common, as in the search for the sins that brought about the destruction of the two Temples and the exile of the Jews from their homeland.4 Also prevalent there is the promise that those who suffer in this life and have not deserved this punishment will receive justice in a future life. Future reward will make up for all evil a person endures in this life. Those deserving punishment in this world who do not receive it here will find it in the next world. In the end, and despite appearances, justice will be done. There is also the development of the idea that God is merciful in meting out punishment. So, God remains perfectly good despite appearances. The Babylonian Talmud (BT Berakhot 5a) speaks of a suffering of love, where God lovingly brings suffering upon a person whom God wishes to shape-up by being extra strict with them. It also explicitly recognizes evil occurrences that are not commensurate with merit. So, it can happen that an innocent person suffers in a harmful situation because the danger is already so “fixed” or inevitable that there is no way to avoid it.5 In medieval philosophy, Saadia Gaon gives much more detail to his views than the Torah or the rabbis did before him. He presents various explanations as to how God’s justice will prevail. Reasons for people enduring evil include suffering for character-building, punishment for the good of the person, as persuasion to leave evil ways, and as trial and testing.6

3 For an excellent survey and discussion of skeptical responses see Tamar Rudavsky, “A Brief History of Skeptical Responses to Evil,” in The Blackwell Companion to the Problem of Evil¸ ed. Justin P. McBrayer and  Daniel Howard-Snyder (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2013), 379–395. 4 David Kraemer shows quite convincingly that there are discernable differences between Palestinian and Babylonian rabbis on these issues and between different periods of history. See the earlier footnote. These differences are not germane to the present discussion, however. 5 I acknowledge that other conceptions are to be found, especially in the Babylonian Talmud. 6 Saadia Gaon, The Book of Theodicy: Translation and Commentary on the Book of Job, trans. Len Goodman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 125–130. See also Saadia Gaon, The Book of Beliefs and Opinions. For the problem of evil in Jewish philosophy, see Oliver Leaman, Evil and Suffering in Jewish Philosophy (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

A Conceivable, Par tial, Soul-Making Theodic y

The main concern of Maimonides, Gersonides, and Hasdai Crescas, with differences between them, is to argue that God is not the source of evil. For them, in the main, evil comes from matter, and is not a positive reality but a corruption of matter, a “privation.” (Blindness is not a positive reality but a privation of sight, sight being good.) This also applies to humans’ bad choices, which are influenced by our material make-up. Hence, much of our suffering is either of our own doing or inevitable because of the material side of our reality. The good only, and not the bad, is from God. While we certainly should believe that suffering can be punishment for sins and that God is especially strict with those God has a special interest to educate to personal improvement, these explanations are rather limited in scope. It is hard to believe that, when a tsunami wipes out an entire city with thousands of deaths, each person who died had to be punished and each person who survived had to be kept alive. The people who are killed so brutally are not being put to a test. Neither are they able to develop their character any longer because of the tsunami experience. Also, we seem not to be able to apply the punishment theme to the suffering and death of minors or little children. Some might take the suffering and death of a child to be punishment to one or both parents. This assumes that the child’s life and death have no autonomous meaning or value aside from what they mean to a parent. But, while this might have been so in biblical times it is not a viable position today with the illness, suffering, and death of little children. Children are not to suffer for the sins of their parents. (See below for more on this topic.) The suffering-as-education theme will figure in what follows but loses force once the subjects of the suffering are those who do not have the mind-set to realize or believe that they are suffering for that reason. A person who does not have the conceptual apparatus for experiencing suffering in that way should not be made to suffer for educational reasons. Neither can the educational explanation apply to cases when people who suffer find their lives destroyed, never to recover. So, these explanations of suffering, although having some true application, are only partial in nature. They require supplementation. Finally, it matters little that evil is a privation of the good and not a positive reality. A perfectly good God has all the good-power and good-knowledge needed to know of the impending occurrence of evil and of its endurance and to deal with it accordingly. The impact of suffering is real in a positive way whether metaphysically positive or not. Indeed, a perfectly good God knows of the negative shortcomings of matter and so should want to avoid creating it in the first place (unless matter was an original component of reality whose existence was not in God’s hands. But that is not consistent with our definition

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of a perfectly good being), or at least track its doings to be perfectly good about things. The autobiographical problem of evil rises above the heads of these explanations. *** One of the triggers of the autobiographical problem of evil is the inability to imagine to oneself any good reason why God could allow the evil or evils in question to exist. This is the heart of the dismay felt in the autobiographical problem. This feeling is likely to arise especially after having rejected the stock attempts to explain why God allows an evil or evils. So, what I want to do here is to try to alleviate somewhat the autobiographical problem by conjuring up a conceivable explanation for why God while being perfectly good would allow at least many of the evils of this world. I call this only a conceivable explanation, since, except in a very limited way (due to what God might have revealed about God’s purposes or what can be reliably deduced about God), we are so far from God’s thinking that we cannot possibly actually know why God would create a world just like ours. So, mine is a conceivable explanation in that it coheres with the idea of God as a perfectly good being. A conceivable explanation should have what it takes to help relieve the bewilderment resulting from your not being able to even imagine a possible reason why God would allow this evil, or the evils God does allow. A possible, imaginable, explanation though not designed to give the true reason why God allows the evil that we know, would show that a justification for many evils is at least imaginable, even if the explanation is not the real one. And if so, there might be other explanations, but these lying beyond our ken. To that extent I hope to weaken the autobiographical problem of evil enough for a residual faith or desire to have faith to come into play. Yet, we should not dismiss that a conceivable theodicy might indeed be true to divine purposes and actions. In that light, I am about to present a possible theodicy, one that could conceivably be a reason why God would allow a world like ours with its evils. Note most importantly that my theodicy is not meant to possibly explain all evil. It is only a partial theodicy. There are evils that I would not touch. My hope is to give a kind of to thinking more broadly about how a perfectly good God might create a world with much evil in it and is not expected to have created a rose garden. So, I am not trying to solve the problem of evil. My aims are far more modest. My point here is to illustrate how when we are dealing with God and evil, we will have to stretch our imaginations and know that the truth still will likely be far beyond what we can conjure up as reasons for evil.

A Conceivable, Par tial, Soul-Making Theodic y

Soul-Making Theology My possible theodicy is a modification and expansion of the “soul-making” theodicy of John Hick. On soul-making theodicy people are created for the purpose of freely perfecting themselves and thereby freely coming to God. This principle played a role in my earlier treatment of the Jews as the Chosen People. A person, writes Hick, “is as yet only potentially the perfected being whom God is seeking to produce. [A person] is only at the beginning of a process of growth and development in God’s continuing providence.”7 For Hick, persons have been created at a distance from God, regarding their imperfect nature and as regards the circumstances of their life, precisely in order to freely come to God.8 The evil in the world will be overcome in the end, for: “In the end and completion of the temporal process, will be a good so great as to justify all that has occurred on the way to it, so that we may affirm the unqualified goodness of the totality which consists of history and its end.” The key here is to believe that when a person dies that is not the end of her or his moral development. For given a belief in life after death, a person will resume the aim of moral development in the next world. Hick maintains, then, that people in this world are in a long process of development from being far from God as morally undeveloped, to being close to God as morally refined. However, this world is not the final stop of development since individual moral development can continue beyond this lifetime. “Soul-making” continues far beyond this life. I take up this basic direction of Hick to develop a conceivable soul-making theodicy for the autobiographical problem of evil. To so do I present crucial elements components that govern this theodicy.

1.

The Principle of Universalism

My soul-making theodicy includes the principle of universalism, namely, that all human beings are destined to join with God in eternal intimacy (with the

7 John Hick,  Evil and the God of Love, 2nd ed. with a new preface (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 211–212. See also his Death and Eternal Life (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1994). Hick calls this an “Irenaean theodicy,” since his type of theodicy originated with Bishop Irenaeus (second century CE). 8 Hick, Evil and the God of Love, 232 (paraphrased).

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possibility of very few exceptions9). No one (with the possibility of very few exceptions) will be rejected by God for all eternity and, if there is a hell, no one will be assigned to hell forever. God’s perfect goodness applies to every person in the end, Jew and Gentile, woman and man, free and bonded. 2 Samuel 14:14 states: “God does not take away life, but devises means so that those who are rejected will not [remain] rejected.” This has served Jewish qualified universalists as a proof text that no Jew will be lost forever. Ultimately, all Jews will be joined with God. This is especially prominent with Hasidic masters, who endorsed universalism, yet for Jews only. However, given a belief in a perfectly good God and given my universalist-type version of Jewish chosenness, in which God loves everybody, as I have outlined in the first part of this book, it is appropriate to to include unqualified universalism in this theodicy. Universalism fits the psalmist’s veneration of God, in Psalm 145, that “God is good to all; he has compassion on all He has made.” Sure enough, the same psalm says that God will “destroy all the wicked.” However, the universalist will take this verse in accordance with BT Berakhot 10a: There were once hooligans in the neighborhood of R. Meir who caused him a great deal of anguish. R. Meir accordingly prayed that they should die. His wife Beruriah said to him: “Why do you think that such a prayer should be permitted? It is written ‘Let sins cease’ (Psalms 104:35). Is it written ‘sinners’? It is written ‘sins.’ Furthermore, look at the end of the verse: ‘and the wicked will be no more.’ Precisely because the sins will cease, then there will be no more wicked people! Rather pray for them that they should repent, and there will be no more wicked.” Rabbi Meir agreed and he prayed for them, and they repented. Just so, the universalist will understand the destruction of all wicked as the result of God bringing about the disappearance of all sins, because of which it will be as though all sinners will be “destroyed.” There will be no sinners left.

2. Middle Knowledge and God Choosing Whom to Create Next, I assume for this theodicy that God has what philosophers call “middle knowledge.” This means that God knows not only what has happened and 9 I find it difficult to believe that the likes of Hitler and Stalin will be saved.

A Conceivable, Par tial, Soul-Making Theodic y

what will happen in future, but also knows for every possible person that God could create or could have created, what that person would do of his or her own free will in each situation in which they would exist. God knows whether Curley will or will not accept a bribe if God creates Curley and has him be in a certain situation at a certain time and place where he is offered a bribe. Based on such knowledge, God can decide who God wants to create and not create, depending on the free actions God knows they would choose if created.10 Of the stock of possible persons to create, God can choose whom to create knowing what they will do if created. God with middle knowledge is more able to implement God’s goodness than God without middle knowledge, because with middle knowledge God has more to go on in deciding what possible persons to create. So, middle knowledge must be part of perfect good-knowledge.11 There might be persons whom if God created them would be from the very start of highly righteous character. Various religions claim to have known such creatures. But God also creates others, who God knows will become perfected of character only after a process of becoming of sterling character. God does so because God is good and wishes to confer upon these others the superlative good of being morally developed and close to God. In creating persons who must undergo a process of growth to become close to God in holiness, God produces extra value over creating only persons ready-made good. Obviously, the justification of evil for the sake of achieving that good has its limitations, but justification there is. There are constraints on which creatures God can create. God creates only creatures about whom God knows, by middle knowledge, that if God creates them, eventually they will freely fulfill God’s goal of becoming God-like. Also, God creates only creatures 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 10 I leave aside the classic quandary about free will and God’s foreknowledge. The traditional Jew is asked to juggle both, as twin operative pictures in her mind. In any case, my purpose here is not to deal with all theological problems that might trouble a believer. Give me a break. 11 Middle knowledge is controversial among philosophers of religion, but here is not the place to slug it out with the opponents. The classic defense is by Luis de Molina, On Divine Foreknowledge: Part IV of the Concordia, trans. Alfred J. Freddoso (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). A major criticism is by Robert Merrithew Adams, “Middle Knowledge and the Problem of Evil,” American Philosophical Quarterly 14 (1977): 109–117. For a technical book-length defense of middle-knowledge see Thomas P. Flint, Divine Providence, The Molinist Account (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).

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with divine assistance. By selecting whom he creates, by way of middle knowledge, God secures the outcome, but not in a way that denies their free will. God creates them because of their free choices. God creates no creatures who will not ultimately be redeemed into harmony with God (with possible exceptions, as noted above). And God is cognizant of what price can justifiably be paid for that and acts accordingly.

3.

Being Close to God

The greatest possible good a person can achieve is being close to God. By being close to God I mean humanly approximating God’s perfect 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 perfect goodness. So, in that respect no created being can be good quite like God. To be good like God in my sense, then, is to radiate all and only goodness to others, doing so only for the sake of others, not for one’s own sake, to the extent 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. God has no self-serving motivations. That kind of goodness comes from concern for one’s own well-being. And one who becomes good to enjoy—for his or her own sake—the divine beatitude everlasting is, in that regard, not like God. To be like God one must 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. And it is to be good for its intrinsic goodness. If one wants to be like God for one’s own sake, then one falls short of wanting to be like God.12

4.

Two Kinds of Goodness

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. Developing a good character

12 Admittedly, there are places in the Torah as well as in the Jewish liturgy that suggest that God does act for God’s own sake. However, as with God walking in the Garden and descending to earth to see what is going on, we need not take such passages at face value. They must be taken as imaginative pictures for pictorial impression or to be translated into theological replacements.

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possesses value above the value of simply having a good character. So, when God creates persons who develop into being close to God, God gains the value of one’s becoming like God, in addition to the goodness of their being like God. God will do this, though, in the best cost/benefit way possible for a perfectly good being. And God will do this only when God knows that the person herself, when the times comes, will come to appreciate the cost of having reached the divine goal. *** Universal redemption is obviously discordant with life in our world. There are children who die young never 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 troubles 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 motto until death. None of these fulfill God’s desire that they become close 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. Furthermore, we know that our world is not truly one in which “God always gives bread to the hungry,” “frees prisoners,” “heals the blind,” and “aids the orphans and widows,” as the Psalmist would have us believe. However, these praises of God cannot remain unfulfilled. They must, somehow, be true of a perfectly good God. For these reasons, it follows that since God is perfectly good, this lifetime cannot be the only lifetime of a person. It is a standard principle of traditional Judaism that there is life after death, in some important sense or other. Now, I reshape this belief to a continuous developing of character in future lives. If not in this life, then in future ones, God will be found to ultimately give “bread” to those hungry for God, free “prisoners” from their own self-imprisonment, heal the “blind” to God and the ultimate good, and aid the “orphans and widows,” namely those who have been abandoned and helpless. The plurality of future lives is a standard Hasidic teaching (for Jews), so that if not in this lifetime, then in future lifetimes, gilgulim, all will eventually return to God. They will then not be in hunger for God, remain blind to their genuine selves, be victims of their self-imprisonment, or feel abandoned with no support. So sayeth the Hasidic Master Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi: “For sure, one will repent of his ways in this lifetime or in another, for no one who is banished

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will remain banished.”13 And R. Menachum Nachum of Chernobyl states: “It is impossible that any Jew, even souls that fell, that is, souls of the wicked, that they be lost, God forbid. For He, be He blessed, works things out so that no one who is detached will stay detached. The person will live some further lives until mended and then they will rise.”14 In keeping with the principle of universalism, I am positing reincarnation and the ultimate attainment of human godliness for all human beings, not only for Jews. However, the version of lives after death in my conceivable theodicy does not consider future lives as punishment for failing to reach the divine aim in this life. My theodicy has a different face. Think about it. There is no good reason to believe that God creates only the universe we inhabit. That is a myopic favoring of one’s own universe. We might call it “universism.” To the contrary, God’s creative abilities for good far surpass the ability to create only one wlorld. It follows that God being perfectly good would create a plurality of separate universes, the better to do good. Accordingly, my theodicy posits a multitude of different universes, a “multiverse.” In accord with God’s creative abilities, the multiverse will include universes quite different from one another in their initial states, laws, materials (if any), and in ways creatures exist in them, universes greatly different from the materials and conditions of our universe.15 The plurality of universes that God creates exists, as it were, simultaneously.16 “Universes” are distinct in not being accessible one from 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. Two universes also could differ when they have the same laws of nature and the same ingredients, but with different starting conditions. Then the two will branch out in different directions from the starting conditions, with very different results. The possibilities are as wide as God’s perfect goodness.

13 Schneur Zalman of Liady, Likutei Amarim Tanya (Brooklyn: Kehot Publication Society, 1981), 198. My translation. 14 Menachum Nachum of Chernobyl, Meor Einayim ( Jerusalem: Yeshivah Meor Einayim, n.d.), 151. My translation. 15 In this my possible scenario of rebirth resembles somewhat the early Buddhist cosmology in which rebirth occurs into various realms, each different from the other in nature. These include six realms ranging from that of the gods down to the level of hells. see “Saṃsāra” in Encyclopedia of Buddhism https://encyclopediaofbuddhism.org/wiki/Sa%E1%B9%83s%C4%81ra Saṃsāra - Encyclopedia of Buddhism Accessed February 28, 2023 16 There is a problem with the idea of “simultaneity” between different universes, even more than simultaneity in our single world. Perhaps, their simultaneity consists of their being together in the mind of God.

A Conceivable, Par tial, Soul-Making Theodic y

In addition to multiple universes, I also include multiple locations of life, in one form or another, within our universe. However, all such locations will be governed by the same laws that exist here on earth, and with basically the same elements. Multiple universes, rather than mere multiple locations within this universe, open the possibility of realities very different from our universe in its laws and materials. There are some close precedents in traditional Jewish sources for my multiverse hypothesis. The medieval philosopher, Gersonides (1288–1344) had considered the possibility of plural worlds. He rejected this possibility only because there would have to be a vacuum between worlds. He rejected the possibility of a vacuum and with it multiple worlds, a reasoning that need not deter us.17 Hasdai Crescas (ca. 1340–1410/11), another medieval philosopher, seriously contemplated the existence of simultaneous multiple worlds. He argued 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 Instruction: put “worlds” together here. the  more  He  increases  goodness; and thus it seems  possible that there exist many worlds.”18 Crescas was bothered by the question of how many worlds God would create, so hesitates to posit multiple worlds. In my theodicy. In my theodicy, the number of universes God creates is evident: as many as are needed for the purpose of providing an array of environments suitable for created persons to progress. The number of universes God creates will be determined by how many universes God needs to bring all created beings close to God, from their own free will and by way of successive lives. And God has created only possible persons God knows by middle knowledge will reach the end-goal if created. Rebirth involves a person ceasing to live in one universe and then “coming back to life” by assuming some form or other in the same or in a different universe. In reincarnation a person can pass serially from one universe to another, so

17 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), 345–370. 18 Translation into English based on Warren Zev Harvey, “Nicole Oresme and Hasdai Crescas on Many Worlds (with an Appendix on Gersonides and Gerald Odonis),” in Studies in the History of Culture and Science: A Tribute to Gad Freudenthal, ed. Resianne Fontaine et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 347–359.

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need not be a return to this universe, but instead passing to a different universe, perhaps one radically different from ours. A modern-day traditional Jew might object to a reincarnational theology. The reason might be no more than that reincarnation is “bizarre” or just crazy. In any case, it is not exactly a chief doctrine of traditional Judaism. In reply, I note that traditional Judaism does normally endorse some kind of an afterlife. My theodicy stretches that out to successive future lives. Also, my theodicy is only a possible one, that does not assert the actuality of successive reincarnations. All we need acknowledge is that God has the power to bring reincarnation into being for it to be a possible theodicy, and that for all we know God would make use of it for the ultimate good of the creatures God creates. This is motivated by thinking hard about what God’s goodness might involve beyond what we know of the present world in which we live. The second uneasiness with reincarnation might be its common association with a punishment theodicy—suffering in this lifetime is punishment for sins in a previous lifetime. A reason to balk at this could be a refusal to acknowledge that a person’s sins could merit the amounts and kinds of suffering of this world. And there are children who die without sin. My reincarnational scheme does not invoke a punishment motif. Instead, passing from one incarnation to another is motivated by what it takes for a given person to freely grow in selfhood to his or her ultimate redeemed self.19 No punishment or disappointment. That will be just what it takes to impel us forward. The greatest discomfort people might have with reincarnation is from a materialist conception of a person.20 The latter comes in two forms. One is that a person is a material substance having only material properties. A second is that a person is a material substance possessing both material and mental properties. For the second type of materialist, the mental has no independent existence, existing only as attached to a material substance. Either way, when a material substance that is the person exists no longer, the person 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 will be no material crossover from universe to universe and so no continuity from one incarnation to another.

19 By referring to a person as “he” or “she” I mean to refer to them only as they are in one universe. A 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. 20 A classic and enduring statement of materialism is David M. Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of the Mind (London: Routledge, 1993).

A Conceivable, Par tial, Soul-Making Theodic y

A traditional Jew need not trouble herself over this difficulty since she has every reason to reject a materialist conception of a person. She already believes in a non-material God and will believe in a non-material “something” or “soul,” whatever that might be, that survives this life, however attenuated a thing it might be in her thinking. Sure, secular philosophers have advanced sophisticated, elegant, materialist conceptions of personal identity, but these need not worry a religious person. Those philosophers have fashioned their theories to fulfill a set of their own, mostly secular, favored requirements for such a theory. Never is one of those requirements to make good sense of personal identity across reincarnations. So, the “success” of such theories for other desired requirements does not yet recommend such theories for application to the non-materialist traditionally religious person. A religious person is within her rights to hold out for a criterion of personal identity that will make sense of non-material existence, whether we have such a criterion now or not. I have been carrying on about a person existing in successive universes until reaching the end point of becoming like God. But what sense really can be given to sameness of individual identity through these universes? One possibility is that there are universes in which a person lives with full memories of previous lives in other universes. This would pin down the individual identity of the person. Yet, there will be other universes, as is our own, in which such memories are absent. To pin down individual identity through such universes we can think of living through a universe somewhat as being absorbed in a film. While being absorbed in this way, I can at least momentarily become quite unmindful of myself or relatively so. My consciousness is full of what transpires now on the screen. When coming out of my absorption in the film, I once again connect with my memories. I remember coming to the cinema, starting to watch the film, and so on, and know it was I who was totally absorbed in the film and who then came out of it to be here this very moment. My individual identity runs through from beginning to end. Just so, when we are alive in a universe, we could be totally absorbed in living in this universe. Then we are not aware of our overarching self-identity outside of our existence in that universe. When one dies, or otherwise exits a universe, one will preserve a memory of life in the universe one has left and regain the memories of all previous universes one has inhabited. A person knows them as her life, 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 that happens. A person is now able to look back on that life and draw lessons from it for the future. And God will have created only people who will in fact freely draw conclusions from the way life was back then. Taking it all to heart, the person is now placed in another

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universe with a personality consequently somewhat different from that 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 for a person to even start to become closer to God. Cross-world identity will make best sense if we believe that a person has a “soul,” a unique “thisness” that passes from universe to universe, molded on the way to its eventual redeemed state. Then the person’s character inheres in the soul substrate which accounts for the fundamental identity of the person, who the person is. One progresses toward God by passing from universe to universe. Two different people do not have to go through the same universes. It all depends on which universes they need to go through in order to, in the end, freely emerge close to God. There will be those who will never appear in our present universe, their trajectory going through other universes. They do not need a universe like ours to succeed in reaching the endpoint. Others that do exist in our universe might appear here more than once. Some might appear in one universe, then in another, and then return back to the first. You and I might cross at one universe in our journeys toward God. Otherwise, we might occupy different universes. *** There are two strata of human goodness. The first is the goodness an individual person exhibits toward others. You ask me to help you with a cut in your arm, and I do so. The second is the goodness displayed by a society in its structure and functioning, the result of a cumulative and cooperative effort by a collective of persons. We, as a society, make hospitals to treat people when they get severe cuts in their arms. Hence, God has created us as social-political beings so as to increase the kinds of goodness that will result from our being like God. As a result, there are further constraints on what universes a person can inhabit. That is because the goodness of the will that must emerge in a person must also be expressed in the creation and functioning of the goodness of the will in societal structures. Hence, to an extent, persons must be selected for universes so as to progress in tandem with societal goodness. 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 each person, the end will consist of being in a universe in which she is like God both in her personal life and in her contribution to a God-reflecting society. A Jewish kabbalist might say that God has created us as social beings so that ultimately, we can imitate the goodness reflected by the supreme unity and harmony in the supernal divine realm. The endpoint for a person cannot be the isolated individual who has come to be like God in emptying out his self-concern replacing it with concern for others. The

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endpoint must include persons in an overarching social structure to which they all contribute, and which is a supreme expression of their goodness. The final universes (no reason to suppose only one) are collectively the “Messianic Age,” where all persons will abide in a Messianic canopy of societal perfection—as much as possible for created beings—in close companionship with God. Our present universe need not be one that participates in the Messianic Age, although it, with every universe, contributes toward the collective Messianic Age. The Messianic Age will be of such value that all the journeys of all the people through the universes, to come to that point, will be understood for what they were and will be appreciated for their having been worth the effort. Again, I cannot claim this for all evils but perhaps for a given amount of evil. For all other evils we must think further. In the end worlds, God will have cured all morally and spiritually sick, will have freed all who are morally and spiritually imprisoned, and always will keep faith with those morally and spiritually asleep in the earth.21 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 but will. At 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 fantastic number of successive universes each person must inhabit in order to become redeemed from self-centeredness. We can be assured that God would not allow more suffering than necessary. Indeed, the number of universes a given person 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 would praise God for “putting to death and giving life,” for in this universe death is the condition for the following life. *** Considering the above, how are we 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?

21 This is my paraphrase from the Siddur, the traditional Jewish prayer book.

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A theodicy can be either an event-theodicy or a universe-theodicy, or a combination of both kinds. An event-theodicy for a universe offers justifying explanations, in principle, for each evil in that universe. For examples, what I do not endorse, one might propose that everything bad that happens in our universe is punishment for a sin committed in this life or in previous lives. Or one might propose that natural evil, earthquakes, famines, floods, and the like, in Universe no. 8 is due to the free-willed rebellion of angels. Or, more broadly, a theodicy might say that every evil that exists contributes causally to a specific good or several goods it is its job to produce. Without that particular evil, the good in question would not come to be. Or that a particular evil is a spin-off of a good that is morally required, with the good sufficiently outweighing the evil. In a universe-theodicy, in contrast, one explains why God is justified in creating the universe in question by referring to the overall nature that world has, without attempting to explain the 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 that God has shaped the universe in question to advance the ultimate good. This would be without claiming that each evil in that universe is required to help bring about a particular good. Rather, the universe is holistically justified by the sort of universe it is. A major difference between an event-theodicy and a universe-theodicy is the possibility of justifying God creating a universe in which chance events occur. In an event-theodicy this might have to be ruled out, since every evil is 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 exists. The theodicy then will focus on the advantage of a person having to endure and respond to a universe that includes chance events. The possible, partial theodicy I present here for our universe is a universetheodicy, with a secondary appeal to an event-theodicy. And that is in recognition that chance events occur in our universe, together with a rationale for why God would create some universes in the multiverse in which there is chance. At the same time, I reserve the possibility of limited divine intervention beyond the chance events. This harkens back to the moderate version of divine providence that I advanced in part two of this book. Our universe appears to be one in which persons and societies are subject to chance and are impacted by impersonal forces, taking no account of merit and demerit. There seems to be no direct ratio between being a victim and the degree to which the victim deserves such treatment. The fate of so many people seems

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to depend on the whims of other people, or haphazard occurrences in nature with no apparent logic to the results. 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.22 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 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.23 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.24 Similarly, Bahyah 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.”25

22 Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, 3:17, 471. 23 Ibid., 3:18, 475. 24 Nachmanides, Perush ha-Ramban al ha-Torah, on Genesis 18:19. My translation. However, elsewhere Nachmanides says otherwise, implying strict providence. 25 Bahyah bar Asher, commentary on Genesis 18:19. My translation and my emphasis.

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Gersonides (1288–1344) is commonly understood to hold a view of providence similar 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. . . .26 Accordingly, I have advocated moderate providence in which chance occurs on one level and divine providence exists on a higher level in a holistic way. God determines broad outcomes without necessarily determining the details that produce that outcome. One way this can obtain is by what I have called “topdown,” or “downward causation.” Top-down causation refers to when a higherlevel system organizes components at a lower level, when the organization cannot be attributed to the properties of the components themselves. The explanation lies in higher organizational levels that work downward to the lower level. This results in chance and randomness at the component level, while the higher-level structure is imposing an overall broad organization on the chance events, in a holistic in a holistic constraining way.27 Our universe, then, will be one of those universes in which chance events occur, even frequently, while other worlds can be of a different nature entirely. And in this universe of ours, chance prevails within generally recognizable regularities of nature. Now, 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 for their being in this universe consists in their needing to live in a universe with much chance events.

26 Gersonides (Levi ben Gerson), The Commentary of Levi ben Gerson (Gersonides) on the Book of Job, ed. and trans. Abraham L. Lassen (New York: Bloch Publishing Company, 1946), 232–233, as quoted by Menachem Kellner, “Gersonides, Providence, and the Rabbinic Tradition,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 42 (1974): 677. 27 For a fuller presentation of moderate providence see Gellman, This Was from God.

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My possible theodicy does not make light of the evils of the multiverse. On the contrary, the purpose of the multiverse is to overcome evil by the gradual formation of a giving self and a giving society in place of a taking self and taking society. At the same time, my possible theodicy demands acting to prevent evil in any universe in which one finds oneself. One should not protest that we must not eliminate evil in our universe since God wants us all to experience a world of chance, including evil and suffering. That is because my conceivable theodicy involves God’s middle knowledge, whereby God knows for every universe God creates what will be the degree of freely chosen altruism in that universe, so already God has factored in the good you will do here when deciding what universes to create. And, our universe is one in which acts of altruism are on display to point forward to what is possible for all others as well. My possible theodicy includes the doing of good by persons who have made progress or are ahead to begin with on the path to the Messianic universes. My possible, partial theodicy takes our vision beyond the “constricted” single universe we inhabit to place our world within a large array of universes and does not insist that our universe is one of the Messianic ones. Finally, my possible theodicy does justice to God’s power, knowledge, and goodness as a perfect being. Hopefully, we have a possible, partial theodicy for the world’s evils. So here is my possible, partial universe-theodicy for that sector of our universe we know, earth. If persons exist elsewhere in this universe, matters might be different. On earth, persons typically are at a world-stage where they have a strong drive for self-centered needs. Persons here are the result of a long evolutionary process the key to which is survival and reproduction. Persons have central, strong drives connected to these which also give rise to secondary drives for security, self-importance, status, livelihood, identity with 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. Our evolutionary past has also endowed us with reciprocal altruism connected to “selfish genes.” Being reciprocal, that altruism is behavioral, serving the interests of the altruist as well. I will do for you to ensure that you will do for me. Our intense self-centeredness on earth is the cause of our suffering in two ways. Persons cause suffering to others because of (what they take to be) their own self-interest. Thoughtlessness, indifference, cruelty, anger, and more are all symptoms of self-regard that act without concern for others. Wars and social upheavals are the same on a large-scale. Economic and political institutions, even when designed not to, inflict great sorrow and unhappiness, not to speak of abuses of economic, gender, and political power, as further consequences of our self-absorption. Other persons and social structures surround persons

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that hurt them in a variety of ways or do not sufficiently protect them from suffering, largely because of the self-centered drive within society. Prevalent types of extreme nationalism, an extension of self-centeredness, make for wars and misery. For too many people on earth, “Hell is other people.” The second way self-centeredness causes suffering is in the way persons experience life. Ordinarily, we react to events from a perspective of our selfcentered absorption. When things do not go our way, often humans will react in disappointment, a mixture of sadness and defeat. When experiencing pain, for example, typically humans will respond by wanting only to escape the pain – sometimes futilely. They will suffer from pain. The phenomenology of pain is distinct from that of suffering, the latter an overlay on the former. Pain need not entail suffering. It all depends on the way the pain is received. Think of a child who has some small pain in her finger and truly suffers from it, being defeated by it. At the same time, an adult looking on might judge that kind of pain hardly worth fussing over. Pain and suffering from pain are separate phenomena. Those who have practiced meditation can appreciate the distinction between the intrinsic phenomenology of pain, which is suffering-neutral, and our response to pain with suffering. I myself have experienced meditative states in which I was aware of a pain, primarily in my legs, as a familiar pain phenomenology in which I would normally be in much distress. But these times it was a simple observation of what otherwise would be painful without suffering, and without any negative reaction to the pain. It was something like, “Oh Look! There is a pain.” Yet, of course, we do standardly take pain in as suffering. Granted, there are phenomena that a normal human being cannot experience except in suffering. Sickness, sustained abuse, floods, famine, storms, earthquakes, and all the rest, bring chaos to human lives, and are experienced almost exclusively as 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 occurrences in their life. Suffering is real, and we must do all we can to alleviate it. The degree of being committed to relieving suffering is one central measure of what it means to progress through worlds. But it is the suffering that obligates us, not the pain as such. My point is that human reactions to adversity, betrayal, and pain in principle could at least sometimes be very different from what they are in fact. We are not generally capable of different reactions to these because of the level we are at in our self-absorption in this present world of ours. Examples of different reactions to pain other than the usual are sprinkled throughout earth’s history. Prime examples are religious martyrs. The Jerusalem Talmud ( JT Berakhot 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

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Akiva was reciting the Shema prayer, the prayer saying we must love God with all our soul, while he was oblivious to the pain. Rufus thought Rabbi Akiva was a magician who could nullify pain or that Rabbi Akiva was simply immune to pain. However, I propose, what Rabbi Akiva had achieved was an immunity to reacting to a strong pain in the usual way, which is to suffer from it. He had conquered his self-absorbed response to pain, to offer his life to God at that very moment. Rabbi Akiva experienced what was phenomenologically the same as what otherwise would cause pain, but now he did not suffer from it. It did not pain him. His attention was elsewhere. Whether the story is true or only a legend is not to the point. Rather, the point is that the Talmud holds up this story as a possible way to respond to pain, for sure requiring resources much beyond what is normally possible in this world. Early Christian martyrs as well 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. Later, some Jews were to display similar religious loyalty facing the Catholic Inquisition. Famously, Zen Buddhists have striven to cultivate an absolute indifference in the face of death. The Zen Master Bokoju, so it is told, stood on his head to await death.28 In these special cases, humans have developed, or at least have recognized an ability, to overcome suffering when enduring what ordinarily would engender suffering or fear and anxiety. So, in principle, to the extent possible for created beings, at least some amount of human suffering could be overcome were we to be less self-absorbed than we are. But we generally are not capable of standing on our heads to turn things around. In this universe, except for those souls far ahead of the rest of us, spread here and there, we might be a mixture of first-time stream-enterers and others not too far ahead. On earth, we learn what it is like to live with chance, while being ourselves equipped with a robust quantity 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 severe disappointments and 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, either in fact or potentially. Many of us discover what it is to experience an entire life in the misery of defeat.

28 For this story see, “Osho on Accepting Death, Osho on Zen Master Bokoju Death,” accessed May 12, 2022, https://www.oshoteachings.com/osho-discourse-on-accepting-death-zenmaster-bokoju-death.

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Our lives include visibly 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, which turns aside from egotism. Reciprocal altruism (although not yet a totally 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. So, it’s possible that a person enters (or re-enters) this world not because it’s a necessary part of his or her own journey towards perfection but in order to serve as a moral example for others, that is, a presence in this world is part of the growing towards perfection at a group/social level.29 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 times of God’s graciousness to us. These are windows onto Messianic futures where these will be the standard of existence. Our life on earth is one, perhaps among many, in which we are shown 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 it, we gain a measure of appreciation as to what extent our suffering is in our hands, both as perpetrators and victims of evil. With the new understanding as our starting point, we proceed to the next universe-station, where we might do more of the 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 over-brimming with goodness and closeness to God, with only small amounts of evil. Such universes will be so in part as a consequence of their inhabitants having gained from living 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. Do all these universes and whirling souls really exist? Are there really Messianic Ages in universes to come? I do not know. But I do advocate that it would be fitting for God to have created them to bring as many people as possible to become freely one with God, in line with perfect goodness. The existence of such multi-universes is consistent with everything we know. And their existence is coherent with theism. Hence, a conceivable theodicy. With 29 I am indebted to Eliot Sacks for this way of putting it.

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this scenario, I hope to have presented a possible candidate for explaining at least some of the evil in this world of ours. And with that, I hope to open the mind to there being other possible explanations beyond our ken. With that I hope to contribute something to lightening to a degree the autobiographical problem of evil for a person of faith. The British philosopher Basil Mitchell once told this parable: In time of war in an occupied country, a member of the resistance meets one night a stranger who deeply impresses him. They spend that night together in conversation. The Stranger tells the partisan that he himself is on the side of the resistance—indeed that he is in command of it and urges the partisan to have faith in him no matter what happens. The partisan is utterly convinced at that meeting of the Stranger’s sincerity and constancy and undertakes to trust him. They never meet in conditions of intimacy again. But sometimes the Stranger is seen helping members of the resistance, and the partisan is grateful and says to his friends, “He is on our side.” Sometimes he is seen in the uniform of the police handing over patriots to the occupying power. On these occasions his friends murmur against him; but the partisan still says, “He is on our side.” . . . He still believes that, in spite of appearances, the Stranger did not deceive him. Sometimes he asks the Stranger for help and receives it. He is then thankful. Sometimes he asks and does not receive it. Then he says, “The Stranger knows best.” But he of course recognizes that the Stranger’s ambiguous behaviour does count against what he believes about him. It is precisely this situation which constitutes the trial of his faith. The partisan can (a) conclude that the Stranger is not on our side; or (b) maintain that he is on our side, but that he has reasons for withholding help. The first he will refuse to do. How long can he uphold the second position without it becoming just silly? I don’t think one can say in advance. It will depend on the nature of the impression created by the Stranger in the first place. . . .30

30 Basil Mitchell, “A. Flew, R. M. Hare, and B. Mitchell Theology & Falsification: A Symposium,” in The Philosophy of Religion, ed. Basil Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 18–20.

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In this parable, the Stranger is God, the partisan is the person who has reason to trust God but is aware of his faith being strongly challenged by the occurrences of evil doings not commensurate with God’s goodness. The partisan experiences what I have called the autobiographical problem of evil. Mitchell is saying that there is no standard way to measure the evil against the good impression a person has of God and God’s goodness. So, according to Mitchell, there is no objective way to measure whether evil should succeed in defeating belief in God or not. This parable has a serious deficiency when applied to God. That is because in the parable the partisan has only a one-time, in-person, meeting with the Stranger. That event is all the partisan has to go on in forming a positive estimation of the Stranger, save for some subsequent intermittent good acts by the Stranger. “They never meet in conditions of intimacy again.” But in God’s case a person may face evil with a much richer store of positive impressions of God. God need not be a stranger to the person of faith. God is always active in the world, the creator and sustainer of all. The person of faith experiences gratitude to God daily for her life and for her loved ones, for the abundant good in the world, and thanks God for the good of life and for the opportunity to do good for others. The sustaining goodness of God is there even when there are unwelcome events in one’s life. Or so may the person of faith experience her life and her world. We thank God for “the daily miracles,” as the way we are encouraged to see the everyday and the commonplace. In prayer a person of faith can experience intimacy with God on an everyday basis. The sense of God’s presence extends beyond any single encounter. The person of faith in Judaism comes to God within a community that nourishes and enhances a sense of God and God’s goodness. A person of faith self-identifies with the continuation of a long relationship of God with the Jewish people. Not as a solitary individual, in a one-time meeting, but as part of a long, historical recognition of God’s goodness. God the creator and sustainer of the universe, who has given the Torah to the Jewish people, who has kept them in existence with their self-identity and their religion over the millennia and has helped them despite all difficulties, to flourish spiritually and culturally. This sense of God pervades Jewish history for the believer even in the dimmest of times. That is why we are dumbfounded when horrendous evil settles on us like a hurricane in the night. We think of God in historical and spiritual terms as close to us and caring. Hence, trust in God is far more entrenched and influential than could be the trust created solely by the partisan meeting the stranger. Hence, the person of faith when facing evils has more on the side of God’s goodness than a bare “belief ” that God is perfectly good, with reinforcement here and there. Add to that my proposal of a possible theodicy, hopefully

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widening the imagination in contemplating how vast are the possibilities for God wanting to allow at least some or a good deal of the world’s evil. Here, I would agree with Mitchell, though, that there is no one way of judging the rationality of a person who retains trust and belief in God’s goodness when enduring the autobiographical problem of evil or of the person who rejects all of that in the face of evils. How could we evaluate the depth and range of an individual’s sense of God’s goodness and trust in God when the factors are so variable within the soul? How can we judge the traumatic, indelible sense of abandonment that has taken up its place in one’s heart from evil endured, making God a virtual impossibility? How can we judge how a given person should rightly respond? It is hard to judge and hard to convince. So, in the end perhaps the best way for a believer or one who wants to believe to respond to the autobiographical problem of evil is to raise up the experience of God both in individual terms and in Jewish peoplehood. To learn to appreciate the goodness of God, so that God will no longer be a stranger. To oppose evil with all our heart and all our soul. As the Psalmist writes (97:10): “Lovers of God hate evil.”

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Index

A  Abraham (Abram), 21–23, 27, 35, 40–41, 45, 52, 91 Adam, 7, 45 Aha, Rabbi, 11 Ahashverosh, 11 Ajātaśatru, 79 Akanistdha Heaven, 79 Akiva, Rabbi, 128–29 Aleinu prayer, 4 Altschuler, Rabbi David, 65 Amalek, 49, 63, 91 Arabs, 66 Asuras, 79 Australian Civil War, 73 Australians, 73 Austria, 107 Avdimi, Rabbi, 11 Avīci, 79 B  Baals, 65 Babel, Tower of, 45 Badin, 79 Bahyah ben Asher, 125 Balaam, 52 Balak, 52 Baras, Dan, 62n21

Berman, Joshua, 47n9 Beruriah, 114 Bethel, 76 Broshi, Magen, 49n12 Buddha, 78–80 Buddhism, 9n6, 78, 80 Butzer, Karl, 49 C  Caesar, 9 Canaan, 22, 45, 49, 62, 91 Cassuto, Umberto, 70 Catholicism, 5 Chaldeans, 22 China, 73 Christ, Jesus, 16, 41 Christendom, 4 Christian Reformed Church, ix Christianity, 23 Crusaders, 4 Crusades, 14, 107 D  Dan, 76 Delta, 47 Devas, 78 Dever, William, 46 Dharma, 79

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Dharmadhara, 79 Dimi, Rabbi, 10 Durban, 73 E  Ebal, Mount, 64 Edwards, Jonathan, 56 Egypt, 3, 13, 45–50, 52–54, 61–62, 65, 76–77, 81 Exodus from, 46–52 Egyptians, 9, 45, 48–49 Eisenhower, Dwight, 73 Elazar, Rabbi Lazer, 34 England, 4, 107 Ephraim, 65 Esther, queen, 11 Europe, 4 Eve, 45 F  Fisher, Cass, viii Flood, 52, 55, 70 France, 4, 107 Frerichs, Ernest, 52 G  Gaash, mountain, 65 Gandharvas, 79 Gaon, Saadia, 55, 110 Garudas, 79 Gellman, Jerome Yehuda, 22–24, 41 Genesis Rabbah, 35 Germany, 5, 107 Gersonides, 111, 119, 126 Gluck, Andrew Lee, viii, x, 18, 21, 27–29, 31 Golden Calf, 13, 28, 75 Goldschmidt, Tyron, viii, 45n1, 51, 54, 58, 60 Goshen-Gottstein, Alon, viii Gottlieb, Dovid, 54, 57–58 Graetz, Rabbi Michael, ix Granoff, Phyllis, 80 H  Halevi, Yehuda, 54–55 Hammurabi Code, 70 Haninah, Rabbi, 13 Haran, 21 Harran, 22 Harris, Michael, viii, x, 18, 21–27, 31 Hasa, 11 Hasdai Crescas, 34n7, 111, 119 Hashem, 38–39 Hasidic teaching, x, 10, 91, 114, 117 Hasidim, 91

Hays, Christopher, 68 Heaven, vii, 7–8, 11, 39, 55, 79, 83, 93 Hebrew, 7, 49 Hebrew Bible, 4–5, 6, 21, 33, 38, 40, 58, 62, 70–71, 97–98 Torah, vii–x, x, 5, 10–12, 15, 29, 35, 39–40, 45–48, 50, 52–53, 55–56, 58–59, 61–68, 70–71, 75–81, 83, 90–91, 93, 98–99, 107, 110, 116n12 Genesis, 17, 22, 35 Exodus, 10, 13, 17, 28, 59–60, 62, 70, 76 Leviticus, 35, 70 Numbers, 49, 52, 66 Deuteronomy, 3–4, 28, 48, 50, 63–64, 97–98 Nevi’im Judges, 63, 65, 68 Kings, 76 Isaiah, 21, 28n15 Ezekiel, 13 Hosea, 13, 20 Malachi, 15 Ketuvim Psalms, 97, 99–100, 114, 117, 133 Chronicles, 4 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 30 Hick, John, 113 Hittites, 5, 15–16, 24 Holocaust, 14, 37, 107–108 Hong Kong, 27 Horeb, 63 Hungary, 107 I  India, 78 Inquisition, 107 Islam, 23 Israel, 4, 12, 14–15, 17, 21, 33, 38, 40, 45, 50, 54–55, 64–66, 75–76 Israelites, 9–10, 12–13, 16, 29, 45–52, 59–60, 62, 65, 67, 69, 71, 76–77, 80 Italy, 107 J  Jacob, 15, 17, 45 Jeroboam, 75–76 Jerusalem, ix, 34, 75 Johanan, 20–21 Jordan, river, 49, 64 Joshua, 49, 55, 65 Judah, 75–76 Judaism, vii–xv, 5–6, 9, 11, 17, 21, 23, 27, 31, 36, 40, 81, 98, 117, 120

Index

K  Kabbalah, 7 Kadesh, 50–51 Kadesh Barnea, 51 Kai-Man Kwan, 87 Kamaras, 79 Kepnes, Steven, viii Kharaskandha, 79 Kierkegaard, Søren, 8 Kimnaras, 79 Korczak, Janusz, 37 Kraemer, David, 110n4 Kuzari Argument, viii–lxiv, 54, 58–59, 61–65, 67–69, 71–73, 75–76, 78–79, 81–82 Kuzarians, 59, 61, 68, 73 L  Lauer, Rabbi Levi, ix Lebens, Samuel, viii–lx, 45n1, 50–51, 54 Levenson, Jon, ix, 91n9 Lotus Sutra, 78–80 Luzzatto, Samuel David, 70 M  Maase Nissim, 81 Madhura, 79 Madhurasvara, 79 Mahādharma, 79 Mahākāya, 79 Mahāpūrna, 79 Maharddhiprāpta, 79 Mahātejas, 79 Mahayana, 78, 80 Maimonides, 63, 66–67, 69–70, 77, 99–100, 102, 111 Mishneh Torah, 99 The Guide of the Perplexed, 66, 69, 125 Malino, Jonathan, ix, 15n13, 98n3, 100n4 Mamre, 35 Manhattan, 74 Manojña, 79 Manojñasvara, 79 Marah, 48 Maruyama, Takao, 80 Meir, Rabbi, 114 Melbourne, 16 Menachum Nachum of Chernobyl, Rabbi, 118 Mendelsohn, Yosef, ix Midrash Tanchumah, 13 Mitchell, Basil, 131 mitzvah, 7 Mohammad, 41 Moses, 9, 13, 28, 45, 48, 54–56, 64–65, 67, 81

N  Nachmanides, 64, 125 Napoleon, 73–74 Nazis, 37 New Orleans, 16 New York, 16, 74 Nightingale, Florence, 73–74 Nissim of Marseilles, Rabbi, 81 Noah, 70 Numbers Rabbah, 13 Nun, 65 O  Orthodox Jews, viii, X, 21, 32, 54, 59 P  Paris, 16 Pasikov, Bayla, ix Peacocke, Arthur, 85 Pentateuch, 56 Percy, Walker, 15 Perth, 73 Pharaoh, 3, 45, 48, 52, 54 Philo, 16 Plantinga, Alvin, ix, 88 Polish Communist Party, 28 Portugal, 5, 107 Pritchard, James, 68 R  Rahu, 79 Rashi, 28n15, 64 Rava, 11 Red Sea, 8, 85, 93 Redmount, Carol, 46 Reeds, See of, 48, 67 Resurrection, 123 Rhineland, 4 Ross, Tamar, ix Russia, 107 S  Sabbath, 17 Sacks, Eliot, ix, 75n39 Sahara, 51 Sahotra, 92 Sarah, 27 Sarkar, 92 Sears, Francis Weston, 88 Sefer ha-Chinukh, 7 Shabbat, 17 Shatz, David, ix Shema, 98 Shields, James, 80

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Shur, 48 Siddur, 123n21 Simon, Rabbi, 35 Sinai, 10–12, 24, 46, 48, 50–51, 54, 58, 60, 62–63, 77, 79, 81 Skeptics, 62 Slonimsky, Henry, 14 Sodom and Gomorrah, 53 Spain, 4–5, 107 Sperry, Roger, 84 Spinoza, Benedict de, 76 Stump, Eleonore, 102 Sudharma, 79 Swinburne, Richard, 102 T  Tabernacle, 7 Talmud, 4, 34, 110 Babylonian Talmud (BT), 4, 10–12, 90, 110, 114 Berakhot, 28n15, 110, 114 Shabbat, 11–12 Eruvin, 90 Chagigah, 4 Avodah Zarah, 10 Makot, 12 Jerusalem Talmud ( JT) Berakhot, 128 Rosh Hashanah, 35n9 Tel-Aviv, 51 Ten Commandments, 10, 12, 45–46, 81

Terah, 21–22 Theravada, 80 Thoreau, Henry David, 105 Timnath-heres, 65 Treblinka, 37 U  Universalism, 113–114, 118 Utnapishtim, 70 V  Vaidehī, 79 Van Leer Institute, ix Van Wijk-Bos, Johanna W. H., 77n41 Vemacitra, 79 W  Ward, Keith, 102 Ward, William, 52 Warsaw, 37 Weiss, Dov, 39 World War II, 37, 73 Wrotslavsky, Zev, ix Wyschogrod, Michael, viii, x, 32–42 Y  Yochanan, Rabbi, 12 Z  Zalman, Rabbi Shneur, 10, 117 Zemansky, Mark W., 88