The Primacy of the Personalist Concept of God in Jewish Thought

Jacob Joshua Ross The University of Memphis and Tel Aviv University

Almost everyone who has been brought up in Western civilization, with its two millennial tradition of Biblical monotheism, 1 is famil- iar with a mode of religious talk that centers itself around the concept of a personal God who created the world, watches over the deeds of mankind, rewards and punishes in accordance with our deserts, and so on. Therefore, being a believer or a non-believer in such a tradition consists for the ordinary person (or so, at any rate, he may be tempted to suppose) of giving a "Yes"or "No" answer to the question "Do you believe in the existence of God?" Such people are, therefore, apt to be puzzled and even disconcerted by the talk they sometimes hear from philosophers, theologians, or scholars of comparative religion regarding "concepts of God." For the simple man, there is only one concept of God, and either you believe in God or you don't. The naive, simple, pious J ew2 is thus hardly aware that he may be operating with what some of the leading thinkers of his own tradition regard as a vulgar, popular concept of God, suitable for children and the untutored, which must be qualified, supplemented,

1 This is so if we regard Western civilization - and this is indeed the com- mon way of regarding it in scholarly studies - as being connected with the origin and spread of Christianity. At least another millennium and a half must be added to this number if we are to include the origins of our civilization in ancient Greece and ancient Israel. We can then trace back this way of speaking about the divine to the early history of ancient Israel, as related in the Hebrew Bible. 2 I speak in this paper pro domo, but I am confident that the problem I am addressing exists in other religious traditions as well.

171 172 JacobJoshua Ross and even replaced in whole or in part in the outlook of every mature, thinking individual. The pious believer, even one learned in the Biblical and Rabbinical texts but as yet uninitiated philosophically, will discover that no less an acknowledged authority than Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), the great luminary of medieval halakhic Jewry, wrote, "All existing things ... exist only through God's true existence," and, "This is what the prophet means when he says 'But the Eternal is the true God' [Jer. 10: 10]; that is, He alone is real .... ,,3 He reads these remarks in Maimonides' great halakhic compendium and is probably puzzled. A scholar of Jewish thought may try to explain to him that these somewhat cryptic utterances reflect the fact (well-known to stu- dents of the history of ideas) that Maimonides' concept of God as summarized in these remarks (which are lacking in full clarity only because they were meant both for the philosophically enlightened as well as for the simple believer),4 is based on his interpretation of Aristotle's notion of "First Cause" (to which Maimonides is here hinting), and which he identifies as the metaphysical counterpart of the Biblical personalist God. But in Maimonides' view, this "First Cause" is also identified, as in Avicenna, with the neo-Platonic notion of "the One." This is what brings Maimonides to say (when writing elsewhere for a more sophisticated reading public) that God exists "but not through an existence other than His essence" and that He is one "not through oneness.,,5 If he follows this expla- nation at all, the simple believer probably finds himself at a loss, for he may realize that this way of talking about God complicates matters and seems somehow to reduce or dilute the warmth of the initial impression of familiarity we had when we supposed that we

3 Mishneh Torah, Book One: "Knowledge," Chapter 1: 1 and 4. Trans. In Isadore Twersky, A Maimonides Reader (New York: Behrman House, 1972). 4 The introduction to the Mishneh Torah explains that Maimonides is writing the work "lekatan ulegadol"; perhaps the translation (Twersky, 40) "young and old" fails to caprure the possible implication that Maimonides' work is meant for the philosophically initiated as well as for the unenlightened. This is the rea- son for the inclusion of the abbreviated philosophical summaries such as we find in Chapters 1-4 of the Book of Knowledge. 5 Compare Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, vol 2, trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963) I 57,122-123.