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The Two Gods of Judaism Disenchantment and Enchantment of the Universe The Two Gods of Judaism The theology of Maimonides and poetic imagery of the Kabbalah offer Jews two different pathways to God. Is it possible to embrace them both? o this day,” wrote Mordecai Kaplan in 1937, “there is no Tintellectually formulated conception which has acquired authoritative recognition in Judaism as the only true idea of God. The inevitable conclusion to which we are led . is that the Jewish civilization cannot survive without the God-idea as an integral part of it, but it is in no need of having any specific formulation of that idea authoritative for all Jews.” {By JOEL HECKER 42 | Winter 2011 Disenchantment and Enchantment of the Universe /// Joel Hecker In making his bold observation, Kaplan, the rabbinical school, I became enthralled by founder of the Reconstructionist movement, Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed, as it touched on one of Judaism’s fundamental offered a philosophical vision of God and of paradoxes: while the faith needs an idea of a divinity’s relationship to the universe, as well God in order to exist, this idea can be taken as a religiosity liberated from God’s relentlessly in many different directions. In our tradition, watchful eyes. Maimonides (1135-1204) staked the multiple forms in which God was described out territory that was sanitized of superstitious, all sought to construct a divinity who could magical, and fantastic beliefs. He made me feel convincingly command, love, communicate, that I could stand proudly, maintaining liberal reward and punish, as well as be present values while practicing a counter-cultural throughout all of reality. The different version of traditional Judaism. understandings of God may often appear to be contradictory, but their co-existence constitutes Judaism is unknowable an invigorating element in Judaism. without God and yet God remains unknowable. Two Sets of Stars At the same time, while engaged in the “The Many Gods of Judaism” is the glibly intensive study of the laws of meat and milk blasphemous title I chose for an adult-education - interesting material, but not the stuff that course I once gave on different conceptions of makes for great theology - I began to read about God in Jewish history. I aimed to demonstrate Kabbalah. The lushness of the kabbalistic that while God was a moving target, Jewish system - its view of God as immanent in the discourse about God is crucial. Ultimately, I created world, the masculine and feminine argued, Judaism is unknowable without God aspects of the Godhead, the notion that and yet God remains unknowable. Therefore, it human beings may influence and enhance the is left up to us to continue to posit models, using power of the Divine - served as a powerful language that reassures and yet strains our challenge and antidote to Maimonides’ often imagination, to strive for the Font of Existence cold intellectualism. that eludes comprehension. Several tensions emerge from the Medieval Jewish discourse has bequeathed consideration of the Maimonidean and us a rich legacy of debate and argumentation kabbalistic world-views. The first tension on the nature of God and its impact on our relates to God’s accessibility; that is, to what life and faith. In the Middle Ages, God-talk extent can we have an experience of God and was a serious endeavor. It went beyond pure the holy, and to what extent is God an ideal to theology and served as the basis of all talk of which we can direct ourselves while it remains holiness, purity, ethics, and the spiritual life. eternally elusive? The second tension has to do In the discussion that follows, I will contrast with religious symbols and metaphors: when we two very different medieval constructs of God: talk about holiness in this world, are we using the rationalist thought of Maimonides and the God-language in the course of religious practice, effervescent visions of Kabbalah. These two or are we talking about supernatural essences conceptions continue to serve as important that run like electrical currents through the poles for orienting ourselves to the abiding natural world? concern of thinking about God today. The answers that Maimonides and the At a certain point in my early adulthood, kabbalists offer to these questions are strikingly theological models that I had internalized different. The former aims for philosophical began to feel unsophisticated and stale. In clarity - a purity and simplicity of conception. HAVRUTA | 43 The latter find the truth of divinity in lush For Maimonides, positing anything about imagery that morphs from one symbol- God is an act of theological hubris. He carefully cluster to another. The kabbalists, rejecting limits the occasions in which one might describe Maimonides’ radical insistence on absolute God in language: during the reading of the Torah transcendence, conceived of ten sefirot - divine or reciting rabbinically sanctioned prayers, but emanations - which enable a bridging of the not beyond these. The Psalmist seems to have chasm between God and humanity. captured Maimonides’ idea precisely: “To You, If we hold both conceptions simultaneously God, silence is praise.” (Psalms 65:2) as separate theological constellations that For Maimonides, and for other rationalist occupy the same universe, we are forced medieval philosophers, the very notion of to adopt one of three possible approaches: divine perfection required that there be (1) accept them as contradictory systems no direct connection between God and the that occur in the flux of Jewish history; (2) material world - a world containing good things, harmonize them (just as kabbalists through to be sure, but also consisting of sickness and the centuries insisted that Maimonides death, mutability and mortality, corruption “converted” once he understood the truth of and cruelty. By insisting on God’s utter remove Jewish mysticism); (3) recognize the values from our world of experience, God is liberated and deficits of each of these options, using from any diminishment and protected from both sets of stars for navigation. The third the banalities commonly ascribed to divinity of these options, I believe, is potentially the in popular religious proclamations. Describing most rewarding. God’s features, actions, or even His greatness, Maimonides’s God-talk emphasizes God’s then, becomes largely a pursuit of fantasy, absolute transcendence. For Maimonides, the appearing in Maimonidean eyes as petty, entire purpose of the Torah is to educate the literalistic, and childish. Jewish people in the knowledge that there is a God who is utterly transcendent, and that all anthropomorphic statements in the Torah Flames and Fringes are to be understood figuratively. As he states in the third of his famous Thirteen Principles The extreme extent to which Maimonides of faith, enumerated in his commentary on pushed his argument may well have played Tractate Sanhedrin of the Mishnah: a role in the abundance of imaginative and highly metaphorical modes of description of God in the kabbalistic literature produced later We are to believe that He is incorporeal, that in the 12th and 13th centuries. In the Zohar, His unity is neither potentially nor actually the canonical masterpiece of Kabbalah, the physical. None of the attributes of matter mystical companions of Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai can be predicated of Him, neither motion, discuss two apparently contradictory verses nor rest, for example . That is why our from chapter 4 of Deuteronomy. Verse 24 reads: sages . said: “On high there is neither “For the Lord your God is a devouring fire, a sitting nor standing, neither want nor jealous God.” And yet, in verse 4, the Torah weariness” (BT Hagigah 15a) . Whenever says: “You, cleaving to the Lord your God, are Scripture describes Him in corporeal terms alive every one of you today.” How can someone like walking, standing, sitting, speaking, cleave to a devouring fire? The Zohar expands and the like, it speaks metaphorically. Thus on the nature of the divine flame: our sages said, “The Torah speaks in human Language.” (BT Berakhot 31b) The word has been discussed among the Companions: There is a fire devouring fire, 44 | Winter 2011 Disenchantment and Enchantment of the Universe /// Joel Hecker Maimonides, Sefer Hamadah (“Book of Knowledge”), illuminated manuscript, Spain, 14th century. The Jewish National & University Library, Shapell Family Digitization Project. devouring and consuming it, for there is fire radiant; the other, a light tinged with black fiercer than fire, as they have established. or blue. The white light is above, ascending But come and see: Whoever desires to unswervingly, while beneath it is the blue penetrate the wisdom of holy unification or black light, a throne for the white, which should contemplate the flame ascending rests upon it, each embracing the other, from a glowing ember or a burning candle. becoming one. This black light colored blue, For flame ascends only when grasped by below, is a throne of glory for the white - here coarse substance. Come and see! In a flame lies the mystery of the thread of blue. This ascending are two lights: one, a white light, blue-black throne is grasped by another HAVRUTA | 45 substance below, so it can flame, arousing of connection to God, whether on the corner it to embrace the white light. Sometimes of one’s garment or at the base of the flame. this blue-black turns red, while the white In the zoharic imagination, the familiar ritual light above never wavers, constantly white. of tsitsit is tied to a divine mystery - the flame (Zohar 1:50b-51a, translated by Daniel Matt) that both embraces and devours. Whereas Maimonides sought to divorce divinity from humanity, the kabbalists entwine The Divine in the Human the human and divine. Contemplating a For the medieval kabbalists, mitzvot are a way burning candle, they interpret the manifold of cleaving to the Divine.
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