How do we imagine God?

EUGENE KAELLIS

At times, I come into social contact with people who can, quite accurately, be characterized as intellectuals, meaning that they possess capacious knowledge and understanding. Not surprisingly, in more or less casual conversation, I often find a significant number of them exhibiting a barely concealed disdain for religion, particularly for what they perceive as its apparently obstinate, anachronistic, even presumptuous, use of “God language.”

Some are simply displeased with God, which may be understandable if one is willing to ignore the free will and, its corollary, responsibility, which, it is said, God graciously bestowed on us. Moreover, their objection may be based on their consideration that such usage has become an anachronism, indeed, an increasingly tenuous one. As for natural calamities that we experience on a more or less regular basis, it may be useful to refer to a reversal of what Voltaire’s character, Dr. Pangloss, says in Candide. That is to say, this is the most possible of all the best worlds, meaning that earthquake, volcanic eruptions, floods, etc., are the unavoidable corollaries of creation.

God can, of course, be ignored and, in our secular culture, very often is, sometimes being mentioned casually only in what can be called trivial linguistic anachronisms, such as, “Thank God,” when something desirable, even if insignificant, occurs or invoking divine support for a “cause” that hardly involves any measure of righteousness or serious content, such as the outcome of a hockey game. Such misappropriations are inconsequential, but invoking divine sanction can become a problem when we consider such slogans as Gott mit uns or Dieu et mon droit or the invocation for a holy war, all of which have been appropriated to promote incalculable violence.

As Jews know, it is a violation to use God’s name vainly. Indeed, the Tetragrammaton has been deliberately excluded from use in peace, in war, even in support of a worthy cause. Instead, Jews refer to Hashem (the Name) because uttering the actual name of God revealed exclusively to Moses is explicitly confined to the no longer existing high priest and only when he is alone on Yom Kippur in the no longer existing Holy of Holies of the no longer existing Temple in Jerusalem. Evidently, we have to settle for God confirming His own existence – “I am that which I am” (Exodus 3:14) – as He did for Moses, by using a tautology that has no logical or forensic probity attached to it, its only credibility resting on faith, which ultimately, of course, requires no justification.

But, how else could God describe Himself? When religions start getting too specific about God or a Godhead, detailing, for example, his alleged parentage, his life and death, Jews, quite rightly, see that as a form of idolatry, which, in the Western world, makes us a distinct minority.

Aside from confirming the existence of what it represents, the Tetragrammaton provides us with no additional information. In ordinary discourse, we use Hashem in compliance with the Second Commandment’s explicit prohibition against vain references to God. The commandment requires an effort to avoid, or at least minimize, our (perhaps inevitable) presumption, and to remind us of the ineffability of God, whose only stipulated virtues are (ultimate) justice and mercy. Evidently, there are some people endowed with the spiritual ability, not truly to know God, but to receive His divine counsel. Foremost among them was Moses, on whom consequently was bestowed the Decalogue.

Nevertheless, presumption easily comes to the lips. I recall a radio interview of someone who had, apparently by chance, missed a flight that later crashed, killing all on board. A “believer,” he attributed his having escaped a violent death to what he claimed was a premonition (perhaps an ex post facto one) from God, warning him to avoid boarding the plane. Why God’s concern was directed solely toward this individual and not to those just as worthy – the crew and passengers, all of whom perished – he never explained. One wonders if, in his relief (and evident conceit), he even had considered his presumption. The lesson, for me, was that he had, indeed, “taken the name of the Lord in vain.”

Some non-believers, depending on whether they are out-and-out atheists or “merely” agnostics or alleged religious “reformers,” claim that it is only a personal God that they deny, seeing it (Him) as the ultimate presumption. Rather, they may assert their belief in a powerful, completely abstract, but allegedly rational – at least in the broadest sense – “Supreme Being,” much as did the followers of Robespierre during a critical period in the French Revolution. Yet, what kind of love can be inspired by a total abstraction at least some of the manifestations of which could now be duplicated by an appropriately programmed computer? Remember Hal in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey? What we do know is that, while “rationalist” religions may win some intellectual acceptance, they do not arouse the fervor inherent in expressing love for a personal God. Granted, it can rightly be claimed that fervor in religion can be a highly dangerous characteristic, which has, over the millennia, all too frequently been translated into violence and oppression, but that was not its inherent consequence; it has derived from deliberate choices.

So-called “rational religions” may actually abstract God to the point that, as someone once remarked, congregants could just as well direct their prayers “To Whom it May Concern.” Hardly a relationship of intimacy, trust and love. It is the very antiquity of our Jewish relationship with God that helps make “Him” real and personal to us. That may sound like a contradiction, but only when considered logically, and religion is fundamentally spiritual, not rational. It cannot be reduced to a series of syllogisms. Centuries ago, some Christian philosophers, perhaps under the intellectual pressure of the inchoate Age of Enlightenment, attempted that exercise. Their reasoning was impeccable, but invariably implicit in their premise was their conclusion. They were merely exercising the art of syllogism. Religion is not rational, nor is it irrational; it is, quite simply, contrarational and, considering the infinitude of the multiverse and the exquisite complexity of human beings, it never need fear attenuation by scientific appropriation. On the contrary, the more science reveals, the greater can be our awe of God.

The more abstractly God is viewed, the less “objectionable” He becomes to “rationalists,” but the more distant He appears to believers prepared to embrace Him. If the properties with which we endow God – ultimate goodness and mercy – were to be replaced by those of a soulless “metaphysical entity,” how could we be moved by a love for God?

Fortunately, there is a cure for the “de-personalization” of God but, to be effective, it has to be self-administered. The remedy is simple, perhaps too simple, because it rests entirely on the internal, impossible-to-verify manifestation of faith. Unfortunately, this essential lack of “intellectual rigor” may make it unacceptable to the very people who could perhaps most benefit from its application. In the Christian Medieval world, with a revival of learning, there were valiant efforts to inject rationality into belief in God. It occupied many scholastic philosophers, who, for example, devised several “proofs” for God’s existence. Anyone carefully examining their “reasoning,” however, could easily detect that their conclusion was implicit in their stated (or easily inferred) premise(s). The syllogisms used were merely pro forma.

Disbelief on the part of some intellectuals is often made with pride, in what can be called “the Prometheus complex,” as if traditional faith in God is inextricably associated with a type of (perhaps servile) mentality believed to have largely disappeared, or ought to have, at the very least, among the cognoscenti of the “advanced” countries of the West, beginning sometime after the Age of Enlightenment, around the middle or end of the 18th Century. “Here am I,” Prometheus says in Goethe’s poem. “I create people after my image. Omnipotent time and eternal fate are your masters as well as mine.” True, but certainly not compelling. Goethe was talking about our inevitably inadequate and mutable perception of God, not God Himself.

Belief is based on the understanding that when we reach the bounds of factual knowledge and the limits of our internally consistent rational comprehension of the natural world, and realize that what lies beyond is subsumed under the heading of “Mystery,” it is how we acknowledge Mystery that determines whether we believe in the divine origin and guidance of our universe or accept the “scientific conclusion.” We can even pretend that Mystery is slowly but surely being reduced with every scientific advancement, though the opposite is true. Nature is infinite and our understanding of it, no matter how broad, is finite. It is precisely this inevitable discrepancy that initiates the Mystery that is the fundamental substratum of faith.

That is not the major problem, however. The major problem has to do with motivation – stipulating the ultimate goodness and mercy of God, which, especially for Jews, is a daunting task. Here, we can take inspiration from the Book of Job, especially without its “happy ending,” which many scholars believe was an apocryphal addendum made “necessary” because people found what preceded it as a disheartening, fairly accurate representation of the tragedies they experienced in their own lives. Today, Job would not only have to experience the personal travails of his life, he also would have to account for the Holocaust. Logic is of no use here. What is evidently required is an approach that my mother would have described as oif tzuloches, in spite of it all, the kind of irrepressible faith in which one approaches God with teeth clenched in determination not to be deterred, no matter what befalls us – to resort to Yiddish, a type of farbissene, stubborn, faith. The only questions then become: Can we make the effort? Should we even try? If we decide not to, what would be the consequences?

Eugene Kaellis has written a novel, Making Jews, on the theme of the current basic problem of Diaspora Jewry, which is available from lulu.com.

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