Judaism and thinking about God

[agricola]

Maimonides, speaking of God (or what we can know about God, or how we can know about God, or whatever. Anyway - 'God'):

Since it has been clarified that He does not have a body or corporeal form, it is also clear that none of the functions of the body are appropriate to Him: neither connection nor separation, neither place nor measure, neither ascent nor descent, neither right nor left, neither front nor back, neither standing nor sitting.

He is not found within time, so that He would possess a beginning, an end, or age. He does not change, for there is nothing that can cause Him to change.

[The concept of] death is not applicable to Him, nor is [that of] life within the context of physical life. [The concept of] foolishness is not applicable to Him, nor is [that of] wisdom in terms of human wisdom.

Neither sleep nor waking, neither anger nor laughter, neither joy nor sadness, neither silence nor speech in the human understanding of speech [are appropriate terms with which to describe Him]. Our Sages declared: "Above, there is no sitting or standing, separation or connection."

When I left the coc, it was mainly because I couldn't square what I was taught about 'what is God like' at the coc with anything reasonable, logical or even believable - there were way too many totally contradictory teachings about 'what is God like'.

Later, I found that Judaism spent more time talking about what God wants us to do instead of demanding some kind of agreement on what was God LIKE, and I read some of Maimonides' Guide to the Perplexed (which is admittedly difficult) and I liked the way he made my mind stretch about concepts I hadn't really had much opportunity to consider before.

Maimonides (also known as 'the Rambam') lived around a thousand years ago, in Muslim lands. He mostly tried to reconcile Aristotelian science and logic with Jewish thought and the Torah. That is, he tried to take a 'Greek logic' approach to the Hebrew Bible. He's very influential, but also sometimes controversial, and not everything he wrote was invariably accepted as authoritative - but everybody since the Rambam has had to deal at least a bit with what the Rambam thought and wrote, either to agree or to object.

He's a pretty major figure.

It is Maimonides who says we can't say God is 'good' because that is a comparative, and God is not something we can compare things to. People can be 'big, bigger, biggest' or 'good, better, best' or even 'dull, smart, brilliant', but God isn't even on the scale. We can only describe God by negatives: God is not evil. God is not foolish. God is not finite.

This leads to - or could have led to - the common mystical name for God, the Ayn Sof. This literally means 'there is no end' or 'the endless' or (usually) 'the Eternal'. But it also means 'the No-Thing'. God is the great 'nothing'.

I like a faith that lets people think this way, and allows for a variety of opinions which are all 'inside the box of possibilities'. If the coc God is in a very small tight box, the Jewish God, it seems to me, inhabits a box of near-infinite dimensions.

[agricola]

An answer to a potential convert to Judaism, who was concerned about faith as a conventional belief, theodicy (if God is good, why is there evil) and other ramifications:
(from somebody else, who said it so much better than I did):

First, it's not necessary for a Jew to believe anything. The Shadal explains that belief was never commanded (not even the first commandment, though, too long to explain here why), because God would never command us to do something that we might not be capable of. And belief, for many of us, and for good reason, is often impossible to conjure.

Another idea is that there needn't be a God who created suffering for his creation. It is very possible that God created the universe which only had the *potential* for things to go wrong, because that was the only way for things to also *naturally* go right. The idea that God created the world but is quite a bit removed from its cause and effect is an older Jewish philosophy, contrary to mysticism, which is overwhelmingly the flavor of the day. Consider it this way: Are your parents to blame for all the bad that befell you in your life? After all, if they didn't give birth to you, you wouldn't be suffering any of it. The creators of your flesh and blood are no more to blame for the badness that befalls you than the Creator of the world is to blame for the badness that befalls the world due to the natural course of men and physics. In fact, laws of ethics are necessary explicitly *because* (a) things can and will go wrong, and (b) God will not interfere.

The most important idea, for me, is one that is defensible on both religious and secular grounds: we have a project in front of us that virtually all mankind understand, which is that we must make the world better than it is. Locally, this means to be ethical––to treat each other with dignity and kindness. Not by mistake, this is what our great sage Hillel says is the entire purpose of the Torah. The rest, he says, are details concerning *how* to be ethical (and then he says we should go and learn it). This idea is virtually universally admired. So what good is religion if its Save The World project is so self-evident? You're right. No religion can offer us certainty about the validity or quality of that project, thereby justifying it. Again, the importance of that project is self evident. But religion can and does offer **a structure for actively contributing to that project.** I like to say, in other words, that religion schedules the study and refinement of our own ethical sensibilities. Religion provides us with scheduled times of day, week, month, and year to refine ourselves through ritual, learning, repetition, simulation, and transmission. Religion, when practiced as religion and not politics, helps us actively push forward the universal project of eradicating suffering. The atheist and believer both agree that this is religion at its best, which is to say that it is at least is or aught to be the goal of religion. (That goal gets refined over time, but that is another conversation altogether.) We can safely say this about Judaism.

So whether any of it is 'true' is frankly beside the point. Remember, Shadal says we are not commanded to believe in anything. I would go further to say that everyone at their most intellectually honest and fair must admit they are agnostic. (This is *not* to say undecided ... that is a misunderstanding of what it means to be agnostic; agnosticism is the belief that it is impossible to know one way or another for certain if there is or isn't a God.) But some of us are subscribing agnostics! We subscribe to the idea that being good and kind are not just self-evident ideas, but that they are self-evident *because* there must be something metaphysical (supernatural) in the universe, which *grounds* these moral truths and *makes* them universally real. Otherwise these are all just ideas that come from our heads, which are no better or worse than any other (e.g., evil) idea that comes from our heads. But the attractiveness of that philosophy is only the lesser of two reasons to be a subscriber, a religious person. The real importance is because subscribing to the religion means that we are committing ourselves seriously to the project of betterment through structured, scheduled education, practice, and (ultimately) good behavior.

It might work for you to call yourself a subscribing (religious) agnostic (ultimately open and uncertain). Agnostic because it's not possible for us to know one way or another if there is a God, but religious because it is profoundly important that we commit ourselves to the *idea* that there is something Supernatural that grounds these ethics in a metaphysical, universal reality ... religious because I want to commit myself to the project of making myself and others and the world truly better.

[Cootie Brown]

I like the Jewish perception of God much better than the Christian version of God. If such a thing as a God does exist I think the Jewish vision of God would be more likely correct.

Good thoughts Agricola. Thanks for sharing.

[agricola]

A precautionary note: the ultra-orthodox/hasidic version of God is just about as interestingly weird and arbitrary as any Christian fundamentalist could wish. But I do think it is interesting that the viewpoints I've quoted above both EXIST and are dealt with seriously and are never considered 'out of line'. Those same ultra-orthodox/hasidic types are aware of these ideas - they certainly mostly DISAGREE (and in some cases, decidedly and strongly disagree) but they don't consider them entirely outside the field for discussion.

My main summary answer when I'm asked 'why do you like/love Judaism' usually involves: 'because there are no questions which can't be asked and discussed'.

[agricola]

And following on from that - here's another person's answer to the same post which elicited the previous answer I posted above:

Thinkers, in their questioning, commonly pose God in opposition to chance and contingency.

But what if the nature of probability itself is simply an aspect of a universe devised by or arising out of God? (In the latter case one could conceive of God *as* existence.)

In either case, it seems clear that a fundamental attribute of being is that things (in the broadest sense) give rise to other things.

When Moshe encounters the burning bush and God speaks to him through it, Moshe asks who he is--"What shall I tell the people is your name?" And God answers with a remark that no one quite knows how to translate: אהיה עשר אהיה: "I am who is/that I am/that I will be. Tell the children of Israel I AM has sent me to you."

It seems in this passage that God is either the thing that requires no prior contingency, or else a thing outside of contingency that acts upon it--or both. Either way, the implication here is that events will unfold because of WHAT IS, which essentially makes the Hebraic God the God of history.

Even in a perfectly non-supernatural sense, we understand that causation is a function of WHAT IS. It *includes* what we understand as chance (which may in fact simply be direct causation that can't be directly measured); chance is not separate from it.

I should say - the original question or post which these people are answering concerned a worry about a problem with belief or faith in the existence of God, given the poster's interest and pursuit of conversion to Judaism.

[agricola]

and most of the people posting responses are just 'ordinary Jews' and not professional clergy or theologians, which I find refreshing -

(OP's name) when you discuss the idea of having a relationship with God, what is the nature of that relationship? When you discuss love, what kind of love is that?

I ask because the desire to have a personal relationship with God and experience God's love in a direct way are usually very much Christian concerns. I've always found them rather more muted in Judaism, where God's love is thought to be evident in His commandments and the Jewish personal relationship is more communal and with an incomprehensible entity.

teresa for instance, keeps referencing the 'Hebrew mind' and the idea of faith as 'trust' rather than as 'mental assent to certain assertions' (i.e., belief) as a hallmark of the proper (Jewish/OT and early NT) human relationship with God. She's not wrong.

It takes a while for a typical westerner raised Christian to wrap their mind around the idea of having 'trust' in something you don't 'believe in', necessarily. Or maybe I mean 'believe THAT'. The coc really stressed hard the idea that we had to believe exactly the right things about God/Jesus, or else.

[agricola]

From a totally different location, a quote from Rabbi David Wolpe (one of the US's premier modern rabbis):

A brittle faith is broken by doubts; a flexible faith is enlarged by them.

[agricola]

As long as you're willing to at least grapple with God as an idea, you can engage Judaism.

anonymous poster

[agricola]

An ethnoreligious group (or ethno-religious group) is an ethnic group whose members are also unified by a common religious background. Ethnoreligious communities define their ethnic identity neither by ancestral heritage nor simply by religious affiliation but often through a combination of both. An ethnoreligious group has a shared history and a cultural tradition of its own. In many cases ethnoreligious groups are ethno-cultural groups with a traditional ethnic religion; in other cases ethnoreligious groups begin as communities united by a common faith which through endogamy developed cultural and ancestral ties.[1][2] Some ethnoreligious groups' identities are reinforced by the experience of living within a larger community as a distinct minority. Ethnoreligious groups can be tied to ethnic nationalism if the ethnoreligious group possesses a historical base in a specific region.[3] In many ethnoreligious groups emphasis is placed upon religious endogamy, and the concurrent discouragement of interfaith marriages or intercourse, as a means of preserving the stability and historical longevity of the community and culture.

For a good working definition of 'Jewish'.

[Cootie Brown]

An ethnoreligious group (or ethno-religious group) is an ethnic group whose members are also unified by a common religious background. Ethnoreligious communities define their ethnic identity neither by ancestral heritage nor simply by religious affiliation but often through a combination of both. An ethnoreligious group has a shared history and a cultural tradition of its own. In many cases ethnoreligious groups are ethno-cultural groups with a traditional ethnic religion; in other cases ethnoreligious groups begin as communities united by a common faith which through endogamy developed cultural and ancestral ties.[1][2] Some ethnoreligious groups' identities are reinforced by the experience of living within a larger community as a distinct minority. Ethnoreligious groups can be tied to ethnic nationalism if the ethnoreligious group possesses a historical base in a specific region.[3] In many ethnoreligious groups emphasis is placed upon religious endogamy, and the concurrent discouragement of interfaith marriages or intercourse, as a means of preserving the stability and historical longevity of the community and culture.

For a good working definition of 'Jewish'.

You make a darn good case for the Jewish faith Agricola. I've been reading your posts for several years now and Judaism makes a lot of sense. I think I might understand why you were attracted to it. Frankly, it makes more sense than Christianity, IMO.