Jewish Monotheism Prof. Paul Eidelberg The teaching of monotheism is said to be the world-historical purpose of the Jewish people. But what precisely is Jewish monotheism? Is it the same as the monotheism attributed to Christianity and Islam? Let us begin at the beginning and review the First and Second Commandments: And God spoke all these words [to the Children of Israel] saying: I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before Me (Exodus 20:1-3). From the First Commandment we learn that the God of Israel intervenes in human affairs. He is not only the God of Nature, but also the God of History. History must therefore have a purpose, and the Jewish People, whom God liberated from Egyptian bondage, must be the instrument of that purpose: “This people have I created that they may relate My praise” (Isaiah 43:21). To relate God’s praise is to show how God’s infinite wisdom, power, and graciousness are manifested in nature and in human history. The Jews were chosen, therefore, to be the educators of mankind. They were to exemplify a way of life guided by ethical and intellectual monotheism. Definitions Our initial task is to understand three names of the Creator. The first is the Ineffable Name consisting of four letters YHVH, the Tetragrammaton, translated above as “Lord.” The Tetragrammaton is a name exclusively used by Jews, for as Judah Halevi states in The Kuzari, “no other people know its meaning.”[1] Jews never pronounce the YHVH; they refer to it in prayer as “Adonoy” or, more familiarly, as “HaShem”—a Hebrew word meaning “the Name.” This name is also referred to as the “Eternal.” (For a correlation of the four-letter name of God with modern physics, see my Rescuing America from Nihilism: A Judeo-Scientific Approach, Lightcatcher Books.) The second name of the Creator is “Elohim,” translated above as “God.” The third name is EH’YEH (Exodus 3:14), which refers to God as the Eternal Now. Consider first, HaShem: “Hear O Israel: HaShem is our God, HaShem is One” (Deuteronomy 6:4). Only HaShem is One; only HaShem has Absolute Unity. Absolute Unity is traditionally understood as that which is absolutely separate and distinguishable from all existing things. It is not subject to creation, destruction, change, or limitation; nor can it be described by any physical or mental category. Consequently, there is nothing we can predicate of HaShem. We say He is One, not to establish His Unity as we understand that term, but only to exclude plurality. When we attribute to Him existence, eternality, infinity, will, omnipresence, omniscience, omnipotence, loving kindness, or any other perfection, it is only to negate their contraries, not to establish them as understood by the human mind. “For My thoughts are not your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8). Thus far, the traditional view. The traditional view also takes cognizance of the anthropomorphisms in the Torah and usually construes them allegorically. Thus, when Moses asks HaShem to see His glory, HaShem responds by saying that no man can see His “face,” only His “back” (Exodus 33:20, 23). Suffice to say the following. HaShem, in His essence, is absolutely unknowable. This may be called the a priori aspect of HaShem, of which we can say nothing without succumbing to idolatry (a negative theology). But there is also the a posteriori aspect of HaShem, of which we can say something without succumbing to idolatry (a positive theology). This second aspect of HaShem is described in various ways in the Torah. These descriptions are necessarily anthropomorphic. They apply only to HaShem’s manifestations or actions, else they would involve contradiction. For example, when HaShem asks Cain, who had just murdered Abel, “Where is your brother?” (Genesis 4:9), this obviously contradicts HaShem’s omniscience. The contradiction is dissolved by bringing into juxtaposition two of the most important concepts of the Torah, both of which underlie human freedom and dignity: Repentance on the part of man, and Graciousness on the part of HaShem. (See Exodus 34:6.) Neither of these qualities could come into effect had Cain been summarily confronted by his crime, condemned and punished. In this example we see one of the purposes of anthropomorphisms: they help us understand the ways by which HaShem relates to men as well as the general ways He would have men relate to each other. (See the Drazin & Wagner English translation of the Onkelos Aramaic rendition of the Torah, which eliminates most anthropomorphisms and is the most literal and rational translation of the Pentateuch.) The fact that anthropomorphisms do not describe HaShem in Himself but only His manifestations is analogous to one of the strange and revolutionary principles of quantum mechanics. According to quantum theory, the macrophysical world—the world of sense perception—is a derived world. Though real, it is not, physically speaking, the ultimately real. To discover the latter we must grasp the microphysical world, the world of subatomic processes. What is distinctive here is that we can only know about the microphysical world indirectly, that is, by its macrophysical or observable effects. The spatial and temporal concepts used to describe these effects are really metaphors. They do not apply literally to the microphysical world itself (just as anthropomorphisms do not apply to HaShem in Himself). In fact, to attribute spatiotemporal properties to microphysical processes is to succumb to anthropomorphism in science. Returning to the First Commandment—“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage” (Exodus 20:2)—this is the basis for Deuteronomy’s referring to the Chosen People as “belonging exclusively to Him.” The First Commandment involves far more than a belief system affirming the existence of God. According to the philosopher Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, man must serve and try to commune with God, and this he can do through four media of experience: intellectual, volitional, emotional, and dialogical (i.e., prayer). In the present context we elaborate only on the intellectual medium: The intellectual approach to God is closely bound up either with scientific-metaphysical research and knowledge or with the study of the Torah. Maimonides considered both of these cognitive performances to be an expression of man’s clinging to God. Thinking in terms of eternal truth, whether theoretical or ethical, is an act of craving for God…. At this intellectual level, Judaism considered the study of the Torah as the most sublime kind of worship, a way of meeting God, of breaking through the barrier separating the Absolute from the contingent and the relative….[2] Israel’s first Chief Rabbi, Avraham Yitzhak Kook (1865-1935), who was well versed in philosophy writes: “Monotheism seeks to probe the unity of the world, of man, of the entire range of reality …” Rabbi Kook also maintained that Israel alone affirms “undiluted monotheism.”[3] He admits, of course, that there are in the gentile world pious men, philosophers, men of God, but there is not a nation—besides Israel—whose soul, whose way of life, whose raison d’être, signifies the Divine Idea in the world.[4] Also significant for Rabbi Kook is that unlike Judaism, gentile religions remain locked in a persistent struggle with indigenous cultures. These religions, he sees, were imposed on pagan nations which often revert to barbarism. Notice the frequent eruption of fratricidal wars of Arab-Islamic states. Notice, too, that Christian Europe has been periodically drenched in rivers of blood.[5] Notice, moreover, that unlike the Quran and the New Testament, the Torah is not the recorded source of a religion but the history of the divine founding of a nation. In Israel alone one cannot separate religion and nationality without destroying Israel’s essence. This fact distinguishes its monotheism from that of Islam and Christianity. Another difference: The founders of Islam and Christianity form an integral part of the faith. Thus, it is not sufficient to believe in the gospels of these messengers, but in the messengers themselves. This is why “holy” wars and forced conversions punctuate the history of these religions. How unlike Judaism, which claims no monopoly on heaven and prohibits proselytizing. Moreover, the Talmud teaches that “a heathen that studies the Torah is equal to a High Priest” (Avoda Zara 3a). We have here a magnanimous and gracious monotheism. Indeed, the Torah repeatedly reminds Jews that because they were slaves in Egypt, they should be all the more disposed to treat strangers in their midst with kindness. This does not mean that Jews are to tolerate those who do not abide by the Seven Noahide Laws, especially the prohibition against idolatry. Idolatry, according to Judaism, is the beginning and the cause of every evil, for example, the slaughtering of children in Moloch worship – which is comparable to Muslims using their own children as human bombs. Clearly, the First Commandment logically entails the Second, the elimination of all forms of idolatry. As previously defined, idolatry is the worship of any created thing, including the products of the human intellect, be it a philosophic or scientific theory, a political or religious ideology, or a particular form of government. Consistent therewith, let us equate idolatry with “reification” which may be defined as the postulation of any physical or mental existent, process, or law as autonomous or self-sustaining. Reification thus applies to any philosophic or scientific monism, dualism, or pluralism that attempts to explain the totality or any part of existence in terms of one or more independent or self-subsisting entities. The Torah therefore rejects the exaltation or fixation of any humanly constructed system of governance. It forbids fetishism, the complete devotion of the self to that which is bounded. “Six days shalt thou work …” and then the Shabbat: autonomy attained through devotion to the unbounded God. In the Second Commandment we behold a doctrine of rational freedom and progress. Let us now consider the name Elohim, which means “the Master of all forces” spread throughout Creation. The Malbim notes that the verb describing Elohim’s actions appear always in the singular form, attesting to the Creator’s being uniquely one, devoid of all multiplicity.[6] Significantly, the name Elohim is used exclusively during the first six days of Creation. Not until the seventh day, the Sabbath, is the name Elohim conjoined with Ineffable Name, YHVH. The difference between the two is this. YHVH is God in Himself, the ultimate source of all existence. But when referred to as the one who place limits, measures, and stable form on the forces of creation, He is called Elohim (see Deut. 4:39). This why YHVH relates to freedom and graciousness, while Elohim relates to the rigor of law or justice. Going further, the Zohar states that the term “saying,” in the words “And Elohim said,” is a creative utterance, a supernal form of energy, so that the universe may be understood as the concretized thought of HaShem.[7] “By the word of HaShem the heavens were made” (Psalms 33:6); and recall Proverbs: “With wisdom HaShem created the heavens and the earth.” Turning to the third name of the Creator, EH’YEH—this is the name God instructed Moses to relate to the Israelites upon informing them of their forthcoming liberation from Egyptian bondage. Their liberation was but the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham: Know with certainty that your progeny shall aliens in a land not their own, they will serve them, and they will oppress them for four hundred years. But also the nation that they shall serve, I shall judge, and afterwards they shall leave … (Genesis 15:13-14). In view of that lengthy passage of time, the enslaved Israelites needed to be taught that the God of their fathers should also be understood as EH’YEH, whose Hebrew letters spell the verb “to be” in its three tenses: I was, I am, I will be. This name explicitly reveals that the past, present, and future are all contained within the Eternal (which explains, by the way, how His foreknowledge does not logically exclude human free will). The name EH’YEH guarantees the fulfillment of God’s covenant with Abraham, hence with the Jewish people, the vehicle of the Torah’s world-historical program. The above names of the Creator indicate that Jewish monotheism involves a personal God Who is both transcendent and immanent (contrary to Islam whose Allah is impersonal and absolutely transcendent). Moreover, in Jewish monotheism there exists no intermediary between God and man (contrary to Christianity). However, even when men have acknowledged the First Commandment, they have ever exhibited a powerful tendency to violate the Second Commandment (for example, by worshipping the stars as a way of exalting HaShem). One may say, therefore, that the primary purpose of the Torah is to destroy idolatry—the worship of false gods. Indeed, mankind has produced an infinite variety of false gods, and none has a greater hold or longevity than the productions of the human mind. Men have exalted a phantasmagoria of political and religious ideologies, and they have blindly adhered to welter of philosophic and scientific theories, such as those which posit an eternal rather than a created universe. By diverting men from worshipping the one and only true God, idolatry leads to the glorification of what is merely human. Universalism versus Particularism Because the Jewish people have been the bearers of monotheism, many Jews emphasize the universalistic principles of Judaism. This emphasis is misplaced. As that penetrating literary critic Edward Alexander once wrote, “universalism is the parochialism of the Jews”! The basis of Judaism is not the universalism it bestowed on mankind, but particularism. If Jewish nationhood means anything it means a distinctive way of life, namely that illuminated by the laws and teachings of the Torah. For example, of the many laws that distinguish Jews from non-Jews, suffice to mention those pertaining to the Sabbath, the dietary laws, and those governing marriage and family purity. These laws preserved the identity of the Jewish people down through the ages. They not only distinguished the Jewish nation from all other nations, but spared them from the fate of nations whose existence depended on having a land of their own. Some nations have been conquered and eradicated. Others have been amalgamated with their conquerors. Still other nations have undergone evolutions and revolutions that fundamentally altered their character. Only the Jews have preserved their 3,300 year-old national identity. This they could do because, in whichever country they lived, regardless of its beliefs and customs, they adhered to the laws of their Torah, such as those just mentioned. It should be borne in mind that God created a world not only for diverse individuals but also for nations with distinct ways of life. However, for these ways of life to be mutually reinforcing and not mutually obstructive, they require the rational constraints of the Seven Noahide Laws of Universal Morality.[8] Rooted in ethical monotheism, these laws prohibit blasphemy, murder, stealing, immorality, and cruelty to animals, and the establishment of courts of justice to try violations of these prohibitions. It bears emphasizing that idolatry involves the worship of any created thing, including the products of the human intellect, be it a philosophic or scientific theory, a political or religious ideology, or a particular form of government. Such is the loftiness of the human intellect, that only its Creator is worthy of worship. It follows that to desecrate the Name of the Creator is to degrade humanity as well. Those who deny the Creator not only deny the source of human perfection; they also undermine the highest possible development of man’s intellectual faculties. Also, when men reject their Creator, they end by worshipping themselves or their own creations, be it an ideology or anything that gratifies their passions. The typical result is either tyranny or bestiality or vulgarity. Moreover, given man’s creation in God’s image, each individual is a center of purposes known to God alone. We must therefore be duly concerned about the life, property, and the honor of other human beings. (To damage a person’s reputation is tantamount to murder.) Finally, given the fallibility of man’s intellect, the Torah requires the establishment of courts of justice. The seven universal laws of morality may rightly be called a “genial orthodoxy.” This genial orthodoxy transcends the social and economic distinctions among men: It holds all men equal before the law. It places constraints on governors and governed alike and habituates men to the rule of law. It subordinates to the rule of law any ethnic differences that may exist among the groups composing a society. It moderates their demands and facilitates coordination of their diverse interests and talents. In short, this Hebraic orthodoxy conduces to social harmony and prosperity. As just implied, the Noahide Laws can be elaborated in various ways and are therefore applicable to the variety of nations comprising mankind. Israel’s world-historical function, therefore, is to provide mankind the example of a nation that synthesizes particularism and universalism, which it can only do as a nation consecrated to God. By affirming a plurality of nations, and by qualifying this particularism with laws of universal morality, Israel avoids the political, cultural, and religious imperialism of Islam, and which once animated Christianity. At the same time, Israel avoids the moral decay evident among democracies that have separated morality from public law. Despite its moral decay, contemporary democracy is commonly regarded as the touchstone of what is good and bad. Democracy thus constitutes the idolatry of the modern era. Mankind desperately needs Israel—of course, an Israel dedicated to God. Only a nation dedicated to God can inspire and elevate mankind. Leo Jung eloquently writes: Had Judaism been entrusted to all nations, it would have lost color and intensity. As everybody’s concern it would have remained nobody’s concern.... Ideals are better entrusted to minorities as their differentiating asset, because of which they live.... Judaism, given at once to the shapeless multitudes of the world, would have become a meaningless phrase ... Hence it was bestowed upon one nation as its heirloom, as the single reason for its existence, as the single argument of its national life, as the aim and end of its struggles and labors. The Jewish people thus received a charge that was to inspire its life, but the benefit of which was to accrue to all the world. At the beginning of Jewish history, Abraham, the first Jew, received the universal call, ‘And thou shalt be a blessing to all the nations of the world.’ For the consummation of this ideal, Israel is to walk apart. It will not be counted among the nations ... Guided exclusively by the will of God, living by His commandments and dying if need be for the sanctification of His name, Israel is to present the example of a whole nation elevated, ennobled, illumined by the life in God and encouraging thereby a universal imitatio Dei.[9] Although this is not proof that the Jews are the Chosen People, it provides evidence for the necessity of such a people. Scientist Gerald Schroeder puts it this way:[10] In his closing address, Moses adjures the people to “Remember the days of old, consider the years of each generation” (Deut. 32:7). Kabbalah tells us these “days of old” are the six days of Genesis, and “the years of each generation” are the historical records of civilization. Understanding the events of our cosmic and social past is a key to discovering the immanence of God. The Bible insists the evidence is there for us to discover God in this world: “You shall know that I am the Eternal” (Ex. 6:7; Ex. 29:46; Deut. 4:39). If studying history is indeed the path for all humanity to discover God, then the reason for one of the more contentious and misunderstood issues of the Bible becomes clear. Having a people chosen to be “holy” becomes a necessity, both biblically and scientifically. The Hebrew word for holy is kodesh, which means separate, set apart…. In the language of experimental science, this “holy” people is an identifiable control group set apart against which the flow of history can be compared…” The best control is one that is present in the actual environment. The problem becomes how to maintain the separate identity of that people even while they are part of society in general. The Torah accomplishes this by presenting them with a list of constraints (foods, clothing, holidays). For three thousand years it has succeeded. To compensate for the burden of being set aside, those chosen to be separate needed a reward to offset the difficulty of the task. According to the Bible, that reward included a method, not necessarily unique or exclusive, to help in discovering and understanding the transcendental unity that forms the base of our universe. Schroeder points out that being “holy” does not mean being intrinsically better. “God tells the Israelites that their being chosen is not because they have inherently superior virtues as a people” (Deut. 9:4-6). No, their being chosen “means to serve mankind as a visible and edifying symbol.” It is in this light that we are to understand why the Jews alone have a universal history and were destined, after horrific dispersion (Deut. 30:1-5), to return to the Land of Israel where they are now the focus of mankind’s hostile attention. Can it be that this hostility, unbeknownst to Jews and Gentiles alike, is the result of Israel’s seeking to be like unto the nations? Can it be that the nations unconsciously despise Israel for not being what it was chosen to be—the God-bearing nation of mankind? [1] Judah Halevi, The Kuzari (Jerusalem: Sefer ve Sefer Publishing, 2003), 182, H. Hirschfeld, trans. [2] Joseph M. Soloveitchik, Worship of the Heart (Jersey City, NJ: KTAV, 2003), 4. [3] Zvi Yaron, The Philosophy of Rabbi Kook (Jerusalem: Eliner Library, 1991), A. Tomaschoff, trans., 55, 64. [4] Abraham Isaac Kook, Orot (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1993), pp. 148-149, B. Naor, trans. [5] Ibid., 15-151, 148, 233, n. 119. [6] Malbim, Commentary on the Torah (3 vols. t.d.; Jerusalem: Hillel Press, 1983), I, 27-28, Z. Faier, trans. See also Judah Halevi, 187. [7] The Zohar (5 vols.; London: Soncino Press, 1973), I. 68-69, H. Sperling & M. Simon, trans. [8] Hugo Grotius, the renowned seventeenth-century legal scholar, often cited the Noahide laws as an early source of international law. But as Aaron Lichtenstein has shown in The Seven Laws of Noah (New York: Z. Berman Books, 198l), these laws are actually general categories which involve no less than 66 of the 613 basic laws of the Torah codified by Maimonides. Also, to convey the humane and progressive character of this most ancient body of laws, Lichtenstein quotes extensively from that remarkable work, The Unknown Sanctuary, in which the French author, Aime Palliere, tells of how his knowledge of Hebrew led him to renounce Catholicism, how he sought to convert to Judaism, to which end he consulted the Italian rabbi, Elijah Benamozegh, who introduced him to Noahism as the “true catholicism.” [9] Leo Jung, Judaism in a Changing World (New York: Jonathan David Publishers, 1939), 15-16. [10] Gerald Schroeder, The Science of God (New York: Broadway Books, 1997), 76-78.
Posted on: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 03:18:43 +0000
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