Commandedness and Theology

Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism

The true meaning of existence is disclosed in moments of living in the presence of God.

Martin Buber

When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.

Mordecai Kaplan in The Many Faces of God: A Reader of Modern Jewish Theologies edited by Rifat Sonsino, pp. 22–23

God is the Power in the cosmos that gives human life the direction that enables the human being to reflect the image of God.

Rosenzweig

• The Torah is Israel’s response to revelation
  • Our task is to recapture the original sense of God’s self-revelation and with it the sense of being commanded to respond
  • Over time, spontaneity in following commands changed into laws into an impersonal legal code
  • God is not a lawgiver but God does command
    • Personal, subjective, individual
    • Commands are felt internally by the individual
      • In all relationships, the partner feels obligated to respond

Kaplan

• • Ritual as a religious folkway
    • God is a process or power within nature
    • Revelation is a form of human discovery or creativity
      • Religion itself is a totally natural expression of the group experience of the community – not at all imposed on the community by a supernatural, personal God
      • Ritual is not viewed as a mitzvah
      • God is not a commanding God
      • Kaplan does away with the entire notion of religious law and sin
      • Practices are expressions of the distinctive lifestyle of the community
        • They serve to distinguish this community from others, to promote group identity, to give the individual sense of unity with the larger group
      • * locate the authority for ritual in the community itself
      • views ritual as an expression of the cultural or civilizational life of the community
• Rituals are outdated and as such they should be abandoned
• Classic position for Reform movement’s platform 1885
• Any ideas that are foreign to modernity and obstruct rather than elevate spirituality should be abandoned

Rambam (Maomonides)

For Maimonides, one was not Jewish–at least not fully Jewish–if one did not believe in God and in the other tenets of belief that he outlined. He stated that the following principles were essential to one's Jewish identity

Robert Putnam (1941-Present)

American political scientist specializing in comparative politics.

I don’t know whether it’s theologically kosher to be both a Jew and an atheist, but if it isn’t, half the Americans who call themselves Jews aren’t quite legit. Of self-identified Jews in the nationally representative surveys David Campbell and I did for our book American Grace, 50 percent say they have doubts about the existence of God. That figure is much higher among Jews than any other major religious group in America. (Among members of all other faiths, only 10-15 percent express any doubts at all about God’s existence.)

Robert Putnam is the author of Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community and the Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University.

Eliezer Berkovits, Faith after the Holocaust, p. 64. 1973

1908-1992 (Born in Berlin; Emigrated to Israel)

The hiding God is present; though man is unaware of him, He is present in his hiddenness. Therefore, God can only hide in this world. But if this world were altogether and radically profane, there would be no place in it for Him to hide. He can only hide in history. Since history is man's responsibility, one would, in fact, expect him to hide, to be silent, while man goes about his God-given task. Responsibility requires freedom, but God's convincing presence would undermine the freedom of human decision. God hides in human responsibility and human freedom.

The Evolution of God: Erich Fromm (1966)

German Jewish Theologian who fled the Nazi regime and settled in the US.

• God becomes progressively less real (and relevant) in traditional Jewish literature.
  1. At the beginning of the Bible, God is an absolute ruler who can (and does) destroy the world when He is not happy with it.
  2. In the next stage, however, God relinquishes His absolute power by making a covenant with humankind. God’s power is limited because it is subject to the terms of the covenant.
  3. The third stage of God’s evolution (or devolution) comes in His revelation to Moses, in which he presents Himself as a nameless God. The evolution of God does not stop with the Bible. Ironically, Maimonides takes it even further by positing that nothing can be said about God. We can venture to say what God isn’t, but God’s positive attributes are unthinkable.
• • The next step, says Fromm, should have been a rejection of God completely, but even he–a self-declared non-theistic mystic–acknowledges that this is impossible for religious Jews. He does, however, recognize that because Judaism has not been primarily concerned with beliefs per se, one who does not believe in God can still come very close to living a life that is fully Jewish in spirit.

Yitz Greenberg: Voluntary Covenant, 1984

b. 1933

The central teaching of Judaism is redemption. Yahadut teaches that the world and the life which emerges within it are grounded in the infinite source of life and energy which we call God. As the continuum of life unfolds, the emerging life becomes more and more God-like-- more and more valuable, more and more responsive to others, more and more free...The intrinsic nature of God is beneficent, giving and pulsing with life. Therefore, the life which is growing in the ground of the Divine will continue to grow until all of its possibilities will be fully realized and perfected.

Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, 1984

1903-1993

When God created the world, He provided an opportunity for the work of His hands – humanity – to participate in His creation. The Creator, as it were, impaired reality with the promise that mortal man could repair its flaws and perfect it. God gave the Book of Creation – that repository of the mysteries of creation – to man, not simply for the sake of theoretical study but in order that man might continue the act of creation...

The perfection of creation, according to the view of the halakhic man, is expressed in the actualization of the ideal Halakhah in the real world. … The Halakhah fills the “deficiency” by drawing the Shekhinah, the Divine Presence, downward into the lowly world, by “contracting” transcendence within our flawed world. … If man wishes to attain the rank of holiness, he must become a creator of worlds. If a man never creates, never brings into being anything new, anything original, then he cannot be holy unto his God.