HJC's Tikkun Leil Shavuot 5783: Does Star Wars have a Jewish Theology?

What is the Force?

Mordecai Kaplan - The Place of Religion in Jewish Life (in Judaism as a Civilization, p. 314)

Man has come to understand that the act of contemplating reality in its wholeness does not place him outside reality. He now realizes that the inter-relatedness which is the source of his awareness of godhood operates within him, no less than outside him. Thus is eliminated the very need of making any dichotomy either between the universe of man and the universe of God, or between the natural and the supernatural. There is only one universe within which both man and God exist.

The so-called laws of nature represent the manner of God's immanent functioning. The element of creativity, which is not accounted for by the so-called laws of nature, and which points to the organic character of the universe or its life as a whole, gives us a clue to God's transcendent functioning. God is not an identifiable being who stands outside the universe. God is the life of the universe, immanent insofar as each part acts upon every other, and transcendent insofar as the whole acts upon each part.

Harold Kushner - Kaplan Simplified (in When Children Ask About God, p. 23)

"God" will come to mean that impulse in the human collective and in the universe as a whole corresponding to conscience in the individual, the name given to that force existing in the cosmos and in very one of us which helps us to identify that which is good and true and worthwhile and which moves us to pledge ourselves to live up to it.

Good vs. Evil?...

...or Good and Evil together?

Art Green - Hesed & Gevurah (in Sefirot: The One and the Ten, p. 47-49)

Hesed is the God of love, calling forth in us the response of love. Hesed in the soul is our love of God an all of God's creatures, our ability to continue this divine flow, passing on to others the gift of love. Gevurah represents the God we fear, the One before whose power we stand in trembling...Gevurah represents our awe before the majesty and magnificence of the cosmos, the smallness we feel as we open ourselves to the totality of Being...

The linking together of hesed and gevurah is an infinitely delicate balance. Too much love and the other has no room to exist. Isaac will indeed die because of Abraham's unbounded love. But too much power or judgment is even worse. The kabbalists see this gevurah aspect of botht he divine and human self as fraught with danger, the very birthplace of evil. The Zohar tells of a disconent on this "left", or gevurah, side of God. Gevurah becomes impatient with hesed, unhappy with its endless casting aside of judgement in the name of love. Our judging side grows weary with love, wanting to get on with the punishment that the "other" (most often another part of our own self) so clearly deserves. Rather than doing its job of permitting love to flow in measured ways, gevurah seeks out a cosmic moment to rule alone, to hold back the flow of love. In this moment divine power turns to rage or fury; out of it all the forces of evil ar born, darkness emerges from the light of God, a shadow of the divine universe that is also manifest in each of us as our ability to do evil.

Here we have one of the most important moral lessons of Kabbalah. Judgment untempered by love brings about evil; power obsessed with itself turns demonic. Evil is not some distant force. It resides within each of us, as it exists in the cosmos as a whole, the result of an imbalance of inner forces.

Finding Balance

Art Green - Tif'eret (in Sefirot: The One and the Ten, p. 47-49)

The balance of hesed and gevurah is called tif'eret, or "splendor," by the kabbalists. This perfectly poised Being is the God before whom we stand in prayer and the One whose person is ideally mirrored in our own lives. Sometimes this rung is referred to as emet, or "truth." The three Hebre letters of emet -- א-מ-ת -- represent the first, middle, and last letters of the alphabet. Truth is stretched across the whole of Being, joining the extremes of right and left, hesed and gevurah (respectively) into a single integrated personality...

This God knows us because our struggle to integrate love and judgment is not ours alone, but the reflection of a cosmic struggle. The inner structure of our psychic life is the hidden structure of the universe; it is because of this that we can come to know God by the path of inward contemplation and true self-knowledge.

How did it all begin?

Abraham Joshua Heschel - The Mystery of Revelation (in God in Search of Man, pp.'s 184-185)

The nature of revelation, being an event in the realm of the ineffable, is something which words cannot spell, which human language will never be able to portray...The words in which the prophets attempted to relate their experiences were not photographs, but illustrations, not descriptions but songs...

The word "revelation" is like an exclamation; it is an indicative rather than a descriptive term. Like all terms that express the ultimate, it points to its meaning rather than fully rendering it..."We believe, says Maimonides, "That the Torah has reached Moses from God in a manner which is described in Scripture figuratively by the term 'word,' and that nobody has ever known how that took place except Moses himself to whom that word reached."

We must not try to read chapters in the Bible dealing with the event at Sinai as if they were texts in systematic theology. Its intention is to celebrate the mystery, to introduce us to it rather than to penetrate or explain it. As a report about revelation the Bible itself is a midrash.