How Does the Jew Know About God?

By Rabbi Alan Yuter
Posted Monday, December 11, 2006

There is a pagan way to learn about God and there is a Jewish way to learn about God. One does not learn about God from "speculation," guessing, musing, intuiting, or thinking. There is no way that a finite human being can appreciate, much less understand, an infinite God. Speculations that claim to divine the Divine or suggest that God has a "shape," dimension, or can be controlled by ritual smack of idolatry.

God gave a Torah to Israel. In this Torah, God appears as a character with seven different divine names. Each of these divine names provides, in human language, a shadowing glimpse into eternity. Humans, created in the image of God that tickles the imagination, must read the Hebrew Scripture, God's revealed template, for a revelation of what in human language may be called the Divine character, or persona.

In order to fully appreciate the God idea in Israel, it is helpful to survey the god "ideas" created by the nations of the world in antiquity. The gods of Mesopomia were human beings on an immortal, immense, but nonetheless finite scale. The gods cowered before fate and nature, and capriciously rewarded and punished their human stewards, who were created to serve as slaves for the gods and the divinely appointed human, the sharrum, the ensi, the lugal, the "big guy." Gilgamesh wants to live forever, but cannot, and must content himself with fame. He almost won immortality but the magical plant that would have given Gilgamesh the gift was consumed by a snake. The parallel to Genesis, according to which the fruit of the tree of knowledge, is eaten by the first couple against the Divine will but in accordance with the seductive snake. The act of creation in Mesopotamia was a war within the realm of the gods. Humans, like the gods that were invented projections of humankind, were animals so rational that war was planned, but not so rational to live in a world where war was to be avoided.

In ancient Egypt, the gods create by sexual activity and they, like their medieval spiritual descendants, were warriors. At first, in the Old Kingdom, eternity is given to the kings, and then, to the nobility and ultimately, to the middle class. In Egypt, the Nile afforded regularity and stability. Hence the notion of a possible and shared eternity. But in Mesopotamia, the Tigris was always out of control and the Euphrates was occasionally out of control. Floods are part of life, and death, and the Mesopotamian person lived under the shadow of death at all time. The best one can make out of life is to enjoy what one has, and in the end, one dies.

In ancient Greece, Heracles pined to live forever. Odysseus was offered immortality by the seductress nymph, Calypso, but he refused her out of fidelity to his human wife, Penelope. We recall that Gilgamesh was approached by a goddess whom he rejected, not because he was not offered immortality, but because he knew that the goddess was a murderous femme fatale. Morality in Egypt and Mesopotamia is no more than living in keeping with the natural order. The gods were either on your side or not; but there was no sense of the ethical as being part of the natural order. It took the Greek Socrates, in Euthyphro, to pose the question, is an act good because it is willed by the gods, or do the gods will the act because it is good? Because there are many gods, there are many forces, none of which is inherently good or evil. The wise life lives within the boundaries of life. The Delphic call "know thyself" is not a command to undergo therapeutic analysis, but to know, accept and stay within one's station in the natural order. The Jew accepts the king of God and cannot accept a human order that places one person over another. If the God of Israel eschews hierarchy of person by investing every individual with the divine image, then the person in possession of the divine image will chafe under the command to "nullify oneself" as an idolatrous human command to deny one's divine image.

In Israel, God wills the good because God is good and is the source of goodness, which is available to humankind if and only if humankind applies its will, as moral agents, to train itself according to the recipe of the divine benchmarks, the publicly revealed commandments The God of Israel tells Israel to "choose life" and the good. God does not make the choice, but makes the choice which, as humans, we make as moral agents. Aftert he creation of humankind, God noted that on this occasion His work was not good, but very good. By creating a creature that is capable of acting as a moral agent, with the ability to make moral choice, God created a being that could become godly in character by perfecting its character. Humankind's first couple are placed in the garden of Eden, or time. It is a very good place. And the first couple work the garden for their good, not for gods good. And when they sin and eat from the fruit of which they were commanded not to eat, God punishes them for theiract but does not utterly destroy them. Indeed, God addresses their sense of guilt, or nakedness, by providing clothing for them. And even after he killed his brother, Abel, God does reject Cain's act, but not Cain the person. God takes this killer out of society, but marks him so he not be killed. Noah is saved in his generation because God will not kill the wicked with the righteous. And that first Hebrew do-gooder, Abraham, asked God. "will you not spare the city [of Sodom] if ten righteous people are to be found in that city?" God did not answer Abraham, but God did answer the reader that were there even ten good Sodomites, God would save the city. In the subsequent chapter, the entire city surrounds Lot's house to claim his guests as targets for homosexual rape. Indeed, we are shown by the Divine Narrator that there were not ten righteous citizens in Sodom.

And like Abraham, who as God's chosen was a hero not because he was a soldier and a knight, but because he was morally upright. And Moses does not appear first as "our teacher," but as a seditious doer of good who rebels against the injustice of Pharaoh, the not so divine embodiment of Horus whose title means the resident of the "big house."

The God of Israel created a book, which is an object to be read by all. In this book, God creates human's in God's image, imposing a radical equality of humankind. In pagan culture the hero/knight/warrior/ruler partakes of godhood in some fashion, legitimating his right to rule. This God Authored a book that was published and given to the nation, and in this book the rights and limits of the human king becomes clear.

In pagan thought, the king is the law because the king is above the law. In Israel, the king may rule only because God defines the office of king with its perks, prerogatives, and limitations. The State is not the private property of the human king; the State belongs to the people who are its constituent citizens In pagan thought, the commandments are loyalty oaths to the person in power; In Torah, the rites of ritual are exercises in moral conditioning. The human king imposes rule through violence of word and if necessary, imposition of violence. If fear does not work, insults and marginalization are applied to insure compliance. And if threats and impulses do not work, then actual violence is applied. When the ruler of ancient Israel did not follow the Hebrew rule, but applied the perks of pagan power, the Israelite prophet appeared to remind the king that he ruled by divine grant, not by divine right. The denial of moral right results in a denial of the divine grant.

The Torah book doctrine is taught in Deuteronomy, where Moses was commanded to write the Torah [1] as a book and [2] as poetry [not prose!] . This book is published, so people have access to its commands, conditions, and expectations, and is ratified not by the king, but by the people who have agreed to be ruled by the Torah. The Torah compact creates a horizontal society between the people and God; being subject to such a compact makes Israel very unwilling to submit to the power politics of human beings who rule because they incorrectly believe that they are "better" because they have power, privilege, and the purse.

The seeds of paganism continue to our own day. Religions based on hierarchies of power are pagan. Religions whose leaders are misleaders, called "highness," tell their adherents to nullify themselves and to be passive, compliant, and obedient to human and social authority. It is arrogant to be a moral agent. Only the high one, the great one, the hierarchically superior being has heard the word of the god or gods. Hammurapi got his law directly from the seeing eye of Shammash, Allah gave his Quran directly to Muhammed, and some claim that in addition to the written Torah and oral Tradition that stems from Sinai, certain rabbis are endowed with the charisma, intuition, and stature to read God's mind and to tell others what to do. Commandments in paganism are political. They show loyalty to the expected and accepted order. The individual must "know themselves," accepting the expected role that is given, or imposed upon them. In Torah, the commandments, when observed, teach ethical lessons and create moral dispositions. For the pagan, the gods are made in the image of macho men who want, like Sargon I, whose name means "the king is legitimate," to legitimate their rule. For Torah, the commands are not magical rites, but signals of moral right.

The God of Israel is known by God's commands and the characters who obey his commands. God commands that Israel act with goodness so that it evolve as a nation into a people of Godliness. The God of Israel the Author of Nature and the Author of value. As moral agents created in the Divine image, we apply the recipe of the Torah for life, because life, like its Author, is good.

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