TALKING ABOUT GOD
What is God? The classical Reconstructionist answer is: “That’s the wrong question.” The better question is, how is God? How does God function in human lives?
When the TaNaKh, the Hebrew Bible, was finalized about 2,300 years ago, Jewish philosophy began moving away from the primitive idea that God can be described in concrete terms. The second Commandment says that we should make no graven image of God. By medieval times, Moses Maimonides, the RaMBaM, asserted that God was completely unknowable. In the seventeenth century, Baruch Spinoza shocked the Jewish world by saying that God does not and cannot intervene in human affairs, and didn’t author the Torah. In modern times, especially after the Holocaust, many Jews began to reject the idea of a supernatural God – God as a supernatural person - entirely. They wondered whether, as a result, they could still call themselves Jews.
Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan (1881-1983), the originator of Reconstructionist Judaism, presented a new approach. He wrote, in essence, that what God is, is irrelevant. There have always been lots of ideas about the nature of God; but the essential thing is how God functions. If God is to be a path to a positive, meaningful, moral world, then what God does is all-important. Whatever impels a person to work toward justice, to be honest, to seek wisdom, to act generously, to help build a good society – that force is God. No further description is needed.
Older God-concepts served our ancestors well. The prevailing idea of God as a sentient creator and judge made sense to them. But human philosophy changes with time, and many of us find it reasonable that God is the power or force in the universe that makes us search for holiness and peace, and gives us the courage to work to repair the world (tikkun olam).
For more about the evolving Jewish perception of God, see the insert “As an example” in the Judaism Is a Civilization section of this website.
Predictably, Rabbi Kaplan was accused by some of being an atheist. The idea of a non-personal God was too radical a concept for many Jews. But he was certainly not an atheist. He was a passionate believer, devoted to a God that did not require him to strain his credulity.
This raises the question of prayer
A common first reaction to Reconstructionist theology is: so, why pray, if no Being is listening?
The Hebrew word for prayer is l’hitpalel. This is a reflexive verb, that implies acting upon oneself, like washing oneself or dressing oneself. That verb, which is not a new word, gives us an interesting concept. When we Jews pray, we are directing something toward our selves. But what?
The act of prayer is generally assumed to be a positive, valuable act, and Reconstructionist Jews agree. We are improved by prayer. Praying consciously draws a person closer to that divine force which inspires us to continue our moral evolution. Humans are self-reflective creatures, capable of taking an active role in improving ourselves and our society.
We are independent; we are interdependent. Prayer is one way we direct ourselves to live fully, both in self-expression and in ethical and responsible relation to others.
Can Jewish prayer continue the chain of our ancestral heritage?
The language of traditional Jewish prayer presents a challenge to those of us who do not envision a God-as-Person. Nearly every page of a siddur (prayerbook) contains glorifications of a Personal God – a God described as king, father, ruler. If we are doing more than just ‘singing along’ we have a dilemma.
Kol HaNeshama, the Reconstructionist siddur for Shabbat and holidays, addresses the issue this way in its Introduction:
“The most difficult translation issue is the question of God-language. The classical translation of the name of God (YHVH) is Lord, a masculine noun that does not work because of its gender. It does not work as living imagery. Furthermore, it is not consistent with a theology that stresses God’s immanence – God made manifest through human action, through nature, and through the workings of the human heart. After a careful review…a decision was reached. Everywhere that the Tetragrammaton or Adonay appears in Hebrew, a descriptive name of God appears in half-caps in the English translation…It solves the problem that many people have in relating to “Lord.” It conveys some of the complexity and freshness of Jewish metaphors that refer to the divine…encourage[ing] every worshipper to become aware of the elements of the divine infused in all the many parts of our lives and our world.”
So when we are following the English translation in Kol HaNeshama, we encounter divine names like “The Eternal” “The Abundant One” and “The Beloved One.” In this way, we link ourselves with the devotion of our ancestors, and of other Jews in the world, using language that doesn’t contradict our conceptions about divinity.
