2. This truth has a religious depth which no philosophy can set forth. Only the God of Revelation is near to man in his frailty and need, ready to hear his sighs, answer his supplication, count his tears, and relieve his wants when his own power fails. The philosopher must reject as futile every attempt to bring the incomprehensible essence of the Deity within the compass of the human understanding. The religious consciousness, however, demands that we accentuate precisely those attributes of God which bring Him nearest to us. If reason alone would have the decisive voice in this problem, every manifestation of God to man and every reaching out of the soul to Him in prayer would be idle fancy and self-deceit. It is true that the Biblical conception was simple and child-like enough, representing God as descending from the heavens to the earth. Still Judaism does not accept the cold and distant attitude of the philosopher; it teaches that God as a spiritual power does condescend to man, in order that man may realize his kinship with the Most High and rise ever nearer to his Creator. The earth whereon man dwells and the human heart with its longing for heaven, are not bereft of God. Wherever man seeks Him, there He is.
3. Rabbinical Judaism is very far from the attitude assigned to it by Christian theologians,[415] of reducing the Deity to an empty transcendental abstraction and loosening the bond which ties the soul to its Maker. On the contrary, it maintains these very relations with a firmness which betokens its soundness and its profound psychological truth. In this spirit a Talmudic master interprets the Deuteronomic verse: “For what great nation is there that hath God so nigh unto [pg 144] them, as the Lord our God is whensoever we call upon Him?”[416] saying that “each will realize the nearness of God according to his own intellectual and emotional disposition, and thus enter into communion with Him.” According to another Haggadist the verse of the Psalm, “The voice of the Lord resoundeth with power,”[417] teaches how God reveals Himself, not with His own overwhelming might, but according to each man's individual power and capacity. The rabbis even make bold to assert that whenever Israel suffers, God suffers with him; as it is written, “I will be with him in trouble.”[418]
4. As a matter of fact, all the names which we apply to God in speech or in prayer, even the most sublime and holy ones, are derived from our own sensory experience and cannot be taken literally. They are used only as vehicles to bring home to us the idea that God's nearness is our highest good. Even the material world, which is perceptible to our senses, must undergo a certain inner transformation before it can be termed science or philosophy, and becomes the possession of the mind. It requires still further exertions of the imagination to bring within our grasp the world of the spirit, and above all the loftiest of all conceptions, the very being of God. Yet it is just this Being of all Beings who draws us irresistibly toward Himself, whose nearness we perceive in the very depths of our intellectual and emotional life. Our “soul thirsteth after God, the living God,” and behold, He is nigh, He takes possession of us, and we call Him our God.
5. The Haggadists expressed this intimate relation of God to man, and specifically to Israel, by bold and often naïve metaphors. They ascribe to God special moments for wrath and for prayer, a secret chamber where he weeps over the [pg 145] distress of Israel, a prayer-mantle (tallith) and phylacteries which He wears like any of the leaders of the community, and even lustrations which He practices exactly like mortals.[419] But such fanciful and extravagant conceptions were never taken seriously by the rabbis, and only partisan and prejudiced writers, entirely lacking in a sense of humor, could point to such passages to prove that a theology of the Synagogue carried out a “Judaization of God.”[420]