Jewish Theology

Systematically and Historically Considered

By

Dr. K. Kohler

President

Hebrew Union College

New York

The Macmillan Company

1918

Contents

[pg v]

Dedication

To The Memory

Of

Edward L. Heinsheimer

The Lamented President of the Board of Governors of

The Hebrew Union College

In Whom Zeal for the High Ideals

of Judaism and Patriotic Devotion

to Our Blessed Country Were

Nobly Embodied

In Friendship And

Affection

Preface

In offering herewith to the English-reading public the present work on Jewish Theology, the result of many years of research and of years of activity as President and teacher at the Hebrew Union College of Cincinnati, I bespeak for it that fairness of judgment to which every pioneer work is entitled. It may seem rather strange that no such work has hitherto been written by any of the leading Jewish scholars of either the conservative or the progressive school. This can only be accounted for by the fact that up to modern times the Rabbinical and philosophical literature of the Middle Ages sufficed for the needs of the student, and a systematic exposition of the Jewish faith seemed to be unnecessary. Besides, a real demand for the specific study of Jewish theology was scarcely felt, inasmuch as Judaism never assigned to a creed the prominent position which it holds in the Christian Church. This very fact induced Moses Mendelssohn at the beginning of the new era to declare that Judaism “contained only truths dictated by reason and no dogmatic beliefs at all.” Moreover, as he was rather a deist than a theist, he stated boldly that Judaism “is not a revealed religion but a revealed law intended solely for the Jewish people as the vanguard of universal monotheism.” By taking this legalistic view of Judaism in common with the former opponents of the Maimonidean articles of faith—which, by the way, he had himself translated for the religious instruction of the Jewish youth—he exerted a deteriorating influence upon the normal development of the Jewish faith under the new social conditions. The fact is that Mendelssohn emancipated the modern Jew [pg viii] from the thraldom of the Ghetto, but not Judaism. In the Mendelssohnian circle the impression prevailed, as we are told, that Judaism consists of a system of forms, but is substantially no religion at all. The entire Jewish renaissance period which followed, characteristically enough, made the cultivation of the so-called science of Judaism its object, but it neglected altogether the whole field of Jewish theology. Hence we look in vain among the writings of Rappaport, Zunz, Jost and their followers, the entire Breslau school, for any attempt at presenting the contents of Judaism as a system of faith. Only the pioneers of Reform Judaism, Geiger, Holdheim, Samuel Hirsch, Formstecher, Ludwig Philippson, Leopold Stein, Leopold Loew, and the Reform theologian par excellence David Einhorn, and likewise, Isaac M. Wise in America, made great efforts in that direction. Still a system of Jewish theology was wanting. Accordingly when, at the suggestion of my dear departed friend, Dr. Gustav Karpeles, President of the Society for the Promotion of the Science of Judaism in Berlin, I undertook to write a compendium (Grundriss) of Systematic Jewish Theology, which appeared in 1910 as Vol. IV in a series of works on Systematic Jewish Lore (Grundriss der Gesammtwissenschaft des Judenthums), I had no work before me that might have served me as pattern or guide. Solomon Schechter's valuable studies were in the main confined to Rabbinical Theology. As a matter of fact I accepted the task only with the understanding that it should be written from the view-point of historical research, instead of a mere dogmatic or doctrinal system. For in my opinion the Jewish religion has never been static, fixed for all time by an ecclesiastical authority, but has ever been and still is the result of a dynamic process of growth and development. At the same time I felt that I could not omit the mystical element which pervades the Jewish religion in common with all others. As our prophets were seers and not philosophers or moralists, [pg ix] so divine inspiration in varying degrees constituted a factor of Synagogal as well as Scriptural Judaism. Revelation, therefore, is to be considered as a continuous force in shaping and reshaping the Jewish faith. The religious genius of the Jew falls within the domain of ethnic psychology concerning which science still gropes in the dark, but which progressive Judaism is bound to recognize in its effects throughout the ages.

It is from this standpoint, taken also by the sainted founder of the Hebrew Union College, Isaac M. Wise, that I have written this book. At the same time I endeavored to be, as it behooves the historian, just and fair to Conservative Judaism, which will ever claim the reverence we owe to our cherished past, the mother that raised and nurtured us.

While a work of this nature cannot lay claim to completeness, I have attempted to cover the whole field of Jewish belief, including also such subjects as no longer form parts of the religious consciousness of the modern Jew. I felt especially called upon to elucidate the historical relations of Judaism to the Christian and Mohammedan religions and dwell on the essential points of divergence from them. If my language at times has been rather vigorous in defense of the Jewish faith, it was because I was forced to correct and refute the prevailing view of the Christian world, of both theologians and others, that Judaism is an inferior religion, clannish and exclusive, that it is, in fact, a cult of the Old Testament Law.

It was a matter of great personal satisfaction to me that the German work on its appearance met with warm appreciation in the various theological journals of America, England, and France, as well as of Germany, including both Jewish and Christian. I was encouraged and urged by many “soon to make the book accessible to wider circles in an English translation.” My friend, Dr. Israel Abrahams of Cambridge, England, took such interest in the book that he induced a young friend of his to prepare an English version. While this did not answer the [pg x] purpose, it was helpful to me in making me feel that, instead of a literal translation, a thorough revision and remolding of the book was necessary in order to present it in an acceptable English garb. In pursuing this course, I also enlarged the book in many ways, especially adding a new chapter on Jewish Ethics, which, in connection with the idea of the Kingdom of God, appeared to me to form a fitting culmination of Jewish theology. I have thus rendered it practically a new work. And here I wish to acknowledge my great indebtedness to my young friend and able pupil, Rabbi Lee J. Levinger, for the valuable aid he has rendered me and the painstaking labor he has kindly and unselfishly performed in going over my manuscript from beginning to end, with a view to revising the diction and also suggesting references to more recent publications in the notes so as to bring it up to date.

I trust that the work will prove a source of information and inspiration for both student and layman, Jew and non-Jew, and induce such as have become indifferent to, or prejudiced against, the teachings of the Synagogue, or of Reform Judaism in particular, to take a deeper insight into, and look up with a higher regard to the sublime and eternal verities of Judaism.

“Give to a wise man, and he will be yet wiser; teach a righteous man, and he will increase in learning.”

Cincinnati, November, 1917.

Introductory

Chapter I. The Meaning of Theology

1. The name Theology, “the teaching concerning God,” is taken from Greek philosophy. It was used by Plato and Aristotle to denote the knowledge concerning God and things godly, by which they meant the branch of Philosophy later called Metaphysics, after Aristotle. In the Christian Church the term gradually assumed the meaning of systematic exposition of the creed, a distinction being made between Rational, or Natural Theology, on the one hand, and Dogmatic Theology, on the other.[1] In common usage Theology is understood to be the presentation of one specific system of faith after some logical method, and a distinction is made between Historical and Systematic Theology. The former traces the various doctrines of the faith in question through the different epochs and stages of culture, showing their historical process of growth and development; the latter presents these same doctrines in comprehensive form as a fixed system, as they have finally been elaborated and accepted upon the basis of the sacred scriptures and their authoritative interpretation.

2. Theology and Philosophy of Religion differ widely in their character. Theology deals exclusively with a specific religion; in expounding one doctrinal system, it starts from [pg 002] a positive belief in a divine revelation and in the continued working of the divine spirit, affecting also the interpretation and further development of the sacred books. Philosophy of Religion, on the other hand, while dealing with the same subject matter as Theology, treats religion from a general point of view as a matter of experience, and, as every philosophy must, without any foregone conclusion. Consequently it submits the beliefs and doctrines of religion in general to an impartial investigation, recognizing neither a divine revelation nor the superior claims of any one religion above any other, its main object being to ascertain how far the universal laws of human reason agree or disagree with the assertions of faith.[2]

3. It is therefore incorrect to speak of a Jewish religious philosophy. This has no better right to exist than has Jewish metaphysics or Jewish mathematics.[3] The Jewish thinkers of the Spanish-Arabic period who endeavored to harmonize revelation and reason, utilizing the Neo-Platonic philosophy or the Aristotelian with a Neo-Platonic coloring, betray by their very conceptions of revelation and prophecy the influence of Mohammedan theology; this was really a graft of metaphysics on theology and called itself the “divine science,” a term corresponding exactly with the Greek “theology.” The so-called Jewish religious philosophers adopted both the methods and terminology of the Mohammedan theologians, attempting to present the doctrines of the Jewish faith in the light of philosophy, as truth based on reason. Thus they claimed to construct a Jewish theology upon the foundation of a philosophy of religion.

But neither they nor their Mohammedan predecessors succeeded in working out a complete system of theology. They left untouched essential elements of religion which do not come within the sphere of rational verities, and did not give proper appreciation to the rich treasures of faith deposited in the Biblical and Rabbinical literature. Nor does the comprehensive theological system of Maimonides, which for centuries largely shaped the intellectual life of the Jew, form an exception. Only the mystics, Bahya at their head, paid attention to the spiritual side of Judaism, dwelling at length on such themes as prayer and repentance, divine forgiveness and holiness.

4. Closer acquaintance with the religious and philosophical systems of modern times has created a new demand for a Jewish theology by which the Jew can comprehend his own religious truths in the light of modern thought, and at the same time defend them against the aggressive attitude of the ruling religious sects. Thus far, however, the attempts made in this direction are but feeble and sporadic; if the structure is not to stand altogether in the air, the necessary material must be brought together from its many sources with painstaking labor.[4] The special difficulty in the task lies in the radical difference which exists between our view of the past and that of the Biblical and medieval writers. All those things which have heretofore been taken as facts because related in the sacred books or other traditional sources, are viewed to-day with critical eyes, and are now regarded as more or less colored by human impression or conditioned by human judgment. In other words, we have learned to distinguish between subjective and objective truths,[5] whereas theology by [pg 004] its very nature deals with truth as absolute. This makes it imperative for us to investigate historically the leading idea or fundamental principle underlying a doctrine, to note the different conceptions formed at various stages, and trace its process of growth. At times, indeed, we may find that the views of one age have rather taken a backward step and fallen below the original standard. The progress need not be uniform, but we must still trace its course.

5. We must recognize at the outset that Jewish theology cannot assume the character of apologetics, if it is to accomplish its great task of formulating religious truth as it exists in our consciousness to-day. It can no more afford to ignore the established results of modern linguistic, ethnological, and historical research, of Biblical criticism and comparative religion, than it can the undisputed facts of natural science, however much any of these may conflict with the Biblical view of the cosmos. Apologetics has its legitimate place to prove and defend the truths of Jewish theology against other systems of belief and thought, but cannot properly defend either Biblical or Talmudic statements by methods incompatible with scientific investigation. Judaism is a religion of historical growth, which, far from claiming to be the final truth, is ever regenerated anew at each turning point of history. The fall of the leaves at autumn requires no apology, for each successive spring testifies anew to nature's power of resurrection.

The object of a systematic theology of Judaism, accordingly, is to single out the essential forces of the faith. It then will become evident how these fundamental doctrines possess a vitality, a strength of conviction, as well as an adaptability to varying conditions, which make them potent factors amidst all changes of time and circumstance. According to Rabbinical tradition, the broken tablets of the covenant were deposited in the ark beside the new. In like [pg 005] manner the truths held sacred by the past, but found inadequate in their expression for a new generation, must be placed side by side with the deeper and more clarified truths of an advanced age, that they may appear together as the one divine truth reflected in different rays of light.

6. Jewish theology differs radically from Christian theology in the following three points:

A. The theology of Christianity deals with articles of faith formulated by the founders and heads of the Church as conditions of salvation, so that any alteration in favor of free thought threatens to undermine the very plan of salvation upon which the Church was founded. Judaism recognizes only such articles of faith as were adopted by the people voluntarily as expressions of their religious consciousness, both without external compulsion and without doing violence to the dictates of reason. Judaism does not know salvation by faith in the sense of Paul, the real founder of the Church, who declared the blind acceptance of belief to be in itself meritorious. It denies the existence of any irreconcilable opposition between faith and reason.

B. Christian theology rests upon a formula of confession, the so-called Symbolum of the Apostolic Church,[6] which alone makes one a Christian. Judaism has no such formula of confession which renders a Jew a Jew. No ecclesiastical authority ever dictated or regulated the belief of the Jew; his faith has been voiced in the solemn liturgical form of prayer, and has ever retained its freshness and vigor of thought in the consciousness of the people. This partly accounts for the antipathy toward any kind of dogma or creed among Jews.

C. The creed is a conditio sine qua non of the Christian Church. To disbelieve its dogmas is to cut oneself loose from membership. Judaism is quite different. The Jew is [pg 006] born into it and cannot extricate himself from it even by the renunciation of his faith, which would but render him an apostate Jew. This condition exists, because the racial community formed, and still forms, the basis of the religious community. It is birth, not confession, that imposes on the Jew the obligation to work and strive for the eternal verities of Israel, for the preservation and propagation of which he has been chosen by the God of history.

7. The truth of the matter is that the aim and end of Judaism is not so much the salvation of the soul in the hereafter as the salvation of humanity in history. Its theology, therefore, must recognize the history of human progress, with which it is so closely interwoven. It does not, therefore, claim to offer the final or absolute truth, as does Christian theology, whether orthodox or liberal. It simply points out the way leading to the highest obtainable truth. Final and perfect truth is held forth as the ideal of all human searching and striving, together with perfect justice, righteousness, and peace, to be attained as the very end of history.

A systematic theology of Judaism must, accordingly, content itself with presenting Jewish doctrine and belief in relation to the most advanced scientific and philosophical ideas of the age, so as to offer a comprehensive view of life and the world (“Lebens- und Weltanschauung”); but it by no means claims for them the character of finality. The unfolding of Judaism's truths will be completed only when all mankind has attained the heights of Zion's mount of vision, as beheld by the prophets of Israel.[7]

Chapter II. What is Judaism?

1. It is very difficult to give an exact definition of Judaism because of its peculiarly complex character.[8] It combines two widely differing elements, and when they are brought out separately, the aspect of the whole is not taken sufficiently into account. Religion and race form an inseparable whole in Judaism. The Jewish people stand in the same relation to Judaism as the body to the soul. The national or racial body of Judaism consists of the remnant of the tribe of Judah which succeeded in establishing a new commonwealth in Judæa in place of the ancient Israelitish kingdom, and which survived the downfall of state and temple to continue its existence as a separate people during a dispersion over the globe for thousands of years, forming ever a cosmopolitan element among all the nations in whose lands it dwelt. Judaism, on the other hand, is the religious system itself, the vital element which united the Jewish people, preserving it and regenerating it ever anew. It is the spirit which endowed the handful of Jews with a power of resistance and a fervor of faith unparalleled in history, enabling them to persevere [pg 008] in the mighty contest with heathenism and Christianity. It made of them a nation of martyrs and thinkers, suffering and struggling for the cause of truth and justice, yet forming, consciously or unconsciously, a potent factor in all the great intellectual movements which are ultimately to win the entire gentile world for the purest and loftiest truths concerning God and man.

2. Judaism, accordingly, does not denote the Jewish nationality, with its political and cultural achievements and aspirations, as those who have lost faith in the religious mission of Israel would have it. On the other hand, it is not a nomistic or legalistic religion confined to the Jewish people, as is maintained by Christian writers, who, lacking a full appreciation of its lofty world-wide purpose and its cosmopolitan and humanitarian character, claim that it has surrendered its universal prophetic truths to Christianity. Nor should it be presented as a religion of pure Theism, aiming to unite all believers in one God into a Church Universal, of which certain visionaries dream. Judaism is nothing less than a message concerning the One and holy God and one, undivided humanity with a world-uniting Messianic goal, a message intrusted by divine revelation to the Jewish people. Thus Israel is its prophetic harbinger and priestly guardian, its witness and defender throughout the ages, who is never to falter in the task of upholding and unfolding its truths until they have become the possession of the whole human race.

3. Owing to this twofold nature of a universal religious truth and at the same time a mission intrusted to a specially selected nation or race, Judaism offers in a sense the sharpest contrasts imaginable, which render it an enigma to the student of religion and history, and make him often incapable of impartial judgment. On the one hand, it shows the most tenacious adherence to forms originally intended to preserve the Jewish people in its priestly sanctity and separateness, [pg 009] and thereby also to keep its religious truths pure and free from encroachments. On the other hand, it manifests a mighty impulse to come into close touch with the various civilized nations, partly in order to disseminate among them its sublime truths, appealing alike to mind and heart, partly to clarify and deepen those truths by assimilating the wisdom and culture of these very nations. Thus the spirit of separatism and of universalism work in opposite directions. Still, however hostile the two elements may appear, they emanate from the same source. For the Jewish people, unlike any other civilization of antiquity, entered history with the proud claim that it possessed a truth destined to become some day the property of mankind, and its three thousand years of history have verified this claim.

Israel's relation to the world thus became a double one. Its priestly world-mission gave rise to all those laws and customs which were to separate it from its idolatrous surroundings, and this occasioned the charge of hostility to the nations. The accusation of Jewish misanthropy occurred as early as the Balaam and Haman stories. As the separation continued through the centuries, a deep-seated Jew-hatred sprang up, first in Alexandria and Rome, then becoming a consuming fire throughout Christendom, unquenched through the ages and bursting forth anew, even from the midst of would-be liberals. In contrast to this, Israel's prophetic ideal of a humanity united in justice and peace gave to history a new meaning and a larger outlook, kindling in the souls of all truly great leaders and teachers, seers and sages of mankind a love and longing for the broadening of humanity which opened new avenues of progress and liberty. Moreover, by its conception of man as the image of God and its teaching of righteousness as the true path of life, Israel's Law established a new standard of human worth and put the imprint of Jewish idealism upon the entire Aryan civilization.

Owing to these two opposing forces, the one centripetal, the other centrifugal, Judaism tended now inward, away from world-culture, now outward toward the learning and the thought of all nations; and this makes it doubly difficult to obtain a true estimate of its character. But, after all, these very currents and counter-currents at the different eras of history kept Judaism in continuous tension and fluctuation, preventing its stagnation by dogmatic formulas and its division by ecclesiastical dissensions. “Both words are the words of the living God” became the maxim of the contending schools.[9]

4. If we now ask what period we may fix as the beginning of Judaism, we must by no means single out the decisive moment when Ezra the Scribe established the new commonwealth of Judæa, based upon the Mosaic book of Law, and excluding the Samaritans who claimed to be the heirs of ancient Israel. This important step was but the climax, the fruitage of that religious spirit engendered by the Judaism of the Babylonian exile. The Captivity had become a refining furnace for the people, making them cling with a zeal unknown before to the teachings of the prophets, now offered by their disciples, and to the laws, as preserved by the priestly guilds; so the religious treasures of the few became the common property of the many, and were soon regarded as “the inheritance of the whole congregation of Jacob.” As a matter of fact, Ezra represents the culmination rather than the starting point of the great spiritual reawakening, when he came from Babylon with a complete Code of Law, and promulgated it in the Holy City to a worshipful congregation.[10] It was Judaism, winged with a new spirit, which carried the great unknown seer of the Exile to the very pinnacle of prophetic vision, and made the Psalmists ring forth from the harp of David the deepest soul-stirring notes of religious [pg 011] devotion and aspiration that ever moved the hearts of men. Moreover, all the great truths of prophetic revelation, of legislative and popular wisdom, were then collected and focused, creating a sacred literature which was to serve the whole community as the source of instruction, consolation, and edification. The powerful and unique institutions of the Synagogue, intended for common instruction and devotion, are altogether creations of the Exile, and replaced the former priestly Torah by the Torah for the people. More wonderful still, the priestly lore of ancient Babylon was transformed by sublime monotheistic truths and utilized in the formation of a sacred literature; it was placed before the history of the Hebrew patriarchs, to form, as it were, an introduction to the Bible of humanity.

Judaism, then, far from being the late product of the Torah and tradition, as it is often considered, was actually the creator of the Law. Transformed and unfolded in Babylonia, it created its own sacred literature and shaped it ever anew, filling it always with its own spirit and with new thoughts. It is by no means the petrifaction of the Mosaic law and the prophetic teachings, as we are so often told, but a continuous process of unfolding and regeneration of its great religious truth.

5. True enough, traditional or orthodox Judaism does not share this view. The idea of gradual development is precluded by its conception of divine revelation, by its doctrine that both the oral and the written Torah were given at Sinai complete and unchangeable for all time. It makes allowance only for special institutions begun either by the prophets, by Ezra and the Men of the Great Synagogue, his associates, or by the masters of the Law in succeeding centuries. Nevertheless, tradition says that the Men of the Great Synagogue themselves collected and partly completed the sacred books, except the five books of Moses, and that the canon was made under the influence of the holy spirit. This holy spirit remained in force also during the creative period of Talmudism, [pg 012] sanctioning innovations or alterations of many kinds.[11] Modern critical and historical research has taught us to distinguish the products of different periods and stages of development in both the Biblical and Rabbinical sources, and therefore compels us to reject the idea of a uniform origin of the Law, and also of an uninterrupted chain of tradition reaching back to Moses on Sinai. Therefore we must attach still more importance to the process of transformation which Judaism had to undergo through the centuries.[12]

Judaism manifested its wondrous power of assimilation by renewing itself to meet the demands of the time, first under the influence of the ancient civilizations, Babylonia and Persia, then of Greece and Rome, finally of the Occidental powers, molding its religious truths and customs in ever new forms, but all in consonance with its own genius. It adopted the Babylonian and Persian views of the hereafter, of the upper and the nether world with their angels and demons; so later on it incorporated into its religious and legal system elements of Greek and Egyptian gnosticism, Greek philosophy, and methods of jurisprudence from Egypt, Babylon, and Rome. In fact, the various parties which arose during the second Temple beside each other or successively—Sadducees and Pharisees, Essenes and Zealots—represent, on closer observation, the different stages in the process of assimilation which Judaism had to undergo. In like manner, the Hellenistic, Apocryphal and Apocalyptic literature, which was rejected and lost to sight by traditional Judaism, and which partly fills the gap between the Bible and the Talmudic writings, casts a flood of light upon the development of the Halakah [pg 013] and the Haggadah. Just as the book of Ezekiel, which was almost excluded from the Canon on account of its divergence from the Mosaic Law, has been helpful in tracing the development of the Priestly Code,[13] so the Sadduceean book of Ben Sira[14] and the Zealotic book of Jubilees[15]—not to mention the various Apocalyptic works—throw their searchlight upon pre-Talmudic Judaism.

6. Instead of representing Judaism—as the Christian theologians do under the guise of scientific methods—as a nomistic religion, caring only for the external observance of the Law, it is necessary to distinguish two opposite fundamental tendencies; the one expressing the spirit of legalistic nationalism, the other that of ethical or prophetic universalism. These two work by turn, directing the general trend in the one or the other direction according to circumstances. At one time the center and focus of Israel's religion is the Mosaic Law, with its sacrificial cult in charge of the priesthood of Jerusalem's Temple; at another time it is the Synagogue, with its congregational devotion and public instruction, its inspiring song of the Psalmist and its prophetic consolation and hope confined to no narrow territory, but opened wide for a listening world. Here it is the reign of the Halakah holding fast to the form of tradition, and there the free and fanciful Haggadah, with its appeal to the sentiments and views of the people. Here it is the spirit of ritualism, bent on separating the Jews from the influence of foreign elements, and there again the spirit of rationalism, eager to take part in general culture and in the progress of the outside world.

The liberal views of Maimonides and Gersonides concerning [pg 014] miracle and revelation, God and immortality were scarcely shared by the majority of Jews, who, no doubt, sided rather with the mystics, and found their mouthpiece in Abraham ben David of Posquieres, the fierce opponent of Maimonides. An impartial Jewish theology must therefore take cognizance of both sides; it must include the mysticism of Isaac Luria and Sabbathai Horwitz as well as the rationalism of Albo and Leo da Modena. Wherever is voiced a new doctrine or a new view of life and life's duty, which yet bears the imprint of the Jewish consciousness, there the well-spring of divine inspiration is seen pouring forth its living waters.

7. Even the latest interpretation of the Law, offered by a disciple who is recognized for true conscientiousness in religion, was revealed to Moses on Sinai, according to a Rabbinical dictum.[16] Thus is exquisitely expressed the idea of a continuous development of Israel's religious truth. As a safeguard against arbitrary individualism, there was the principle of loyalty and proper regard for tradition, which is aptly termed by Professor Lazarus a “historical continuity.”[17] The Midrashic statement is quite significant that other creeds founded on our Bible can only adhere to the letter, but the Jewish religion possesses the key to the deeper meaning hidden and presented in the traditional interpretation of the Scriptures.[18] That is, for Judaism Holy Scripture in its literal sense is not the final word of God; the Bible is rather a living spring of divine revelation, to be kept ever fresh and flowing by the active force of the spirit. To sum up: Judaism, far from offering a system of beliefs and ceremonies fixed for all time, is as multifarious and manifold in its aspects as is life itself. It comprises all phases and characteristics of both a national and a world religion.

Chapter III. The Essence of the Religion of Judaism

1. We have seen how difficult it is to define Judaism clearly and adequately, including its manifold tendencies and institutions. Still it is necessary that we reach a full understanding of the essence of Judaism as it manifested itself in all periods of its history,[19] and that we single out the fundamental idea which underlies its various forms of existence and its different movements, both intellectual and spiritual. There can be no disputing the fact that the central idea of Judaism and its life purpose is the doctrine of the One Only and Holy God, whose kingdom of truth, justice and peace is to be universally established at the end of time. This is the main teaching of Scripture and the hope voiced in the liturgy; while Israel's mission to defend, to unfold and to propagate this truth is a corollary of the doctrine itself and cannot be separated from it. Whether we regard it as Law or a system of doctrine, as religious truth or world-mission, this belief pledged the little tribe of Judah to a warfare of many thousands of years against the hordes of heathendom with all their idolatry and brutality, their deification of man and their degradation of deity to human rank. It betokened a battle for the pure idea of God and man, which is not to end until the principle of divine holiness has done away with every form of life that tends to degrade and to disunite mankind, and until Israel's Only One has become the unifying power and the highest ideal of all humanity.

2. Of this great world-duty of Israel only the few will ever become fully conscious. As in the days of the prophets, so in later periods, only a “small remnant” was fully imbued with the lofty ideal. In times of oppression the great multitude of the people persisted in a conscientious observance of the Law and underwent suffering without a murmur. Yet in times of liberty and enlightenment this same majority often neglects to assimilate the new culture to its own superior spirit, but instead eagerly assimilates itself to the surrounding world, and thereby loses much of its intrinsic strength and self-respect. The pendulum of thought and sentiment swings to and fro between the national and the universal ideals, while only a few maturer minds have a clear vision of the goal as it is to be reached along both lines of development. Nevertheless, Judaism is in a true sense a religion of the people. It is free from all priestly tutelage and hierarchical interference. It has no ecclesiastical system of belief, guarded and supervised by men invested with superior powers. Its teachers and leaders have always been men from among the people, like the prophets of yore, with no sacerdotal privilege or title; in fact, in his own household each father is the God-appointed teacher of his children.[20]

3. Neither is Judaism the creation of a single person, either prophet or a man with divine claims. It points back to the patriarchs as its first source of revelation. It speaks not of the God of Moses, of Amos and Isaiah, but of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, thereby declaring the Jewish genius to be the creator of its own religious ideas. It is therefore incorrect to speak of a “Mosaic,” “Hebrew,” or “Israelitish,” religion. The name Judaism alone expresses the preservation of the religious heritage of Israel by the tribe of Judah, with a loyalty which was first displayed by Judah himself in the patriarchal household, and which became its characteristic [pg 017] virtue in the history of the various tribes. Likewise the rigid measures of Ezra in expelling all foreign elements from the new commonwealth proved instrumental in impressing loyalty and piety upon Jewish family life.

4. As it was bound up with the life of the Jewish people, Judaism remained forever in close touch with the world. Therefore it appreciated adequately the boons of life, and escaped being reduced to the shadowy form of “otherworldliness.”[21] It is a religion of life, which it wishes to sanctify by duty rather than by laying stress on the hereafter. It looks to the deed and the purity of the motive, not to the empty creed and the blind belief. Nor is it a religion of redemption, contemning this earthly life; for Judaism repudiates the assumption of a radical power of evil in man or in the world. Faith in the ultimate triumph of the good is essential to it. In fact, this perfect confidence in the final victory of truth and justice over all the powers of falsehood and wrong lent it both its wondrous intellectual force and its high idealism, and adorned its adherents with the martyr's crown of thorns, such as no other human brow has ever borne.

5. Christianity and Islam, notwithstanding their alienation from Judaism and frequent hostility, are still daughter-religions. In so far as they have sown the seeds of Jewish truth over all the globe and have done their share in upbuilding the Kingdom of God on earth, they must be recognized as divinely appointed emissaries and agencies. Still Judaism sets forth its doctrine of God's unity and of life's holiness in a far superior form than does Christianity. It neither permits the deity to be degraded into the sphere of the sensual and human, nor does it base its morality upon a love bereft of the vital principle of justice. Against the rigid monotheism of Islam, which demands blind submission to the stern decrees of inexorable fate, Judaism on the other hand urges its belief [pg 018] in God's paternal love and mercy, which educates all the children of men, through trial and suffering, for their high destiny.

6. Judaism denies most emphatically the right of Christianity or any other religion to arrogate to itself the title of “the absolute religion” or to claim to be “the finest blossom and the ripest fruit of religious development.” As if any mortal man at any time or under any condition could say without presumption: “I am the Truth” or “No one cometh unto the Father but by me.”[22] “When man was to proceed from the hands of his Maker,” says the Midrash, “the Holy One, Blessed be His name, cast truth down to the earth, saying, ‘Let truth spring forth from the earth, and righteousness look down from heaven.’ ”[23] The full unfolding of the religious and moral life of mankind is the work of countless generations yet to come, and many divine heralds of truth and righteousness have yet to contribute their share. In this work of untold ages, Judaism claims that it has achieved and is still achieving its full part as the prophetic world-religion. Its law of righteousness, which takes for its scope the whole of human life, in its political and social relations as well as its personal aspects, forms the foundation of its ethics for all time; while its hope for a future realization of the Kingdom of God has actually become the aim of human history. As a matter of fact, when the true object of religion is the hallowing of life rather than the salvation of the soul, there is little room left for sectarian exclusiveness, or for a heaven for believers and a hell for unbelievers. With this broad outlook upon life, Judaism lays claim, not to perfection, but to perfectibility; it has supreme capacity for growing toward the highest ideals of mankind, as beheld by the prophets in their Messianic visions.

Chapter IV. The Jewish Articles of Faith

1. In order to reach a clear opinion, whether or not Judaism has articles of faith in the sense of Church dogmas, a question so much discussed since the days of Moses Mendelssohn, it seems necessary first to ascertain what faith in general means to the Jew.[24] Now the word used in Jewish literature for faith is Emunah, from the root Aman, to be firm; this denotes firm reliance upon God, and likewise firm adherence to him, hence both faith and faithfulness. Both Scripture and the Rabbis demanded confiding trust in God, His messengers, and His words, not the formal acceptance of a prescribed belief.[25] Only when contact with the non-Jewish world emphasized the need for a clear expression of the belief in the unity of God, such as was found in the Shema,[26] and when the proselyte was expected to declare in some definite form the fundamentals of the faith he espoused, was the importance of a concrete confession felt.[27] Accordingly we find the beginnings of a formulated belief in the synagogal liturgy, in the Emeth we [pg 020] Yatzib[28] and the Alenu,[29] while in the Haggadah Abraham is represented both as the exemplar of a hero of faith and as the type of a missionary, wandering about to lead the heathen world towards the pure monotheistic faith.[30] While the Jewish concept of faith underwent a certain transformation, influenced by other systems of belief, and the formulation of Jewish doctrines appeared necessary, particularly in opposition to the Christian and Mohammedan creeds, still belief never became the essential part of religion, conditioning salvation, as in the Church founded by Paul. For, as pointed out above, Judaism lays all stress upon conduct, not confession; upon a hallowed life, not a hollow creed.

2. There is no Biblical nor Rabbinical precept, “Thou shalt believe!” Jewish thinkers felt all the more the need to point out as fundamentals or roots of Judaism those doctrines upon which it rests, and from which it derives its vital force. To the rabbis, the “root” of faith is the recognition of a divine Judge to whom we owe account for all our doings.[31] The recital of the Shema, which is called in the Mishnah “accepting the yoke of God's sovereignty,” and which is followed by the solemn affirmation, “True and firm belief is this for us”[32] (Emeth we Yatzib or Emeth we Emunah), is, in fact, the earliest form of the confession of faith.[33] In the course of time this confession of belief in the unity of God was no longer deemed sufficient to serve as basis for the whole structure of Judaism; so the various schools and authorities endeavored to work out in detail a series of fundamental doctrines.

3. The Mishnah, in Sanhedrin, X, 1, which seems to date back to the beginnings of Pharisaism, declares the following [pg 021] three to have no share in the world to come: he who denies the resurrection of the dead; he who says that the Torah—both the written and the oral Law—is not divinely revealed; and the Epicurean, who does not believe in the moral government of the world.[34] We find here (in reverse order, owing to historical conditions), the beliefs in Revelation, Retribution, and the Hereafter singled out as the three fundamentals of Rabbinical Judaism. Rabbi Hananel, the great North African Talmudist, about the middle of the tenth century, seems to have been under the influence of Mohammedan and Karaite doctrines, when he speaks of four fundamentals of the faith: God, the prophets, the future reward and punishment, and the Messiah.[35]

4. The doctrine of the One and Only God stands, as a matter of course, in the foreground. Philo of Alexandria, at the end of his treatise on Creation, singles out five principles which are bound up with it, viz.: 1, God's existence and His government of the world; 2, His unity; 3, the world as His creation; 4, the harmonious plan by which it was established; and 5, His Providence. Josephus, too, in his apology for Judaism written against Apion,[36] emphasizes the belief in God's all-encompassing Providence, His incorporeality, and His self-sufficiency as the Creator of the universe.

The example of Islam, which had very early formulated a confession of faith of speculative character for daily recitation,[37] influenced first Karaite and then Rabbanite teachers to elaborate the Jewish doctrine of One Only God into a philosophic creed. The Karaites modeled their creed after the Mohammedan pattern, which gave them ten articles of faith; of these the first three dwelt on: 1, creation out of nothing; 2, the existence of God, the Creator; 3, the unity and incorporeality of God.[38]

Abraham ben David (Ibn Daud) of Toledo sets forth in his “Sublime Faith” six essentials of the Jewish faith: 1, the existence; 2, the unity; 3, the incorporeality; 4, the omnipotence of God (to this he subjoins the existence of angelic beings); 5, revelation and the immutability of the Law; and 6, divine Providence.[39] Maimonides, the greatest of all medieval thinkers, propounded thirteen articles of faith, which took the place of a creed in the Synagogue for the following centuries, as they were incorporated in the liturgy both in the form of a credo (Ani Maamin) and in a poetic version. His first five articles were: 1, the existence; 2, the unity; 3, the incorporeality; 4, the eternity of God; and 5, that He alone should be the object of worship; to which we must add his 10th, divine Providence.[40] Others, not satisfied with the purely metaphysical form of the Maimonidean creed, accentuated the doctrines of creation out of nothing and special Providence.[41]

This speculative form of faith, however, has been most severely denounced by Samuel David Luzzatto (1800-1865) as “Atticism”;[42] that is, the Hellenistic or philosophic tendency to consider religion as a purely intellectual system, instead of the great dynamic force for man's moral and spiritual elevation. He holds that Judaism, as the faith transmitted to us from Abraham, our ancestor, must be considered, not as a mere speculative mode of reasoning, but as a moral life force, manifested in the practice of righteousness and brotherly love. Indeed, this view is supported by modern Biblical research, which brings out as the salient point in Biblical teaching the ethical character of the God taught by the prophets, and shows that the essential truth of revelation is not to be found in a metaphysical but in an ethical monotheism. At the same time, the fact must not be overlooked that the Jewish doctrine of God's unity was strengthened in the contest with the dualistic and trinitarian beliefs of other religions, and that this unity gave Jewish thought both lucidity and sublimity, so that it has surpassed other faiths in intellectual power and in passion for truth. The Jewish conception of God thus makes truth, as well as righteousness and love, both a moral duty for man and a historical task comprising all humanity.

5. The second fundamental article of the Jewish faith is divine revelation, or, as the Mishnah expresses it, the belief that the Torah emanates from God (min ha shamayim). In the Maimonidean thirteen articles, this is divided into four: his 6th, belief in the prophets; 7, in the prophecy of Moses as the greatest of all; 8, in the divine origin of the Torah, both the written and the oral Law; and 9, its immutability. The fundamental character of these, however, was contested [pg 024] by Hisdai Crescas and his disciples, Simon Duran and Joseph Albo.[43] As a matter of fact, they are based not so much upon Rabbinical teaching as upon the prevailing views of Mohammedan theology,[44] and were undoubtedly dictated by the desire to dispute the claims of Christianity and Islam that they represented a higher revelation. Our modern historical view, however, includes all human thought and belief; it therefore rejects altogether the assumption of a supernatural origin of either the written or the oral Torah, and insists that the subject of prophecy, revelation, and inspiration in general be studied in the light of psychology and ethnology, of general history and comparative religion.

6. The third fundamental article of the Jewish faith is the belief in a moral government of the world, which manifests itself in the reward of good and the punishment of evil, either here or hereafter. Maimonides divides this into two articles, which really belong together, his 10th, God's knowledge of all human acts and motives, and 11, reward and punishment. The latter includes the hereafter and the last Day of Judgment, which, of course, applies to all human beings.

7. Closely connected with retribution is the belief in the resurrection of the dead, which is last among the thirteen articles. This belief, which originally among the Pharisees had a national and political character, and was therefore connected especially with the Holy Land (as will be seen in Chapter [LIV] below), received in the Rabbinical schools more and more a universal form. Maimonides went so far as to follow the Platonic view rather than that of the Bible or the Talmud, and thus transformed it into a belief in the continuity of the soul after death. In this form, however, it is actually a postulate, or corollary, of the belief in retribution.

8. The old hope for the national resurrection of Israel took in the Maimonidean system the form of a belief in the coming of the Messiah (article 12), to which, in the commentary on the Mishnah, he gives the character of a belief in the restoration of the Davidic dynasty. Joseph Albo, with others, disputes strongly the fundamental character of this belief; he shows the untenability of Maimonides' position by referring to many Talmudic passages, and at the same time he casts polemical side glances upon the Christian Church, which is really founded on Messianism in the special form of its Christology.[45] Jehuda ha Levi, in his Cuzari, substitutes for this as a fundamental doctrine the belief in the election of Israel for its world-mission.[46] It certainly redounds to the credit of the leaders of the modern Reform movement that they took the election of Israel rather than the Messiah as their cardinal doctrine, again bringing it home to the religious consciousness of the Jew, and placing it at the very center of their system. In this way they reclaimed for the Messianic hope the universal character which was originally given it by the great seer of the Exile.[47]

9. The thirteen articles of Maimonides, in setting forth a Jewish Credo, formed a vigorous opposition to the Christian and Mohammedan creeds; they therefore met almost universal acceptance among the Jewish people, and were given a place in the common prayerbook, in spite of their deficiencies, as shown by Crescas and his school. Nevertheless, we must admit that Crescas shows the deeper insight into the nature of religion when he observes that the main fallacy of the Maimonidean system lies in founding the Jewish faith on speculative knowledge, which is a matter of the intellect, rather than love which flows from the heart, and which alone leads to piety and goodness. True love, he says, requires [pg 026] the belief neither in retribution nor in immortality. Moreover, in striking contrast to the insistence of Maimonides or the immutability of the Mosaic Law, Crescas maintains the possibility of its continuous progress in accordance with the intellectual and spiritual needs of the time, or, what amounts to the same thing, the continuous perfectibility of the revealed Law itself.[48] Thus the criticism of Crescas leads at once to a radically different theology than that of Maimonides, and one which appeals far more to our own religious thought.

10. Another doctrine of Judaism, which was greatly underrated by medieval scholars, and which has been emphasized in modern times only in contrast to the Christian theory of original sin, is that man was created in the image of God. Judaism holds that the soul of man came forth pure from the hand of its Maker, endowed with freedom, unsullied by any inherent evil or inherited sin. Thus man is, through the exercise of his own free will, capable of attaining to an ever higher degree his mental, moral, and spiritual powers in the course of history. This is the Biblical idea of God's spirit as immanent in man; all prophetic truth is based upon it; and though it was often obscured, this theory was voiced by many of the masters of Rabbinical lore, such as R. Akiba and others.[49]

11. Every attempt to formulate the doctrines or articles of faith of Judaism was made, in order to guard the Jewish faith from the intrusion of foreign beliefs, never to impose disputed beliefs upon the Jewish community itself. Many, indeed, challenged the fundamental character of the thirteen articles of Maimonides. Albo reduced them to three, viz.: the belief in God, in revelation, and retribution; others, with more arbitrariness than judgement, singled out three, five, six, or even more as principal doctrines;[50] while rigid conservatives, [pg 027] such as Isaac Abravanel and David ben Zimra, altogether disapproved the attempt to formulate articles of faith. The former maintained that every word in the Torah is, in fact, a principle of faith, and the latter[51] pointed in the same way to the 613 commandments of the Torah, spoken of by R. Simlai the Haggadist in the third century.[52]

The present age of historical research imposes the same necessity of restatement or reformulation upon us. We must do as Maimonides did,—as Jews have always done,—point out anew the really fundamental doctrines, and discard those which have lost their holdup on the modern Jew, or which conflict directly with his religious consciousness. If Judaism is to retain its prominent position among the powers of thought, and to be clearly understood by the modern world, it must again reshape its religious truths in harmony with the dominant ideas of the age.

Many attempts of this character have been made by modern rabbis and teachers, most of them founded upon Albo's three articles. Those who penetrated somewhat more deeply into the essence of Judaism added a fourth article, the belief in Israel's priestly mission, and at the same time, instead of the belief in retribution, included the doctrine of man's kinship with God, or, if one may coin the word, his God-childship.[53] Few, however, have succeeded in working out the entire content of the Jewish faith from a modern viewpoint, which must include historical, critical, and psychological research, as well as the study of comparative religion.

12. The following tripartite plan is that of the present attempt to present the doctrines of Judaism systematically along the lines of historical development:

I. God

a. Man's consciousness of God, and divine revelation.

b. God's spirituality, His unity, His holiness, His perfection.

c. His relation to the world: Creation and Providence.

d. His relation to man: His justice, His love and mercy.

II. Man

a. Man's God-childship; his moral freedom and yearning for God.

b. Sin and repentance; prayer and worship; immortality, reward and punishment.

c. Man and humanity: the moral factors in history.

III. Israel and the Kingdom of God

a. The priest-mission of Israel, its destiny as teacher and martyr among the nations, and its Messianic hope.

b. The Kingdom of God: the nations and religions of the world in a divine plan of universal salvation.

c. The Synagogue and its institutions.

d. The ethics of Judaism and the Kingdom of God.

Part I. God

A. God As He Makes Himself Known To Man

Chapter V. Man's Consciousness of God and Belief in God

1. Holy Writ employs two terms for religion, both of which lay stress upon its moral and spiritual nature: Yirath Elohim—“fear of God”—and Daath Elohim—“knowledge or consciousness of God.” Whatever the fear of God may have meant in the lower stages of primitive religion, in the Biblical and Rabbinical conceptions it exercises a wholesome moral effect; it stirs up the conscience and keeps man from wrongdoing. Where fear of God is lacking, violence and vice are rife;[54] it keeps society in order and prompts the individual to walk in the path of duty. Hence it is called “the beginning of wisdom.”[55] The divine revelation of Sinai accentuates as its main purpose “to put the fear of God into the hearts of the people, lest they sin.”[56]

2. God-consciousness, or “knowledge of God,” signifies an inner experience which impels man to practice the right and to shun evil, the recognition of God as the moral power of life. “Because there is no knowledge of God,” therefore do the people heap iniquity upon iniquity, says Hosea, and he hopes to see the broken covenant with the Lord renewed through [pg 030] faithfulness grounded on the consciousness of God.[57] Jeremiah also insists upon “the knowledge of God” as a moral force, and, like Hosea, he anticipates the renewal of the broken covenant when “the Lord shall write His law upon the heart” of the people, and “they shall all know Him from the least of them unto the greatest of them.”[58] Wherever Scripture speaks of “knowledge of God,”[59] it always means the moral and spiritual recognition of the Deity as life's inmost power, determining human conduct, and by no means refers to mere intellectual perception of the truth of Jewish monotheism, which is to refute the diverse forms of polytheism. This misconception of the term “knowledge of God,” as used in the Bible, led the leading medieval thinkers of Judaism, especially the school of Maimonides, and even down to Mendelssohn, into the error of confusing religion and philosophy, as if both resulted from pure reason. It is man's moral nature rather than his intellectual capacity, that leads him “to know God and walk in His ways.”[60]

3. It is mainly through the conscience that man becomes conscious of God. He sees himself, a moral being, guided by motives which lend a purpose to his acts and his omissions, and thus feels that this purpose of his must somehow be in accord with a higher purpose, that of a Power who directs and controls the whole of life. The more he sees purpose ruling individuals and nations, the more will his God-consciousness grow into the conviction that there is but One and Only God, who in awful grandeur holds dominion over the world. This is the developmental process of religious truth, as it is unfolded [pg 031] by the prophets and as it underlies the historic framework of the Bible. In this light Jewish monotheism appears as the ripe fruitage of religion in its universal as well as its primitive form of God-consciousness, as the highest attainment of man in his eternal seeking after God. Polytheism, on the other hand, with its idolatrous and immoral practices, appeared to the prophets and lawgivers of Israel to be, not a competing religion, but simply a falling away from God. They felt it to be a loss or eclipse of the genuine God-consciousness. The object of revelation, therefore, is to lead back all mankind to the God whom it had deserted, and to restore to all men their primal consciousness of God, with its power of moral regeneration.

4. In the same degree as this God-consciousness grows stronger, it crystallizes into belief in God, and culminates in love of God. As stated above,[61] in Judaism belief—Emunah—never denotes the acceptance of a creed. It is rather the confiding trust by which the frail mortal finds a firm hold on God amidst the uncertainties and anxieties of life, the search for His shelter in distress, the reliance on His ever-ready help when one's own powers fail. The believer is like a little child who follows confidingly the guidance of his father, and feels safe when near his arm. In fact, the double meaning of Emunah, faith and faithfulness, suggests man's child-like faith in the paternal faithfulness of God. The patriarch Abraham is presented in both Biblical and Rabbinical writings as the pattern of such a faith,[62] and the Jewish people likewise are characterized in the Talmud as “believers, sons of believers.”[63] The Midrash extols such life-cheering faith as the power which inspires true heroism and deeds of valor.[64]

5. The highest triumph of God-consciousness, however, is attained in love of God such as can renounce cheerfully all [pg 032] the boons of life and undergo the bitterest woe without a murmur. The book of Deuteronomy inculcates love of God as the beginning and the end of the Law,[65] and the rabbis declare it to be the highest type of human perfection. In commenting upon the verse, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy might,” they say: “Love the Law, even when thy life is demanded as its price, nay, even with the last breath of thy body, with a heart that has no room for dissent, amid every visitation of destiny!”[66] They point to the tragic martyrdom of R. Akiba as an example of such a love sealed by death. In like manner they refer the expression, “they that love Thee,”[67] to those who bear insults without resentment; who hear themselves abused without retort; who do good unselfishly, without caring for recognition; and who cheerfully suffer as a test of their fortitude and their love of God.[68] Thus throughout all Rabbinical literature love of God is regarded as the highest principle of religion and as the ideal of human perfection, which was exemplified by Job, according to the oldest Haggadah, and, according to the Mishnah, by Abraham.[69] Another interpretation of the verse cited from Deuteronomy reads, “Love God in such a manner that thy fellow-creatures may love Him owing to thy deeds.”[70]

All these passages and many others[71] show what a prominent place the principle of love occupied in Judaism. This is, indeed, best voiced in the Song of Songs:[72] “For love is strong as death; the flashes thereof are flashes of fire, a very [pg 033] flame of the Lord. Many waters cannot quench that love, neither can the floods drown it.” It set the heart of the Jew aglow during all the centuries, prompting him to sacrifice his life and all that was dear to him for the glorification of his God, to undergo for his faith a martyrdom without parallel in history.

Chapter VI. Revelation, Prophecy, and Inspiration

1. Divine revelation signifies two different things: first, God's self-revelation, which the Rabbis called Gilluy Shekinah, “the manifestation of the divine Presence,” and, second, the revelation of His will, for which they used the term Torah min ha Shamayim, “the Law as emanating from God.”[73] The former appealed to the child-like belief of the Biblical age, which took no offense at anthropomorphic ideas, such as the descent of God from heaven to earth, His appearing to men in some visible form, or any other miracle; the latter appears to be more acceptable to those of more advanced religious views. Both conceptions, however, imply that the religious truth of revelation was communicated to man by a special act of God.

2. Each creative act is a mystery beyond the reach of human observation. In all fields of endeavor the flashing forth of genius impresses us as the work of a mysterious force, which acts upon an elect individual or nation and brings it into close touch with the divine. In the religious genius especially is this true; for in him all the spiritual forces of the age seem to be energized and set into motion, then to burst forth into a new religious consciousness, which is to revolutionize religious thought and feeling. In a child-like age when the emotional life and the imagination predominate, and man's mind, still receptive, is overwhelmed by mighty visions, the Deity stirs the soul in some form perceptible to [pg 035] the senses. Thus the “seer” assumes a trance-like state where the Ego, the self-conscious personality, is pushed into the background; he becomes a passive instrument, the mouthpiece of the Deity; from Him he receives a message to the people, and in his vision he beholds God who sends him. This appearance of God upon the background of the soul, which reflects Him like a mirror, is Revelation.[74]

3. The states of the soul when men see such visions of the Deity predominate in the beginnings of all religions. Accordingly, Scripture ascribes such revelations to non-Israelites as well as to the patriarchs and prophets of Israel,—to Abimelek and Laban, Balaam, Job, and Eliphaz.[75] Therefore the Jewish prophet is not distinguished from the rest by the capability to receive divine revelation, but rather by the intrinsic nature of the revelation which he receives. His vision comes from a moral God. The Jewish genius perceived God as the moral power of life, whether in the form expressed by Abraham, Moses, Elijah, or by the literary prophets, and all of these, coming into touch with Him, were lifted into a higher sphere, where they received a new truth, hitherto [pg 036] hidden from man. In speaking through them, God appeared actually to have stepped into the sphere of human life as its moral Ruler. This self-revelation of God as the Ruler of man in righteousness, which must be viewed in the life of any prophet as a providential act, forms the great historical sequence in the history of Israel, upon which rests the Jewish religion.[76]

4. The divine revelation in Israel was by no means a single act, but a process of development, and its various stages correspond to the degrees of culture of the people. For this reason the great prophets also depended largely upon dreams and visions, at least in their consecration to the prophetic mission, when one solemn act was necessary. After that the message itself and its new moral content set the soul of the prophet astir. Not the vision or its imagery, but the new truth itself seizes him with irresistible force, so that he is carried away by the divine power and speaks as the mouthpiece of God, using lofty poetic diction while in a state of ecstacy. Hence he speaks of God in the first person. The highest stage of all is that where the prophet receives the divine truth in the form of pure thought and with complete self-consciousness. Therefore the Scripture says of Moses and of no other, “The Lord spoke to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to another.”[77]

5. The story of the giving of the Law on Mount Sinai is in reality the revelation of God to the people of Israel as part of the great world-drama of history. Accordingly, the chief emphasis is laid upon the miraculous element, the descent of the Lord to the mountain in fire and storm, amid thunder and lightning, while the Ten Words themselves were proclaimed [pg 037] by Moses as God's herald.[78] As a matter of fact, the first words of the narrative state its purpose, the consecration of the Jewish people at the outset of their history to be a nation of prophets and priests.[79] Therefore the rabbis lay stress upon the acceptance of the Law by the people in saying: “All that the Lord sayeth we shall do and hearken.”[80] From a larger point of view, we see here the dramatized form of the truth of Israel's election by divine Providence for its historic religious mission.

6. The rabbis ascribed the gifts of prophecy to pagans as well as Israelites at least as late as the erection of the Tabernacle, after which the Divine Presence dwelt there in the midst of Israel.[81] They say that each of the Jewish prophets was endowed with a peculiar spiritual power that corresponded with his character and his special training, the highest, of course, being Moses, whom they called “the father of the prophets.”[82]

The medieval Jewish thinkers, following the lead of Mohammedan philosophers or theologians, regard revelation quite differently, as an inner process in the mind of the prophet. According to their mystical or rationalistic viewpoint, they describe it as the result of the divine spirit, working upon the soul either from within or from without. These two standpoints betray either the Platonic or the Aristotelian influence.[83] Indeed, the rabbis themselves showed traces of neo-Platonism [pg 038] when they described the ecstatic state of the prophets, or when they spoke of the divine spirit speaking through the prophet as through a vocal instrument, or when they made distinctions between seeing the Deity “in a bright mirror” or “through a dark glass.”[84]

The view most remote from the simple one of the Bible is the rationalistic standpoint of Maimonides, who, following altogether in the footsteps of the Arabic neo-Aristotelians, assumed that there were different degrees of prophecy, depending upon the influence exerted upon the human intellect by the sphere of the Highest Intelligence. He enumerates eleven such grades, of which Moses had the highest rank, as he entered into direct communication with the supreme intellectual sphere. Still bolder is his explanation of the revelation on Sinai. He holds that the first two words were understood by the people directly as logical evidences of truth, for they enunciated the philosophical doctrines of the existence and unity of God, whereas the other words they understood only as sounds without meaning, so that Moses had to interpret them.[85] In contrast to this amazing rationalism of Maimonides is the view of Jehuda ha Levi, who asserts that the gift of prophecy became the specific privilege of the descendants of Abraham after their consecration as God's chosen people at Sinai, and that the holy soil of Palestine was assigned to them as the habitation best adapted to its exercise.[86] The other attempt of some rationalistic thinkers of the Middle Ages to have a “sound created for the purpose”[87] of uttering the words “I am the Lord thy God,” rather than accepting the anthropomorphic Deity, merits no consideration whatever.

7. It is an indisputable fact of history that the Jewish people, [pg 039] on account of its peculiar religious bent, was predestined to be the people of revelation. Its leading spirits, its prophets and psalmists, its law-givers and inspired writers differ from the seers, singers, and sages of other nations by their unique and profound insight into the moral nature of the Deity. In striking contrast is the progress of thought in Greece, where the awakening of the ethical consciousness caused a rupture between the culture of the philosophers and the popular religion, and led to a final decay of the political and social life. The prophets of Israel, however, the typical men of genius of their people, gradually brought about an advance of popular religion, so that they could finally present as their highest ideal the God of the fathers, and make the knowledge of His will the foundation of the law of holiness, by which they desired to regulate the entire conduct of man. Thus, religion was no longer confined by the limits of nationality, but was transformed into a spiritual force for all mankind, to lead through a revelation of the One and Holy God toward the highest morality.

8. The development of thought brought the God-seeking spirits to the desire to know His will, or, in Scriptural language, His ways, in order to attain holiness in their pursuit. The natural consequence was the gradual receding of the power of imagination which had made the enraptured seer behold God Himself in visions. As the Deity rose more and more above the realm of the visible, the newly conceived truth was realized as coming to the sacred writer through the spirit of God or an angel. Inspiration took the place of revelation. This, however, still implies a passive attitude of the soul carried away by the truth it receives from on high. This supernatural element disappears gradually and passes over into sober, self-conscious thought, in which the writer no longer thinks of God as the Ego speaking through him, but as an outside Power spoken of in the third person.

A still lower degree of inspiration is represented by those writings which lack altogether the divine afflatus, and to which is ascribed a share of the holy spirit only through general consensus of opinion. Often this imprint of the divine is not found in them by the calm judgment of a later generation, and the exact basis for the classification of such writings among the holy books is sometimes difficult to state. We can only conclude that in the course of time they were regarded as holy by that very spirit which was embodied in the Synagogue and its founders, “the Men of the Great Synagogue,” who in their work of canonizing the Sacred Scriptures were believed to have been under the influence of the holy spirit.[88]

9. Except for the five books of Moses, the idea of a mechanical inspiration of the Bible is quite foreign to Judaism. Not until the second Christian century did the rabbis finally decide on such questions as the inspiration of certain books among the Hagiographa or even among the Prophets, or whether certain books now excluded from the canon were not of equal rank with the canonical ones.[89] In fact, the influence of the holy spirit was for some time ascribed, not only to Biblical writers, but also to living masters of the law.[90] [pg 041] The fact is that divine influence cannot be measured by the yardstick or the calendar. Where it is felt, it bursts forth as from a higher world, creating for itself its proper organs and forms. The rabbis portray God as saying to Israel, “Not I in My higher realm, but you with your human needs fix the form, the measure, the time, and the mode of expression for that which is divine.”[91]

10. While Christianity and Islam, its daughter-religions, must admit the existence of a prior revelation, Judaism knows of none. It claims its own prophetic truth as the revelation, admits the title Books of Revelation (Bible) only for its own sacred writings, and calls the Jewish nation alone the People of Revelation. The Church and the Mosque achieved great things in propagating the truths of the Sinaitic revelation among the nations, but added to it no new truths of an essential nature. Indeed, they rather obscured the doctrines of God's unity and holiness. On the other hand, the people of the Sinaitic revelation looked to it with a view of ever revitalizing the dead letter, thus evolving ever new rules of life and new ideas, without ever placing new and old in opposition, as was done by the founder of the Church. Each generation was to take to heart the words of Scripture as if they had come “this very day” out of the mouth of the Lord.[92]

Chapter VII. The Torah—the Divine Instruction

1. During the Babylonian Exile the prophetic word became the source of comfort and rejuvenation for the Jewish people. Now in its place Ezra the Scribe made the Book of the Law of Moses the pivot about which the entire life of the people was to revolve. By regular readings from it to the assembled worshipers, he made it the source of common instruction. Instead of the priestly Law, which was concerned only with the regulation of the ritual life, the Law became the people's book of instruction, a Torah for all alike,[93] while the prophetic books were made secondary and were employed by the preacher at the conclusion of the service as “words of consolation.”[94] Upon the Pentateuch was built up the divine service of the Synagogue as well as the whole system of communal life, with both its law and ethics. The prophets and other sacred books were looked upon only as means of “opening up” or illustrating the contents of the Torah. These other parts of [pg 043] the Mikra (“the collection of books for public reading”) were declared to be inferior in holiness, so that, according to the Rabbinical rule, they were not even allowed to be put into the same scroll as the Pentateuch.[95] Moreover, neither the number, order, nor the division of the Biblical books was fixed. The Talmud gives 24, Josephus only 22.[96] Tradition claims a completely divine origin only for the Pentateuch or Torah, while the rabbis often point out the human element in the other two classes of the Biblical collection.[97]

2. The traditional belief in the divine origin of the Torah includes not only every word, but also the accepted interpretation of each letter, for both written and oral law are ascribed to the revelation to Moses on Mt. Sinai, to be transmitted thence from generation to generation. Whoever denies the divine origin of either the written or the oral law is declared to be an unbeliever who has no share in the world to come, according to the Tannaitic code, and consequently according to Maimonides[98] also. But here arises a question of vital importance: What becomes of the Torah as the divine foundation of Judaism under the study of modern times? Even conservative investigators, such as Frankel, Graetz, and Isaac Hirsch Weiss, not to mention such radicals as Zunz and Geiger, admit the gradual progress and growth of this very system of law, both oral and written. And if different historical conditions have produced the development [pg 044] of the law itself, we must assume a number of human authors in place of a single act of divine revelation.[99]

3. But another question of equal importance confronts us here, the meaning of Torah. Originally, no doubt, Torah signified the instruction given by the priests on ritual or juridical matters. Out of these decisions arose the written laws (Toroth), which the priesthood in the course of time collected into codes. After a further process of development they appeared as the various books of Moses, which were finally united into the Code or Torah. This Torah was the foundation of the new Judean commonwealth, the “heritage of the congregation of Jacob.”[100] The priestly Torah, lightly regarded during the prophetic period, was exalted by post-exilic Judaism, so that the Sadducean priesthood and their successors, the rabbis, considered strict observance of the legal form to be the very essence of religion. Is this, then, the true nature of Judaism? Is it really—as Christian theologians have held ever since the days of Paul, the great antagonist of Judaism—mere nomism, a religion of law, which demanded formal compliance with its statutes without regard to their inner value? Or shall we rather follow Rabbi Simlai, the Haggadist, who first enumerated the 613 commandments of the Torah (mandatory and prohibitive), considering that their one aim is the higher moral law, in that they are all summed up by a few ethical principles, which he finds in the 15th Psalm, Isaiah XXXIII, 15; Micah VI, 8; Isaiah LVI, 1; and Amos V, 4?[101]

4. All these questions have but one answer, a reconciling one, Judaism has the two factors, the priest with his regard for the law and the prophet with his ethical teaching; and the Jewish Torah embodies both aspects, law and doctrine. [pg 045] These two elements became more and more correlated, as the different parts of the Pentateuch which embodied them were molded together into the one scroll of the Law. In fact, the prophet Jeremiah, in denouncing the priesthood for its neglect of the principles of justice, and rebuking scathingly the people for their wrongdoing, pointed to the divine law of righteousness as the one which should be written upon the hearts of men.[102] Likewise, in the book of Deuteronomy, which was the product of joint activity by prophet and priest, the Law was built upon the highest moral principle, the love of God and man. In a still larger sense the Pentateuch as a whole contains priestly law and universal religion intertwined. In it the eternal verities of the Jewish faith, God's omnipotence, omniscience, and moral government of the world, are conveyed in the historical narratives as an introduction to the law.

5. Thus the Torah as the expression of Judaism was never limited to a mere system of law. At the outset it served as a book of instruction concerning God and the world and became ever richer as a source of knowledge and speculation, because all knowledge from other sources was brought into relation with it through new modes of interpretation. Various systems of philosophy and theology were built upon it. Nay more, the Torah became divine Wisdom itself,[103] the architect of the Creator, the beginning and end of creation.[104]

While the term Torah thus received an increasingly comprehensive meaning, the rabbis, as exponents of orthodox Judaism, came to consider the Pentateuch as the only book of revelation, [pg 046] every letter of which emanated directly from God. The other books of the Bible they regarded as due only to the indwelling of the holy spirit, or to the presence of God, the Shekinah. Moreover, they held that changes by the prophets and other sacred writers were anticipated, in essentials, in the Torah itself, and were therefore only its expansions and interpretations. Accordingly, they are frequently quoted as parts of the Torah or as “words of tradition.”[105]

6. Orthodox Judaism, then, accepted as a fundamental doctrine the view that both the Mosaic Law and its Rabbinical interpretation were given by God to Moses on Mt. Sinai. This viewpoint is contradicted by all our knowledge and our whole mode of thinking, and thus both our historical and religious consciousness constrain us to take the position of the prophets. To them and to us the real Torah is the unwritten moral law which underlies the precepts of both the written law and its oral interpretation. From this point of view, Moses, as the first of the prophets, becomes the first mediator of the divine legislation, and the original Decalogue is seen to be the starting point of a long process of development, from which grew the laws of righteousness and holiness that were to rule the life of Israel and of mankind.[106]

7. The time of composition of the various parts of the Pentateuch, including the Decalogue, must be decided by independent critical and historical research. It is sufficient for us to know that since the time of Ezra the foundation of [pg 047] Judaism has been the completed Torah, with its twofold aspect as law and as doctrine. As law it contributed to the marvelous endurance and resistance of the Jewish people, inasmuch as it imbued them with the proud consciousness of possessing a law superior to that of other nations, one which would endure as long as heaven and earth.[107] Furthermore, it permeated Judaism with a keen sense of duty and imprinted the ideal of holiness upon the whole of life. At the same time it gave rise also to ritualistic piety, which, while tenaciously clinging to the traditional practice of the law, fostered hair-splitting casuistry and caused the petrifaction of religion in the codified Halakah. As doctrine it impressed its ethical and humane idealism upon the people, lifting them far above the narrow confines of nationality, and making them a nation of thinkers. Hence their eagerness for their mission to impart the wisdom stored in their writings to all humanity as its highest boon and the very essence of divine wisdom.

Chapter VIII. God's Covenant

1. Judaism has one specific term for religion, representing the moral relation between God and man, namely, Berith, covenant. The covenant was concluded by God with the patriarchs and with Israel by means of sacrificial blood, according to the primitive custom by which tribes or individuals became “blood brothers,” when they were both sprinkled with the sacrificial blood or both drank of it.[108] The first covenant of God was made after the flood, with Noah as the representative of mankind; it was intended to assure him and all coming generations of the perpetual maintenance of the natural order without interruption by flood, and at the same time to demand of all mankind the observance of certain laws, such as not to shed, or eat, blood. Here at the very beginning of history religion is taken as the universal basis of human morality, so developing at the outset the fundamental principle of Judaism that it rests upon a religion of humanity, which it desires to establish in all purity. As the universal idea of man forms thus its beginning, so Judaism will attain its final goal only in a divine covenant comprising all humanity. Both the rabbis and the Hellenistic writers consider the covenant of Noah with its so-called Noahitic commandments as unwritten laws of humanity. In fact, they are referred to Adam also, so that religion appears in its [pg 049] essence as nothing else than a covenant of God with all mankind.[109]

2. Accordingly, Judaism is a special basis of relationship between God and Israel. Far from superseding the universal covenant with Noah, or confining it to the Jewish people, this covenant aims to reclaim all members of the human family for the wider covenant from which they have relapsed. God chose for this purpose Abraham as the one who was faithful to His moral law, and made a special covenant with him for all his descendants, that they might foster justice and righteousness, at first within the narrow sphere of the nation, and then in ever-widening circles of humanity.[110] Yet the covenant with Abraham was only the precursor of the covenant concluded with Israel through Moses on Mt. Sinai, by which the Jewish people were consecrated to be the eternal guardians of the divine covenant with mankind, until the time when it shall encompass all the nations.[111]

3. In this covenant of Sinai, referred to by the prophet Elijah, and afterward by many others, the free moral relationship of man to God is brought out; this forms the characteristic feature of a revealed religion in contradistinction to natural religion. In paganism the Deity formed an inseparable part of the nation itself; but through the covenant God became a free moral power, appealing for allegiance to the spiritual nature of man. This idea of the covenant suggested to the prophet Hosea the analogy with the conjugal relation,[112] a conception of love and loyalty which became typical of the tender relation of God to Israel through the centuries. In days of direst woe Jeremiah and the book of [pg 050] Deuteronomy invested this covenant with the character of indestructibility and inviolability.[113] God's covenant with Israel is everlasting like that with the heaven and the earth; it is ever to be renewed in the hearts of the people, but never to be replaced by a new covenant. Upon this eternal renewal of the covenant with God rests the unique history of Judaism, its wondrous preservation and regeneration throughout the ages. Paul's doctrine of a new covenant to replace the old[114] conflicts with the very idea of the covenant, and even with the words of Jeremiah.

4. The Israelitish nation inherited from Abraham, according to the priestly Code, the rite of circumcision as a “sign of the covenant,”[115] but under the prophetic influence, with its loathing of all sacrificial blood, the Sabbath was placed in the foreground as “the sign between God and Israel.”[116] In ancient Israel and in the Judean commonwealth the Abrahamitic rite formed the initiation into the nationality for aliens and slaves, by which they were made full-fledged Jews. With the dispersion of the Jewish people over the globe, and the influence of Hellenism, Judaism created a propaganda in favor of a world-wide religion of “God-fearing” men pledged to the observance of the Noahitic or humanitarian laws. Rabbinism in Palestine called such a one Ger Toshab—sojourner, or semi-proselyte; while the full proselyte who accepted the Abrahamitic rite was called Ger Zedek, or proselyte of righteousness.[117] Not only the Hellenistic writings, but also the Psalms, the liturgy, and the older Rabbinical literature [pg 051] give evidence of such a propaganda,[118] but it may be traced back as far as Deutero-Isaiah, during the reign of Cyrus. His outlook toward a Jewish religion which should be at the same time a religion of all the world, is evident when he calls Israel “a mediator of the covenant between God and the nations,” a “light to the peoples,”—a regenerator of humanity.[119]

5. This hope of a universal religion, which rings through the Psalms, the Wisdom books and the Hellenistic literature, was soon destined to grow faint. The perils of Judaism in its great struggles with the Syrian and Roman empires made for intense nationalism, and the Jewish covenant shared this tendency. The early Christian Church, the successor of the missionary activity of Hellenistic Judaism, labored also at first for the Noahitic covenant.[120] Pauline Christianity, however, with a view to tearing down the barrier between Jew and Gentile, proclaimed a new covenant, whose central idea is belief in the atoning power of the crucified son of God.[121] Indeed, one medieval Rabbinical authority holds that we are to regard Christians as semi-proselytes, as they practically observe the Noahitic laws of humanity.[122]

6. Progressive Judaism of our own time has the great task of re-emphasizing Israel's world-mission and of reclaiming for Judaism its place as the priesthood of humanity. It is to proclaim anew the prophetic idea of God's covenant with humanity, whose force had been lost, owing to inner and outer obstacles. Israel, as the people of the covenant, aims to unite all nations and classes of men in the divine covenant. It must outlast all other religions in its certainty that ultimately there can be but the one religion, uniting God and man by a single bond.[123]

B. The Idea Of God In Judaism

Chapter IX. God and the Gods

1. Judaism centers upon its sublime and simple conception of God. This lifts it above all other religions and satisfies in unique measure the longing for truth and inner peace amidst the futility and incessant changes of earthly existence. This very conception of God is in striking contrast to that of most other religions. The God of Judaism is not one god among many, nor one of many powers of life, but is the One and holy God beyond all comparison. In Him is concentrated all power and the essence of all things; He is the Author of all existence, the Ruler of life, who lays down the laws by which man shall live. As the prophet says to the heathen world: “The gods that have not made the heavens and the earth, these shall perish from the earth and from under the heavens.... Not like these is the portion of Jacob; for He is the Former of all things.... The Lord is the true God; He is the living God and the everlasting King; at His wrath the earth trembleth, and the nations are not able to abide His indignation.”[124]

2. This lofty conception of the Deity forms the essence of Judaism and was its shield and buckler in its lifelong contest with the varying forms of heathenism. From the very first the God of Judaism declared war against them all, whether at [pg 053] any special time the prevailing form was the worship of many gods, or the worship of God in the shape of man, the perversion of the purity of God by sensual concepts, or the division of His unity into different parts or personalities. The Talmudic saying is most striking: “From Sinai, the Mount of revelation of the only God, there came forth Sinah, the hostility of the nations toward the Jew as the banner-bearer of the pure idea of God.”[125] Just as day and night form a natural contrast, divinely ordained, so do the monotheism of Israel and the polytheism of the nations constitute a spiritual contrast which can never be reconciled.

3. The pagan gods, and to some extent the triune God of the Christian Church, semi-pagan in origin also, are the outcome of the human spirit's going astray in its search for God. Instead of leading man upwards to an ideal which will encompass all material and moral life and lift it to the highest stage of holiness, paganism led to depravity and discord. The unrelenting zeal displayed by prophet and law-giver against idolatry had its chief cause in the immoral and inhuman practices of the pagan nations—Canaan, Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon—in the worship of their deities.[126] The deification of the forces of nature brutalized the moral sense of the pagan world; no vice seemed too horrible, no sacrifice too atrocious for their cults. Baal, or Moloch, the god of heaven, demanded in times of distress the sacrifice of a son by the father. Astarte, the goddess of fecundity, required the “hallowing” of life's origin, and this was done by the most terrible of sexual orgies. Such abominations exerted their seductive influence upon the shepherd tribes of Israel in their new home in Canaan, and thus aroused the fiercest indignation of prophet and law-giver, who hurled their vials of wrath against those shocking rites, those lewd idols, and those who [pg 054] “whored after them.”[127] If Israel was to be trained to be the priest people of the Only One in such an environment, tolerance of such practices was out of the question. Thus in the Sinaitic law God is spoken of as “the jealous God”[128] who punishes unrelentingly every violation of His laws of purity and holiness.

4. The same sharp contrast of Jewish ethical and spiritual monotheism remained also when it came in contact with the Græco-Syrian and Roman culture. Here, too, the myths and customs of the cult and the popular religion offended by their gross sensuality the chaste spirit of the Jewish people. Indeed, these were all the more dangerous to the purity of social life, as they were garbed with the alluring beauty of art and philosophy.[129] The Jew then felt all the more the imperative duty to draw a sharp line of demarcation between Judaism with its chaste and imageless worship and the lascivious, immoral life of paganism.

5. This wide gulf which yawned between Israel's One and holy God and the divinities of the nations was not bridged over by the Christian Church when it appeared on the stage of history and obtained world-dominion. For Christianity in its turn succeeded by again dragging the Deity into the world of the senses, adopting the pagan myths of the birth and death of the gods, and sanctioning image worship. In this way it actually created a Christian plurality of gods in place of the Græco-Roman pantheon; indeed, it presented a divine family after the model of the Egyptian and Babylonian religions,[130] and thus pushed the ever-living God and Father of mankind into the background. This tendency has never been [pg 055] explained away, even by the attempts of certain high-minded thinkers among the Church fathers. Judaism, however, insists, as ever, upon the words of the Decalogue which condemn all attempts to depict the Deity in human or sensual form, and through all its teachings there is echoed forth the voice of Him who spoke through the seer of the Exile: “I am the Lord, that is My name, and My glory will I not give to another, neither My praise to graven images.”[131]

6. When Moses came to Pharaoh saying, “Thus speaketh JHVH the God of Israel, send off My people that they may serve Me,” Pharaoh—so the Midrash tells—took his list of deities to hand, looked it over, and said, “Behold, here are enumerated the gods of the nations, but I cannot find thy God among them.” To this Moses replied, “All the gods known and familiar to thee are mortal, as thou art; they die, and their tomb is shown. The God of Israel has nothing in common with them. He is the living, true, and eternal God who created heaven and earth; no people can withstand His wrath.”[132] This passage states strikingly the difference between the God of Judaism and the gods of heathendom. The latter are but deified powers of nature, and being parts of the world, themselves at one with nature, they are subject to the power of time and fate. Israel's God is enthroned above the world as its moral and spiritual Ruler, the only Being whom we can conceive as self-existent, as indivisible as truth itself.

7. As long as the pagan conception prevailed, by which the world was divided into many divine powers, there could be no conception of the idea of a moral government of the universe, of an all-encompassing purpose of life. Consequently [pg 056] the great thinkers and moralists of heathendom were forced to deny the deities, before they could assert either the unity of the cosmos or a design in life. On the other hand, it was precisely this recognition of the moral nature of God, as manifested both in human life and in the cosmic sphere, which brought the Jewish prophets and sages to their pure monotheism, in which they will ultimately be met by the great thinkers of all lands and ages. The unity of God brings harmony into the intellectual and moral world; the division of the godhead into different powers or personalities leads to discord and spiritual bondage. Such is the lesson of history, that in polytheism, dualism, or trinitarianism one of the powers must necessarily limit or obscure another. In this manner the Christian Trinity led mankind in many ways to the lowering of the supreme standard of truth, to an infringement on justice, and to inhumanity to other creeds, and therefore Judaism could regard it only as a compromise with heathenism.

8. Judaism assumed, then, toward paganism an attitude of rigid exclusion and opposition which could easily be taken for hostility. This prevailed especially in the legal systems of the Bible and the rabbis, and was intended primarily to guard the monotheistic belief from pagan pollution and to keep it intact. Neither in the Deuteronomic law nor in the late codes of Maimonides and Joseph Caro is there any toleration for idolatrous practices, for instruments of idol-worship, or for idolaters.[133] This attitude gave the enemies of the Jew sufficient occasion for speaking of the Jewish God as hating the world, as if only national conceit underlay the earnest rigor of Jewish monotheism.

9. As a matter of fact, since the time of the prophets Judaism has had no national God in any exclusive sense. While the Law insists upon the exclusive worship of the one God of [pg 057] Israel, the narratives of the beginnings in the Bible have a different tenor. They take the lofty standpoint that the heathen world, while worshiping its many divinities, had merely lost sight of the true God after whom the heart ever longs and searches. This implies that a kernel of true piety underlies all the error and delusion of paganism, which, rightly guided, will lead back to the God from whom mankind had strayed. The Godhead, divided into gods—as is hinted even in the Biblical name, Elohim—must again become the one God of humanity. Thus the Jew holds that all worship foreshadows the search for the true God, and that all humanity shall at one time acknowledge Him for whom they have so long been searching. Surely the Psalms express, not national narrowness, but ardent love for humanity when they hail the God of Israel, the Maker of heaven and earth, as the world's great King, and tell how He will judge the nations in justice, while the gods of the nations will be rejected as “vanities.”[134] Nor does the divine service of the Jew bear the stamp of clannishness. For more than two thousand years the central point in the Synagogue liturgy every morning and evening has been the battle-cry, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” And so does the conclusion of every service, the Alenu, the solemn prayer of adoration, voice the grand hope of the Jew for the future, that the time may speedily come when “before the kingdom of Almighty all idolatry shall vanish, and all the inhabitants of the earth perceive that unto Him alone every knee must bend, and all flesh recognize Him alone as God and King.”[135]

Chapter X. The Name of God

1. Primitive men attached much importance to names, for to them the name of a thing indicated its nature, and through the name one could obtain mastery over the thing or person named. Accordingly, the name of God was considered to be the manifestation of His being; by invoking it man could obtain some of His power; and the place where that name was called became the seat of His presence. Therefore the name must be treated with the same reverential awe as the Deity Himself. None dare approach the Deity, nor misuse the Name. The pious soul realized the nearness of the Deity in hearing His name pronounced. Finally, the different names of God reflect the different conceptions of Him which were held in various periods.[136]

2. The Semites were not like the Aryan nations, who beheld the essence of their gods in the phenomena of nature such as light, rain, thunder, and lightning,—and gave them corresponding names and titles. The more intense religious emotionalism of the Semites[137] perceived the Godhead rather as a power working from within, and accordingly gave it such names as El (“the Mighty One”), Eloha or Pahad (“the Awful One”), or Baal (“the Master”). Elohim, the plural form of Eloha, denoted originally the godhead as divided into a number of gods or godly beings, that is, polytheism. When [pg 059] it was applied to God, however, it was generally understood as a unity, referring to one undivided Godhead, for Scripture regarded monotheism as original with mankind. While this view is contradicted by the science of comparative religion, still the ideal conception of religion, based on the universal consciousness of God, postulates one God who is the aim of all human searching, a fact which the term Henotheism fails to recognize.[138]

3. For the patriarchal age, the preliminary stage in the development of the Jewish God-idea, Scripture gives a special name for God, El Shaddai—“the Almighty God.” This probably has a relation to Shod, “storm” or “havoc” and “destruction,” but was interpreted as supreme Ruler over the celestial powers.[139] The name by which God revealed Himself to Moses and the prophets as the God of the covenant with Israel is JHVH (Jahveh). This name is inseparably connected with the religious development of Judaism in all its loftiness and depth. During the period of the Second Temple this name was declared too sacred for utterance, except by the priests in certain parts of the service, and for mysterious use by specially initiated saints. Instead, Adonai—“the Lord”—was substituted for it in the Biblical reading, a usage which has continued for over two thousand years. The meaning of the name in pre-Mosaic times may be inferred from the fiery storms which accompanied each theophany in the various Scriptural passages, as well as from the root havah, which means “throw down” and “overthrow.”[140]

To the prophets, however, the God of Sinai, enthroned amid clouds of storm and fire, moving before His people in war and peace, appeared rather as the God of the Covenant, without image or form, unapproachable in His holiness. As the original meaning of JHVH had become unintelligible, they interpreted the name as “the ever present One,” in the sense of Ehyeh asher Ehyeh, “I shall be whatever (or wherever) I am to be”; that is, “I am ever ready to help.” Thus spoke God to Moses in revealing His name to him at the burning bush.[141]

4. The prophetic genius penetrated more and more into the nature of God, recognising Him as the Power who rules in justice, mercy, and holiness. This process brought them to identify JHVH, the God of the covenant, with the One and only God who overlooks all the world from his heavenly habitation, and gives it plan and purpose. At the same time, all the prophets revert to the covenant on Sinai in order to proclaim Israel as the herald and witness of God among the nations. In fact, the God of the covenant proclaimed His universality at the very beginning, in the introduction to the Decalogue: “Ye shall be Mine own peculiar possession from among all peoples, for all the earth is Mine. And ye shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”[142] In other words,—you have the special task of mediator among the nations, all of which are under My dominion.

5. In the Wisdom literature and the Psalms the God of the covenant is subordinated to the universality of JHVH as Creator and Ruler of the world. In a number of the Psalms and in some later writings the very name JHVH was avoided probably on account of its particularistic tinge. It was surrounded more and more with a certain mystery. Instead, God as the “Lord” is impressed on the consciousness and adoration of men, in all His sublimity and in absolute unity. [pg 061] The “Name” continues its separate existence only in the mystic lore. The name Jehovah, however, has no place whatsoever in Judaism. It is due simply to a misreading of the vowel signs that refer to the word Adonai, and has been erroneously adopted in the Christian literature since the beginning of the sixteenth century.[143]

6. Perhaps the most important process of spiritualization which the idea of God underwent in the minds of the Jewish people was made when the name JHVH as the proper name of the God of the covenant was given up and replaced by Adonai—“the Lord.” As long as the God of Israel, like other deities, had His proper name, he was practically one of them, however superior in moral worth. As soon as He became the Lord, that is, the only real God over all the world, a distinctive proper noun was out of place. Henceforth the name was invested with a mysterious and magic character. It became ineffable, at least to the people at large, and its pronunciation sinful, except by the priests in the liturgy. In fact, the law was interpreted so as directly to forbid this utterance.[144] Thus JHVH is no longer the national God of Israel. The Talmud guards against the very suspicion of a “Judaized God” by insisting that every benediction to Him as “God the Lord” must add “King of the Universe” rather than the formula of the Psalms, “God of Israel.”[145]

7. The Midrash makes a significant comment on the words of the Shema: “Why do the words, ‘the Lord is our God’ precede the words, ‘the Lord is One’? Does not the particularism of the former conflict with the universalism of the latter sentence? No. The former expresses the idea that the Lord is ‘our God’ just so far as His name is more intertwined [pg 062] with our history than with that of any other nation, and that we have the greater obligation as His chosen people. Wherever Scripture speaks of the God of Israel, it does not intend to limit Him as the universal God, but to emphasize Israel's special duty as His priest-people.”[146]

8. Likewise is the liturgical name “God of our fathers” far from being a nationalistic limitation. On the contrary, the rabbis single out Abraham as the missionary, the herald of monotheism in its march to world-conquest. For his use of the term, “the God of heaven and the God of the earth”[147] they offer a characteristic explanation: “Before Abraham came, the people worshiped only the God of heaven, but Abraham by winning them for his God brought Him down and made Him also the God of the earth.”[148]

9. Reverence for the Deity caused the Jew to avoid not only the utterance of the holy Name itself, but even the common use of its substitute Adonai. Therefore still other synonyms were introduced, such as “Master of the universe,” “the Holy One, blessed be He,” “the Merciful One,” “the Omnipotence” (ha Geburah),[149] “King of the kings of kings” (under Persian influence—as the Persian ruler called himself the King of Kings);[150] and in Hasidean circles it became customary to invoke God as “our Father” and “our Father in heaven.”[151] The rather strange appellations for God, “Heaven”[152] and (dwelling) “Place” (ha Makom) seem to originate in certain formulas of the oath. In the latter name the rabbis even found hints of God's omnipresence: “As space—Makom—encompasses all things, so does God encompass the world instead of being encompassed by it.”[153]

10. The rabbis early read a theological meaning into the two names JHVH and Elohim, taking the former as the divine attribute of mercy and the latter as that of justice.[154] In general, however, the former name was explained etymologically as signifying eternity, “He who is, who was, and who shall be.” Philo shows familiarity with the two attributes of justice and mercy, but he and other Alexandrian writers explained JHVH and Ehyeh metaphysically, and accordingly called God, “the One who is,” that is, the Source of all existence. Both conceptions still influence Jewish exegesis and account for the term “the Eternal” sometimes used for “the Lord.”

Chapter XI. The Existence of God

1. For the religious consciousness, God is not to be demonstrated by argument, but is a fact of inner and outer experience. Whatever the origin and nature of the cosmos may be according to natural science, the soul of man follows its natural bent, as in the days of Abraham, to look through nature to the Maker, Ordainer, and Ruler of all things, who uses the manifold world of nature only as His workshop, and who rules it in freedom as its sovereign Master. The entire cosmic life points to a Supreme Being from whom all existence must have arisen, and without whom life and process would be impossible. Still even this mode of thought is influenced and determined by the prevalent monotheistic conceptions.

Far more original and potent in man is the feeling of limitation and dependency. This brings him to bow down before a higher Power, at first in fear and trembling, but later in holy awe and reverence. As soon as man attains self-consciousness and his will acquires purpose, he encounters a will stronger than his own, with which he often comes into conflict, and before which he must frequently yield. Thus he becomes conscious of duty—of what he ought and ought not to do. This is not, like earlier limitations, purely physical and working from without; it is moral and operates from within. It is the sense of duty, or, as we call it, conscience, the sense of right and wrong. This awakened very early in the race, [pg 065] and through it God's voice has been perceived ever since the days of Adam and of Cain.[155]

2. According to Scripture, man in his natural state possesses the certainty of God's existence through such inner experience. Therefore the Bible contains no command to believe in God, nor any logical demonstration of His existence. Both the Creation stories and those of the beginnings of mankind assume as undisputed the existence of God as the Creator and Judge of the world. Arguments appealing to reason were resorted to only in competition with idolatry, as in Deuteronomy, Jeremiah, and Deutero-Isaiah, and subsequently by the Haggadists in legends such as those about Abraham. Nor does the Bible consider any who deny the existence of God;[156] only much later, in the Talmud, do we hear of those who “deny the fundamental principle” of the faith. The doubt expressed in Job, Koheleth, and certain of the Psalms, concerns rather the justice of God than His existence. True, Jeremiah and the Psalms[157] mention some who say “There is no God,” but these are not atheists in our sense of the word; they are the impious who deny the moral order of life by word or deed. It is the villain (Nabal), not the “fool” who “says in heart, there is no God.” Even the Talmud does not mean the real atheist when speaking of “the denier of the fundamental principle,” but the man who says, “There is neither a judgment nor a Judge above and beyond.”[158] In other words, the “denier” is the same as the Epicurean (Apicoros), who refuses to recognize the moral government of the world.[159]

3. After the downfall of the nation and Temple, the situation changed through the contemptuous question of the [pg 066] nations, “Where is your God?” Then the necessity became evident of proving that the Ruler of nations still held dominion over the world, and that His wondrous powers were shown more than ever before through the fact of Israel's preservation in captivity. This is the substance of the addresses of the great seer of the Exile in chapters XL to LIX of Isaiah, in which he exposes the gods of heathendom to everlasting scorn, more than any other prophet before or afterward. He declares these deities to be vanity and naught, but proclaims the Holy One of Israel as the Lord of the universe. He hath “meted out the heavens with the span,” and “weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance.” Before Him “the nations are as a drop of the bucket,” and “the inhabitants of the earth as grasshoppers.” “He bringeth out the hosts of the stars by number, and calleth them all by name,” “He hath assigned to the generations of men their lot from the beginning, and knoweth at the beginning what will be their end.”[160] Measured by such passages as these and such as Psalms VIII, XXIV, XXXIII, CIV, and CXXXIX, where God is felt as a living power, all philosophical arguments about His existence seem to be strange fires on the altar of religion. The believer can do without them, and the unbeliever will hardly be convinced by them.

4. Upon the contact of the Jew with Greek philosophy doubt arose in many minds, and belief entered into conflict with reason. But even then, the defense of the faith was still carried on by reasoning along the lines of common sense.[161] Thus the regularity of the sun, moon, and stars,—all worshiped by the pagans as deities—was considered a proof of God's omnipotence and rule of the universe, a proof which the legend ascribes to Abraham in his controversy with Nimrod.[162] In like manner, the apocryphal Book of Wisdom[163] [pg 067] says that true wisdom, as opposed to the folly of heathenism, is “to reason from the visible to the Invisible One, and from the cosmos, the great work of art, to the Supreme Artificer.”

5. Philo was the first who tried to refute the “atheistic” views of materialists and pantheists by adducing proofs of God's existence from nature and the human intellect. In the former he pointed out order as evidence of the wisdom underlying the cosmos, and in the latter the power of self-determination as shadowing forth a universal mind which determines the entire universe.[164] Still, with his mystical attitude, Philo realized that the chief knowledge of God is through intuition, by the inner experience of the soul.

6. Two proofs taken from nature owe their origin to Greek philosophy. Anaxagoras and Socrates, from their theory of design in nature, deduced that there is a universal intelligence working for higher aims and purposes. This so-called teleological proof, as worked out in detail by Plato, was the unfailing reliance of subsequent philosophers and theologians.[165] Plato and Aristotle, moreover, from the continuous motion of all matter, inferred a prime cause, an unmoved mover. This is the so-called cosmological proof, used by different schools in varying forms.[166] It occupies the foremost place in the systems of the Arabic Aristotelians, and consequently is dominant among the Jewish philosophers, the Christian scholastics, and in the modern philosophic schools down to Kant. It is based upon the old principle of causality, and therefore takes the mutability and relativity of all beings in the cosmos as evidence of a Being that is immutable, unconditioned, and absolutely necessary, causa sui, the prime cause of all existence.

7. The Mohammedan theologians added a new element to the discussion. In their endeavor to prove that the world is the work of a Creator, they pointed as evidence to the multiformity and composite structure, the contingency and dependency of the cosmos; thus they concluded that it must have been created, and that its Creator must necessarily be the one, absolute, and all-determining cause. This proof is used also by Saadia and Bahya ben Joseph.[167] Its weakness, however, was exposed by Ibn Sina and Alfarabi among the Mohammedans, and later by Abraham ibn Daud and Maimonides, their Jewish successors as Aristotelians. These proposed a substitute argument. From the fact that the existence of all cosmic beings is merely possible,—that is, they may exist and they may not exist,—these thinkers concluded that an absolutely necessary being must exist as the cause and condition of all things, and this absolutely unconditioned yet all-conditioning being is God, the One who is.[168] Of course, the God so deduced and inferred is a mere abstraction, incapable of satisfying the emotional craving of the heart.

8. While the cosmological proof proceeds from the transitory and imperfect nature of the world, the ontological proof, first proposed by Anselm of Canterbury, the Christian scholastic of the XI century, and further elaborated by Descartes and Mendelssohn, proceeds from the human intellect. The mind conceives the idea of God as an absolutely perfect being, and, as there can be no perfection without existence, the conclusion is that this idea must necessarily be objectively true. Then, as the idea of God is innate in man, God must necessarily exist,—and for proof of this they point to the Scriptural verse, “The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God,” [pg 069] and other similar passages. In its improved form, this argument uses the human concept of an infinitely perfect God as evidence, or, at least, as postulate that such a Being exists beyond the finite world of man.[169]

Another argument, rather naïve in character, which was favored by the Stoics and adopted by the Church fathers, is called de consensu gentium, and endeavored to prove the reality of God's existence from the universality of His worship. It speaks well for the sound reasoning of the Jewish thinkers that they refused to follow the lead of the Mohammedans in this respect, and did not avail themselves of an argument which can be used just as easily in support of a plurality of gods.[170]

9. All these so-called proofs were invalidated by Immanuel Kant, the great philosopher of Königsberg, whose critical inquiry into the human intellect showed that the entire sum of our knowledge of objects and also of the formulation of our ideas is based upon our limited mode of apperception, while the reality or essence, “the thing in itself,” will ever remain beyond our ken. If this is true of physical objects, it is all the more true of God, whom we know through our minds alone and not at all through our five senses. Accordingly, he shows that all the metaphysical arguments have no basis, and that we can know God's existence only through ethics, as a postulate of our moral nature. The inner consciousness of our moral obligation, or duty, implies a moral order of life, or moral law; and this, in turn, postulates the existence of God, the Ruler of life, who assigns to each of us his task and his destiny.[171]

10. It is true that God is felt and worshiped first as the supreme power in the world, before man perceives Him as [pg 070] the highest ideal of morality. Therefore man will never cease looking about him for vestiges of divinity and for proofs of his intuitive knowledge of God. The wondrous order, harmony, and signs of design in nature, as well as the impulse of the reason to search for the unity of all things, corroborate this innate belief in God. Still more do the consciousness of duty in the individual—conscience—and the progress of history with its repeated vindication of right and defeat of wrong proclaim to the believer unmistakably that the God of justice reigns. But no proof, however convincing, will ever bring back to the skeptic or unbeliever the God he has lost, unless his pangs of anguish or the void within fill his desolate world anew with the vivifying thought of a living God.

11. Among all the Jewish religious philosophers the highest rank must be accorded to Jehudah ha Levi, the author of the Cuzari,[172] who makes the historical fact of the divine revelation the foundation of the Jewish religion and the chief testimony of the existence of God. As a matter of fact, reason alone will not lead to God, except where religious intuition forms, so to speak, the ladder of heaven, leading to the realm of the unknowable. Philosophy, at best, can only demonstrate the existence of a final Cause, or of a supreme Intelligence working toward sublime purposes; possibly also a moral government of the world, in both the physical and the spiritual life. Religion alone, founded upon divine revelation, can teach man to find a God, to whom he can appeal in trust in his moments of trouble or of woe, and whose will he can see in the dictates of conscience and the destiny of nations. Reason must serve as a corrective for the contents of revelation, scrutinizing and purifying, deepening and spiritualizing ever anew the truths received through intuition, but it can never be the final source of truth.

12. The same method must apply also to modern thought and research, which substituted historical methods for metaphysics in both the physical and intellectual world, and which endeavors to trace the origin and growth of both objects and ideas in accordance with fixed laws. The process of evolution, our modern key with which to unlock the secrets of nature, points most significantly to a Supreme Power and Energy. But this energy, entering into the cosmic process at its outset, causing its motion and its growth, implies also an end, and thus again we have the Supreme Intelligence reached through a new type of teleology.[173] But all these conceptions, however they may be in harmony with the Jewish belief in creation and revelation, can at best supplement it, but can certainly neither supplant nor be identified with it.

Chapter XII. The Essence of God

1. An exquisite Oriental fable tells of a sage who had been meditating vainly for days and weeks on the question, What is God? One day, walking along the seashore, he saw some children busying themselves by digging holes in the sand and pouring into them water from the sea. “What are you doing there?” he asked them, to which they replied, “We want to empty the sea of its water.” “Oh, you little fools,” he exclaimed with a smile, but suddenly his smile vanished in serious thought. “Am I not as foolish as these children?” he said to himself. “How can I with my small brain hope to grasp the infinite nature of God?”

All efforts of philosophy to define the essence of God are futile. “Canst thou by searching find out God?” Zophar asks of his friend Job.[174] Both Philo and Maimonides maintain that we can know of God only that He is; we can never fathom His innermost being or know what He is. Both find this unknowability of God expressed in the words spoken to Moses: “If I withdraw My hand, thou shall see My back—that is, the effects of God's power and wisdom—but My face—the real essence of God—thou shalt not see.”[175]

2. Still, a divinity void of all essential qualities fails to satisfy the religious soul. Man demands to know what God is—at least, what God is to him. In the first word of the [pg 073] Decalogue God speaks through His people Israel to the religious consciousness of all men at all times, beginning, “I am the Lord, thy God.” This word I lifts God at once above all beings and powers of the cosmos, in fact, above all other existence, for it expresses His unique self-consciousness. This attribute above all is possessed by no being in the world of nature, and only by man, who is the image of his Maker. According to the Midrash, all creation was hushed when the Lord spoke on Sinai, “I am the Lord.”[176] God is not merely the supreme Being, but also the supreme Self-consciousness. As man, in spite of all his limitations and helplessness, still towers high above all his fellow creatures by virtue of his free will and self-conscious action, so God, who knows no bounds to His wisdom and power, surpasses all beings and forces of the universe, for He rules over all as the one completely self-conscious Mind and Will. In both the visible and invisible realms He manifests Himself as the absolutely free Personality, moral and spiritual, who allots to every thing its existence, form, and purpose. For this reason Scripture calls Him “the living God and everlasting King.”[177]

3. Judaism, accordingly, teaches us to recognize God, above all, as revealing Himself in self-conscious activity, as determining all that happens by His absolutely free will, and thus as showing man how to walk as a free moral agent. In relation to the world, His work or workshop, He is the self-conscious Master, saying “I am that which I am”; in relation to man, who is akin to Him as a self-conscious rational and moral being, He is the living Fountain of all that knowledge and spirituality for which men long, and in which alone they may find contentment and bliss.

Thus the God of Judaism, the world's great I Am, forms a complete contrast, not only to the lifeless powers of nature and destiny, which were worshiped by the ancient pagans, [pg 074] but also to the God of modern paganism, a God divested of all personality and self-consciousness, such as He is conceived of by the new school of Christian theology, with its pantheistic tendency. I refer to the school of Ritschl, which strives to render the myth of the man-god philosophically intelligible by teaching that God reaches self-consciousness only in the perfect type of man, that is, Christ, while otherwise He is entirely immanent, one with the world. All the more forcibly does Jewish monotheism insist upon its doctrine that God, in His continual self-revelation, is the supermundane and self-conscious Ruler of both nature and history. “I am the Lord, that is My name, and My glory will I not give to another,”—so says the God of Judaism.[178]

4. The Jewish God-idea, of course, had to go through many stages of development before it reached the concept of a transcendental and spiritual god. It was necessary first that the Decalogue and the Book of the Covenant prohibit most stringently polytheism and every form of idolatry, and second that a strictly imageless worship impress the people with the idea that Israel's God was both invisible and incorporeal.[179] Yet a wide step still intervened from that stage to the complete recognition of God as a purely spiritual Being, lacking all qualities perceptible to the senses, and not resembling man in either his inner or his outer nature. Centuries of gradual ripening of thought were still necessary for the growth of this conception. This was rendered still more difficult by the Scriptural references to God in His actions and His revelations, and even in His motives, after a human pattern. Israel's sages required centuries of effort to remove all anthropomorphic and anthropopathic notions of God, and thus to elevate Him to the highest realm of spirituality.[180]

5. In this process of development two points of view demand consideration. We must not overlook the fact that the perfectly clear distinction which we make between the sensory and the spiritual does not appeal to the child-like mind, which sees it rather as external. What we call transcendent, owing to our comprehension of the immeasurable universe, was formerly conceived only as far remote in space or time. Thus God is spoken of in Scripture as dwelling in heaven and looking down upon the inhabitants of the earth to judge them and to guide them.[181] According to Deuteronomy, God spoke from heaven to the people about Mt. Sinai, while Exodus represents Him as coming down to the mountain from His heavenly heights to proclaim the law amid thunder and lightning.[182] The Babylonian conception of heaven prevailed throughout the Middle Ages and influenced both the mystic lore about the heavenly throne and the philosophic cosmology of the Aristotelians, such as Maimonides. Yet Scripture offers also another view, the concept of God as the One enthroned on high, whom “the heavens and the heaven's heavens cannot encompass.”[183]

The fact is that language still lacked an expression for pure spirit, and the intellect freed itself only gradually from the restrictions of primitive language to attain a purer conception of the divine. Thus we attain deeper insight into the spiritual nature of God when we read the inimitable words of the Psalmist describing His omnipresence,[184] or that other passage: “He that planted the ear, shall He not hear? He that formed the eye, shall He not see? He that chastiseth the nations, shall He not correct, even He that teaches man knowledge?”[185]

The translators and interpreters of the Bible felt the need of eliminating everything of a sensory nature from God and [pg 076] of avoiding anthropomorphism, through the influence of Greek philosophy. This spiritualization of the God idea was taken up again by the philosophers of the Spanish-Arabic period, who combated the prevailing mysticism. Through them Jewish monotheism emphasized its opposition to every human representation of God, especially the God-Man of the Christian Church.

6. On the other hand, we must bear in mind that we naturally ascribe to God a human personality, whether we speak of Him as the Master-worker of the universe, as the all-seeing and all-hearing Judge, or the compassionate and merciful Father. We cannot help attributing human qualities and emotions to Him the moment we invest Him with a moral and spiritual nature. When we speak of His punitive justice, His unfailing mercy, or His all-wise providence, we transfer to Him, imperceptibly, our own righteous indignation at the sight of a wicked deed, or our own compassion with the sufferer, or even our own mode of deliberation and decision. Moreover, the prophets and the Torah, in order to make God plain to the people, described Him in vivid images of human life, with anger and jealousy as well as compassion and repentance, and also with the organs and functions of the senses,—seeing, hearing, smelling, speaking, and walking.

7. The rabbis are all the more emphatic in their assertions that the Torah merely intends to assist the simple-minded, and that unseemly expressions concerning Deity are due to the inadequacy of language, and must not be taken literally.[186] “It is an act of boldness allowed only to the prophets to measure the Creator by the standard of the creature,” says the Haggadist, and again, “God appeared to Israel, now as a heroic warrior, now as a venerable sage imparting knowledge, and again as a kind dispenser of bounties, but always in a [pg 077] manner befitting the time and circumstance, so as to satisfy the need of the human heart.”[187] This is strikingly illustrated in the following dialogue: “A heretic came to Rabbi Meir asking, ‘How can you reconcile the passage which reads, “Do I not fill heaven and earth, says the Lord,” with the one which relates that the Lord appeared to Moses between the cherubim of the ark of the covenant?’ Whereupon Rabbi Meir took two mirrors, one large and the other small, and placed them before the interrogator. ‘Look into this glass,’ he said, ‘and into that. Does not your figure seem different in one than in the other? How much more will the majesty of God, who has neither figure nor form, be reflected differently in the minds of men! To one it will appear according to his narrow view of life, and to the other in accordance with his larger mental horizon.’ ”[188]

In like manner Rabbi Joshua ben Hanania, when asked sarcastically by the Emperor Hadrian to show him his God, replied: “Come and look at the sun which now shines in the full splendor of noonday! Behold, thou art dazzled. How, then, canst thou see without bewilderment the majesty of Him from whom emanates both sun and stars?”[189] This rejoinder, which was familiar to the Greeks also, is excelled by the one of Rabban Gamaliel II to a heathen who asked him “Where does the God dwell to whom you daily pray?” “Tell me first,” he answered, “where does your soul dwell, which is so close to thee? Thou canst not tell. How, then, can I inform thee concerning Him who dwells in heaven, and whose throne is separated from the earth by a journey of 3500 years?” “Then do we not do better to pray to gods who are near at hand, and whom we can see with our eyes?” [pg 078] continued the heathen, whereupon the sage struck home, “Well, you may see your gods, but they neither see nor help you, while our God, Himself unseen, yet sees and protects us constantly.”[190] The comparison of the invisible soul to God, the invisible spirit of the universe, is worked out further in the Midrash to Psalm CIII.

8. From the foregoing it is clear that, while Judaism insists on the Deity's transcending all finite and sensory limitations, it never lost the sense of the close relationship between man and his Maker. Notwithstanding Christian theologians to the contrary, the Jewish God was never a mere abstraction.[191] The words, “I am the Lord thy God,” betoken the intimate relation between the redeemed and the heavenly Redeemer, and the song of triumph at the Red Sea, “This is my God, I will extol Him,” testifies—according to the Midrash—that even the humblest of God's chosen people were filled with the feeling of His nearness.[192] In the same way the warm breath of union with God breathes through all the writings, the prayers, and the whole history of Judaism. “For what great nation is there that hath God so nigh unto them as the Lord our God is, whenever we call upon Him?” exclaims Moses in Deuteronomy, and the rabbis, commenting upon the plural form used here, Kerobim, = “nigh,” remark: “God is nigh to everyone in accordance with his special needs.”[193]

9. Probably the rabbis were at their most profound mood in their saying, “God's greatness lies in His condescension, as may be learned from the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings. To quote only Isaiah also: ‘Thus saith the High and [pg 079] Lofty One, I dwell in high and holy places, with him that is of a contrite and humble spirit.’[194] For this reason God selected as the place of His revelation the humble Sinai and the lowly thornbush.”[195] In fact, the absence of any mediator in Judaism necessitates the doctrine that God—with all His transcendent majesty—is at the same time “an ever present helper in trouble,”[196] and that His omnipotence includes care for the greatest and the smallest beings of creation.[197]

10. The doctrine that God is above and beyond the universe, transcending all created things, as well as time and space, might lead logically to the view of the deist that He stands outside of the world, and does not work from within. But this inference has never been made even by the boldest of Jewish thinkers. The Psalmist said, “Who is like the Lord our God, that hath His seat on high, that humbleth Himself to behold what is in heaven and on earth?”[198]—words which express the deepest and the loftiest thought of Judaism. Beside the all-encompassing Deity no other divine power or personality can find a place. God is in all; He is over all; He is both immanent and transcendent. His creation was not merely setting into motion the wheels of the cosmic fabric, after which He withdrew from the world. The Jew praises Him for every scent and sight of nature or of human life, for the beauty of the sea and the rainbow, for every flash of lightning that illumines the darkened clouds and every peal of thunder that shakes the earth. On every such occasion the Jew utters praise to “Him who daily renews the work of creation,” or “Him who in everlasting faithfulness keepeth His covenant with mankind.” Such is the teaching of the men of the Great Synagogue,[199] and the charge of the Jewish [pg 080] God idea being a barren and abstract transcendentalism can be urged only by the blindness of bigotry.[200]

11. The interweaving of the ideas of God's immanence and transcendency is shown especially in two poems embodied in the songs of the Synagogue, Ibn Gabirol's “Crown of Royalty” and the “Songs of Unity” for each day of the week, composed by Samuel ben Kalonymos, the father of Judah the Pious of Regensburg. Here occur such sentences as these: “All is in God and God is in all”; “Sufficient unto Himself and self-determining, He is the ever-living and self-conscious Mind, the all-permeating, all-impelling, and all-accomplishing Will”; “The universe is the emanation of the plenitude of God, each part the light of His infinite light, flame of His eternal empyrean”; “The universe is the garment, the covering of God, and He the all-penetrating Soul.”[201] All these ideas were borrowed from neo-Platonism, and found a conspicuous place in Ibn Gabirol's philosophy, later influencing the Cabbalah.

Similarly the appellation, Makom, “Space,” is explained by both Philo and the rabbis as denoting “Him who encompasses the world, but whom the world cannot encompass.”[202] An utterance such as this, well-nigh pantheistic in tone, leads directly to theories like those of Spinoza or of David Nieto, the well-known London Rabbi, who was largely under Spinozistic influence[203] and who still was in accord with Jewish thought. Certainly, as long as Jewish monotheism conceives of God as self-conscious Intellect and freely acting Will, it can easily accept the principle of divine immanence.

12. We accept, then, the fact that man, child-like, invests God with human qualities,—a view advanced by Abraham [pg 081] ben David of Posquieres in opposition to Maimonides.[204] Still, the thinkers of Judaism have ever labored to divest the Deity of every vestige of sensuousness, of likeness to man, in fact, of every limitation to action or to free will. Every conception which merges God into the world or identifies Him with it and thus makes Him subject to necessity, is incompatible with the Jewish idea of God, which enthrones Him above the universe as its free and sovereign Master. “Am I a God near at hand, saith the Lord, and not a God afar off? Can any hide himself in secret places that I shall not see him? saith the Lord. Do I not fill heaven and earth?”[205] “To whom will you liken Me, that I should be equal?”[206]

Chapter XIII. The One and Only God

1. From the very beginning no Jewish doctrine was so firmly proclaimed and so heroically defended as the belief in the One and Only God. This constitutes the essence and foundation of Judaism. However slowly the people learned that there could be no gods beside the One God, and that consequently all the pagan deities were but “naught and vanity,” the Judaism of the Torah starts with the proclamation of the Only One, and later Judaism marches through the nations and ages of history with a never-silent protest against polytheism of every kind, against every division of the Godhead into parts, powers, or persons.

2. It is perfectly clear that divine pedagogy could not well have demanded of a people immature and untrained in religion, like Israel in the wilderness period, the immediate belief in the only one God and in none else. Such a belief is the result of a long mental process; it is attained only after centuries of severe struggle and crisis. Instead of this, the Decalogue of Sinai demanded of the people that they worship only the God of the Covenant who had delivered them from Egypt to render them His people.[207] But, as they yielded more and more to the seductive worship of the gods of the Canaanites and their other neighbors, the law became more rigid in prohibiting such idolatrous practices, and the prophets poured forth their unscathing wrath against the “stiff-necked people” [pg 083] and endeavored by unceasing warnings and threats to win them for the pure truth of monotheism.[208]

3. The God of Sinai proclaims Himself in the Decalogue as a “jealous God,” and not in vain. He cannot tolerate other gods beside Himself. Truth can make no concession to untruth, nor enter into any compromise with it without self-surrender. A pagan religion could well afford to admit foreign gods into its pantheon without offending the ruling deities of the land. On the contrary, their realm seemed rather to be enlarged by the addition. It was also easy to blend the cults of deities originally distinct and unite many divinities under a composite name, and by this process create a system of worship which would either comprise the gods of many lands or even merge them into one large family. This was actually the state of the various pagan religions at the time of the decline of antiquity. But such a procedure could never lead towards true monotheism. It lacks the conception of an inner unity, without which its followers could not grasp the true idea of God as the source and essence of all life, both physical and spiritual. Only the One God of revelation made the world really one. In Him alone heaven and earth, day and night, growth and decay, the weal and woe of individuals and nations, appear as the work of an all-ruling Power and Wisdom, so that all events in nature and history are seen as parts of one all-comprising plan.[209]

4. It is perfectly true that a wide difference of view exists between the prohibition of polytheism and idolatry in the Decalogue and the proclamation in Deuteronomy of the unity of God, and, still more, between the law of the Pentateuch and the prophetic announcement of the day when Israel's [pg 084] God “shall be King of the whole earth, and His name shall be One.”[210] Yet Judaism is based precisely upon this higher view. The very first pages of Genesis, the opening of the Torah, as well as the exilic portions of Isaiah which form the culmination of the prophets, and the Psalms also, prove sufficiently that at their time monotheism was an axiom of Judaism. In fact, heathenism had become synonymous with both image-worship and belief in many gods beside the Only One of Israel, and accordingly had lost all hold upon the Jewish people. The heathen gods were given a place in the celestial economy, but only as subordinate rulers or as the guardian angels of the nations, and always under the dominion of God on high.[211]

5. Later, in the contest against Græco-Egyptian paganism, the doctrine of God's unity was emphasized in the Alexandrian propaganda literature, of which only a portion has been preserved for us. Here antagonism in the most forcible form is expressed against the delusive cults of paganism, and exclusive worship claimed for “the unseen, yet all-seeing God, the uncreated Creator of the world.”[212] The Rabbinical Haggadah contains but dim reminiscences of the extensive propaganda carried on previous to Hillel, the Talmudic type of the propagandist. Moreover, this period fostered free inquiry and philosophical discussion, and therefore the doctrine of unity emerged more and more from simple belief to become a matter of reason. The God of truth put to flight the gods of falsehood. Hence many gentiles espoused the cause of Judaism, becoming “God-fearing men.”[213]

6. In this connection it seems necessary to point out the difference between the God of the Greek philosophers—Xenophanes and Anaxagoras, Plato and Aristotle—and the God of the Bible. In abandoning their own gods, the Greek [pg 085] philosophers reached a deistic view of the cosmos. As their study of science showed them plan and order everywhere, they concluded that the universe is governed by an all-encompassing Intelligence, a divine power entirely distinct from the capricious deities of the popular religion. Reflection led them to a complete rupture with their religious belief. The Biblical belief in God underwent a different process. After God had once been conceived of, He was held up as the ideal of morality, including both righteousness and holiness. Then this doctrine was continuously elucidated and deepened, until a stage was reached where a harmony could be established between the teachings of Moses and the wisdom of Plato and Aristotle. To the noble thinkers of Hellas truth was an object of supreme delight, the highest privilege of the sage. To the adherents of Judaism truth became the holiest aim of life for the entire people, for which all were taught to battle and to die, as did the Maccabean heroes and Daniel and his associates, their prototypes.

7. A deeper meaning was attached to the doctrine of God's unity under Persian rule, in contact with the religious system of Zoroaster. To the Persians life was a continual conflict between the principles of good and of evil, until the ultimate victory of good shall come. This dualistic view of the world greatly excels all other heathen religious systems, insofar as it assigns ethical purpose to the whole of life. Yet the great seer of the Exile opposes this system in the name of the God of Judaism, speaking to Cyrus, the king of Persia; “I am the Lord and there is none else; beside Me there is no God. I will gird thee, though thou dost not know Me, in order that the people shall know from the rising of the sun and from the west that there is none beside Me. I form the light and create darkness; I make peace and also create evil, I am the Lord that doeth these things.”[214] This declaration of pure [pg 086] monotheism is incompatible with dualism in both the physical and the moral world; it regards evil as being mere semblance without reality, an opposing force which can be overcome and rendered a source of new strength for the victory of the good. “Out of the mouth of the Most High cometh there not the evil and the good?”[215]

8. The division of the world into rival realms of good and evil powers, of angelic and demoniacal forces, which originated in ancient Chaldea and underlies the Zoroastrian dualism, finally took hold of Judaism also. Still this was not carried to such an extent that Satan, the supreme ruler of the demon world, was given a dominion equal to that of God, or interfering with it, so as to impair thereby the principle of monotheism, as was done by the Church later on. As a matter of fact, at the time of nascent Christianity the leaders of the Synagogue took rigid measures against those heretics (Minim) who believed in two divine powers,[216] because they recognized the grave danger of moral degeneracy in this Gnostic dualism. In the Church it led first to the deification of Christ (i.e. the Messiah) as the vanquisher of Satan; afterwards, owing to a compromise with heathenism, the Trinity was adopted to correspond with the three-fold godhead,—father, mother, and son,—the place of the mother deity being taken by the Holy Ghost, which was originally conceived as a female power (the Syrian Ruha being of the feminine gender).[217]

9. The churchmen have attempted often enough to harmonize the dualism or trinitarianism of Christianity with the monotheism of the Bible. Still Judaism persists in considering such an infringement upon the belief in Israel's one and only God as really a compromise with heathenism. “A [pg 087] Jew is he who opposes every sort of polytheism,” says the Talmud.[218]

10. The medieval Jewish thinkers therefore made redoubled efforts to express with utmost clearness the doctrine of God's unity. In this effort they received special encouragement from the example of the leaders of Islam, whose victorious march over the globe was a triumph for the one God of Abraham over the triune God of Christianity. A great tide of intellectual progress arose, lending to the faith of the Mohammedans and subsequently also to that of the Jews an impetus which lasted for centuries. The new thought and keen research of that period had a lasting influence upon the whole development of western culture. An alliance was effected between religion and philosophy, particularly by the leading Jewish minds, which proved a liberating and stimulating force in all fields of scientific investigation. Thus the pure idea of monotheism became the basis for modern science and the entire modern world-view.[219]

11. The Mohammedan thinkers devoted their attention chiefly to elucidating and spiritualizing the God idea, beginning as early as the third century of Islamism, so to interpret the Koran as to divest God of all anthropomorphic attributes and to stress His absolute unity, uniqueness, and the incomparability of His oneness. Soon they became familiar with neo-Platonic and afterward with Aristotelian modes of speculation through the work of Syrian and Jewish translators. With the help of these they built up a system of theology which influenced Jewish thought also, first in Karaite and then in Rabbanite circles.[220] Thus sprang up successively the philosophical systems of Saadia, Jehuda ha Levi, Ibn Gabirol, Bahya, Ibn Daud, and Maimonides. The philosophical hymns and the articles of faith, both of which found a place in the liturgy [pg 088] of the Synagogue, were the work of their followers. The highest mode of adoring God seemed to be the elaboration of the idea of His unity to its logical conclusion, which satisfied the philosophical mind, though often remote from the understanding of the multitude. For centuries the supreme effort of Jewish thought was to remove Him from the possibility of comparison with any other being, and to abolish every conception which might impair His absolute and simple unity. This mental activity filled the dwellings of Israel with light, even when the darkness of ignorance covered the lands of Christendom, dispelled only here and there by rays of knowledge emanating from Jewish quarters.[221]

12. The proofs of the unity of God adduced by Mohammedan and Jewish thinkers were derived from the rational order, design, and unity of the cosmos, and from the laws of the mind itself. These aided in endowing Judaism with a power of conviction which rendered futile the conversionist efforts of the Church, with its arguments and its threats. Israel's only One proved to be the God of truth, high and holy to both the mind and the heart. The Jewish masters of thought rendered Him the highest object of their speculation, only to bow in awe before Him who is beyond all human ken; the Jewish martyrs likewise cheerfully offered up their lives in His honor; and thus all hearts echoed the battle-cry of the centuries, “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One,” and all minds were illumined by the radiant hope, “The Lord will be King of the earth; on that day the Lord shall be One, and His name shall be One.”

13. Under all conditions, however, the doctrine of unity remained free from outward compulsion and full of intrinsic vigor and freshness. There was still room for differences of opinion, such as whether God's life, power, wisdom, and unity are attributes—distinct from His being, and qualifying it,—or [pg 089] whether they are inherent in His nature, comprising His very essence. This controversy aimed to determine the conception of God, either by Aristotelian rationalism, as represented by Maimonides, or by the positive religious assumptions of Crescas and others.

This is Maimonides' statement of the unity: “God is one; that is, He is unlike any other unit, whether made one in point of numbers or species, or by virtue of composition, separation, and simplification. He is one in Himself, there being no multiplicity in Him. His unity is beyond all definition.”[222]

Ibn Gabirol in his “Crown of Royalty” puts the same thought into poetic form: “One art Thou; the wise wonder at the mystery of Thy unity, not knowing what it is. One art Thou; not like the one of dimension or number, as neither addition nor change, neither attribute nor quality affects Thy being. Thou art God, who sustainest all beings by Thy divinity, who holdest all creatures in Thy unity. Thou art God, and there is no distinction between Thy unity, Thy eternity, and Thy being. All is mystery, and however the names may differ, they all tell that Thou art but one.”[223]

14. Side by side with this rationalistic trend, Judaism always contained a current of mysticism. The mystics accepted literally the anthropomorphic pictures of the Deity in the Bible, and did not care how much they might affect the spirituality and unity of God. The philosophic schools had contended against the anthropomorphic views of the older mystics, and thus had brought higher views of the Godhead to dominance; but when the rationalistic movement had spent its force, the reaction came in the form of the Cabbalah, the secret lore which claimed to have been “transmitted” (according to the meaning of the word) from a hoary past. The older system of thought had stripped the Deity of all reality and had robbed religion of all positiveness; now, in [pg 090] contrast, the soul demanded a God of revelation through faith in whom might come exaltation and solace.[224]

Nevertheless the Maimonidean articles of faith were adopted into the liturgy because of their emphasis on the absolute unity and indivisibility of God, by which they constituted a vigorous protest against the Christian dogma. Judaism ever found its strength in God the only One, and will find Him ever anew a source of inspiration and rejuvenation.

Chapter XIV. God's Omnipotence and Omniscience

1. Among all the emotions which underlie our God-consciousness the foremost is the realization of our own weakness and helplessness. This makes us long for One mightier than ourselves, for the Almighty whose acts are beyond comparison. The first attribute, therefore, with which we feeble mortals invest our Deity is omnipotence. Thus the pagan ascribes supreme power over their different realms to his various deities. Hence the name for God among all the Semites is El—“the Powerful One.”[225] Judaism claims for God absolute and unlimited power over all that is. It declares Him to be the source and essence of all strength, the almighty Creator and Ruler of the universe. All that exists is His creation; all that occurs is His achievement. He is frequently called by the rabbis ha Geburah, the Omnipotence.[226]

2. The historical method of study seems to indicate that various cosmic potencies were worshiped in primitive life either singly or collectively under the name of Elohim, “divine powers,” or Zibeoth Elohim, “hosts of divine powers.” With the acceptance of the idea of divine omnipotence, these were united into a confederacy of divine forces under the dominion of the one God, the “Lord of Hosts.” Still these powers of heaven, earth and the deep by no means at once surrendered their identity. Most of them became angels, “messengers” of the omnipotent God, or “spirits” roaming in the realms where once they ruled, while a few were relegated as monsters to the region of superstition. The heathen deities, which [pg 092] persisted for a while in popular belief, were also placed with the angels as “heavenly rulers” of their respective lands or nations about the throne of the Most High. At all events, Israel's God was enthroned above them all as Lord of the universe. In fact, the Alexandrian translators and some of the rabbis actually explained in this sense the Biblical names El Shaddai and J.H.V.H. Zebaoth.[227] The medieval philosophers, however, took a backward step away from the Biblical view when, under the influence of Neoplatonism, they represented the angels and the spirits of the stars as intermediary forces.[228]

3. According to the Bible, both the Creation and the order of the universe testify to divine omnipotence. God called all things into existence by His almighty word, unassisted by His heavenly messengers. He alone stretched out the heavens, set bounds to the sea, and founded the earth on pillars that it be not moved; none was with Him to partake in the work. This is the process of creation according to the first chapter of Genesis and the fortieth chapter of Isaiah. So He appears throughout the Scriptures as “the Doer of wonders,” “whose arm never waxes short” to carry out His will. “He fainteth not, neither is He weary.” His dominion extends over the sea and the storm, over life and death, over high and low. Intermediary forces participating in His work are never mentioned. They are referred to only in the poetic description of creation in the book of Job: “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?... When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.”[229]

Proof of God's supreme power was found particularly in history, either in His miraculous changing of the natural order, or in His defeat of the mighty hostile armies which bade Him defiance.[230] Often the heathen deities or the celestial powers are introduced as dramatic figures to testify to the triumph of the divine omnipotence, as when the Lord is said to “execute judgment against the gods of Egypt” or when “the stars in their courses fought against Sisera.”[231]

4. God's power is limited only by His own volition. “He doeth what He willeth.”[232] In man the will and the power for a certain act are far apart, and often directly conflicting. Not so with God, for the very idea of God is perfection, and His will implies necessarily the power to accomplish the desired end. His will is determined only by such factors as His knowledge and His moral self-restraint.

5. Therefore the idea of God's omnipotence must be coupled with that of His omniscience. Both His power and His knowledge are unlike man's in being without limitation. When we repeat the Biblical terms of an all-seeing, all-hearing, and all-knowing God, we mean in the first instance that the limitation of space does not exist for Him. He beholds the extreme parts of the earth and observes all that happens under the heavens; nothing is hidden from His sight. He not only sees the deeds of men, He also searches their thoughts. Looking into their hearts, He knows the word, ere it is upon the tongue. Looking into the future, he knows every creature, ere it enters existence. “The darkness and the light are alike to Him.” With one glance He surveys all that is and all that happens.[233] He is, as the rabbis express it, “the all-seeing Eye and the all-hearing Ear.”[234]

In like manner the distinctions of time disappear before Him. The entire past is unrolled before His sight; His book records all that men do or suffer, even their tears;[235] and there is no forgetfulness with Him. The remotest future also is open before Him, for it is planned by Him, and in it He has allotted to each being its days and its steps.[236] Yea, as He beholds events ere they transpire, so He reveals the secrets of the future to His chosen ones, in order to warn men of the judgments that threaten them.[237]

6. The idea of divine omniscience could ripen only gradually in the minds of the people. The older and more child-like conception still remains in the stories of the Deluge and the Tower of Babel, where God descended from heaven to watch the doings of men, and repented of what He had done.[238] Obviously the idea of divine omniscience took hold of the people as a result of the admonitions of the prophets.

7. Philosophical inquiry into the ideas of the divine omnipotence and omniscience, however, discloses many difficulties. The Biblical assertion that nothing is impossible to God will not stand the test as soon as we ask seriously whether God can make the untrue true,—as making two times two to equal five—or whether He can declare the wrong to be right. Obviously He cannot overturn the laws of mathematical truth or of moral truth, without at the same time losing His nature as the Source and Essence of all truth. Nor can He abrogate the laws of nature, which are really His own rules for His creation, without detracting from both His omniscience and the immutability of His will. This question will be discussed more fully in connection with miracles, in chapter [XXVII].

Together with the problem of the divine omniscience arises the difficulty of reconciling this with our freedom of will and [pg 095] our moral responsibility. Would not His foreknowledge of our actions in effect determine them? This difficulty can only be solved by a proper conception of the freedom of the will, and will be discussed in that connection in chapter [XXXVII].

Altogether, we must guard against applying our human type of knowledge to God. Man, limited by space and time, obtains his knowledge of things and events by his senses, becoming aware of them separately as they exist either beside each other or in succession. With God all knowledge is complete; there is no growth of knowledge from yesterday to to-day, no knowledge of only a part instead of the whole of the world. His omniscience and omnipotence are bound up with His omnipresence and eternity. “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts.”[239]

Chapter XV. God's Omnipresence and Eternity

1. As soon as man awakens to a higher consciousness of God, he realizes the vast distance between his own finite being limited by space and time, and the Infinite Being which rules everywhere and unceasingly in lofty grandeur and unlimited power. His very sense of being hedged in by the bounds and imperfections of a finite existence makes him long for the infinite God, unlimited in might, and brings to him the feeling of awe before His greatness. But this conception of God as the omnipresent and everlasting Spirit, as distinct from any created being, is likewise the result of many stages of growing thought.

2. The primitive mind imagines God as dwelling in a lofty place, whence He rules the earth beneath, descending at times to take part in the affairs of men, to tarry among them, or to walk with them.[240] The people adhered largely to this conception during the Biblical period, as they considered as the original seat of the Deity, first Paradise, later on Sinai or Zion, and finally the far-off heavens. It required prophetic vision to discern that “the heavens and the heavens' heavens do not encompass God's majesty,” expressed also in poetic imagery that “the heaven is My throne and the earth My footstool.”[241] The classic form of this idea of the divine omnipresence is found in the oft-quoted passage from Psalm CXXXIX.[242]

3. The dwelling places of God are to give way the moment His omnipresence is understood as penetrating the universe to such an extent that nothing escapes His glance nor lies without His dominion.[243] They are then transformed into places where He had manifested His Name, His Glory, or His Presence (“Countenance,” in the Hebrew). In this way certain emanations or powers of God were formed which could be located in a certain space without impairing the divine omnipresence. These intermediary powers will be the theme of chapter [XXXII].

The following dialogue illustrates this stage of thought: A heretic once said sarcastically to Gamaliel II, “Ye say that where ten persons assemble for worship, there the divine majesty (Shekinah) descends upon them; how many such majesties are there?” To which Gamaliel replied: “Does not the one orb of day send forth a million rays upon the earth? And should not the majesty of God, which is a million times brighter than the sun, be reflected in every spot on earth?”[244]

4. Nevertheless a conception of pure spirit is very difficult to attain, even in regard to God. The thought of His omnipresence is usually interpreted by imagining some ethereal substance which expands infinitely, as Ibn Ezra and Saadia before him were inclined to do,[245] or by picturing Him as a sort of all-encompassing Space, in accordance with the rabbis.[246] The New Testament writers and the Church fathers likewise spoke of God as Spirit, but really had in mind, for the most part, an ethereal substance resembling light pervading cosmic space. The often-expressed belief that man may see God after death rests upon this conception of God as a substance perceptible to the mind.[247]

A higher standpoint is taken by a thinker such as Ibn Gabirol, who finds God's omnipresence in His all-pervading will and intellect.[248] But this type of divine omnipresence is rather divine immanence. The religious consciousness has a quite different picture of God, a self-conscious Personality, ever near to man, ever scanning his acts, his thoughts, and his motives. Here philosophy and religion part company. The former must abstain from the assumption of a divine personality; the latter cannot do without it. The God of religion must partake of the knowledge and the feelings of His worshiper, must know his every impulse and idea, and must feel with him in his suffering and need. God's omnipresence is in this sense a postulate of religion.

5. The second earthly and human limitation is that of time. Confined by space and time, man casts his eyes upward toward a Being who shall be infinite and eternal. Whatever time begets, time swallows up again. Transitoriness is the fate of all things. Everything which enters existence must end at last. “Also heaven and earth perish and wax old like a garment. Only God remains forever the same, and His years have no end. He is from everlasting to everlasting, the first and the last.” So speak prophet and psalmist, voicing a universal thought[249]; and our liturgical poet sings:

“The Lord of all did reign supreme

Ere yet this world was made and formed;

When all was finished by His will,

Then was His name as King proclaimed.

“And should these forms no more exist,

He still will rule in majesty;

He was, He is, He shall remain,

His glory never shall decrease.”[250]

6. But the idea of God's eternity also presents certain difficulties to the thinking mind. As Creator and Author of the universe, God is the First Cause, without beginning or end, the Source of all existence; as Ruler and Master of the world, He maintains all things through all eternity; though heaven and earth “wax old like a garment,” He outlasts them all. Now, if He is to manifest these powers from everlasting to everlasting, He must ever remain the same. Consequently, we must add immutability as a corollary of eternity, if the latter is to mean anything. It is not enough to state that God is without beginning and without end; the essential part of the doctrine is His transcendence above the changes and conditions of time. We mortals cannot really entertain a conception of eternity; our nearest approach to it is an endless succession of periods of time, a ceaseless procession of ages and eons following each other. Endless time is not at all the same as timelessness. Therefore eternity signifies transcendence above all existence in time; its real meaning is supermundaneity.[251]

7. This seems the best way to avoid the difficulty which seemed almost insuperable to the medieval thinkers, how to reconcile a Creation at a certain time and a Creator for whom time does not exist. In the effort to solve the difficulty, they resorted to the Platonic and Aristotelian definition of time as the result of the motions of the heavenly bodies; thus they declared that time was created simultaneously with the world. This is impossible for the modern thinker, who has learned from Kant to regard time and space, not as external realities, but as human modes of apperception of objects. So the contrast between the transient character of the world and the eternity of God becomes all the greater with the increasing realization of the vast gap between the material world and the divine spirit.

At this point arises a still greater difficulty. The very idea of creation at a certain time becomes untenable in view of our knowledge of the natural process; the universe itself, it seems to us, extends over an infinity of space and time. Indeed, the modern view of evolution in place of creation has the grave danger of leading to pantheism, to a conception of the cosmos which sees in God only an eternal energy (or substance) devoid of free volition and self-conscious action.[252] We can evade the difficulty only by assuming God's transcendence, and this can be done in such a way as not to exclude His immanence, or—what is the same thing—His omnipresence.

8. Both God's omnipresence and His eternity are intended only to raise Him far above the world, out of the confines of space and time, to represent His sublime loftiness as the “Rock of Ages,” as holding worlds without number in “His eternal arms.” “Nothing can be hidden from Him who has reared the entire universe and is familiar with every part of it, however remote.”[253]

Chapter XVI. God's Holiness

1. Judaism recognizes two distinct types of divine attributes. Those which we have so far considered belong to the metaphysical group, which chiefly engage the attention of the philosopher. They represent God as a transcendental Being who is ever beyond our comprehension, because our finite intellect can never grasp the infinite Spirit. They are not descriptions, but rather inferences from the works of the Master of the world to the Master himself. But there are other divine attributes which we derive from our own moral nature, and which invest our whole life with a higher moral character. Instead of arising from the external necessity which governs nature in its causes and effects, these rest upon our assumption of inner freedom, setting the aims for all that we achieve. This moral nature is realized to some extent even by the savage, when he trembles before his deity in pangs of conscience, or endeavors to propitiate him by sacrifices. Still, Judaism alone fully realized the moral nature of the Deity; this was done by investing the term “holiness” with the idea of moral perfection, so that God became the ideal and pattern of the loftiest morality. “Be ye holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.”[254]—This is the central and culminating idea of the Jewish law.[255]

2. Holiness is the essence of all moral perfection; it is purity unsullied by any breath of evil. True holiness can be [pg 102] ascribed only to Divinity, above the realm of the flesh and the senses. “There is none holy but the Lord, for there is none beside Thee,” says Scripture.[256] Whether man stands on a lower or higher level of culture, he has in all his plans and aspirations some ideal of perfection to which he may never attain, but which serves as the standard for his actions. The best of his doings falls short of what he ought to do; in his highest efforts he realizes the potentiality of better things. This ideal of moral perfection works as the motive power of the will in setting for it a standard; it establishes human freedom in place of nature's compulsion, but such an ideal can emanate only from the moral power ruling life, which we designate as the divine Holiness.

3. Scripture says of God that He “walketh in holiness,”[257] and accordingly morality in man is spoken of as “walking in the ways of God.”[258] “Walk before Me and be perfect!” says God to Abraham.[259] Moses approached God with two petitions,—the one, “Show me Thy ways that I may know Thee!” the other, “Show me, I pray Thee, Thy glory!” In response to the latter God said, “No man can see Me and live”, but the former petition was granted in that the Lord revealed Himself in His moral attributes.[260] These alone can be understood and emulated by man; in regard to the so-called metaphysical attributes God will ever remain beyond human comprehension and emulation.

4. In order to serve as vehicle for the expression of the highest moral perfection, the Biblical term for holiness, Kadosh, had to undergo a long process of development, obscuring its original meaning. The history of this term gives us the deepest insight into the working of the Jewish genius towards the full revelation of the God of holiness. At first the word [pg 103] Kadosh[261] seems to have denoted unapproachableness in the sense in which fire is unapproachable, that is, threatening and consuming. This fiery nature was ascribed by primitive man to all divine beings. Hence the angels are termed “the holy ones” in Scripture.[262] According to both priestly practice and popular belief, the man who approached one of these holy ones with hand or foot, or even with his gaze, was doomed to die.[263] Out of such crude conceptions evolved the idea of God's majesty as unapproachable in the sense of the sublime, banishing everything profane from its presence, and visiting with punishment every violation of its sanctity. The old conception of the fiery appearance of the Deity served especially as a figurative expression of the moral power of God, which manifests itself as a “consuming fire,”[264] exterminating evil, and making man long for the good and the true, for righteousness and love.

5. The divine attribute of holiness has accordingly a double meaning. On the one hand, it indicates spiritual loftiness transcending everything sensual, which works as a purging power of indignation at evil, rebuking injustice, impurity and falsehood, and punishing transgression until it is removed from the sight of God. On the other hand, it denotes the condescending mercy of God, which, having purged the soul of wrong, wins it for the right, and which endows man with the power of perfecting himself, and thus leads him to the gradual building up of the kingdom of goodness and purity on earth. This ethical conception of holiness, which emanates from the moral nature of God, revealed to the prophetic genius of Israel, must not be confused with the old Semitic conception of priestly or [pg 104] ritual holiness. Ritual holiness is purely external, and is transferable to persons and things, to times and places, according to their relation to the Deity. Hence the various cults applied the term “holy” to the most abominable forms of idolatry and impure worship.[265] The Mosaic law condemned all these as violations of the holiness of Israel's God, but could not help sanctioning many ordinances and rites of priestly holiness which originated in ancient Semitic usages. Hence the two conceptions of holiness, the priestly or external and the prophetic or ethical, became interwoven in the Mosaic code to such an extent as to impair the standard of ethical holiness stressed by the prophets, the unique and lofty possession of Judaism. Hence the letter of the Law caused a deplorable confusion of ideas, which was utilized by the detractors of Judaism. The liberal movement of modern Judaism, in pointing to the prophetic ideals as the true basis of the Jewish faith, is at the same time dispelling this ancient confusion of the two conceptions of holiness.

6. The Levitical holiness adheres outwardly to persons and things and consists in their separation or their reservation from common use. In striking contrast to this, the holiness which Judaism attributes to God denotes the highest ethical purity, unattainable to flesh and blood, but designed for our emulation.

The contemplation of the divine holiness is to inspire man with fear of sin and to exert a healthful influence upon his conduct. Thus God became the hallowing power in Judaism and its institutions, truly the “Holy One of Israel” according to the term of Isaiah and his great exilic successor, the so-called Deutero-Isaiah.[266] Thus His holiness invested His people with [pg 105] special sanctity and imposed upon it special obligations. In the words of Ezekiel, God became the “Sanctifier of Israel.”[267]

The rabbis penetrated deeply into the spirit of Scripture, at the same time that they adhered strictly to its letter. While they clung tenaciously to the ritual holiness of the priestly codes, they recognized the ideal of holiness which is so sharply opposed in every act and thought to the demoralizing cults of heathenism.[268]

7. Accordingly, holiness is not the metaphysical concept which Jehuda ha Levi considers it,[269] but the principle and source of all ethics, the spirit of absolute morality, lending purpose and value to the whole of life. As long as men do good or shun evil through fear of punishment or hope for reward, whether in this life or the hereafter, so long will ideal morality remain unattained, and man cannot claim to stand upon the ground of divine holiness. The holy God must penetrate and control all of life—such is the essence of Judaism. The true aim of human existence is not salvation of the soul,—a desire which is never quite free from selfishness,—but holiness emulating God, striving to do good for the sake of the good without regard to recompense, and to shun evil because it is evil, aside from all consequences.[270]

8. The fact is that holiness is a religious term, based upon divine revelation, not a philosophical one resting upon speculative reasoning. It is a postulate of our moral nature that all life is governed by a holy Will to which we must submit willingly, and which makes for the good. How volition and compulsion are with God one and the same, how the good exists in God without the bad, or holiness and moral purpose without unholy or immoral elements, how God can be exactly opposite to all we know of man,—this is a question which [pg 106] philosophy is unable to answer. In fact, holiness is best defined negatively, as the “negation of all that man from his own experience knows to be unholy.” These words of the Danish philosopher Rauwenhoff are made still clearer by the following observations: “The strength in the idea of holiness lies exactly in its negative character. There is no comparison of higher or lesser degree possible between man's imperfections and God's perfect goodness. Instead, there is an absolute contrast between mankind which, even in its noblest types, must wrestle with the power of evil, and God, in whom nothing can be imagined which would even suggest the possibility of any moral shortcoming or imperfection.”[271] As the prophet says, “Thou art too pure of eyes to look complacently upon evil,”[272] and according to the Psalmist, “Who shall ascend into the mountain of the Lord, and who shall stand in His holy place? He that hath clean hands and a pure heart.”[273]

9. The idea of holiness became the preëminent feature of Judaism, so that the favorite name for God in Rabbinical literature was “the Holy One, blessed be He,” and the acme of all ceremonial and moral laws alike was found in “the Hallowing of His name.”[274] If the rabbis as followers of the Priestly Code were compelled to lay great stress upon ritual holiness, they yet beheld in it the means of moral purification. They never lost sight of the prophetic principle that moral purity is the object of all human life, for “the holy God is sanctified through righteousness.”[275]