The Impossibility of Talking about God

Our teacher, Rabbi Artson, has skillfully and convincingly presented the case for abandoning the classic "overlay," in his terms, of Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions imposed upon the raw text of the Bible. He also implies, without stating it specifically, that the raw text of the Bible is created out of religious experiences. So it is possible that the religious experiences of our ancestors who created the texts of the Bible are also overlaid with conceptions that they did not hold—witness the cognate ideas, languages, and metaphors of the ancient Near East present in the Tanakh, as demonstrated through biblical scholarship. The idea itself, however, is extremely revolutionary, in the most literal meaning of that word, for ideas held to be central and true for hundreds of years are now seen as false to the very tradition they supposedly presented to the world.

Indeed, one of Rabbi Artson's central points is that the idea of a static, unchangeable, all-powerful and all-knowing God does not square at all with the God of the Bible. Instead we are asked to take seriously the dynamic, changing, powerful (but not all-powerful), and knowing (but not all-knowing God) of the Bible. This is akin to the approach of our teacher, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel z"l, who took the prophets seriously at their word, rather than interpreting all prophetic utterances as "merely metaphor" or simply exhortation.

I would like to make two comments about Rabbi Artson's masterful essay. One has to do with the need to go further, and the other has to do with the subsequent traditions of rabbinic Judaism, and how they fit in to this new conception of God.

We are, as the paper shows clearly, always in tension between ideas and language that we grew up with, learned in Hebrew School, and encounter around us daily, on the one hand, and the ideas and language of scholarly academic learning and philosophical and theological inquiry, on the other. Our basic use of the word "God" leans heavily on all of those inherited modes, from kindergarten on. I doubt if any kindergarten even hints at a documentary hypothesis for the origin of the Bible or utilizes a curriculum that reflects Maimonidean rationality to its core. And yet, we somehow think that these "new" ways of thinking and talking about religion are available to all people.

Furthermore, if we are totally honest with ourselves, we know firmly, true and certain, that it is impossible to talk about God. We have no knowledge or understanding of God. Yet we talk as if we knew, as if there were some verifiable evidence. Worse than that, we talk as if we could give true explanations of God's thoughts, intentions, and actions. We are seduced by texts, traditions, and the feeling of law as solid and of divine origin. How can we get out of this dilemma? Is there any justification for God-talk, given our intellectual understanding that whatever we say can be neither proven nor disproven—that is, that it is clearly and perfectly untrue? (For a brilliant attempt to grapple with this dilemma, see Rabbi Martin S. Cohen's book, Sefer Ikkarim le-Zemaneinu, published in Beersheva by the Mercaz Shiluv in 2000.)

The poet Yehudah Amichai has many phrases of theological import. Indeed, perhaps we learn more about theology from poets than from anyone else. In one of his last poems he writes:

Open, closed, open.Before a person is bornEverything in the universe is open without him.During his life everything is closed within his life.When he dies everything is again open.Open, closed, open, that is the whole person.

Amichai points to the paradox of solipsism as the only possible truth, and to the human ability to believe in and even trust, the ultimate meaning of belief: that there are real things outside of us, beyond our closed selves.

Intellect and emotion may be at odds. We are programmed to recognize the transcendent, but destined to know the limits of intellect. So, for the transcendent, we can only...