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Modern Judaism 25.3 (2005) 316-326



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The Promise and Peril of Jewish Barthianism:

The Theology of Michael Wyschogrod*

Harvard University

Michael Wyschogrod is Maimonides' worst nightmare. For the medieval philosopher and legist, the unity and incorporeality of God, established incontrovertibly by philosophy, are foundations of the Jewish faith. Not surprisingly, then, The Guide of the Perplexed opens with an extended attempt to undermine the initial impression created by scripture—that God has a physical reality and is given to a range of intense and dramatic emotions. To believe this about God—in other words, to read the Bible literally—is, for Maimonides, to be guilty not merely of wrongheadedness but also of out-and-out idolatry. Idolatry can be avoided only by reading scripture through the lens of philosophical metaphysics.

Wyschogrod will have none of this. To suggest that the God of Israel is somehow equivalent to the God of metaphysical speculation is to commit a crime against scripture and authentic Jewish thinking. The God of Israel is a "specific person . . . [who] . . . does not hesitate to assume a proper name" (p. 40), and the Bible itself "does not hesitate to speak of him in personal and anthropomorphic terms" (p. 42). The Bible shares none of Maimonides' discomfort with divine corporeality and mutability; only "improperly understood" can the God of Abraham be turned into some kind of "metaphysical Absolute" (p. 30). Maimonides is thus a kind of tragic figure for Wyschogrod, a Jewish thinker who "stakes his Judaism" on a set of philosophical concerns entirely alien to the heart of Jewish theology. All of Maimonides' tortured theologizing leaves us, according to Wyschogrod, with little more than "an overly rarefied God who is so beyond all conception that he cannot be distinguished from no god at all" (p. 177).

The divide between the two theological projects could not be more stark. For Maimonides, to speak of God in biblical terms unrefined by philosophical reflection is to flirt with idolatry; for Wyschogrod, to [End Page 316] dilute biblical language in the alien waters of metaphysical speculation is to come perilously close to atheism. Wyschogrod is this generation's most eloquent and emphatic critic of Maimonides; he is at his most compelling in insisting upon the irreducible tension between scriptural, covenantal monotheism, on the one hand, and abstract, philosophical monotheism, on the other. No amount of creative (i.e., destructive) Maimonidean exegesis, Wyschogrod insists, will ever be able to bridge the unbridgeable divide between philosophy's God and revelation's. Thus, for example, Wyschogrod demonstrates quite convincingly that the Shema is not a philosophical formulation of God's metaphysical oneness but, rather, an impassioned declaration of covenantal fidelity—"Adonai Echad" means not that "God is one" in His inner nature but that "God alone" is to be worshiped. If philosophical monotheism is concerned with abstract truths about a transcendent deity, its scriptural counterpart is concerned with the concrete interactions of a personal God and His people.

Wyschogrod's theology is fundamentally a theology of election. The God of Israel has "fallen in love" with Abraham and elected his seed as his own nation, seared his covenant into their flesh, and given them an array of commandments that they must obey. God loves and seeks to redeem all of humanity, but Israel is God's favorite child, and God "loves it as no other, unto the end of time" (p. 28). The nations are understandably jealous of Israel's status, but they must learn to accept it and to discover that "non-election does not equal rejection" (p. 172); Israel, in turn, must learn that election is intended as the basis not for vain pride but for universal responsibility, since, as God tells Abraham in their very first encounter, all the nations of the earth must receive blessing through him (Gen 12:3). Israel can disobey God's word but only with "the most disastrous consequences" (p. 26), both for itself and for the larger world. Israel's God is a God of love but also a God of wrath...

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