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Reviewed by:
  • Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition by Arthur Green
  • Harold Kasimow
Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition Arthur Green. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. 197 pp.

Arthur Green’s book is one of the most profound interpretations of the Jewish tradition that I have read in the last decade, and it is certainly the most radical. Green, currently rector of the Rabbinical School at Hebrew College in Massachusetts, has also served as president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical School and as professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Brandeis University. For the last fifty years Green, one of the most significant Jewish theologians in America, has devoted his life to learning and teaching the classical Jewish sources, especially mystical and Hasidic sacred texts. This book is so rich in its use of major classical Jewish sources, including some of the most cryptic ones from the Jewish mystical tradition, and covers so many critical issues that in this short review I will focus only on his view of God, which to me seems to be the most controversial issue in this work and has serious implications for other core Jewish ideas.

Green argues that at the heart and center of Judaism the one core idea which Jews must continue to teach to the world is the universalist vision of Simeon ben Azzai for whom the Torah’s most basic principle is that there is one God and that every human being is created in God’s image. In Green’s new vision of the Jewish tradition, this means that “Being is One, and each person is God’s unique image” (153). Green further claims that today we must expand Ben Azzai’s message “to recognize the holiness of earth, air, and water as well as that of the human body and spirit, demanding that we care for the survival of other species alongside our devotion to humanity” (154).

What does Green mean by “Being is One”? He calls himself a religious Jew, a religious humanist, and a mystical panentheist, one who believes that God is present throughout all existence, that “Being or Y-H-W-H underlies and unifies all that is. . . . When I refer to ‘God,’ I mean the inner force of existence itself, that of which one might say: ‘Being is.’ I refer to it as the ‘One’ because it is the single unifying substratum of all that is. . . . I choose to personify, to call Being by this ancient name ‘God’” (18, 19).

For me, the following deeply personal statement is most helpful in understanding Green’s vision of Judaism: “I write as a mystic and a monist, one who believes in (and in rare and precious moments has come to know) the essential truth that there is only one Being and that all distinctions between self and other and between God, world, and soul represent partial betrayals of that truth. In my liturgical and communal religious life, however, I continue to speak this dualistic religious language. I do so because [End Page 148] I remain a Westerner” (74–75). Nevertheless, Green considers it his task to educate and awaken us “to the reality of the single Truth” (75).

Green, who also thinks of himself as a neo-Hasidic Jew, is aware that his radical idea of God will be problematic for many Jews and members of other faiths. In fact, Green’s teaching that neither God nor soul are entities seems to have a strong affinity with the Buddhist idea of ultimate reality, but he comes to his vision by way of Jewish sources, especially ones from the Hasidic movement. The following statement by the Hasidic master Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh Leib of Ger (1847–1904) has a strong affinity to Green’s view of ultimate reality. The Gerer Rebbe stated in his classic work Sefat Emet that “The meaning of ‘Y-H-W-H is one’ is not that He is the only true God, negating other gods (though that too is true!). But the meaning is deeper than that: there is no being other than God. [This is true] even though it seems otherwise to most people. . . . Everything that exists in the world, spiritual and...

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