Intro to Judaism - Week 9

I'm going completely off-topic today, because I finished the open-ended reading assignment (as opposed to the weekly assignments) and have some reflections on it. The book is called Finding God: Selected Responses, by Rifat Sonsino and Daniel B. Syme.

I went on a bit of a roller coaster with this book. Initially, I could not have been more excited, because the introduction was a bit misleading about what it would contain - or certainly my expectations about how these subjects would be approached was completely off. The questions posed ("Do you ever wonder...") were all things that I was excited to learn about. Yes, what IS the Jewish view on prayer, Satan, evil, God's relationship with individuals, etc? Tell me all about it, this is exactly what I've been wanting to know!!!

Then I dove into a book that turned out to be full of summaries of the very differing views of various Jewish scholars, philosophers, and rabbis. This person believed/taught such and such, while this next person believed/taught this. I felt like I was in my "Ideas and Culture" class, a year-long course my college required to be completed by the end of sophomore year. I just wasn't that interested in what a lot of these people believed. I'm sure they were revolutionary in their time, but many of their ideas seemed either somewhat outdated, common and unenlightening, or very odd. I briefly entertained not finishing the book, but the avid reader and student in me just couldn't bear that, so I stuck it out.

By the end of the book, I was much more engaged. I suspect this is because the views expressed were beginning to be more modern (the sections were in chronological order) and more something I could relate to, consider, wrestle with. One idea I particularly liked, put forth by Roland B. Gittelsohn, holds that the workings of the universe and nature can be explained scientifically, and that God is the energy and sustaining life force for it all. Nature is a part of God, and God does not perform miracles (defined as something that goes against the laws of nature) because God created nature and the limits inherent in it. Mordecai Kaplan also does not make room for miracles in his understanding of God: "Our belief in God must be consistent with our knowledge of the universe." (p.115)

How do we make this make sense with the tradition of miracles within Judaism? An excerpt from Kaplan's book Judaism without Supernaturalism is quoted on the same page as the above: "If we study the tradition carefully, we are bound to discover nuances and anticipations of attitudes toward life that were not only tenable but well worth cultivating. Those are the permanent values in our tradition, which we cannot afford to ignore." So the idea behind the legends, how they were created and how they sustained the Jewish people, are what's important. But wait - how could I be skeptical about, for example, the miracle of the oil in relation to Hanukkah? Well, for one, that is not mentioned in the story of the Maccabbean battle - it was a legend later associated with the historical record and isn't the most significant takeaway from the story. Sure I can be a little skeptical! Now other miracles actually recorded in the Torah I'm going to have a bit more trouble with - but the very struggle is a holy endeavour that I look forward to encountering throughout my lifelong journey.

While seeing a lot of my own thoughts and beliefs reflected in this Jewish naturalism, I still personify God more than these writers. I don't see God as a "process" as Kaplan suggested, or just an inner sense of striving to be good, like the humanists believe. I believe that God is a singular entity, and for me that doesn't conflict with the other beliefs I've expressed above. Wait - I just created my own amalgamation of different beliefs that make sense for me, and that's okay. I am still amazed by this.

One of the things that drew me to Judaism is that there isn't a creed. There isn't a set of explicit beliefs that one must hold in order to identify as Jewish. So much of it is understood to be unknowable. Groups of people or individual scholars wrestle with the various subjects and questions and come up with what is most believable and makes the most sense for them - and it could be a neverending evolution. Interesting that this is the very thing that appealed to me and helped me feel I could come back to organized religion, and yet I went into this book expecting hard answers. There can be some comfort in having confirmed answers, but only if you can embrace them fully. If I couldn't agree with those set answers I expected to see, where would that have left me? Likely in the same place Christianity left me when I couldn't embrace much of what I was supposed to believe - distant, unsettled, and lost.