God as an Idea (Part One)
- By Ilan Stavans and Justin David
A Teacher and a Rabbi in Conversation
(Link to Part Two)
Rabbi Justin David: In Paradise Lost (1667), John Milton says that “the mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, and a hell from heaven.” I want to talk to you about a number of perhaps disparate themes: God’s place in the human mind, about living a dignified life, about how religion is perceived in the secular world, about finding meaning in what we do. Perhaps Milton’s quote is a fitting place to start, a kind of home.
In college, Paradise Lost was the first text I really sweated over, waking up early to read it, reading it over multiple times in the process of studying it, and figuring out how to write about it. It was my introduction to what may be called a midrashic way of thinking. The quote is itself a window onto the enterprise of divining meaning through the retelling of stories.
For better or worse, Milton is right: as moderns, we know well the ways in which the mind distorts, turns in on itself, and suffocates its own imaginative capacities. On the other side of the coin, to “make a heaven of hell, and a hell from heaven” is to acknowledge our myth-making abilities. It also clarifies our understanding by helping us see either the nightmare or the redemption we live with day to day.
For example, what does beresheet, the first Hebrew word of Genesis, mean? In the first chapter of the Torah, we read an almost classically ordered account of creation: simple, plain, pleasurable in its economy of language. In it God creates the universe merely by speaking: “Let there be…” Of course, no act of creation is so simple or unmuddled. For Milton, to create is to invite the cosmic and moral conflicts that drive Paradise Lost. For the rabbis who authored the classical midrashim, the interpretive stories and commentaries on the Torah, creation means an infinite number of things: “The Torah has seventy faces!”
Unlike Milton’s vision of a battle between heaven and hell, the rabbis envision God as the chief architect of the universe, consulting with his committee of angels. Passionate disagreements ensue, and we live with the broken resolutions. Our task as humans is to draw on our creative capacities to rescue what is “true,” i.e. that which is existentially, emotionally, and spiritually real to our experience. And we do so by activating the gifts of mind.
Ilan Stavans: Milton’s quote should also be read through a different lens, one you hinted at the end of your comment: the mind is a factory of data; it informs us as much as it deceives us. And everything around us is nothing but a creation of it: the mind makes heaven of hell and hell of heaven. In other words, we have the capacity to make life either happy or miserable. Everything around us is a figment of the mind—including God. In this sense, the mind isn’t a tool to understand God’s doings but it is the very maker of the idea of God we have manufactured for ourselves.
Justin David: Yes, most definitely God is a product of the mind. However, for me, this is not merely some kind of detached evasion of the problem of God. The quality of one’s connection to or understanding of God begins with attention to the workings of one’s mind. Abraham Joshua Heschel was famous for excoriating the ways in which modern society reduces us to living out a series of clichés, and so our task is to see through them and deconstruct them so that we may live as morally generous and spiritually spontaneous human beings. A person who seeks to engage religiously, spiritually needs to always check back with the constructions of one’s mind to sort out what is real and what is getting in the way.
That said, the construction of God in one’s mind is actually crucial, I believe, both from a traditional perspective as well as a modern critical one. In a mystical sense, God lives most immediately in one’s consciousness. As the medieval Spanish poet Solomon Ibn Gabirol said of God, “the heavens have no room for you to dwell/Yet you have a palace in my mind.” In our day, the great American Jewish thinker Mordecai Kaplan claimed that we can build authentic religious lives on the realization that God is not supernatural, but a construct of the human mind. The idea here is not that God is make believe, but that the collective subjective of experience of a group of people, tested over time, points to something true. This brings me back to your question, Ilan: although our mind produces notions of God, can those notions—those intuitions—still be true? And if it’s a challenge to say that they are true, can we say that they are real in some way?
Ilan Stavans: It’s a Schopenhauerian conundrum: How to prove that what our mind offers us is true? When we burn our finger, not only do we feel the pain but our skin shows signs of injury. The senses are a register of that natural phenomenon. But with spiritual matters, we long for a similar sensorial register that, by definition, is intangible. Does that mean it doesn’t exist? Think of dreams, Justin. When we wake up in the morning, there is no proof whatsoever that we dreamed a dream. Yet we know we did. Not only that, we’re overwhelmed by its imagery. The same goes for ideas: only if we write down our thoughts do they exist in the world, which doesn’t mean they also inhabit our mind. In response to your question, there are two types of truths, sensorial and mental. Neither of them is more or less valid.
The trick, of course, is to be able to differentiate between true ideas, true dreams, true mental images and untrue ones. This is a more difficult distinction to establish. The latter ones might be said to be the product of unbalanced minds, that is, minds in hallucinatory states. But since thee mind is both the producer of thought and its judge, how to differentiate between a coherent idea and a deranged one? I mention this because religious experiences—you talked about the mystics—are often the result of altered mind states. Do some of the biblical prophets show signs of schizophrenia? Is the “Sermon on the Mount” by Jesus Christ a product of a mind on the edge?
Justin David: No, the Prophets were not on the edge of sanity, although by necessity they lived on the edge, or beyond the edge, of society. We should remember that prophetic literature is great literature, deeply emotional and poetic with a titanic moral sense. To produce that kind of literature, the authors had to be empathic people, extraordinarily sensitive to the suffering of other human beings and radically perceptive as to the causes of their suffering. One of the surprising and striking things about the prophets is how rational they become at the peak of their emotions. It is when they are most distraught and angry that they express the perception that the corruption of society lies in how we treat the most vulnerable.
I find it interesting that you bring up the Sermon on the Mount. I am by no means well versed in the Christian Bible, but for someone who knows early rabbinic literature, the Sermon on the Mount is compelling reading. It feels less like Isaiah and more like what Rabbi Akiba or Hillel would say if they could speak more than one or two sentences at a time. When I read the sayings of Jesus as written in the Book of Matthew, I often feel as if I’m reading an expansion of the rabbinic conversation.
(Link to Part Two)
Ilan Stavans is the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. Rabbi Justin David is the spiritual leader of Congregation B'nai Israel in Northampton, Massachusetts.
