God as an Idea (Part Two)
- By Ilan Stavans and Justin David
A Teacher and a Rabbi in Conversation
(Link to Part One)
(Link to Part Three)
Ilan Stavans: I’ve often been asked if I believe in God. You know, Justin, I confess to keep changing my mind, not because I don’t believe in God—do I, really?—but because I like counting the various options my mind is able to come up with.
Rabbi Justin David: I don’t like the English construction “believing in God”; I find it either infantile or contradictory. If you say “I don’t believe in God,” you’re already acknowledging God as an idea worth thinking about. In Judaism, that constitutes the first step, so even professed “non-believers” believe. But the real reason I dislike the phrase is that it turns the spiritual life into a game of make believe, as if “believing in God” is akin to the tooth fairy. Also, the English construction is completely foreign to Jewish patterns of thinking about God, even in our post-Enlightenment age.
If we can’t avoid being skeptical because of the culture and the times that we live in, we still have examples of great minds who passionately embrace that skepticism. Elie Wiesel at the end of Night (1955), Emmanuel Levinas in his Talmudic explorations, Abraham Joshua Heschel in confronting the insipid quality of modern society and much of institutional religion, Buber in I and Thou (1923), all are towering examples of how we engage with the question of God’s existence amid the existential crises we face. For me, as a person as well as a rabbi, the critical question is not do we “believe in God” or not, but rather, are we willing to engage our minds in thinking about God and be part of a dialogue with tradition, its great thinkers, and contemporary souls.
Ilan Stavans: I like your approach: I’m part of that dialogue. Skepticism is a useful tool to explore the ins and outs of an idea, and, as you put it, the value of tradition as a whole. The problem is that skepticism, on face value, leaves you always on the fence. Are you or are you not committed to these ideas? Well, I’m not committed to them, although I do ponder them. In other words, Justin: skepticism places you in a strange frame of mind: I’m neither here nor there, it argues, although I’m clearly somewhere…
So why do I endorse a skeptical approach? Because it defines my way of relating to the universe. Everything that comes to me—everything that is filtered through my mind—needs to be questioned. The questioning is an end on itself, for it doesn't lead to either certainty or denial. I’m convinced this is a Jewish attitude, by the way. What does the Talmud want from us if not to argue? To argue about everything: about God, about morality, about existence, even about the value of argument.
I find Levinas utterly enlightening (if also frustratingly cryptic in his syntax). He too seems to me to doubt—that is the premise he starts from. But his doubt leads him to the recognition that we need others to exist. And those others deserve the same respect we desire for ourselves. In the depth of night, overwhelmed by insomnia, I often entertain myself following Levinas’ line of thought. His is a lucid mind: informed, unpretentious, unpoetic as Heschel’s and Buber’s are, ready to think things true. What else are we put on earth if not to think things through?
Yes, for me God is an idea. And I know that is dangerous, for seeing it that way turns it into a convenient justification. We tell ourselves that God exists in order to justify our sense of who we are and our contract with each other. You talked about the word beresheet in Genesis 1:1: for me, it’s a story about how humans invented God in order to explain the beginning of things.
Justin David: Yes, and we have to resist the urge to crystallize a notion or image of God in our minds. Moses Maimonides was clear that doing so is no less an act of idolatry than constructing an statue of God. In fact, to read Maimonides, he seems much more worried about how human beings make an idol of God in their own minds rather than other ways. Contemporary, non-Orthodox, non-fundamentalist and critical religion tries to do something unprecedented in the history of Western civilization.
We pay close attention to the human hand in constructing religious ideas and traditions, and we try to see through those constructions to what is real. We’ve been doing this for the better part of two hundred years, but set against the backdrop of about three thousand years, we’re still in an experimental phase. So can we do both? In Jewish tradition, we’re fortunate to have a two-thousand-year history of interpretation that has built a certain kind of muscle— our foundational texts do not have to be literally true in order to impart something that is true, alive and enduring. In fact, Rashi (10th c., France) says explicitly in places that we can only understand the Torah if we leave aside its literal interpretation. That gives us a great advantage as moderns. In a sense, we are acting in a traditional way when we deconstruct Genesis 1:1 in order to uncover something universal, whatever that may be.
(Link to Part One)
(Link to Part Three)
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.
