Rabbi Michael Leo Samuel

Despite the daily pogroms, persecutions and misery of the old European Shtetle, the pre-modern Jew had an inner faith in a personal God who was always close to his heart. The Eastern European Jew resembled Shalom Aleichem’s character Tevye, the old pious Jew who addressed God as freely and intimately as one would speak with a friend or neighbor. His spiritual language portrayed metaphors that were shamelessly personal, passionately rich and profoundly anthropomorphic. It was a culture of intense intimacy, spirit, song, dance, and tears. The Eastern European Jew could still address God as Tatte (Yiddish for daddy). God was perceived as a Bore Olam - Creator of all the world. God-talk contained many terms of endearment and signified how God’s living Presence could be discerned in the world.

The political, social, scientific events that shaped the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries exploded the naiveté and innocence that characterized the pre-modern Jewish world. An early 20th century Jewish existentialist Franz Rosenzweig, tells about a conversation Herman Cohen, a famous Jewish neo-Kantian philosopher, once had with an old pious Jew. This conversation typified the dilemma Jewish intellectuals in the post- Emancipation era experienced when the ghetto walls finally crumbled down:

He once expounded the God-idea of his Ethics to an old Jew of that city. The Jew listened with reverent attention, but when Cohen was through, he asked, “And where is the Bore olam (Creator)?” Cohen had no answer to this, and tears arose in his eyes.

Rosenzweig added:

Here the term Bore Olam does not mean something remote, as the content of the words seem to indicate. On the contrary: in popular speech the words are fraught with emotion, they are something near, and in the case of the God of the heart, the heart never for a moment forgets that He is the one -who is. So here the spark does not merely oscillate between the two poles of nearness and remoteness, but each pole has a positive and a negative charge, only in a different pattern. The Creator who is above the world takes up his “habitation,” and the abstract God of philosophy has his “being in the crushed heart.”[3]

Herman Cohen’s concept of “ethical monotheism” utilized the idea of God as the organizing principle and nexus of ethical behavior. The God idea was a necessary postulate in order to have a just and ethical world. However, Cohen’s reduction of God to an idea meant that Jews would not have to relate to God on a personal level. Cohen was convinced that any “personalization” of God was nothing more than a Christian aberration.

Despite Cohen’s secularity, he still felt a sense of homelessness when it came to his relationship with God. It did touch his heart. In many ways this feeling is emblematic of the way many Jews today feel about their faith in God, and in their own identities as Jews. The current sensation of “homelessness” stems from fragmentation and ‘loss of soul’ that has become commonplace in today’s postmodern Judaic community.

As if the changes initiated by the new historical consciousness were not enough, the trauma of the Holocaust shattered the old pious world-view of the Jew into a million pieces. Like the old nursery rhyme, “All the kings horses and all the king’s men, couldn’t put Humpty Dumpy back together again.”

Since the end of the second World War, picking up the pieces and redefining the nature of our faith has proven to be a profound challenge; our traditional ideas of God have dissolved in a sea of doubt and endless questioning. Our capacity and personal ability to experience of the God of the Exodus has proven cognitively as well as emotionally difficult.

Still and all, while the experience of God may seem problematic for many, I would encourage you to follow Maimonides’ principle: Before you can arrive at what you do believe in, you must first determine what you do not or will believe in. Faith requires that we see our lives in terms of a great and wonderful quest that leads to the greatest discovery of fulfillment and purpose. Yes, Tillich is correct: religion is about our Ultimate Concern and hopefully, this realization will help us redefine our relationship with the Divine.

Maimonides was one of the first great advocates of Jewish meditation, which he considered to be the highest form of worship. Petitional prayer for Maimonides represented a more prepubescent form of worship because it presupposes the idea that we are the center of God’s universe. This is spiritual narcissism, and Maimonides reminds us that Creation is God-centered and not human-centered. According to Maimonides, God is the Redemptive Power Who liberates us from the shackles of our illusions. In a post-Holocaust world, I believe the time has come to rethink our relationship to God based on some of the ideas proposed by Maimonides.