Arguing about Judaism

A Rabbi, a Philosopher and a Revealing Debate

Peter Cave, Dan Cohn-Sherbok

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000045086
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

Arguing about Judaism differs from other introductions to Judaism. It is unique, not solely in its engaging dialogues between a Reform rabbi and a humanist, atheist philosopher, but also in its presentation of and challenges to the fundamental religious beliefs of the Jewish heritage and their relevance to today's Jewish community.

The dialogues contain both Jewish narratives and philosophical responses, with topics ranging from the nature of God to controversies over sexual relations, animal welfare and the environment — from antisemitism to the state of Israel and Zionism.

Although the rabbi and philosopher argue strongly, clearly enjoying the cut and thrust of debate, they do so with sensitivity, charm and respect, revealing the rich intricacies of the Jewish religion and contemporary Jewish life. While essential reading for those studying Judaism and Jewish history, the book aims to stimulate debate more generally amongst Jews and non-Jews, the religious and the atheist — all those with a general interest in religion and philosophy.

PART I

Jewish beliefs

1

GOD

1.1 Dan introduces

Well, Peter, we are now embarking on a long journey of exploration. You are not Jewish. And you are an atheist. So, many of the ideas we are due to discuss will inevitably appear foreign and strange. I am interested to know what you think. No doubt you will challenge many if not most of the ideas and assumptions of the Jewish heritage. I am sure you will force me to dig deep, perhaps deeper than I have ever dared.

So, where to begin? The obvious starting point is belief in God. As you know, such a conviction is the fundamental principle of the Jewish faith. For nearly 4,000 years Jews have affirmed the existence of a Divine Being who created the universe from nothing. In the Hebrew Bible, the universe owes its existence to the one God, the creator of heaven and earth. Since all human beings are created in his image, all men and women are brothers and sisters. Thus the belief in one God implies that there is one humanity and one world.

In the Jewish tradition, God’s names reflect his attributes. First of all, He is eternal. Throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, He is described as having neither a beginning nor an end. Thus God is fundamentally different and other from his creation. He lies outside it. He is the one constant against which the ephemera of the universe passes. Everything in the physical world is subject to the laws of birth and death, renewal and decay. God alone is unchanging.

Connected with the belief in God’s eternity is the conviction that God is omniscient – that He knows everything. The rabbis were aware that this raises the problem of human freedom. If God knows what human beings will do in advance (since He is experiencing history in his eternal present), it seems impossible that they could act freely. Nonetheless, the sages insisted that human beings are free to act. The second century sage Rabbi Akiva, for example, declared: ‘All is foreseen, but freedom of choice is given.’

Connected with the attribute of omniscience is that of omnipotence. Nothing is said to be impossible by God. As God himself declared in the book of Jeremiah, ‘Behold I am the Lord of all flesh; is anything too hard for me?’ (Jeremiah 32:27). This also raises innumerable perplexities. Most Jewish thinkers were convinced that even though God is omnipotent, He is not capable of doing what is logically impossible. It was generally accepted, for example, that God cannot defy the laws of mathematics or change the past.

In recent times, the attributes of omniscience and omnipotence have raised a seemingly insoluble problem. If God knows everything, He must have been aware that six million of his chosen people were being murdered in unspeakable circumstances. If He is all-powerful, then He could have prevented this tragedy. Yet despite such a conundrum, the Jewish people remain faithful to their belief in the God of history.

1.2 Peter responds

As you imply, Dan, I know next to nothing about Judaism, though I have stood at the Wailing Wall – oops, sorry, I mean the Western Wall. The ‘wailing’ attribution, I gather, these days meets with frowns and condemnation. Yes, I am ignorant of Judaism, save for what you have already told me, though I have smatterings of the basics of Christian belief and rituals, combined with a love of sacred music and a fascination at the mysteries manifested in the words at Evensong. Other religions are, at heart, lost on me.

Your introduction of the God of Judaism is, unsurprisingly, the God that is recognized by most major philosophers, from St Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth-century highly influential Dominican friar, and other Christian believers such as René Descartes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz of the seventeenth century, to agnostics and atheists, for example, David Hume of the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment and Bertrand Russell of the humanist twentieth century.

The highly significant philosopher Baruch Spinoza – a Portuguese Jew, born in Holland in 1632, named ‘Benedito de Espinosa’ – reasoned things through from the concept of God and certain self-evident axioms; he deduced that most of the attributes of God that you list must be jettisoned or, at least, radically reinterpreted. His reward, in 1656, was to be excommunicated, and much cursed, by the Amsterdam synagogue; thus, he modified his first name, becoming ‘Benedict’ Spinoza. His writings – notably his Ethics, published posthumously in 1677 – have led him to receive the accolade of ‘god-intoxicated’ from some, yet ‘atheist’ from others.¹

I mention Spinoza to draw attention to how some Jewish philosophers are prepared to challenge the Orthodoxy of Judaism, even to the extent of embracing atheism, yet they may still value the rituals, narrative and community of Judaism, of Jew-icity, as I may term it. Apart from the obvious paradoxes to which you refer – and we shall be looking at those in future chapters – we have certain fundamental questions, which may sensibly be flagged here.

First, there is the matter of Judaism as a religion. Understandably, you have started us off with God; maybe for Judaism, God is central. Many would argue, though, at least when reviewing some current Christianity and other religions, that what is essential to religion is the sense of community, the historical narrative and facing the future together. True, most believers talk of a transcendent being, an eternal deity, but formal arguments for or against fail to touch their belief. Use of the term ‘God’ is perhaps more a mark of the quest for meaning to life, with the commitment that one can be found, one that is tied up with how we ought to behave to others and ourselves.

If Judaism does take talk of God as talk truly of an existent – ‘He really, really, exists’ – then, before we delve into the paradoxes, we perhaps should reflect on how those Jews who are committed to Judaism, how Rabbi Dan Cohn-Sherbok, how rabbis be they Orthodox or Reform, come to believe in a deity as an eternal unchanging reality, creator and designer of our world.

1.3 Dan answers

How does one come to belief in God? You are right to ask the question. The Bible explains that when the ancient Israelites were gathered at Mt Sinai, they accepted the Torah with the words ‘na’aseh v’nishma,’ we will do and we will harken (Exodus 24:7). The Jews who stood at Sinai believed without a shadow of doubt that there was a God who spoke to them. There are many Jews today who have the same conviction. They maintain with absolute certainty that God exists, that He chose the Jews as his special people, and revealed his word to them on Mt Sinai. Such trust is not the result of rational reflection – it is a matter of faith. Certainly, this is so for the majority of strictly Orthodox Jews who regard the Five Books of Moses as the word of God, and contend that God revealed himself through the teachings of rabbinic sages.

I should stress, however, that through the ages Jewish thinkers maintained that alongside such religious belief, it is possible to demonstrate the God’s existence by rational argument (such as the ontological, cosmological and teleological arguments). This was certainly the case in the medieval period. Yet, as a result of Immanuel Kant’s critique of the ability of human reason to arrive at conclusions beyond its scope and experience, many religious Jews today regard such arguments more as pointers than as proofs. Others have been attracted to religious existentialism and ‘leaps of faith.’ Mystics, though, tend to speak of faith as ‘higher than reason,’ treating it almost as a divine gift for those who seek God with all their heart, mind and will.

On the whole, the Jewish way to faith is through tradition. To find God in this way is not the same thing as to argue that there must be a God because people in the past believed in him, or that his existence can be proved through reason. The appeal of faith through tradition is that human beings in the past have claimed to have met God who endowed their lives with moral worth and significance. They have passed down what the encounter meant for them. Their words stir the hearts of the faithful. When Jews gather together to pray, it is the weight of nearly 4,000 years of history that draws them to the Divine.

1.4 Peter is unsure

There is a lot in what you say, Dan. Well, I mean that you touch on a wealth of considerations relevant to the ways in which people have come to believe. Allow me to strip down to some basic puzzles. First, though, I should comment on the term ‘universe.’ I take it we mean everything that there is, the totality, except for the transcendent being, God, if there is one. The universe need not be grasped as solely physical; after all, I, an atheist, accept the reality of numbers, mathematical and moral truths – and psychological states that are not ‘nothing but’ neurological states.

Whether the universe is understood in my wide sense or as ultimately totally physical, its existence, as it is, has led many – Christians, Muslims, Jews and many others – to conclude that God must exist or is highly likely to exist. The universe’s existence is deemed mysterious, unless explained by God’s existence as creator-designer. The fault in such reasoning is that if we understand the universe’s existence as a mystery, one that demands explanation, then it is mysterious how that demand is quelled by reference to God whose existence and features are also mysterious, being without explanation.

Religious believers typically resist any ‘leaps of faith,’ or little jumps and jiggles, into accepting arguments wittingly acknowledged as bad; after all, the flaws boomerang them back onto rationality’s seemingly firm territory. ’Tis far better, I suppose, if you are going to leap, to leap over all arguments, directly into the mystery of an eternal being. That, no doubt, was the essence of the leap associated with the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Maybe the approach is in line with the Jewish Mystics. Christians also delight in mystery. Tertullian, around 200 CE, welcomed the Christian belief in God’s incarnation through Jesus, a human being, as involving contradictions:

the Son of God was born and then died and just because it is absurd, it is to be believed; and he was buried and rose again; it is certain because it is impossible.

The non-religious – and probably quite a few religious – would see that particular line as utterly bizarre, perhaps reminding one of Keynes’s ‘hocus pocus’ to which I referred in the Prologue.

Dan, you highlight ‘Faith through tradition’: today’s Jews, you say, do not believe in God because previous generations so believed, but because some people ‘met God,’ their lives then endowed with moral worth and significance. That coheres with my penultimate remark in 1.2 that perhaps properly to grasp any religion, the focus should be the meaning of life that the religion brings. Let me avoid posing the awkward questions of what constitutes ‘meeting God’ and how would one tell that the meeting was for real. Let me ask instead: how do such believed encounters with God help in providing life with moral worth and significance?

1.5 Dan prepares to embark

Before embarking on a discussion of the ways in which belief in God can provide a framework for living a moral life, I want to return to the question of whether there are rational grounds for believing that God exists. So far I have pointed to the significance of faith and tradition. But, I do think there are compelling reasons for belief. Despite Kant’s (and others’) objection to proofs for the existence of God, I have always felt that the universe itself offers evidence of God’s presence.

Let me briefly outline the reasoning: such an argument typically proceeds by attempting to identify various features of the world that offer evidence of intelligent design. God’s existence is then said to be the best explanation for these features. The Bible suggests such an idea. Psalm 19:1 states, ‘The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows his handiwork.’

This is a brief outline of the steps of the argument:

1. The universe appears to have a design analogous to artefacts produced by human beings.
2. The design of any human artefact is the result of having been made by an intelligent being.
3. Like effects have like causes.
4. The conclusion is that the design of the universe must have been due to an intelligent being.
5. That intelligent being is God.

I know you won’t like the argument. You will tell me that Hume criticized this argument on two grounds: first, he rejected the analogy between the universe and anything created by human beings. Secondly, he argued that, even if the resemblance between the universe and what human beings create justify believing that they have similar causes, it would not demonstrate that an all-perfect God exists and created the world.

Those are powerful objections, yet I remain convinced that the order of the universe points to the existence of a divine creator. So, alongside the centuries of Jewish tradition that affirm the existence of God, I believe that God exists on rational grounds: the order and structure of the universe point to a creator who is the cause of all. This does not mean, however, that the Jewish view of God as omnipotent, omniscient and all-good is justified by the design argument. But, it does provide a basis for belief beyond blind faith.

1.6 Peter sighs

Cardinal Newman – granted saintly status in 2019 – gave a pithy account of how we cling to certain beliefs. He offered the couplet:

A man convinced against his will,

Is of the same opinion still.

Dan, to justify your belief in God as creator-designer, you put forward the classic version of the Design Argument. You then accept that there are objections – nay, ‘powerful objections’ – to the argument, but, instead of showing why those objections are mistaken, you contentedly insist that the argument is sound. For Dan on God, we could say,

When Dan knows his reasoning’s wrong,

His belief remains – so very strong –

With such a strength – as all along.

Of course, it is difficult to know how to respond when you – and many believers – insist that belief in God is rational, based on arguments from the universe’s features, yet clear objections to those arguments neither undermine the belief nor stimulate answers to the objections. I skim through a few pertinent factors.

You make use of some similarity existing between the universe and objects designed by human beings. Human beings, though, have not been creators of the objects’ u...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Prologue
• Introduction: Judaism’s diversity
• PART I: Jewish beliefs
• PART II: Jewish practice
• PART III: Jews and others – and the world
• Epilogue
• Glossary
• Further reading
• Index