Deus Absconditus

The interventionist God died in Auschwitz. The most charitable reading of Jewish theology in the light of Jewish history is that God laid down the law at Sinai and, as it were, retired. The attitude Samuel Beckett characterized as "waiting for Godot" is no longer tolerable. If the Jews of Europe had placed their faith in human potentiality instead of divine intervention, more might have resisted the Nazi death march.

Dostoevsky was the first to articulate that if God is dead, everything is permitted. God is the necessary postulate to prevent the war of all against all. If the interventionist God is irretrievably dead, we must seek Him in other forms. The kabbalah tells of a God in exile who has left sparks of the divine hidden within the shards of the material world. The role of Israel is to liberate the hidden sparks and repair the shattered vessel.

Leo Strauss said "it is surely nobler to be victim of the most noble dream than to profit from a sordid reality and to wallow in it." My interest in religion is not based on blind faith and biblical literalism, but rather incessant doubt and the beauty of allegory. Militant secularism is spiritual suicide and militant orthodoxy is intellectual suicide. The meaning of Israel is not certainty but struggle: "He has striven with God." Even if God is dead, we must struggle with His ghost.

Comments

  1. DudeMay 26, 2009 at 1:09 PM

    "The kabbalah tells of a God in exile who has left sparks of the divine hidden within the shards of the material world."

    "Truth is a mirror that shattered as it fell from the hand of God. Everyone picked up a piece of it, and each decided that the truth was what he saw reflected in his fragment rather than realizing that the truth had become fragmented among them all."
    — Rumi

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