This is something that I often have to defend in my own life, to my ongoing frustration. There's a certain degree to which many non-religious people I know assume all religious people are biblical literalists (...I think a big part of that is the pervasiveness of Evangelical Christian theology in American politics right now, but I digress).
What I'm trying to say is, I wish there were a way to get people to understand more easily that beardy-man-in-the-cloud-chair is not the default way of thinking for every faithful person. I feel like no matter how many times I explain that to some folks, their past experience with the literalists is always the prevailing narrative of religion in their minds, and it hurts when I feel like people I'm close with are putting out energy that feels like a head pat towards my religious observance. Even when they're generally respectful about it, it can still feel like the underlying message is still, "that's nice, but you're crazy and uncritical for buying this stuff."
I do understand that if you're, say, a queer person who has been burned by a particular kind of religious person in your life, it makes sense that your default is caution/skepticism/dislike of all religion generally. But I wish there were a way to change the default narrative from a fundamentalist one to this more curious one.
PS: Rabbi, can I just take a minute to thank you, again, for doing this? The last couple weeks, I've been marveling at and appreciating your ability to come at us with such deep thinking twice a week. I always feel like I want to participate in every comment thread, but sometimes I can't think of anything to say, even in response to others, and then I stand (well, sit) in awe of the fact that you can hit such resonant notes every time.
There's a line somewhere in the Talmud, on the principles of Biblical exegesis, that says if two verses appear to contradict each other, the third will come and reconcile them. That's the phrasing: not "you must find a third" but "the third will come."
On matters of practical halacha it can be a real problem if there appears to be a contradiction, because how are we supposed to know what to do? But on matters of theology or cosmology or narrative, I'm inclined to read that phrasing as a subtle hint: we don't have to wear ourselves out _searching_ for a reconciling verse that makes sense out of the contradiction. It'll come. Maybe when we aren't expecting it, and maybe not when we want it, so in the meantime maybe what we should do is sit with it and get comfortable with not having the answer.
(There's a song someone wrote called "The Word of God," which made me think about this concept on another level entirely; I want to come back to this when I have time to write all that out.)
Thank you for today's post. Realizing that I could (should) treat the Tanakh as poetry rather than journalism made it so much more possible and fulfilling to make a place for it in my adult life.
I was raised as a Methodist. I went away in my teens and tried numerous spiritual ideas on and off for a long time and came back as a Lutheran.
The way that christians often seem to weaponize the language of 2 Tim. v16-17 (about all of the bible being the inspired word of G!d) into an unquestioning non-critical acceptance of the literal (often mis/poorly translated) English they read or have read to them has always troubled me.
In many congregations, it's hard to question - well - anything, but it always seemed to me that questions had to be continually asked. The prophets all asked and so did Christ, but we aren't supposed to ask? It has never sat well with me.
This line of study is a breath of fresh air and I remain grateful for it, Rabbi.
Is there a way to upload images into comments here? I tried just cutting and pasting but it didn't work. There's a meme that floats around Jewish social media that I thought y'all might find some delight in - it's the one that shares an image of the Shema and translates the opening line (usually "Hear O Israel") as "Listen-up God-Wrestlers". :) :)
Rabbi, you just drive me wild. I wish I had grown up with this brand of Judaism, of theology, from the get-go. And am so grateful now to be exposed to this. May the turning continue. Thank you.
So here's my puzzle: I grew up convinced that talking about my personal experience of God was not a Jewish thing to do. I associated it with Christians "witnessing" at me and trying to convert me. Also, I was very aware that one person's honest experience might not be the same as another's (even standing at Sinai!), and that some people made up a God in their own image. Talking about God in the text was and is something I adored doing, but talking about God in my experience felt like telling secrets about my wife and me in the bedroom to people she doesn't know. It just felt icky, and perhaps immoral.
Yet I am seeing more and more that people who don't hear about Jews having a personal experience of God think that there is no such thing in Judaism, and some of them go looking for it elsewhere. And that makes me sad.
It's sometimes easier for me to see it through a comparison to more modern literature. There's a guy I talk about on my cemetery tours named Matt Sorto. He was blinded while trying to rob a grocery store as a teenager, and ended up sharing a cell with Nathan Leopold, the famous murderer, who learned braille just to teach it to him. He became a voracious reader and spent his later years writing long commentaries on "the secret language of the poet," the divine revelation that so many classical writers were trying to describe. If there was some sort of divine revelation, Sorto only saw it second-hand through art, and most of his writings are just dense rambles. But it's a similar idea - artists trying to describe a glimpse of something bigger - Shakespeare's "dream that hath no bottom," Dylan's "vague traces of skipping reels of rhyme." It's sometimes easiest for me to think of Torah as a human record and attempt to make sense of a glimpse of something even less comprehensible than what the poets were trying to describe.
I mentioned being ok with not understanding. Came across this beautiful post on Instagram on @blackliturgies (it’s not for everyone but don’t throw the baby away with the bath water -there is some mind blowing stuff there)They speak about ‘it’s ok not to know. Mystery is a liberation’
“G-d of all mystery,
It is liberating to be with a G-d who seems more interested in our presence and attunement to the spiritual, than the precise articulation of it. The demand for certainty is exhausting and alienating. Help those of us inclined toward intellectual exploration to do so not out of idolatry or superiority but out of sacred curiosity-that curiosity which is capable of reason without being enslaved to it. And protect those of us whose encounter with the Divine cannot be met with words or precise language. Let us stand strong in mystery, without pressure to to name every sacred thing. Help those in bondage to certainty, turn toward these voices and spiritual expressions as a beautiful guide. And as we make space for the mysterious, let us expand into our liberated selves.”
I'm having a thought about the 70 faces of Torah and how Kabbalah teaches there are 70(?) names of G!d, but I'm at work and I can't figure out where I wanted to go with this.
Hey Reb. So when you were studying did you have moments when you're reading all these clergy, theologians, sages, past & present and think "Fuck! that's what I've always been saying, and now I'm reading it being said better than I ever could!"? It happens with the work of many people I admire, past and present. It feels like the wind going out of my sails. It feels like, "why bother trying to say my thing? I'll never top that!" I want to be one of those clergy/theologian-writer-types one day, but this feeling keeps getting me down and it makes it all far less fun than it should be.
At the risk of excommunication, ;) Isn't some of this a lot like what Spinoza was trying to teach us? Any Spinoza scholars out there who might be able to weigh in on the history and philosophic/theological implications?
When I was younger, I spent some time dating someone who was an Evangelical Christian. That was a perplexing experience for both of us. I later dated someone else who had grown up in a fundamentalist Anglican church, and we discussed that prior relationship of mine. I remember distinctly how completely mutually baffled we were about the other person’s take on the matter — I was shocked and frankly appalled by the literalism both of them brought to their idea of the Divine, and the latter person couldn’t believe that I thought that metaphor was somehow more powerful than a hyperliteral interpretation. It was an astoundingly profound, deep chasm of difference in understanding and perspective and belief.
I have (& continue to!) really appreciated your perspective on God and literalism and allegory; I feel like it has really helped me to better be able to communicate something I have deeply felt but sometimes struggled to articulate in the face of complete incomprehension from someone else.
Love this!! I had written a looooong comment and the page refreshed!! Maybe it was nonsense. So I’ll try and keep this short.
I read somewhere that the Bible isn’t necessarily contradictory-just that as God breathed it is, it was still written by imperfect human beings. They could have added and subtracted as they saw fit or according to their inclinations(surely G-d doesn’t really mean that). When we look at the books of Kings and Chronicles we can see this somewhat.
It wasn’t until much later in life I was taught that the there is poetry, history, etc in the Bible. So Job was very much a literal book for me in my childhood. I still struggle with what to take literally and what not to which I think is neither here nor there actually.
I also think we as creation need to be ok with not fully understanding the Creator. How do we even begin to wrap our heads, our imagination, around the concept of G-d and His character? What’s important to me is that He reveals the aspect of character that I deeply need at the time I need it. When I’m lacking in whatever, He is Jehovah Yireh. When I’m distressed, He shows up as Jehovah Shalom. When my spirit, mind or body is broken, He turns up as Jehovah Rapha. Most important He turns up as Yahweh. I AM. And at a very literal/base level He is whatever I’m needing at that time (I understand there’s
So, Maimonides almost certainly doesn't mean (in "Those who believe that God is One and that God [also] has many attributes declare the unity with their lips and assume the plurality in their thoughts.”) what it seems to me that these words mean, and I'm puzzled.
On first (and second, and third) reading this sentence seems to assert that if God is One then God is simple and has only one attribute/characteristic/trait. Plurality seems to stand in opposition to complexity here as much as to unity.
It just seems so unlikely that this is what's intended. But I don't know how to read it otherwise.
(And none of this perplexity is getting in the way of me following along the rest of this essay--just me, getting distracted in the details and tangents.)
I do feel a bit off-put by thinking that taking the emotional moments as literal is a form of idolatry. It might just be me, but if we are made in God's image, but God is Too Much for it to be the physicality, then that really just leaves the emotional, doesn't it? Especially also considering that what we do or say or feel reflects to God, that God changes as humanity does... I can't quite remember if that was a conversation that happened here, or in my Daf Yomi group (or both!) but it's something that really resonated with me, and maybe people will think I'm overstepping, but I'd be willing to fight Maimonides about it, ha.
I can see it becoming a kind of idolatry if we try to say God is *just* a specific emotional thing- an angry God, a jealous God, even something positive like a caring God- because that's limiting, but isn't it just as limiting to say that God cannot have angry moments, jealous moments, caring moments? To me, along with the historical things, scripture is about teaching us to treat others as full people, and a lot of times it seems like God needs to learn that too- or make us learn it so that God can reflect it? Idk, metaphysics and such are hard.
All the rest of this is very resonant, I just wanted to pick that out as something sticking at me.
This is something that I often have to defend in my own life, to my ongoing frustration. There's a certain degree to which many non-religious people I know assume all religious people are biblical literalists (...I think a big part of that is the pervasiveness of Evangelical Christian theology in American politics right now, but I digress).
What I'm trying to say is, I wish there were a way to get people to understand more easily that beardy-man-in-the-cloud-chair is not the default way of thinking for every faithful person. I feel like no matter how many times I explain that to some folks, their past experience with the literalists is always the prevailing narrative of religion in their minds, and it hurts when I feel like people I'm close with are putting out energy that feels like a head pat towards my religious observance. Even when they're generally respectful about it, it can still feel like the underlying message is still, "that's nice, but you're crazy and uncritical for buying this stuff."
I do understand that if you're, say, a queer person who has been burned by a particular kind of religious person in your life, it makes sense that your default is caution/skepticism/dislike of all religion generally. But I wish there were a way to change the default narrative from a fundamentalist one to this more curious one.
PS: Rabbi, can I just take a minute to thank you, again, for doing this? The last couple weeks, I've been marveling at and appreciating your ability to come at us with such deep thinking twice a week. I always feel like I want to participate in every comment thread, but sometimes I can't think of anything to say, even in response to others, and then I stand (well, sit) in awe of the fact that you can hit such resonant notes every time.
There's a line somewhere in the Talmud, on the principles of Biblical exegesis, that says if two verses appear to contradict each other, the third will come and reconcile them. That's the phrasing: not "you must find a third" but "the third will come."
On matters of practical halacha it can be a real problem if there appears to be a contradiction, because how are we supposed to know what to do? But on matters of theology or cosmology or narrative, I'm inclined to read that phrasing as a subtle hint: we don't have to wear ourselves out _searching_ for a reconciling verse that makes sense out of the contradiction. It'll come. Maybe when we aren't expecting it, and maybe not when we want it, so in the meantime maybe what we should do is sit with it and get comfortable with not having the answer.
(There's a song someone wrote called "The Word of God," which made me think about this concept on another level entirely; I want to come back to this when I have time to write all that out.)
Thank you for today's post. Realizing that I could (should) treat the Tanakh as poetry rather than journalism made it so much more possible and fulfilling to make a place for it in my adult life.
I was raised as a Methodist. I went away in my teens and tried numerous spiritual ideas on and off for a long time and came back as a Lutheran.
The way that christians often seem to weaponize the language of 2 Tim. v16-17 (about all of the bible being the inspired word of G!d) into an unquestioning non-critical acceptance of the literal (often mis/poorly translated) English they read or have read to them has always troubled me.
In many congregations, it's hard to question - well - anything, but it always seemed to me that questions had to be continually asked. The prophets all asked and so did Christ, but we aren't supposed to ask? It has never sat well with me.
This line of study is a breath of fresh air and I remain grateful for it, Rabbi.
So - Tech Help needed:
Is there a way to upload images into comments here? I tried just cutting and pasting but it didn't work. There's a meme that floats around Jewish social media that I thought y'all might find some delight in - it's the one that shares an image of the Shema and translates the opening line (usually "Hear O Israel") as "Listen-up God-Wrestlers". :) :)
Rabbi, you just drive me wild. I wish I had grown up with this brand of Judaism, of theology, from the get-go. And am so grateful now to be exposed to this. May the turning continue. Thank you.
So here's my puzzle: I grew up convinced that talking about my personal experience of God was not a Jewish thing to do. I associated it with Christians "witnessing" at me and trying to convert me. Also, I was very aware that one person's honest experience might not be the same as another's (even standing at Sinai!), and that some people made up a God in their own image. Talking about God in the text was and is something I adored doing, but talking about God in my experience felt like telling secrets about my wife and me in the bedroom to people she doesn't know. It just felt icky, and perhaps immoral.
Yet I am seeing more and more that people who don't hear about Jews having a personal experience of God think that there is no such thing in Judaism, and some of them go looking for it elsewhere. And that makes me sad.
How do I square this circle?
It's sometimes easier for me to see it through a comparison to more modern literature. There's a guy I talk about on my cemetery tours named Matt Sorto. He was blinded while trying to rob a grocery store as a teenager, and ended up sharing a cell with Nathan Leopold, the famous murderer, who learned braille just to teach it to him. He became a voracious reader and spent his later years writing long commentaries on "the secret language of the poet," the divine revelation that so many classical writers were trying to describe. If there was some sort of divine revelation, Sorto only saw it second-hand through art, and most of his writings are just dense rambles. But it's a similar idea - artists trying to describe a glimpse of something bigger - Shakespeare's "dream that hath no bottom," Dylan's "vague traces of skipping reels of rhyme." It's sometimes easiest for me to think of Torah as a human record and attempt to make sense of a glimpse of something even less comprehensible than what the poets were trying to describe.
I mentioned being ok with not understanding. Came across this beautiful post on Instagram on @blackliturgies (it’s not for everyone but don’t throw the baby away with the bath water -there is some mind blowing stuff there)They speak about ‘it’s ok not to know. Mystery is a liberation’
“G-d of all mystery,
It is liberating to be with a G-d who seems more interested in our presence and attunement to the spiritual, than the precise articulation of it. The demand for certainty is exhausting and alienating. Help those of us inclined toward intellectual exploration to do so not out of idolatry or superiority but out of sacred curiosity-that curiosity which is capable of reason without being enslaved to it. And protect those of us whose encounter with the Divine cannot be met with words or precise language. Let us stand strong in mystery, without pressure to to name every sacred thing. Help those in bondage to certainty, turn toward these voices and spiritual expressions as a beautiful guide. And as we make space for the mysterious, let us expand into our liberated selves.”
I'm having a thought about the 70 faces of Torah and how Kabbalah teaches there are 70(?) names of G!d, but I'm at work and I can't figure out where I wanted to go with this.
Hey Reb. So when you were studying did you have moments when you're reading all these clergy, theologians, sages, past & present and think "Fuck! that's what I've always been saying, and now I'm reading it being said better than I ever could!"? It happens with the work of many people I admire, past and present. It feels like the wind going out of my sails. It feels like, "why bother trying to say my thing? I'll never top that!" I want to be one of those clergy/theologian-writer-types one day, but this feeling keeps getting me down and it makes it all far less fun than it should be.
At the risk of excommunication, ;) Isn't some of this a lot like what Spinoza was trying to teach us? Any Spinoza scholars out there who might be able to weigh in on the history and philosophic/theological implications?
When I was younger, I spent some time dating someone who was an Evangelical Christian. That was a perplexing experience for both of us. I later dated someone else who had grown up in a fundamentalist Anglican church, and we discussed that prior relationship of mine. I remember distinctly how completely mutually baffled we were about the other person’s take on the matter — I was shocked and frankly appalled by the literalism both of them brought to their idea of the Divine, and the latter person couldn’t believe that I thought that metaphor was somehow more powerful than a hyperliteral interpretation. It was an astoundingly profound, deep chasm of difference in understanding and perspective and belief.
I have (& continue to!) really appreciated your perspective on God and literalism and allegory; I feel like it has really helped me to better be able to communicate something I have deeply felt but sometimes struggled to articulate in the face of complete incomprehension from someone else.
Love this!! I had written a looooong comment and the page refreshed!! Maybe it was nonsense. So I’ll try and keep this short.
I read somewhere that the Bible isn’t necessarily contradictory-just that as God breathed it is, it was still written by imperfect human beings. They could have added and subtracted as they saw fit or according to their inclinations(surely G-d doesn’t really mean that). When we look at the books of Kings and Chronicles we can see this somewhat.
It wasn’t until much later in life I was taught that the there is poetry, history, etc in the Bible. So Job was very much a literal book for me in my childhood. I still struggle with what to take literally and what not to which I think is neither here nor there actually.
I also think we as creation need to be ok with not fully understanding the Creator. How do we even begin to wrap our heads, our imagination, around the concept of G-d and His character? What’s important to me is that He reveals the aspect of character that I deeply need at the time I need it. When I’m lacking in whatever, He is Jehovah Yireh. When I’m distressed, He shows up as Jehovah Shalom. When my spirit, mind or body is broken, He turns up as Jehovah Rapha. Most important He turns up as Yahweh. I AM. And at a very literal/base level He is whatever I’m needing at that time (I understand there’s
more to it in Jewish text) Hope I’m making sense.
So, Maimonides almost certainly doesn't mean (in "Those who believe that God is One and that God [also] has many attributes declare the unity with their lips and assume the plurality in their thoughts.”) what it seems to me that these words mean, and I'm puzzled.
On first (and second, and third) reading this sentence seems to assert that if God is One then God is simple and has only one attribute/characteristic/trait. Plurality seems to stand in opposition to complexity here as much as to unity.
It just seems so unlikely that this is what's intended. But I don't know how to read it otherwise.
(And none of this perplexity is getting in the way of me following along the rest of this essay--just me, getting distracted in the details and tangents.)
I do feel a bit off-put by thinking that taking the emotional moments as literal is a form of idolatry. It might just be me, but if we are made in God's image, but God is Too Much for it to be the physicality, then that really just leaves the emotional, doesn't it? Especially also considering that what we do or say or feel reflects to God, that God changes as humanity does... I can't quite remember if that was a conversation that happened here, or in my Daf Yomi group (or both!) but it's something that really resonated with me, and maybe people will think I'm overstepping, but I'd be willing to fight Maimonides about it, ha.
I can see it becoming a kind of idolatry if we try to say God is *just* a specific emotional thing- an angry God, a jealous God, even something positive like a caring God- because that's limiting, but isn't it just as limiting to say that God cannot have angry moments, jealous moments, caring moments? To me, along with the historical things, scripture is about teaching us to treat others as full people, and a lot of times it seems like God needs to learn that too- or make us learn it so that God can reflect it? Idk, metaphysics and such are hard.
All the rest of this is very resonant, I just wanted to pick that out as something sticking at me.