Can There Be a Jewish Pantheism?

Abstract

Can There Be a Jewish Pantheism: Review Essay CAN THERE BE A JEWISH PANTHEISM? A REVIEW ESSAY by Michael Levine Michael P. Levine is currently senior lecturer in philosophy at The University of Western Australia. He has published numerous articles in the areas of philosophy of religion, metaphysics, history of philosophy, philosophy of history and ethics. He is the author of Hume and the Problem of Miracles (Kluwer, 1989) and Pantheism: A Non-Theistic Concept ofDeity (forthcoming). 83 Seek My Face, Speak My Name: A ContemporaryJewish Theology, by Arthur Green. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1992. 266 pp. What you are reading is a heterodox mystical theology ofJudaism. I do not see a divine intent or will in the life force.... This is not "will" in our highly personalistic human sense, but a striving inherent in the very existence and evolution of the universe. . . . The voice of God does speak to us at Sinai, but it is none other than the voice of Moses. The hands and feet of God do bring redemption, but they are none other than our own limbs.... . . . Jewish panentheism, the world [is] included or "located" within the divine. Nothing other than that is intended in this book. Arthur Green Arthur Green's book is provocative, clearly written, and well worth reading. However, for reasons discussed in section II, I do not believe it can be anything but very marginal to contemporary Jewish theological discourse. Green, presumably, does not see his project as more of an imaginative discourse on pantheism than as a fundamental reinterpretation , or even reinvention, ofJudaism. Nevertheless, the book can be seen 84 SHOFAR Summer 1993 Vol. 11, No.4 in this way (i.e., as fundamentally pantheistic rather than Judaic), and it is as a theology of pantheism rather than of Judaism that, in my view, the book is most interesting and makes a significant contribution. Pantheists should read this book: Before critically assessing Green's project and discussing some of the problems I see with it, I shall give a brief account of his central theses. Green puts his main points in italics so they are easy to discern. The validity of his theses is not generally argued for, but is simply asserted and then elaborated upon. He is describing what he thinks a credible contemporary Jewish theology should be like. He bases his account on religious experience. "Theology is ... an attempt to articulate that intangible we call 'religious experience'" (p. xix). Even apart from considerations of the truth of what is being described, such imaginative description is a legitimate theological task. I. Green is explicit in his denial of the literal truth of the events regarded as central to Judaism (e.g., the revelation on Sinai). Ultimately, we will strike a bargain, the tradition and the seeker. I will enter into its language, celebrate the weekly recreation of the world, the liberation from bondage in Egypt, the standing before the mountain to hear God's word. I will do so not as a literal 'believer,' but rather as one who recognizes that all these 'events' are themselves metaphors for a truth whose depth reaches far beyond them (p. xxiii). He describes the journey to God as a "journey inward, where the goal is an ultimately deep level within the self rather than the top of the mountain" (p. 12). '''God' and the 'world' are different faces of the same reality, different modes of the only Being there is," (p. 14). The self who continues to live in the world of 'self and 'other' needs the dualistic language of 'I' and 'Thou,' even though it does not mirror the deepest truth we know.... [B]ehind this veil of separate ... individualism, lies another reality, one in which all souls are one Soul. ... [T]he boundaries that separate them are but illusion (pp. 17, 20). Green is describing a classical religious monistic metaphysic. Green sees creation as emanation. ". . . the 'act' about which we speak is really a process, a flowing forth of the divine self, rather than the creation of a wholly other out of nothing.... It is within the divine nihil, the nothingness that is God, that creation takes place" (pp. 59-60...