Walking With God

by Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson

This year, the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at the American Jewish University launched a major new adult education project in partnership with the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism and the Rabbinical Assembly. Walking With God features commissioned essays from scholars and thinkers reflecting the breadth of Conservative Judaism’s best insights. These essays present approaches to God from the full range of Jewish thought and literature throughout the ages. Edited by Rabbi Artson and Deborah Silver, a Ziegler School rabbinical student, the essays were supplemented with worksheets presenting primary sources and questions to help stimulate lively conversations in hevruta. The books were printed and mailed to every congregational rabbi in the Conservative movement – at no cost – with the hope that this tool will strengthen congregational adult learning. The entire book is available for free download at www.ajula.edu. We are already hard at work on the second volume, Walking With Justice. In addition to partnering with United Synagogue and the RA, the Ziegler School is joined this year by Women’s League for Conservative Judaism and the Federation of Jewish Men’s Clubs in this exciting enterprise in talmud Torah. What follows is an excerpt from the introduction to Walking With God.

Much of contemporary theological discussion is marred by the coerciveness of its participants. Few people discuss theology in order to account for the broadest number of facts and perceptions. Instead, theology is characterized by a twofold attempt to coerce others to believe as does the theologian and to compare the selected best of one’s own tradition against the less (subjectively) palatable aspects of another’s. Both efforts prevent an understanding of other people’s perceptions of the world and inhibit one’s own religious growth. I wish to avoid both blemishes.

So, at the outset, I must confess that I have no desire to persuade a belief in God the way I do or for the reasons I do. I offer my own perceptions of God, hoping that you will do the same, and that through our mutual attempts to internalize or even to reject (after careful thought) each other’s theology, we will emerge somewhat wiser, more sophisticated, and better servants of God.

I have an additional confession to make. I cannot adhere exclusively to a single theological approach to God. To reduce God to one philosophical system (ontological, experiential, or existential) is to miss the full extent of God’s majesty. This reduction is no less belittling to God than is the attempt to claim that God’s complete revelation can be contained in mere words. This caveat is not intended as an excuse for sloppy thinking or unjustifiable conclusions, simply to assert that God is experienced on many levels, that people are complex creatures, and that any theology which ignores that multifacetedness and that complexity cannot do justice to its subject.

As an atheist, I was unable to justify even the simplest moral claims. For many years, I had no theoretical grounding for assertions as clear as “raping my sister is wrong” or “murdering the Jews in Nazi Germany was wrong.” If there is no external, non-human source of morality, then the most I could assert was that I think raping my sister is wrong. But the rapist thinks it is right and the matter must rest there. Teku. Even more upsetting, if morality is based on human or social need, a Nazi could make an irrefutable argument that Germany’s need required the execution of millions of Jews – not that Jews were really a threat, but that the German people needed a scapegoat. And, if consensus is our basis of morality, there certainly were more Germans than there were Jews.

For me, the only way to ground morality into a system which didn’t collapse was to place moral authority beyond human judgment. God is the source of morality. We may understand God’s moral imperative imperfectly, but that does not make the imperative or its Source any less real than an imperfectly transmitted letter would render its author’s existence false. God has planted in each person a moral force, akin to our drive for food, sleep, and sex. Just as with those other drives, they can be denied, perverted, or rationalized away, but they are real nonetheless. God is the reason why raping my sister is simply wrong and why murdering Jews cannot be justified on grounds of social utility.

It might be argued that moral treatment of people derives from human equality. Such an assertion cannot be demonstrated exclusively through reason, and I must treat it as a dogma of faith (one which I share). People are clearly not equal unless we have something perfect with which to compare them – some are brighter than others, some stronger, some richer, some better looking. And some are weak, stupid, poor, or ugly. There must be an outside point of comparison, One whose nature is so radically different from that of any person, however wonderful, that in the face of that Other all people are essentially equal, despite their distinctions. People are equalized in comparison to the Holy Eternal One. It is through God that the moral argument that all people are equal (“created equal,” in fact) gains force.

My intuitive insistence on morality nurtures my intellectual recognition of God.

One cannot consider the existence of God from a neutral position. One can act as a believer and see if the promises made to a believer are true, or one can act as a nonbeliever and judge the merit of non-belief. Experience is rich and divergent enough, filled with wonders and horrors to the point that its testimony is eloquent in both directions – regardless of one’s religious assertions.

But when I say the Aleinu, I know that I stand before the Ruler of space and time and that we have a shared relationship. When my wife lights Shabbat candles we are enjoying a gift from the Holy One and God’s company and love. When I spend a night in a shelter for the homeless I am God’s ally, and when I speak about a Jewish response to the possibility of nuclear holocaust, I am caring for creation and thereby serving the Creator.

So many experiences in my life point to God’s reality. No, that is too pale. Many of my experiences point to God’s love and involvement. I have been richly blessed, and the very ability to perceive those blessings is itself another pointer to God. These experiences and perceptions are the everyday miracles in which I sustain my relationship with God.