The Jewish Approach to God: A Brief Introduction for Christians

By Rabbi Neil Gillman, PhD

A window into the Jewish understanding of God throughout
history and today—written especially for Christians.

In Jewish Scripture—Christianity's foundation—God's presence is everywhere: in nature, in history, and in the range of human experience. Yet the Torah, Maimonides, and 4,000 years of Jewish tradition all agree on one thing: that God is beyond any form of human comprehension. How, then can Judaism be so crowded with descriptions and images of God? And what can they mean to the ways Christians understand their own faith?

In this special book, Rabbi Neil Gillman guides you through these questions and the countless different ways the Jewish people have related to God, how each originated and what each may mean for you. Whether you are Christian, Muslim, or even Jewish, this nuts-and-bolts introduction will both answer your questions—and stimulate new ones.

A theologian who writes as a great teacher, Gillman addresses the key concepts at the heart of Judaism’s approach to God. From Ein Sof (Infinity) to Shekhinah (Presence), Gillman helps you understand what the search for knowing God itself says about Jewish tradition and how you can use the fundamentals of Judaism to strengthen, explore, and deepen your own spiritual foundations.

• God Is Echad (Unique)
• God Is Power
• God Is Person
• God Is Nice—Sometimes
• God Is Not Nice—Sometimes
• God Can Change
• God Creates
• God Reveals
• God Redeems

• Language: English
• Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
• Release date: Aug 10, 2012
• ISBN: 9781580236621

Rabbi Neil Gillman, PhD

Neil Gillman, rabbi and PhD, is professor of Jewish philosophy at The Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, where he has served as chair of the Department of Jewish Philosophy and dean of the Rabbinical School. He is author of Believing and Its Tensions: A Personal Conversation about God, Torah, Suffering and Death in Jewish Thought; The Death of Death: Resurrection and Immortality in Jewish Thought, a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and a Publishers Weekly "Best Book of the Year"; The Way Into Encountering God in Judaism; The Jewish Approach to God: A Brief Introduction for Christians; Traces of God: Seeing God in Torah, History and Everyday Life (all Jewish Lights); and Sacred Fragments: Recovering Theology for the Modern Jew, winner of the National Jewish Book Award.

Book preview

1

GOD IS ECHAD

THE SHEMA

BY ANY MEASURE, the one passage in all of Scripture that every Jew, no matter what his or her identification with Judaism, will recognize is Deuteronomy 6:4, commonly known as "the Shema." It appears more frequently in our traditional liturgy than any other single passage in the Bible. Worshiping Jews recite it daily, morning and evening, and more frequently on the Sabbath and festivals. It is also the most ancient biblical passage to be incorporated into our liturgy, dating at least from the days of the Second Temple (before 70 C. E.). It has been the traditional last word of Jewish martyrs throughout the ages, and to this day pious Jews pray that they may be able to recite this verse as death approaches.

In its original context, the verse is part of Moses’ extended sermon to the Israelites prior to his death and to their entering the Promised Land. Moses begins by exhorting the people to revere God and to observe and obey God’s Torah (literally, Instruction), so that they may increase and prosper in the land that God has promised to them. Then comes the Shema, followed immediately by an exhortation familiar to Christians, love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.

But the Shema verse has suffered the fate of other familiar texts: it has come to be recited almost mindlessly, with little attention to what it really means. In fact, its meaning is not all that obvious. The translation of the verse in the English edition published by the Jewish Publication Society in 1985 reads, Hear O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. A footnote in the text adds the more familiar, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. That latter reading—sometimes with a minor variation in the first phrase, "the Lord is our God, the Lord is One—is omnipresent in traditional prayer books. A further variation is to translate the first word as Hearken or Take heed rather than Hear."

The Lord is One is by far the more conventional translation because the Hebrew word echad is usually translated as one, the first in the chain of integers. However, that translation has been subject to much criticism. It is not at all clear what it means to claim that any single being is in fact one. Is this a mathematical statement? God is one, not two or three? Hearing this, one might be tempted to add, One what? The word is an adjective, but here there is no noun for it to modify. God may be one, but so is this apple in my hand. To refer to this apple as one implies that there are other apples around but that I am holding one apple, not two or three. Does this also apply to God?

That is why the translation the Lord alone has much to commend it. It indicates that Israel’s God alone is Israel’s Lord; God is the only Lord. The other putative gods do not qualify to be Israel’s Lord. The claim that God is echad now becomes a statement about the exclusivity of this God. That understanding is borne out by the use of the word our in the verse. For Israel, God alone is God. The statement expresses Israel’s relationship to God. Thus, the verse probably means something along these lines: Take heed, O Israel! The Lord our God alone is God.

If this is the literal meaning of the verse, then it is echoed elsewhere in the Bible—for example, in the first two of the ten commandments (Exodus 20:2; Deuteronomy 5:6): I am the Lord your God.… You shall have no other gods besides Me…in the heavens above, or on earth below, or in the waters under the earth. That formulation accentuates the relational nature of the claim that God alone is our God. For Israel, God alone is God. Israel shall have no other gods besides this one. That is why we are to love this God with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our might.

LOVING GOD

How can we be commanded to love anything? Can feelings be commanded?

The Bible does in fact suggest that people can be commanded to have certain feelings. The last of the ten commandments, for example, instructs us not to covet. Elsewhere, we are told not to bear hatred to our kinfolk in our hearts. In the Bible there is no clear distinction between a feeling itself and the expression of that feeling in action or behavior. In this context, then, the command to love God includes the command that we are to act lovingly toward God. Even more, we are to act lovingly with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our might. This threefold formula lends a note of urgency or emphasis to the command. How are we to act lovingly toward God? Exceedingly! Emphatically! Exclusively! We are to take God’s instructions to heart, the passage continues. We are to impress them on our children, recite them morning and evening, bind them on our hands and foreheads, and inscribe them on the doorposts of our houses and on our gates. (The last two instances refer to tefillin, the black leather boxes worn by observant Jews on the upper arm and the forehead when worshiping in the morning, and the mezuzah affixed to our doorposts. Both contain this passage inscribed on parchment.)

The juxtaposition of God being echad with the obligation to love God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might implies that because only this God is our God, we are to grant this God exclusive loyalty.

The notion that the God of Israel is exclusively God, is the only God, rests at the heart of the Jewish monotheistic claim. It later becomes the central doctrine of both of Judaism’s daughter religions, Christianity and Islam. Since all three religions claim that this doctrine, with all of its implications for the human condition, is not only ultimately true, but also of infinite value, all three religions understand their responsibility to spread this truth to all the corners of the earth, to all peoples. Whether this mission is to be pursued more aggressively, as in some forms of Christianity and Islam, or more passively, by simply living as witness to this one God, as in Judaism, all three communities believe that at the end of days, this mission will be accomplished. Then, in the immortal words of Isaiah, The land shall be filled with devotion to the Lord as water covers the sea (11:9). This eschatological vision, propounded millennia ago, remains unshaken in all three faith communities to this very day.

THE UNIQUE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN GOD AND ISRAEL

The Rabbis of the Talmud note a second biblical use of the word echad, this time applied to Israel, and, typically, they find a common thread between the two uses. 1 Chronicles 17:20–22 reads:

O Lord, there is none like You, and there is no other God but You.… And who is like Your people Israel, a unique nation on earth, whom God went and redeemed as His people.… You have established Your people Israel as Your very own people forever; and You, O Lord, have become their God.

In this passage, the Hebrew term for unique is also echad. God and Israel share the quality of being unique to each other; these two uniquenesses are mutually dependent. As Israel proclaims God’s uniqueness (by wearing tefillin and reciting the Shema), so does God establish Israel’s uniqueness—in a stunning image that has God wearing tefillin in which is inscribed this verse from Chronicles, just as human tefillin contain the Shema (Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 6a).

This interdependence of God’s and Israel’s uniqueness is captured in the liturgical passage of rabbinic origin that immediately precedes the recitation of the Shema in the morning service. The conclusion of the passage reads:

You have chosen us from among every people and tongue, and you have brought us close to Your great name forever in truth, to offer praiseful thanks to You, and to proclaim Your uniqueness with love. Blessed are you, God, who chooses His people Israel with love.

This segues into the Shema verse and then the continuation of the biblical passage, And you shall love the Lord your God…

In this passage, to love and to choose are synonyms, and both are also synonymous with proclaiming someone as unique, as singled out. As we proclaim God’s uniqueness, so does God proclaim Israel’s uniqueness by choosing Israel from among the peoples. As God loves Israel, so Israel is to love God with all your heart, and so on. What else does love mean than that I and the one I love are exclusively loyal to each other, to the exclusion of everyone else—especially one I love with all my heart?

In a more modern idiom, the theme of mutual exclusivity is best captured by Martin Buber’s notion of an I-Thou relationship. The difference between an I-Thou relationship and an I-It relationship is that the latter tolerates any number of different Its and Is; I have multiple I-It relationships—with bus drivers, store clerks, the maintenance workers in my apartment building—none of which is exclusive; they can all be easily replaced. But in my I-Thou relationships—with my wife and daughters—both the I and the Thou are unique and exclusive to each other. Of course, I can also have multiple I-Thou relationships, but in each of these the I and the Thou acknowledge the uniqueness and personhood of the Thou.

The claim that the Jewish people’s exclusive and mutually binding relationship to God is eternal is at the very heart of Jewish self-awareness. But some interpretations of early Christian writings are understood to challenge that claim. These writings seem to suggest that the birth of Jesus was designed to supersede God’s original covenant with Israel. According to this view, through this new fact, God established a new covenant (reflected in the term New Testament for the Christian Scriptures), which overrode the original covenant, effectively canceling it out. Now, faith in Jesus’ saving death and resurrection is the sole path to God’s favor.

By this reading, the Jews who rejected Jesus and their children through the centuries were in turn rejected by God. Understandably, this reading of Christianity was one of the factors, though not the only one, that inspired Christian persecution of Jews as a despised [by God] people and led to the death of countless Jews through the centuries of the Common Era. More recently, it has also led to the charge that the groundwork for the Nazi Holocaust had been laid by centuries of anti-Jewish sentiment in Christian

Reviews for The Jewish Approach to God

[herdingcats_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is an interesting book that expounds a very liberal Jewish viewpoint. In this liberal Jewish view, Torah, or the Bible, is not the literal "word" of God, but rather the human understanding of God, written by our ancestors in a metaphorical form. I was raised in the Reform Jewish religion, then, as an adult, became a born-again Christian so I went from a very liberal concept about God and religion to a very conservative view. In the past few years, I have been studying the Jewish religion and have come to appreciate many things about it that I did not learn while growing up in it.One interesting statement from this book is the author's interpretation of the verse from the Shema - the phrase "On that day, the Lord will be One and His name shall be One". According to the author, "On that day", refers to the end of days, the age of the Messiah, and for the Lord to be One and His name to be One means that the entire world will acknowledge God.I also found it interesting that the author refers to Jonah as the only successful prophet in the Bible. I had not thought of it that way before. The author shares that in the Jewish religion, the Bible is not the final authority on doctrine, but rather tradition plays a large part as well. Judaism does not have creeds and no one has the final word - everything can be argued. When I left the Jewish religion years ago, that was one thing that I disliked about it. I felt that it made the religion pointless if there was not an "answer", and everything could be argued. I was thrilled, as a born again Christian to find that Christ is the answer to everything. Now, I am also appreciating the more Jewish view that God's ways are not our ways and we really cannot truely understand Him and, in my opinion, those who claim to know the exact answers and truth are, many times, deluded or deceived.The author states that "Judaism is the only religion in which study is equivalent to worship." He shares that ha-satan, refered to in Job, means the satan, not "Satan" as a proper name and that the Jewish view of the satan is not the same as the Christian view in that in the Jewish view, the satan does not act independantly from God, but rather co-operates with God.I find Gillman's understanding of what it means for Jews to be the "chosen people" refreshingly different. He explains that just as we might chose an apple from a bowl of mixed fruit , that does not mean that we might not chose a pear another day nor does it imply that the apple is superior to the pear and all of the other fruit. He states that "the doctrine of Israel as God's chosen people is Israel's self-perception, not God's own perception of Israel. No human being knows objectively what God wants, feels, or does. God transcends human understanding."Rabbi Gillman presents the liberal Jewish view that the Bible is man's word, man's understanding of God and the world. He shows how some Christian viwes are based on those of the Jewish religion and how some Jewish beliefs are influenced from the Greek philosophy that also influences the Christian religion. For example, the concept of an immortal soul, which is one concept that some Jews believe, originated in Greek philosophy.This is an interesting and insightful book.