Radical Judaism_ Rethinking God and Tradition - Arthur Green [18]
In asserting that humans are “called” in a distinctive way by the One that dwells within us, I also realize that I am making a claim for our species that sounds as though we are the apex or final goal of this ongoing self-disclosing process that takes place within all creatures. Far from it! I do believe that there is an inbuilt drive toward greater complexity and higher forms of consciousness, in which the emergence of the human brain is a most significant step.19 But again I want to acknowledge that the ultimate stages of this process lie far, far beyond us, as far beyond our awareness and sensitivities as our mind is from those forms of life we consider much simpler and more “primitive.” Living as we do at the dawn of a new age, one in which the human mind will be augmented and challenged by our golem of “artificial intelligence,” we can hardly imagine the new heights and depths that understandings of reality will attain, even in a relatively short expanse of time. As we unravel the genome and the mysteries of DNA, the truth that each of us bears within us the memory of all earlier generations— indeed, of the whole evolutionary process— becomes ever clearer. What will it take to convert that understanding into conscious memory, and how greatly will that add to our appreciation of who we are and the journey on which we have come?
Within the few millennia that we call human history, the tiny tip of evolution's timeline that we can reconstruct from the remains of human civilization, the evolutionary process continues unabated, manifest in the evolving human brain but also in the societies and civilizations that result from it. Within this ongoing process, a special place belongs to the evolution of religion, as ideas, images, and conceptions of the gods, God, the life-force, or the essence of Being grow and change with the times. This evolutionary approach to the history of religion forms the background for the next section of this book, my treatment of our Jewish and Western views of God, which I seek to address in the combined roles of scholar and seeker. I do this out of conviction that the evolution of species and the evolution of religious ideas, or of our understanding of reality, are continuous parts of a single evolutionary process. I ultimately suggest that the emergence of an explicitly pantheistic or panentheistic theology in our day is a natural result of this complex evolution, some key steps of which I hope to trace in the following pages. The journey from the tribal warrior god and the projected superhero to the unitive face of Being is indeed a long one, and one in which prior steps are never quite entirely left behind. Because of this, any current discussion of God, particularly in the context of a tradition as ancient as Judaism, is freighted with images, liturgical memories, and literary tropes from each stage along the way.
I have been making a transition here from God to “God” in a multilayered way. I began by talking about reality as I understand it, about the existence of a unifying single Being, a constant within all change, that which undergoes the astro-, geo-, and biohistory of our universe and planet. I then immediately complicated matters by referring to that constant as “God,” an English term derived from ancient Teutonic mythology but for many centuries also used to designate other deities as well, including the One who is the chief subject of the Hebrew Bible, and thus of Jewish and Christian faith. I use this term even though I mean it in a way that is quite different from that meant by most Jews and Christians, since I say quite openly that I choose it in order to personify this underlying singularity of being. As “the One” becomes personal, “Being” (HWYH in Hebrew) becomes “God” (Y-H-W-H). That which I designate as “the One