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By Root 473 0

time, I was exposed to Jewish scholarship, including the critical reading of the Hebrew Bible and its history. This exciting intellectual enterprise, which gripped my imagination, also undermined the residue of faith I had in Scripture as revealed. The text was edited, composed of many sources. Each of these represented a particular human community or interest group. What, then, was left of revelation? Where was the authority of Scripture, if the text was merely human? I struggled with what it could mean to claim that God had “given us His Torah” when the Torah text itself seemed to “evaporate” into so many documents. Without that, I had no basis for believing in a God who had commanded specific forms of religious behavior. (This seemed to be the essential “payoff” question in Judaism.) So the pillars of naive faith had given way, and its edifice lay in ruins. I had no answers to the great questions around which my religious life had been constructed.

I was no longer a believer, in the usual sense of that term, but I learned rather quickly that I was still a religious person, struggling with issues of faith. I still sought after God, perhaps even more so once I had given up on my naïve understandings of reality. That was the true beginning of my quest, one in which the only questions that mattered were the unanswerable ones. I absorbed much of Nietzsche, Kafka, and Camus in those years of questioning. From Nietzsche came the moment of joy at the death of my childhood God and the liberation from all that authority. But this gave way rather quickly to the bleak and empty universe Kafka so poignantly described, a joyless world from which God was absent and there was no air left to breathe, no room left to live, to love, or to create. From Camus and Nikos Kazantzakis came the noble call to make meaning on my own, to defy meaninglessness with creativity and moral action. But the more I sought to create a framework of meaning, picking up the shattered tablets of my onetime Jewish life, the more I came to realize that I was in fact only rediscovering patterns that were there to be seen, and had indeed been seen and articulated by countless generations before me.

It was in the course of this re-creation that I had to come back to the question of God. Who or what was the God I sought— and still seek today, half a century later! — once I had accepted that I was such a “nonbeliever” in the God of my childhood? The question seemed to be whether we post-naïve seekers dare to use the word “God” any more, and what we might — or might not — mean by it, while remaining personally and intellectually honest.

To explain this, I have to go back to the phrase “I was still a religious person.” What can it mean to “be religious,” in a Jewish (and not Buddhist) context if one does not “believe in God,” at least as defined by the above parameters? It means that I still consider the sacred to be the most important and meaningful dimension of human life. “The sacred” refers to an inward, mysterious sense of awesome presence, a reality deeper than the kind we ordinarily experience. Life bears within it the possibility of inner transcendence; the moments when we glimpse it are so rare and powerful that they call upon us to transform the rest of our lives in their wake. These moments can come without warning, though they may be evoked by great beauty, by joy, by terror, or by anything else that causes us to stop and interrupt our ordinary all-encompassing and yet essentially superficial perception of reality. When that mask of ordinariness falls away, our consciousness is left with a moment of nakedness, a confrontation with a reality that we do not know how to put into language. The astonishment of such moments, that which my most revered teacher termed “radical amazement,” is the starting point of my religious life.2 I believe, in other words, in the possibility and irreducible reality of religious experience. Such experience stands behind theology; it is the most basic datum with which the would-be theologian has to work. The awareness that derives