Radical Judaism_ Rethinking God and Tradition - Arthur Green [32]
When Judaism was presented to the modern West, however, the erotic element was dismissed as an embarrassment, and Kabbalah was completely sidelined. A notion of “mainstream” Judaism was created by nineteenth-century scholars, largely for the purpose of discarding the mystical tradition. Freud was right, in other words, when he saw religion, as he experienced it in the Judaism of his day, to be little more than the revering of a projected superego, the God of the Jews being an obvious father figure.32 But that was the Judaism the generations immediately preceding him had chosen to present to the world, one denuded of the eros of sacred passion. We can only wonder whether Freud, himself only one generation removed from Galician Hasidism, realized how much of repressed eros underlay the stern and sober Vatergott of Viennese Jewish respectability.
Apologetics and an emerging Jewish bourgeois sense of propriety had much to do with this elimination. It should be recalled that liberal-spirited Protestant and Deist elites were the first to champion the breakdown of the ghetto walls and to accept Jews into European society. A lot of effort was devoted among Jews to returning that great favor by showing those good people that our religious faith was much like their own. Neither the erotic terminology of the Kabbalist nor the devotional intensity of early Hasidism was acceptable in this setting, one that was carried over and taken to new extremes as American Judaism developed out of the nineteenth-century German model.
But there may also have been another reason why the language of religious eros was dismissed. The Song of Songs is clearly to be associated with the image of God as a youth, to which I referred above. “At the sea, He appeared to them as a youth”: this is the young warrior-hero, defeating the Egyptians on the day of battle. But this is also God as young lover, the one who brought forth Israel the handmaiden, she who “saw more at the sea than did Isaiah and Ezekiel,”33 the greatest visionaries among the prophets. What did she see that even they were to miss? “She” saw God as Lover and youthful Redeemer, the subject of her true love and devotion. In the later religious imagination of the West (especially in Christian iconography), this figure of the young, attractive male deity comes to be fully identified with Jesus, in his role as “God the Son.” Christianity, especially in its monastic versions, indeed knows an eroticized religious passion in the love of Christ. The Jews, in some combination of distaste and envy at the constant visual reminders of the dying and reborn young God, wanted no part of him or of any language too readily associated with him. They chose, rather proudly, to be defined as a religion that worshipped God the Father. This choice by definition left them without sacred eros, creating a religion largely devoid of religious passion as well.
From Myth to Philosophy
But I have got somewhat ahead of myself. The evolution of religion does not take place in simple chronological lines. Until now we have been discussing myths and metaphors through which God was conceived and worshipped, especially metaphors that sought to express religious intimacy. But there is another trend in the history of theology, found in Judaism as well as in Christianity and Islam, which leads in a quite different direction. This is the philosophical piety that developed in the Middle Ages. In Jewish history this tendency is most identified with Moses Maimonides (1135-1205), but it in fact included a wide range of thinkers and schools, beginning in the ninth to tenth centuries, and played a significant role for perhaps half a millennium.
To begin our understanding of this development, we have to go back to the internal metaphor and trace a bit more of its evolution. We also have to examine how the vertical/internal axis works in relation