Radical Judaism_ Rethinking God and Tradition - Arthur Green [39]
The Hebrew term used to speak of the intimate relationship between God and the individual, throughout both the philosophical and mystical sources, is devekut, often translated as “attachment” or “cleaving.” The verb is used several times in the book of Deuteronomy to describe the relationship between God and His faithful (“You who cleave to Y-H-W-H your God are all alive this day” [4:4]; “to walk in all His ways and to cleave to Him” [11:22]), and it is from here that it enters the later Jewish religious vocabulary. But the term is also used in a very telling and well-known single instance in Genesis 2:24: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and they shall be one flesh.” There has been much discussion among scholars of Jewish mysticism as to whether and how frequently devekut means actual union with God, entailing a loss of individual identity.52 But the human experience that stands behind devekut is also that of marriage, including moments of great intimacy and even union, but implying as well the long-standing marital fidelity that leads a couple to see themselves as one. Devekut with God is entering into a similar state of oneness. In its highest form it may indeed be described as mystical union, a moment when the self is completely absorbed and overwhelmed by the reality of oneness, the climax of religious experience. Yet it also allows for the soul to return to itself, enriched and even transformed by the unitive moment but still able to live and act as a separate spirit — indeed, still able to maintain its existence within the body.
The classical Jewish piety of the Middle Ages and later, to which I am pointing here, is to be found within both philosophy and mysticism. It is characterized by what I would like to call a union of intimacy and abstraction. Abstraction demands that God be understood as nothing less than the unity of all being, the One that underlies all the infinitely varied and changing faces of reality. It is the One after which there is no “two,” a One that knows no other. The power to describe such oneness was not generally native to the language of the ancient Hebrews. It was only in borrowing and adaptation from the Greeks that it could be articulated. But the longing for this abstract One was ever described in language taken from the personalist terminology of ancient Jewish tradition, both the paternal imagery of the old liturgy and the erotic passion of the Song of Songs.
Mystical Judaism Lost and Reclaimed
In popular Judaism, and especially in the religious education of ongoing generations, the philosophical edge of that language was intentionally dulled, and the old personalist language of the biblical and rabbinic sources overwhelmed it. As modern Judaism emerged, beginning in the eighteenth century, Kabbalah was hidden away and proclaimed “outside the mainstream,” as I have indicated. The profound theology of Hasidism was completely unknown to Westernized Jews, who had been taught to dismiss this form of Jewish piety as the senseless jabber of ignorant Jews still living in the Middle Ages. Maimonidean philosophy nominally fared better in the modern era. It was praised by the post-Mendelssohnian generations as the apex of enlightened Judaism.53 But while it may have been taught in rabbinical colleges and graduate seminars, it did not filter down into popular Judaism in either Orthodox or liberal circles. The intellectual difficulty of Maimonides’ tour de force combined with an old fear of the heretical implications of some of his teachings to keep him out of the hands of most Jews. What dominated instead was a Judaism of rather simplistic rabbinic faith, the religion,