Radical Judaism_ Rethinking God and Tradition - Arthur Green [6]
In fact much of theological conversation in modern times has focused on the idea of God rather than on an actual Being who precedes this universe and is responsible for its existence. Philosophically, of course, it is more Immanuel Kant than Charles Darwin who is responsible for this change. But the inevitability of this move is most loudly proclaimed by the fact that we talk about the biohistory of our planet and its species without recourse to divine intervention. If God is not present in “Creation,” as the medievals already understood, neither providence nor the possibility of miracles remains. With that, there is little more to talk about than the human idea of God and the various psychological and social benefits — or perhaps detriments — that such belief entails. The best representatives of modernity in the Jewish theological conversation, Hermann Cohen in the German neo-Kantian context and Mordecai M. Kaplan against the background of American pragmatism, both operated within these bounds.
The most impassioned and inspiring Jewish religious voices in the twentieth century were those shaped by religious existentialism and phenomenology, attempts to set aside or “bracket” the seemingly insurmountable modern objections to the claims of faith and to rebuild Judaism around an intimate personal relationship with God, a renewed study of the premodern Jewish sources, and the need for religious community. In varying ways, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, J. B. Soleveitchik, and A. J. Heschel all fall into this category. They opened up for moderns the possibility of a Jewish faith marked by emotional resonance and profundity. But like their existentialist counterparts in Christendom, these thinkers were all longer in passion than in defining precisely what they meant by “God,” invoking the old Pascalian bon mot decrying definition in matters of faith. None of them was quite able or willing to tell his readers just what the God of love, devotion, and demand might have to do with the history of our physical universe, the evolution of life, and the emergence of humanity from among the primates. None of these sophisticated and university-educated thinkers was willing to enter the lists against the Darwinian narrative (as did the late Lubavitcher rebbe, by contrast), but neither were they willing to make it their own or imagine a Judaism that fully embraced it. The same was mostly the case with regard to biblical and Near Eastern scholarship and the obvious challenges they offered to Judaism. Existential religion chose to operate on a plane of reality different from that of the scientific worldview and thus to have little intersection with it.
The challenge to modernity that arose in the second half of the twentieth century had much to do with the aftermath of World War II and the onset of the nuclear age, the realization that the scientifically dominated worldview, hallmark of the modern era, had brought us not to peace and understanding but rather to potential and real viciousness and destruction on a previously unimagined scale. Beginning in the 1960s, many of the best minds of the West began to look outside the modern, progressivist, scientific canon and turned instead to areas of human knowledge that had been overthrown or ignored in the rush toward modernity. Some in fact turned to religious existentialism, which had its greatest influence in the early postwar era. Many others, however, sought out more obscure sources of truth. The hope was that somewhere in the recesses of past human creativity we would find the wisdom that might help us change our way of life, slow the maddening pace of contemporary existence, and desist from the violent behaviors that social Darwinism seemed to proclaim an inevitable part of our biological legacy. That truth might be found by sitting with a Zen master, by breathing with