Radical Judaism_ Rethinking God and Tradition - Arthur Green [8]
This book draws on both of these approaches to religion and its role in proclaiming a truth or reality that is an alternative to that of our modern scientific worldview. The reader will immediately see that I take both Scripture and tradition quite seriously, though I am far from literalism or fundamentalism. I am also much influenced by the rediscovery of mystical consciousness that has taken place in our time. Though my theology and the roots of my imagination are deeply and particularly Jewish, I write with a broad awareness of contemporary, including Eastern, religious thought. In proposing a Jewish theology for the twenty-first century (or the approaching fifty-ninth, if you prefer), I proceed from an understanding that the twentieth century's battles are very much over and that an essential reframing of our response to the great religious questions is needed. I hope the reader will find some pieces of it in these pages.
The title of the book shows my roots in the Radical Theology movement of the late 1960s. I have recalled elsewhere a conversation I had with my mentor Abraham Joshua Heschel in which I asked him what he thought about Radical Theology, a movement that spoke of the “death of God,” which Heschel had termed blasphemy.4 But this very “death of God,” a realization that conventional Western religious language had reached a point of exhaustion, was also pushing away much theological debris, making room for precisely the sort of “depth theology” that Heschel himself had advocated. “Radical theology is very important,” he answered, “but it has to begin with the teachings of the later Hasidic masters.”5 Some forty years later (a number of some significance among Jewish journeyers!), I hope this book is that theology.
The “radicalism” of this work may not be what some readers would expect. I am primarily a thinker and teacher, not an activist. Although I share strong liberal or progressivist views on most political and social issues, this book is about a different sort of radicalism, one that takes us back to our deepest spiritual roots and challenges us to rethink our lives from that perspective. It has implications in the social sphere, to be sure, but its core lies in the realm of a contemporary mystical understanding of who we are, how we got here, and where we are going. In Jewish terms, it is a call to return to our Source, the one that underlies and precedes all our so-venerated “sources.”
A few words about some of the readers I have in mind would probably be appropriate here. In earlier times, theology was written only for those who lived within a particular religious community and shared the symbols and liturgical language of that faith. Its function was largely to explicate those symbols and to give an intelligible account of how they bore that community's message. But given the wider concerns and the urgency of the hour, I have set myself a different goal. I am writing a theological work for a broad and as yet undefined audience. The fact that I am writing in English rather than Hebrew is significant to me. It means that my community of readers should include both Jews and non-Jews. I especially welcome readers of Christian or Islamic heritage. Despite the differences in religious language, they will find many key issues, and much of my own struggle with them, quite familiar. This audience will also, I hope, embrace readers who have been exposed to the religious languages of the East, including some of the many who are making a journey “homeward” after encountering meditation and spirituality first in an Eastern setting. I think they will find the language spoken here to represent a Judaism closer to those teachings than they might have expected.
As a teacher, I also think of the broadest circle of “my students” as readers of this book. These include rabbis of