Radical Judaism_ Rethinking God and Tradition - Arthur Green [9]
The object is not just to explicate Judaism, to tell you what our tradition has to say about the world, and why it all makes sense. There are plenty of books, including some good ones, seeking to do that. I want to reflect, as a Jew, on the big and universal issues: what we might mean today by saying “God;” the purpose of human existence, how we got here, where we are going, and what we can do to save this beloved planet. I can do so only by speaking my own religious language. But the objective is never just to explain or defend that language; rather, it is to use it as a pathway to universal insights that lie within it. At times this process will demand your patience and a bit of perseverance, especially as I lead you into the labyrinth of Kabbalistic symbolism. Please stay with me; I promise you will be well rewarded. The book is supplied with a glossary of Hebrew terms that may render the journey a bit easier.
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Y-H-W-H: GOD AND BEING
In the Beginning
I open with a theological assertion. As a religious person I believe that the evolution of species is the greatest sacred drama of all time. It is a tale — perhaps even the tale — in which the divine waits to be discovered. It dwarfs all the other narratives, memories, and images that so preoccupy the mind of religious traditions, including our own. We Jews, Christians, and Muslims are all overinvolved with proclaiming— or questioning—the truth of our own particular stories. Did Moses really receive the Torah from God at Mount Sinai? Did Jesus truly rise from the tomb? Was Muhammad indeed God's chosen messenger? We refine our debates about these forever, each group certain that its own narrative is at the center of universal history. In the modern world, where all these tales are challenged, we work out sophisticated and nonliteralist ways of proclaiming our faith in them. But there is a bigger story, infinitely bigger, and one that we all share. How did we get here, we humans, and where are we going? For more than a century and a half, educated Westerners have understood that this is the tale of evolution. But we religious folk, the great tale-tellers of our respective traditions, have been guarded and cool toward this story and have hesitated to make it our own. The time has come to embrace it and to uncover its sacred dimensions.
I believe that “Creation,” or perhaps more neutrally stated, “origins,” a topic almost entirely neglected in both Jewish and liberal Christian theology of the past century, must return as a central preoccupation in our own day. This indeed has much to do with the ecological agenda and the key role that religion needs to play in changing our attitudes toward the world within which we humans live.1 But it also emerges from our society's growing acceptance of scientific explanations—those of the nuclear physicist, the geologist, the evolutionary biologist, and others — for the origins of the world we have inherited. The finality of this acceptance, which I share, seemingly means the end of a long struggle between so-called scientific and religious worldviews. This leaves those of us who speak the language of faith in a peculiar situation. Is there then no connection between the God we know and encounter daily within all existence and the emergence and history of our universe? Does the presence of eternity we feel (whether we call ourselves “believers” or not) when we stand atop great mountains or at the ocean water's edge exist only within our minds? Is our faith nothing more than one of those big mollusk shells we used to put up against our