Radical Judaism_ Rethinking God and Tradition - Arthur Green [98]
53. Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) was thought of as the ideal representative of early modern enlightened Judaism. He is to the Jewish Enlightenment much as Ba'al Shem Tov was to Hasidism: less the “founder” of the movement than the idealized figure whose life story was to stand as the beacon for future generations. For a full treatment of Mendelssohn see the masterful biography Moses Mendelssohn by my teacher Alexander Altmann (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1973).
54. Of course, the secularization of modern Jewry was a complex process, having important social and economic components. But I am claiming that it was partly due also to an internal religious and educational failure in which an increasingly educated (in the Western sense) population was shielded, for apologetic reasons, from much of the more interesting and potentially attractive theological literature that existed within its own tradition.
55. The writings of Jack Kornfeld and Joseph Goldstein, two leading Western teachers of the Vipassana Buddhist tradition, are particularly noteworthy in this regard.
56. See my essay “Hasidism: Discovery and Retreat,” in The Other Side of God: A Polarity in World Religions, ed. Peter Berger (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1981), pp. 104-130.
57. Missing from this discussion is the work of Mordecai M. Kaplan (1881-1983). Kaplan, an American thinker influenced by pragmatism, is sophisticated and rigorously honest in the raising of challenges to conventional theism, and the various alternatives he proposed through his long career have appealed to many. Unfortunately, he was completely alienated from the mystical tradition and did not see the earlier roots it might have provided for a different approach to the question of God, which for Kaplan remained largely (though not wholly) within the realm of “the God-idea.” His disciple Jack Cohen wrote a comparative study of Kaplan and R. Abraham Isaac Kook, Morim Li-Zeman Navokh (Tel Aviv: ‘Eqed, 1993), which tried to bridge some of this distance.
58. The Zohar's definition of the sin of the Golden Calf (Zohar 1:3a) as worship of eleh (“these,” as in “These are your gods, O Israel” [Ex. 32:4]), representing the sefirot that encompass divine personhood, detached from mi, the ultimate question that transcends them (mi + eleh = elohim, “God”), constitutes such a statement. The unspoken but clear implication is that worshipping the personal God alone, detached from the mystery beyond, is nothing but idolatry.
59. The BeShT's inverting interpretation of Lev. 20:17, where the term hesed is used to describe incest, is quoted several times in early Hasidic sources, especially by R. Menahem Nahum of Chernobyl in Me'or ‘Eynayim, lekh s.v. ve-et ha-nefesh; mi-qets s.v. ke-divreykhem (see my translation Upright Practices and The Light of the Eyes [Ramsey, NJ: Paulist Press, 1982], pp. 114f. and 267f.), shemini s.v. va-yehi; shelah s.v. be-masekhet; pinhas s.v. vayedabber. The point is that there is only one love, the love of God, and that all other loves or erotic attractions, including those forbidden by the Torah, are fallen expressions of that love, capable of uplifting or redemption. This is early Hasidism at its most radical. It is the sort of aggadah that might well have been taken up — but alas was not — in some of the recent rabbinic discussions of homosexuality.
60. Maggid Devaraw le-Ya'aqov (Jerusalem, 1962) 17a.
61. Hence the interweaving of the letters of the two names (YAHDWNHY) found in Sephardic Jews’ prayer books, influenced by Kabbalah.
62. A thorough treatment is to be found in Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, pp. 971-974.
63. Otsar Mikhtavim u-Ma'amarim (Jerusalem, 1986), pp. 75f. Quoted more fully in the introduction to my selection of teachings from the Sefat Emet, The Language of Truth (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1998), pp. 36f.