Opening: a “diet” for Jewish thought

Why is this needed at all?

In almost every community there are people who have questions about faith. Haredim and religious Zionists, young and old, and often secular people who are interested too. Sometimes the questions are of the especially troubling kind: does God really know what I will choose tomorrow? Why do the righteous suffer? Are my prayers answered? What exactly am I required to believe, and what can I let go of? And most of these people have nowhere to ask. In some places the very question is considered “heresy.” In others you get a rebuke, or a warm hug, but not an answer. Some answer “that is the evil inclination talking,” and some answer with a story about a tzaddik. And the result is well known: serious and talented people leave religion, and those who stay sometimes stay for the wrong reasons: fear of change, or unwillingness to be honest with themselves.

This article was born out of that distress. It tries to do for Jewish thought what might be called a “diet”: to look for the minimal skeleton one must believe in to be a believing Jew, and to check honestly what, of everything else, is an addition. It turned out, as we will see, that much of what is considered “principles of faith” is really the opinions of particular thinkers: respectable opinions, sometimes very beautiful, but without binding authority, and sometimes without clear content either. Such a “thin” theology (theology is the study of the divine: what can be said about God and about his relationship to the world) is easier to defend, and it frees those who are wrestling from the need to accept an entire “package deal,” in which not believing every detail is like believing nothing at all.

The starting point

This article continues a previous one, in which we showed that there is a God, that he created the world and the laws of nature, that he is the source of our ability to understand the world and of morality, and that he commanded us at Sinai. From here on the question is different: what else must one believe? What does Judaism say about the relationship between God and the world, about providence, miracles, prayer, Torah study, and the popular beliefs we all grew up on?

The approach that will guide us was already presented there, but it is worth repeating in one sentence. The skeptic and the fundamentalist agree on one thing: that “truth must be certain.” The skeptic concludes that there is no truth, and the fundamentalist concludes that the truth lies “above reason,” and must not be examined. The third way says: we can know things with high probability, without certainty, and it is always permitted to examine. Faith is a result of thinking, not a substitute for it. And so here too, on every question, we will ask: what is reasonable? What is proven? And what has merely been said?

There is no “pope” in Judaism

Before we begin, something must be said about authority. In halakha there is a clear framework: sources, rules of decision, and a way to decide. In Jewish thought there is none. So when someone says of an idea “that is heresy,” he has answered nothing. “You are a heretic” is a substitute for an argument, not an argument.

The best proof that there is no “official thought” in Judaism is its history. Maimonides formulated the faith in the language of Greek-Arabic philosophy. The Maharal formulated it in his own language. Kabbalah, Hasidism and Rav Kook each built a different world of concepts, and sometimes these thinkers would not even have understood one another. Every generation reformulated the faith in the language of its time: Maimonides’ “Guide for the Perplexed,” the “Guide for the Perplexed of the Time” in the 19th century, Rav Kook’s “For the Perplexed of the Generation.” Whoever thinks there is one binding version of Jewish thought simply does not know it.

And from here an important point: there is no “Jewish philosophy.” There is correct philosophy and mistaken philosophy. Correct philosophy binds everyone, Jews and non-Jews, and mistaken philosophy does not become correct because a Jew wrote it. That is why in this article we will not rely on “authoritative” sources. We will bring sources, sometimes many, but only to illustrate and to show that the ideas are not entirely new. The argument stands or falls by its own logic.

The Sages themselves knew this. The Gemara (Pesachim 94b) brings a dispute between the sages of Israel and the sages of the nations on an astronomical question, and Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, the editor of the Mishnah, says: “Their words seem more correct than ours.” The truth can be with others, and the Sages were not ashamed to say so. This is no disrespect to the Sages. On the contrary. Seeing them as great human beings, who could err, honors them more than seeing them as angels.

And some will claim: “Things like this make people leave.” The answer is that truth matters, and that it is precisely ignoring the questions that drives people away. In the Haskalah period, about two hundred years ago, many left Judaism because they were put before an impossible choice: to be a “wise sinner” or a “foolish saint.” This article assumes that one can be both wise and a believer.