God is extinct from many areas where He used to rule.
Last year I read Mary Douglas' "Leviticus as Literature". One of her comments that interested me was that Leviticus is missing the Oracular function, which is an integral part of all 'natural' religions. As is clear from the text, sacrifices are to be brought for unintentional transgressions, intentional transgressions have the punishment of excision or death. So if it was an unintentional or unknowing transgression, how did the transgressor learn of his sin? We live today with an awareness that "I'm ok, you're ok" (in Israel that may tend to be "I'm ok, you're not ok"). When we are told that we have sinned, our immediate reaction will probably be denial.
I discussed this with a teacher of mine, and he claimed that modern consciousness is primally different from ancient consciousness. The world view of ancient man was that if something bad happened to me, I must have sinned, and to return life to normal I require atonement. If I can't recall my sin, I will go to the Oracle to find out what type of sacrifice is needed. Modern (and post Modern) Man, even if he is a "Haredi" Jew or an Evangelical Christian or a Shiite Muslim is different on a very basic level. If we are sick, we go to a Doctor, not a Priest. We take medicine as opposed to bringing offerings or performing magic rituals.
God has been pushed into small "nature reserves" such as Religious Institutions and football matches. Even "religious" people allocate a limited amount of time to Him, during the rest of the time they live a modern life along with the rest of us.
As I understand history, as a rule a god of a nation would rise and fall together with its nation. After being conquered or defeated, the god would dissappear, "die".
The God of Israel is an exception to this rule. When we were conquered something strange happened, and instead of deciding that our God was dead, and that we would do well to move our allegiance to the god of the conquerer, we decided (at least those of us who decided to remain Jews and are therefore our ancestors) that our God is punishing us. Our God is so powerful he controls our enemies and uses them as tools of chastisement. If our fate improves, then He is fulfilling prophecies of redemption, and if we are again on the way to the bottom of the heap, He is fulfilling prophecies of catastrophe. Using Popper's concept of a falsifiable hypothesis, the God hypothesis is unfalsifiable and therefore 'true' and 'false' are inapplicable.
Over the years the idea grew more complex -- perhaps God is punishing us, or He has a divine plan that is beyond human understanding, or His failure to redeem us is our own failure, for not strengthening and unifying the GodHead (as the Kabbalists conceived it).
When Nietzsche said "God is Dead" he was (according to most commentaries) pointing to the fact that with the breakdown of a 'divine' political and cosmological order, and the move to a scientific and realpolitik world view, God was no longer relevant, and was therefore 'Dead'. It was only the primeval urge to believe in God that kept people from realizing this, it was just a matter of time until this realization became generally accepted.
It would seem that the Jews were somewhat vaccinated against the Nietzschean death of the Deity, since our God was already working behind the scenes, pulling the strings. Just as it is possible to imagine God pulling the strings of Gentile Kings, so it is possible to continue and imagine God pulling the strings of science.
The Holocaust is a crisis for the Jewish concept of God as a God of History. It is one thing to have persecution and massacres, they could be punishments, or a Divine plan, or even just "the way of the world". But the Holocaust was different, a different order of magnitude, a different approach to genocide, industrialized genocide.
The connection (not to say causality) between the Holocaust and the Rebirth of Israel is hackneyed, but I find it theologically monstrous to suggest that God was involved.
At the same time, we have a primeval urge to believe in (a) God. If we don't choose a sublime one, we will be left with a lowest_common_denominator God.
2 comments:
There are a few responses to the question of God after the Holocaust.
I remember reading in one of the Haredi type teen mags I used to get, that the Holocaust was a result of the Haskala movement, so thats one. The obvious one is a sacrifice to allow the beginning of the Geula (i.e. the state of Israel). Finally there is the one with the jump over the pit..
G-d as a parent is by the way a Freudian view of the religious as children type adults...one of the secular arguments that pissed me off most when I was a kid...
Other then that Good one :)
I actually read this only after writing the poem. Its a bit lengthy, but boils down to: punishment, divine plan, don't/can't understand God, God is not omnipotent, free will trumps all, pave the way for the State.
From a young age I had consciously/rationally rejected the 'God as parent' idea, but apparently that was not enough, since I didn't really have anything tangible to replace it with. The depth of my grief on publicly acknowledging the death of that aspect of God took me by surprise.
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