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Praying to the God you don't believe in rather than the God you do
Sunday, March 15th, 2015 06:03 pmOne hears stories of rabbis* replying to the typical nonbeliever's grouch against religion with "The God you don't believe in, I don't believe in either."
* I can't remember who, and googling this phrase, one comes up with any number of people to whom it has been attributed.
I'm happy to accept that notable rabbis have said this. My question is that if, as moderns, we don't believe in a simplistic theology dating from thousands of years ago, which is irreconcilable with what we see in the world, but instead come up with sophisticated ways of trying to bridge that gap, be it pantheism or panentheism, the philosophy of Buber or that of Levinas (or even of Mordecai Kaplan, though this would not be acceptable to the traditionalist rabbis of which I am talking), etc, etc, then why do we as Jews still pray with a liturgy addressing itself to that God we agree we don't believe in?
And yes, I'm aware of the tension between the need to adapt liturgy to make it speak to people, and the danger of loss of the authority that comes from changing too far wording that has been hallowed through usage over the centuries; but still.
Or, to put it another way: if being killed and enslaved and carried off into exile, then persecuted and murdered and expelled from our countries multiple times through the ages, and eventually subjected to a cold-blooded attempt at total genocide resulting in 5.6 million deaths is not enough to outweigh two or three incidents from the very remote past in which God did save our people (again, coming from a traditionalist perspective that does not query the historicity of this), then what the hell would be?
* I can't remember who, and googling this phrase, one comes up with any number of people to whom it has been attributed.
I'm happy to accept that notable rabbis have said this. My question is that if, as moderns, we don't believe in a simplistic theology dating from thousands of years ago, which is irreconcilable with what we see in the world, but instead come up with sophisticated ways of trying to bridge that gap, be it pantheism or panentheism, the philosophy of Buber or that of Levinas (or even of Mordecai Kaplan, though this would not be acceptable to the traditionalist rabbis of which I am talking), etc, etc, then why do we as Jews still pray with a liturgy addressing itself to that God we agree we don't believe in?
And yes, I'm aware of the tension between the need to adapt liturgy to make it speak to people, and the danger of loss of the authority that comes from changing too far wording that has been hallowed through usage over the centuries; but still.
Or, to put it another way: if being killed and enslaved and carried off into exile, then persecuted and murdered and expelled from our countries multiple times through the ages, and eventually subjected to a cold-blooded attempt at total genocide resulting in 5.6 million deaths is not enough to outweigh two or three incidents from the very remote past in which God did save our people (again, coming from a traditionalist perspective that does not query the historicity of this), then what the hell would be?
