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August 8, 2003/Av 10 5763, Vol. 55, No. 50
God's presence is found in history
Torah study
RABBI NEIL GILLMAN
Va'etchanan/Deuteronomy 3:23-7:11
The "Etz Hayim Chumash" introductory note to chapter four of Deuteronomy in this week's Torah reading refers to it as "the theological heart of Deuteronomy." That is an understatement. It's really the theological heart of the entire Torah.
First, to the question of how or where do we find God, this chapter's answer is by looking and seeing. Note the multiple appearances of references to seeing, sprinkled throughout the chapter. "You saw with your own eyes," (Deuteronomy 4:3) "do not forget the things that you saw with your own eyes," (Deuteronomy 4:9) "you saw no shape when the Lord spoke to you," (Deuteronomy 4:15) are just a few examples.
The author of this text is not a rationalist; the way to God is through experience. This author is not an early Maimonides; he is the predecessor for Abraham Heschel and Mordecai Kaplan, both of whom are religious empiricists.
Or, to put it another way, this author appeals not to reason, but rather to history as a record of God's presence. "Inquire about bygone ages," this author suggests, "has anything as grand as this ever happened? ... Has any god ventured to go and take for himself one nation from the midst of another?" Therefore the obvious conclusion, "it has been clearly demonstrated to you that the Lord alone is God." (Deuteronomy 4:32-35)
Among medieval thinkers, this author is the model for Yehuda Halevi. In his "Kuzari," Halevi's argument for the superiority of Judaism over Christianity and Islam rests on the record of God's relationship with Israel as narrated in Torah.
Like any good empiricist, this author is also very much aware that experience can be deceptive and its message ambiguous. He is concerned with pointing out where the people should not look for God. "When you look up to the sky and behold the sun and the moon and the stars, you must not be lured into bowing down to them." (Deuteronomy 4:19) This author could not anticipate that in the later philosophical tradition, it was precisely the motion of the heavenly bodies that was invoked by the cosmological argument for the existence of a Prime Mover God.
In our text, this is followed by a fascinating tidbit: God acknowledges that the worship of the heavenly bodies, forbidden to Israel, is legitimate for the other nations. What is idolatry for Israel is acceptable for the nations.
Why did the medieval rationalists abandon the appeal to experience in favor of reason? Precisely because they knew, as our author knows, that the evidence of the senses is transient. "Take utmost care so that you do not forget the things that you saw with your own eyes and so that they do not fade from your mind as long as you live." (Deuteronomy 4:9) In contrast, the medieval philosophers affirmed, what is rationally demonstrated is true for all time.
Our text also acknowledges one more major ambiguity in the appeal to looking and seeing: What the people never saw - and could never see - is God. When they stood at Sinai, "you heard the sound of words but perceived no shape - nothing but a voice." (Deuteronomy 4:12) Torah is replete with references to hearing God, but very, very few references to seeing God. What we see are traces of God's presence in the world and in history, but not God. Seeing is very complicated. For those traces to become identified as reflections of God's presence requires a good deal of interpretation. That is precisely what this text tries to accomplish.
Rabbi Neil Gillman is professor of Jewish studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary.
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