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February 5, 1999/19 Shevat 5759, Vol. 51, No. 19
Knowledge of God must be rooted in experience
Torah Study
RABBI ISMAR SCHORSCH
Yitro/Exodus 18:1-20:33
Martin Buber tells the story of an unexpected visit by an elderly English clergyman in the spring of 1914. A simple Christian of deep faith, he had done much good for the nascent Zionist movement in the days of Theodor Herzl, and Buber knew him well. What brought him to Buber that particular day was his foreboding of an imminent outbreak of war worldwide, based not on any public or secret sources of information, but on his own careful recalculation of the age-old prophecies of Daniel.
When the presentation ended, Buber took his guest back to the railroad station. Before they parted, the clergyman grasped Buber's arm and said to him with utmost gravity: "Dear friend, we are living in a great time. Tell me: Do you believe in God?" Buber could muster only an awkward and evasive answer that left neither man satisfied.
A few months later, traveling on a train, Buber was struck with the answer he would have liked to have given to his friend at the time: "If believing in God means being able to speak of God in the third person, then I probably do not believe in God; or at least, I do not know if it is permissible for me to say that I believe in God. For I know, when I speak of God in the third person ... my tongue cleaves to the roof of my mouth so quickly that one cannot even call it speech."
Activating and redemptive, our faith in God must be grounded in personal experience. Short of that, it can be no more than derivative, speculative and passive.
In accord with that profound insight, the Ten Commandments opens with a resounding experiential statement: "I the Lord am your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage" (Exodus 20:2). Everything that follows is undergirded by the immediacy of that overwhelming reality.
Abraham Ibn Ezra and Yehuda Halevi, Sephardic scholars of the 12th century, proposed the question: Why was this preamble not cast in terms of God as the creator of heaven and earth? And their answer suggests they fully appreciated that the issue was not one of God's grandeur, but God's attentiveness and responsiveness. Experience trumped theory.
No one standing at Sinai had witnessed the birth of the cosmos. Indeed, ancient philosophers tended to dispute the very idea that the cosmos had a beginning. But every Israelite at Sinai had experienced the indisputable evidence that God existed and cared for the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It is for this reason that the commandments begin with the affirmation of God's role in the exodus, rather than in creation.
Only after the experience of the 10 plagues, the splitting of the sea, the provision of food and water in the wilderness, and the defeat of the Amalekites was Israel primed to accept and submit to God's stern guidance.
The experience of God's saving power was inestimably deepened by the darkness of inescapable suffering. Bondage forged an I-Thou relationship with God to which Israel would ever remain faithful, despite lapses in purity and intensity.
Thus is it no accident that the jubilant song of Moses at the sea, read last week, is recited daily in the synagogue service. Judaism, in the spirit of the Torah, embraced history and not nature as the most vivid manifestation of God's love, and the liturgy perpetuates the memory of that first divine intervention in the fate of Israel.
Our challenge is to internalize memory and transform it into an experience of God in the third person to God in the second person.
While our knowledge and experience of God may come from others, we must appropriate and enliven and personalize God for ourselves. There is great comfort in knowing that this God was also worshiped by our ancestors, but without unceasing effort, that supreme being will be only a relic and not a felt force in our own lives.
We can pray to God only in the second person. But when we do, we discover that the act itself is part of the answer we seek.
Rabbi Ismar Schorsch is chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City.
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