Traces of God

Neil Gillman

Description

A Probing and Powerful Look at the Role You Play
in Shaping Your Relationship with God

“No matter how hard we look, the God of Israel cannot be seen. Looking is not seeing, and seeing God is not like seeing an apple. It is much more like making a medical diagnosis on the basis of looking at a complex set of symptoms. Each of the symptoms is a dot. We can look at the dots and still miss the pattern.”
—from Part I

The Torah is replete with references to hearing God but precious few references to seeing God. Seeing is complicated. What we look for and see are traces of God’s presence in the world and in history, but not God. In order to identify those traces as reflections of divine presence, we need to re-examine how we see, what we see, and how we interpret that information.

In this challenging and inspiring look at the dynamics of the religious experience, award-winning author and theologian Neil Gillman guides you into a new way of seeing the complex patterns in the Bible, history, and everyday experiences and helps you interpret what those patterns mean to you and your relationship with God.

Examining faith and doubt, revelation and law, suffering and redemption, Gillman candidly deconstructs familiar biblical moments in order to help you develop and refine your own spiritual vision, so that you are able to discern the presence of God in unanticipated ways.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Jewish studies
• Jewish history
• Hebrew Bible
• Jewish philosophy
• Old Testament
• Judaism
• Religion

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 06 mai 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781580235792
• Langue: English

Extrait

Traces of God
Seeing God in Torah, History and Everyday Life
NEIL GILLMAN
O THER J EWISH L IGHTS B OOKS BY N EIL G ILLMAN
The Death of Death: Resurrection and Immortality in Jewish Thought The Jewish Approach to God: A Brief Introduction for Christians The Way Into Encountering God in Judaism
Traces of God: Seeing God in Torah, History and Everyday Life
2006 First Printing 2006 by Neil Gillman
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or reprinted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information regarding permission to reprint material from this book, please write or fax your request to Jewish Lights Publishing, Permissions Department, at the address / fax number listed below, or e-mail your request to [e-mail] .
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gillman, Neil. Traces of God: seeing God in Torah, history and everyday life / Neil Gillman. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-58023-249-3 1. God (Judaism) 2. God-Biblical teaching. 3. Bible. O.T. Pentateuch-Theology. 4. Bible. O.T. Pentateuch-Criticism, interpretation, etc. 5. Spiritual life-Judaism. I. Title. BM610.G525 2006 296.3 114-dc22 2005035116
Manufactured in the United States of America Jacket Design: Tim Holtz
Published by Jewish Lights Publishing A Division of LongHill Partners, Inc. Sunset Farm Offices, Route 4, P.O. Box 237 Woodstock, VT 05091 Tel: [phone] Fax: [phone] www.jewishlights.com
F OR S ARAH
Contents
Introduction
P ART I S EEING G OD
Connecting the Dots
Faith in a Silent God
Perceiving God s Presence
God s When and Where
God, Hidden and Revealed
Discerning the Hand of God
The Value of Atheism
The Mystery of the Red Cow
Holy Tension
Abraham s Faith and Doubt
Looking and Seeing
The Holiness of Yom HaAtzma ut
Mundane Miracles
Remembering to Remember
Remember and Forget
P ART II I MAGES OF G OD
The Divine Wrath
Testing God
The Rebuke
Unshakable Covenant
Symbol or Idol
Face to Face with God
The God of Jonah
Arguing with God
Schoenberg s Midrash on the Golden Calf
Two Solitudes
God Is Moved
El Elyon
An Emotional Roller Coaster
The Ambiguities of a Metaphor
A Single Sacred Spot
When Liturgy Is Problematic
Selective Memories
P ART III R EVELATION AND L AW
Narrative and Law
Sinai Was a Moment
Boundaries
Aggadah and Halachah
The Best Interest of Judaism Clause
In the Presence of a King
The Fanatic
Cosmos and Chaos
Moments of Darkness
A Written Record
P ART IV S UFFERING , D EATH, AND R EDEMPTION
The Challenge of Job
Suffering and Redemption
Private and Public
From Redemption to Reality
Confronting Death and Resurrection
Confronting Chaos
Ultimate Vulnerability
Separations
Death Is Over
Redeeming God
From Cosmos to Chaos to Cosmos
We Are Hagar
The Prophet and the Person
Redemption and Destruction
The Dread of Time
Jacob Lives
Interim Eschatologies
A Drama of Life and Death
Suggestions for Further Reading
Index of Torah Readings

About Jewish Lights
Copyright
Introduction
T WENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO , I was invited by the administration of the Jewish Theological Seminary, the school with which I have been associated for more than fifty years, to serve as one of three regular contributors to The Sabbath Week column in The Jewish Week , New York s Anglo-Jewish weekly. I was to be the voice of the Conservative movement, joining Rabbis Shlomo Riskin and Lawrence Hoffman, who were representing the Orthodox and Reform movements respectively. I was replacing Rabbi Gerson D. Cohen, then Chancellor of the Seminary, whose illness had forced him to withdraw from this assignment.
Since then, to this day, every three weeks with absolute regularity, I submit a column on that week s Torah portion. I typically begin with the Torah reading itself, though from time to time, I use the haftarah or the themes of an upcoming festival. To my great good fortune, The Jewish Week has allowed me total freedom both to choose the theme and to express my opinion. I am grateful to the publisher and editors of The Jewish Week for this latitude and for permitting me to publish this anthology.
My field is Jewish theology, so it is not at all surprising that much of my writing deals with that subject. I have reflected on some of the pervasive issues in the field, on questions that continue to trouble me or that engage my attention in my Seminary classes, always trying to ground my thinking on the biblical text. Frequently, these brief discussions have served as a preliminary statement of conclusions that later appeared in my published books.
Shortly after being invited to write, I had a chance encounter with Larry Hoffman and asked him about his experience with the column. He replied that it was a double gift. First, he was now reviewing the Torah reading week by week; second, nothing else that he had ever written had such a wide readership as these statements. After twenty years, I can testify that he was absolutely right on both counts.
For the purposes of this anthology I have selected roughly one third of these columns. My selections were based first, on my personal judgment as to their relative merit, and second, on the extent to which theology was central to the discussion. In each selection, I have eliminated all explicit references to the Torah portion that originally prompted the reflection, but those references can be found in the Index of Torah Readings located at the end of the book. I have done little further editing. What you read now is more or less what I originally wrote. Also, I have ignored the original sequence in which these reflections originally appeared. Instead, I have arranged them according to four broad themes.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATION
Unless noted, the Bible translation I have used in this book is almost entirely from the Jewish Publication Society translation of the Tanakh (1985). This translation uses what we today recognize as masculine God language. This is in contrast to the language that I have used in my own writing throughout the book, but I leave the masculine God language intact to preserve the authenticity of the citations.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This volume could never have been published without the help of two of my rabbinical students who have worked closely with me as my research assistants. Dan Ain, in particular, reviewed all of the material I had written during these twenty-five years and made a preliminary selection of those pieces that he felt were most appropriate for inclusion. Dan s mastery of the technological skills that have become indispensable in modern-day publishing was simply indispensable. Ben Kramer reviewed my final selections, prepared the index, and checked all biblical and rabbinic references for accuracy. My gratitude to both Dan and Ben is unbounded.
I write these lines as Rabbi Ismar Schorsch approaches the final months of his career as Chancellor of the Seminary. Rabbi Schorsch has been unfailingly generous with his support and encouragement of my teaching and writing throughout the decades that we have been colleagues. I use this opportunity to express my gratitude for his many kindnesses on my behalf throughout the years and to wish him well as he embarks on another phase of his accomplished career.
I work daily in a rich center of Jewish life and thought. Whatever I have accomplished as a rabbi and teacher of Judaism, I owe to the Seminary. Not a day goes by without my learning from an extraordinary group of faculty colleagues. I have also long realized that my most insightful teachers have been the generations of students that have come to study with me. They will recognize their contributions to my thinking on every page of this volume.
This is the fourth volume that I have entrusted to the publishing skills of Stuart M. Matlins, publisher of Jewish Lights, and his staff. Scholars often compare notes about their misadventures with the various publishers with whom they have had to deal. I listen to their tales of woe with astonishment. Working with Jewish Lights is a dream, largely because of Stuart and his staff, particularly Emily Wichland, who nursed this volume with the same gentle care that she has my previous books.
Nothing has meant more to me, throughout the years, than the constant love and support of my daughters, Abby and Debby, and my sons-in-law, Michael and Danny. My grandchildren, Jacob, Ellen, Livia, and Judah serve as my personal fountain of youth. They keep me young and revitalize everything I do.
I dedicate this volume to my wife, Sarah, who frequently serves as my sounding board as I prepare to write these pieces, who is usually the first person to read them as they are published, who continues to be my most perceptive critic, and who has long urged me to publish this anthology.
Finally, it is a perpetual source of radical amazement to me that as I enter my eighth decade, I continue to enjoy God s gifts of mind and heart that enable me to teach Torah. For these gifts, in the words of the liturgy, I praise God daily for having kept me in life, for sustaining me, and for enabling me to reach this moment.
P ART I
Seeing God
Connecting the Dots
W E DIDN T CONNECT THE DOTS .
We heard this refrain again and again as American intelligence agencies tried to explain why they failed to anticipate the attacks of September 11, 2001. They acknowledged that in retrospect, there were many pieces of evidence that an attack was forthcoming, but what analysts failed to see was how the pieces fit together. They could not discern a coherent, overall pattern. They saw the individual dots, but they were unable to connect them. That was their failure.
The analogy of connecting the dots refers to a childhood gam