[This was first posted ay 8, 2013; an essay from A Modern Treasury of Jewish Thoughts: An Inspiring Collection of Writings in Jewish Deed, Doctrine, and Destiny, edited by Sidney Greenberg, Introduction by Charles Angoff. The book is one of four donated to our S6K resources by Dr. Tiglao. a collector of rare books that he finds in estate sales in the US; the ‘most clicked’ book he has donated which we have featured is The Jewish Mystique. This essay is by Joshua Loth Liebman, “Peace of Mind.” Reformatting and highlights ours. —Admin1.]
Image from www.odysseyofthesoul.org
One man’s spiritual Odyssey may be of interest to others seeking peace of mind, because it may reflect something of the alternating turbulence and tranquillity of our modern age. I offer my experience — in no way exceptional — for whatever help it may give to my perplexed contemporaries.
To begin with, I have gone through a number of stages in my own thoughts on God.
- I shared in my childhood the usual picture of Divinity —a daguerreotype, as it were, of my grandfather — a heavenly replica of an old, bearded patriarchal figure.
- Later, as a theological student, I lived through anguished years when nothing in the external world could stifle the question,
“Where is God? What is his nature?”
I realize now that my adolescent sufferings were a disguise for a deeper distrust of life, a sense of personal uncertainty. Yet I know that those adolescent years of searching for God were invaluable for my own spiritual maturation. No religious teacher who has not himself tasted of the bitter cup of rejection, agnosticism, and fear can be of help to other men and women.
During all these years there came a time when I thought that man was enough and that humanism was the answer. Traditionally, emphasis upon man and humanistic values is one of the fundamental Jewish concepts; yet I have come to see that humanism is not enough to explain man. Neither his mind nor his creative powers can be truly understood except as the offspring of some universal parent. I have come to feel that the whole human story, with all its tragedy and its triumph, is like a page torn from the middle of a book without beginning or end–an undecipherable page when cut out of its context.
The context of man is the Power greater than man.
The human adventure is part of a universal sonnet — one line in a deathless poem. Without faith that our human intelligence and haunting human conscience are a reflection of a greater intelligence and a vaster creative power, the key to the cipher is lost and the episode of mankind on earth becomes a hidden code — a meaningless jumble of vowels and consonants . . . .
Only within recent years have i begun to discover a pathway to God that is intellectually satisfying to my own wrestling spirit. I found the first hints in the pages of Hebrew wisdom. I came to understand that the prophets in Palestine were also wrestling with the same problem. They, too, held the conviction that God was all-good, but that He did not abrogate the oral laws of life for any favorites. Those ancient prophets, in effect. said to the people of Israel.
“God has established natural laws in the universe, and He expects them to cooperate. He has given you consciences and minds, and He expects you to use them. If you abuse them He will not set His world topsy-turvy in order to rescue you from the consequences of your deeds.”
Image from pastordaveonline.org
I began to see a deep wisdom of that message — the wisdom of maturity–which does not expect God to be a father cajoled and wheedled into violating the necessary principles of human life. I understood why Jeremiah told the people of Jerusalem (who were so confident that they were God’s favorites) not to believe presumptuously that He would be partial to them and to their beloved city. There is no partiality in a moral universe. Gradually I came to understand how my ancestors were able to find the greatness of God and to discern His truth not in the eras of luxury and security but in the catastrophe of exile, when their world was shaken to its foundation.
The unthinking man might say that during this whirlwind of national tragedy the Jews should have lost faith in God. Is there not something startling and profound in this neglected truth that the giants of the Bible found the handwriting of God not in the sunlit hours of triumph, but in the state of tragedy? It seems like a paradox of evil and suffering should have been the birthplace of the moral God.
The very experience that now seems to make so many people atheistic is what made the prophets of Israel maturely religious. Why? Because they had gone beyond a childish view of Divinity. At a time when thousands of Jews must have been saying with their emotions, “There is no God,” it was then that the prophets — Titans of the spirit — taught their new message:
“God cannot do anything that will mock his moral law. He is not an Oriental monarch, to be bribed into overlooking violations of the principles upon which the earth and human society must rest.” . . . .
When I think with my mind rather than feel with my heart, I cannot conceive of a world where God would interfere capriciously with personal and social destiny, making all human effort and human striving worthless. We cannot look to God to save us from man-made evil, whether it be a civic catastrophe born out of negligence or greed or whether it be a dictatorship that mankind long knew would slay the innocent if it were not stopped in time. We dare not run to God to wipe away by a miracle the effects of our human misdeeds. We cannot have only the blessings that come with mind and conscience and that distinguish us from the lifeless rock and expect God to be our heavy insurance policy against all of the dangers and the failures of life.
God must indeed be filled with sorrow as He sees how the human race has misused its freedom of choice and how it has violated His moral laws.
“Men, men,” He could cry, “I gave you an earth ribbed with veins of diamonds and gold and black with frozen heat. I gave you strong and dynamic waters to drive your windmills and make your turbines hum with power. I gave you rich loam upon which you could grow waving wheat. What have you done? My coal often you have stolen, leaving only the slag for the poor. My diamonds, my gold, my living waters, you have imprisoned behind the walls of your selfish greed. Because you refused to use my gifts in order to build a just earth, you have been forced to spend gold like water for ships blown up in the twinkling of an eye. You have seen your cities ruined and your precious sons annihilated on a thousand battlefields. Now, at last, the intelligence which I have implanted in you, O race of man, has fashioned the key to unlock my treasure house of energy. Within the secret heart of my atoms is the power of life and death for all of you. O men, will you this time choose weapons of death or tools of life, unconditional destruction or unconditional survival?” . . .
It is true that we can never actually define God, since we human beings are so limited and our language is always inexact, and we shall probably always have to use metaphor and analogy in order to interpret Divine reality. What many people do not understand is that our scientific description of the universe is just as metaphorical as the religious description. Men thought that they were very exact and scientific when they called the world a great machine. Is that not an analogy, a metaphor? Whenever we speak of reality as a machine or as purely material, we are reading something into the world.
Why should we continue to interpret the universe in terms of the lowest that we know rather than in terms of the highest that we experience? Intelligence, purpose, and personality, the will to live, the need to love, the yearning to be related—these are just as important clues to reality as atoms and electrons. It sometimes seems to me that our habit of looking at the universe in terms of purpose and of conscience is a reflection of our inferiority complex — as though we human beings were not worthy to be regarded as mirrors of the Divine. Perhaps this is part of that spiritual self-deprecation which is always fashionable in certain theological circles. There is no logical reason, however, why we should explain reality always by reducing the complex to the simple. Why exalt the atom as the clue to truth and ignore the mind of man? Why should we not believe that that which is highest in ourselves is a reflection of that which is deepest in the universe—that we are children of a Power who makes possible the growing achievement of relatedness, fulfillment, goodness?
We may not ever come to know God’s essence, but His attributes of activity —namely, the universal laws of social, mental, and moral health — these we can possess. God, as Hocking insists, is not the Healing Fiction but the Healing Fact, and we come upon Him at work in the majesty of nature and the fruitfulness of mind, in the laws of atoms and the goals of men.
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