Are Jews God-phobic? With Arnold Eisen

(RNS) — “Must love God.”

I am talking to a friend of mine about his experience on various dating sites. He tells me that from time to time, he will come across a profile that seems promising. And then, right there in the first paragraph, the woman will write: “Must love God.”

As he scrolls down a little further, he sees that she is a Christian — and that she inevitably describes her politics as “conservative.”

“I don’t get it,” he says to me. “Why is it that anyone who writes ‘must love God’ is always Christian? I’m Jewish. I love God. Do these people think that only Christians love God? And since when does ‘must love God’ mean ‘must be a Christian – and of a particular kind and political persuasion’?”

That was the question that led me into a conversation with Professor Arnold Eisen, one of American Judaism’s most esteemed thinkers and personalities.

From 2006 to 2020, he served as the chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America — the flagship academic institution of Conservative Judaism — where he was only the second nonrabbi to serve in that post. He is an author of many books, and a cherished teacher and public intellectual.

I have been learning from Professor Eisen for years.

Among my most cherished of his insights: Judaism (any religion, actually) provides two things that are not readily available in the secular world: meaning and community. For him, the most important piece of Jewish writing in recent decades was the opening paragraph of Abraham Joshua Heschel’s “God in Search of Man.”

Check this out:

It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion — its message becomes meaningless.

A second thing — less theology, more sociology.

In Professor Eisen’s book (with Steven M. Cohen), “The Jew Within: Self, Family, and Community in America,” the authors interviewed American Jews. They discovered a new Jew, who had become (along with other upper-middle-class Americans) a “sovereign self.”

“No one can tell me what I should do as far as Jewish observance goes” … No one had the right to dictate the rights and wrongs of ritual or ethical practice: not their parents or their rabbi or their spouse. They would do what gave them pleasure or meaning at the moment (as long as it did not directly harm others), and if not, not. A prospective mitzvah had to pass muster before that high bar or they would not engage in it. What is more, I learned, they not only believed strongly that it was their right to make such decisions, and not just a fact of life in a free society, but that it would have been wrong of them not to choose in this way. It would be wrong to defer to community, custom, family tradition, or religious prescription.

But let’s go to the “American Jews and God” thing. Professor Eisen has just written a new book, “Seeking the Hiding God: A Personal Theological Essay.”

About the God thing:

American Jews have long been among the least religiously observant and believing of all major religious groups. Jews engage in sustained or fervent God-talk much less than Americans of other faiths; in fact, it is often argued that theology has never been central to Judaism. … When Jews have engaged in theology over the centuries, their God-talk usually focused less on God’s nature or workings than on how to seek and serve God. Unlike Christians, who are asked to take a leap of faith for belief in God, Jews — in the words of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the American Jewish thinker who has had more impact on me than any other — are asked to take a “leap of action.”

Here is Professor Eisen’s big idea: God is hiding in the world. God is not readily accessible to us.

It all starts with Moses.

Moses cannot see God’s face. The Lord’s visage cannot be an object to Moses’s gaze. The connection between them cannot be a thing that Moses controls or conjures. Religious people of every time and place need to know this. But Moses can and will be held by God: protected, forgiven, comforted, and loved. He can and will see where God has been, looking with an eye of discernment at the trace of the presence and action that God has left behind. We too can and do experience these things.

So, yes: God is in eclipse. Or, perhaps, we cannot define God, which might be a better way of understanding Moses’ inability to see God’s face. Perhaps it is “only” (a very big “only”) standing in God’s presence.

So, where was God on Oct. 7? The question is simultaneously current and ancient. A partial answer: We might not have felt that presence. We might have protested, and continue to protest, that absence.

Here’s the thing. Such protest is an inescapable, and even essential, part of faith.

The Psalmist addressed [these words] to God, that “You have made us like sheep to be eaten and scattered us through the nations. … You made us a shame to our neighbors, derision and mockery to those around us. … For Your sake we are slain all day long, we are counted as sheep for slaughter. Awake, why sleep, O Master! Rouse up, neglect not forever.” Another psalm asks “Why, O God, have You abandoned us forever? Your wrath smolders against the flock You should tend.”

Finally, you will smile when you read this summation of a scholarly and menschlich life well lived:

I believe — as I move past the age of seventy, savoring friendships that have lasted half a century, a marriage of forty-plus years, relations with children in their thirties, and now two grandchildren — that whenever you and I love, we love because of love ultimately planted in us by God. … If those who raised us had not showered us with love, it would be difficult for us to give love to others. … Love could not have made its way to us if God’s love were not ever-present in the world, in our communities, and in our families. … We can be confident God’s love is present, like the central seam of the tallit in which I drape myself when I pray. If that seam frays, the tallit falls apart; the fact that the tallit holds together bears witness to the integrity of the seam.

To which I might add: Every generation reweaves that tallit.