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God Has Survived The Enlightenment. But Whose God?

Written by Rabbi Dr. Tony Bayfield Friday, 25 September 2009

Yom Kippur Sermon 5770, Monday 28th September 2009 at North Western Reform Synagogue.

This sermon has been brewing for three or four years but I only found the way in to it a few weeks ago when I was on holiday in Israel with my grandchildren Francesca and Oliver – and their parents.  For some unaccountable reason, I didn’t read Amos Oz’s autobiography ‘A Tale of Love and Darkness’ when it was first published four years ago.  It felt really appropriate to read it during our holiday – Tsfat, Ramot, the Dead Sea and Jerusalem. 

Before I start, let me mention that Amos only took the surname Oz when he became a kibbutznik.  The family name is Klausner – the same Klausner family who merged with the Janners some years ago.  If you don’t know who the Janner-Klausners are, Philip Cohen has retired.

The Oz/Klausner autobiography is the greatest autobiography that I’ve ever read.  I was moved by almost every page.  But there’s one section that jumped out at me as the way in to this long-brewed sermon.

“Rav Alexander Ziskind of Horodno was a mystic, kabbalist, ascetic, the author of several influential ethical writings.  It was said of him that ‘He spent his life shut away in a small room studying Torah; he never kissed or held his children and never had any conversation with them that was not directed to heavenly things.’  His wife ran the household and brought up the children on her own.  Nevertheless, this outstanding ascetic taught that one should ‘worship the Creator with great joy and fervour’.  But neither joy nor fervour prevented Rabbi Alexander Ziskind from leaving instructions in his will that after his death ‘the Burial Society shall perform on my corpse the four death penalties entrusted to the Sanhedrin’, until all his limbs were crushed.  His descendants bear the family name Braz, which is an abbreviation for ‘Born of Rabbi Alexander Ziskind’.” 

Oz goes on:  “His son, Rav Yossele Braz, one of those whom their father never kissed or held, was considered a consummate Righteous Man who studied the Torah all his days and never left the house of study on a weekday even to sleep: he would permit himself to doze off as he sat, with his head on his arms and his arms on the desk, for four hours each night, with a lighted candle held between his fingers so that when it burnt down the flame would wake him.  Even his snatched meals were brought to him in the house of study, which he only left at the onset of the Sabbath and to which he returned as soon as the Sabbath was over.” 

“Rav Yossele’s son, Rav Alexander Ziskind Braz (my grandfather Alexander’s grandfather) was a successful businessman who dealt in grain, linen and even hogs’ bristles; he traded as far afield as Königsberg and Leipzig.  He was a scrupulously observant Jew, but so far as is known he distanced himself from his father’s and grandfather’s zealotry: he did not turn his back on the world, did not live by the sweat of his wife’s brow, and did not hate the Zeitgeist and the Enlightenment.  He allowed his children to learn Russian and German and a little ‘alien wisdom’, and even encouraged his daughter, Rasha Keile Braz, to study, to read and to be an educated woman.  He certainly did not admonish the Burial Society with dire threats to crush his body after his death.”

“Menahem Mendel Braz, son of Alexander Ziskind, settled in the early 1880s in Odessa where, together with his wife Perla, he owned and ran a small glass factory.  Menahem Braz was a well-to-do, good-looking bon-viveur, and a strong-willed non-conformist even by the very tolerant standards of late nineteenth-century Jewish Odessa.  An undisguised atheist and well-known hedonist, he abhorred both religion and religious fanatics with the same whole-hearted devotion with which his grandfather and great-grandfather had insisted on observing every jot and tittle of the Law.”

So there you have it.  The entire recent history of our spiritual and intellectual journey as Jews encapsulated in just four paragraphs covering eighty years from 1805 when Oz’s great, great, great, great grandfather was seventeen and living in Lithuania, to 1885 when his great grandfather was living in Odessa.  From faith stronger than the agonies of self-imposed deprivation and affliction, to faith fragmented into a hundred irreparable shards.

That’s a huge claim for me to make – the recent history of our spiritual and intellectual journey in eighty years and four paragraphs.  In some ways it’s outrageous.  But permit me a few minutes – well, twenty – to justify the outrage.

Forty years ago I was a student at the Leo Baeck College.  Once a week for two years I made the journey to a suburban semi – its owner would have called it with approval a bourgeois semi – in Edgware.  The owner, my theology teacher, was a German refugee, a pupil of Leo Baeck called Ignaz Maybaum.  One could argue that Rabbi Maybaum was the only true Jewish theologian to have taught and worked in this country.  His theology was challenging, counter-cultural and, in some respects, deeply distasteful.  But in many other respects he offered unique and enduring insights.

As you can imagine, his theology was dominated by the Holocaust but, almost uniquely, he denied the uniqueness of the most catastrophic and traumatic episode in Jewish history.  Catastrophic ‘yes’, unique ‘no’, said Maybaum.  The term Shoah had not been coined and he referred to the Holocaust by the term Churban, destruction, the term used in classical Jewish literature to describe the destruction of the First Temple, the first Churban and the destruction of the Second Temple, the second Churban.  The Holocaust was the third Churban.  Terrible but of a piece with the past.  Of the central question of evil and suffering, Maybaum might have said that the Shoah asked no new questions, but it made the old questions press in on us with irresistible ferocity.

Where was God?  If there is a God, why didn’t God intervene?  How could God have permitted the murder of a million children?  Where is God?  If there is a God, why doesn’t God intervene?  Why does God permit the death and the suffering of innocent women and men when the world is supposedly God’s creation and God is supposedly good?

I’ve been privileged to have a number of remarkable teachers – Ignaz Maybaum, Ellen Littmann, Lionel Blue, Hugo Gryn, John Rayner, Louis Jacobs, Albert Friedlander – but some of you know that the person who has influenced me most is Dow Marmur, the rabbi responsible for Alyth’s reputation as the Reform Movement’s leading intellectual congregation.  At quite a late stage in the gestation of this sermon, I suddenly realised that here Dow and I are not at one.  I understand where he’s coming from but I, almost certainly because I’m not a Shoah survivor like him and because I’ve been more influenced by the British academic tradition than him, part company on one issue.  It’s not a dispute or a break but the consequence of different journeys.

Dow sent me a lecture that he’d given and asked me if I would like him to adapt it for MANNA.  I said ‘yes’ with great enthusiasm and you can read his article in the October issue.  It’s characteristically brilliant and I would urge the ten people here – and I know all your names – who are not MANNA subscribers to repent today and subscribe tomorrow.

The Marmur essay is about Emil Fackenheim, a German-born Canadian scholar who taught that the Shoah had given rise to a 614th commandment – to survive as Jews and not grant Hitler a posthumous victory.  Marmur’s critique is that Fackenheim did not go “beyond survival” and tell Jews how we should live in this world of faith shattered into a hundred irreparable shards.

Marmur goes much further than Fackenheim.  God has become distant, inaccessible, incomprehensible.  So the task of the Jew is to wait.  Not passively, but actively.  Living out a distinctively Jewish life in the Divine absence, or, to use biblical language, with the divine countenance turned away, with only distance and silence and no answers.

That’s the point at which our journeys, that of my great mentor and mine, diverge.  Because I can’t.  I can’t wait either actively or passively.  I can’t avoid the challenge.  I can’t resist questioning.    I need to shout at the apparent silence.  To find some explanation.  Where was God?  Where is God?  Why didn’t God, why doesn’t God intervene?

Which doesn’t take me back to the Third Churban, the Holocaust.  It takes me back much further.  To Amos Oz’s autobiography and to his great, great, great, great grandfather Alexander Ziskind of Horodno, born in Lithuania in 1788, mystic, kabbalist, ascetic who spent his life shut away in a small room studying Torah and never kissed or held his children and never had any conversation with them that was not directed to heavenly things.

I protest with every fibre of my being.  If that’s faith I want nothing of it.  I’d rather be an atheist like Menachem Mendel Braz of Odessa.  But I can’t be.  God won’t let me.

We started our Israel holiday – and I read Oz’s account of Rav Alexander Ziskind of Horodno – in Tsfat (Safed if you go with Holy Land Tours.  We didn’t).  We started in Tsfat because I remembered Tsfat as a beautiful town full of pomegranate trees and filled with artists, still echoing to the sounds of Lecha Dodi which was written there and sung as its inhabitants accompanied the Sabbath bride in from the fields.  It was a mistake.  Tsfat is horribly changed, down at heel and filled with people living as if it were Horodno in Lithuania at the time of Rav Alexander Ziskind.

But I had another reason – which I now confess to Lucy and Matthew – for inflicting Tsfat on my family.  It was home in the 16th century to Isaac Luria and I was wondering whether I might get a sense of him from the town in which he lived and taught. 

It’s really odd that this man Luria, also a mystic, the founder of kabbalistic theory, should attract me more strongly even than Alexander Ziskind of Horodno repels me.  Luria was born in Jerusalem of a Sephardi mother just a couple of decades after the disaster of the expulsion from Spain.  His Ashkenazi father died when he was young.  He was brought up by a wealthy uncle in Cairo.  Married to a cousin at fifteen, he’s reputed to have become a recluse in his twenties.  But it’s clear that his background of personal and collective tragedy influenced him and introduced a theological realism that runs through the thought of some of his Ashkenazi followers in the dark, brutal years of the 17th century in Eastern Europe. They recognised, they knew with every fibre of their being that this world is not an easy place and it is manifestly obvious that God does not intervene to ‘rescue and save’ the innocent, zap the wicked and vindicate the righteous.

There is a metaphor at the heart of Lurianic kabbalah which I, who cannot wait actively or passively, who feel compelled to try to understand, explain, find enormously helpful.

Luria taught that God is all and everything.  When God, as it were, decided to create the world, God therefore needed to withdraw, or rather to contract into God’s self, to leave space for the world.  This world, this universe, is not God.  It is very different from God.

To use today’s language – from the moment of the big bang the universe, the reality we experience, the world of time and space began to develop according to the laws implicit from the moment of the big bang and the universe came into being and could not have been, could not be, otherwise.  It is how it is.  With, as Dawkins insists, the self-sufficient wonder of evolution.  With tsunamis and cancers.  The world is as it is.  Different from God, separate from God and, by definition, not a place where divine wand-waving takes place.  The ‘is-ness’ of the world is a direct consequence of God’s contraction and God’s act of creation.

But what Luria realised and his followers grasped was that the metaphor, the myth of divine contraction to leave space for the world does not render God either absent without leave or completely irrelevant.  For God is nevertheless accessible, present.  God is to be encountered, experienced through prayer and meditation.  And, I would add, most importantly of all simply through living.

I’m surprised, gratified even, that I can now add that last phrase without equivocation or apology – “simply through living”, through walking one’s particular walk with openness and integrity and thinking about it, reflecting on it.  Despite my exposure to the excessive rationalism and secularity of British society; despite my academic training; despite the sceptical questioning which has always threatened to turn me into a second rate A C Grayling – I’ve never had the inner anger to be a second-rate Richard Dawkins – I experience God.  As a harsh and relentless judge and also as a consoling presence; as the One who find it funny how bothersome I find God and as the One who surprises me when I think that my logic has proved God dead.  Let me be clear.  I’m not talking of God in naturalistic or psychological terms.  I’m not a follower of Mordecai Kaplan.  I’m speaking the language not of the natural but of the metaphysical (I’d use the term supernatural were it not to conjure up images of ghosts and mysterious spirits and forces which is precisely what I don’t believe in).  I’m talking about the One Whom you think I’m talking about when I say ‘God’.

It may sound odd – it probably is odd – to draw towards a close with this particular example.  But it suits me, so humour me.  When Jesus is on the cross he’s truly a fellow Jew.  For on the cross, facing death, he utters the opening lines of Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  ‘Dear God, here I am suffering unjustly.  Please reach down and save me from crucifixion’.  But it doesn’t happen.  We may hope, we may pray but it doesn’t happen.  When Christians teach that it all came right because three days later Jesus was physically, bodily resurrected, I can only understand what they teach as metaphor.  But Jews and Christians most certainly share the tradition of a God who weeps tears at our suffering and offers us the consolation of redeeming life, providing it with meaning and purpose.  A meaning and a purpose which the kabbalists expressed in terms of nitz’tzot, redeeming the sparks of goodness.  But that’s another sermon.

This sermon takes us back to my mentor Dow Marmur and his insistence on the tradition that goes back to Maimonides and Job of active waiting, accepting the inscrutability of God and getting on with Jewish life.  The path I have long been unable to walk.  I’ve felt compelled to try to penetrate the silence, challenge it, find some explanation.

There is a sentence that I was taught went back to a Catholic theologian but some claim as Jewish which says that no theology has any validity today unless it can be uttered in the presence of a million murdered children.  I hope that nothing I have said betrays their memory.

Back a century before the Holocaust to Amos Oz né Klausner and my outrageous claim that all of recent Jewish spiritual and intellectual history is encapsulated in the eighty years that separate the great, great, great, great grandfather who worshiped a God who denied him the privilege and the duty of holding his own children from his atheist, hedonistic great grandfather.

What the four paragraphs from Oz teach me is that it was exposure to the modern world, the Enlightenment, the haskalah in Eastern Europe, not the Shoah which shattered faith into a hundred shards – destroyed faith or, rather, destroyed a certain kind of faith, a problematic faith, a damaged faith, a faith born out of centuries of unimaginable, endless suffering, a faith which clung to the hope of divine intervention against all the evidence of common sense and experience of reality.

A concept of God which has now gone for ever.

Or has it?  Searching in Sfat for one of the sources of my own faith Isaac Luria, I found, we – Matthew and me – found only charedim who re-assert that which most of us thought the Enlightenment and the haskalah had swept aside well over 100 years ago.  I must confess it repelled me and angered me.  Because of its lack of ethic: “His wife ran the household and brought up the children on her own.”  Because of its refusal to face up to reality and insistence on endlessly re-telling stories of the world that God has created that don’t work, that are simply not true.  Because of its profound disservice to God and to faith.

I stand before you this Day of Atonement as a believing Jew, as one who loves God – or, rather, asks questions of God almost as frequently as God – my truest Critical Friend, by far the most difficult, bothersome So and So in my life – asks questions of me and, perhaps, of you.