… if
there is one theological foundation for what most of us believe as Conservative
Jews, it is the denial of verbal revelation. I use the negative formulation here deliberately. It leaves room
for a wide range of positive formulations such as Franz Rosenzweig's notion of
revelation as encounter with a "commanding" (though not
"law-giving") Thou-God,[1] Abraham
Heschel's notion of the Bible as midrash,[2] Mordecai
Kaplan's notion of revelation as human discovery,[3] even
Mendel of Rymanov's notion that all that was revealed
at Sinai was the aleph of anokhi, the first word of the ten commandments,[4] and a
multitude of talmudic homilies that teach that not all of the words of the
Torah were revealed to Moses at Sinai.[5] All of
these positions affirm a decisive and active human role in the formulation of
the content of revelation as we have it. Torah then is indeed a midrash, a
human interpretation of some more remote content that is itself inherently
beyond direct human apprehension. Whatever else it may be, it is also, then, a
cultural document, reflecting the idiom of the societies and periods in which
it was composed. Or, to use a more contemporary formulation, it is an
elaborate, complex myth.
Popular
usage to the contrary, to say that a theological claim is a myth is not
synonymous with saying that it is a fiction, a deliberate lie. But neither is
it a literal, precise photograph or reproduction of reality. As soon as we deny
verbal revelation, we must formulate an alternative view of the status of
the language of religion. One such alternative is to dismiss all theological
statements as factually meaningless because they are beyond falsification or
verification.[6]
Proponents of this view will usually hasten to add that theological claims can
still serve other significant purposes. They may, for example, express our
feelings about ourselves, our lives or the world, or serve as spurs to ethical
behavior. But they are not factual, not descriptions of "the nature of
things" out there, beyond ourselves, however much they may parade as such.
The proponents of this view may well be sincere about the many other legitimate
purposes of theological language but it is clear that this position
significantly diminishes the significance of the entire enterprise of religion.
It is not surprising, then, that contemporary theologians and philosophers of
religion have struggled to redeem theological claims as in some sense factually
significant and that the most suggestive of these efforts is the one that views
them as myths.
Theology as Myth
A
seminal elaboration of this thesis is in Paul Tillich's
Dynamics of Faith.[7]
According to Tillich, myths-and the religious symbols
out of which they are fashioned-use material from ordinary experience, from the
framework of time and space, to enable us to conceptualize and talk about a
reality which is in essence totally beyond direct human experience. A myth is
an attempt to capture, usually in dramatic and poetic form, some hidden or
elusive reality. Myths are accommodations, but essential and even indispensable
accommodations, given the nature of the reality to which they refer and the
limitations of our powers of apprehension.
The
simple fact is that the Ultimate cannot enter into our scriptures, liturgies,
theologies or rituals unless it is concretized in some human idiom. The issue,
then, is not myth or no myth, but rather which myth, which set of symbols.
There are of course many other issues which flow from this thesis: In what
sense is a myth "true" or "false"? What criteria can we use
to reach these determinations? What happens when the myth is
"broken," that is, recognized as myth and not as literal truth? The
literature on these and all other implications of the thesis is extensive and
we will return to some of them later in this paper, but a serious attempt must
be made to integrate these proposals into our theology.
Parenthetically,
it should be noted that religion is not the only realm of human experience that
must resort to myth-making. To the extent that science, for example, has to
deal with realities that escape direct human, apprehension, it too must
surrender the view that its theories can be literally true or false. Freudian
psychology, much of astronomy, and the various theories that deal with the
behavior of subatomic particles all fall into this category. There are
significant differences between science and religion as to how myths originate
and what purposes they serve, but all myths share one common feature: they are
evolving human accommodations - partial approximations, subjective constructs,
or impressionistic portraits of the reality to which they
refer-not direct, literal reproductions.[8]
The
claims that God created the world in six days, that He took our ancestors out
of
Implications for
Theology
The
question posed above raises all of the theological issues implied in viewing
the language of Torah as mythical and symbolic. Great religious myths are both
generated by and in turn nurture religious communities. They are the
distinctive manner in which that community reads its historical experience.
Historical facts, by themselves, are mute or infinitely ambiguous. They are
shaped and acquire meaning when they are read by the experiencing community
through the spectacles of its distinctive myth. The community then transcribes
and transmits its reading of its experience through its sacred literature, its
liturgies and its distinctive rituals. Thus the liturgy and rituals of Hanukkah
record not the "facts" of the Maccabean wars but rather the Jewish
community's reading of these facts through the prism of its distinctive myth.
There
is an integral nexus between a community and its myth. A living community will
fight desperately to retain the validity and vitality of its myth. When
necessary, it will refine and revise it-we Jews call this process midrash-in line with its ongoing historical experience in order that it
may continue to work for that community. Above all, a community will not let
its myth die, for when it dies, the community will also die.
The
truth or falsity of a myth, then, cannot be measured by its correspondence or
lack of correspondence with any prior or more primitive body of truth. There is
simply no such more primitive body of truth. Rather, myths are "true"
when they work, when they are effective in doing what they are uniquely
designed to do: promote our ability to identify with that community, disclose
unsuspected layers of meaning in our historical experience, generate rituals,
grip us emotionally, or, when presented in the form of a comprehensive
theology, spell out in an intellectually coherent form our community's distinctive
understanding of the meaning of the human enterprise.
In
this perspective, a Jewish theological statement should not be evaluated by its
fidelity to past formulations, however ancient or sacred, but rather by its
ability to address the historical situation out of which it emerges and which
it attempts to integrate. Theologies will inevitably display continuity with
the past; if anything, a community clings tenaciously to those formulations
that have worked well in the past, not only because they are secure and
familiar but also because the process of evolving new ones is arduous, lengthy,
and inherently disruptive. Much more frequently, a theology will appear
patently anachronistic to a new generation which will thus be impelled to
rewrite it in the light of its own historical experience.
A
community will never abandon an ancient and revered formulation of the content
of its myth until a replacement has been found. In fact, myths are never
discarded as a whole. What usually happens is that segments or individual
symbols within the myth die for segments of the community or for individuals
within the community at different times. What dies is replaced through midrash but enough of the broader texture remains for enough of the
community to make the myth as a whole still viable. Thus, in our day, those of
us for whom "Umipnei Hata'einu . . ." is no longer a
satisfactory explanation of our uniquely twentieth century historical trauma
will struggle to replace this claim with an alternative-hence the enterprise of
what has come to be called holocaust theology. But most of us continue to
function as religious Jews.
Finally,
myths and symbols can be "broken," that is recognized as myths and
symbols and not as literal descriptions. When this happens, the alternatives
are neither precritical literalism nor postcritical reductionism. There is a third possibility,
articulated most concisely in Tillich's memorable
line: "one should never say 'only a symbol,' but one should say 'not less
than a symbol" And again: "There is no substitute for the use of
symbols and myths; they are the language of faith."[9] The
alternative is not myth or no myth but rather which myth, which symbol.
This third possibility not only acknowledges the indispensability of symbolization
and myth-making but even welcomes the uncanny and elusive powers of these myths
and symbols to disclose residues of meaning that lie beneath the surface of our
experience.[10]
Viewed
in this context, the viability of our being able to use the language of "mitzvah" when
God is no longer literally understood as a "mitzavveh" depends on whether the symbol "mitzvah," however
"broken" it may be for some of us, remains a living symbol. Some of
us believe it does because we believe that the central symbol in the Jewish
people's self-definition is that of "covenant." A covenant is a
juridical institution and therefore covenants are concretized in the
life-experience of the covenanted community through a
code of law, those stipulations expressed in legal form which spell out the
difference between being covenanted and not.[11] For
many of us, the symbol "covenant" and its correlate symbol
"law" are very much alive and retain their power to define, disclose,
move, explain, and motivate us as Jews.
Witness,
for example, the palpable sense of awe that pervades a brit milah ritual. That sense of awe, very
different from the emotional tone that pervades a wedding ritual, testifies to
the ongoing power and vitality of the sense of being covenanted. Of course,
those of us for whom these symbols are no longer effective will understand
their Jewishness in a very different way. Thus
emerges one possible parameter that distinguishes different communities within
the body of the Jewish people.
From Toward a Theology for Conservative Judaism by Neil
Gillman in Conservative
Judaism, Vol. 37(1), Fall1983 @1983 The Rabbinical Assembly
NOTES
[1] On Jewish Learning, edited by N. N. Glatzer,
[2] God in Search of Man,
[3] The phrase is actually Ira
Eisenstein's, The Condition of Jewish
Belief, p. 46. I have no doubt that Kaplan would accept that formulation
as well.
[4] 8. Gershom
Scholem, On
the Kabbalah and its Symbolism.
[5] One useful compendium of these
texts is in Elliot Dorff, “Conservative Judaism: Our Ancestors to our Descendents”,
[6] . The classic dismissal of all
theological claims as factually meaningless is in A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic,
[7]
[8] . Two suggestive studies of the
status of scientific theories reflecting this perspective are: Thomas S. Kuhn's
seminal The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions, Chicago:
[9] Dynamics of
Faith, pp. 46 and 51.
[10] See James W. Fowler's Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human
Development and the Quest for Meaning, San Francisco: Harper and Row,
1981. This is a highly suggestive study of the stages in the possible evolution
of religious faith in the life of a believer. Stage five, which Fowler calls
"Conjunctive Faith," traces the reconstitution of faith after its
mythical and symbolic nature has been exposed.
[11] . The nexus between covenant and
law emerges clearly in George Mendenhall's pioneering study of Hittite
suzerainty treaties and their biblical parallels in "Covenant Forms
Israelite Tradition," The Biblical Archaeologist Reader, Vol. III,
Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, pp. 25-53.