Closely connected with these ideas is the concept of divine personhood, most particularly illustrated in the use of the pronoun “thou” in direct address to God. The community and the individual, confronted by the creator, teacher, and redeemer, address the divine as a living person, not as a theological abstraction. The basic liturgical form, the berakha (“blessing”), is usually couched in the second person singular: “Blessed art thou….” This relationship, through which remoteness is overcome and presentness is established, illuminates creation, Torah, and redemption, for it reveals the meaning of love. From it flow the various possibilities of expressing the divine-human relationship in personal, intimate language. Sometimes, especially in mystical thought, such language becomes extravagant, foreshadowed by vivid biblical metaphors such as the husband-wife relation in Hosea, the “adoption” motif in Ezekiel 16, and the firstborn-son relation in Exodus 4:22. Nonetheless, although terms of personal intimacy are used widely to express Israel’s relationship with God, such usage is restrained by the accompanying sense of divine otherness. This is evident in the liturgical “blessings,” where, following the direct address to God in which the second person singular pronoun is used, the verbs are with great regularity in the third person singular, thus providing the requisite tension between nearness and otherness, between the personal and the impersonal. Modern views of God
The Judaic affirmations about God have not always been given the same emphasis, nor have they been understood in the same way. This was true in the Middle Ages, among both philosophers and mystics, as well as in modern times. In the 19th century, western European Jewish thinkers attempted to express and transform these affirmations in terms of German philosophical idealism. Later thinkers turned to philosophical naturalism, supplemented with the traditional God language, as the suitable expression of Judaism. In the first half of the 20th century the meaningfulness of the whole body of such affirmations was called into question by the philosophical school of logical positivism. The destruction of six million Jews in the Holocaust raised the issue of the validity of concepts such as God’s presence in history, divine redemption, the covenant, and the chosen people. Israel (the Jewish people) Choice and covenant
The concluding phrase of the second benediction of the liturgical section—“who has chosen thy people Israel in love”—clearly states that God’s choice to establish a relationship with Israel in particular was determined by divine love. The patriarchal narratives, beginning with the 12th chapter of Genesis, presuppose the choice, which is set forth explicitly in Deuteronomy 7:6–8 in the New Jewish Version:
For you are a people consecrated to the Lord your God: of all the peoples on earth the Lord your God chose you to be His treasured people. It is not because you are the most numerous of peoples that the Lord set His heart on you and chose you—indeed you are the smallest of peoples; but it was because the Lord loved you and kept the oath He made with your fathers that the Lord freed you with a mighty hand and rescued you from the house of bondage, from the power of Pharaoh king of Egypt.
Later rabbinic traditions on occasion sought to base God’s choice upon some special merit of Israel, and the medieval poet and theologian Judah ha-Levi suggested that the openness to divine influence originally present in Adam continued only within the people of Israel.
The background of this choice is the recurring disobedience of humankind narrated in Genesis 2–11 (the stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, and the Tower of Babel). In the subsequent chapters of Genesis, Abraham and his descendants are singled out not merely as the object of the divine blessing but also as its channel to all humanity. The choice, however, demands a reciprocal response from Abraham and his lineage. That response is obedience, as exemplified in the first instance by Abraham’s readiness to leave his “native land” and his “father’s house” (Genesis 12:1). This twofold relationship was formalized in a mutually binding agreement, a covenant between the two parties. The covenant, thought by some modern biblical scholars to reflect the form of ancient suzerainty treaties, indicates (as in the Ten Utterances, or Decalogue) the source of Israel’s obligation—the acts of God in history—and the specific requirements those acts impose. The formalization of this relationship was accomplished by certain cultic acts that, according to some contemporary scholars, may have been performed on a regular basis at various sacred sites in the land before being centralized in Jerusalem. The content of the covenantal obligations thus formalized was Torah. Israel was bound in obedience, and Israel’s failure to obey provided the occasions for the prophetic messages. The prophets, as spokespersons for God, called the community to renewed obedience, threatened and promised disaster if obedience was not forthcoming, and sought to explain the covenant’s persistence even when it should have been repudiated by God.
The Tower of Babel, oil painting by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1563; in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.Courtesy of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
The choice of Israel is expressed in concrete terms in the requirements of the precepts (mitzwot, singular mitzwa) that are part of Torah. The blessing recited before the public reading of the pentateuchal portions on Sabbath, festivals, holy days, fasts, and certain weekdays refers to God as “He who chose us from among all the peoples and gave us His Torah,” thus emphasizing the intimate relationship between the elective and revelatory aspects of God.
Israel’s role was not defined solely in terms of its own obedience to the commandments. Abraham and his descendants, for example, were seen as the means by which the estrangement of disobedient humankind from God was to be overcome. Torah was the formative principle underlying the community’s fulfillment of this obligation. Israel was to be “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exodus 19:6) functioning within humanity and for its sake. This task is enunciated with particular earnestness in the writings of the Prophets. In Isaiah 43–44, Israel is declared to be God’s witness and servant, who is to bring the knowledge of God to the nations, and in 42:6–7 it is described as a “covenant of the people, to be a light of the nations, to open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the prisons, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison house.” This double motif of a chosen people and a witness to the nations, joined to that of the righteous king, developed in the biblical and postbiblical periods into messianism in its several varieties.
The intimate relation between choice, covenant, and Torah determined the modality of Israel’s existence. Religious faith, far from being restricted to or encapsulated in the cult, found expression in the totality of communal and individual life. The obligation of the people was to be the true community, in which the relationship between its members was open, in which social distance was repudiated, and in which response to the divine will expressed in Torah was called for equally from all. One of the important recurring themes of the prophetic movement was the adamant rejection of any tendency to limit divine sovereignty to the partial area of “religion,” understood as the realm of the priesthood and cult. Subsequent developments continued this theme, though it appeared in a number of other forms. Pharisaic Judaism and its continuation, Rabbinic Judaism, resolutely held to the idea of the all-pervasive functioning of Torah, so that however the various Jewish communities over the centuries may have failed to fulfill this idea, the self-image of the people was that of a “holy community.” Israel and the nations