God-Talk: an Introduction

Abstract

SPEAKING ON STRANGE GROUND

“How [aikh] can we sing the Lord’s song [shir adonai] on strange ground?” (Psalms 137:4) So sang the Jewish exiles in Babylonia after their deportation from Jerusalem in the wake of the destruction of the Temple in 586 BCE (where the psalms were sung during the sacrificial service).¹ What are the exiles saying here? Are they uttering an exclamation, or are they asking a question? If this is an exclamation, it might be in effect saying: “no, we can’t sing the Lord’s song in a foreign country, because the words of our sacred song can’t be translated into the words of the foreign country’s language.”² On the other hand, if this is a question, the answer might be: “yes, we can sing the Lord’s song there, but we need to know how to sing our song authentically in that foreign language so it might be understood there.” This answer also implies that the new language is not only the native language spoken by the gentiles among themselves, not only the language the Jews have to speak to the gentiles among whom they are presently living, but even the language the Jews are presently speaking among themselves.

Now the term “the Lord’s song” can connote Jewish “God-talk” (whether sung, spoken, or even written) in general. By “God-talk” I mean what God says to humans of Godself in biblical revelation; what humans can theologically speculate of Godself; what Jewish tradition mandates humans can say to God of themselves in prayer.

Interpreting the words of the psalm above as an exclamation, and then having them connote Jewish God-talk in general, means that Jewish God-talk must be confined to inter-Jewish discourse; and that conducting Jewish God-talk elsewhere is like the sacrilege of offering a sacrifice outside the Temple precincts.³ On the other hand, interpreting the words of the psalm above as a genuine query, and then having them connote Jewish God-talk in general, implies a positive answer: “yes, Jewish God-talk can be conducted in a foreign language.” Nevertheless, that language must have the capacity for Jewish God-talk to be authentically expressed therein without distorting its essential meaning. Some languages have that capacity; others do not.⁴ Of those languages not having this capacity, some never had it; others had it but lost it, or they had it and the words that had been adequate for Jewish God-talk (or any God-talk) were removed from public discourse by deliberate efforts to secularize the language.

In today’s secular milieu, God-talk has been steadily removed, indeed banished, from public discourse. Some Jews accept that removal as a fait accompli. They opt to either abandon the secular cultural milieu because any God-talk is not welcome there (and where they do not want to be anyway), or they opt to abandon God-talk altogether because they do want to be welcome in the secular milieu, even if that means giving up the God-talk lying at the heart of the Jewish tradition.

On the other hand, the removal of God-talk from public discourse is not accepted as a fait accompli by other Jews. We want to conduct our God-talk in public discourse wherever we happen to be, but with theological integrity, neither fleeing into an intellectual ghetto nor obsequiously subordinating ourselves to another culture. Like the question (rather than the exclamation) of those in the psalm genuinely inquiring and thus truly searching for a positive answer, our question becomes: “How do we conduct our Jewish God-talk in a secular cultural milieu where God-speakers are a distinct minority?” How can this to be done, steering clear of the Scylla of sectarianism and the Charybdis of assimilation?

Can Jews (or Christians or Muslims for that matter) conduct their traditional God-talk in a cultural milieu from whose public discourse any God-talk has been largely—indeed intentionally—eliminated? I answer “yes you can” to this genuine question. Here, I attempt to explicate Jewish God-talk in and for our contemporary, secular, cultural milieu, by first arguing that God-talk has not, indeed cannot, be eliminated from contemporary public discourse. In fact, attempts at this elimination have and still do greatly impoverish the historic languages from which even their specialized intellectual discourse has been abstracted. Indeed, those who speak this abstract dialect still cannot dispense with their need as communicating beings to speak with other persons the more comprehensive language they have inherited from their cultural forbearers, in a culture they did not invent. God-talk is an integral component of that prior, more comprehensive language. God-talk cannot be excised from interpersonal public communication any more than that prior language in its fullness can be excised from current public discourse.

RETRIEVING GOD-TALK

Due to semi-successful attempts by militant atheists to eliminate God-talk from public discourse, however, the historic language of the culture—and especially its God-talk—needs to be retrieved. That needs to be done so God-speakers can speak again in public in a language that can no longer be silenced for being irretrievably passé, like some embarrassing, primitive ancestor. Also, by retrieving public Jewish God-talk, Jews can actually help others retrieve the God-talk taken away from them too by those who believe they can reinvent language altogether so as to conform to their own political-cultural agenda. This retrieval can be done by uncovering a vocabulary still employed by religious Jews, Christians, and Muslims, which can still be cogently employed when speaking of and to God in public. As such, I happily appreciate both parallel and common efforts to make God-talk truly intelligible universally.⁵

That a language has the capacity for God-talk to be conducted therein is a possible meaning of the rabbinic principle, “the Torah speaks according to human language (ke-lashon bnei adam).”⁶ Now that could be saying that the Torah—the source of all authentic Jewish God-talk—is given in language already being spoken in the world.⁷ And, whereas God created the cosmos “out of nothing” (ex nihilo), there being nothing to precede it, God gave the Torah de novo. That is, although God gave the Torah newly into the world, the world was already there, and humans already had multiple languages they had already been speaking beforehand. What the old words—especially the name “God”—mean, and what people had believed are their real referents, God now revealed in the Torah that these words are true.⁸ It was like the old words were waiting for God to let people know that what they had heretofore only believed to be true was now confirmed to be the truth by their experience of the event of revelation and their acceptance of its message.⁹ However, nobody could accept statements about God and from God to be true unless they understood what the name “God” means.

In order for the Torah and its God-talk to be understood by the speakers of a human language to whom the Torah is given, their language must have the vocabulary whereby the Torah’s God-talk could be expressed.¹⁰ But if a language is devoid of words and concepts adequate for the expression of God-talk, the Torah’s truth would then be blocked from being revealed as it would fall on deaf ears. “They have ears, but they do not hear.” (Jeremiah 5:25)¹¹ As such, the Torah’s truth coming down from heaven would have no place to land on earth.¹²

GOD-TALK AND ITS CRITICS

In this article (and previously), I attempt to explain to both religious and secular readers that the God-talk Jewish thinkers have spoken and still do speak is cogent, having a logic governing what can be said and what cannot be said correctly, and that it draws upon rich resources in the Jewish tradition accurately. My explication of Jewish God-talk here attempts to show how it can be spoken cogently. And, since philosophy seems to be the most precise and insightful way of examining how humans speak of questions of deepest concern, it is employed here. I hope to indicate how some of the basic questions regarding human language, in which God-talk is inextricably imbedded, are discussed by western philosophers, similar to the ways they have been discussed in the Jewish tradition.

Before exposing, analyzing, and speculating in earnest about some major themes in Jewish God-talk, there is a need to argue against dismissals of the enterprise to which I am existentially committed as somebody living and working in a tradition that is so saturated with God-talk. That needs to be done because the dismissal of God-talk is ubiquitous in our secular culture, especially in academic discourse, where there seems to be an aversion to any God-talk at all.

In this article (and previously), I refuse the attempt of atheists to keep those of us who sincerely speak the name “God” out of public discourse, shoving us into the closet as it were.¹³ Alas, this can only be done polemically, by arguing against the rationale of their dismissals of God-talk and those of us who speak it publicly in the present tense. Nevertheless, this article is not essentially a polemic. The polemic here is but a ground-clearing exercise to enable me to get to the positive thesis soon, yet as carefully as possible. This cannot be done cogently if one tries to do an “end-run” around very serious attempts to block God-speakers from speaking in public at all. The opposition of many atheists to authentic God-talk being conducted in a cultural milieu that they believe they own is often quite vehement. It should never be underestimated.

Atheistic dismissal of God-talk is twofold. It either attempts to dismiss God-talk altogether as “nonsense,” or it attempts to show that when the name “God” is invoked, it actually names some other reality, which its speakers have now forgotten, having long ago repressed their memory of it. In this latter view, speakers of their common language who do still invoke the name “God” do so because they are now unconscious of their own wish-projection, whose product is their fantastic invention of a god. Thus, it is advocated that those who have now become enlightened or conscious of this illusion can—indeed they should—overcome it by working through it, and that they should encourage others less enlightened to act similarly.

Both of these atheistic views, despite their specific differences, generally deny that anybody can speak cogently of the extra-mental reality who religious people call “God.” These dismissals need to be countered by those of us God-speakers who do not accept the banishment of God-talk from current public discourse. This must be done by showing how these dismissals of God-talk are part of—perhaps the reason for—modern attempts to impoverish ordinary language to the point where what could be expressed in the past can no longer be expressed anymore at present. The task of perspicacious God-speakers, who have not been intimidated by this imposed deprivation of the common cultural-linguistic heritage, is to retrieve the intelligibility of what has been relegated to the intellectual dustbin of “meaninglessness.” In our case, God-talk needs to be retrieved by first arguing that its banishment has been arbitrary, and then by showing what it is and how it can be done again intelligently.¹⁴

EPISTEMOLOGICAL DISMISSAL

The first dismissal of God-talk we might call “epistemological.” Its error is that it confines all meaningful speech to its own invented, descriptive language. Anything that is not verifiable is what cannot be spoken of, the prime example being any talk of God.¹⁵ However, by confining meaningful speech only to verifiable descriptions of impersonal entities or things, thus eliminating anything normative from it, those who hold the narrower view of language thereby dismiss most of what historical languages contain out of hand. By so doing, proponents of this view are certainly myopic, being unwilling to accept the fact that normative human speech is unavoidable, and that normative is primarily prescriptive and only secondarily descriptive. In fact, it could be argued that our descriptions of things are ultimately for the sake of knowing how they can be used effectively in fulfilling prescriptive claims made to us by other persons, with whom we are interrelated in a common enterprise. Only persons are the subjects and objects of normative speech. So, for example, scientists learn to speak correctly about the things they observe in order to answer (or at least respond to) the question posed to them by their fellow scientists, with whom they are engaged in the communal discourse that is science.¹⁶

Furthermore, even if God-talk is not a topic for discussion in strictly scientific discourse, it is still an important component in the ordinary language of the larger society where scientists too have to speak with their non-scientific fellow members. As such, scientists can abstract their discourse from ordinary language so that it only pertains to observable entities and their quantification, but they may not go further by excising from ordinary language those components which they cannot, as scientists, deal with. When that is done, however, whether by scientists themselves or by intellectuals on their behalf, we are left with “scientism,” presuming that what cannot be spoken of in scientific discourse therefore does not exist.

All interpersonal discourse, no matter how informal, consists of the claims of those speaking with one another, making claims upon one another. But from whom does a member of a normatively ordered society derive his or her right to claim any other member of that society, or the society itself? This is an important question, requiring an answer when one’s right to make a claim is challenged. At such challenging times, the question often is: “Who gave you the right to claim X from Y?” If one answers that his or her right is an entitlement from the society, then this person has no claim on the society itself, which often attempts to recall what it had previously given to individual members. In fact, often the most unjust claims made upon a member of a society are made when the society unjustly entitles itself, or unjustly privileges some members of the society over other members of the society.

However, to say, “I gave myself this right,” means “I have created myself as a normative being.” That is as absurd as saying “I have created myself as a natural being.”¹⁷ Therefore, humans have come to ascribe their rights to a transcendent Source of all rights and the commanded duties corresponding to them. That is the case whether these rights and duties devolve on the society or on its individual members. This Source is the Creator of the very existence of the society and its individual members. They are both coequally creatures of the same Creator. As such, an individual has no priority over his or her society, any more than a society has priority over its members. Their interrelationship is dialectical. One’s society was there before its individual members came into this world and will probably continue after they depart from this world. Yet that priority is overturned by the fact that individual persons have the ability to leave their native society (either physically, or by repudiating its moral authority over them while still remaining there physically), or to join another society, or to found a new society, or to survive the demise of their native society elsewhere. God, however, has priority over both society and its individual members since God transcends them both, whereas they cannot transcend God.¹⁸ That is so even when they think they have killed God, whether collectively or individually.

Even though this is where moral/political discourse becomes metaphysical, necessarily involving God-talk, it is not abstract philosophical discourse, only to be conducted in an arcane academic milieu. It is, in fact, assumed in ordinary moral judgment, conducted in ordinary language.¹⁹ So, for example, when we condemn somebody for being “authoritarian,” meaning the illegitimate usurpation of proper authority, we often denounce this person as a charlatan for “playing God.” Thus, we say to him or her: “Who do you think you are, God?!” That objection assumes that God truly exists, that the name “God” has a real referent, and “you are not really God at all!” But if it were not assumed that God exists, would there be any point in denouncing somebody for impersonating someone whom we believe is a phantom?

The metaphysical dimension of any normative language, and the normative order it constitutes, enables God-speakers to speak the name “God” with its proper meaning wherever that language is allowed to be spoken in its fullness. Of course, this does not prove God exists. It only argues that living under a normative order is a necessity for humans as political beings. And, to affirm that order’s authority at least implies recognition of the transcendent Originator and Sustainer of that order, which is expressed in the ordinary language spoken by the members of this normative order. Nevertheless, this recognition does not require one to attempt to argue persons into believing or having faith in the Lawgiver, who commands but is not Himself commanded. One can only argue for the plausibility that there is an irreducible Source of a normative order, and that the ultimate authority of that order could only be the Creator-God.²⁰ Anyone else claiming that ultimate authority is easily exposed to be a false god, whose claims are idolatrous.

Atheists who do deny that God is real, and who are convinced that all God-talk is nonsense, should not speak the name “God” at all. Nevertheless, they have no good reason to try to remove from public discourse those who do correctly invoke the name “God,” even if they themselves believe these God-speakers are fantasying. Yet all too often, atheists having political power (like Lenin, Stalin, and Mao) do prohibit God-talk altogether, and punish those who do engage in it sincerely. That is because traditional God-talk is a great threat to the Absolute which they have inevitably replaced God with. That replacement is inevitable because they certainly have to speak in a normative language constituting a normative order, which cannot fully function without superlatives. This was stated most poignantly by T. S. Eliot, to a largely secular audience at Cambridge University in 1939, on the eve of World War II:

The term ‘democracy,’ as I have said again and again, does not contain enough positive content to stand alone against the forces you dislike --- it can easily be transformed by them. If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God) you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.²¹

PSYCHOLOGICAL DISMISSAL

The second dismissal of God-talk we might call “psychological.”²² God-speakers can retort to this dismissal of God-talk as follows: You seem to think that God-talk was introduced into public discourse as a novum by those who forgot whom they were really intending to speak of in the first place. So, what might be called their “God-illusion” is by now their unconscious substitution of what they have forgotten.²³ But, if the name “God” is the name of someone new, whom nobody in their discursive world had ever heard of before, why then would anybody there believe the name to have a real referent (much less have any authority, which is what any “god” has) as opposed to being a fanciful projection?²⁴ The name “God” would only be intelligible to those already speaking that name, believing that it names a reality they themselves did not invent.

The psychological dismissal of God-talk presumes that there was a time when humans were not religious, when the name “God” had never been heard in the human world. The burden of proof, though, is on those who presume that humans were once without any God-talk intending a real, not a humanly invented, referent. But that requires locating a time and a place when human God-talk was introduced, which can only be a guess based on the kind of wishful thinking the psychological dismissal of God-talk itself claims to have deconstructed.

Conversely, those who hold the more traditional view, that God-talk is coeval with human existence itself, do not have to prove a beginning in history that has not been convincingly shown to have ever actually occurred. It is easier to assume that God-talk is coeval with humans emerging in the world as necessarily normative-linguistic beings.²⁵ The burden of proof is on those who say otherwise. Nevertheless, the strength of the psychological dismissal of God-talk is that its proponents are still able to take two historical facts seriously, which proponents of the epistemological dismissal of God-talk simply ignore, treating God-talk as if it never had been conducted intelligently at all.

Proponents of the psychological dismissal of God-talk, being more historically sensitive, are able to take seriously the fact that many speakers of the natural languages in which public discourse is inextricably rooted, still authentically invoke the name “God,” intending by this invocation that God is real and not just a figment of their imagination. As such, those who hold this psychological dismissal are at least able to respect the intelligence of the many smart people (even philosophers) who have spoken and still do speak the name “God,” by which they intend a reality outside their own minds, which they could not have invented. In other words, those laboring under this illusion are not taken to be stupid. Their illusion is not cognitive, but emotional. Their illusion is not due to what they do not know; it is due to what they want and wish for. So, what they need in order to overcome this illusion are not arguments, but therapy. That therapy is not conducted through philosophical argument, but rather through psychological introspection.

Nevertheless, at least with the epistemological deniers of God-talk, a reasoned public dialogue is still possible. But the psychological deniers of God-talk will only engage in the private discourse of psychotherapist and patient. Unlike the still possible publicly reasoned public dialogue between God-speakers and atheistic deniers as equal partners in a common enterprise, in the private discourse of patient to and psychotherapist to patient, the therapist–patient relationship is unequal. Therapists are the interpreters of the emotional data patients bring to them for insight into their real motives, which the patients cannot provide for themselves. Theirs is not a dialogue appealing to common reasons pertaining to them both equally.

GOD-SPEAKERS, A MINORITY

Both kinds of dismissal of God-talk, however, seem to be less vehement and less persuasive now than they once were. That might be because many people in our secular cultural milieu believe these two dismissals have already accomplished their task of removing God-talk from public discourse. Hence there no longer seems to be any need for these dismissals to be reiterated again by arguing for them. That is why the task of God-speakers is to get God-deniers to pose their arguments against us seriously again, so that we might counter them with equal seriousness. But that only can be done when discerning God-speakers are able to deconstruct the arguments made against us. This negating or polemical task gives us the opening to have our positive God-talk get at least a tolerant hearing in the contemporary secular milieu where public discourse is conducted.

In pre-modern times when God-talk was ubiquitous, it was the deniers who had to argue for their inclusion in public discourse. Now, the burden of argumentation is on the God-speakers. That is because in pre-modern times, God-speakers were the vast majority and God-deniers were a small minority, even in the more intellectual areas of the culture. Today, however, it is the reverse. God-speakers are the minority, and God-deniers (or, at least, those indifferent to God-talk altogether) are the majority, especially in the more powerful areas of culture-formation like the universities, the courts, and the media. It is always the minority, not the majority, in any culture who have to argue for their right to speak in public discourse. Today, this requires perspicacious God-speakers to argue persuasively that God-talk cannot be dismissed. And, more importantly, it requires our showing insightfully how God-talk has been done and is still being done cogently today, and that various God-speakers are entitled to claim an attentive hearing in truly pluralistic secular space, even by those who do not want to enter into our God-talk themselves, or by those who insist their kind of God-talk is the only legitimate God-talk to be heard in public.

Nevertheless, some atheists today consciously and willingly avoid speaking of “God”—(which means the One and Only God proclaimed by Jewish, Christian, and Islamic monotheism)—altogether. Instead, they only speak of “gods” or “a god.” That is their way of even avoiding the normative meaning of monotheistic God-talk, let alone whether it is true or not. However, as we have just noted, they do so given what might be the raison d’être of their impoverishing the historical language of their culture that is still spoken outside their limited discursive circle.

Finally, by not trying to prove the existence of the universal God of whom Jewish God-speakers do speak, nor by trying to prove the truth of the particular revelation of God’s revelation in which Jews traditionally have faith that God spoke to us, I am not trying here to get others to join us by speaking God-talk like we do, or speaking God-talk at all. Our speaking the name “God” in public is not a proselytizing project. Here, I am only trying to show that our invoking in public the name “God” is not nonsense, that it has meaning, and that our invocation of it is to show others where our primary existential commitment lies. Nevertheless, its truth must “come from another place” (Esther 4:14).

POSITIVE JEWISH GOD-TALK

We are now ready to discuss what Jewish God-talk is, and also the theological perspective that I think is more cogent than the alternatives, that more adequately corresponds to the biblical-rabbinic tradition than do the alternatives. Let me say at the outset, though, this is not a “zero sum game” here. That is, I do not say what I think is true, and therefore what others think is false. It is not an “either/or” proposition. Rather, it seems to me that my preferred perspective is more cogent and more adequate to the sources than are the alternatives. Nevertheless, by stating the alternatives to my preferred perspective as fairly and as empathetically as possible, readers might find these alternatives more cogent and corresponding more adequately to the Jewish tradition than my own preference.

There are four theoretical perspectives Jewish theologians have employed for engaging in God-talk: the perspective of natural theology; the perspective of metaphysical theology; the perspective of kabbalistic theology; the perspective of what can be called “covenantal theology.” Regarding these four theological perspectives, by way of introduction let me now comment on them, while also indicating which one I prefer and thus employ.

First, from the perspective of natural theology, we humans can speak about God, but humans can neither speak directly of God nor speak directly to God. And God speaks neither of us nor to us. Here, God is silent. It is we humans who speak about God wisely making the cosmos, yet human speech about God does not come out of our direct experience of God’s creative activity. (After all, no humans were present to witness the dawn of creation.) Natural theology talks about God as cosmic Artificer by inference, that is, by seeing in nature an analogy to our own artistic creations. This is what has been called the “argument from design.”²⁶ This argument states that we know from our experience that intricate artifacts clearly show they have been intentionally designed or ordered to be what they are. Since natural entities are more intricately designed than humanly made things, we can infer that they have been so designed by an Artificer much greater than ourselves. Thus, what is true of humanly made artifacts is, all the more so, true of natural entities.

In Scripture, conversely, before humans can speak to God or of God, God first speaks to humans (Genesis 2:16–17). The first human to speak to God is Adam, the first human person, whose power of speech is because God spoke to Adam first, demanding that Adam answer God’s question, “where are you?” (Genesis 3:19)²⁷ The first human person to speak of God is Abraham (Genesis 24:3), whom God had invited to speak to Him (Genesis 18:17–33), who is the person God had previously spoken to (Genesis 12:1–4; 15:1–16).²⁸

From the perspective of natural theology, though, we humans do not speak to God any more than God speaks to us. As such, there could not be a direct relation to someone to whom we do not speak and who does not speak to us. The most we can do is admire the divine Artificer when contemplating nature, but we cannot infer from nature that its Artificer actually speaks to us, demanding that we listen to Him or that He wants to listen to us. That is why natural theology cannot be an adequate explanation of what is meant by “religion” (minimally, meaning Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), which is a direct, two-way relationship of God to humans and humans to God. This relationship involves God speaking to humans through revelation, and humans speaking to God through prayer.

Now both revelation and prayer are basically prescriptive, involving claims and counterclaims. Through verbal revelation God claims human obedience to His commandments by addressing them to us; and through verbal worship or prayer we humans claim God’s answer to our pleas by addressing them to God. Natural theology, though, is descriptive, and thus unable to explain the normative content of religion. In fact, it cannot even prepare us for normative religion, any more than knowing that what is the case can then lead to doing what ought to be done.²⁹ It could be said that natural theology is aesthetic rather than essentially religious. At best, aesthetics is tangential to religion. Aesthetics only becomes a religious activity when one appreciates the beauty of God’s creation and thanks God for the opportunity to behold it and enjoy it.³⁰

Second, from the perspective of metaphysical theology, God speaks of Godself—what God is—in a way we humans can intuit. We thereby differentiate our imperfect, becoming selves from God as perfect Being, who never had to become what He already is eternally. That limits any idolatrous pretension by making our difference from God one of kind. Even more so, that limits any pretension to equate ourselves with God.

Now affirming God’s Being also means God is necessary relative to the existent cosmos, which is contingent on God. So, when we humans infer from our creaturely imperfection our dependence on the most perfect God, we then aspire to become as much like God’s perfection as is possible for fallible humans in our very imperfect world. This aspiration is expressed in speech and in action. In that way, human aspiration to be like God translates into prescribed speech and deed (mitsvot). Nevertheless, this relation is not an interrelationship; rather, it is a one-way relation. That is, we know how to relate ourselves to God, but we do not know how God relates Godself to us. In fact, we do not know how or even whether God is with us. So, metaphysical theology does not enable humans to speak positively of the interrelationship of God and humans, what the Bible calls “the covenant” (ha-berit). Yet this is the central theme in biblical revelation, the locus of all authentic Jewish God-talk. At best, metaphysics is tangential to God-talk, speculating on the implications of revealed God-talk. But when metaphysics is presumed to ground God-talk, it only grounds God-talk coming from a place other than Sinai.

Third, from the perspective of kabbalistic theology, the Torah is God totally speaking of Godself and nothing else. And, since the Torah is coequal with all reality, nothing outside of it truly exists at all, as there is nothing outside God at all. Everything takes place within God. Moreover, human action mandated by the divine Torah is not the action of a being separate from God. Human action is essentially conscious participation in what is a complete inner divine reality. Even when a Torah-mandated act seems to be a mundane human deed, it is really a participation in the inner divine reality (elohut). And, even when not immediately evident, the essential function of this mandated act is symbolic, pointing to what is ultimately true of the divine life.

However, there can be no interrelationship between those who are not separate from each other, any more than a part can relate with the whole that encompasses it, or that the whole can relate with a part inside it. There is no externality here, which is presupposed by any interrelationship. Such a divine-human interrelationship is only possible when the Creator is separate from His creatures and creatures are separate from their Creator. Thus, in biblical revelation, God speaks of Godself in relation to humans with whom God has an ongoing, covenantal, interrelationship. Jewish God-talk is the expression of this real interrelationship. It is an interrelationship through which God who is not human and humans who are not God do come together. Yet God does not absorb us humans into Godself any more than we humans could absorb God into ourselves.

All these objections make kabbalistic God-talk problematic theologically.

Finally, we come to the fourth perspective, that of covenantal theology, from which I think Jewish God-talk is most cogently and most adequately explained.

COVENANTAL THEOLOGY: DIVINE GOD-TALK

The original and ever prime locus of all authentic Jewish God-talk is a biblical revelation. This revelation being verbal is essentially normative: eliciting an active response to its call to listen to it, then prescribing what we humans are to do in response. In one way or another, biblical revelation is God addressing us humans by making claims on us, to which we are to dutifully respond in word and in deed. Thus, the most foundational commandment in the Torah, given to us at the beginning of the Decalogue (or “Ten Commandments”), is directly normative: “I am the Lord your God” (Exodus 20:2). God speaks here immediately in the first-person singular, addressing Godself to humans immediately in the second person singular.³¹

The commandments follow upon the people’s general acceptance of what has been revealed, namely, God’s wise and beneficent kingship. They are further specifications of God’s wisdom and benevolence.³² The commandments wisely and beneficently guide the people in their active journey through this world, directing them to their final destination, what the Rabbis term “the world-yet-to-come” (ha`olam ha-ba).³³ Only then are we humans, who have been so addressed by God, able to keep the commandments freely rather than coercively, happily rather than grudgingly. This acceptance, called “faith” (emunah), also dispels the suspicion that the commandments are given to harm us. Yet more needs to be told so that we humans addressed by God can willingly accept God’s commandments because they are wise and beneficial.³⁴

Descriptive God-talk is what is needed, to narrate for us the context in which God’s commandments, the content of revelation, are given and received. That context is the covenantal relationship between God and the people Israel, concretized at the event of the Sinaitic revelation of the Torah. Thus, in the second clause of the foundational commandment, God proclaims He is the One “who took you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.” This clause describes what the people have recently experienced, namely, being taken out of Egypt.³⁵ Moreover, even this description of God’s taking Israel out of Egypt is actually a description of God’s fulfilling a previous prescription, which God autonomously made to Godself. It states that God has done what He promised to do, that is, what God autonomously commanded Godself to do in a covenantal oath. “I remember My covenant (beriti). Therefore, say to the Israelites I am the Lord, who shall take you out from under the burdens of Egypt.” (Exodus 6:5–6) In other words, God is telling or describing to the people that He has fulfilled His promise to them made previously.

Accepting the commandments because God’s authority over us (“I am the Lord your God”) is unavoidable, means that we accept them due to our being in awe (yir’ah) of God’s power over us. Accepting the commandments because God’s benevolence to us (“who took you out of the land of Egypt”) is irresistible, means we accept them due to our being in love (ahavah) with God.³⁶

Subsequent God-talk is conducted by theologians inferring from these biblical narrations of what God did why God did it. And subsequent to that, some theologians can and do speculate as to how God deliberates over which of the possible options to be realized as wise and benevolent action that God chooses to do with God’s human creatures, who have the unique capacity to interrelate with God.

That speculation, however, does not lend itself to any totalizing theological system from whose ideas the narrated events in Scripture are but instantiations. Instead, whatever ideas one draws from the biblical narrative are only the result of random, unsystematic reflections on the implications of the biblical narrative itself. In fact, devising a total theological system might well tempt us to deduce revelation and its content from it. But that would turn revelation into a conclusion rather than a datum. That is why the philosophic method best suited for theological inference and speculation is phenomenology.³⁷ Phenomenological reflection begins with what the data (what has been given to reflect on) show us. In the case of the Torah’s verbal revelation, phenomenological reflection begins with what the Torah is saying to us, that is, what the Torah is giving to us and what we can take from it. (Revelation is called by the Rabbis mattan torah, “the gift of the Torah.”³⁸) Since this theological speculation is usually random, imaginative, and often quite tentatively connected to particular biblical texts, it seems to be more akin to the halachic casuistry one finds in the Talmud and in the responsa literature than it is to the architectonic classification one finds in the mediaeval law codes. It seems more akin to the often impressionist method one finds in rabbinic midrash, which is why rabbinic midrash provides the best models for Jewish theological speculation.

Whereas descriptive God-talk concerns our experience of what God does for our covenantal relationship with God, prescriptive God-talk is concerned with what we humans ourselves ought to do for our covenantal relationship with God. The former concerns our experience of God’s action; the latter concerns God commanding human action.

Prescriptive God-talk consists primarily of the norms God directly commands us humans to do. As for the actual interpretation and application of the primary revealed norms, human authorities have considerable leeway to do what seems right in their eyes.³⁹ Speculative God-talk (which is theological reflection) goes beyond prescriptive God-talk by conjecturing what it intends, having even more leeway. And, what needs to be conjectured from prescriptive God-talk are the reasons God probably might have employed for specifically commanding humans to do what we have been commanded to do (ta`amei ha-mitsvot).⁴⁰

Now some of these reasons are more evident than others and are thus rather easily inferred.⁴¹ When we think these reasons are likely to be God’s wise and beneficent purposes in commanding us as God does, our keeping of the commandments becomes our participation in God’s governance of the cosmos. It is not just mundane pragmatic action.⁴² This can make us more enthusiastic in keeping the commandments as persons created in the image of God. When one’s intention in keeping the commandments seems to comport with God’s intention in giving them to us, we no longer keep God’s commandments like “human precepts (mitsvat anashim) learned by rote” (Isaiah 29:13). In this case, we keep the commandments because we want to be in harmony with God’s wise and beneficent commanding us to keep them, not just because we have to keep them. But when we cannot even think of a probable reason why God commanded us to do or not do a certain act, we have to do even what we do not want to do.⁴³

Furthermore, when the authorities charged with interpreting and applying the commandments understand the reasons for which the commandments are prescribed, they have greater insight in how to enhance observance of the commandments, and how to reinterpret the commandments when needed.⁴⁴ Usually, the success of this reinterpretation only requires the jurisprudence of ordinary jurists, who have the wisdom to judge whether a norm whose application is being changed through reinterpretation is practically feasible or not.⁴⁵ Now this could well be a political requirement in any ordinary, humanly constructed legal system. But Jewish Law (halakhah) does not present itself as ordinary jurisprudence. Instead, it presents itself to be the humanly formulated structure of the commandments revealed by God in the Torah. Although it could not be an actual requirement that halakhists be inspired (let alone be able) to speculate about God’s ultimate purposes in legislating even seemingly mundane matters, it is a desideratum nonetheless. In fact, this speculative God-talk has been impressively engaged in by some sages who are jurists, and who are also theologians.⁴⁶

About some of the less evident reasons of the commandments, we can only speculate very tentatively, if at all. Some of the reasons, about which any speculation could only be guesswork at best, might never be known by us. We can only believe that they are truly in God’s mind, although they seem to be forever beyond our ken, at least in this world, being just too arcane for us here and now. But surely, God always knows precisely why He commanded us to do all the commandments the way God has commanded us in the Torah to do them. Thus, human action realizes divine purposes in cooperation with God, whether we humans know these purposes and how they are ultimately fulfilled or not. In other words, the commandments should always be done willingly, even if not always knowingly. And, we should at least hope to know, perhaps in the world-yet-to-come, what these reasons truly are.⁴⁷

Finally, the highest level of keeping the commandments is when we discern how God Himself performs the acts that have been revealed to us as imitable. They are the acts that God performs in an exemplary manner. As such, we discern God’s modus operandi. Therefore, we keep the commandments not only because God did command them, not only because of why God commanded them, but also because we can imitate how God does for us exemplarily what we can now do among ourselves in imitation of God.⁴⁸

COVENANTAL THEOLOGY: HUMAN GOD-TALK

So far, our representation of Jewish God-talk has been discussing descriptions of what God does with the human recipients of revelation, plus discussing prescriptions of what these human recipients ought to do with God accordingly. We now need to discuss the kind of Jewish God-talk in which humans speak to God. Liturgy or sacred worship (avodat ha-qodesh) is where Jewish God-talk is conducted most extensively, which is in prayer (tefillah) as sacred worship’s essential verbal component.⁴⁹ We now need to look at how speaking to God in prayer is constituted normatively.

Prayer, according to rabbinic tradition, is to be conducted in two ways: one, by acknowledging the good God has done for us in the past (hoda’ah); two, by requesting God to do good for us in the future (baqashah).⁵⁰ The former is looking back from our present vantage point; the latter is looking ahead from our present vantage point. Now this acknowledgment is thankfully remembering the One who did benefit us in the past. It is not passive nostalgia, though. We actively call upon God to remember His past beneficence so that we can reasonably hope that this same divine Benefactor will do this same kind of good for us in the future.⁵¹ As such, prayer involves our making a twofold, active appeal to God: reminding God of His past beneficence and, simultaneously, asking God to be benevolent to us again in the future.⁵² Our human action is always in the present. It is only from our present vantage point that we remember the past and hope for the future. This past-looking and future-looking perspective makes the significance of our present action more than ephemeral.

What is the relation of hoda’ah and baqashah? Do we first request that our needs be fulfilled, only thereafter acknowledging God to be the One to whom our request is to be directed because of what God has does for us in the past? Or do we have to acknowledge God first, only thereafter requesting that our needs be fulfilled by God? This question is debated in the Talmud, where two Rabbis differ over the proper sequence in the liturgy.⁵³ Rabbi Eliezer holds that we are to request our needs be fulfilled first, and then acknowledge God. Conversely, Rabbi Joshua holds that we acknowledge God first, thereafter requesting our needs be fulfilled. Their debate is legal, exegetical, and ultimately theological.

As for the legally structured order (seder) of the liturgy, Rabbi Joshua’s view is the norm.⁵⁴ Logically, this makes sense. The Rabbis want worshipers to acknowledge exactly whom they are beseeching before actually doing so. In terms of our experience, though, it seems that the expression of our needs by crying out to anyone to fulfill them precedes our acknowledging to whom they are to be ultimately directed.⁵⁵ In fact, the way we are to pray we learn from Hannah, the mother of the prophet Samuel, who prayed spontaneously out of the depths of her sorrow at being unable to conceive a child (I Samuel 1:10).⁵⁶ And, her prayer was uttered before any official verbal liturgy had been formulated. In her day, sacrifice was the only kind of official worship. Nevertheless, although spontaneous prayer is still to be done, even encouraged, the Rabbis instituted officially composed prayers and the times when they are to be said.⁵⁷ And, while spontaneous prayer is instituted by individual humans, communal prayer is instituted by the leaders of the community for the members of the community.⁵⁸ In other words, humans themselves institute that they are to address God, and how they are to address God.⁵⁹ From their communal experience, the members of the community know to Whom they are to pray before actually making their requests.⁶⁰

The very act of requesting anything begins in our infancy, when we cry out to anyone else, begging them to mercifully save us and nurture us any way possible. This infantile helplessness accompanies us throughout our life as the necessary initiating motivation of our asking anyone else for anything good for ourselves, or at least to pay attention to our beseeching them. However, this infantile motive is not a sufficient reason for our making a justifiable claim on anyone else. So, as we mature, we need to learn from our past experience what is truly good for us, who can be trusted to benefit us, and who we hope will do good for us again in the future.

Thereafter, we have to patiently learn how to justify our requests as being reasonable, because we deserve what is being requested. That is not because of what we have done—it is not payment for our having done good for our benefactors—but rather it is because of who we are, which is how God has made us. (For example, minor children deserve the support of their parents ipso facto; and parents deserve the respect and attention of their adult children ipso facto.⁶¹) Thus what begins as our ever present infantile cries for mercy becomes more and more our requests for justice. We learn to do that as we progressively attain the language in which to argue for our justifiable claims on those whom we trust to respond to them mercifully.

Now when praying becomes an adult exercise, our requests are for more justice than we could expect from any human authorities.⁶² Although we may always call upon God to act favorably toward us, our requests are just when we can present reasons before God for God to act mercifully toward us. Thus, prayer enables us to make a justifiable claim on God, the God whose beneficent deeds for us are described in biblical revelation. (Indeed, were it not for that revelation, we would not know them at all.) The descriptive biblical narrative enables us to know it is to God alone that our greatest requests are to be made, requests that should not be made to anyone else, because no one else deserves them, and no one else is able to fulfill them.

Our prayers, even though individually said, are not for us as individuals alone. That is why Jewish prayer is expressed communally, in the first-person plural. (Even when one prays alone, he or she says “we,” rarely “I.”⁶³). When praying is worshiping with a community, and in a liturgy formulated in that community’s tradition, we presently call upon God to do for us henceforth going into the future what God promised to do for us in the past. But God did not yet completely fulfill His promises back then. Thus, our prayer for the future is our hope that God will finally bring His heavenly kingdom down here on earth. Prayer expresses an eschatological hope, which is a hope for divine justice to be finally and completely executed. This finality will only come to be in a radically transformed world: “a new heaven and a new earth” (Isaiah 66:22).

Furthermore, prayer as a communal activity is the best access to God’s response to our requests.⁶⁴ That is because the historical background of these prayers is the biblical narration of the history of God’s covenantal relationship with the people Israel, which God promises never to nullify and to ultimately consummate. “Even when the mountains move and the hills be moved, My covenant of peace will not move away from you says the Lord who loves you.” (Isaiah 54:10) Thus, an individual member of the covenantal community can make a more reasonable case for God to benefit her or him, when that person requests from God what will enable him or her to be a happier, more proactive participant in the communal life of the covenant. Minimally, this means that this person will not be impeded in keeping the commandments that constitute covenantal life.⁶⁵ Without this covenantal background, although anybody can cry out for God’s mercy, they have no assurance that their cry is heard, and even more so that their cry might well be answered favorably.

The reason we may claim that God keeps His promises is because by promising one obligates oneself. By taking a verbally expressed oath (shevu`ah), promising is exercising one’s autonomy. Now our human autonomy is relative insofar as our promises can be annulled by higher human authority, by those who have authority over us.⁶⁶ And, all the more so, the Torah invalidates any autonomous promises made by us (by invoking God’s name in an oath) if that promise of ours contradicts any of God’s revealed commandments, thus denying God’s absolute authority, which is God’s autonomy both to command His creatures and to command Godself.⁶⁷

Nevertheless, God’s autonomy is not like ours. It is absolute, evidenced by the fact that God’s promises cannot be annulled because there is no higher authority who could possibly annul them.⁶⁸ This, in fact, strengthens our claim on God to do what God has obligated Godself to do for us unconditionally. And, since God has not revealed the timetable or the map for the fulfillment of His promises to us, we may not hold God to adhere to a timetable or a map of our own.⁶⁹ We may only request that God shall completely fulfill His promises, but we have no right to insist when or where that will be done. “No eye but God’s has seen what He will do [ya`aseh] for those who wait for Him.” (Isaiah 64:3)⁷⁰

Reminding God of what God has promised and what God has fulfilled is a descriptive covenantal exercise of God-talk. The prescriptive covenantal exercise here is reminding God to fulfill what God has prescribed to Godself by His own promises; and it is reminding God to help us fulfill what God has prescribed for us to do in response to them. And, whereas in the Torah God prescribes to us humans what we are to do, plus where and when that is to be done, in prayer we may only remind God of what God has prescribed to Godself, but never prescribe to God the where-and-when of the fulfillment of God’s covenantal promise.

On your walls, Jerusalem, I have appointed watchers, All day and all night they are never silent. Those reminding [ha-mazkirim] the Lord, don’t be quiet, and don’t be quiet to Him, until He establishes and until He makes Jerusalem praised on earth. (Isaiah 62:6–7)⁷¹

This essay is adapted from Chapter 1 of David Novak’s God-Talk: The Heart of Judaism (2024), published by Bloomsbury/Rowman & Littlefield.

Footnotes