GOD HAS SEVENTY FACES

Rachel Elior

I have come to praise God, the handiwork of man. Let me state from the start that my subject is not the believer’s “The Holy One, Blessed Be He.” Of a God, Creator of Heaven and Earth, I know nothing, nor do I have the authority to discuss what is exalted beyond the powers of human apprehension. That I leave to prophets, poets, and philosophers. My subject matter is elsewhere, in the meanings men and women create when they talk about God. In the ideas they develop when they try to set down what man may do in relation to God. What are they driving at? Let us go back to the beginning, not in our time but, say, 4,000 years ago. Around that time there was a group of people in Egypt who had been enslaved. As they saw it, or at least as one of them saw it, God revealed Himself to him and told him something heard by no man before. He instilled in his mind the concept of a marvelous transmutation - from the arbitrary restrictions of human slavery to the promise embodied in choosing God: “From slaves to free men.” And further: “A man acting under divine inspiration commands the power to make slaves into free men.” Were it only for this one single idea, the idea of freedom, the idea on which our peoplehood is founded, it has been worth having a God and people who make Him the author of the idea that men and women can take themselves from slavery into freedom. There was not a single society in the ancient world that thought it possible to alter an inherited or acquired social structure, with the exception of the Jews, with their faith in the power of the divine promise to make slaves into free men.

The World Was Created by Letters and Numbers

And further still: When we look at the roots of things, the opening chapters of Genesis, for instance, we have to ask ourselves why the story of the creation has had such an effect on so many civilizations and so many people. My answer is: not because it describes things as they once were and not because of the Darwinist disputes it provokes - was there evolution or not? Was the world created in seven days or not? These are trivial issues. The truly important question is what do we, as human beings, learn from the story? And we learn that from the very first of His acts, God created the world using the selfsame unique thing that we also possess - letters and numbers, language and speech. The message of Jewish civilization from thousands of years ago is that the act of creation was accomplished by the power of speech and number. When, according to Jewish tradition, God said “Let there be light” then “there was light.” The act of creation, that means, was an act of the spoken word, a pronouncement, an invocation, a matter of wording. At the moment when chaos became cosmos and the void became creation, the spoken word became an instrument in the hands of both God and humankind, equally. When Jewish mystics want to express the same thought, the Sefer HaYetzira, written about two thousand years ago, says approximately: “When God decided to create His world with the 32 ways and wonders of wisdom…” The figure of 32 was chosen to denote the 22 letters of the alphabet and the ten numbers. In other words, we can join in too, we also know letters and numbers, we too can count and write, we also command the power to make the potential actual, the chaos cosmos - and merely by the power of words, thought and language.

Why did we invent the phrase “the holy tongue” [“tongue” in the sense of language]? Where did we find such a wonderful idea? And what is holy in the holy tongue apart from its divine source - the idea that it is infinite, that man possesses exactly that which is the essence of the Divine, spirit, infinitude, the power of creation. What is “divinity?” It is the fusion of all the values which we want without limit and of which we can never have too much. Can anyone say there is too much justice, too much wisdom, too much life, too much infinitude? No, we will always want more of these and we will never have enough. Men and women will always be saying: “we need more wisdom, more justice, more peace,” and these are exactly the values which characterize the Divine in Jewish thought.


The Question Is Not Whether God Exists But Why Men and Women Need a God At All

As sorry and angry as we may be at what has become of those great concepts of wisdom and knowledge and justice and law, as painful as it may be to see what they have descended to, and as bitter, insulting and humiliating as it may be to see to what depths that descent has dragged us, nevertheless, in the beginning they were cause to marvel. The men who said: “You shall love truth and peace and pursue justice with all your strength” and “Honor your father and mother” were speaking truths that can never fail, and it matters not a jot if man or God said it first. Imperatives like these have become a frame of reference for men and women like a light source or a flaming torch, a code of noble values of absolute validity, as incontestable then as today. Can we deny the need for justice, or claim that peace is not worth the effort or that there is no need for knowledge, truth, liberty and wisdom? Yet these are human concepts conceived in imitation of God. Whether this God is a substantial God, that is, whether there is a divine reality is totally unimportant. What is important is the conceptual and linguistic tradition entrusted to us, that there exists a complete code of concepts and values necessary to preserve, expound, understand, develop and pass on to our successor generations. It is not we who made language. It is not we who created justice, knowledge, peace and wisdom. We have inherited them, bound them up with divine authority and now want to hand them on. What has come down to us from the past and what we want to bequeath to posterity is bound up with the world of the past, with an image of a God, with a divine tradition, divine self-revelations, prophecy. There is absolutely no need to quarrel over the trivial question of whether there is or is not a God. That is irrelevant. The key question is what humankind does with these concepts, formulated as revelations of divine authority, and why they need divine authority at all? For the concept of human originality and autonomy is a very new one, no more than a few hundred years old. For millennia, authority was always derived from divine revelation and divine revelation was not something with which to argue. The great majority of the ideas that have come from this source are very worthwhile indeed, very precious ideas, ideas of great beauty.

Why Have We Always Looked For Realities Beyond the Bounds of our Own Realm?

With our limited powers and our fate being to die in the dust, it is natural that we have wanted to envision realities beyond our own limitations. Is that not exactly the same as science and the arts and religion and the conception of God? Possessing such limited powers, we have never ceased struggling to create worlds and realities surpassing us, in the beyond. Hekhalot literature, composed in the first centuries of the Common Era, contains a beautiful definition of God: R. Akiba, who knew more than any other man, and was reputed to have been to Paradise and returned, was asked what he saw. What did God look like? After all, you were there. He replied with an answer that has scarcely been bettered: “His face is the face of the spirit, his countenance the countenance of the soul.” In other words, I saw nothing that can be described. After all, no one can see his own soul or another’s spirit. This is the point of the Biblical teaching when it speaks of man’s spirit, a hovering spirit, the spirit of God, a creative spirit in the faith of free men - it does not matter what expression is used. We understand that beyond the boundaries of the material there is something else and on that peg we hang all sorts of ideas and imaginings.


What is the Sabbath?

It is worth remembering that when we discuss keeping the Sabbath we are not talking about a fracas between political party A and political party B or a slap in the face to kibbutzniks by closing their shops for the day. That is not what keeping the Sabbath means. What does it mean? Sabbath is the idea that men and women have to halt their day-to-day preoccupations in favor of another idea, one of social justice. The Sabbath is about reminding yourself that you have obligations to other matters beyond your total immersion in the day-to-day. To keep the Sabbath you do not need to be religious or secular. You need only recall that beyond the unending rat-race that occupies us all day and every day – with all its urgent demands for our attention - we are being asked to halt our routine for a moment. Not for ourselves, but for the stranger and the orphan and the widow and the slave and the day laborer and all those whose image and likeness were once ours. They are us, a slave people who decided to give themselves the Sabbath as a day of rest from work, as one of the fundamental rights of every human being, even of every animal! In other words, we need to understand the origins of things in order to understand their beauty and justice and wisdom, and to distance ourselves from their ugly aspects.


What is a Divine Idea?

The ideas deriving from God are the best the human spirit has conceived. The fundamentals of justice, equality, truth, law, authority all deserve to be considered the inheritance of every man. What is the acid test of a divine idea? It is an idea whose span of validity is infinite, embracing every person on the planet. Wisdom, justice, truth, knowledge, peace, and equality are all divine ideas. Once you privatize an idea, and place it in Group A or Group B, you have a problem. When you make an idea and its divine authority the basis for causing someone harm, you have erred seriously. The ideas which in antiquity were bound up with the image of God were all universals - human obligations, human rights, human wisdom, memory and eternality, knowledge and liberty and we, in our stupidity, have excelled in corrupting and belittling them as far as humanly possible.

We must not exchange the great conceptions that were part of the covenant with God for man’s petty substitutes. No one, we should remember, owns these great ideas. Language, holiness, justice, knowledge, freedom, wisdom, equality and peace are not owned by anyone. These are all names of God and they are all ideas that we need in equal measure. No one would say there is too much peace and too much equality. There is only one voice: we need peace and equality and justice and truth and knowledge and freedom, and in limitless quantity.


What did Man Create God For?

There has never been unanimity as to the nature of God. There has never been a single answer to the question: What does God want of us? On the contrary, every century, every decade has brought new ideas of God’s image, what He wants from us, and how we should respond. In other words, man is constantly recreating God in his own image and likeness. But why does he need God at all? The answer is to remind him constantly that there are longitudes and space and horizons beyond the limits of his body and his experiences, surpassing the limits of his puny size and his time and location, longitudes and horizons that came before and will remain after him. It does not matter if this reality is a person or an idea. It is an abstraction, the spirit of God. It is the place where the spirit of man encounters the spirit of God and the human spirit is dynamic and learns and changes, just as the spirit of God also is never still or unchanging. In that place of meeting where the human spirit is constantly recreating and refashioning God in its own image and likeness, there it is entitled to re-examine, reappraise and revise the meaning of the divine discourse.

Those who take an interest in the changes that have occurred in man’s conceptualization of God will come to the conclusion that Maimonides’ God is neither the God of Abraham nor the God of the Covenant as written. The Vilna Gaon’s God is not the God of the Hekhalot texts. The God of the Talmud Sages is not the God of the men who composed the Book of Enoch and the Sefer HaYetzira. Century by century, the definition of God, the content of the nature of the divine, the concepts that God represents or which humankind represents in relation to Him, exegesis and interpretation, halakha, aggada and commentary, are all and always have been in a state of flux. The matter we are dealing with is totally dynamic, totally alive and, to prove that this is how it will always be, Jewish tradition has evolved two equally wonderful modes of thought. One is called the “Seventy Faces of Torah” and the second “Infinitude” or “Endlessness” (einsof).

The meaning of Infinitude is that there are infinite ways of expressing God’s existence or being, with no one final definition. We are at liberty, as many times as we like, to discover a new aspect of meaning or knowing or apprehension and to actualize it in terms of a domain at some remove from it, a domain we may call now science, now art, now the authority of the law, now inspiration, now halakha, now the commandments. Every century we can apply new terms, new concepts. But one thing has to be remembered: the acid test remains that what has universal value and benefit is divine and what can do harm is human.

The second idea, that the Torah has seventy faces, claims that no one can say there is only one correct version, one truth, one teaching, and one viewpoint. The opposite is true: there are infinite viewpoints, for to say seventy is to say seven hundred or seven thousand. The moment you say that Torah has more than one face, more than one aspect, then there is more than just the pshatt [literal] meaning, there are seventy meanings; there is the pshatt for pragmatic purposes but there are infinite other aspects too.

What are these infinite other facets? They are the infinite number of doors by which the human spirit can enter into the text and recreate it: take each sentence and each word and breathe new life into it, new insights, new relevances, questions troubling our own generation, new definitions of good and evil. God has said what is good and what is evil, but that is only one possibility. We also have the right to fashion and widen and deepen the concepts of good and evil according to the insights and experience our own generation has earned.


What Has God Contributed to the Human Spirit?

As a people that has lived in exile 2,500 years - the exile must be reckoned form the destruction of the First Temple in the 6th century B.C.E. - it behoves us to remember that we have always put our trust in God, even though we have created Him anew and refashioned Him. Without that anchor for our hope and vision, for our dream of redemption and of the freedom kept for us somewhere, we would not have succeeded in bringing it all to reality. The question, therefore, is not whether I believe in God but what God has contributed to the human spirit. What has the human spirit accomplished in these thousand of years by virtue of its affinity with the divine idea? What has been the source of knowledge, law, authority and justice bound up with the image of God and what freedom of thought and action has this way of thinking bequeathed to us, a way of thinking that deserves preserving and assessing rather than scorn, vilification or rejection. We should also note that the same vast domain, containing thought and creativity and spirituality and culture and art, all of which take their rise in religious thinking, is also the inheritance and property and right of all of us, provided only that no one forces anything on anyone, that everything proceeds from choice, freedom, will, and knowledge. If that happens, then everything is possible.

Rachel Elior is Professor of Jewish Philosophy at Hebrew University, Jerusalem and visiting professor at colleges and universities throughout the world. Her research includes the history of Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah, Messianism, Hasidism and Jewish women.

This article first appeared in issue 21 of Free Judaism, the quarterly journal of the Israeli Secular movement for Humanistic Judaism, and in Contemplate, Issue One/2001, published by the Center for Cultural Judaism. It is reprinted here with permission of the publisher.

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