GOD AND OTHER LITERARY CHARACTERS

Yaakov Malkin

Yaakov Malkin's forthcoming book discusses the relations between Elohim and human literary heroes and heroines, the significance of reading the Bible as literature, the necessity of separating the Biblical text as written from the rabbinic and midrashic readings accredited to it as though “belonging to” the original, the value of Biblical creative fiction as historical record, the differences between knowledge and belief, and the functions filled by both in the lives of people free of the hold of religion and of the concept of a personal God.

Future issues of Contemplate will include successive chapters of this groundbreaking book. We are honored to be entrusted with its English-language publication.

“Thank God, I am still an atheist.”
Luis Bunuel

God Was Born in Men’s Minds and Has No Existence Beyond Man-Made Literature and Art

The evidence for the gods having been created by man is their being found only in man-made things — in books and paintings and theologies. The human mind knows only man-made gods. The “God” we know is a character in literature, a figure fashioned by story-makers and then represented to a believing public by every other art-form humans have devised, painting, sculpture and mask, dance, pantomime and theater. There is not a religion in the world that has not had recourse to literature and the arts to represent its god and there is not a god in the world that has not been described in words and depicted in figure and form. Man’s arts fashion the god’s image and render its life and deeds in exciting narrative. They endow it with features and traits of character, with commandments and statutes.

In Judaism’s literary classics, some human heroes and heroines actually meet Yahweh-Elohim face to face. Adam and Eve, Abraham and Jacob and Moses, so the Bible tells us, encountered Him here in this world, the one world there is, so the Biblical authors believed, the world in which we all live and die. Later compositions, the mystical Merkava and Hekhalot writings (dating to the first centuries of the Common Era) recount journeys made by Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Ishmael to a second world. This one comprises no less than seven heavens and is the abode of Yahweh-Elohim, where He sits enthroned as a king over his court (a court, says scholar of mysticism, Joseph Dan, bearing a marked resemblance to descriptions of the Imperial Persian court). In these tales of early science fiction Yahweh-Elohim is depicted encircled by hosts of archangels and ministering angels who govern the peoples and states ruled over by the King of Kings.

The myths and legends that manufacture gods by compiling biographies of their deeds and putting words into their mouths were a prime source for our classic masterpieces. The Gilgamesh Epic, the Garden of Eden narratives, the novel of patriarchs and matriarchs we call the book of Genesis, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, all obviously draw on this source. We read these masterworks and our imagination fuses with the author’s art to give life and breath to their word-fashioned figures. They enter our consciousness, possessing the same “existence” as people we remember or fantasize into being in day and night dreams.

The prophets and others who believe in “God” and in the words ascribed to Him, because they have had a sleeping or waking vision of Him and “saw” Him in a form like the one they knew from books and other art-forms, have had an encounter experience essentially no different to any other literature-reader’s encounter with a well-drawn hero or heroine, be the hero/heroine’s name Isaac, Penelope or Elohim. Both the religious and the non-religious (by non-religious I mean people liberated from obedience to religious commandments and from commitment to the reality of a personal god) meet Yahweh-Elohim only through the agency of human art and artistry. The one is no different from the other in knowing Him as a living figure, who acts on human history only by dint of the belief rendered Him by the selfsame people who devised and made Him.

To Believe that God is a Literary Creation or to Believe in God, Creator, Lawmaker and Ruler of the Universe

Free-thinkers, also known as “seculars,” are well aware that among Elohim’s creators, the authors of the Bible’s source materials, for instance, were many who were certain of His reality outside the texts they composed. He was Creator, Legislator, source of the mitzvot, king-ruler of the whole universe, and all-seeing controller of human lives. The laws and mitzvot they followed were attributed to Him, even though these laws were the formulation of human men, in Elohim’s name of course. They were God-fearing men, these believers, and they feared Elohim’s capacity for wreaking punishment.. They also hoped anxiously that He would reward their obedience to the mitzvot and halakhot they ascribed to Him and look kindly on their compliance with the rulings of every rabbi who, they chose to believe, spoke in His words or had the secret, more than other sages, of deciphering His will.

A belief-system of this sort molds lifestyle and children’s education, predetermines sex life, diet, dress and politics. The last, of course, will be the sort that fights to raise halacha to priority over democracy and to nullify laws of the state daring to outface those of the halachic code. Believing instead that Yahweh-Elohim is a literary creation, conjured into existence only by the artistry of His human creators, one knows that the point of ascribing man-formulated mitzvot and halakhot to “God” is to make the people feel bound by them (“a legal fiction” is how former Israeli Supreme Court justice, Haim Cohen, terms it). With this knowledge comes freedom, freedom to choose to obey religious commandments or not, and to disqualify or amend pointless and immoral mitzvot — which is precisely what secular Jews and the great majority of “traditional” and Reform Jews do. They ignore the greater part of the halachic code, select out the mitzvot which seem positive, and repudiate the immoral (those, for example, which discriminate against women or order the genocide of whole peoples).

The difference between believing that Yahweh-Elohim is a figure from literature and believing in Elohim-Yahweh as personal God and lawmaker is a gulf of principle between two conceptions of life, morality, democracy, education, Judaism and Jewishness. Believing in the creative powers of literature allows the values of humanism to assume supremacy (the values of Hillel, for instance, Do not do to others what you would hate done to you; and Kant's, Only universal rules are ethical). From this position, it is clear that every law and mitzva must stand and pass the test of a universal humanist moral code and one that cannot — religious or otherwise — is at once null and void, no matter how many “words of God” stand behind it.

Fictional Characters Take on Life in Readers' Imaginative Minds

Breathing life into a word-fashioned figment of the author’s art is one of the wonders that great literature performs for us (with our help). Before our very eyes the figments become personalities, distinctive and inimitable: they violate norms and morality, they are led astray by weaknesses, they struggle — some of them — against their fate; in other words, they are just like the reader, at least in potential. Yahweh, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Rachel, Yehuda, Tamar, Ruth, Jephtha, Saul, David, Jeremiah, the list goes on and on. Ajax and Hercules, Plato’s Socrates, Don Quixote, Madame Bovary, the Karamazov brothers, Tolstoy’s Natasha — over each one the magic life-giving wand has waved. But beyond the printed page and the reader’s mind’s eye their existence ends, unless another artist in another art-form takes up the work of hero-molding, as Michaelangelo did for Elohim and Adam, Picasso for Don Quixote, Shakespeare for Kyd’s Hamlet.

Over the course of the first millennium B.C.E., authors and editors in Hebrew created Yahweh-Elohim, an exclusive and unique god of multiple images and personalities — creator and destroyer, inconsistent and by no means almighty, a sinner punishing sins, a regretter of deeds done, rescuing His chosen people then deciding to annihilate them. Yahweh-Elohim is the collective hero of the “Collected Works” we know as the Bible, an anthology which opens with His creation of the world and humankind and immediately follows it with His original sin against the humankind He has created. This is the very stuff of which literary heroes are made. Believable and familiar in all His foibles and failures, Elohim is the very embodiment of human desires and of human beings’ megalomaniac aspirations to make and mend worlds.

Elohim's Original Sin – A Key Component in a Vivid Literary Creation

Most of the world’s great classics confront the reader with richly idiosyncratic heroes and heroines, who enthrall us with the very audacity of their sinning — for which Plato proposed lading the authors with laurels and glory and then throwing them out of the city.

Shame, for instance, is a trait that the solitary-living Elohim totally lacks. Men and women, in contradistinction, cannot do without it, something the author(s) of Genesis knew full well, for this is the first emotion the first two human beings feel after eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Elohim’s great sin, committed with that characteristic total shamelessness, is to forbid Adam and Eve this knowledge of morality in order to stop them assuming God-like qualities.

Richard III, Dr. Faustus, Medea, and other famous literary sinners captivate us in spite of ourselves. The list of sinning Biblical heroes is also extensive. Abraham unhesitatingly prepares to sacrifice his son on the altar, Jacob cheats his blind father to steal his elder brother’s birthright, Joseph taunts his brothers and father and mother with the dream of the sun and the stars foretelling his destiny to rule over them, Yahweh plots with Satan to rain destruction on Job and his family for no other reason other than Job, a pure-living and righteous man, deserves to have his faith tested by ordeal. Heroes and stories like these, revealing our capacity for sinfulness, have risen to symbolic status. A whole generation of Israeli parents saw in the Sacrifice of Isaac a metaphor for their readiness to send their children and grandchildren into battle and death, in defense of the Zionist vision they believed vital to Jewry’s survival and redemption.

The Garden of Eden narrative (was it authored by a woman, as Harold Bloom speculates?) can be read not as Eve’s “original sin” but as her rebellion against Elohim’s original sin in trying to keep human beings from knowing good from evil. (How does Elohim respond but by imposing a curse on all women for all time, a curse encapsulating the socio-biological tragedy of women in a patriarchal society — enslavement to their menfolk, a life filled with the pains of childbirth, which only serves to increase their dependency and enslavement, and love and lust for the men who enslave them.) Jewish tradition followed Catholic (Augustinian) tradition in transferring the “original sin” from Elohim to Eve but the Biblical text says nothing of the kind. On the contrary, it marks this successful mutiny as the major turning point in the history of humanity. Humankind learns morality and with it shame, the foundation of conscience. The mutiny liberates it from a prehistoric never-changing jungle and challenges men and women to begin creating a human civilization and culture.

As the Bible sees it, therefore, the onset of civilization is the onset of ongoing conflict between its divine hero, Yahweh-Elohim, and its human heroes and heroines. From Eve to Job, the reader is witness to a succession of conflicts between humans and their “God,” between humankind and the symbol of its aspiration to achieve the image of its ideal self — a mighty god wavering, like men and women, between lapses into sin and the making of masterful moral laws and ringing calls for social justice.

Long at the forefront of secular Jewish education, Yaakov Malkin is the founder and academic director of Meitar, the College of Judaism as Culture in Jerusalem, formerly the College of Pluralistic Judaism, and co-dean of the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism, which ordained its first Humanistic rabbi in 1999. He is Editor of Free Judaism, a quarterly published in Jerusalem. Professor of Aesthetics and Rhetoric at Tel Aviv University, he has also taught literature and literature of theater and cinema during a distinguished academic career spanning over four decades.

This chapter of God and Other Literary Characters was published in Contemplate Issue One/2001 by the Center for Cultural Judaism. It is reprinted with permission of the author.

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