Near and Far
Vaetchanan: When Monotheism is not Enough
You have but to inquire about bygone ages that came before you, ever since God created man on earth, from one end of heaven to the other: has anything as grand as this ever happened, or has its like ever been known? Has any people heard the voice of a god speaking out of a fire, as you have, and survived? Or has any god ventured to go and take for himself one nation from the midst of another by prodigious acts, by signs and portents, by war, by a mighty and an outstretched arm and awesome power, as the LORD your God did for you in Egypt before your very eyes? It has been shown to you that the Lord alone is God; there is none beside God. (Deuteronomy 4:33-35)
Hear O Israel, the Lord (YHWH) our Our God (Eloheinu), the Lord (YHWH) is One. (Deuteronomy 6:4)
You have made Me a single entity in the world, as it is stated, “Hear, Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One” (Deuteronomy 6:4). And because of this, I will make you a single entity in the world, “Who is like Your people, Israel, one nation in the land?” [Consequently, the Holy One, is glorified through the glory of Israel whose praises are written in God’s phylacteries.] (Talmud Brachot 6a)
What does the realization that there is only one God (monotheism) have to do with the Exodus from Egypt? Why should the liberation from slavery yield an obligation to worship only one God and to refrain from idolatry? These are the questions that arise as Moses mirrors for the people their sense of distinction in this week’s Torah reading, Parashat Vaetchanan (Deut. 3:23–7:11) . Two pillars of Israelite identity stand out in Moses’s speech: 1) This is a people for whom God is “near at hand.” 2) This is a people who should know better than to represent God.
An obvious and straightforward answer is that the one God took the people out of Egypt in order to be known. The ban on idolatry is simply God’s way of saying, “Hello, it’s me.” But this begs the question.
Today, many people identify as monotheistic, but only the Jewish people claims the Exodus narrative as its heritage and lineage. (Of course, many peoples have also been inspired by the Exodus story, but do not draw their genealogy from it). From our point of view, the Exodus is what distinguishes the people, not the belief in one God. And this may have also been true even in the ancient world. Scholars believe the ancient Egyptians were amongst the first to develop the monotheistic concept.
As I wrote about here, on parashat Noach, God has more than one name. The two most common ones are YHWH and Elohim. To reduce the Torah to abstract monotheism is to miss the dynamism of God’s names. While Elohim creates the world, YHWH reveals Godself to the people. Elohim is the universal God—the God worshipped by all monotheists. YHWH is the particularistic God who manifests an idiosyncratic personality. The Shema prayer which we read this week affirms that YHWH is Eloheinu. The particularistic God is not a different God than the universal one. The God who can be known rationally and abstractly is not a different God than the one who is discovered in history, in prayer, in community.
I believe that the crux of Moses’s speech is not simply that there is one God, but that we can and should have a relationship with this one God. Philosophers have long deduced the existence of God; but the Exodus cannot be deduced.
The temptation of those who know only Elohim (deists) is to think that the world is effectively impersonal. The temptation of those who know only YHWH is to worship God in a petty, self-absorbed way, as if the world revolved around oneself. Whenever someone would tell Yeshayahu Leibowitz that they stopped believing in God after some terrible thing happened, he’d reply, “then you never believed in God in the first place.” There is a kind of monotheism that feels atheistic. And there is a kind of monotheism that feels pagan. As I see it, Moses’s speech attempts to thread this needle—to offer up the possibility of a God who is near, but not reducible to us; a God who is transcendent, but not so inaccessible as to be irrelevant.
The Exodus represents the synthesis of divine nearness and farness. God is near in that God shows a concern for our wellbeing. God is far in that the effect of the liberation is so overwhelming that it stupefies.
The quest to affirm a God who is near and far isn’t simply a theological one. It’s also an anthropological one, corresponding to the question of identity. The Talmud makes this point vivid by imaging God wearing tefillin with God’s own Shema inside—an inversion of ours. While our Shema sings of God’s unity and singularity; God’s shema sings of ours. To what extent are we unique and to what extent are we the same? The Elohist point of view sees all humanity in terms of human nature; the YHWHist point of views sees the human being as singular. It is possible to be an Elohist-monotheist who has no problem with slavery; but the belief that we are fundamentally singular provides the basis for a social critique of any society that fails to honor this basic insight. The liberation from Egypt requires YHWH because YHWH manifests the principle of individuality. Elohim gives us the principle of order—but as Hannah Arendt notes, totalitarian rule can always just itself in the name of order. YHWH is the aspect of God and ourselves that checks our imperialistic tendency, our “blessed rage for order” (Wallace Stevens).
If you only emphasize particularism, you end up isolated. If you only emphasize universalism, you end up disowning that which makes you special. (And since it is impossible to do this, you end up creating a false definition of universality that is just a projection screen for your particularism). Followers of YHWH alone feel no need to justify themselves to others, to learn from others, to translate their wisdom and their ethics into broader principles. Followers of Elohim alone are rootless wanderers, since every place is fallen relative to their imagined, Platonic ideal. Why should I speak this language, live here, attend this service—asks the Elohist caricature—when it’s all one? Why be Jewish when I can find God in any mode of worship?
In Buddhist terms, the Elohist knows that form is emptiness, but has not learned the corresponding truth that emptiness is form. The Elohist knows how to analyze but not how to participate. This, the YHWHist worshipper knows. To say the Shema and to assert that Elohim and YHWH are the same is to admit that we cannot sever theory from action or universality from particularism.
For Maimonides, idolatry occurs when we worship our mental representations of God, instead of God. But how can we do anything but represent God? When I look at anything, I’m really looking at my visual representation of it, say neuroscientists (and Kantians). It can’t be that representation is off limits or there’d be nothing left (Ok, maybe that’s his point). Rather, I see the Torah as prohibiting two kinds of representations. One is a ban against false universalism, a hubristic sense that we’ve figured it all out and now know everything, from the ideal city, to the nature of humanity, to the laws of physics, to the principles of morality. One is a ban against small-minded parochialism, a belief that I get to decide what my truth is without care for what others or the reality principle has to say in response. One is self-worship posing as care for transcendence; the other is unbridled self-worship.
And yet we do matter. Thus, the call to worship rightly is a call to understand the ways in which being a self is holy and divine. Just as God is both near and far, we, too, must discover ourselves and one another in our nearness and farness.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins @Etz Hasadeh
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