Truth and Temperament

Using the Self to Go Beyond the Self in Tetzaveh

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“To do philosophy is to explore one's own temperament and yet at the same time to discover the truth.” - Iris Murdoch, On God and the Good

“I will abide among the Israelites, and I will be for them a God.” (Exodus 29:45)

וְשָׁ֣כַנְתִּ֔י בְּת֖וֹךְ בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל וְהָיִ֥יתִי לָהֶ֖ם לֵאלֹהִֽים

“ I will be for them a God”—I will supervise their affairs without resorting to an intermediary. They will have no reason to be afraid of what astrology portends, seeing that they are far more honored by me than are the celestial planets… (Seforno on Exodus 29:45)

The most radical theological idea in the Five Books of Moses is not that God exists, not that God is all-powerful, or all-knowing, not that there is only one God, but that God seeks to dwell on earth, amongst people. The Book that most emphasizes this particular position is Leviticus (Vayikra), at the heart of which are a set of instructions for building the Mishkan, the site of God’s indwelling.

Sometimes the indwelling of God can feel overbearing. One Midrash compares God to a father who asks his son-in-the-law (the Jewish people) to build an annex for him to inhabit, because he does not want to be separated from his newly married off daughter (the Torah.) “Build me a sanctuary” is a kind of protest from a divine “empty-nester”: “Don’t abandon me, now that you have my Torah.” This is an extreme, and extremely anthropological view, but in its extremity it highlights the boldness of the Tabernacle. Why should God desire to dwell on earth? The sentiment is also intuitively astute, given that in the 20th century, Emmanuel Levinas will write of the duty to “Love the Torah more than God.”

Other interpretations move in the opposite direction. The Mishkan reflects not God’s desire, per se, but rather God’s compliance. God desires our desire, and accedes to our need for divine worship. The aloof God permits relationship, permits anthropomorphism, as a concession to human psychology.

Which view is “correct”—the one that sees religion as a human response to a real divine call or the one that sees religion as a tolerated projection, a divinely sanctioned opiate?

In the verse quoted above (Exodus 29:45), I take both views to find expression. The first half of the verse, “Build me a sanctuary” suggests divine need; “I will be for you a God” suggests human need.

The verse seemingly could have left out the second part. What does it add to say “I will be to you as a God?” In fact, the language is quite bizarre. “As a God??” If God is God, why should God be a God to us, or for us. Why should that matter? And isn’t God already a God to or for us before building the Mishkan?

The atheist philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach is famed for saying “God did not, as the Bible says, make man in His image; on the contrary man, as I have shown…made God in his image.” But as I am arguing, Feuerbach is wrong to posit these two options as mutually exclusive. Human beings make God in their image while at the same time being made in the divine image. Our Biblical verse can be read as saying that the Tabernacle is a place not just where God and humanity meet, but where truth and projection touch.

In the history of philosophy, much ado is made about the extent to which truth is subjective (ideal) or objective (real), conventional or natural. Postmodern thought is often criticized for being too subjectivistic, and thus too relativistic, for saying that one’s identity and/or social position determine everything all the way down. But why must we accept this either/or? Franz Rosenzweig writes, “My eyes are only my eyes, but it would be foolish to pluck them out in order to see straight.” A similar sentiment is at work in the claim of Iris Murdoch that philosophy is both a search for one’s own temperament and a search for truth.

The Midrash that says God wants the Mishkan teaches something powerful: even God has a subjectivity. Truth by itself is not enough. Truth seeks relationship. The Mishkan elucidates but it also distorts, as do all houses of worship (some more than others).

It is an academic cottage industry to try to parse the symbolic meaning of every aspect of the Tabernacle, every aspect of the” ritual objects” and priestly vestments. Yet we can also get lost in the anthropological study of religion, in the reduction of religion to “collective effervescence” (Emile Durkheim) or “purpose” (Peter Berger) or “webs of significance” (Clifford Geertz). The wager of Leviticus is that the study of religion says very little as compared to what religion is also fundamentally about, namely God, a real presence, a real presence dwelling in the midst of our lives. There is no way to talk about God without passing through the truisms of sociology and anthropology, but that doesn’t mean that God-talk is just what social scientists can say about it. Vayikra suggests that divinity is here and real.

Moreover, it suggests that God can be found wherever we seek to build an abode for God. If we seek to do it using academic tools, then God can be found also in the study of religion. The Mishkan is a building like any other, but what distinguishes it is the attitude or temperament that we bring to it. Thus it doesn’t matter that God is a God in the abstract. God is here praising and giving blessing to subjectivity itself: I don’t want to be God in general, I want to be a God for you. Identity and particularism aren’t obstacles to me, they are passages to me. But meaning doesn’t begin and end with bias or prejudice, either. Identity and particularism are also, crucially, passages to me.

This is one way that we can now hear the phrase, “Build me a Sanctuary and I will dwell among you.” Use your position, your selfhood, to get beyond the self. Religion is not about the self, but nor can it do with out it. Bring me your imperfect understanding, your frailties and delusions, and I will dwell with you even there, precisely there.

Shabbat Shalom,

Zohar Atkins @ Etz Hasadeh

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