God Enough Sometimes Is

In a commencement speech to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College, the late David Foster Wallace began his remarks with the following parable:

Two young fish were swimming along and happened upon an older fish swimming in the opposite direction. The older fish nodded at them saying, “Morning boys, how’s the water?” The two young fish swam on for a bit and then eventually, breaking the silence, one of them looked over at the other and said, “What the heck is water?”

The point of the fish story, for Wallace and for us today, is that it is inevitably the case “that the most obvious and most important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.” Today it is that kind of topic I want to discuss: God. Given Oscar season, I will begin with a spoiler alert: my sermon will conclude by affirming my belief in God. Given the size and diversity of this congregation, there is a statistical probability that not everyone in this room shares my belief. There may be one or two or ten or twenty members of this congregation who harbor doubts about what to me is as obvious as the water in which a fish swims. I can even imagine that here in this room are proud, card-carrying, dues-paying members of this community for decades, who love Judaism, the Jewish people, and the state of Israel, who are fully invested in the successful transmission of Yiddishkeit from generation to generation, but who – when it comes to God – are the loyal opposition. “I get it,” goes the argument, “there was a time and place when belief in God was a driver of personal and group identity, morality and metaphysics. But that time and place are no longer, that belief is passé and anachronistic. To paraphrase the words of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan: “Religion conceived in terms of supernatural origin is the astrology and alchemy stage of religion. [Ours] is the astronomy and chemistry stage of religion.” (Judaism as a Civilization, 399)

The topic is a big one – there have been one or two books written on the subject – and our time is short. So this being New York, I want to approach it the only way that New Yorkers know how to discuss anything – quickly and self-referentially. I’ll tell it by way of two rabbinic giants who were colleagues and friends. One, a predecessor of mine here at Park Avenue Synagogue Rabbi Milton Steinberg, and the other – his teacher and mentor at the SAJ on 86th Street – Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan. If you are a regular, then you may have noticed an uptick in Kaplan references lately. He was the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, and this spring marks the eightieth year since the publication of his monumental volume Judaism as a Civilization. My Tuesday evening class is studying his life and thought, and next week I will be presenting at a conference on him at Georgetown University. This morning, I want to focus on one particular aspect of his life – his relationship with Rabbi Steinberg, specifically, on the subject of God – a topic where, we shall see, Steinberg was Kaplan’s most distinguished, devoted and dissenting disciple.

Mordecai Kaplan had a very textured if not complicated relationship with God. At one and the same time, he “thought about God and the belief in God almost every day of his life,” and yet was “the most famous naturalist the Jewish people has ever produced,” (Scult, p. 133) For him as a rabbi, philosophy alone would not suffice; Kaplan may be best described as a religious humanist. His biographer Dr. Mel Scult relates a telling entry in Kaplan’s diary on the day that four JTS rabbinical students paid him a visit, asking if they could serve the Jewish people with a non-theistic expression of Judaism. Kaplan wrote: “I told them plainly they could not do [so], since as rabbis their main function was to maintain the identity and continuity of the Jewish tradition. That tradition minus the God belief,” Kaplan wrote, “is like the play of Hamlet without Hamlet.” (Scult, 145) Throughout his life – in his books, sermons and diaries – God was a necessary and constant presence in Kaplan’s writings.

And yet, in studying Kaplan, or any theologian for that matter, it all depends on what you mean by the word “God.” “Words, like institutions, like life itself,” wrote Kaplan, “are subject to the law of change.” (JC, 398) One should not be misled into believing that by retaining the “God” vocabulary of the ancients, Kaplan meant what his predecessors meant. In other words, Kaplan did not subscribe to the notion of a supernatural providential deity.” (Scult, 132) He used words like “transnatural” and “supranatural” to describe God, but never “supernatural.” Kaplan interpreted God as “the sum of the animating, organizing forces and relationships which are forever making a cosmos out of chaos.” Or, as is often quoted, God is “the power that makes for salvation.” To this day, I am not entirely sure what all this means. It doesn’t make it easier that Kaplan wrote unsystematically, often inconsistently, and over a very very long, long time; he lived to 102. But to return to our New York setting, remember that Kaplan’s book was published in 1934, the same year as John Dewey’s Common Faith. (As it happens, they both lived on West 115th Street.) Whether the influence was direct or simply in the air, both men readily assigned the word “God” to certain idealized qualities to which individuals or societies aspire – like justice, beauty, piety and creativity. In Kaplan’s mind, for Judaism to be viable, the God-Idea must be part of it, but in calling it the “God-Idea,” and not “God,” Kaplan showed his naturalist hand. Kaplan knowingly and consistently differentiated his theological stance from that of his Jewish predecessors. It would be a mistake to reduce Kaplan’s God to simply the “good that we do,” but all acknowledge the theological tightrope he walked between an immanent and transcendent God, a God who is merely a process, ethical ideal or inner illumination and a God who exists as a distinct entity beyond human consciousness.

All of which, in Rabbi Steinberg’s estimation, fell short. The esteem in which Steinberg held Kaplan cannot be overstated. When I visited the Steinberg archives, I found ample record of the intellectual, professional and personal debt Steinberg owed his teacher. They collaborated on building a movement, on publishing prayer books, on matters of the heart and of the mind. Notwithstanding this debt, or perhaps precisely because of it, Steinberg was also unflinching in critiquing his teacher. Steinberg didn’t believe for a second that God was a long-beard who literally brought on plagues and split seas, but Kaplan’s “God Idea” left Steinberg entirely wanting. In Kaplan’s theology, wrote Steinberg, “Does God really exist or is he only man’s notion?” In Kaplan’s metaphysics, remarked Steinberg, “The universe is left unexplained. To say of God that He is a power with the scheme of things leaves the scheme altogether unaccounted for.” (RA Address, 1949) And as Steinberg said from this very pulpit just months before he died, “To me it makes a great deal of difference whether God is an entity, a being in Himself or whether He is an aspect of reality.” (Stenographed lecture notes, Steinberg Archive) Steinberg’s tragic death at the age of 47 denied him the opportunity to express what his developed theology would look like. What is clear is that Steinberg understood faith as a different and complementary muscle group from philosophical reasoning. Steinberg knew Kaplan’s love of Judaism and the Jewish people as well as anyone, but in failing to embrace a Supernatural God, a God with a consciousness and a will, Kaplan had jettisoned the very sacred vocation for which Judaism was intended in the first place. Such a Judaism would be akin to assembling the entire mishkan, the desert tabernacle in all its commanded and painstaking details, and then forgetting that the whole point was to house God’s presence. In Steinberg’s mind, Kaplan’s God, was “not God enough.”

The God debate between Kaplan and Steinberg may appear – both in its moment and in retrospect – of little consequence, a modern day “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” Their positions, we may say, differ only in degree, not in kind, neighboring shades on the theological spectrum. And while that might be true, that is also exactly the point. I would contend that it is precisely in this narrow space, or better yet, in the give-and-take between Kaplan and Steinberg that most of North American Jewry still exists. Long gone are the days that any Reform, Conservative or even Orthodox Jew subscribes to a pre-modern or fundamentalist view of God. Very few Jewish clergy insist on a literal understanding of the text with talking snakes, a world in which evil comes as punishment for sin, and a God who elects one group of humanity over another. Kaplan, to put it squarely, had a point. But what Steinberg understood, and what we all know to be the case, is the power of standing before God in prayer, the drama of fulfilling a commandment in response to the divine will and the urge to understand what it is that God wants of us. All of us search for meaning, each one of us longs for greater purpose, and each of us, I imagine, has at some point asked the question of how we fit into the grand narrative of existence. For me, belief in God – not the God Idea – but God, is not only satisfying, not only inspiring, but also, with all its problems, altogether reasonable. For many in this room my answer may not work; your response may be different than mine. The debate between Kaplan and Steinberg matters deeply because it covers territory that in many respects remains altogether resonant and relevant to this day.

Ultimately, the most important thing Kaplan and Steinberg shared was not their views, and not even, for that matter, their friendship. The most important thing they shared was a questing spirit – what Heschel would refer to as “radical amazement.” A poetic if not romantic appreciation for the enigma of existence, the depth of the human soul and the humble acknowledgement that there will always be far more about this world that we do not know than we do. Both men thirsted for God, both men sought to articulate answers of spiritual and intellectual integrity and intensity, and both men worked tirelessly on behalf of the Jewish people. Did they disagree? Of course they did – as can we. But we swim together as they did, side-by-side, seeking to understand, express and respond to the most important mysteries of our lives.