Dialogue with Rabbi Milton Steinberg

I’ve been reading in more detail, Rabbi Milton Steinberg’s essay “The Theological Issues of the Hour”. Although not indicated in the title, it is essentially a study of Immanence and Transcendence of God and the vassilating pendulum in historical periods and amongst various successive thinkers who emphasized one to the exclusion of the other. Steinberg maintains that in so doing even the emphasized one is lost. This essay is included along with several other of his essays in the book, ” Anatomy of Faith”, first published in 1960, and edited by Arthur A. Cohen, who, in his introductory notes to this essay, writes of Steinberg, ” He succeeded, as no one else had succeeded, in translating the concepts of contemporary theology and metaphysics into their Jewish coefficients. He served to bridge the widening gap between Jewish intellectuals outside the synagogue and believing jews within it.” The essay was first delivered June 1949 to the Rabbinical Assembly of America. I am not knowledgeable enough to agree or disagree with Cohen, the editor, but he is of the opinion that during the past hundred years, American-Jewish life pretty much avoided theology and that this was quite justified by great external threats, the need for social adjustments, and the need to focus on survival in a world full of ever worsening conditions for Jews. He then concludes that, at the time of his writing, 1960, “Survivalist theologies are on the wane; theologies that perform the task of rationalizing Jewish practice and worship as intrumentalities of self-preservation and group identity are under scrutiny. That scrutiny began with the work of Milton Steinberg.”( I can’t help asking Cohen here, but didn’t my friend Maimonides also live in a very difficult traumatic time having to flee as a young boy, about age 12, with his family and he was one of the greatest theologians! Many wondered how on earth he even found time to write when all day he had to serve the Muslim court as physician then late into the night serve his community, all lined up waiting for the doctor with their illnesses. But maybe Cohen’s point just serves to add to the overall greatness of Maimonides achieving the almost impossible and shows his great passion as a truth seeker, over and against tremendous odds.

Now on to the essay. I will be presenting what I consider Rabbi Steinberg’s main discussions both re how he sees the opinions of other theologians and philosophers as well as his own conclusions. I will at the same time dialogue with him, overall in agreement as he overwhelmingly in many ways restored my theological sanity. Yet I will also question, challenge and maybe disagree, always keeping in mind that I’m coming from the different perspectives of my own intellectual formation. Oh how I wish he were still with us to directly dialogue. This is a personal wish but also one where I’d so love to see his influence on current Jewish theological thought!!!

Rabbi Milton Steinberg, (RMS) says that Immanence, (IM) dominated religious thought since the Renaissance and the scientific revolution, reaching a high point in Spinoza, and then in Hegel. It was countered, he says, only by Orthodoxy and its more traditional concept of Transcendence, (TR). Judaism, RMS writes, has also been in this stream, and he adds that “Hasidism partook of it for social, psychological reasons, rather than scientific, philosophical ones” Here, I’d like to ask, I agree not from scientific, philosophical perspectives…but wasn’t it more from prayerful, mystical aspects and their deeply tuning into Biblical sense,ambience?? RMS goes on ,” Immanence in our day is a prime force in American Judaism through Mordecai Kaplan, (MK), God being conceived as the power within the world and man that makes for salvation.” ( My favorite rendering of this Kaplanian thought is : “God is that aspect of reality, which elicits from us the best that is in us and enables us to bear the worst that can befall us.” So beautiful, though I’d prefer to keep TR in here by saying “G!d is the One Who” etc.) This Jonathan come lately is also wondering, and sensing that IM is equally a force currently via Hasidism and via Renewal’s Zalman who reframed its expression more for our current world, because they are prayerful mystics. Seeking oneness with God, they find him, as do the Psalms, everywhere in His creation, in the human soul and even in the darkest places. Yet when I read them and Zalman, I never get a feeling that TR is absent, rather that it is equally present.

RMS says that Kierkegaard, was the start of the reaction against exclusive IM. ala Renaissance and Spinoza. Kierkegaard came from exclusive TR from his Orthodox rearing. He reacted,per RMS, ” out of disgust with Hagel, whose God was so absorbed into the flow of things, that he was only their underlying idea. Against this, Kierkegaard’s chief thesis is of ‘the eternal qualitative difference between God and man and between time and eternity’.” ( I want to say here, to Kierkegaard, ” This is so anti biblical; are we not made in His Image?) RMS goes on, “Barth similarly proclaims, ‘God is in heaven; you are on earth’. And any contact between the two is not from within outward.” To illustrate this, Barth uses a geometric metaphor that eternity is like a perpendicular intercepting time as a horizontal. Along with Kierkegaard and Barth, Niebuhr too is in the same vein and RMS quotes him, “The favorite predisposition of liberal theology is within; that of post-liberal over and against.” I might add that maybe these trends bounce back and forth like a pendulum, precisely because when one is emphasized to the exclusion of the other, true seekers sense and abhor the inadequacy and emptiness of the exclusive one, but rather than integrate them, they swing to the other exclusively. Or maybe the one they swing from remains entrenched somewhere in their psyche, though not expressed, and they’re reaching out for the much needed absent one, which they express exclusively. RMS interestingly puts Martin Buber as “occupying a middle ground between these two. His God is TR, as apart from the world as the Thou from the I which addresses it and yet not only in relation to it but in some measure determined by the relationship.” And no surprise, I may add, that Buber loved the Hasidim, who to me express IM and TR equally. He wrote extensively about them and helped make their tales and works more accessible as well as considering them the most significant spiritual movement of the past two and a half centuries.

RMS goes on, “IM is, of all theologies, the easiest to envisage. It gives warmth and dignity to nature and man, where TR devalues both. It accounts for the good, the true and the beautiful in the world and the human soul. It brings God near and makes Him accessible. But on those who set up God the IM in place of God the TR, to the latter’s exclusion…..their exclusion compromises the adequacy of what they accept. For they will be alianated from the Biblical tradition which is overwhelmingly TR and revelation for them will be little more than man’s discovery of the truth, though coached in pietist language.” ( Again, though I agree there is much of TR, isn’t IM also at once in and through the biblical tradition, especially in the Psalms, e.g. 104 and many others, as well as the prophetic writers, Isaiah et all. And from the start in the Creation story we are in His Image and Likeness, the God within as our truest selves, plenty of humanism there! ) RMS goes on, “Also since they, (pure IMs) conceive of God as residing in all things, the indiviuality of each thing (I add as an ontological being in itself) is blurred, tending to be swallowed up in the All, as in eastern religions, Spinoza, Hegel, and Schopenhauer. But the individual is a high concern of historic Judaism and the rock on which any moral life is built. Both the practical needs of the religious life and considerations of pure theory, compel the simultaneous acceptance of both TR and IM.”

RMS describes the two ambiguous or double meanings the word”God” aquired after Judaism bumped into Greek metaphysics through Philo. The first, the Living God of Scripture with whom we enter into covanential relationship,”Who is the Thou in I-Thou complex, Who discloses Himself in love and ethical demand, whose purpose we can advance, retard or even defeat, who is therefore affected by and dependent upon us.” And secondly, a “God Who is an ultimate principle of being, a first and final cause, an unmoved mover, timeless, unchanging …this is God the Absolute…..the God of Philo, Maimonides, Aquinas, Spinoza, Hegel, Bradley…. the One Pascal rebelled against, saying, ‘ the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob but not the God of the philosophers’. ” RMS lists both Maimonides and Aquinas among these, but I disagree that these two and many in their intellectual traditions including yours truly, who see these two meanings of “God” as One and the same, should be listed as pure absolutsts. I assume RMS refers to us when he writes of the philosophers, “If they professed a religion and if it ever burst into flame, then, though they spoke the language of Absolitism, it was by a non-absolute God that the fire was kindled.” Yes, the fire for many of us was kindled by our Beautiful One entering into close covenant with us, dealing with us with our very human like emotions, getting angry with us when we err, but then ever forgiving, going after us to gather us up under maternal wings. But then, how do we know if and who this One is Who is revealing Himself to us, how know there is a One. It is, per Maimonides, in our very Reason, our desire and propensity to know and understand that we are in His image, will He not want this Reason to be at peace, to need to know this? And when Moses asks Him doesn’t His answers, ” I am that I am, Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh Asher”, sound consistent with the philosophers’ words re one who’s essence is to exist, uncaused necessary existence, existence itself and the continued source of all other existences. There have been a number of primordial theories scientists have come up with re the origins of our universe, but they all neglect the biggest, unexplained mystery of why anything at all should exist, no matter how primitive the starting point. Making it ever more primitive still doesn’t say why or how it exists. Who the hell put into existence what they now call the singularity, an extremely dense,hot, zero volume entity of infinite density which cooled into the then gradually expanding universe we have. Scientists are just as clueless as everyone else as to its origin or that of any earlier entity they may yet posit. And who created the amazingly intelligent laws of its evolution…why do these even exist let alone that yet to be determined original something.

For Aristotle, though God is first, formal and final cause of the universe, he was not its material cause which is independent of him and eternal. But for Maimonides and Aquinas he was also material cause and more consistent with the biblical creation story it was not eternal. However Maimonides leaves an opening here that as long as something is not contrdictory to reason go with biblical creation story but if science/reason ever discovered something contrary, then take the biblical account metaphorically. For him, anything biblical which contradicts reason, should be taken metaphorically. ( As an aside here, the very question about whether matter is eternal always puzzled me as to whether it even makes sense, as a question. If time is the measure of motion or change, per Aristotle, and therefore an inherent property of all matter, how is there any time before which God created matter as there is nothing with motion or change which can be measured? Anyone with light to shed here, or anywhere in this writing, is most welcome!!!)

RMS goes on to describe as new, (at the time of his essay), a non- absolute conception of God, put forth on either rational or pragmatic grounds and he places both William James and RMK in this category. Per James,”the meaning of an idea is its affective and effective content” and “Kaplan interprets God as the sum of the animating, organising forces and relationships which are forever making a cosmos out of chaos” and “the power that makes for salvation.” For both, RMS observes, “this God is a force in the world, rather than the force behind it …both conceptions therefore are non- absolutist”. So they are both a non- absolute, non TR but IM God- Idea, defined by His pragmatic affective and effective role in our lives.

RMS then goes on to discuss Pierce as another non- absolutist. He writes of Pierce, emerging from his thought is “an interplay between God and chance, progressing from the original chaos, toward a final and total orderliness.” He also quotes Pierce directly, “At any time, however, the element of pure chance survives and will remain until the world becomes an absolutely perfect, rational and symmetrical system in which mind is at last crystalized in the infinitely distant future.”

I’d like to interject here. Why is chance discussed, whether by Pierce or RMS, as though separate from the natural physical and chemical laws of science and why does God as the infinitely creative, artistic Creator need to limit His work to culminating “in an absolutely perfect, rational and symmetrical system”? Don’t most artists just love to work with the accidents, the chance element. And why is a “perfect, symmetrical rational order” even the goal? “Rational ” seems a limited way of understanding things. Explosive accidents are more beautiful at times or at least stimulate the creator more as opportunity to exercise more amazing creativity. Watch the greatest painters, jazz improvisers, movie actors, directors. So why is God as Creator thought of as separate from chance? Isn’t it all part of the same process of Creation? When I see the amazing undersea creature world, I think, some improvising, indeed, at work here! Why can’t chance be included in the evolving laws of science, both created by God. He is the Source of all, inlcuding chance. RMS concudes re Pierce, that God “remains the supremely meaningful Being, but He is no Absolute.” Whitehead is another thinker discussed by RMS who concludes re him, ” Neither as primordial nor as consequent is God an Absolute. In the former case, He is limited by other principles.” “He mediates between the drive behind the universe and the infinite possibilities into which that drive might conceivably incarnate itself. Neither the underlying activity nor the forms of possability derive from Him….so He is not metaphysically ultimate and in the latter, He owes some of his essence and actuality to events….a God created by the world…non Absolutism indeed!” Again, I ask here, is the artist created by how he reacts to his work, either intended or by the chance elements he himself created/allowed to happen as part of his willed first act. Again, e.g. when working with watercolors, maybe the artist chose them precisely because they can explode. And maybe musicians choose their co-players because they like to work with the unexpected as more creative. Improvisation is chosen, not hoisted from the outside on the person as if from another source.

Charles Hartsborn is also seen by RMS as in the same ontological pattern as Pierce and Whitehead, but he adds, more afer the design of Anselm than of Aristotle. Hartsborn rejects the Absoluteness of God, saying it’s not consistent with historical religion but also because it’s philosophically untenable. However, he says if the God,-Idea is cleared of what he designates as its accrued absolutist excesses, it renains “the best of all possible explanations of reality.” He also avoids James’s relativism, because it is metaphysically more problematic than any moral or psychological aspects he may have saved. It leaves, he says, reality unaccounted for. Says RMS, Hartsborn ends with a conception of God as a non absolute absolute, but one “which is yet relative, entering into relations with the world and us and yet is subject to change, knowing and sharing in our thoughts, in their flow, our emotions in their mutations, our hopes and fears, our joys and sorrows and preserving them and so us in Himself. This without sacrificing the ontological function of God….he seeks to restore His role as man’s companion and ally, in a word, the God of living religion.”

Again, it seems to me, both Maimonides and Aquinas first borrowing absolutist ideas from Aristotle, establishing from reason God’s Ontological Being, the neceessarily Existent One, whose Essence is to exist, these philosophers restore my ability to know He is there to reveal Himself to us more intimately and enter into a covenant with us, and there to listen to us as per the Psalms and also in and through us and the universe. Pure, isolated, exculuve IM often seems to deny as does Kaplan, that He listens or is personal in any way. And though Immanence is often claimed to be a more humanist approach as even RMS gives it credit for, it actually leads to the loss of this very human, and biblical notion of God present to our hearts as we open them, even if silently before Him. Father Raphael Simon, a psychiatrist who became a contemplative trappist monk, once wrote, “God is the only one who will never walk away from us, no matter how angry we get at Him.” And no matter what painful, desparate, even ugly, dark thoughts we throw at Him, He will never walk away from us in anger or disgust.

Except for three reservations, RMS gives a lot of merit to Pierce’s and Hartsborn’s non Absolute God concept, especially Hartsborn’s which he says freed him “from servitude to the classical metaphysicians and their God, who in his rigid external sameness, is no God at all and certainly not the God of whom scripture makes proclamation, nor whom the human heart requires.” Love that last phrase, but I think I’ve amply shown in more than one way how I didn’t experience nor do I remotely see either Maimonides or Aquinas as RMS just described classical metaphysicists. Maybe this is because these two integrated so closely their absolute aspects of God with their Biblical Faith…this was the whole thrust of their theological endeavors. And I believe I saw it as one because they did.

And Maimonides, even in his Absolutist stance, maintained that if we can’t say God is personal, neither can we say he is not personal!

RMS goes on to describe his three conditions he believes should be met by non- absolutism, in order to preserve the merits he sees in Immanintism.

First, though non- absolute in some respects, God must be seen as absolute in others as the ground of all existence, as the sure criterion of the good to avoid total relativism, which, he considers is, “ethically demoralizing, aesthetically distasteful and emotionally depressing and….presents inordinate difficulties, maybe outright impossibilities in logic.” Secondly, it shouldn’t be used as excuse to avoid metaphysics. “The cognitive is not the least of religion’s many functions. Man is helped by his religious beliefs to comprehend the universe of which he is a part.” I do agree here, as reason, thinking, is a big part of His Image in us, and one of our greatest God given resources, and aren’t we urged in the Shema to love Him with all of them? But I also see this task as equally and maybe more primordially belonging to the realm of philosophy, before any religious faith, but also as a handmaid to theology, to understanding God’s communications to us. James, says RMS ,”leaves the universe unexplained, even unthinkable. ” His pragmatism makes him avoid seeking any integration re the parts of his universe. Here also he says is where RMK fails. “Being a philosophy without metaphysics, it is really not a theology at all, but an account of the psychological consequences of affirming one.” And “Kaplan’s refusal to engage in philosophical speculation concerning God, His Existence and Nature is deliberate and an issue of principle.” Again, “The God- Faith has its roots not in anything intellectual, but in the biological will to live.” I say here to RMK, though I disagree with this, if this were so, by your very logic, then my will to live nessecitates a Loving Existing One, an Ontological Other, Who is personal, Who is there and listens to our hearts, our cries, even if silent before Him. Again per RMK, “It is not something reasoned but something willed.” And why is willing something better than reasoning, apprehending accurately what it is. This comes first as the will chooses whatever it chooses under the aspect of the good, as reason presents it and reason needs to correctly discern what is truly good. Another quote from RMK,”The mere process of reasoning about God is predestined to futility.” Thus concludes RMS, “metaphysical speculation is adjudged irrelevant to any serious human interest.” Since Kaplan thinks it’s an idea’s affective and effective practical results that matter, then there’s no point in exploring what any ontological reality or thing in itself is behind it. This reminds me of the metaphor my first philosophy professor used. I could tell someone to bring this gift basket down the road to a friend and enumerate a bunch of “ethical” do’s and don’ts like don’t shake it, don’t drop it, don’t leave it in the sun and so on, but if I just gave them one ontoligical truth, saying,”there are eggs in it” , all the “ethics” will follow. Also if we aren’t going to be sure about any objective reality, whether theologic or otherwise, why discriminate merely re theologic thought. Let’s throw all philosophy, all reasoning even about anything out the window. Kaplan himself has expressed a beautiful thought that if the true, the good and the beautiful aren’t all there together as one, i. e. if one is absent, the whole thing falls apart. I see this as at least akin to a metaphysical statement of the core attributes of all being per Aristotle. In as much as a thing exists, it is one, is true, ( it is what it is), is good and beautiful. Metaphysics is not religion but it seeks to understand the common sense reality of things as well as the most universal aspects of all reality, of all being, which then points to the reasonableness for any leap of faith into the religious sphere. Showing there’s a need for a first uncaused cause, being whose essence is to exist as prelude to his entering into close personal covenant with us. RMS returns to discuss further whether metaphysics is necessary to theology a need RMK denies. He says that since RMK speaks of the God,-Idea, rather than of God, and this “Idea being what is affective and effective, and because furthermore he shrinks God to the sum of those aspects of reality which enhance man’s life”, then the following conclusions result.

1.) The actuality of God is brought under question. It is asked: Does God really exist, or is He only man’s notion? Is there anything objective which corresponds to the subjective concrption? And who adds up the ‘ sum’ in the ‘sum total of forces that make for salvation ‘? Is the sum added up ‘ out there’ or in the human imagination?”My comment: To put this simply, is God an ontological Being or just an Idea however one conceives of that Idea. Also RMS may be bumping up against many who think all of what we call ” reality ” are just our ideas of it not reality itself, that what we perceive is always just the idea in our mind and never corresponds to objective reality. But if they are only subjectivists re God and objective re all other created beings, then I say this is a big deal!

2.) “The universe is left unexplained. To say of God that He is a power within the scheme of things, leaves the scheme altogether unaccounted for…” He goes on to say, though not important to many, through out history such philosophical issues have been intensely important to so many minds. And many of us, I add, are intense seekers as well and, like Maimonides, we need our reasons to be at peace! RMS concludes that his loved and respected teacher made the best possible case for “religion without metaphysical theology.” But he says, “God-in-Himself is needed too, as a principle of explanation…but also because otherwise the God-Idea itself is emptied of content and potency.” Of course we don’t all need to be metaphysicians, but at least by intuition, (I’d say also by common sense) our belief needs to have at its core, “something ontological, some affirmation, whether naive or sophisticated, guessed or reasoned, concerning the ultimate nature of things,”

I’d like to end returning to what RMS said re the Biblical God, and tradition being “overwhelmingly Transcendent”. However, we’re told from the start, in Genesis, that this same Transcendent, biblical God, creates us in His Image and Likeness! To a great degree, that says it all for me! For if one truly believes this, we should be able to find all that is most beautiful, good and true within that very image, i.e. in all that is most beautiful, good, just and true in the human heart and soul. For me, this spells the true humanism at once human and Divine. So does not the biblical view or ethos in general radiate an integration of both Transcendence and Immanence?

Preview of a future endeaver here. I just came across a great sounding book, by a well known Israeli author, Micah Goodman. Its translation from the Hebrew into English was published in 2015. Did I mention I wish Rabbi Milton Steinberg were still with us to dialogue with? Well, this author dialogues with none other than Maimonides in this book entitled, “Maimonides and the Book that Changed Judaism: Secrets of Guide for the Perplexed.” I hear that it’s brilliant so can’t wait to read it for my own forever ongoing truth seeking and then hopefully to share about it here. I have a hunch that after absorbing it, his bringing the great Maimonides into our times will enormously stretch and enlighten my current thoughts on the subjects discussed hear. After all, RMS simply lumped Maimonides with all the other pure absolutsts, and as I mentioned, I couldn’t feel or intuit him as belonging there, yet don’t feel I am knowledgeable enough to defend this as fully as I’d like.