Winter 1984 - 1985 - Quarterly Review

QUARTERLY REVIEW, WINTER 1984
In "hiding," divine was calling on Israel to discern the divine,
which was hidden but present everywhere. The manifest God is visible
in Jerusalem. The hidden God can be found everywhere. One need
not literally go to Jerusalem to pray. One can pray anywhere in the
world. The synagogue, which was a secondary institution before the
destruction, became a central institution afterward. In the temple,
God spoke, either directly, or through the breastplate, or through the
prophet. The synagogue is the place you go to when God no longer
speaks to you.
The deepest paradox of the rabbis' teaching was that the more God
is hidden, the more God is present. The difference is that in the good
old days one did not have to look—the divine illumination lit up the
world. Now, one must look. If one looks more deeply, one will see
God everywhere. But to see God everywhere, one must understand.
The key to religious understanding is learning. The Jewish people, in
biblical times an ignorant peasantry, awed by sacramental, revelatory
experiences in the temple, were trained by the rabbis to learn and
study. Now that God no longer speaks directly, how would one know
what God wants? The answer is to go to the synagogue; there one
does not see God visibly, but one prays and asks God for guidance. Go
ask a rabbi: "What does God want from me?" and the rabbi answers,
"I do not have direct access. I will study the record of God's past
revelation. I will study the precedents for the situation and give you
my best judgment as to what God wants right now." Note that the
human agent takes a much more active part in discerning God's will
but the answer is much less certain at the end of the process.
Whenever one asks a question, rabbis disagree. When there is human
participation, there is disagreement but both views are valid.
In the triumph of the rabbis, there was an incredible transformation
of Judaism. The manifest, sacramental religion of the Bible was
succeeded by the internalized, participatory, more "laic" faith of the
rabbinic period. Indeed, the rabbis came to the conclusion that they
had lived through events comparable almost to a reacceptance of the
covenant. Even as Christians responded to their great religious
experiences by proclaiming its record to be a New Covenant, Jews
responded to theirs by affirming a renewal of the covenant.
In short, to reverse a classic Christian explanation of the
relationship of Judaism and Christianity, I would argue that both
Judaism and Christianity are outgrowths of and continuous with the
biblical covenant; that indeed Christianity is closer to the biblical
world, but not in the triumphalist way that Christianity has always
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