Karen Armstrong - A History of God--The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam

181
The new confidence brought by emancipation was dealt a harsh blow with the outbreak of a vicious anti-Semitism in Russia
and Eastern Europe under Tsar Nicholas II in 1881. This spread to Western Europe. In France, the first country to
emancipate the Jews, there was an hysterical surge of anti-Semitism when the Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus was wrongly
convicted of treason in 1895. That same year, Karl Lueger, a notable anti-Semite, was elected Mayor of Vienna. Yet in
Germany before Adolf Hitler came to power, Jews still imagined that they were safe. Thus Hermann Cohen (1842-1918)
still seemed preoccupied with the metaphysical anti-Semitism of Kant and Hegel. Concerned above all with the accusation
that Judaism was a servile faith, Cohen denied that God was an external reality that imposes obedience from on high. God
was simply an idea formed by the human mind, a symbol of the ethical ideal. Discussing the biblical story of the burning
bush, when God had defined himself to Moses as 'I am what I am' Cohen argued that this was a primitive expression of the
fact that what we call 'God' is simply being itself. It is quite distinct from the mere beings that we experience, which can only
participate in this essential existence. In The Religion of Reason Drawn from the sources of Judaism (published
posthumously in 1919), Cohen still insisted that God was simply a human idea. Yet he had also come to appreciate the
emotional role of religion in human life. A mere ethical idea - such as 'God' - cannot console us. Religion teaches us to love
our neighbour so it is possible to say that the God of religion - as opposed to the God of ethics and philosophy - was that
affective love.
These ideas were developed out of all recognition by Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), who evolved an entirely different
conception of Judaism which set him apart from his contemporaries. Not only was he one of the first existentialists but he
also formulated ideas that were close to the oriental religions. His independence can perhaps be explained by the fact that
he had left Judaism as young man, become an agnostic and then considered converting to Christianity before finally returning
to Orthodox Judaism. Rosenzweig passionately denied that the observance of the Torah encouraged a slavish, abject
dependence upon a tyrannical God. Religion was not simply about morality but was essentially a meeting with the divine.
How was it possible for mere human beings to encounter the transcendent God? Rosenzweig never tells us what this
meeting was like - this is a weakness in his philosophy. He distrusted Hegel's attempt to merge the Spirit with man and
nature: if we simply see our human consciousness as an aspect of the World Soul, we are no longer truly individuals. A true
existentialist, Rosenzweig emphasised the absolute isolation of every single human being. Each one of us is alone, lost and
terrified in the crowd of humanity. It is only when God turns to us that we are redeemed from this anonymity and fear. God
does not reduce our individuality, therefore, but enables us to attain full self-consciousness.
It is possible for us to meet God in any anthropomorphic way. God is the Ground of being, so bound up with our own
existence that we cannot possibly talk to him, as though he were simply another person like ourselves. There are no words
or ideas that describe God. Instead the gulf between him and human beings is bridged by the commandments of the Torah.
These are not just proscriptive laws, as the goyim imagine. They are sacraments, symbolic actions that point beyond
themselves and introduce Jews to the divine dimension that underlies the being of each one of us. Like the Rabbis,
Rosenzweig argued that the commandments are so obviously symbolic - since they often have no meaning in themselves -
that they drive us beyond our limited words and concepts to the ineffable Being itself. They help us to cultivate a listening,
waiting attitude so that we are poised and attentive to the Ground of our existence. The mitzvot do not work automatically,
therefore. They have to be appropriated by the individual so that each mitzvah ceases to be an external command but
expresses my interior attitude, my inner 'must'. Yet although the Torah was a specifically Jewish religious practice, revelation
was not confined to the people of Israel. He, Rosenzweig, would meet God in the symbolic gestures that were traditionally
Jewish but a Christian would use different symbols.
The doctrines about God were not primarily confessional statements but they were symbols of interior attitudes. The
doctrines of creation and revelation, for example, were not literal accounts of actual events in the life of God and the world.
The myths of revelation expressed our personal experience of God. Creation myths symbolised the absolute contingency of
our human existence, the shattering knowledge of our utter dependence upon the Ground of being which made that
existence possible. As Creator, God is not concerned with his creatures until he reveals himself to each one of them, but if
he were not the Creator, that is, the Ground of all existence, the religious experience would have no meaning for humanity as
a whole. It would remain a series of freak occurrences. Rosenzweig's universal vision of religion made him suspicious of the
new political Judaism that was emerging as a response to the new anti-Semitism. Israel, he argued, had become a people in
Egypt not in the Promised Land and would only fulfil its destiny as an eternal people if it severed its ties with the mundane
world and did not get involved with politics.
But Jews who fell victim to the escalating anti-Semitism did not feel that they could afford this political disengagement. They
could not sit back and wait for the Messiah or God to rescue them but must redeem their people themselves. In 1882, the
year after the first pogroms in Russia, a band of Jews left Eastern Europe to settle in Palestine. They were convinced that
Jews would remain incomplete, alienated human beings until they had a country of their own. The yearning for the return to