God willing

Israel Salánter is probably one of the least known of the great Jewish thinkers — even in Jewish communities, where the names of Spinoza, Maimonides, Moses Mendelssohn, and Martin Buber would be quite familiar. Loius Jacobs in his Jewish Religion ~ A Companion (OUP) begins his entry on Salánter:

Lithuanian Talmudist and religious thinker (1810–83), founder of the Musar movement… A gifted teacher, he encouraged his disciples not to rely on him but to work things out for themselves… The picture that emerges from the accounts of Salánter’s life is one of a severly introspective personality, torn by a realisation of his unworthiness and a compelling need to teach other how to strive for self–improvement.

There is something profoundly attractive in the nature of this most severe and apparently conservative of thinkers. True he exacts a hard line or discipline, but it’s one in which his concern is always directed to the freeing of man from his sins or limitations. And if Love does not precisely enter his vocabulary, it’s because as a physician of the soul that is not one of his instruments.

In addition to his highly original ethical writings Rabbi Israel also has an interesting, if exceedingly complex, eschatology, the details of which would almost certainly tax my discursive capacities — if not those of most of my readers. So I hope that I will not do violence to the subtleties of Rabbi Israel by ‘isolating’ some of his thoughts, and using them as starting points for discussion.

Perhaps one of Rabbi Israel’s most curious ideas — though one with a good pedigree, and apparently shared by Maimonides — is that our free will is not incompatible with God’s perfect foreknowledge. Which on the face of it is problematic, because if God knows what I am going to do tomorrow, then my actions are predetermined and I do not have free will. Well, we are in deep waters here, and I might add that Rabbi Israel seems to complicate matters by promulgating degrees of unequally distributed predetermination of fortune, such that some of us will ineluctably endure a harder lot than others. Why God should apparently tip the scales for certain individuals — let alone how we could possible know that He does — is not explained, but the Rabbi was quite untroubled by these contradictions or antinomies, putting them into a thought compartment that he might perhaps have labelled ‘Beyond Human Understanding’.

Yet is there really an inconsistency between our free will and God’s complete foreknowledge? Maybe God has foreknowledge of the free will choice that I will make. So, God may know that I will visit pensioner Plotnick tomorrow, but the decision to visit will still be freely made by me. Yet there is anyway, I think, a singular objection to the idea of God’s perfect foreknowledge: which is that, in all seriousness, His days would be profoundly lacking in drama. It would be a nightmare vision, an eternal ennui. Or, to put it another way, would it not be as if God were viewing an eternal film, every frame of which He knew to the last detail? We might perhaps argue that He is beyond all such mundane considerations, but if so we are surely in danger of placing Him in a position so remote as to question any notion of humanly understandable relationship (and a God so remote would be very un–Jewish!) But why should we suppose, for example, that when Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon, this work was not something new and surprising to God also? And then too, should we suppose God to have yawned and drummed His fingers while Einstein was working on his Special Theory of Relativity? We should no doubt be right to assume God’s omniscience in these realms, but otherwise would His sentiment not be that of a teacher’s delight in a pupil’s progress? And then again, why assume that God’s attention is riveted to every motion of Einstein’s mind? If I may put it humorously, God might well be preoccupied with other matters during the day, while looking forward to seeing what His pupil would turn in as homework in the evening! Yet the God that seems to be forever stuck in our minds is one of a wrathful Old Testament world — with good reason, because it is grim beyond reason — not of a God that might engage with the ever new and unfolding ‘present’, and certainly not one subject to the emotions of hope, fear, or uncertainty even. 

It might perhaps be objected that the picture I've painted of God errs too much towards the Greek polytheistic model. As if God might be given to sulking or ribald laughter, or might be unsettlingly inconsistent in mood and attitude. In other words, that He might be too human. And yet, at risk of inconsistency, this is not what I intend. As far as those attributes of God generally prefixed by omni goes I would certainly expect Him to be omniprudent, and equally omnijurisprudent — so to speak. In other words, He would be beyond any form of rash or prejudicial behaviour, and He would be perfect in his judgement. Equally, He would by definition be beyond any form of envy, covetousness, or any of the other emotions resulting from lack of insight or selfish behaviour. It would follow from this that His rewards would be perfectly just, and that all circumstances and imponderables (to us, at least) would be weighed in scales as perfect as any that Plato might have dreamed of. Though strictly, there would be no weighing: rather, God’s judgement would be in the nature of those fatal summing–ups  — communicated in a single glance of the eye — that we knew so well as children, and from which we are never quite secure as adults.   

There is a further aspect of Rabbi Israel’s theology that I have not mentioned. This relates to the afterlife, the reality of which he never seems to question. He speaks of the desirability of eternal bliss — as opposed, it must be said, to eternal punishment — yet never speculates on the nature of such an eternity. Which is a pity, given the originality of his thinking on other matters. Yet I confess to a perplexity here: I mean what on earth is one supposed to do in all eternity? And do we ever stop to think what eternity really means: literally a continuation forever? Do we really want that? It sounds a perfect nightmare to me (and if the county of Sussex is not included then I want no part of it!). Certainly to be free of life’s problems is an attractive prospect. But then all the interest and richness of our lives arises from our contact with ‘the madding crowd’, and from the peculiar — in that word’s less common usage — circumstances in which we find ourselves. This is, if you like, the literature of our lives, the script of which we are only partly in control. But it’s a life, as I seem to sense Beckett would say, and its significance bears no relationship to its duration. What we chiefly value — and ought to cultivate — is good moments, and ‘the soul well employed is very incurious of immortality.’ It’s a luxury, this literature that we enjoy, and not everyone has access to it. So we ought to do what we can in general and particular ways to alleviate suffering, in whatever places we find ourselves. And for the rest, would I suggest with Candide that ‘we must go and work in the garden’? Yes, but alternately with thinking, when that activity has reached its limits. 

Note. This was first published in Kol Shalom, the magazine of the Cambridge (UK) Reform Jewish Community.