The Teachings of Judaism

Judaism has undergone many changes in its long history. For the purposes of our study, however, we will start by looking at those concepts and values that the majority of Jews living today would regard as enduring.

God

The Jewish religion is most commonly referred to as a type of ethical monotheism, as it assumes the existence of a Creator God whose benevolence and goodness are reflected in his love of humanity and who has imparted to the Jews ethical principles by which they (and the rest of the human race) are expected to live.

As Jewish philosophy developed over the centuries, an understanding of God’s nature deepened, and additional qualities—such as omniscience and omnipotence—were added to the portrait of the deity. Most important for Judaism, however, is the concept of divine “oneness,” which can be understood to mean that there is only one divine Being in the universe; this one Being is truly incomparable, and no human being (or anything we can possibly imagine) can be compared to this Being. Judaism’s idea of divine transcendence presupposes that a fundamental difference in reality exists between God and the world he has brought into existence, and that this difference precludes the possibility of God’s embodiment or “incarnation” in a particular human personality.

Yet for all its emphasis on God’s “otherness,” Judaism is not lacking a sense of God’s nearness, or immanence. The very fact that Jews pray to God—and do so with the expectation that their prayers will be heard and that those prayers may move the deity to respond—suggests that there are limits to the distance between the divine reality and human consciousness. Moreover, the ancient liturgical tradition of addressing God through the use of masculine nouns and pronouns (still preserved in many prayer books today) suggests that, at the level of common speech, Jews have long thought of God in human terms.

One of the great constants in Jewish theology, however, has been its assumption that the Creator God was also the shaping force behind our universe and our human world. Judaism has never conceived of God as a deity who abandoned the universe once it was brought into being. On the contrary, Jews have always assumed that God is determined to see his creative purposes fulfilled in time. Judaism assumes, therefore, that God is moved to respond by every human act of goodness and contrition.

The Problem of Evil

How such a God can tolerate the continued existence of evil in a world that he has created is a question that has long troubled Jewish philosophers. The oldest Judaic response to this question—a question that philosophers today often refer to as the “problem of evil”—takes the form of an accusation: the people of Israel have sinned against God by violating his covenant, and therefore God has no alternative but to punish those who have rejected him and his laws.

However, the Nazi genocide against the Jews during World War II has prompted many Jewish theologians to reexamine this traditionalist argument and to reject this cause-and-effect pattern of thinking. For some, the spectacle of mass murder or, even worse, the possibility of global annihilation makes the biblical idea of a just, compassionate, and omnipotent Creator God insupportable. Indeed, according to this argument, such a God concept is no longer acceptable to post-Holocaust Judaism.¹ Still others, unwilling to embrace the agnosticism (or atheism) this argument inevitably leads to, insist on reviving the biblical idea of a divine “eclipse”: the belief that God periodically conceals himself from human understanding, thereby creating a seeming void in which evil, for a time, may prevail.-

Nevertheless, according to this counterargument, even during this period of divine “absence,” God remains present in many human hearts, and in time God will “return” to our world in the form of humanity’s moral striving and severe self-judgment. This alternative view of God’s role in the world holds that reconciliation with God, and a renewal of those divine values that reside within all enlightened human cultures, is still possible, and that one should never doubt God’s continuing love for, and anguish over, the human race.