I hope this paper is of interest, personally I found it remarkable. Abraham Heschel has always been a favorite of mine.
There is another block to Jewish theology. This danger is a more insidious one. I refer to the Hellenization of Jewish theology… To oversimplify the matter: this approach would have Plato and Moses, for example, say the same thing. Only, Plato would say it in Greek and Moses in Hebrew. Consequently, you can say that Moses was a sort of Hebrew Plato. This view has had a great impact on much of Jewish medieval philosophy. They talk about God in the language of the Greeks.
We are inclined to think in non-Jewish terms. I am not discouraging exposure to the non-Jewish world. I am merely indicating that it is not biblical thinking. It is not rabbinic thinking. It is not Hassidic thinking. It is non-Jewish thinking. A non-Jewish philosophy is fine. But we would also like to have in our thinking a Jewish view of things… If you take biblical passages or biblical documents or rabbinic statements, and submit them to a Greek mind, they are often absurd. They make no sense… May I say to you personally that this been my major challenge, ever since I began working on my dissertation; that is: How to maintain a Jewish way of thinking?
In the second part of The Prophets, as in several other places, Heschel explained why he rejected the Greek God of complete actualization or being, instead introducing God as an omnipotent but passable God of Pathos, in need of man. As he wrote, “Plato thinks of God in the image of an idea; the prophets think of God in the image of personal presence. To the prophets God was not a Being of Whose existence they were convinced in the way in which a person is convinced of the truth of an idea. He was a Being Who is supremely real and staggeringly present.”48 Heschel did “not offer a systematic essay in metaphysics,” as Shai Held states; “he was content, instead, to point out that the metaphysical principles Maimonides simply took for granted are in fact historically conditioned—of Greek rather than biblical provenance.”49
To give a comprehensive overview of his rejection is beyond the scope of this essay; I will only point briefly to the way Heschel went about discrediting the Greek approach as unbiblical and why he deemed that vital. It should first be stated that Heschel did not intend to go so far as to claim a conceptualization of God’s essence: “The idea of divine pathos is not a personification of God but an exemplification of divine reality, an illustration or illumination of His concern. It does not represent a substance, but an act or a relationship.”50 In fact, to make such a contention would be to misunderstand the root of Heschel’s issue with Greek thinking.
According to the celebrated statement of Xenophanes, ‘If oxen and horses and lions had hands or could draw with hands and create works of art like those made by men, horses would draw pictures of gods like horses, and oxen of gods like oxen…’ The essential error is not in how man depicts God, but in depicting Him at all. The great revolution in biblical faith was to regard any image of God as an abomination.51
Greek thought stands are absent: The notion of God as a perfect Being is not of biblical origin. It is not a product of prophetic religion, but of Greek philosophy… In the Decalogue, God does not speak of His perfection, but of His having made free men out of slaves. Signifying a state of being without defect and lack, perfection is a term of praise which we may utter in pouring forth emotion; yet, for man to utter it as a name for His essence would mean to evaluate and to endorse Him. Biblical language is free of such pretentions; it dared to call perfect (tamim) only “His work” (Deut. 32:4), “His way” (II Sam. 22:31), and the Torah (Ps. 19:7). We have never been told: “Hear, O Israel, God is Perfect!”52
In contrast Heschel states: To the prophet… God does not reveal Himself in an abstract absoluteness, but in a personal and intimate relation to the world. He does not simply command and expect obedience; He is also moved and affected by what happens in the world and reacts accordingly. Events and human actions arouse in Him joy or sorrow, pleasure or wrath . . . Quite obviously in the biblical view, man’s deeds may move Him, affect Him, grieve Him or, on the other hand, gladden and please Him. This notion that God can be intimately affected, that He possesses not merely intelligence and will, but also pathos, basically defines the prophetic consciousness of God.53
He subsequently elucidates the metaphysical assumptions which caused the Greek thinkers and those Jewish theologians influenced by them to arrive at a notion of God as an unchanging and unaffected being of complete unity. He then explicates the difficulties that lie in attempting to reconcile it with the God of the Bible, and suggests that: These difficulties arise from the attempt to reduce the biblical insight to an exact rational category. To be sure, the rational component is central to the biblical understanding of unity. However, the biblical intention is not to stress an abstraction, an idea in general, but the fullness of the divine Being; the certainty that the creator is the Redeemer, that the Lord of nature is the Lord of history. God’s being One means more than just being one.
This was Heschel’s chief issue with the Hellenized understanding. He recognized its incapability to remain consistent with the Biblical narrative, in which Heschel saw God in search of man as the major theme. The Bible is not man’s theology, Heschel would say, but God’s anthropology. No Aristotelian theologian could coherently synthesize his philosophical assumptions with what was in Heschel’s eyes this undisputable motif: Ribono Shel Olam [master of the universe], why do you bother? Why are you in search of man? Why are you still searching and waiting? Searching for whoever it is that may come? To create a better world; to create a better species? God in search of man? Why? And my answer to this would be: Because God is in need of man. The idea of God being in need of man is central to Judaism and pervades all the pages of the Bible, of Chazal, of Talmudic literature…55
Microsoft Word - Lieblich (hakirah.org)
There is another block to Jewish theology. This danger is a more insidious one. I refer to the Hellenization of Jewish theology… To oversimplify the matter: this approach would have Plato and Moses, for example, say the same thing. Only, Plato would say it in Greek and Moses in Hebrew. Consequently, you can say that Moses was a sort of Hebrew Plato. This view has had a great impact on much of Jewish medieval philosophy. They talk about God in the language of the Greeks.
We are inclined to think in non-Jewish terms. I am not discouraging exposure to the non-Jewish world. I am merely indicating that it is not biblical thinking. It is not rabbinic thinking. It is not Hassidic thinking. It is non-Jewish thinking. A non-Jewish philosophy is fine. But we would also like to have in our thinking a Jewish view of things… If you take biblical passages or biblical documents or rabbinic statements, and submit them to a Greek mind, they are often absurd. They make no sense… May I say to you personally that this been my major challenge, ever since I began working on my dissertation; that is: How to maintain a Jewish way of thinking?
In the second part of The Prophets, as in several other places, Heschel explained why he rejected the Greek God of complete actualization or being, instead introducing God as an omnipotent but passable God of Pathos, in need of man. As he wrote, “Plato thinks of God in the image of an idea; the prophets think of God in the image of personal presence. To the prophets God was not a Being of Whose existence they were convinced in the way in which a person is convinced of the truth of an idea. He was a Being Who is supremely real and staggeringly present.”48 Heschel did “not offer a systematic essay in metaphysics,” as Shai Held states; “he was content, instead, to point out that the metaphysical principles Maimonides simply took for granted are in fact historically conditioned—of Greek rather than biblical provenance.”49
To give a comprehensive overview of his rejection is beyond the scope of this essay; I will only point briefly to the way Heschel went about discrediting the Greek approach as unbiblical and why he deemed that vital. It should first be stated that Heschel did not intend to go so far as to claim a conceptualization of God’s essence: “The idea of divine pathos is not a personification of God but an exemplification of divine reality, an illustration or illumination of His concern. It does not represent a substance, but an act or a relationship.”50 In fact, to make such a contention would be to misunderstand the root of Heschel’s issue with Greek thinking.
According to the celebrated statement of Xenophanes, ‘If oxen and horses and lions had hands or could draw with hands and create works of art like those made by men, horses would draw pictures of gods like horses, and oxen of gods like oxen…’ The essential error is not in how man depicts God, but in depicting Him at all. The great revolution in biblical faith was to regard any image of God as an abomination.51
Greek thought stands are absent: The notion of God as a perfect Being is not of biblical origin. It is not a product of prophetic religion, but of Greek philosophy… In the Decalogue, God does not speak of His perfection, but of His having made free men out of slaves. Signifying a state of being without defect and lack, perfection is a term of praise which we may utter in pouring forth emotion; yet, for man to utter it as a name for His essence would mean to evaluate and to endorse Him. Biblical language is free of such pretentions; it dared to call perfect (tamim) only “His work” (Deut. 32:4), “His way” (II Sam. 22:31), and the Torah (Ps. 19:7). We have never been told: “Hear, O Israel, God is Perfect!”52
In contrast Heschel states: To the prophet… God does not reveal Himself in an abstract absoluteness, but in a personal and intimate relation to the world. He does not simply command and expect obedience; He is also moved and affected by what happens in the world and reacts accordingly. Events and human actions arouse in Him joy or sorrow, pleasure or wrath . . . Quite obviously in the biblical view, man’s deeds may move Him, affect Him, grieve Him or, on the other hand, gladden and please Him. This notion that God can be intimately affected, that He possesses not merely intelligence and will, but also pathos, basically defines the prophetic consciousness of God.53
He subsequently elucidates the metaphysical assumptions which caused the Greek thinkers and those Jewish theologians influenced by them to arrive at a notion of God as an unchanging and unaffected being of complete unity. He then explicates the difficulties that lie in attempting to reconcile it with the God of the Bible, and suggests that: These difficulties arise from the attempt to reduce the biblical insight to an exact rational category. To be sure, the rational component is central to the biblical understanding of unity. However, the biblical intention is not to stress an abstraction, an idea in general, but the fullness of the divine Being; the certainty that the creator is the Redeemer, that the Lord of nature is the Lord of history. God’s being One means more than just being one.
This was Heschel’s chief issue with the Hellenized understanding. He recognized its incapability to remain consistent with the Biblical narrative, in which Heschel saw God in search of man as the major theme. The Bible is not man’s theology, Heschel would say, but God’s anthropology. No Aristotelian theologian could coherently synthesize his philosophical assumptions with what was in Heschel’s eyes this undisputable motif: Ribono Shel Olam [master of the universe], why do you bother? Why are you in search of man? Why are you still searching and waiting? Searching for whoever it is that may come? To create a better world; to create a better species? God in search of man? Why? And my answer to this would be: Because God is in need of man. The idea of God being in need of man is central to Judaism and pervades all the pages of the Bible, of Chazal, of Talmudic literature…55
Microsoft Word - Lieblich (hakirah.org)
