Studies in Judaism 23

Studies in Judaism 23

But if there is anything sure, it is that the highest motives which worked

through the history of Judaism are the strong belief in God and the

unshaken confidence that at last this God, the God of Israel, will be the

God of the whole world; or, in other words, Faith and Hope are the two

most prominent characteristics of Judaism.

 

In the following pages I shall try to give a short account of the manner

in which these two principles of Judaism found __EXPRESSION__, from the

earliest times down to the age of Mendelssohn; that is, to present an

outline of the history of Jewish Dogmas. First, a few observations on the

position of the Bible and the Talmud in relation to our theme.

Insufficient and poor as they may be in proportion to the importance of

these two fundamental documents of Judaism, these remarks may nevertheless

suggest a connecting link between the teachings of Jewish antiquity and

those of Maimonides and his successors.

 

I begin with the scriptures.

 

The Bible itself hardly contains a command bidding us _to believe_. We are

hardly ordered, _e.g._, to believe in the existence of God. I say hardly,

but I do not altogether deny the existence of such a command. It is true

that we do not find in the scripture such words as: "You are commanded to

believe in the existence of God." Nor is any punishment assigned as

awaiting him who denies it. Notwithstanding these facts, many Jewish

authorities--among them such important men as Maimonides, R. Judah Hallevi,

Nachmanides--perceive, in the first words of the Ten Commandments, "I am

the Lord thy God," the command to believe in His existence.(109)

 

Be this as it may, there cannot be the shadow of a doubt that the Bible,

in which every command is dictated by God, and in which all its heroes are

the servants, the friends, or the ambassadors of God, presumes such a

belief in every one to whom those laws are dictated, and these heroes

address themselves. Nay, I think that the word "belief" is not even

adequate. In a world with so many visible facts and invisible causes, as

life and death, growth and decay, light and darkness; in a world where the

sun rises and sets; where the stars appear regularly; where heavy rains

pour down from the sky, often accompanied by such grand phenomena as

thunder and lightning; in a world full of such marvels, but into which no

notion has entered of all our modern true or false explanations--who but

God is behind all these things? "Have the gates," asks God, "have the

gates of death been open to thee? or hast thou seen the doors of the

shadow of death?... Where is the way where light dwelleth? and as for

darkness, where is the place thereof?... Hath the rain a father? or who

hath begotten the drops of dew?... Canst thou bind the sweet influences of

Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion?... Canst thou send lightnings, that

they may go, and say unto thee, Here we are?" (Job xxxviii.). Of all these

wonders, God was not merely the _prima causa_; they were the result of His

direct action, without any intermediary causes. And it is as absurd to say

that the ancient world believed in God, as for a future historian to

assert of the nineteenth century that it believed in the effects of

electricity. We _see_ them, and so antiquity _saw_ God. If there was any

danger, it lay not in the denial of the existence of a God, but in having

a wrong belief. Belief in as many gods as there are manifestations in

nature, the investing of them with false attributes, the misunderstanding

of God's relation to men, lead to immorality. Thus the greater part of the

laws and teachings of the Bible are either directed against polytheism,

with all its low ideas of God, or rather of gods; or they are directed

towards regulating God's relation to men. Man is a servant of God, or His

prophet, or even His friend. But this relationship man obtains only by his

conduct. Nay, all man's actions are carefully regulated by God, and

connected with His holiness. The 19th chapter of Leviticus, which is

considered by the Rabbis as the portion of the Law in which the most

important articles of the Torah are embodied, is headed, "Ye shall be

holy, for I the Lord your own God am holy." And each law therein

occurring, even those which concern our relations to each other, is _not_

founded on utilitarian reasons, but is ordained because the opposite of it

is an offence to the holiness of God, and profanes His creatures, whom He

desired to be as holy as He is.(110)

 

Thus the whole structure of the Bible is built upon the visible fact of

the existence of a God, and upon the belief in the relation of God to men,

especially to Israel. In spite of all that has been said to the contrary,

the Bible _does_ lay stress upon belief, where belief is required. The

unbelievers are rebuked again and again. "For all this they sinned still,

and believed not for His wondrous work," complains Asaph (Ps. lxxviii.

32). And belief is praised in such exalted words as, "Thus saith the Lord,

I remember thee, the kindness of thy youth, the love of thine espousals,

when thou wentest after me in the wilderness, in a land that was not sown"

(Jer. ii. 2). The Bible, especially the books of the prophets, consists,

in great part, of promises for the future, which the Rabbis justly termed

the "Consolations."(111) For our purpose, it is of no great consequence to

examine what future the prophets had in view, whether an immediate future

or one more remote, at the end of days. At any rate, they inculcated hope

and confidence that God would bring to pass a better time. I think that

even the most advanced Bible critic--provided he is not guided by some

modern Aryan reasons--must perceive in such passages as, "The Lord shall

reign for ever and ever," "The Lord shall rejoice in his works," and many

others, a hope for more than the establishment of the "national Deity

among his votaries in Palestine."

 

We have now to pass over an interval of many centuries, the length of

which depends upon the views held as to the date of the close of the

canon, and examine what the Rabbis, the representatives of the prophets,

thought on this subject. Not that the views of the author of the _Wisdom

of Solomon_, of Philo and Aristobulus, and many others of the Judćo-

Alexandrian school would be uninteresting for us. But somehow their

influence on Judaism was only a passing one, and their doctrines never

became authoritative in the Synagogue. We must here confine ourselves to

those who, even by the testimony of their bitterest enemies, occupied the

seat of Moses.

 

The successors of the prophets had to deal with new circumstances, and

accordingly their teachings were adapted to the wants of their times. As

the result of manifold foreign influences, the visible fact of the

existence of God as manifested in the Bible had been somewhat obscured.

Prophecy ceased, and the Holy Spirit which inspired a few chosen ones took

its place. Afterwards this influence was reduced to the hearing of a Voice

from Heaven, which was audible to still fewer. On the other hand the

Rabbis had this advantage that they were not called upon to fight against

idolatry as their predecessors the prophets had been. The evil inclination

to worship idols was, as the Talmud expresses it allegorically, killed by

the Men of the Great Synagogue, or, as we should put it, it was suppressed

by the sufferings of the captivity in Babylon. This change of

circumstances is marked by the following fact:--Whilst the prophets mostly

considered idolatry as the cause of all sin, the Rabbis show a strong

tendency to ascribe sin to a defect in, or a want of, belief on the part

of the sinner. They teach that Adam would not have sinned unless he had

first denied the "Root of all" (or the main principle), namely, the belief

in the Omnipresence of God. Of Cain they say that before murdering his

brother he declared: "There is no judgment, there is no judge, there is no

world to come, and there is no reward for the just, and no punishment for

the wicked."(112)

 

In another place we read that the commission of a sin in secret is an

impertinent attempt by the doer to oust God from the world. But if

unbelief is considered as the root of all evil, we may expect that the

reverse of it, a perfect faith, would be praised in the most exalted

terms. So we read: Faith is so great that the man who possesses it may

hope to become a worthy vessel of the Holy Spirit, or, as we should

express it, that he may hope to obtain by this power the highest degree of

communion with his Maker. The Patriarch Abraham, notwithstanding all his

other virtues, only became "the possessor of both worlds" by the merit of

his strong faith. Nay, even the fulfilment of a single law when

accompanied by true faith is, according to the Rabbis, sufficient to bring

man nigh to God. And the future redemption is also conditional on the

degree of faith shown by Israel.(113)

 

It has often been asked what the Rabbis would have thought of a man who

fulfils every commandment of the Torah, but does not believe that this

Torah was given by God, or that there exists a God at all. It is indeed

very difficult to answer this question with any degree of certainty. In

the time of the Rabbis people were still too simple for such a diplomatic

religion, and conformity in the modern sense was quite an unknown thing.

But from the foregoing remarks it would seem that the Rabbis could not

conceive such a monstrosity as atheistic orthodoxy. For, as we have seen,

the Rabbis thought that unbelief must needs end in sin, for faith is the

origin of all good. Accordingly, in the case just supposed they would have

either suspected the man's orthodoxy, or would have denied that his views

were really what he professed them to be.Still more important than the above cited Agadic passages is one which we

are about to quote from the tractate Sanhedrin. This tractate deals with

the constitution, of the supreme law-court, the examination of the

witnesses, the functions of the judges, and the different punishment to be

inflicted on the transgressors of the law. After having enumerated various

kinds of capital punishment, the Mishnah adds the following words: "These

are (the men) who are excluded from the life to come: He who says there is

no resurrection from death; he who says there is no Torah given from

heaven, and the Epikurus."(114) This passage was considered by the Rabbis

of the Middle Ages, as well as by modern scholars, the _locus classicus_

for the dogma question. There are many passages in the Rabbinic literature

which exclude man from the world to come for this or that sin. But these

are more or less of an Agadic (legendary) character, and thus lend

themselves to exaggeration and hyperbolic language. They cannot,

therefore, be considered as serious legal dicta, or as the general opinion

of the Rabbis.

 

The Mishnah in Sanhedrin, however, has, if only by its position in a legal

tractate, a certain _Halachic_ (obligatory) character. And the fact that

so early an authority as R. Akiba made additions to it guarantees its high

antiquity. The first two sentences of this Mishnah are clear enough. In

modern language, and positively speaking, they would represent articles of

belief in Resurrection and Revelation. Great difficulty is found in

defining what was meant by the word _Epikurus_. The authorities of the

Middle Ages, to whom I shall again have to refer, explain the Epikurus to

be a man who denies the belief in reward and punishment; others identify

him with one who denies the belief in Providence; while others again

consider the Epikurus to be one who denies Tradition. But the parallel

passages in which it occurs incline one rather to think that this word

cannot be defined by one kind of heresy. It implies rather a frivolous

treatment of the words of scripture or of Tradition. In the case of the

latter (Tradition) it is certainly not honest difference of opinion that

is condemned; for the Rabbis themselves differed very often from each

other, and even Medićval authorities did not feel any compunction about

explaining scripture in variance with the Rabbinic interpretation, and

sometimes they even went so far as to declare that the view of this or

that great authority was only to be considered as an isolated opinion not

deserving particular attention. What they did blame was, as already said,

scoffing and impiety. We may thus safely assert that reverence for the

teachers of Israel formed the third essential principle of Judaism.