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Tough Topics - God
Although being Jewish is more about behaving than believing, there are some beliefs that most Jews hold to be true: one of them is monotheism. Nevertheless, there is no single Jewish concept of God, and Jews have defined and depicted God in various ways throughout their history. The Jewish tradition understands that God is beyond comprehension yet strives to know God more through what is within the world than what is beyond it. Paradoxically, Jews need to speak about—and to—God but also recognise that all God-talk is metaphor and symbol.
In the Bible, God has various names and qualities, some seeming to be mutually contradictory. God is sometimes presented as a person, with a range of emotions, yet the most recurrent representations of God are: God’s oneness; God’s creativity; God’s demand for goodness; God’s desire for partnership with the people; and God’s redeeming power.
As the biblical period progresses, God is shown as decreasing in the extent of direct communication and increasingly giving the people autonomy. By the rabbinic period, when the literature is more ethical than theological, the prophetic tradition has closed and God is no longer seen as a direct legal authority. In neither the biblical nor the rabbinical writings is there a systematic theology.
Medieval Jewish thinkers strove to reconcile traditional Jewish concepts of God with classical and contemporary philosophy. Moses Maimonides formulated thirteen principles of faith, several of which are concerned with the nature of God. Medieval mystics referred to God as infinite through the name ‘no end’ and said that, although God cannot be defined or described, God can be know through ten attributes or powers.
In the modern age, especially since the 20th century, Jewish concepts of God have encountered several challenges: from secularisation; from feminism that questions the predominantly male images of, and language about, God; and from those who argue that no powerful, loving and just God could permit the evil we have witnessed in our age. Contemporary Jewish thinkers respond to these challenges by, variously, rejecting, reaffirming or reformulating traditional concepts.
The names of God
The names of God from the Bible are only pronounced during worship or exceptionally, sometimes, in education. This practice stems from a sense that God’s names indicate God’s essence and respect for the ineffable deity means that the illusion of knowing God and being God’s equal should be avoided. Indeed there is one name for God the pronunciation of which is unknown, having been a holy secret of the high priest.
For these reasons, Torah scrolls, Bibles and prayer books (and any other papers that contain God’s names, such as photocopies of passages from these works) are treated with respect. There are certain disciplines through which this respect is manifested. Some are a matter of law, such as burying (not throwing away) a Torah scroll or one of these books when they are beyond use. Others are a matter of custom, such as kissing the cover of one of the books before and after using it.
Although there are no holy words in English, some Jews retain awareness of respect for God’s name and express the idea of being unable to know God completely, by writing ‘G-d’.