In Hebrew the term for martyrdom is kiddush ha-Shem, which means literally “sanctification of the Name,” as mystical experience is referred to as “the unification of the Name.” On the surface, this seems like a mere periphrasis, a flight of pious rhetoric. But, as Hugo Bergmann points out in this essay, the notion that human activity has a real effect on the Name (i.e., God) is at the very root of Jewish religiosity, and is perhaps specific to it.
Mr. Bergmann, professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has had a long and distinguished career. He was born in Prague in 1883, and was one of the leaders in the development of cultural Zionism. The present essay, condensed from the original, is taken from a symposium, Vom Judentum, published in Prague in 1913; practically all Jewish thinkers in Western Europe contributed to this volume, which marked the emergence of the modern “Jewish renascence.” The translation from the German is by Felix Giovanelli.—Ed.
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In the twenty-second chapter of the book of Leviticus there appears a passage which was destined to form the point of departure for one of the most characteristic religious concepts of the Jewish people. It runs: “Therefore shall ye keep my commandments, and do them: I am the LORD. Neither shall ye profane my holy name; but I will be hallowed among the children of Israel: I am the LORD which hallow you.”
What is singular about this verse is the Hebrew word v’nikdashti, “but I will be hallowed.” God the hallower, who, in his own words, confers holiness, is to be hallowed in turn by the children of Israel. It would be tempting to regard this verse as a mere metaphorical flight, but there is much more here than meets the eye.
First, let us fully comprehend the meaning of the word kadosh (“holy,” “to hallow”). As it is used in the Bible, it reveals an intimate connection between the claims of holiness and those of moral action, with holiness being a special aspect of God’s moral action—he hallows. Man, in contrast to God, confronts the moral imperative as an alien, coercive power. It is related in Jewish tradition that when God revealed himself to the
Israelites on Mount Sinai, “he inverted the mountain over them as one would a cask”; at first, then, the moral law is a compulsion inflicted upon us. Though we can obey the moral law only in a state of freedom, though it is impossible to compel moral action—compulsion would make it unmoral or morally indifferent—the fact remains that man, insofar as he is a creature, can only obey the claims of moral right at the expense of a conflict with his senses.
God emerges in Jewish thought as the creator of the moral law, not as if he were a capricious despot who, as a captious sophistry has so cleverly puzzled it out, put the stamp of right on whatever he chooses to call right, but because truth and moral right are his essence, are inseparable from him. He is the hallower, for he fulfills the moral act without conflict or contradiction.
But it is at this point that the concept of God’s being hallowed appears very difficult to grasp. For if God is in himself holy, what meaning can be assigned to the injunction that he is to be hallowed by his creatures? To understand this, one must plunge deeper into the conception of God that characterizes Jewish religious thought. It is obviously a conception completely alien to the mental world of our present culture. In the present view of the West, God and the world are seen as something given once for all, the world and the creatures in it as separate and apart from God. The Jewish conception also separates God and the world, but yet binds the destiny of God and world so intimately that not only is the world dependent on God but—and this is of central importance—God’s destiny hangs upon the world’s outcome.
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We could perhaps best distinguish the Jewish from the prevailing outlook by saying that in the European view, the relation of God to the world is static, in the Jewish, dynamic. According to the former, God is, he is one, he is holy. The Jewish approach is to contemplate God from the point of view of his creatures, to see him as the end and task of creaturely life. Whether there is anything or not, philologically speaking, in Lagarde’s rendering of the Hebrew words El (“God”) and Elohim (“God”) as “end,” it nevertheless answers very closely to the intent of the Jewish conception of God. God is, to his creatures, a task to be fulfilled, an end to be realized.
Even that quality of God which bears the greatest significance for the Jews, his oneness, his unity, is apprehended dynamically. Reference is made less to God’s unity than to union with God: yichud ha-Shem—“unification of the Name.” The unity of God depends—as the Zohar teaches—on man’s prayer. In the Zohar we find a minute—and in its fantastic way, sustained—description of the manner in which the penetration of its hero’s prayer into heaven brings about this union. At the end of the Day of Atonement there is the seven-times-repeated phrase: “YHVH is Elohim!” In our day this phrase is a mere formula. But to the Jew it was traditionally the expression of the holiest of secrets. The inner exaltation in which the Day of Atonement was lived brought it to pass that YHVH and Elohim should be united: that is, the creation whose principle is Elohim had again found its way back to its source, YHVH, the divine governor and preserver of the world. In inner prayer the Jew had reconciled God’s manifoldness with his unity and could now say: the many is one, the world is divine, YHVH is Elohim! The sevenfold repetition of this cry at the conclusion of the Day of Atonement corresponded in some measure to what had been achieved through prayer, fasting, and self-mortification throughout that day.
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Thus God, as seen from the point of view of his creatures, is essentially a task, and his destiny depends to that extent upon them. In Chapter 30 of the Midrash Vayyikra rabbah [COMMENTARY on Leviticus], we read: “And if ye so do, God may speak; and when ye have covenanted, in that self-same hour do I rise, am I elevated.” In another part of the Midrash, a significant passage points to the reason why God has elected to dwell in Israel: “Has a sale ever been laid before you whereunder the person of the seller should be included in the transaction? Certainly not! But I, I have deeded my teachings to you and myself am part of the bargain.” This not only means that he who truly lives in the meaning of the Law can rule and dispose in God’s stead—“The righteous man decides and the Holy One, may he be blessed, fulfills”—but means further: “God’s destiny reposes in the hand of the righteous.” Other pertinent passages may be cited. In Psalm 68, we find: “Thy God hath commanded thy strength.” This passage is interpreted by tradition: “The strength of the righteous is added unto that of the power above.” In Paragraph 69 of the Midrash Bereshit rabbah [COMMENTARY on Genesis], this occurs: “The bad subsist through their God; but as for the righteous, God subsists through them, for it has been said: Behold, the Lord resteth on him.”
The Cabala explains the impact of the righteous man on the world above to mean that he cannot exert an influence on it in its relationship to itself but rather in its relationship to the world below. By the created being’s moral action, the uninterrupted efflux of grace from the infinite and boundless source, the En Sof (Infinite) is so multiplied via the Sefirot (the hierarchy of spiritual realms emanating from the En Sof) as to overflow, spill over—with the consequence that all the worlds of the universe sense the presence of a benign influence.
In other passages of the Zohar the theory that divine unity—and the persistence of the world assured by it—depends on the act of union of God’s creation with God is set down in stark simplicity without attempts at further explanation. Even in the introductory words of the Zohar one finds at the very outset: “Just as in the divine name, Elohim, the two words eleh [“these”] and mi [“who”] come together, and together form the name of God the creator, so does the world subsist only through the union of the revealed, the manifest [the “these”!] with the unrevealed ‘who,’ the subject of the world. And by this secret doth the world subsist.”
Thus, created beings uphold the world as much as does God. God created the world, but his creatures maintain it insofar as they recognize it as divine; they maintain, they preserve it insofar as they unite themselves to the divine, as they bring it down below. Whoever fulfills a moral act becomes a partner of God the hallower in the handiwork of the first beginning.
And just as man renews the divine work of creation by his moral action, so does he, on the other hand, bring about God’s abasement by his sinning. By his acts, not only is a fissure (pegimah) opened in the sinner’s soul, but the divine glory is diminished and sinks down to “lower levels.” In the Zohar it is related of God that he addressed the first of his creatures, after his sin, in this wise: “Woe unto thee, thou hast weakened the power above and darkened the light above.” In another passage the expulsion of man from paradise is interpreted beautifully and movingly to mean that by man’s sin God has been driven out of paradise.
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One could multiply indefinitely the number of references from Hebraic writings that emphasize in this manner the dependence of divine destiny on man’s doing. Those cited above—quite unmethodically—may suffice to give some idea of the concept. It is a more difficult task, however, really to think this concept through, especially to harmonize it with another certitude by which Jewish thought is completely permeated: the complete conviction of God’s being. For, if God is, how can he be dependent on us, how can his being be interwoven with our doing? In what manner does a creature reciprocally influence its creator? How can we created beings hallow God?
For there can be no mistake about it: to dissolve the idea of God into that of a goal, to think of God merely as a telos to be realized—that would be to miss the Jewish conception of God completely. That God is, independently of whether or not I realize him within myself, is not a subject for doubt to the Jew. But—and this is the decisive turn of thought which the Jew completes—God exists only for himself, he is not something existing in himself that one can grasp from without, that can be possessed in the sense that a thing is grasped. Thus, he exists only for those who are in communion with him, who are in union with him. Hence, the Jew asks: in what way is God for me? And he answers: insofar as he becomes my act in my life. Insofar as I have validated him, has he become a reality in my world. In the Pesikta of Rab Kahana we read: “Ye are my witnesses, the Eternal speaks and I am God: Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai said: ‘If ye give witness unto me, then am I the Eternal. If ye be not my witnesses, then am I not the Eternal, as it were.’”
Those words with which God manifested himself out of the burning bush to Moses, as the “I am that I am,” may be taken as a fair approximation of the meaning; but the word “am” is in Hebrew in the imperfect tense, in the tense of uncompleted being, and can therefore be translated with equal justice as “I shall be.” As an I in being but at the same time unfulfilled and yet to be realized, God manifests himself.
The Jew does not base his religious thought on the antithesis of creator and creature, but on that of thing and I. Man, so we read in a Hasidic text, may be likened to a ladder. His feet are planted on the ground and his head towers skyward, and the angels of God climb up and down, over and through him. For divine glory sinks down if he sink, and when he scales the height it goes up with him. Man’s role as God’s elect, as one fashioned in the image of God, is that he should be a guide on the way of the world’s fulfillment, that, in the words of the Zohar, God may utilize him as the vehicle in which he, God, makes his way upward.
This double nature of the Divine is what, in my opinion, Hebrew thought has given expression to by the duality of God and Shem (“Name,” used as a synonym for God). Shem refers to the unpronounceable tetragrammaton, the God-name YHVH, but is also to be distinguished from it. Shem is how one designates God in words, what one can say about him. When the potentiality of the divine is realized by his creatures, when the created being has achieved the sacred union (the yichud ha-Shem) within himself, only then can he say to God: YHVH. In this connection, Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai observed that only after the completion of the creation does the complete name YHVH Elohim occur in the story of Genesis, that only with the restoration of the oneness of the world will it have become possible to address God by his very name.
It is therefore understandable that the High Priest was wont to utter the name of God only once a year, in the highest moment of religious rapture. On all other days, when the moment of communion was not completely attained, the God-name Adonai (“Lord”) was used in the service. If one spoke of God in everyday life, one said ha-Shem. Thus, ha-Shem is God as an object of speech, it is what we can grasp of him without being in communion with him.
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In his Essence of Christianity, Harnack points to the infinite worth of the human soul as one of the most characteristic doctrines of Christianity. This doctrine is Jewish through and through. (I say this not out of a puerile desire to make claims to priority but rather because it is important that the contemporary Jew should become aware that the doctrine of Jesus of Nazareth is, if truly considered in its “essence,” Jewish, and that Jesus could say with right that he had come to fulfill the Law. Not, certainly, as Western thought has misunderstood it, to fulfill it for us. The task that he wished to carry out is one that subsists from generation to generation.) The soul of a man is infinitely precious to the Jews, for it is there that the great miracle of union with God is to be consummated, the bud whence God can and shall bloom, as it were. Hence, Rabbi Nehemiah could say: “One individual man is equal in worth to the whole creation.” The Talmud has it: “Each man is duty-bound to regard himself as though the world had been created expressly for him.”
In the account of the creation of the world given in the first chapter of Genesis, the otherwise recurrent “And God saw that it was good” is notably missing at the end of the second day of creation. As if to make up for it, the narrator says at the end of the sixth day: “And God saw everything he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” This singular construction has considerably exercised the Jewish imagination ever since. Out of the multiplicity of interpretations, one may be singled out for our purpose. On the second day, God created the firmament which was to divide the waters (above) from the waters (below). For the first time, duality had been introduced into the world. This is the reason that God chose not to call his work good. But on the sixth day, with the creation of man, of him who was destined to be the fulfiller of sacred union, all duality was completely overcome. Hence, God could now bless not only the work of that day but also, viewing retrospectively the work of the second day, add the blessing: “And behold, it was very good.” The Midrash interprets “very” to refer to the impulse to do evil. Because man can also be evil, because he is free to withstand temptation, he is the center of the creation.
In the Jewish view man is at one and the same time creator and creature. A creature only so long as he is like a thing impelled from without, who is conditioned in his acts. A creator when, loosening himself from the bonds of necessity, he rises freely to the moral act. As a moral being, man is his own self-creator; this we are expressly taught by the Talmud. Man’s task, in the words of the Zohar, is to transform himself from a cistern—a receptacle for alien waters—into a spring that gushes forth its own element. We are now enabled to understand the ever recurrent admonition of the Zohar, namely, that God himself bids man to become like him in all things. Similarly, we can now also understand what the Pentateuch had already had God say: Ye will be holy, for I, your God, am holy. As seen from the Jewish point of view, the command is quite natural; for God is the end of human striving. With each act whereby within ourselves we fashion an I from a thing, whereby we create a free being from a conditioned creature, with every morally responsible act, we become God-like in our doing, we fulfill the divine.
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