The faith of a Jew is the faith of a man for whom there are no synods, no edicts, no authorities to whom he can turn for final answers to his questions regarding the specific nature of things, mundane or divine. Even his Bible fails to give the Jew clear answers to the simplest questions; his God speaks in a language for which no man seems to have a key. In order to know all he should, the Jew is forced to speculate, to think for himself, to follow the trail of truth wherever it may lead, under the guidance of the wise who have gone part of the way before.
The theology of the Jew is theology at a minimum. It affirms nothing more than that God is One, leaving open even the question of what his nature is, what it means for him to be, and what his Unity implies. The Jew’s cosmology, too, is at a minimum. It affirms little more than that the world has a history, man a dignity, and each thing some degree of value. Beyond these bare affirmations, whatever the Jew asserts he asserts precariously, as the closest he can now come to truth by free and honest inquiry. The faith of a Jew is the faith of one who passionately desires and wholeheartedly tries to understand the nature of God and the nature of the world. He can be true to his faith only to the extent that he faithfully pursues the truth.
The Jew has a faith that there are acts that are absolutely right and acts that are absolutely wrong. His is the faith, too, of one who knows that man is not only a guilty being because he does not do all he ought, but is a tragic one as well, because he cannot do all he ought.
The ethic of the Jew is universal, absolute, and onerous. Its minimum demand is that one should not do to others what one would not have them do to oneself. To subscribe to this Golden Rule is to have the faith that what is evil for oneself is evil for others. The ethic of the Jew, therefore, is the ethic of one who acknowledges a common human nature, in terms of which the strong and the weak, the wise and the foolish, are absolutely equal.
For the Jew, all men have a common nature for which the same things are evil. That one man abhors what another applauds means for the Jew, not that there is no good or evil, or that the good and evil change in nature from tribe to tribe, but that some men do not live and judge in the light of what is truly good.
The Jew is one who seeks to know what is, and to bring about what ought to be; he is one who is constantly aware that he fails to know or to do all he should. If this be an essential characterization of the Jew, many who are Jews by birth and church, in habit and in ritual, must of course be said not to be Jews in fact. No one can inherit the status of being a Jew. Birth and ritual may make it possible to merit the designation more readily; they do not and cannot guarantee it. The fact that there are many Jews by census who are not Jews in spirit reveals not that the census should be our guide, but that there is much work for rabbis—and for us—to do.
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If our account is correct, no one is a Jew who is not ethical, reflective, and modest. There are many who have these traits, of course, and are not Jews. This does not mean that they do not have the faith and ideals characteristic of a Jew, but that to be a Jew something more than these is needed. A Jew is one who, in addition, pledges himself to commemorate by word or deed some unique past event, such as a covenant, marking off his group from all others. He thus consciously and openly shares in the history of the Jews, and thereby becomes a Jew in spirit, one who consciously and publicly identifies himself with historical Judaism.
What makes him a Jew is not so much just how he commemorates but what and why. He denies himself a future when he becomes so orthodox that he attempts to commemorate everything that happened once before. He reforms himself into a mere historic figure when he commemorates solely to remind himself that he has a past. The Jew need commemorate no more than a single event, but then he must commemorate it as a peak in an historic attempt to know the true and do the good. His commemoration may take the form of a well-entrenched ritual, but there is no reason why it may not have a different form at different times and for different individuals. What is important is that it be his way of making a public avowal that he is a Jew, that it make manifest in word and deed that he deliberately accepts and tries to fulfill the covenants his ancestors made long ago.
One thing more is necessary before a man can become a full Jew. He must be picked out from a multitude. Men are born, but Jews are chosen. The method of choosing Jews, however, seems to vary with the ages. Once it took God to choose a Jew, now it needs only a Gentile. However, the choice is not really a choice unless a designation from without is met with a pledge from within to live a life that God would approve. To be a Jew in fact, one must so manifest oneself through word or deed, pledge oneself to be kin in spirit and act, as well as birth, with ancestors who promised to love the truth and pursue the good.
Chosen men are men apart. They are a minority, aliens. They have the unique privilege of standing outside the confining boundaries that hold the rest together. They are free from the restrictive and transitive dogmas that hem in even the boldest thinkers of their age. It is to them that one can turn in the hope of discovering what lies hidden to those immersed in the civilization of the day. The Jew, because he is a chosen, minority figure who has renewed the pledge of his ancestors, is compelled to, and ought to, think boldly and freely.
Today the basic intellectual problem for the Jew is somewhat different from what it was in the past. In Philo’s day, he had the task of reconciling the idea of perfection with that of finitude. Today he must try to reconcile nature and freedom. The Jew knows himself to be an integral part of nature and to be responsible for what he does. At one and the same time, he is faced with the task of living in this world and of freely determining his destiny in the light of what is right. Only where nature and freedom are compatible can he exist in fact; only where he lives in consonance with nature and yet freely does the good does he live as a full human Jew. A quick examination of some vital but neglected features of the universe may, despite its inevitable obscurity and dogmatic tone, help us see that this could be so.
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Man is completely immersed in nature. He originated there. He lives nowhere else. He can act only as a part of it. Whatever laws there be to which natural beings are subject are laws to which he also must submit. Physics, chemistry, biology, are sciences of man as surely as they are sciences of other types of being. When a man falls from a height, he falls at the rate an inanimate body would—no thought, no gritting of the teeth, no resolution or prayer, makes the slightest difference to the speed, direction, or nature of his downward flight. When he breathes, drinks, and eats, he uses organs similar to those of brutes, and he makes use of what he ingests in similar ways and for similar reasons. So far as he has a mind, a language, a society, and an art, which no other beings possess, there are sciences that pertain to him alone. But these, on pain of tearing man away from the rest of nature, must illustrate the same universal principles that other sciences do. Man has features and functions others do not have, but they are variants of a single pattern in somewhat the same way that heat and light are variations of motion. Man is a creature in nature with a limited place in that one cosmic history in which the tale of all finite beings is fully told.
A man is a natural being. But he is also free. He has the power of deciding otherwise than he does, and is, therefore, responsible for whatever decisions he makes. Man alone of all the beings in nature has the privilege and the burden of being free to determine just what he intends to do. He alone can be ethically good or bad because he alone can avoidably do or fail to do what ought to be done.
Man is free. Therefore every being is. Otherwise man would exist in a world apart, subject to special rules which could go counter to those that govern the rest. If one natural being is free, every other must be as well. One might have wings where another has forelegs, as different agencies by which similar powers can be diversely expressed. But one natural being cannot be free and another wholly bound without their being separated into different universes, governed by radically different principles.
Man’s freedom, of course, is not identical with the freedom of other beings, for his alone is a freedom to be responsible for what he does. He and other beings are equally free but he exercises his freedom in ways they cannot. This makes him, while natural, different in kind, with a destiny and function different from that of any other being.
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Freedom is the power to make the inderterminate determinate, the future present, the universal particular, the abstract concrete, the ideal real. Instead of conflicting with, it is presupposed in every process of causation. Between each cause and effect there is a temporal gap in which freedom makes itself manifest. Where there is no such gap, the effect would coexist with its cause and there then would be no passage of time. An effect occurs after its cause. In the interval between the two, a process of causation takes place, a process that is unique, having a nature and details that were never before and could never be again. The process of causation is a free, unpredictable, new occurrence that converts a future effect, an effect made possible by a cause, into an actual effect, an effect existing in a real present time.
Because all effects are the outcome of processes of causation, freshly constituted when and as they occur, no effect can be known in its concreteness before it in fact exists. We are unable to know the detailed nature of the future, not because our knowledge is a limited knowledge—which of course it is—but because there are no details in the future for us to know. Not even God can know what will in fact ensue tomorrow. God cannot know this for the same reason that he cannot contradict himself, do evil, make himself impotent, ignorant, or foolish. Just as his omnipotence is the power to do only what can be done, so his omniscience is the power to know only what can be known. He cannot do what cannot possibly be done; he cannot know what cannot possibly be known. God cannot know exactly what tomorrow will in fact bring forth. He can now know only what is possible, what might be tomorrow. Nor can the prophet go further. It is the mark of the false prophet to claim to know the future in detail before it occurs. Prophecy is wisdom pointing to what will most likely occur as a consequence of iniquity; it is not fantasy masquerading as fact.
The process of causation is constituted by the actions of independent, interplaying individuals. Each of these, inanimate or animate, brute or man, freely acts to realize an objective, a good with which it is concerned. In the course of its activity, each encounters resistance, preventing it from realizing its objective. If that resistance cannot be overcome, the individual has no other recourse, if it is to have a realizable objective, but to change the direction and objective of its concern. The living arise from the non-living and men from animals as the outcome of such free alterations in the character of resisted concerns.
The theory that life or man are special creations ought to be abandoned as sacrilegious because unreasonable. One does not add to the glory of God by asserting that he produced a universe so decrepit that it can decay but cannot improve. The universe does not need constant tinkering. What it contains it produces from within. It is self-contained and self-sufficient.
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The levels of nature are levels freely achieved. They are domains of different types of individuals, each of which exercises an intrinsic freedom in a characteristic way. The levels are, at the same time, places in which beings exhibit a single universal good in different degrees.
This last assertion has a strange ring for us today. We have been so pleased these many years with our escape from the Ptolemaic astronomy, with its stress on this tiny world as the centre of the universe, that we have failed to note the price we have paid. Our modern epoch began when we wisely stretched our sciences to the borders of the cosmos. But, because those sciences had no room for value, we at the same time foolishly contracted our sensitivity to the point we took to be ourselves.
We insisted that the world was made up of electrons, protons, atoms, that there was a stone age, and that there were star clusters outside our astronomical system—though none of these were open to observation. We defined this vast universe as little more than a tissue of formulae, a matrix of mathematical units, coldly, noiselessly, and meaninglessly working out mathematical relations. There is much to be said for this modem view of ours, but it is surely a little dogmatic for us to suppose that it encompasses the whole of reality. It is folly to deny reality to beauty and goodness—particularly when it is these above all that can be constantly and directly observed. We certainly have not made much gain if, while making our sciences Copernican, we make our values Ptolemaic, spinning the one around the stars while forcing the other inside fallible foolish minds. The world contains values as surely as it contains mathematical relations. If we are to be truly modem in spirit, we must stand opposed to the thinkers of the last three centuries and agree instead with the ancients, for it is the Hebrews and the Greeks who hold most firmly to the “Copernican” thesis that things are good or bad because of the natures they have and what they do, and not because a man says they are. The glory that belongs to the lily and that of the rose have nothing to do with the question whether or not men exist, or whether or not they are interested in flowers. “God said let us call light good, and lo the light was good” is bad Hebrew, bad Greek, and bad philosophy.
A non-anthropomorphic theory of value allows one to affirm that man has a greater value than any other natural being because of the nature that he has. The superiority of man over other natural beings is an intrinsic superiority. It is not his possession or use of a peculiar body, mind, will, language, or tools that makes him superior—for there are many men who do not own or use these. His superiority over other beings is due to the fact that he and only he has a self—or if one prefers, a psyche or a soul—a constant, unique, private core inseparable from a body and concerned with the good.
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Other beings persist and are concerned with good. But only man is selfsame over the years and is concerned with the absolute good, a good pertinent to all. It is his self, standing apart from the body it quickens and with which it is united to constitute a single being, that can continue unchanged while the body alters in appearance, nature, act, and power. It is his self that directs him to that single, all-embracing good, to embody which is to be perfected.
The good that concerns the self ought to be realized. On being realized it will be better than it was. As unrealized it therefore is not good enough; it is inferior to what we attempt to achieve by realizing it in this world of ours. The self, so far as it succeeds in realizing the good, necessarily benefits that good.
The good that concerns the self is universal, pertinent to everything. To realize it fully is to embody it everywhere. Man, therefore, solely because he is a man, solely because he has a self and is therefore concerned with the one universal good, has an infinite responsibility. He ought to realize the good everywhere. He must make use of a mind to know just how that responsibility is to be fulfilled, and must make use of a will in order to bring about what his mind discloses. But no matter how hard he tries and what he does, he will fail to do all he ought.
Man, because he has an infinite obligation and a finite power, is a necessarily guilty and tragic being who does not and cannot do all he should. A man might try to escape from this Hebraic conclusion by echoing the question of Cain. But the reply to him must be the same. To detract from one’s responsibility is to detract from one’s humanity, to stand apart from human kind. A man has infinite value because he is infinitely obligated. It is his duty to care for whatever is nourished by the nature that mothered him.
No man can fulfil his obligations fully. All are tainted with this original, native sin. Theologians have confused this sin, which is a sin of omission, a sin that follows from the fact that man is a finite being with an infinite reach, with the sin of commission, the sin of freely choosing to do what is wrong. Since men are and must always be finite, they cannot as individuals avoid committing a sin of omission. None can rightly look to a Messiah to wipe away such a sin. The function of a Messiah is to make it possible for men to act together so as to circumvent it. The true Messiah introduces men to a way of life in which they together can do what is beyond the power of each. Men must work together as a unity if they are to do all they ought. The sin of omission is avoidable only in that ideal Messianic state where all men do what each man should.
The sin of omission accounts for the need of a Messiah. Its acknowledgment stands in the way of that easy optimism which supposes that man is somehow already redeemed—an optimism that demeans man by demanding that he see himself as an adjective of another man, who is perhaps divine in intent, origin, or function. That optimism defines each of us as at best but half a man, as a man who is dependent for his hope, his meaning, and his being on the substance of another.
The dignity of man is the dignity of one who suffers not vicariously and partially, but in himself and unrelieved. It is the dignity of one for whom the tragedy of existence cannot be solved or negated by the death of another, no matter how pure and good, and to whom the fundamental flaw in man is not his arrogance or his ambition, his willfulness or his ignorance, but his impotence, his inability to do all a man should. If men are already redeemed in principle or in fact, the world for the Jew has already come to an end.
There are exultant shouts of joy in the Old Testament; a heavy cloud of sadness hangs over the New. But the story of the Old is that of a broken covenant, of what men should but cannot and do not do, whereas the point of the New Testament is that the covenant is at an end and men therefore already renewed. Judaism is one long drawn-out lament; for the Christian this is but the necessary birth-cry of a joyous miracle. The two positions cannot be one, for it is of the essence of Judaism to deny and of Christianity to affirm that there was a day some two thousand years ago in which darkness suddenly and forever gave way to blinding light. Judaism is Moses in the wilderness straining to reach a land he knows he never can. For the Christian this truth is but the necessary first act in a Divine Comedy. The history of the universe for the Christian is in principle already told. It is a delightful tale with but a spicing of momentary woe. For the Jew history is in the making. It has peaks and valleys, goods and bads, inseparably together and forever.
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On the understanding of the sin of omission the fate of diverse creeds depends. The issue, though at the very heart of the history of civilization, and though of vital concern to theology, is outside the interest of common man. His concern is with ethical questions, with the right and wrong men freely do. His assumption is that there is a universal standard in terms of which every voluntary decision and act is to be judged. The assumption, I think, is correct. It is a sin of commission for a man wantonly to kill his friend. This is always wrong. It is wrong in China and wrong in Brazil. It was wrong in the days of the Egyptians; it is no less wrong today. It is wrong for all, because it is in conflict with what is universally right to do.
We can and ought to go further. It is wrong not only to kill a friend wantonly, but wantonly to kill anything. We can go further still. It is wrong not only to kill unnecessarily, but it is wrong unnecessarily to reduce the value of anything. Every reduction in value must be justified as an unavoidable wrong that will be compensated for by the production of at least an equal good. An eye for an eye is a sound and modest demand once it is freed from the misconception that justice is done when losses are multiplied. “An eye for an eye” means that for an eye that is taken at least an eye ought to be given. It is a good ethical maxim that science today is showing us how to fulfil. It would be folly to say that an eye ought to be taken so as to wipe out the wrong that the loss of an eye involves.
A man inevitably obligates himself to make good whatever losses in value he freely brings about. If he cannot fulfil his obligation, he reveals himself as one who acted without possible justification. We do unjustifiable wrong when we voluntarily act so as to destroy a value for which no compensation is possible and promised. We are guilty men, not only because we do not fulfil a cosmic obligation to benefit all things, but because we do not fufil an ethical obligation to make good the losses we voluntarily bring about. We are always guilty because we are beings too weak to do all we ought; sometimes we are guilty as well because we voluntarily do wrongs we cannot possibly make good.
The pathos of the tale of Job lies in part in his inability to see that the avoidance of a guilt following on wrongs voluntarily committed has no bearing on the punishments that the guilt or tragedy consequent on acts of omission might reasonably entail. The pain that should accompany a suffering for wrongs voluntarily done ought not to be confused with the suffering that sometimes comes to men because they are limited, faulty instruments of the good. Job was not punished because he was unethical, because he did wrong voluntarily, but because he was finite, because he was a man. Nor was he punished for the sake of others, to redeem them or to improve them. He was punished as Job, and the punishment was deserved. What is remarkable is not the fact that he was punished so severely, but the fact that there are so few who are punished as much, though all deserve his punishment and more. Rightly understood, the story of Job makes evident that everything short of suffering, profound and continuous, is an undeserved gift calling for thanksgiving.
It is unfair to Job to suppose that punishment is deserved only if it is invoked against the deliberate perpetrators of ethical wrongs. Job was an ethical man. His innocence as an ethical being but pointed up the truth that ethics and religion are quite distinct. An ethic in fact requires no religious sanction, explanation, or support, as is evident from the fact that a basic rule of ethics such as the Golden Rule is known and followed by men who are not religious. A religion, on the other hand, may demand such unethical acts as the sacrifice of an Isaac. The commands of ethics and religion may be, but are not necessarily always, compatible, and so far as they are compatible, the one must be subordinated to the other. It is desirable that religious men endorse and encourage the ethical life, but they have lost their religion when they forget that for them ethics must play a subordinate role. Ethics should, from the perspective of religion, stand to religion as the lower to the higher, the easier to the harder, the negative to the positive, commands to avoid to commands to do.
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So far we have not distinguished between natural and revealed religion, a religion rooted in a cosmology and a religion rooted in God. The distinction is important. A natural religion demands that men do what they know to be good to all. A revealed religion makes equally positive but quite arbitrary demands. What is revealed is always arbitrary in the sense of demanding what for ethics and natural religion may be wrong or indifferent. The commands of God must have an arbitary cast, for nothing finite could be adequate to his intent.
The crucial problem for the Jew is whether he will hold to a natural or a revealed religion. And if he decides for the latter he must be prepared to believe and do what may appear to him and all his fellows wrong or absurd. The faith he has is Abraham’s—that what is revealed is more right and more reasonable than anything else could possibly be—that what he takes God to assert and command are nought but the really true and the good. But he who with most of us accepts only a natural religion can be a Jew as surely as he who clings to a revealed religion, and in addition he has the virtue of not defying what men know to be ethically wrong.
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We have now swung full circle back to the point at which we began. The true and the good transcend all creeds. But for the Jew they have special significance because they are ideals he endeavors to embody, because he has faith that they support the things he now affirms and the acts in which he now engages, and because it is these that he discerns to be the meaning behind or over against the apparently absurd and wrong things he might find himself divinely urged to think and do.
To be true and good the Jew must concern himself with the good and true. Most of all he must avoid adopting beliefs and practices not sanctioned by his thought or his God. For him there is no such thing as a religion that asks him to do only what he can, no such thing as a world in which men are not responsible, no such thing as a good that exists only in thought. He ought to do what he cannot, is free to do what he ought not, and loves what he has not. An optimistic theology, a deterministic cosmology, and a relativistic ethics—these are the indelible marks of the gentiled Jew. A true, good Jew lives in the light of the fact that in this world there is no good without evil, nor evil without good, that man is free to make himself better or worse, and that all that happens is to be judged in terms of universal principles applicable to all beings everywhere.
