The Jewish Rock and the Christian Hard Place

Dr. Elliott Malamet

The central question of any Western religion is how is it possible to connect with a God? What would that kind of connection look like? Is a “relationship” with God the wishful thinking of deluded believers, or the deepest truth of existence? Judaism and Christianity take radically different routes to the God-human connection. Jews pray to an invisible, incorporeal [no body] God; Christians pray to and through the man Jesus, in whom, Christians say, God became flesh. So, if you are Jewish and you want to figure out what all of this means for your own spiritual life, what directions can you take? How is it possible to connect to a God that is described on Jewish thought as invisible and, from a common sense point of view, unreachable? Read on…   

“One evangelical woman told me that I should have coffee with God. She had coffee with God all the time, hung out with God, she chatted with God and talked with God as if he were a person.”  Professor T.M.  Luhrmann, author of When God Talks Back.

“Some years [ago], I had a conversation about religion with a devout Catholic friend. When I explained that I was an observant Jew and began each day by reciting the morning prayers but wasn’t really sure how God fit into my life, he was perplexed. When I admitted that these theological questions didn’t really occupy much of my attention and certainly weren’t particularly germane to my life as an observant Jew, he became agitated. And when I told him that I certainly wasn’t sure if Jewish law was divine or simply the result of two millennia of rabbinical interpretations, he threw up his hands and said: “How can you do everything you do, and live a life with so many restrictions and so many obligations, if you don’t even believe in God?” Jay Lefkowitz, “The Rise of Social Orthodoxy.”

Despite the ubiquitous (and lazy) phrase “the Judeo-Christian tradition”, there are striking distinctions in much of what passes for Jewish vs. Christian spirituality. Perhaps the most glaring difference is the attitude not to belief in God (which is an abstraction) but more crucially, to the reality of a daily relationship with God. For many Jews, even to mention that phrase causes their eyes to glaze over, and they will say, unwittingly, “that sounds sort of…Christian.”

Are there exceptions to this in contemporary Jewish world? Yes, but in very moderate amounts, with the most popular example being a contemporary revival of the work and inspiration of Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav, with his popular credo ”it is a mitzvah always to be happy.” The writings of Rebbe Nachman, who lived in the Ukraine and died in 1810 at the age of 38, manifest these “Christian” kinds of sentiments with perhaps the plainest and least self-conscious reaching out to God that one will find in the modern Jewish lexicon.

Here is one of Rebbe Nachman’s teachings: “Set aside time each day to meditate and pray alone in a room or some meadow and express your innermost thoughts and feelings and personal prayers to God. Plead with God to draw you closer and let you truly serve Him. You should hold these conversations in whatever language you speak best. Our set prayers are said in Hebrew, but if this is not one's native language, it is difficult to use it to give expression to all one's innermost thoughts and feelings and the heart is less drawn after the words. It is easier to pour out your heart and say everything you need in your own language.”

Not the kind of thing you will ordinarily hear in conventional Jewish discourse.

Why many contemporary Jews are uncomfortable with this unembarrassed approach to the divine may be traced partly to the influence of the way we worship (many structured and repetitive prayers, with little emphasis on spontaneity, often expressed in ancient or medieval language); and partly a result of the great skepticism that modern Jews bring to the whole notion of faith in God.

The self-undermining element of Jewish prayer came home to me through a very unlikely medium, a comment made by the inimitable ZZ Top guitarist Billy Gibbons. He was discussing how he started out as a very young guitarist and at one point shared a dressing room with the legendary bluesman BB King. King asked to try out Gibbons’ guitar and, after a moment, commented “these strings are a little heavy...my question to you is 'why you workin’ so hard?’”

For many Christians I have met, that would be their question me as a Jew – “Why you workin’ so hard?” Why does your religion imagine a God who is invisible and unknowable? Why does your prayer experience feel so removed? To them, it’s like creating a game and then turning around and making the rules so difficult as to make the game almost unplayable.

I could, of course, throw back at such inquiries the example of Rebbe Nachman as well as many sincere contemporary Jewish educators and religious figures desperately trying to inject “the spiritual” in the Jewish conversation. They too will speak of “talking to God,” treating God as someone you can share intimate thoughts with and bare your soul. But for all of this effort, does it prove to be an almost unfulfillable task?   Because as all of us know, real intimacy is fleshly as well as ghostly. Although I can conjure up a God image in my mind, and talk to it in perpetuity, is that really a satisfying alternative to the feeling of seeing and touching a real body in front of me, with whom I can laugh, and upon whom I can lay my head down and cry?

Which brings us to the Jewish unsayable, the belief in Jesus Christ as the saviour, the object of all of one’s hopes and longings. The red line for a Jew is the idea of a human being as divine, as somehow God and man all wrapped up in one package. What Christians call salvation, Jews call idolatry. It is a bridge that will not be crossed. And yet, there is a poignant outcome to this irreconcilable clash of theologies. For the Jew, Jesus is untenable as an object of worship. In the Jewish imagination, praying to a God/human is not just heresy. It is, perhaps far worse, simply ludicrous. But on the other hand, does that condemn Jews who care about such matters, to forever be workin’ too hard?  

I am arguing that for the well-intentioned Jew of modern life, one who actually takes the notion of a spiritual life seriously, this creates an almost unsolvable paradox. The person I envision is neither alienated from Jewish life and practice nor, on the other hand, comfortable with what a friend of mine calls the country club atmosphere of many contemporary shuls. Such men and women want to “find” God, and they want to do so within a Jewish framework. They seek out guides who will go beyond rote Jewish teaching; they practice meditation; they hungrily devour books and articles about “the spiritual”; they look for teachers who talk about “connecting to Hashem.” But at the end of the day, what can be found when God is, for all intents and purposes, located within one’s mind and dreams? 

I perfectly understand, and even empathize with the immediate and indignant rejoinders to my picture. Hashem, in the words of the Kotzker Rebbe, can be found wherever you let Him in. God is in the “still small voice” as the prophet Elijah learns in the Book of Kings. God is inside the heart. You have to read the signs of your life and God will be found there. And so on.

I have heard these and other salves for the open wound of divine silence for many years. But I am not buying in. But nor can I relate, in any way, to the idea of worshipping a human being from ancient Palestine or calling upon him to save my life and my soul. The Jesus door is closed for someone like me, and not just because it is bad Judaism. It simply does not resonate for me as person, does not make its way past my conception of what is real.

But I am fully, painfully aware of the immense shortcomings of Jewish prayer, of sending prefab words out into space, never—and I mean never—knowing if they have reached their address or even if such an address exists.

What’s a poor boy or girl to do?

Not to return to the country club, for a start, though it must be admitted that many find the synagogue service comforting and gain genuine solace from its structure and familiarity. I do not belittle the contentment they find there. Others enjoy the socializing they can do with their friends and shul running mates (indeed, for some, that is the chief attraction). Yet it seems to me the answer lies elsewhere.

That approach, or the beginnings of one in some inchoate fashion, has to do with restructuring Jewish communities as ones of love, concern and compassion, as opposed to judgment or ritualistic preoccupation. Because despite the modern emphasis—indeed, nearly an obsession, a sacred right—on our individual self-expression and our fierce proclamations of the need for personal authenticity (none of which I am opposed to in principle), I do not believe that we can navigate our spiritual worlds only by ourselves.

The British paediatrician and psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott once remarked: “There is no such thing as a baby…whenever one finds an infant one finds maternal care, and without maternal care there would be no infant.” The idea that “there is no such thing as a baby” stems from Winnicott's observation that the infant’s self is forged, not on some developmental island, but through its relationship with mother, that in fact the way we experience ourselves is always through relation with the other. We learn and grow by being in “relationship with,” and this is true of growing one’s faith as well. Theoretically, faith can be developed in isolation—witness the inner work done by monks and recluses in all traditions--but like Winnicott’s baby, we become more through the relationships which show us back to ourselves.

And so I dream of a community that fosters a shared quest for enlightenment, in which knowing what prayers mean would be far more important than who gets an aliyah to the Torah, or how much did the rabbi’s speech entertain me, or whether there will be a good kiddush at the end of all of my dutifulness. In which silence would not need to be filled but would be relished. In which love gently overcomes judgment. In which people would commune in the core meaning of that term, and not simply be a mass of bodies duplicating one another’s movements and words. In which matters of real importance would be unabashedly discussed and where probing, difficult questions would be embraced, and facile, easy answers would be discouraged. In which the safety of denominational dogmas would be cast off for the risk of real encounter with those with whom one does not agree. That is my Jewish community. Whether it can be found in the material world is another question. 

Otherwise, there is always BB’s advice to Billy Gibbons: “Get some light gauge strings.”

Please feel free to write me at ellliott@livingjewishly.org and share your thoughts, ideas and experiences, and your questions.

Further Reading:

• T.M.  Luhrmann, When God Talks Back, 2012
• Jay Lefkowitz, “The Rise of Social Orthodoxy.” Commentary Magazine, April 2014.
• Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man’s Quest for God, 1954
• Arthur Green, Tormented Master: The Life and Spiritual Quest of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, 1979.