Rabbi Edmond Weiss, Ph.D.

10/11/2024

09/23/2024

https://jewishsacredaging.com/there-are-no-difficult-passages-in-the-torah/

Rabbi Dr. Edmond Weiss discusses God as expressed in the Torah, and God as found in Jewish thought and belief today.

09/12/2024

A CREDO FOR INTELLECTUAL JEWS

• God is a construct, the answer to the question: Why is there anything? And why is the universe the way it is and not some other way? One approaches this question, that is, one contemplates Spinoza’s God, through science, scholarship, and analytical philosophy. (Not through prayer and ritual.) Getting closer to the answer provides flashes of insight and understanding and an intense pleasure.

• This God has never done anything, does not do anything, has no will or preferences, cannot be said to know or care about anything, and does not (cannot) intervene in the laws of nature, which, are, in fact, the observable manifestation of God. Everything about God is necessity, not will or contingency. God, thus, is neither king, father, nor judge.

• Although the soul may exist as an idea, and even be immortal as a construct, there is no memory or perception except in living bodies. Thus, there is no comprehensible afterlife, and certainly no reward and punishment in the afterlife. Such notions as the pre-existing soul, the reincarnation of the soul, or the re-insertion of the soul into a resurrected body must be understood as poetic figures. Fear of a terrible, eternal afterlife is a shameless fraud, used by religions to terrorize their adherents.

• Religion and religious institutions must never be linked in any way with government. No divinity can attach itself to a secular government. Such linkages result not only in the obvious loss of religious freedom, but also, and more important, in the loss of political freedom and personal liberty. (This is as true in the US and Israel as in Tehran.) Diderot was exaggerating only slightly when he observed that mankind will not be free “until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”

• Although the Bible and other world scriptures contain occasional nuggets of ethical and moral wisdom, they are just as often ethically shallow and helplessly tribalistic in comparison with serious works of ethics by bona fide philosophers. This also means that the problem of “troublesome” or “difficult” passages in Torah is not a real problem at all; the behaviors and utterances in Torah—like those in any book—may be outdated, wicked, wrong-headed, and inconsistent or contradictory without engendering ethical dilemmas for the contemporary reader.

• If, as Jews, we assume that there are persuasive reasons for the mitzvoth (commandments), that they are not merely arbitrary, then understanding the reasons is sufficient for our adherence as rational beings. (Divine authority not required.) If, like Job, we are told that the reasons are none of our business, then we are justified in following only those mitzvoth that appeal to our educated reason.

• Scriptures are subject to the same forms of examination, testing, and criticism as any other work that claims to contain historical or factual truths. (Contradictions and inconsistencies are not “paradoxes.” When there are testable or provable claims of fact, the reader is entitled to assess their truth. Further, when scriptures purport to do ethical philosophy, they should similarly expect to be challenged philosophically.

• The State of Israel is a secular and political reality. Its safety and security are imperatives in a world that, for reasons still unfathomable, would like to have Jews disappear. (Many “Christian” enthusiasts seem to embrace Israel because they hope the end-of-the-world scenario outlined in John’s Revelation will begin after all the Jews return. Hard as it may be to believe, millions of Christians are eager for the world to come to an end.) Whatever our judgments about the way Israel was created, whatever our objections to its policies, Israel must survive, and it would be a terrible mistake for intellectual Jews to depend on religious extremists for its life.

03/16/2023

Putting the finishing touches on Making Arguments: Reason in Context, which will be available this spring.

03/16/2023

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03/16/2023

The Elements of International English Style: A Guide to Writing Correspondence, Reports, Technical Documents, and Internet Pages for a Global Audience

08/19/2022

08/12/2022

Shabbat Va’etchanan; Deuteronomy 3:23 - 7:11

Rabbi Edmond H Weiss, Ph.D.

In this week’s portion, Moses continues his recapping of the story of Israel, the events that have led the people to the shores of the Jordan. At this most poignant moment, Moses recalls God’s prohibition against him, the denial of entry into the land. Va’etchanan, he says:

Moses Pleads Deut. 3:23 - 27

"I pleaded with the LORD, saying: "O Lord GOD, you have only begun to show your servant your greatness and your might; what god in heaven or on earth can perform deeds and mighty acts like yours! Let me cross over to see the good land beyond the Jordan, that good hill country and the Lebanon." But the LORD was angry with me on your account and would not heed me. The LORD said to me, "Enough from you! Never speak to me of this matter again! Go up to the top of Pisgah and look around you to the west, to the north, to the south, and to the east. Look well, for you shall not cross over this Jordan."

It is interesting that Moses merely “pleads,” rather than arguing or persuading as in the past. He knows that God has vulnerabilities in debate and has used them several times to lessen the penalties on Israel. Is he reluctant to use his rhetorical powers in his own behalf? Is he exhausted from the decades of struggle?

A Jewish Paradox
Thus, at the core of this sedra is a paradox: Moses felt wronged, or at least deserving of a special dispensation. He was entitled to feel bitter and betrayed. Could not God, who had so often changed His mind and reduced the severity of His punishments in the past not be persuaded to reconsider the sentence of his most loyal servant, Moses.

The paradox is that Moses, who might be bitter and vindictive, chooses this portion to utter the most succinct affirmation of Jewish faith: the Sh’ma. The declaration (Hear, O Israel . . .) and the first two stanzas of the vi’ahavtah appear in this par’sha.

Loving God . . . Anyway
The message is clear and terrifying: Israel is to love God not only because of what He has done for them but in spite of what He has done to them. It is a strange covenant: We give everything (all our heart, soul, and strength) and God does what He wants to do. If God arbitrarily hurts us and we, like Job, demand an accounting, God says to us, as He said to Job: “And where were you when I created the earth!”

To be sure, it is easy to love God when all goes well, and not so easy when our children are ill or when the people we love have their lives cut short. And it is indefensible to hold, with some of the ultraorthodox, that there is a halachic basis for all the suffering and depredation. (The Holocaust meant to teach us a lesson, indeed!)

When we are in grief, instead of pleading with God--instead of protesting or suing--we praise the “righteous judge” and say the Kaddish, a song of highest praise, comparable in spirit and attitude to the Sh’ma.

So, there is no problem of evil, because there is not now, and never has been, a systematic reward for keeping the covenant. Life and death, happiness and suffering, are by any fair accounting largely independent of how observant we are. As J. Leibowitz (z ” l) observed in an interview once, we do not “conclude” that being observant is correct, we do not arrive at our religious conduct through analysis; we simply “decide.” We cannot decide what is true; that is a property of the external world, beyond our control. But we can decide what we will do and what we will say and what rules of conduct we will follow. So, some of us say the sh’ma and the kaddish . . . and that’s all there is to it.

Mitzvot from Va’etchanan
According to Maimonides, there are 12 of the 613 mitzvot in this week’s portion, several of them (highlighted) derived from the Sh’ma itself:

416 Not to covet another's possessions
417 To know that there is only one God the eternal, to believe in His unity or oneness, and that He alone is the creator....
418 To love God the Eternal, and to observe his laws
419 To study and teach the Law
420 To recite the Sh’ma daily
421 To wear the Tephillin on the arm
422 To wear the Tephillin on the forehead
423 To fix a Mezuzzah on the doorpost
424 Not to provoke the prophet or teacher who righteously corrects the people and instructs them to do what is right
425 To rid utterly the Holy Land of the pagans
426 Not to show pity or compassion in ridding the Holy Land of the pagans
427 Not to intermarry with pagans

Adonai is One
Modern Jews differ about the translation of Adonai Echad. Is it?

• God is One
• God is Unity
• Adonai Alone

It would be a historical mistake to transfer the notions of modern religions to these words by assuming, as we do nowadays, that all Jews, Christians, and Moslems worship the same singular God. Prior to the Babylonian exile, many of the tribes of Israel believed that Adonai was the most powerful among the many gods of the world; indeed, the names El and Ya reflect the major divisions within the early Jewish people. Some have speculated that it was not until the beginning of the Babylonian exile that these two gods became one, and not for a while after that until Israel decided that YHVH was the only true God in the universe.

My own interpretation of Echad is somewhat more contemporary. I believe that Oneness and Unity are “divine” notions in themselves. Early in this century, the mathematician/philosopher Gottlieb (!) Frege argued persuasively that we never actually observe one of anything in nature. Everything we see can be divided into parts; everywhere we point creates a vector with millions of items on it.

Thus, “one” is an abstraction, a construct applied to the world by the mind. Maria Montessori notwithstanding, we cannot learn to count by manipulating objects. Any child who sees “one” of something has overlaid a concept on the object.

Oneness precedes all experience and, since it is an abstraction, will survive the physical world. It is a quasi-mystical idea that enables human beings to count, build, plan, reason, and construct scientific models of the universe. Indeed, as inconceivable and unimaginable as the idea of God is, were it not for the notion of “one” we probably couldn’t talk about God at all.

One makes everything possible. Without it, we have no minds.