7 minute read
In the Beginning, All There Was, Was God
Rabbi Howard Laibson | Rabbi Emeritus, Congregation Shir Chadash
Early next year, a book entitled, “A God We Can Believe In,” will be published by Wipf and Stock. It presents 27 essays that offer perspectives on God through the lens of Jewish Religious Naturalism. It is not the only understanding of God that is legitimate, but one for those who do not/cannot believe in a supernatural deity. The comments below contain some of the ideas in my essay. I present them here with the hope that other local rabbis will share their ideas as well, so as to open a conversation about Jewish views of God, a topic too frequently ignored.
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In the beginning, all there was, was God. For reasons that are simply unknown, God set about to create the universe, which obviously includes our world. Jewish mystics, who frequently personalized God in anthropomorphic terms, believe that God somehow felt a need to create, but there was no “place” for God to place creation. So, in an act of what we assume was supreme love, God contracted into God’s Self – smaller and smaller, more intensely compacted into the finest point of light we mere mortals might imagine – in order to make room for creation in what would then be the vastness of space. In the process of contraction (in Hebrew, tzimtzum), God’s divine energy burst forth, sending emanations of that energy everywhere. Kabbalists believe that the keilim, the vessels carrying the energy, were unable to encapsulate it and they shattered into sparks. Those sparks ultimately became “the stars, planets, stones, and living things of the universe” (Professor Richard Elliott Friedman, The Hidden Face of God, 1995, p. 228f). Picture an enormous explosion radiating light outward, massive amounts of energy flying in every direction.
Fascinatingly, this is very similar to how physicists and cosmologists understand the beginning of the universe. They don’t officially ascribe a divine role in this process, of course. But their perspective is that at one moment approximately 14 billion years ago, an infinitesimal area of energy became extremely compressed and dense (perhaps due to gravitational forces), until the pressure was so great that the energy burst forth in every direction. Eventually, some of that energy cooled and became material, and in innumerable locations was drawn together into communities of matter and energy, coalescing into the universe as we know it. This initial event became known as the Big Bang. It is interesting to note that this term was originally used in a highly derogatory manner in 1950, by British astronomer Fred Hoyle (Rabbi Josh Nelson, Judaism, Physics and God, 2005, p. 4), who thought the concept lacked credibility. The label stuck, and today, the Big Bang is generally accepted by the scientific community as the beginning of everything.
As a Jewish religious naturalist, I seek to harmonize, as much as is possible, Jewish theology and values with what we know about objective reality. I am a committed religionist, but I reject supernaturalism (including the concept of God as a non-physical, all-powerful, all-knowing conscious entity). While I embrace the results of physical science, I nonetheless believe, teach and preach the importance of spirituality in our lives. Along those lines, I insert the role of God into the process of the Big Bang (much like the mystics), but without the anthropomorphic supernatural entailments. For me, God is the Divine Purposive Energy that began creation and that drives all living creatures to live, survive, and when circumstances permit it, to thrive. I’ll have more to say about that momentarily.
For now, we should focus on the role of energy after the Big Bang.
Professor Daniel Matt (God and the Big Bang, 1996, p. 44) reminds us that, following the dramatic explosion of energy, “time and space began. But the early universe was an undifferentiated blend of energy and matter. How did matter emerge?”
“A scientist would say that the energy congealed. Matter is frozen energy. No nucleus or atom could form until some energy cooled down sufficiently that it could be bound and bundled into stable particles of matter.
“Einstein discovered the equivalence of mass and energy. Ultimately, matter is not distinct from energy, but simply energy that has temporarily assumed a particular pattern. Matter is energy in a tangible form; both are different states of a single continuum, different names for two forms of the same thing.”
The 16th century mystic Moses Cordovero, wrote, “Do not say, ‘This is a stone and not God.’” Dr. Matt adds, and as a religionist, I assert: “Divine energy pervades all material existence” (ibid.). Professor Friedman (ibid., p. 229) similarly states, “Some remnant of the divine light that burst in at the moment of the expansion persists. There is a residue of divine manifestation in every being.” Those sparks of divine energy are part and parcel of everything – animate and inanimate. The timehonored phrase that, within all people, there is a spark of the divine (See Yismach Yisrael on Pesach Haggadah, Rabban Gamliel’s Three Things, 7:1, each person is enjoined to recognize his/her essence as an allusion to the divine spark found in each of us) should, in my view, be taken literally.
In other words, the collections of energy and matter that emerged from the Big Bang are all reflections of their source, God. All of these collections, and everything that grew out of them, everything that evolved from them, remain reflections or extensions of God.
From the well-worn path of evolution on this planet, we begin with single-celled bacteria and, over a great deal of time, we see the development of plants, insects, all sorts of animals, and ultimately arrive at the emergence of human beings. It would be hubris to assume that we are the final stage of that evolutionary path. But for now, we are at the top rung of the evolutionary ladder. As we observe this entire process, we can readily discern its purpose – LIFE: the drive to survive and thrive. Studies of evolution have indicated that each species (and an individual within a species) must meet three specific needs in order to maintain its existence: nutrition, security, and offspring. A species must eat, survive
and reproduce. Rabbi Ralph Mecklenburger (Why Call It God?, 2020, p. 69) has written about this and the broader goal of what I call thriving. “In the context of purpose and meaning we must raise the stakes beyond survival and aspire to excellence . . . A social species, to thrive we require cooperation and thus exemplary character – trustworthiness and decency.” Dr. Matt (ibid. p.62) summarizes this long process of evolution by saying “… we have learned not only how to survive, but how to thrive. We created art, science, philosophy, values, civilization.” Indeed, we have. We still are.
In this connection, it is important to know that the most frequently mentioned name of God in the Bible is YAHVEH, which means “the One who causes to be.” God brings everything into being, through the explosive Big Bang and the perpetual growth of evolution. The result is, eventually, the emergence of a vast array of species of living things. Surely, this is the purpose behind God’s emanations of divine energy. Professor Daniel Matt (ibid., p.28) indicates: “If God spoke the world into being, the divine language is energy; the alphabet, elementary particles; God’s grammar, the laws of nature.”
And now I ask the reader to discuss the above with family, friends and your rabbis. Feel free to disagree with my perspective. Articulate your own.
