Is there a way to be Jewish today that brings together God, Israel, and Jewish peoplehood and that is available to Jews with very different conceptions of all three? If you’ve read this far, you won’t be surprised to hear that my approach comes wrapped in Maimonides’s teaching in his Guide of the Perplexed that to make sense of it all, we must both use reason and also simultaneously recognize the limits of our reason. We must think clearly and logically to find truth. We must not commit the error of believing there are definitive proofs for everything, or that everything we cannot prove is necessarily untrue. I cannot prove my answer with perfect and full demonstration. It can be criticized and rejected. If it contains contradictions, they are probably (certainly!) my own. Nevertheless, I owe it to you, my reader, to try. I also owe it to myself.
The answer that resonates for me brings us back to Jacob. Specifically, it brings us back to Jacob on the morning after the all-night struggle in which he saw Elohim face-to-face. On that morning, Jacob saw someone else face-to-face for the first time in many years. It was his brother Esau, whom he had not met since the day he stole Esau’s blessing and fled his father’s house some twenty years before.1
In that period, the book of Genesis recounts, Jacob had worked for his cousin Laban for seven years to earn the right to marry his beloved Rachel and for another seven years after Laban tricked him into marrying Leah instead. After that, Jacob, Leah, Rachel, and Jacob’s two other wives, Bilhah and Zilpah, remained in Laban’s house long enough for a total of twelve children, eleven boys and a girl, to be born.
When the time came for Jacob and his family to leave Laban, Jacob found he had to engage in yet another act of trickery to get what he believed (and that God told him) was rightfully his. In a kind of repetition compulsion of his initial flight from Esau and his home, Jacob fled again, this time not alone but with his family and livestock. The family went west, heading for Canaan. To get there from Mesopotamia, they would have to pass through the land of Se‘ir, the field of Edom, where Esau dwelt.
Jacob feared his brother Esau. When he heard that Esau was coming to meet him with four hundred men, he divided his camp into two, so that half might survive if the other were struck down. To propitiate his brother, he sent him in advance hundreds of sheep and goats, camels and cattle and asses. It was on the brink of a familial showdown that he remained alone at night and met the man or angel or god or God with whom he struggled.2
The climactic meeting between the two brothers did not go the way Jacob anticipated. Terrified that Esau would punish him for his past treachery, Jacob arrayed his family before Esau and prostrated himself seven times as a mark of submission. But here is what happened instead, delivered in the famously stripped-down narrative style of the book of Genesis: “Esau ran toward him and embraced him and fell on his neck and kissed him and they cried.” In place of confrontation, Jacob found love and reconciliation. When he offered his worldly goods to Esau, his brother replied, “I have much. My brother, may what you have be yours.”3
I have always been moved by this scene of brotherly love and tears, even more than by Joseph’s tears when he reencounters Jacob after many years of absence, in another chapter of the family’s painful story.4 What is so striking is the purity of the forgiveness demonstrated by Esau. Jacob had wronged him, by his lights and their father’s. They had struggled mightily with each other. But they were still family. Esau calls Jacob his brother. After years of separation, brothers embrace. They kiss. They cry.
Esau’s embrace of Jacob echoes the action of the being or Being who wrestled with Jacob the night before. The Hebrew words for “embrace” and “wrestle” are separated by just one letter of their three-letter roots.5 The biblical text uses the linguistic parallel to underscore the physical parallel. In the space of a night and a day, Jacob has been embraced in struggle and in love. He has struggled in embrace with God and been embraced by family with whom he has struggled.
Here, for me, lies the entry point for a Jewishness that is both familial and oriented toward the divine. To be a Jew, in this sense, is ultimately not, or not only, something one does alone. To be a Jew is also to struggle with God together, as a family, embracing one another. Sometimes, when we are very fortunate, we might feel, too, the experience of embracing the divine and being embraced by it.
That is why the word “Israel,” the name given to Jacob to memorialize his struggle, is more a collective noun than a personal name for Jacob. It is why we, and the rabbis, and the whole of the Jewish tradition call the individual Jacob but call his family the children of Israel. In encountering and struggling with God and becoming Yisra’el, he who strives with ’El, the individual becomes a people.
In turn, God’s covenant joins the people of Israel to God. Indeed, it is precisely the covenant with God that turns the individual descendants of Jacob into the Israelite people. The biblical covenant starts with God’s promise to the forefathers to make their children many, like the stars in the sky. Their collective relationship with God is what joins the people of Israel to one another. This covenant is more than a contract. It is, in the Bible and beyond, the strong force that joins God and Israel and the Jewish people.
In the picture I am painting, it is crucially important that God and the people and individual Jews all figure. Sometimes one must struggle with the divine, or with its absence, alone, like Jacob, and like Rabbi Steven Greenberg’s early literary persona Yaakov Levado, “Jacob Alone.”6 Most mysticism and most accounts of religious experience recognize this lonely aspect of the search for transcendent experience. To pray, to meditate, to reason, to reflect: all these begin to occur within the self, within the soul, alone.
But one who always and only struggles alone cannot genuinely partake in the collectivity that is marked by the name Israel. There can be no fully alone, fully private Jewish experience, as there can be no fully alone, fully private language.7 To be Jewish requires communication and connection with others. To communicate and connect requires others, requires a family, requires people. In the morning, Jacob finds his brother and finds embrace and love. “It is not good for man to be alone.”8 Greenberg, in his career, went from depicting the loneliness of Jacob alone to designing a new ritual of partnership and togetherness, a ritual for creating a nuclear family within the framework of the family-people that is Israel.
Similarly, a nationalism that tries to take God out of the picture and transmute Jewishness into an expression of pure peoplehood will not provide access to experiences of transcendent meaning that make life worth living. To live only for the group’s survival is a strategy of evolutionary cooperation. It is not a reason for being that can suffice for thinking humans capable of asking the question, why? For it to be worthwhile for the family of Jews to survive, the humans who make up that family must be joined in acts of meaning making. They must be oriented, somehow, to the divine, understood as that which would transcend mere existence.
Like all humans, Jews need others, need family, to prosper: If we are not for ourselves, who will be for us? But, also like other humans, Jews need to make sure their connection to others is oriented toward something greater, some power capable of helping us imagine love and kindness and compassion: If we are only for ourselves, what are we? God, understood however we may choose, stands for that aspiration to encompassing love that reaches all beings. The nation, I am afraid, loves only itself and its members. At its best, it merely tolerates others.
What we need, therefore, is a Jewishness that enables us, as a people-family, to engage together and alone in the collective and individual experiences of embrace and struggle with and alongside God. By thinking and speaking and feeling and being and, yes, arguing, we fulfill our part of the covenant. By being Jewish, Jews are seeking to fulfill God’s will, even if they doubt or disbelieve in God. We are trying to chart a course for what to do and how to live. We as Jews can accomplish that by gathering in our familial and collective settings to try to make sense of our world and our experience.
The first of those settings is, always, the home. Jewishness begins at home with our immediate family. The Shema‘, the most fundamental element of the Jewish liturgy, drawn from Deuteronomy, enjoins us:
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your might. These words which I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall inculcate them to your children, and speak of them when you sit in your house and when you walk upon the way and when you lie down and when you arise.
I remember my father teaching me these words while we walked to the synagogue on the Sabbath, thus doubly fulfilling the biblical commandment. In fact, in my (fallible) memory, I can mark the precise spot where he first taught it to me, about a block from our house, climbing the hill toward the pond.
This love of God is a walking meditation—and a sleeping one, and a rising one, and one for all the moments of our lives. It is a particularly Jewish meditation, because it entails reflecting on words, words that are also laws. That means the meditation can issue forth in debate and disagreement. It means that debate is itself an expression of loving God. To disagree is to seek meaning. The meaning sought is the meaning of God’s words, the Jews’ only remaining evidence of God’s will. In that debate, we struggle with one another, with and alongside God. And we do it together, embracing, as a family.
The Sabbath table is a rich weekly setting for teaching and learning and experiencing the struggle with and alongside God together. The family is united by presence and enlivened by discussion. The reason for being there is to acknowledge the rhythm of the week, which mimics and recalls the rhythm of God’s acts of creation and rest. On the Jews’ Sabbath, when you pause, you reflect. When you reflect, you talk. There is no fixed agenda, except that some form of Torah is expected. That Torah can lead to or can consist in discussions of values, politics, and Jewish life. Disagreement is normal, because Torah calls for discussing and disagreeing about its own meaning. Together, the Jewish family tries to make sense of the world through the magic of Torah.
The Passover seder, mentioned before as the idealized site of Jewish familial engagement, takes this home-based struggle a step further. It has a fixed topic, Exodus in all its forms. It has a script, one designed to be modified and riffed on and argued about. That script famously boasts of its questions, four for starters. Here disagreement is normative. The Haggadah recounts rabbis’ arguments and opinions. It encourages expansion: “The more anyone discusses the Exodus from Egypt, the more praise is deserved.” The discursive discussion seems to have no end, and not only because it feels that way if you’re hungry. In the Haggadah we find the seder of the Mishnaic rabbis in Benei Berak, which ended only when their students told them it was time for the morning Shema‘. We find the instruction to invoke the Exodus “all the days of one’s life … to include the days of the messiah.” The endless seder is the endless loop of the Jews’ reflection on their existential condition and its relation to the divine. Can we be liberated? From what? Have we been freed? If so, what must we do to free others, and ourselves?
From the home, the family’s struggle alongside God moves outward to the synagogue and the study house, which can be one and the same for Jews. (The shul is, after all, just the school, put into Yiddish.) Now the broader community is present, not just close relatives and guests.
The rituals of prayer and study evoke, in their own ways, the two most fundamental aspects of Jewish engagement with the divine. We pray together to a God whom we address, but who remains silent and does not answer our prayers in words. Together we try to interpret God’s Law, invariably by weighing the suggestions of the many interpreters who have come before us. By continuing that interpretive activity, we become links in the chain of tradition. We respect what those who came before us taught, but we also expand on it by posing disagreements and postulating conflicts and contradictions that need resolving. If our forebears had exhausted their subject, we would have nothing more to say. That, somehow, has never happened in thousands of years of Jewish study, not even once.
The debates of the synagogue and the study hall cannot be contained within their walls. They radiate outward. As the venue expands, so do the topics—and so do the numbers of participants. As the Jewish community argues its way into the public sphere, it further makes itself into a people among other peoples. Here, for the last couple of centuries, the grand questions of peoplehood have dominated, becoming questions of the Jews’ place in the world and of the nation postulated and created by Zionism.
In the global era of nationalism and nation-states, the Jews have been arguing about what we are and who we should become. A discussion that began among Jews became one involving many more nations and peoples. From the time Israel began to be conceived as a nation in search of a state, long before 1948, the Palestinian nation came to be foremost among those for whom the debate mattered and who wished to be heard in it. In an important and tragic historical sense, Palestinian nationhood and Israeli nationhood became entwined.
In the wake of this complicated, troubled, troubling entwinement, the old Jewish question has been transformed into the Israel question of today. Neither question was destined to be discussed by Jews only. Yet it is also true that Jews who somehow participate in the Israel or Israel-Palestine conversation today—which means, approximately, all Jews—are doing something slightly different than non-Jews who participate in it. By their words, and by their actions, those Jews are performing their own Jewishness. They are struggling with and alongside God, asking what God has to do with the fate of the Jewish people. That is true of Religious Zionists who insist that God has given them the land. It is equally true of Jewish non-Zionists and anti-Zionists, whether they are Traditionalist, Progressive, or Godless Jews.
The fact that Jews debate Israel as Jews does not tell us which Jews are right in that debate. Nor does it follow from the existence of this debate that all sides are somehow correct. The Jewish tradition is rarely relativist. Jews who are arguing about Israel believe their own positions to be the best. They are, whether directly or indirectly, arguing about what is right. In the broadest sense, they are arguing about what God wants. My own contribution to this debate, in this book, is to show how it has come to dominate large parts of Jewish thought and belief; to notice the conflicts and challenges that development is causing; and to urge all concerned to conduct their Jewish debate in a way that respects the Jewish theology of the land of Israel, a theology ever conscious of the possibility of prideful sin.
If Jewishness is a struggling together with God, in and out of familial and divine embrace, is there anything especially appealing about it? After all, the Jewish people-family today, like the families in the Bible, could be described as troubled and divided to the point of dysfunction. As for God’s relationship with the people of Israel, encompassed in the theology of collective sin and collective punishment, it too has its dysfunctional aspect. Just ask the prophet Hosea, commanded by God to love a wayward woman who takes other lovers, “like the love of God for the children of Israel.”9
To someone approaching the Jews from another perspective, whether Christian or Buddhist or take your pick, the notion of a people-family that strives with God together, that struggles as it embraces and embraces as it struggles, may seem downright perverse. Why not drop all the struggling and liberate yourself by accepting and giving love in its purest and most idealized form? Alternatively, why not recognize the impermanence of attachment and free yourself from the pain of struggle, along with the other recurring pains of this world?
To these reasonable questions, neither I nor the rest of the Jews can give the kind of answer that would end the discussion with an interlocutor saying, “You know what, you’re right!” The best I can say is that Jewishness is a way of encountering other humans and the transcendent divine that refuses perfect, permanent solutions. The Jewish family is both loving and troubled, embracing and wrestling, because most real families are like that. The search for ultimate meaning is ongoing and feels as much like a struggle as an embrace because for nearly all humans, nearly all the time, that is how it works.
Holding up the ideals of pure love or pure non-self—of the perfect God-man or the arhat who achieves enlightenment—can be a tremendously powerful way of orienting our lives through aspiration and imitation. It takes just a second to realize that those ways of being must be much more appealing to the vast majority of people than the Jewish way, if you measure by how few Jews there are in the world and how many Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and so forth. There’s nothing wrong with that, from a Jewish perspective. The Jews have rarely, if ever, believed that the whole world should become Jewish.
To see what can make being Jewish appealing, it is enough to acknowledge that there are some types of people who could find it meaningful to struggle with God and embrace God; to struggle with one another and embrace one another in that same struggle-embrace. We have a name for those people: those people are Jews. They are not, I think, much like the happy families who are all alike. But they are a family and a people, take them for all in all.
If the God of the Jews loves them and wants them to love him and to love one another—if this God is, in the final analysis, a God of love—then why does the Jewish experience entail so much struggle? Why can’t we skip the struggle and go right to the embrace?
One possible answer is that we are human, and as a consequence we love as humans, which means we love partly in struggle. You don’t have to read Darwin to realize that humans simultaneously cooperate and compete, love and fight. Seen in these terms, the Jewish way of struggle with God is a way of encountering the divine, designed for humans who are all too human.
Another answer, one that resonates with the Hebrew Bible, is that love itself inherently combines wrestling and embrace. The God of the Hebrew Bible loves and struggles. That God, though a God of love, also says he is a God of anger and zeal and vengeance. That God loves all humans equally and yet relates to some people with special love and special rigor that leads to special punishment. The One Westers I met on the New Haven Green weren’t wrong in reading the Bible as evincing God’s special love for his chosen people. And I wasn’t wrong, not entirely, in wanting to read the same Bible as sometimes treating that love as nothing unique to the Israelites.
How could God’s love be anything other than pure and uncomplicated? The answer lies in the question of how a universal, transcendent Being could experience emotion at all, as a straightforward reading of the Bible would suggest God does. That question drove Maimonides in the direction of allegory. The earliest rabbis had already observed that the Torah speaks in human language. From this premise, Maimonides could conclude that the actions and emotions ascribed to God are not of the same kind as those we ascribe to mortals. The God of the Bible is a God of metaphor. God no more experiences feelings than does God have an arm that inflicted plagues on the Egyptians.10
The power of such allegorical reading remains unquestioned. Yet it is worth noticing that if God’s zeal or anger are metaphors, then so is God’s love. God’s love is a metaphoric representation of the kind of love we humans experience, love that incorporates struggle alongside embrace.
If that’s right, it remains possible, conceptually and theologically, to insist that God’s love itself inherently encompasses struggles. If so, wrestling and embrace may be twinned aspects of the same reality. Our families and our loves and our complex feelings about them are reflections of a dimly perceived relation with the transcendent divine.
I love my family. I struggle with my family. I love and struggle alongside my family. Together we love and struggle alongside our people-family with a God whose embrace we seek even if it should elude us. In this way, we may be alone and not alone. We may be with God and without. Together, we struggle, we strive, we embrace, we are embraced. If worthy, we may be able.