Is there a unifying Jewish theological worldview, one broad enough to include God as understood by Jewish Traditionalists, Progressives, and Evolutionists, and also the possibility that there is no God? I think the answer is yes. I want to suggest it is possible to characterize Jewishness in the way the Bible explains the meaning of the name Israel: to strive, struggle, and contend with God. The nature of the striving-struggling-contending differs for each form of Jewishness, as it does for each Jew. But anyone who embraces the self-definition of belonging to the people of Israel, in whatever way, will find something powerful and familiar and meaning-making in the process.
This Jewishness may have much in common with other faith traditions, but it is nevertheless distinct from them and wholly (holy) its own. It can involve accepting divine authority, but it is not the submission of Islam. It can involve acts of perfect faith, but it is not the same as the Christian acceptance of God and the divinity of Christ. It can involve mystical union with the divine, but it is not the same as the transcendence of Buddhism. It can involve radical skepticism or denial of God, but it is not the same as the familiar forms of agnosticism or atheism.*
Here I want to sketch this inclusive vision of Jewish experience briefly and suggestively. To do so, I will draw on that most distinctive of Jewish interpretive methodologies: midrash, a creative and open-ended way of giving meaning to the Bible—and the world.
To elucidate what unites very different Jewish ways of encountering God and the world, consider the enigmatic and beautiful story of Jacob’s nighttime struggle with a being who might be a man, an angel, a god, and/or God. This is the passage in the Bible where the word “Israel” is first introduced and its meaning explained. (It is also the same story that Rabbi Steven Greenberg used to express his own struggles with God and sexuality.)
The explanation, as we shall see, uses a Hebrew verb, sarah, which only occurs in the Bible in the context of Jacob’s encounter story.
Here is Genesis 32:25–31:
Jacob remained alone. A man wrestled with him until the break of dawn.
He saw he could not prevail against him. He touched the hollow of his thigh. The hollow of Jacob’s thigh was injured in his wrestling with him.
He said, “Let me go, for the dawn has broken.” He said, “I shall not let you go unless you have blessed me.”
He said, “What is your name?”
He said, “Jacob.”
He said, “Jacob shall no longer be said to be your name, rather Yisra’el, for you have striven with Elohim and with men and have prevailed.”
Jacob said, “Tell me your name.”
He said, “Why do you ask for my name?” He blessed him there.
Jacob called the name of the place Peni’el, “Because I saw God face to face and my soul was delivered.”
Before offering an explanation and explication, let me add one more text, from the book of Hosea, 12:4–5. This is the only other instance in the Hebrew Bible where this episode is mentioned and the only other place where the Bible uses the verb to strive, sarah. Speaking of Jacob, the prophet says, in poetic form:
In the womb he grabbed his brother’s heel;
By his strength he strove with Elohim.
He strove with an angel and prevailed;
He wept and begged him.
He found him in Bethel;
There he speaks to us.
Nearly everything about the material in these two crucial passages is puzzling. With whom did Jacob wrestle? The Genesis passage calls Jacob’s antagonist “a man.” But he has no name himself, and he has the power to confer a name on Jacob. That makes him sound like an angel. And indeed, Hosea says that Jacob strove with an angel.
Yet when the time comes to give Jacob his blessing, the “man” tells him that he, Jacob, has striven with Elohim as well as with men. Hosea echoes this formulation. Elohim is itself an extraordinarily tricky biblical word. It is one of several proper names of God. Sometimes it means “gods,” plural (as in, “on all of the gods of Egypt I shall perform wonders”).† Does the biblical text mean that Jacob has striven with gods, plural, as he has with men, plural? Does it mean that he has striven with a god named Elohim? In the Hebrew Bible, El and Elohim can both be names of God. The name Israel means, according to the text, “he strives with El.” Jacob gives the place the name Peni’el, roughly, “the face of El.” Does this mean that Jacob has striven with the one true God, Elohim? Has he seen God face-to-face, as only Moses is otherwise said to have done in the Bible?
I don’t propose to answer any of these challenging questions adequately. I want to focus, instead, on what it might mean to strive with God. It is from there that I seek to derive a picture of Jewish experience that might account for its extraordinary multiplicity while providing some degree of unification.
What does the verb sarah mean? Because it occurs in the Bible only in the two places I’ve mentioned, we might want to look at related terms. In biblical Hebrew, sar means an officer or someone who rules. The name Sarah is the feminine form of that same word. Ordinarily, then, we might think that to engage in the act captured by the verb sarah would mean to achieve mastery or rulership. The King James Version of the Bible translates our verse: “He said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed.” Taken a bit more literally, the meaning would be that Jacob rules over gods (or God) and men.
To deepen this possible interpretation, consider the Hebrew names that have the form of an imperfect verb followed by El. These ordinarily mean that El does or has done something. Yishma’el (Ishmael), for example, means “God hears.” Were it not for the story, we would therefore think that the name Yisra’el meant something like “El rules,” or “El rules as prince.” The narrative, however, wants Jacob to be the subject of the verb. So it might well follow that according to the narrative, the verse means to tell Jacob that he rules over El. He has after all, “prevailed” in the conflict.
The difficulty with this interpretation arises because to us, it seems like an anomaly or an impossibility for Jacob, a man, to rule over God. This leads us to interpret Yisra’el as striving or struggling or contending with God, not, as if it were possible, ruling over God. Even Hosea seems to share this concern. He says that Jacob “strove” with Elohim, but he restricts the conclusion that Jacob “prevailed” to the line where he says that Jacob strove with an angel. Even if Genesis says that Jacob strove with Elohim and prevailed, Hosea apparently cannot bring himself to say precisely that.
This impulse tells you a lot about Jewish perspectives on God. Whatever the ancient meaning of the biblical verse, for later Jews at least, it is unthinkable that a human could prevail over God. God is far too great for that to be contemplated. Yet God is a being with whom it is possible nevertheless to strive, to struggle, to contend.
For Traditionalists, God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-authoritative. For the people of Israel to strive with God, then, cannot mean, or must not mean, struggle with God’s power or authority. Instead, for Traditionalists, striving with God takes two other forms.
The first is the human struggle to accept the yoke of God’s authority in the face of our limitations and our incomprehension of God’s thoughts and ways. To struggle with God in this Traditionalist sense is to force oneself willfully to accept the judgment of Heaven, notwithstanding the impulse to question it. Almost no one in the entirety of the classical rabbinic tradition has suggested that it is easy—or even easeful—to accept divine authority, perform God’s commandments, and come to terms with the way God’s world appears to us to operate.
The most familiar Traditionalist manifestation of this struggle is associated with the Hasidic masters, who, in the tradition of Abraham demanding that God not destroy the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, challenge God’s justice. There is no doubt that ultimately they will acknowledge the finality and justice of the divine decree. The struggle comes from their effort to demand that God manifest mercy alongside judgment.
The second way in which Traditionalists can be said to strive with God is in the contentious effort to understand God’s Law. This is not so much struggling against God as it is struggling alongside God, striving and contending to comprehend the Law. From the Talmud until today, the main mode of studying and learning the Law is through argument and debate. To call the debate contentious is to understate the case considerably. The study of Torah can be likened to a war—a war of ideas, but a war nonetheless. “The zealotry of scribes” (kin’at soferim) is a rabbinic trope that describes the intense and intensely felt stance of oppositionality that Torah scholars constantly occupy. Even the most irenic great scholar of the Talmud lives and breathes disagreement, dissension, and dissensus. The words of God, says Jeremiah, are “as a hammer that fragments a rock.”1 The fragments, say the rabbis, are the multiplicity of Torah opinions: “Just as this hammer produces several sparks, a Bible verse may have several meanings.”2
Much of the contentious nature of Jewish collective life—among, it seems, all Jews, regardless of whether they study the Talmud directly or not—is influenced by the multiplicity of sparks produced by the tradition of Talmudic debate. Contending alongside God, Jews contend with one another. To outsiders, this contentiousness can look fearsome (which it is) and off-putting (which, to be honest, it sometimes is too). Yet in its essence, the unceasing argument among Jews is a reflection of divine worship, channeled through the human activity and obligation of studying God’s word to ascertain its best meaning, or meanings. If Jewishness is creative and productive, its creativity and productivity can be traced to this contentious mode of being-by-interpreting. Hence the paradox that Traditionalists, who so value authority and communal cohesion, communicate invariably in terms of (holy) conflict.
For Jewish Progressives, striving or struggling or contending with God partly takes the form of actively reviewing and revisiting God’s laws and God’s words with an eye to extracting moral truth from them. If Traditionalist Jews make the tradition alongside God by reasoning their way through the logic of the Law, Progressive Jews make their Judaism alongside God by determining which of its teachings to keep as essential and eternal and which to reject as the product of past human limitations. To Progressives, the word of God as passed to Moses and the elders and the rabbis is in need of editing and renewal in the light of morality as we are given to realize and apprehend it over time.
There is another sense in which Progressive Judaism counts as a struggle alongside God. There need be no struggle, for Progressives, about God’s goodness or morality, or even about God’s core message. God embodies love and social justice, as we understand those evolving concepts. The struggle alongside the God of justice comes in applying unfolding moral truths to the world. God too is struggling, say some Progressive theologians, to effectuate justice in the world. The original Kabbalistic conception of tikkun ‘olam, repair of the world, depended on the human duty to repair the fabric of the Godhead by fulfilling the commandments with proper mystical intentions. Progressive tikkun ‘olam calls for human struggle to restore the world to justice through good deeds.
The Evolutionist struggle with God is perhaps even more dramatic than the struggle of Traditionalists or Progressives, incorporating as it does aspects of both approaches. Evolutionist Jews in principle accept God’s authority and joyfully embrace the contention of Talmudic reasoning. But they are committed to doing so at the same time as they seek to understand what morality requires, so as to evolve the law in that direction. Consequently, Evolutionists find themselves struggling in both directions. They struggle to ascertain what morality demands, influenced as they are by the weight of the tradition. And they struggle to interpret the Law in good faith, even as they know what they want the Law to mean. No wonder their experience feels so much like a constant struggle to make meaning out of lived tradition that accords with contemporary moral intuition.
The extremity of the struggle is, however, also what makes Jewish Evolutionists so nobly archetypal as struggling Jews. The Talmudic imperative to second-guess every known truth, to ask “why” in the face of every jot and tittle of the Law, is made manifest in their daily efforts. Meanwhile, the Jewish need to do more than simply obey—to understand why one is obeying and what applied version of the law deserves obedience—is itself a recipe for near-permanent internal struggle.
For Jewish mystics, of whatever Jewish stripe, striving with God means striving for union with the divine order, and hence with both God and the universe. In wrestling with God, Jacob simultaneously embraces God. (I will return to this loving embrace at the end of part III.) The physical-metaphysical joining of bodies stands for the possibility of unio mystica, the conjunction of the human soul with the divine Soul that is sought by mystics of many traditions. This union would be a union beyond contention.
Achieving it, however, is not without effort. To the contrary. Kabbalah teaches spiritual exercises associated with knowing God, with shaping God, and with developing the practical mystical skills to attain union with God. Mystical union is figured, in much Kabbalah, as the joinder of the “feminine” and “masculine” elements of the Godhead into a transcendent union that is far beyond and above sex or gender. Jacob and the man and the angel and the gods and God become, and are, one. Jacob says that he has seen Elohim face-to-face. For the Kabbalists, that is the highest possible expression of mystical union. And it is achieved through the mystical mechanism of striving.
Godless Jews and cultural Jews and secular Zionists, in all their multifarious manifestations, are struggling with God too, whether they like it or not. To deny God is to wrestle with him, always. To deny God while still belonging to a Jewish people that classically self-defined in relation to God is a struggle of a still taller order.
The effort of Godless Jews to remain Jews is perhaps the most Jewish struggle of all. What greater mark of respect for God could there be than continuing to struggle with that God once one is utterly convinced of God’s nonexistence? What covenant could be more honored than one that continues to carry weight for people who are certain that, on the other side of that covenant, there is no divine partner? To secularize a nonexistent God and a self-fashioned covenant is to take on a struggle so hard and so basic that the effort can only be marveled at in wonderment, if not always in admiration. If, in certain moments, some Godless Jews have imagined they have prevailed over the deity, the challenges they face in explaining what Jewishness still means to them can reveal that the nonexistent God they refuse to worship is looming close, undefeated.
In biblical narrative and poetry, Jacob “prevails.” But does he? The Hebrew word here is yakhol, which can mean “to prevail” but ordinarily means to be able to do something. In the theological picture I am painting, it is not that Jacob prevails in his struggle. Jews can never prevail in their struggle alongside the divine, or against God—not while remaining Jews. In place of “prevail,” read, rather, “to be able.” Israel is the people who strive with the divine—and are able.
The capacity to strive with God and be able is neither more nor less than the ability to ask again and afresh the questions that have animated Jewish life for millennia, as well as new ones that are being added every day. So long as Jewish people undertake their efforts to make meaning through the rubrics of Jewish thought and life and practice, that striving will never be done. However Jewish beliefs about God continue to develop, however the actually existing state of Israel continues or does not continue to shape the major trends in Jewish belief, however Jewish peoplehood evolves, striving with God will remain the defining and unifying marker of Jewish living and thinking and breathing. The Jew who strives with God cannot be a bad Jew. And every Jew strives with God—because that is what it means to be a Jew.