Reverent Unknowing

Eighteen years ago, Arnold Eisen surprised his academic colleagues in religious and Jewish studies by leaving his position at Stanford, where he studied American Judaism, to become one of its leaders as the sixth chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS). Now, after retiring, he has done something perhaps even more surprising, at least for a JTS chancellor: He has published an unguarded “personal theological essay” for nonacademic Jewish readers who, like him, are unabashed, undogmatic seekers.

Despite a lifetime studying religious thought, “I have little knowledge of God and what I do have is uncertain,” Eisen writes in the preface. And, of course, it is not just him. “No one who addresses God, seeks encounter with God, feels inspired by God, or believes they have come near to God,” Eisen writes, “can possibly have an accurate conception of the God whom they are addressing, encountering, approaching, or serving.” No human experience or authoritative text can provide that, though both play a role in Eisen’s reflections. Consequently, Eisen not only writes in a tentative conversational voice; he introduces the book with a full chapter of anonymized “letters to and from friends with whom I have talked about everything from religion and politics to children and careers.” In these letters, Eisen, or “Arnie” as his friends address him, tries to explain why “I want and need to know what it means to love my neighbor as myself, and to love God; I want and need guidance in following God’s commandments.”

Given how little he thinks he can know, Eisen’s focus in these letters and the chapters that follow is more on “yearning and desire” than on system or doctrine. “I have a strong sense,” he writes, “that God is both hiding and seeking.” God is both “in search of man,” as Eisen’s theological hero Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel famously put it, but also “hard to find.”

Eisen wants to hold on to the God of history, but he wants to hold on loosely. We should, Eisen counsels, reject the “appalling” notion that God was behind the Nazi slaughter, but that rejection, he insists, should not cause us to lose faith in “a God Who is present in history.” Eisen realizes that he cannot offer a comprehensive theory of divine providence that will make sense of the unspeakable horrors God seemingly allows to unfold. As he nicely puts it, theological reasoning is like long division: “The arguments rarely come out even with nothing left over.” Thus, whether we like it or not, “the path to theological coherence is blocked.”

He criticizes thinkers who claim to know too much about what God is doing at any given time. To say, for example, as Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik did, that God’s countenance was hidden at Auschwitz but was revealed again in the United Nations partition vote of 1947 “courts serious danger.” Such specificity and certainty are more than unwarranted; they are ultimately damaging to faith. To conceive of God’s involvement in these terms is to run the risk of feeling blessed by God in one moment and cursed in the next. Eisen’s reservations about interpreting historical events theologically are reminiscent of David Hartman’s remark that to affirm that God manages the affairs of Jewish history was to court “manic-depression,” a sense that God loved us one day and detested us the next. But Eisen does not go quite as far as Hartman. He maintains that God is involved in history—but he’s frankly unsure precisely how.

In his uncertainty, Eisen again follows Heschel, who wrote that “God’s will does not dominate the affairs of men.” As Eisen interprets him, “Heschel refused to lay responsibility for what happens in the world upon God—but he would never state categorically that God is not involved in human history.” As I understand Eisen and Heschel—though both are somewhat fuzzy on this point—God is present in history but more through summoning humanity to the good than through dictating history’s outcomes. According to Eisen, we do not know, we cannot know, how God works in the world, but one can nevertheless “walk on a path where God can be encountered from time to time.”

To put this somewhat differently, Eisen invites Jews to wait for God, but not passively. This is, he insists, what the rabbis of the Talmud counseled too: “Do not wait for God’s Messiah to make things right . . . but do not give up on divine assistance or ignore the help that comes to us, indirectly and invisibly, ‘from some other place.’”

But such activism doesn’t license presumptuousness. For instance, Eisen warns against the radical messianic project of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook and his successors. On this point, at least, he thinks haredim are closer to the theological mark. And yet there are times, according to Eisen, when God’s will is clear—or should be. The mandate to combat the evils of racism, for example, is unambiguously the will of God. And yet Jewish tradition cautions us not to forget that “in most cases political reality is not black and white.” To live covenantally, Eisen writes, we need both fierce passion and genuine humility.

To live covenantally with others and with God also means walking “the way of Mitzvah,” Eisen says, and this means giving up some measure of individual autonomy; it requires what Mordecai Kaplan called “a measure of involuntarism.” Mitzvot are best understood, according to Eisen, not as the edicts of a divine despot but as the loving guidance of a parent and a “senior partner” in the work of redemption. They are given, we must always remember, in the context of a genuine relationship between God and the Jewish people.

The norms of covenantal living, however, must never be frozen in amber. Eisen insists that halakha be interpreted—and, when necessary, reinterpreted—“reasonably, boldly, and lovingly.” Like many thinkers in the Conservative movement before him, Eisen takes the interpretive audacity of the talmudic sages as precedent for what he sees as necessary reinterpretations in our time. (He proudly notes, for example, that the Jewish Theological Seminary began to ordain LGBT students under his leadership.)

Eisen suggestively contrasts his approach to tradition with Kaplan’s Reconstructionist approach. Whereas for the latter, “the ancient authorities” famously had “a vote but not a veto,” for Eisen, tradition has more than a vote but less than a veto. It has more than a vote because “Torah stands at the very center of my thought and practice,” but it has less than a veto since it has no need of one. This is “because my obedience to the Torah’s instruction is not coerced, and because my Jewish community plays an active role in interpreting the law and keeping it vital and up to date.”

Yet while Eisen cherishes the idea of mitzvah, he seems less enthusiastic about the rigors of halakha. Approvingly citing Kaplan’s dismissal of at least some halakhic discourse as “pettifogging,” Eisen declares: “I have little patience for legal minutiae or the search for loopholes.” But can one have mitzvot without halakha? And if one is invested in some degree of “involuntarism,” where does one draw the line between careful halakhic reasoning on the one hand and what Eisen derides as “the sort of legal acrobatics that have driven many people to flee religion,” on the other? I do not pretend to have answers to any of these questions, but I would have wanted to hear Eisen say much more.

Although Eisen tells us that he dons “the symbolic equivalent of stereo headphones that enable [him] to hear in one ear the words written on the page and, in the other ear, the interpretations [he has] learned to give those words over the years,” he seems at times surprisingly unconscious of the interpretive license he takes.

Consider his comments on the Passover Seder, which he clearly loves. As Eisen describes it, the essential message of the Haggadah is that we celebrate Passover “because God redeemed your ancestors from Egypt and has redeemed you as well. You need to remember that you are now obligated to help redeem others.” Indeed, he says, “we come together at Passover to consider the consequences and implications that the story [of the exodus from Egypt] holds for us—and then to act on those lessons.” One of those implications, he writes—one gets the sense that to him, it is the most important one—is “our responsibility to work for the redemption of humanity”; we must, he says, “join the project of redemption.”

In this account of the Seder and the Haggadah, Eisen sounds very much like many of the American Jews he has devotedly studied for decades. We tell the story of the exodus and attempt to learn its lessons—lessons, we tend to think, that are primarily ethical and political. To be sure, those lessons are found in the Jewish tradition; indeed, they are present at its very center. According to the Torah, I have argued, Israel is summoned to build an anti-Egypt, a society that represents a radical alternative to the abusive cruelty it endured in Egypt. But, strikingly, none of this is mentioned or even alluded to in the traditional Haggadah.

One can debate the question of why this is the case, but that it is the case is beyond dispute. Eisen seems not to notice that the vulnerability of the widow, the orphan, and the stranger is not where the Haggadah has us focus, at least on this night. Perhaps on the night of the Seder, the Rabbis intended to direct our attention exclusively to the God who saved us, or perhaps they meant for us to experience the full arc of oppression and liberation and to consider the implications only on the morning after. I honestly do not know. In ignoring this—or perhaps simply missing it—Eisen also misses an opportunity to reflect on the gap between how many of us experience the Seder and what the traditional words do and do not actually say.

The God Eisen worships is hiding but not hidden, not Aristotle’s or Maimonides’s unreachable and unmoved mover. It is “axiomatic” for him, he says, that “God in some sense cares about human beings and our world.” Indeed, he writes, “I stake my life on the conviction that God exercises concern for humanity, however episodically and unpredictably.” God is involved in the world, Eisen is confident, even if “in a manner that surpasses human understanding.”

Eisen invokes the other modern theologian who—along with Heschel—has been most important to him, Martin Buber, to suggest the way in which we can see divine action playing out in the world. Buber says of the “wonder on the sea”:

The real miracle means that in the astonishing experience of the event, the current system of cause and effect becomes, as it were, transparent and permits a glimpse of the sphere in which a sole power, not restricted by any other, is at work.

Eisen writes that “one holds onto that experience ever after.” And yet God can sometimes seem impossibly far away, leaving religious believers to confront both bewilderment and pain. As Eisen poignantly confesses, “I bang my head against the wall that blocks the hidden things from view, frustrated at the mass of dark matter that threatens to swallow the light from the brightest stars.”

But Eisen will not allow—cannot allow—divine hiddenness to have the last word. God hides, yes, but nevertheless we can “find numerous traces of God’s presence,” not only in historical events like the splitting of the sea after the Exodus but also in our own lives. In a moving passage, Eisen describes “the most powerful religious experience of my life”:

My wife, Ace, and I faithfully attended a Lamaze class so that I could be helpful to her during labor. I was somewhat familiar, therefore, with the “current system of cause and effect” operating in the stages of fetal development, labor, and delivery. When my daughter emerged from the birth canal, and the nurses washed her off and handed her to me, I did two things immediately and without forethought. I danced around the room with her, singing the Supremes’ “Baby, baby, I hear a symphony.” And I said over and over, dozens of times, perhaps hundreds of times, uncontrollably, “Thank God, thank God.”

In an epilogue addressed to his wife, the Bible scholar Adrian “Ace” Leveen, Eisen declares:

The mysteries remain with God, of course; that’s a given, and it is frustrating; but the “revealed things” we share are so fulfilling that God’s absence is not impossible to bear by any means.

This passage is found just a few pages after Eisen’s confession that sometimes “we are not sure we can bear it.” The difference, which makes bearing it possible for Eisen after all, is the love we show one another. Eisen’s vision is simple but powerful: With the help of those we love, we live each day “without resolving any of the great mysteries but, hopefully, doing some good along the way.”

What is most compelling and powerful about Arnold Eisen’s writing is his honesty and vulnerability—and his unabashed willingness to share his religious yearnings. In a time when so many Jews and so many of our leaders—even our religious ones—are theologically tongue-tied, it is refreshing to encounter a thinker who confesses: “My longing for assurance of God’s presence and care is sometimes as intense as my craving for life itself.”