On God’s Holiness and Mystery in Judaism

In The Natural History of Religion, David Hume claims that the human mind has difficulty holding on to the pure (i.e., unencumbered) idea of divine simplicity, and thus tends to apply familiar (i.e., human) attributes or qualities onto that idea (i.e., anthropomorphism), as if hanging ornaments on a naked Christmas tree. Eclipsed or compromised, or even lost entirely, is the quality of God being wholly other, and thus being qualitatively different than us and anything in our world. The Christian theologian Dionysius grasped this idea in his claim that God goes beyond the limits of human conception, perception, and sensibility (i.e., human emotions). The Biblical claim in the Book of Job that God is angry with Job’s “friends” for making statements about God’s ways without knowing them can be analyzed with an eye towards both viewing anger as only going so far with respect to God and being critical of the “friends’” presumption in assuming that God’s ways are within the limits of human cognition (i.e., theories). Rather than go to a negative theology wherein God is thought to be ineffable, I want to stress the value of recognizing both distance and mystery as being indispensable with respect to our relation to God lest we reduce God to our various masks of eternity.

The full essay is at "Holiness and  Mystery of God in Judaism."

Hinduism and Judaism on Deities and Transcendence

A basic tenet of the Advaita (non-dualist) Hindu philosophy of Shankara holds, “If saguna points to brahman’s immanence, nirguna points to brahman’s transcendence. . . . superiority should not be accorded to the nirguna mode of discourse.”[1] Being a non-dualist, Shankara held that brahman is one, since reality or existence is unitary, and thus brahman as existence and reality of all is indivisible ontologically. Applying David Hume’s separability thesis from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, the distinction between nirguna and saguna can be understood as one made only by human reason, which does not mean that nirguna and saguna are separate entities. In short, we make the distinction; it does not belong to brahman itself. Lest it be thought that nirguna brahman has no analogue in Western philosophy of religion, we need only bring in Spinoza, whose nirguna-like God is so different from the saguna-comparable Abrahamic personal deity that both Judaism and Christianity banished his texts; Judaism excommunicated him. The tremendous qualitative difference between saguna and nirguna brahman can be useful to anyone trying to understand why Judaism excommunicated Spinoza, which is not my task here. Rather, taking nirguna brahman as reality or existence of everything, which, like Spinoza’s notion of God, itself has awareness, I want to stress both how much this differs in kind (i.e., qualitatively) from both Hindu deities and the Abrahamic deity, and the more fundamental point that brahman is One. In spite of the qualitative difference, keeping the Hindu concept of nirguna brahman in mind while thinking about the personal deities that are consistent with saguna brahman is useful.

The full essay is at "Hinduism and Judaism on Deities."

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1. Anantanand Rambachan, The Advaita Worldview: God, World, and Humanity (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006), p. 90.