Rabbi Leon Morris: I am Leon Morris, the Executive Director of the Skirball Center for Adult Jewish Learning, and I am pleased to be sitting here with NG who is the Skirball Center scholar in residence this year, and is Professor of Jewish Philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Dr. Gillman is a world-renowned thinker and teacher and the author of several seminal books, many of which we will mention and speak about in conversation today. Those books include, Sacred Fragments: Recovering Theology for the Modern Jew. Hello, Neil.

Dr. Neil Gillman: Hi.

LM: You write in one of your books about, at that time, your five-year-old granddaughter’s pronouncement that God is everywhere and you suggest –- borrowing from your colleague Professor Steven Brown –- that a more appropriate question than "where is God" is "when is God." What do you mean by this?

NG: My sense is that I was trying to have people focus less on locating God in the world, in nature, in the synagogue, and more at specific moments in our life experience. I was reflecting also on that famous Hasidic saying that’s been attributed to many different rabbis: "Where is God? Where you let Him in." I believe that was the way I was taught it. And my answer to that was I would not say so much ‘where you let Him in’ but where you put Him in. In other words, God is not a reality that we suddenly encounter. I am speaking frivolously– getting out of a stretched limo or something like that, but there are moments when we become aware of an extra dimension to nature, to history, to our life experience, and we can– we have the option– if we have the vocabulary, if we have the awareness to suggest that at those very, very special moments God is present. But that’s not an objective fact. It’s nothing that I can prove to anybody else, but rather it’s an interpretation. It’s a way of seeing. To use a metaphor, it’s when I put on my spectacles and I see something that I don’t normally see without my spectacles. Heschel called those moments, moments of radical amazement. "A grain of sand is a drama." Well, most grains of sand are not dramas. To see a grain of sand as a drama is to put God into the experience, but that’s not everywhere. The notion that God is everywhere is, I think, terrifying. I think it’s terrifying to kids. There are a lot of places where I want to be and I don’t want God to be right next to me in the room, above my bed, or whatever, but when is an entirely different thing, and I think what I was trying to suggest is that when you have these special moments, you have the option then, to sense that those moments are transcendent moments, are transformatory moment and they come because at those moments you put God in the picture, so that’s an answer to not ‘where’ but ‘when.’

LM: And so it’s prescriptive rather than descriptive?

NG: It’s very much prescriptive because there is nothing to describe. What am I going to describe, a grain of sand, the sea, nature, a sunset? It’s not as if I am describing anything that’s there. God is not an answer. God is not a ‘there.’ God is not ‘there’ for me to perceive. I can put God there if I have a faculty, if I have the resources, if I am attuned to looking at a particular scene, a natural scene, a historical event, a personal experience. \

LM: It’s a very different way…

NG: And at that moment my sense is that I put God in the picture and that’s an interpretative ‘seeing.’ I don’t believe… seeing is not believing. I think we see what we want to see, what we are prepared to see, what we are educated to see.

LM: That’s a very different concept of God and of faith and what many people, particularly those who define themselves as non-believers understand about God and faith. And I am thinking about how there has been a plethora of new books driven by atheism in recent months.

NG: These are straw men…

LM: Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens.

NG: Yes.

LM: What do you make of that and their popularity, and that they are on the bestseller list. What is it in their characterization of religion and faith that is so appealing?

NG: Okay. Well, I don’t know how appealing it is. I have many different answers to the question. I think that they are all attacks on the new fundamentalism. It’s a straw man that they are putting up. It’s the God of the Bible belt, the God of the religious and the political right-wing. It’s the God that has become very popular. It’s the image of God that has been very popular, and they are fighting that. They are not fighting a view of God that is propounded by more sophisticated, more liberal, theologians or thinker. But on an entirely different level, when I ask myself, ‘what are you so angry at?’ And whenever I see people who are so angry at something I always sense that it’s– I use my little bit of psychoanalytic insight that I have– it’s a defense. They are defending something. And I would invoke a wonderful sentence or two by Yitz Greenberg that in his long attempt to argue in favor of pluralism that, "There is an atheist at the heart of every believer and a believer at the heart of every atheist." And when the atheist screams at the believer he is screaming at the believer that is within him. It’s a classic defense mechanism, I think, and it’s unfortunate because the books are doing very, very well, and there are a plethora of them, and my sense is that the people whom they are attacking won’t read them, and the people who might read them are the people who will dismiss these books as not reflecting, in any way, the kind of God they believe in.

LM: Do you see a lack of imagination and a lack of poetry in these texts, in the failure to capture a kind of a nuanced, sophisticated theology?

NG: I don’t know what it’s a failure of. It may be simply a failure of reading or a failure of education. I mean I don’t know what these guys read, but it’s certainly a reflection of a state of mind that looks at faith or at the epistemological issues involved in faith, in religion, in belief, in a very hard-headed, concrete, scientific way. Let me tell you something that as a departure (or maybe not so much of) to all of this, my sense is that never before have science and theology been so close, because science and theology both deal with realities that elude our immediate perception. Nobody will ever see a quark. Nobody will ever see the dark matter. I try to read up in contemporary science and I find it fascinating because in so many areas, cosmologists, physicists, people who work in quantum mechanics, confess that what they are doing is positing realities that have to exist in order to be able to explain what it is that we do see. In other words, if we want to explain what we do see we have to posit realties that we don’t see. I mean Freud did it with the ego. No one has ever seen an ego, but Freudians believe that an ego is as real as anything, and where is the ego? Okay, it’s nowhere. It’s everywhere. It’s throughout the human personality. A quark has a lifespan of many trillions of years, and if the Large Haldron Collider ever gets up and gets going, scientists will be able to discover the Higs Bozon and the quarks and all of these subatomic particles, and everybody is anticipating and waiting for the time when somebody is going to see it. But what are they going to see? They are not going to see any of these things. They are going to see a program, a computer printout, because that’s what’s going to happen. The activity takes place within the super collider that is buried deep within the Earth in Switzerland or France, whatever, and the activity that’s going to take place, once these neutrons are exploded, is going to be recorded on measuring devices buried deep within the Earth, that are going to translate whatever the explosion that took place, whatever happened, whatever particles were released, into computer printouts, and then some physicist sitting up in an office building is going to say, oh look, there is the higspozon. We have discovered it. Well, yes, they have discovered it, but what have they discovered? Strings vibrating in 11 dimensions. The New York Times Science section on Tuesdays from time to time tries to portray on two dimensions, on a piece of newsprint, what it’s like to be a vibrating string in 11 dimensions. I look at it and it looks to me like the veggie-wrap that my cafeteria serves at lunch because they are trying to suggest that the only way you can conceive of 11 dimensions is if the dimensions are wrapped into each other, which is like a wrap. But, you know, that’s a picture that you have to look at not as a literal reproduction of what’s out there, but as an attempt to capture in two dimensions an 11 dimensional reality. Well, that’s God. God is another instance of positing the invisible in order to explain the visible, except that the scientists are trying to explain a tiny little corner of what they see, namely planets and stars and stuff like that, whereas theologians are trying to explain the whole shebang. And when a theologian who believers in God is suggesting is that in order to understand what we do see, namely the entire frame, the raw frame of human existence, nature, history, and personal experience– the whole thing– how does it all hang together? We have to posit it to a reality that we’ll never see and that is what we mean by God. Now, so if that’s what I mean by God, this is not the God that fundamentalists believe in, and I don’t see any of these books as even beginning to appreciate and to touch that kind of a God.

LM: Do you think these books are descriptive of the state of theology in America today in any way?

NG: Not theology but of religion.

LM: In what way?

NG: Well, I mean they are attempts to destroy those religious bodies that are arguing against evolution, in favor of prayer in the schools, against the gay phenomenon–

LM: Because they are–

NG: –against the whole attempt to put the fundamentalist hinge to American political life that’s what they are fighting against.

LM: In their popularity, is there something about the state of theology in America? In other words, the fact that people find these arguments persuasive and are not able to rework their religious understanding–

NG: I don’t know who finds these arguments persuasive.

LM: Right, you can’t assume everyone buying it…

NG: I can’t assume– right. Because I think that the far religious right is just not going to read Hitchens and Dawkins and all of these people, Sam Harris, and the people whose approach to theology is very much like mine are also not going to read them because they don’t see this as a threat or as interesting. I think it’s a commentary, not so much on the state of theology, but on the state of religion in America today and on the rise of the religious right.

LM: So bringing this closer to our community, how would you assess the state of faith in American Jewish life today?

NG: Gee, that’s complicated. It’s a very big question. Let’s just take a little piece of it and maybe break it down a little bit. There has never been, I don’t think, in the history of the Jewish community a more sophisticated, intelligent, educated Jewish laity than there is today. I think Skirball has built on that. An enormously large percentage of Jews have higher education, are in academia, in the professions, and are working in areas which require a great deal of sophisticated thinking, mastery of certain disciplines. Our lay community… they read books, they think, they study. They study all kinds of things. I am stunned by the popularity of courses on tape. People buy courses in Jewish history in the Second Temple period in a number of different tapes, and they listen to them while they are driving to work. Plus because of the Internet, there has never been as much serious studying as there is today, not only courses. I mean there are a whole number of them besides Skirball there is Melton and Wexner and Meah. There are all kinds of Adult Ed courses, programs being offered around the country. There’s an enormous amount of activity. I read the Israeli press. I mean you know this better than I do. You just came back from Israel. But on any one evening in Jerusalem you can go to a dozen lectures and every Shabbat afternoon there are courses and classes and lectures being given, so Jews are reading books. Jews are thinking. Jews are studying. There is also– this is sort of the second point– that there’s an awful lot of Jewish learning going on throughout the world. The lay community is, I think, buying into the notion that as Jews they want to study. They want to learn. They want to learn their tradition. How much of this is theology I don’t know. Theology has never been an intuitively popular discipline in the Jewish world. All of us who do theology sort of as an academic discipline or who teach is are aware of the fact that there are not many of us around. I deal with a rabbinical school student body. There are precious few philosophy majors in our school. There are an awful lot of people who are majoring in Bible, majoring in Talmud, majoring in History, even majoring in Literature, and for some reason there’s a tremendous attraction to text work. The notion that if you are going to study you are going to devote your studying to studying Biblical text very carefully or studying page after page after page of Talmid very carefully. That’s astonishing. Look at the Daf Yomi phenomenon -- is not to be believed. So not only are Jews intelligent and sophisticated in thinking, there are Jews that are studying Judaism. They are not studying much theology and there are relatively few creative Jewish theologians who are actively engaged in writing theology books, books on philosophy. There are text scholars and there are historians and a lot of Jews are writing fiction and poetry, but I don’t know how many of them are doing theology, in a classical sense of theology. How many are writing about God? How many are writing about the problems of suffering? How many are writing on the afterlife? I sort of made my reputation writing a book on death and a book on God, and these are still not exactly popular topics around, so that’s a second point. The third point is how much of all of this study is translated into active engagement in Jewish living is, I think, far more complicated. I don’t see a tremendous revival of, for example, Jewish observance. I think American Jews specifically are highly individualistic, and I think that they believe that they have the right and/or responsibility to decide for themselves what they are going to observe, what synagogues they are going to join, how much they are going to observe. It’s pick and choose. Hopefully an intelligent pick and choose, but not necessarily. It could be even a more capricious pick and choose, but it’s a sense in which nobody is going to tell me how to express my Judaism. So yes, I will study. It’s easy to get Jews to study because we think, and Jewish study at mature, sophisticated Jewish classes and courses will attract Jews to study. How much of that study gets translated into a much more serious observance of Shabbat or festivals, synagogue attendance? Relatively little. I am struck by how few– if you ask Jews why they go to the synagogue– how few Jews will tell you that they go to the synagogue to pray or to discover God. The most common answer to that question is because that’s where I meet Jews. It’s a sociological phenomenon. I think the revival of modern orthodoxy is more sociology than ideology. I make myself crazy. I ask these sophisticated Jewish women who are lawyers and doctors and stockbrokers and academicians why they daven in an orthodox synagogue with a mehitzah. The answer is rarely for religious reasons. It’s because that’s where my community is. That’s where my friends are, and more frequently because I want my children to be brought up in an observant community.

LM: There was much being said about– say in the last 10 or 15 years– about more God talk in non-orthodox synagogues. Was that a passing phenomenon? Have you noticed a difference in your students?

NG: I can notice, yes. I think that– well I remember earlier in my teaching career a younger rabbinic colleague of mine telling me, if you think God is absent from the pulpits of conservative synagogues, you should see how absent he is from the classrooms of the seminary. Okay?

LM: Speaking of The Jewish Theological Seminary, but probably equally true at that time of Hebrew Union College.

NG: I am sure it is, yes. Now the interesting thing is that a younger generation of Rabbis, and they will tell me proudly because they maybe even want to give me some credit for that, they will tell me proudly, ‘I gave two sermons at Rosh Hashana on God’ and that’s happening. I am hearing that and that’s happening, and people send me copies of the sermons they have given, and I feel that they are good and they are solid and they are intelligent. The agenda for sermons of the earlier generation of rabbis was almost solely communal. It was anti-Semitism. It was ethics. It was the Holocaust, Soviet Jewry. It was Jewish education. It wasn’t religion. There was no religion in the synagogue. I mean certainly not in the sermons. The word sin was never heard on Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur. There was precious little preaching on human suffering, on human vulnerability, certainly nothing about the afterlife. My own sense was that there was previous little preaching on observance. I don’t think– I ask people who have spent 25, 30, 40 years in one of these cathedral synagogues, the conservative synagogues with eminent, competent, successful Rabbis, long-time Rabbis– did you at any point hear a sermon about God? No. Did you at any point hear a sermon urging you to be more observant, to put on tefillin? No, nothing of that was ever– this was not the agenda of the preaching. I always felt that I should get a student to do a research about going through synagogue bulletins. We have those in our archives. Go through synagogue bulletins. Take 10 major cathedral synagogues, East Midwood in Brooklyn, St. Louis, Minneapolis, and sermon topics were usually published in the synagogue bulletins.

LM: Right. Incentives…

NG: What?

LM: Incentives for synagogue attendence–

NG: Yes, I don’t know whether the actual sermon was actually on the topic that was announced because the sermon topic had to be turned in months in advance because of the deadlines for the bulletin, but at least to go through the bulletins and to see what where the topics and to see how many topics were– even in the expanded sense– were what I would call religious.

LM: I want to ask you for our last question today, you have written about Abraham as a paradigm of faith and doubt. Say a few words about the relationship of those two attributes, faith and doubt in the life of the religious Jew?

NG: There is no faith without doubt. It’s a total misconception to believe that faith is a plateau that once you get it you have got it. Faith is a struggle. It’s an uphill struggle and it’s a constant challenge. You finally get and you lose it, and you get it and you lose it.

LM: What is the "it" here?

NG: What you have called faith.

LM: Yes.

NG: A sense, I mean, on the most basic level, a sense that there is a God in the world who cares about me or who cares about the world. There is so much in our life experience that contradicts that evidence, that is counter to that claim, and how can you live a life, a normal, mature, adult life in the world today, without having that faith shaken? There is disaster everywhere. As we speak, 2,500 people are being driven out of their homes in California because of a forest fire. Now, I live on the 15th floor-

LM: It’s 250,000.

NG: 250,000, yes, okay. So I live in a condo on the 15th floor of a Manhattan apartment. I am not threatened by forest fires. I am not threatened by meteorites. I am not threatened by floods. I am not in Darfur. I am not Indonesia. I am not– God help us– even in Malibu, but what does it mean to have lived a life in a home and to suddenly to be woken up in the middle of the night and you had to get out and to watch as your home is consumed by fire and everything that’s in it is consumed by fire? I have two healthy children. I have four– thank God– healthy grandchildren. I have not had the experience of having given birth to or having one of my children given birth to an autistic child, a child with a birth defect, a child who has died, a teenager who has died of leukemia, but these are all around me, my friends, my colleagues see this all the time. And if we believe that there is a God who rules– who has something to say about what goes on in the world and goes on in creation and in history and in our individual lives– how in the world can one hold onto one’s faith without having it shaken? So I think there are– go back to what we began with, Leon, we began with the fact that there are moments, there are these incredible moments when if we wear our radical amazement spectacles we put God into the world, but those moments are rare. We achieve them and then we lose them and they are gone, and they are replaced by the moments of chaos, and then we have to struggle to find meaning again when everything around us screams absurdity, randomness, chaos, and we doubt. And just to go back to what I quoted from Yitz Greenberg. What I quoted from Yitz Greenberg was that, "There is an atheist at the heart of every believer and there is a believer in the heart of every atheist." So we have talked about the believer that is in the heart of the atheist that the atheists are angry at and are striking out against, but what about the atheist that is in the heart of every believer? There are moments where it all hangs together. There are moments when nothing hangs together, and Yitz concludes that paragraph with a statement that the ultimate difference with the believer and the atheist is the issue of frequency. Just for the record, for those of you who are listening into this, those comments are in a keynote address that he delivered at a conference on the Holocaust at Cathedral of St. John the Divine about 25 years ago. It’s one of his first published writings and it’s contained in a volume called Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era, edited by Eva Fleischner and it’s published by Ktav. It’s a paperback. It’s available. It’s on the shelves, and it’s a keynote address with a long title about clouds of fire. The sentence that is memorable in that paper is when Yitz quotes Elie Wiesel to the effect that nobody should make any statement about faith after the holocaust that cannot be said in the presence of the burning children. Okay. But enlarge that, no statement can be made about God in a post-Holocaust world that I would not be prepared to make in the presence of the burning children. So what’s the problem with doubt? The issue is how could you possibly have faith at all in the first place when the chaos– I think we live on the precipice here and we live perpetually on the margin, and I think that to feel that once faith is so solid that it is unshakable– and I look at these ‘twice-born’ people who live in other parts of our country whose faith is rock-solid, unshaken, who sort of bounce through life with a big smile, the sun it out, it’s always sunny. I am thinking of the character in the L’il Abner comic strip where wherever he stood it rained. [Laughter] He had a name that was all consonants. It was unpronounceable– Mr. Btzlplck or something like this– but wherever he stood there was rain. There was sunshine everywhere but wherever he stood there was rain. Well, in a sense, where we stand it is raining. Those moments when we are prepared to put God in are very previous. Many of those moments for with are with music, great music, and it’s when I listen to– recently on channel 13 on public television– they broadcast the opening concert of the Harmonic for this year, and Yo Yo Ma paid the Devorak cello concerto, which is one of my all-time favorite pieces. The last two or three minutes of the third movement of that cello concerto is– if anything is proof of the existence of God– that’s proof of the existence of God, and every time I have seen it now because they keep re-broadcasting it like at 3:00 in the morning, I am aware of that. I stay up to hear it. Whenever I despair I think that if it is possible for one human being to have written those bars of music and for a Yo Yo Ma to have performed it on his cello, it’s to me, when I first heard it again this year, I was just totally overwhelmed, and I recall that as soon as the applause died down the telephone rang. My daughter called me and she said, "Did you hear?" I said, "Yes, I did." She said, "That’s God." I said, "Yes, that’s God." And that’s God, and so that moment was a moment of faith and then you go back to the history and then you read the headlines the next day and you deal with all the tragedies that are around us and then you start the long climb back up to the moment when you can have faith again.

LM: I have enjoyed this conversation, Dr. Gillman.

NG: Thank you.

LM: And our next podcast will have an opportunity to speak a little bit about revelation and what was revealed and why is it so difficult for contemporary Jews to believe that revelation is possible, so I look forward to that discussion. Thank you very much.

NG: Thank you, so do I.