Holy Nothingness

The God of the Hebrew Bible is depicted as the faithful protector of his chosen people. Yet at least 6,000,000 Jews died at the hands of the Nazis. To believe in the God of the Covenant today, concludes Richard L. Rubenstein, Jews must affirm that their creator "used Adolf Hitler as the rod of his wrath to send his people to the death camps. I find myself utterly incapable of believing this. Even the existentialist leap of faith cannot resurrect this dead God after Auschwitz."

As it happens, Rubenstein, 44, is not a disaffected atheist but an ordained rabbi in good standing and a Jewish chaplain at the University of Pittsburgh, where he also teaches humanities. One of the most interesting of American Judaism's younger theologians, he is at least a spiritual cousin of Christianity's "death-of-God" thinkers, who are considerably more enthusiastic about his work than are Rubenstein's fellow Jews.

Ocean & Waves. Rubenstein, who has an M.A. from Jewish Theological Seminary and a doctorate in psychology of religion from Harvard, expressed his disbelief in Judaism's traditional deity in After Auschwitz, a collection of essays published in 1966. There he argued that Hitler's holocaust was deathly proof that the "transcendent, theistic God of Jewish patriarchal monotheism" was no more. Strongly influenced by the late Paul Tillich, Rubenstein nonetheless concludes that there is a "Holy Nothingness" as the source of all being. This Holy Nothingness is totally beyond human comprehension or categorization, and he compares its relationship with man to that of an ocean and its waves: "Each wave has its moments in which it is discernible and distinguishable as a separate entity. Nevertheless, no wave is really separate from the ocean, which is its substantial ground."

Although he has much in common with today's Christian radicals, Rubenstein is critical of them. He rejects the optimism voiced by William Hamilton and Thomas Altizer, who argue that God's death makes possible the freedom of man to achieve spiritual maturity. "The death of God as a cultural event is undeniable," answers Rubenstein, "but this is no reason to dance at the funeral," for man alone is incapable of eliminating tragedy from life.

Rubenstein believes that religion still has a worthwhile social value in an age of atheism. He is convinced that it can help men live with "the cold, indifferent cosmos" by providing a form of fellowship and hope, primarily through spiritually satisfying liturgy and ritual. "The primary role of religion is priestly," Rubenstein argues. "It offers men a ritual and mythic structure in which the abiding realities of life and death can be shared."

Primal Crime. In a new book called The Religious Imagination (Bobbs-Merrill; $5.95), Rubenstein presents a historical and psychoanalytical study of how the Jewish religion has been a source of spiritual strength. The focus of his interest is the influences that shaped the Haggada--the body of legend and myth contained in the rabbinical Talmud. Rubenstein accepts Freud's thesis that the God of Genesis actually grew out of guilt felt for a "primal crime," in which primitive men cannibalistically devoured their fathers out of both jealousy and a desire to identify with them; in time, the father image was projected into the cosmos to alleviate inherited guilt. Rubenstein contends that the Haggada's tales, especially as they were elaborated after the Diaspora, have helped provide the Jewish people with "the psychological strength to live as an endangered minority without inner deterioration."

He sees these stories as stemming from human psychological motives rather than divine inspiration. In his view, the same kind of cool, critical analysis that has been applied to Jewish problems of the past should be focused on the Jewish condition of the present. For example, he raises the question of how the fate of the Jewish people should be interpreted not only after Auschwitz, but in the light of their reconquest of Old Jerusalem last year. "A straightforward theological confrontation with the facts of recent Jewish history," Rubenstein insists, "painful though it may be, is an act of religious and psychological therapy urgently needed by the Jewish community."

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