Show notes

00:00 Arnie Eiseon

I started reading Torah and realized the Torah is that way too. The Torah is not about a God that everyone knows. This God is inscrutable. This God is mysterious. Abraham doesn't understand this God. Moses doesn't understand this God. At the top of Mount Sinai, Moses says, tell me what I'm doing right, God. Haren'inat p'odecha, show me your glory. And God says, I can't do that.

00:22 Shaina Hammerman

That was Arnold Eisen, the former chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, and importantly, Emeritus Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and Religion at Stanford. Now retired from the all-consuming role of chancellor, Eisen spent the recent past evaluating the central questions of Jewish religious experience. Where is God, and how can he be in relationship with God? How can ancient Jewish narratives continue to influence and illuminate

the struggles and commitments of faith in today world? Eisen published his thoughts on these questions in a book length essay called Seeking the Hiding God. I'm Shaina Hammerman and this is Cite and Sound, the Stanford Jewish Studies Podcast. Here, we host conversations with scholars and artists as we explore Jewish scholarship culture and history.

On today's episode, the final episode of the first season of Cite and Sound, Arnold Eisen joins the Taube Center for Jewish Studies’ faculty director, Vered Shemtov, to explore why he chose to examine these profound questions now, the answers he arrived at, and the questions he carries forward with him. And now, the conversation.

01:32 Vered Shemtov

So Arnie, it's great to have you here at Stanford.

01:35 Eisen

It's great to be back at Stanford. Yeah. So familiar. [Shemtov: We missed you.] I missed you all.

01:40 Shemtov

So you're here because we missed you, but also to speak about your book. And so maybe let's start with your new book and if you can say a few words about it and maybe read something from the book and then we'll talk also about other things.

01:56 Eisen

And I had to do that despite the fact that to me, God is not near at hand. God is not something you really know about. God is a very inscrutable, mysterious, sometimes all too close, but sometimes all too distant force being, I don't know, to describe, there are no good words. And so I called it a personal theological essay for the personal to capture the point that this is me. I'm not speaking for anybody but myself, just me. Not for Judaism, not Conservative Judaism, not the Jewish Theological Seminary, but me. And it's an essay, it's an attempt to say a few things that at this point in my life I think are true. Nothing systematic, nothing coherent, just something that arises out of my personal experience and reflection at this point in my life. And so that's what I did and I realized that it's not just me that's seeking a God who is often hidden and even hiding. There are lots of Jews before me and lots of contemporaries, and not just Jews, but Christians. It's commonplace to not experience God's presence. It's much more commonplace to experience God's absence.

I did a kind of personal inventory of what prayer is in the Siddur I responded to the most. Well, the Friday night service has the prayer Yuddin Nefesh, like the soul is seeking its soulmate, God, or there's a beautiful hymn called Shir Ha’Kavod, which is a thousand years old, which talks about how everything I'm saying in prayer is just an image and it's not really God. It says, Dimitri halva lokefi yesh halva. I picture you God, but not as you are. Himshilu halva rovachis, you know it. They describe you in many, many, many likenesses. And to me, that's what prayer is. And I started reading Torah and realized the Torah is that way too. The Torah is not about...

a God that everyone knows. this God is inscrutable. This God is mysterious. Abraham does not understand this God. Moses doesn't understand this God. At the top of Mount Sinai, Moses says, tell me what I'm doing right God. Harini nat podecha, show me your glory. And God says, I can't do that. that's the kind of, that's what I wanted to capture. My own personal quest, occasional glimpses, what Peter Berger, the sociologist called signals of transcendence, or he has another lovely phrase, a rumor of angels, a rumor of angels. So that's the book I wrote. So can I read two paragraphs for it? [Shemtov: Yes, please.] These are paragraphs to the end of the prologue.

I'm writing this book in part to urge you, myself, and my readers not to abandon our attempt at relation with the Lord of the universe because accurate knowledge of the Creator is far beyond reach. Let's not shut down theological inquiry or prayer from the heart, because we cannot make sense of addressing God from our station on a planet that orbits one of billions of stars in the known universe. Theological muscles should not be immobilized by the fact that we cannot fathom the absence or silence of God in the face of relentless evil and incalculable suffering. We called to keep our side of the covenant, to keep seeking and not hiding, no matter what happens from God's side of the relationship. While difficult to comprehend, it is true that God needs us. For sure the world needs us. A lot of hungry children need us, with God's help to bring forth bread from the earth. So here I am, my friends, about to join the believers and teachers of all the world's traditions who have ventured over the years onto the uncertain terrain of theology, determined to walk there without sacrifice of intellectual integrity. I am driven by longing to speak to God and about God despite lack of knowledge of what God is really like. Your voices accompany me on the path, whether or not you believe in God or see the value of theological inquiry. Either way, you remind me that the path to the eternal vow goes through I-Thou relations with other human beings and must aim at fashioning a world where relations of love are the rule.

08:03 Shemtov

I love it. And I love it also because it makes you feel good. It connects to the positive part of relationships with God. And the same are most of the words you use, the y’did nephesh, soulmate, shir ha’kavod, the song, angels, wonder, longing. But relationships are not always easy. [Eisein: Of course not]. And so we have Job that has, you know, he has a relationship with God that is a relationship of rage and so how do you balance that? Well, maybe if you could tell me more about the relationship that is not necessarily just positive and...

08:50 Eisen

You know, Heschel told me many things. And so one of things he told me was how, after losing his entire family in the Holocaust, basically, and getting out, you he escaped Poland six weeks before the Nazis marched in. And then how can he write about God the way he writes about God? Beautifully. And the answer is, has to be, because he had experiences of love and blessing that counteracted the other experiences. So he was able to contain them in some way.

And, you know, there's been a certain amount of tragedy in my life, in my parents' lives, but not enough to overpower the blessing and the love. And so I try to keep focused on that. when I've been speaking about this book around the country, so many people have told me their personal stories. And I cannot tell you how many people tell me I prayed to God when my son got sick and God did not heal my son. And I haven't, I haven't prayed to God since. I'm never going to talk to God again. Or a woman who stood up and talked in Boston and said, when my husband died, I didn't talk to God for a very long time. But this wonderful woman, this rabbi here, brought me back. And it's experiences of love and sometimes of justice, I think, that enable us to carry on despite the difficulties in the relationship. Let me say one more thing about that. The chapter in the book that was by far the hardest to write was the middle chapter about love and mitzvah, which to me make up the covenant. We can talk about that in a moment. But love and mitzvah. And how do you say something intelligent about love? I you know, I've been married for 40 plus years, I'm a parent for 30 plus years, I've been friends with people for 50 plus years. And what am I going to say about love that's not a cliche, that's true, as you said, to the experience of the good parts and the bad parts of love? And then how am going to talk about love of God when I'm saying I'm seeking God, God's hiding, I don't know God all that well?

How am going to talk about love of God? And one of things I realized was what I knew about love and the difficulty of the relationships and the fact that it doesn't always work out and there are ups and there are downs and there's distance and there's closeness and all of that is part of relationship to God. It's part of love of God. And love of God, know from the Torah, is not just a feeling. It's primarily not a feeling. It's not something in your heart. It's something between you. It's a matter of relationship. It's a matter of…of actions so that one can, if one can't love God directly, one can love God's children. One can take care of God's children, right? That's some of what I try to capture in this book about the complexities of loving people and loving God.

11:40 Shemtov

Well this takes us, think, directly into ethics and the connection between loving God and ethics. Can you say something about that?

11:51 Eisen

As the chancellor of JTS, I had just been appointed and I got a chance to make a policy decision in the ethical realm because the decision had to be made about whether or not to let gay and lesbian students become rabbis and cantors at JTS. And so I was the chancellor who worked with the faculty and the trustees and the students, but I was the leader of the institution when we did that. And I was able to do that on ethical grounds, not in spite of the Torah. But because of the Torah and the interpretations of Torah, which people like Abraham Heschel had given to me, so we need to be ethical. I don't know what God is like, but if we're not going to be ethical, then this whole Judaism thing is not worthwhile as far as I'm concerned.

15:33 Shemtov

And the ethics, these are the two things that kind of helps you decide which part of the Torah you will highlight.

15:43

Yes, but I love the fact that Judaism does not rest with us. So justice and ethics, great. Okay, but why I would call it a very Jewish move. Right after the Ten Commandments, we get Mishpatim, which means law. So for the Torah, ethics to be serious has to be translated into laws of day-to-day behavior. And same thing with Leviticus. It talks about loving your neighbor as yourself, but all the commandments surrounding that, they're not about feelings of love. They're about not taking vengeance and not gossiping and not cheating in business. so loving is behavioral. And for Jews, ethics becomes serious when it gets into nitty gritty details. And the minute you're down in the details, they've got to keep changing because life changes and life is complex. And so the details have to be treated in a complex way that's constantly adapted to contemporary situations. So again, I learned from the Torah. This I studied very well. I'm studying these things. These are lessons I've learned at the age of 14. So here I am going on 74. So these are lessons I learned in Hebrew high school at the age of 14, that when the rabbis interpreted Mishpatim, this very first law code in the Torah, and they came to the verse that says, eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and they decide it doesn't mean an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, that is a crucial thing they're doing. Because what they're doing then is empowering us, not only empowering us, I think commanding us to do for our time what they did for their time. So it says, eye for an eye, tooth for tooth. It cannot possibly mean literally an eye for an eye, tooth for tooth. It means financial compensation for injuries. What the Torah says about homosexuality in the book of Vayikra is not the end of the story for 21st century Jews. We have other ethical considerations and we don't just learn them from Jewish texts. We learn them from Christian texts and philosophy and from Buddhism, the best the human mind can offer.

17:38 Shemtov

This connects to how we continue thinking and how we continue feeling and in how we continue seeking. What about the part that cannot be changed? For example, some texts that are part of rituals, which I remember, for example, when my kids were younger and we talked with you about Kaddish and you said that, if I remember correctly, that you say the same thing, you don't think, you don't believe in it. And when you say it, you're in a difficult place sometimes, but then you say it and you say it until the text and what you feel, you know, connect. So where are the moments in which you think that we need to stick to the text and not pick and choose and find our way in the way?

18:30 Eisen

We're not going to have a committee decide. An edited Torah that we're going to take out all the stuff that feels objectionable to us because another committee would come along in 20 years closer to us and make another set of decisions. And pretty soon we have no unified text. So what has kept the Jewish people Jews for 3,000 years is we have this Torah and we're just going to keep finding meaning in it. And sometimes the task of finding meaning in it means we have to argue with it. Similarly with the Siddur, one of the things I discovered when writing this book is how much I love the Siddur. It lives in me. I mean, I've been going to synagogues since I'm five years old. I mean, probably before that, but I don't remember. But these prayers, I've been saying them my entire life. And I couldn't possibly have meant by them, even 20 years ago, what I mean by them now. They're different words that are important to me now. But I don't want to scrap the Siddur and get a different Siddur. I'm all in favor of a loose leaf binder kind of Siddur where we're going to a lot of the Sidur that we currently have. And some of the passages that don't mean that much to me, we're going to take out and substitute contemporary passages, contemporary poets. There's a new Siddur published by the conservative movement, which does this on the sides of the pages. They have contemporary voices, men and women and Jews and non-Jews that bring the prayers to life. And for a lot of people, the prayers themselves are not alive, but these other commentaries bring them to life.

So I think it's a great gift to be able to choose from things you didn't choose. In other words, we're not going to write a new book, but inevitably some things on that book are going to mean things to us and other things are not. There are entire sections of the Torah, I've said this, that when I was 20 years old, 25 years, the book I loved was the book of Deuteronomy. I mean, here you are about to enter the land and Jews had just returned to the land of Israel. And Deuteronomy is political theory and I was really interested in politics. I loved the book of Deuteronomy. I had no interest whatsoever in the book of Leviticus. The great Jewish thinker Martin Buber was notorious for saying nothing about the book of Leviticus. I mean, blood, sacrifice, and priests, meaningless. And then I came to middle age. And all of sudden this book about mortality and sexuality and frailty, sickness, death means everything to me. And now my favorite book in the Torah is the book of Leviticus because it's so human. It also has the command to love in it. But I love the book of Leviticus, even though it's so outdated, it's so anachronistic. And I'm not interested in following the laws as they're written. The laws about homosexuality, the laws about menstrual purity, all these kinds of things. They're not that important to me. And yet there is truth in this book, in these passages.

I did an exercise which I report in the Yom Kippur chapter in the book about the Alenu prayer. You have a prayer which Jews say every day, a couple times a day, which apparently thanks God for not making us like non-Jews. If you read it that way, it's obnoxious. A lot of Jews I know refuse to say it. And I realized that I don't think that's what it's actually saying, but certainly that's not what it's going to say for me. And so I do a kind of keeping the words as they are, but reinterpreting. It's a poem and I'm reading the poem differently. And for me, it's a central moment in the Yom Kippur service, which when I believed Alenu was thanking God for not making me like Gentiles, I couldn't get into it. But there's this central moment where people get down on all fours and genuflect in front of God. Don't just bow, but get down on all fours. you know, during the Alenu prayer, it's a high point of the service.

And it can only be a high point of service if it doesn't block us from doing just action by congratulating ourselves for being Jews and not Gentiles. So I had to get rid of that. I had to keep the prayer and reinterpret it. And that's Judaism. We've always been doing this.

22:45 Shemtov

Well, since you brought it up, what is Or la’goyim, to be a light for the Gentiles, means to you?

22:55 Eisen

Well, I think that Jews being the bearers of this tradition, I don't know how it came about that we have the Torah, let alone that we have the Tanakh. The entire middle section of our Bible is the war, the eternal war between prophets and kings, which goes on today still and will go on in every generation. The people that have power and money and they think they own the world, they're never going to be comfortable with the prophets who are telling you to worship one God only and do acts of justice and kindness. And so this whole middle section of the Torah is like absolutely indispensable to me because it brings up this eternal conflict between the prophet and the king. And that's still where we are. We're not any different from that. And God knows in the present moment, both in Israel and America, we need prophetic voices to stand up and say, you know, power is not the end of it. Money is not the end of it. There's other things that we have to serve in life.

24:07 Shemtov

Before I move to ask you more about your personal journey, since I think your book is an invitation for that a little bit. [Eisen: Potentially so. Yes.] And we were part of your journey here at Stanford. [Eisen: Thank God.] But before that, I feel like we talked about ritual, we talked about texts. I feel that we need to talk about community too. And you just mentioned that. Did writing the book and writing the book now at this time, did it change anything you think or feel about community? Something that you studied for a long time?

24:43 Eisen

I knew from the sociology I had studied that in the modern world, and especially in a secular society in the modern world, and I always give the example of Stanford University, where if you were to mention God in a scientific classroom, you'd be kicked out as a faculty member. And where if you would mention God in a history classroom as a cause of any historical event, you don't get tenure as a historian. So God is not a feature of the dominant culture of contemporary America. So in this kind of environment, you need what the sociologist Peter Berger called plausibility structures. need institutions which are going to stand between you and the larger culture. In America, it's either Christian or secular, overwhelmingly. And the kind of Christian it is, is not the mainstream Christian that so many Jews used to have as neighbors and friends. It's now evangelical fundamentalist Christian, right? And more more secular altogether.

And all through my life, I've had experiences of community of that sort. And that's what keeps me going. I say in the book seriously, not jokingly, that I get by with a little help from my friends. I think we all do. But certainly I get by Jewishly with help from my friends. And I dedicate the final chapter of the book, the epilogue, to my closest friend, my wife of 42 years, trying to express a little bit about how she anchors me. The chapter is about Shabbat and dedicated to my wife because she and Shabbat anchor me. But you asked me about community, not about marriage. Well, Shabbat is not just about marriage. I mean, that Shabbat table has guests at it and you're only able to do that because you're part of a larger community which also has Shabbat. And you go to a synagogue on Shabbat morning or Friday night, which is a large number of people who are making Shabbat real to you. You can't do it just yourselves.

29:03 Shemtov

Yeah. I think you mentioned this song and then also you can't always get what you want.

29:11 Eisen

Yes. You want me to talk about that or not? [Shemtov: Yeah, why not?] Because I mentioned in the talk I gave just now at Stanford that one of the inspiring lines in the Torah, which means everything to me, is Deuteronomy chapter 29 verse 28, which is part of the portion that the rabbis arranged for Jews to read every year before Rosh Hashanah, not coincidentally. And it says that the secret things that Nista wrote, which is the same word as I have in my title for hiding God. Secret things belong to God. We'll never know them. But the revealed things belong to us and to our children to do the words of this Torah. In other words, you can live a good life. You can find meaning. You can, within certain parameters that are given to you that you can't change, have a life of blessing. And I realized when I heard the Rolling Stones sing, you can't always get what you want and repeat that. I love the fact they repeat it. You can't always get what you want.

No, can't always get what you want. No, you can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find that you get what you need. And that that's profound to me. I mean, that's, know, that's not just a pop lyric. That is profound. You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find that you get what you need, which involves appreciation and gratitude. And I think those are two primary religious virtues, appreciation and gratitude. Right? get what you need, okay, you didn't have everything.Some people don't have a lot of things. It's horrible what they have to live with. But you get what you need somehow.

30:39 Shemtov

You feel that moving away from Stanford was part of getting something you needed? And do you feel this book is part of the same journey of moving from the academic world to the Jewish theological seminary?

30:55 Eisen

Yes. Yes and yes. I don't believe that God controls people's destinies. So I didn't hear any voice telling me to leave Stanford or to write this book. But there are things that we realize in life being who we are and knowing ourselves and what makes us happy and what we're good at, that we should do them. You know, I wrote a lot about Puritans when I was at Oxford. And there was a Puritan who wrote a book called The Treatise on Vocations. And he says, how do you know when you have a vocation or a calling? When you do work well and you enjoy the work and the work is needed by the world. And so that's my notion of calling. If I love this work, which I do, and I think I do it well, and I think it's good for the world, then I can think that's a calling. I felt, because I reached my mid fifties, it wasn't enough to teach undergraduates and graduate students at Stanford and occasionally to give community lectures. I wanted to have a direct hand day by day by day in training the leadership of the American Jewish community of the next generation and having some of the impact on them that people like Heschel had had on me.

So that's why I went to JTS and I did indeed find it very satisfying. I didn't love worrying about money all the time, but you know, you've heard people say it and it's true that fundraising is about relationships and it's about sharing with people what's important to you and what's important to them and getting them to see that you care about the same things and some of them are going to want to support you. So even that part of the job, I kind of liked, I didn't like worrying about whether there'd be enough money at the end of the day but I liked the contact with the people. I had wonderful, wonderful conversations and some good friendships. And then writing this book, I felt like, okay, I've done the scholarship piece. I don't need to do that again, but I need to get myself clear on what it is I think about these things. And so I had a sense of, this is what I'm meant to do. And especially during COVID, you're home all day, you can't go out. It was just a great time for reflection. And writing this book was a wonderful...Just writing it was a wonderful experience and now I'm having the fun of going around the country talking about it. It's like, you know, it's sheer pleasure.

33:11 Shemtov

Well, thank you. Thank you for this book. Thank you for the conversation. And I'm going to ask you something that we're, we always ask our guests and that is to share with us a text that you think is meaningful today.

33:27 Eisen

Yes. And I just have to find the page that I'm going to share with you. So I'll tell you the story, which I tell in the book about why this passage means so much to me. So it's a passage from the 20th century Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber. And it's a commentary in the book of Exodus, and he's talking about the crossing of the Red Sea. And he wants to come up with a notion of miracle that he can accept. So I'm going to read you what he says, and then I'm going to explain why this passage means so much to me because I came to understand it watching my daughter be born. I'd read the boober many, many times. I probably had taught it. I probably had written about it, but I hadn't really understood it until my daughter was born. So he says, miracle, correctly understood, is not something supernatural or super historical, but an incident, an event, which can be fully included in the objective scientific nexus of nature and history.

So here I am, my daughter is now 39 years old and I still don't believe my wife and I did that by ourselves. I still believe, I don't know how, I don't know what it means. I don't know. I'm not suspending signs, but somehow the greater power was involved in that. And that's why I would call that miracle. And that's how I came to understand that beautiful passage by Martin Buber. And that's a moment of finding. Of finding. Without seeking, which is why many, moments of…Maybe always come to us as moments of finding when you don't see.

37:20 Shemtov

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. To be continued, hopefully.

38:03 Hammerman

Today's episode was produced by me, Shaina Hammerman, along with Iva Klemm and Nilofar Saraj. Sound designed by Romy Chiorean. Original music is by Jeremiah Lockwood. Cite and Sound is a production of the Taube Center for Jewish Studies at Stanford.

38:22

Stanford University.