A Quick Note on Deuteronomy 30:11, for Paul Williams

[Nota Bene: the webmaster of the Answering Abraham blog has been kind enough to include this guest post, by Denis Giron.]

Paul Williams recently posted an entry on his blog, titled Further thoughts on Christianity versus the Jewish Bible, in which he invokes a passage he has been hitting people with for years: Deuteronomy 30:11. His essential argument is a simple one: this or that English translation of Deuteronomy 30:11 gives the impression that the Mosaic Law is not difficult to keep, therefore any Christian (or even New Testament author) who says otherwise is contradicting Deuteronomy.

Readers can visit the relevant blog entry, and see, for example, Sam Shamoun, offering a detailed response to Mr. Williams' argument (assuming the censorship-prone Williams has not deleted said comment(s) by the time one reads this). I would like to make one small contribution to the discussion by noting what Rashi had to say on this issue. Here's a portion of Rashi's commentary on the relevant verse, as it appears in my copy of Miqra'ot Gedolot:

 

In the underlined portion, Rashi argues that the text is stating the commandment is not covered (or concealed, or hidden, which interestingly lines up with the KJV). Rashi goes on to support his stance by providing other examples of where the relevant verb means to cover or hide.

This, then, raises a question: being that even eminent Jewish authorities (who cannot be accused of some sort of Christian bias) understood the text as stating that the command is not hidden or covered, we need not consider it as necessarily being a comment on how difficult the Law is. For an analogy, I can put a quantum physics text book right in front of you (thus it will not be hidden, you will not have to go looking for it), but that in itself does not mean making it accessible to you is the same as it not being difficult for you to follow.

A multi-personal God is philosophically sound and theologically superior to a unitarian God

An Orthodox Jewish Scholar and ordained Rabbi, Dr Benjamin Sommer describes in one of his famous works why a multi-personal being is superior to a uni-personal being and more adequately rendered as being the one true God worthy of worship:

"The Bible’s fluidity traditions are not polytheistic. J and E and the other texts that evince the notion that God has more than one body never speak of other gods having any independent power or import, and they oppose the worship of other deities.74 Nevertheless, one may tend initially to think of the fluidity model, even in its monotheistic form, as closer to paganism and to view the antifluidity model as representing a purer monotheism. The emphatically embodied God of the fluidity traditions seems, at first glance, to lack the radical differentiation from humanity that must be required of a monotheistic conception of divinity. In any event, that is surely how P and D must have seen the matter. Further reflection shows the opposite to be the case. The fluidity tradition presents us with the most profoundly monotheistic perception of God in the Hebrew Bible.

Yochanan Muffs points to a tension that pervades and nourishes the entire Hebrew Bible. He argues that the tension between the concept of transcendence, which insists the Deity is not to be identified with the physis of the world, and radical personalism, which insists the Deity is anthropomorphically involved in the world, is the very source of the creative dynamism of biblical anthropomorphism.75

I would like to suggest that the fluidity traditions provide an especially deft resolution to this tension, a resolution that comes into focus when we contrast the fluidity model with some other theological models with which it might initially be confused. The notion of multiple embodiment, it must be stressed, is not identical with the idea that God’s presence pervades the world or, less pantheistically, the idea that the effects of God’s presence (which might also be termed God’s concern) pervade the whole cosmos, a notion expressed most eloquently and famously in Psalm 139.7–10:

Where can I go away fromYour spirit?
Where can I escape your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, You are there.
If I make the underworld my bed, here You are.
If I ride the wings of dawn to the nethermost west,
There, too, Your hand will guide me, and your right arm will hold me in.

In these pantheistic or panentheistic conceptions, God can be equally present in all things and all places. The notion of multiple embodiment is something else altogether. Although they acknowledge that God’s power and concern can reach any place, the fluidity traditions maintain that God is literally located in some object sand not others: God is here, in this rock that has been anointed, but not there, in that one. In this regard, the fluid God retains a degree of transcendence that is lacking in the antifluidity traditions on the one hand and in pantheistic and panentheistic understandings of God as omnipresent on the other. The conception of God as multiply embodied allows for the possibility that God can be anthropomorphically involved in the world even as God is not identified with the world, because this God is bound to no one place. For a monotheistic religion that insists on God’s personhood and on God’s intimate concern with the world, the concept of multiple embodiment cuts the Gordian knot: God is not the same as the world’s physis, but God can choose to inhabit specific parts of the physis in order to be present to His worshippers.

This concept, then, seems almost inevitable as a consequence of the biblical stress on both transcendence and immanence. It is precisely when there is only a single divine body, on the other hand, that the tension between these two forces in biblical religion becomes so severe: If the divine person has one body, that body must be in a particular place. If that place is on the planet Earth, then God is clearly immanent but not transcendent. If that place is exclusively in heaven, then God is transcendent but not immanent. (In its most extreme forms, the tension produces a line of reasoning that leads to highly abstract conceptions of God that deny not only divine embodiment but even divine personhood [e.g., in the philosophicalwork of Maimonides or, quite differently, in the thought of Mordecai Kaplan].) In light of this tension as it emerges in the antifluidity traditions, it is not at all surprising that notions of multiple embodiment appear again and again in Judaism even after P and D attempted to stifle them. The fluidity traditions furthermore emphasize the radical difference between God as person on the one hand and humanity on the other. In fact, they do so much more strongly than priestly and deuteronomic writings in which God has only one body.76

Postrabbinic teachings according to which God has no body also stress the difference between God and humanity, but those teachings achieve this differentiation at the cost of the personal God. In this regard, Elaine Scarry’s statement that “to have no body is to have no limits on one’s extension out into the world”77 points toward a crucial point. A normal body – that is, a single body, constrained in space – is limited. But in the fluidity traditions, God differs from humans not in that God has no body, but in that God’s bodies are unlimited. A God who can be in various asherot and mas.s.ebot and in heaven at the same time is embodied but in no way constrained. Now, any physical God, whether a God with one body or with many, is a God who can change. Such a God, furthermore, is a deity in whom we can find pathos; a God who can change is a God who can experience joy and pain, loneliness and love. And that physical God of pathos, with one body or many, can seek out humanity.78 But only the God with many bodies can rise above God’s own physicality. The God with many bodies remains woundable and alterable, but this deity can nevertheless be omnipotent.

In short, the fluidity model manages, to a greater extent than the traditions that posit a single divine body, to preserve God’s freedom and transcendence even as it maintains the divine personhood and vulnerability so central to biblical and rabbinic literature. Here we note a significant irony. The most extreme antifluidity positions are those of the philosophers, especially Saadia and Maimonides, who insist that monotheism is incompatible with a belief in divine embodiment, as Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit point out: For Maimonides the belief in the oneness of God meant not merely denial of polytheism, which is obvious, but, more important, denial of the perception of God himself as a complex being.

The description of God as one according to Maimonides refers mainly to his own “simple unity.” “Multiplicity” is therefore not only the belief in many gods, it is also an error that concerns God himself, which may be called “internal polytheism.”

The strict demand on unity implies a rejection of corporeality, which assumes that God is divisible like any other body.79 The essence of the fluidity model, however, lies precisely in the recognition that God’s divisible bodies are not in fact like any other bodies. God’s divisibility does not detract from God’s might or transcendence; because the number of divine bodies is potentially infinite, the disappearance or fragmentation of any one of them is, ontologically speaking, a matter of no concern. It follows that the fluidity model may preserve God’s uniqueness and transcendence no less than the philosophical theology of Maimonides.80

Further, the fluidity model is considerably less limiting than the priestly or even deuteronomic models. For P and for the Zion-Sabbaoth traditions described in Chapter 4, God was present in a particular sanctuary and nowhere else; according to these texts, we could once say, “God is Zion.”

For D and Dtr, God was emphatically not present in Zion or anywhere else under the heavens; according to them, we were able to say positively, “We know that God is not in Zion.” But for the fluidity model, we could only say, “God is to some degree present in Zion, and God may be elsewhere as well, if not today then tomorrow or yesterday.” The fluidity model makes God both accessible and unknowable. The depth of the fluidity model, then, is its extraordinary ability to bridge gaps, to be on both sides of what we thought was a polarity. “The value of anthropomorphism,” Mark Smith has written, deserves fuller consideration.

In some contexts it could convey the personal aspects of divinity and its accessibility in the face of a general notion of divine transcendence. If divinity is analogous to humanity, then divinity is perceptible as personal, as the paramount paradigm of personal relations remains human-human interaction.81

In the fluidity model, however, it is through a form of anthropomorphism that the analogy between humanity and divinity is broken down. It is of all things the God present in multiple bodies who is completely unlike us. Such a God is, to recall the poet Friedrich H¨olderlin’s words, at once nearby and hard to grasp:

Nah ist,
und schwer zu fassen der Gott.82

Yair Lorberbaum points out that philosophers, theologians, and mystics reject anthropomorphism in part because they hold that a god with a body is exposed, visible, and hence not mysterious. (“A god who is understood is no god at all,” he quotes Augustine as saying).83

But in the fluidity model, precisely the opposite is the case. That model speaks of a God with a body, and hence a God who can be nearby, but its God is also radically unlike a human being, for God’s fluid self and unity across multiple bodies are fundamentally incomprehensible to humanity.

Rudolph Otto’s categories of “wholly other” and “mysterious,” we learn from the fluidity model, do not consist only of “transcendent” or “distant.” The immanent deity of the fluidity model can, mysteriously enough, be wholly other, even more so than the transcendent one. Yhwh’s fluidity does not render Yhwh something akin to a polytheistic deity, even though we saw in Chapter 1 that the gods of ancient Near Eastern polytheism were fluid.84

Rather, the perception of divinity we have explored here reflects Yhwh’s freedom, even as it expresses Yhwh’s grace – more specifically, Yhwh’s desire to become accessible to humanity. This conception renders God an unfathomable being, but nevertheless one with whom we can enter into dialogue.85 This God matters to a modern Jewish theology, as do the texts in which this God was first perceived."

The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel © Dr. Benjamin D. Sommer 2009 (The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo, Cambridge University Press, The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK, First published in print format) pp. 158-161  (also here)