The Denial and Acknowledgment of Faith
There is such a thing as denial of faith that is like
acknowledgment of faith.
And there is also such a thing as acknowledgment of faith
that is like denial.
A person may acknowledge that the Torah is from heaven.
But his picture of heaven is so distorted that it contains not
even a trace of true faith.
On the other hand, a person may deny that the Torah is
from heaven. But his denial is based only on what he has
learned from believers whose minds are filled with empty
and confused thoughts. As a result, he decides that the
Torah must have a higher source than that. And so he
seeks its source in the greatness of the spirit of humanity,
in the depth of ethics and in the Torah's spirit of wisdom.
Although this has not yet brought him to the heart of truth,
such a denial is considered acknowledgment. And it
steadily comes ever closer to faith.
A confused generation of such people must certainly
improve.
This question as to whether or not the Torah is from
heaven is merely one example that illustrates all questions
of faith, general and particular: the relationship between
how they are perceived and their core being, the latter
being the goal of faith.
"There are many apikorsim who are deniers, in
accordance with the standards of Halacha. However,
when we examine their soul we will discover in them a
connection to the Divine content, in a hidden form. And
that is why in our generation there is a tendency toward
merit and kindness even toward absolute deniers.
- Orot Ha'Emunah, Rav Kook
How dare you!
Repeated offender you!
Addicted to taking His name!
Continually adding His authority, to your discourse.
You know better of course!
And I’m not talking of swearing!
I might have forgiven the heart of holy expletives
In the heat of passion. No.
No. I mean all this God-speak-
As if . . . you understand His will, His desire, His
personality!
As if . . . your texts, your theology, your logos
admits you to some secret gnosis
about Him.
As if… He backs your petty imitation piety
Giving you the authority you so desperately seek,
Or is it comfort?
Can't you see?
Havent you heard of Herr Dr Freud?
Hasn’t he finally cleansed you of your petty projections
of God "up there"?
Some CEO or spiritual accountant,
trafficking in good deeds.
Didn't you listen to Herr Rabbiner Wittgenstein?
(remember that foto of him and Hitler in kindergarten
together!)
Didn't he finally expose your holy discourse as mere
language games.
Hasn't Auschwitz made you reel?
And forced you to pull back those false projections of Him
La Nom-du-Pere and Rabbi Derrida
Did he not teach you to
Jettison those moralistic-pietistic glib responses
Dump the pseudo-frumkeit once and for all?
Are you still locked in to the pre-modern apologia?
Have you not raged against the darkness of the night?
Or is the anxiety of the past, the Text, the prior authority
figures-
Essentially your father's God, too weighty?
When will you stop abusing His Name?
It's forbidden, you know.
To even articulate the Tetragrammaton
Let alone write it!
Why do you think that even its translations like Gott or
God are any different?
The pious even remind us with a dash (G-tt and G-d)!
Yet you talk of Him constantly
In and out of speech, in your effort to connect and convert
Those from one addiction to yours.
At least admit you are powerless over organized frumkeit,
orthodoxy, denomination of your choosing, pastor rabbi or
whatever!
You say to yourself "if only" he would convert, become
frum, change his position to mine, "do" the rituals, walk the
talk, "believe" in God . . .
Then he will be saved, and my days work is done
In the name of the Lord.
And the others?
The so-called atheists?
What of them?
Are they damned? Like we are told on late night cable TV.
You know some of God's children don't believe in Him
In your conception of Him
What of them?
Are they truly damned? After all Hitler made no distinction
between communist or Rabbi
Trotskyite disciple or Hassid
Homosexual or pietist.
Will you be more exacting than the demon?
These do not practice the faith–of-the-fathers.
Don't genuflect on command
Bend the knees on page 22 of the Artscroll Siddur
Are not "upstanding" when told and "be seated" when told
by the pulpit Rabbi.
Some God's children lost their faith.
What of them?
They (unlike you) never took His name in vain!
They never even mention His name!
His name never crosses their lips.
They never even write His name on paper with a dash!
He never enters their discourse.
For them, there is only no-thing. Indescribable. Period.
Man needs to get on with the rest of it. Period.
These holy atheists.
Your Holier-than-thou piety
Seems closer to the Senate Missouri Lutherans than the
tradition of our fathers!
As if . . . on arrival in America you appropriated the worst
of local piety
And the easiest way to avoid the real question of the day.
As if . . . we can ignore the central issue that begs our very
relationship to the divine
As if . . . we can put Auschwitz behind us as in a family
spat.
Instead we wallow in self-pity, mea culpa, communal selfanalysis,
and cheap anti-secular shots to rationalize the
crime that fits this punishment-
As if . . . this will somehow allow us to move on with the
communal self intact and restored in the center of the
circle once more.
Where is God you might ask?
And in the Artscolification of Judaism
Some awaken to its bourgeois pettiness
Its middle class morality
Its Victorian residua
And see it at odds with tradition
Awakening as if from a coma of 70 years
Blurry-eyed, blinking and squinting from too much light
Slightly disoriented but awake enough to realize
Something is seriously wrong.
And in the search for meaning
A reflection of the state of play
A meta-analysis
We find that at the very heart of the matter
The core of this blindness
The cause for such a prolonged stupor
Was the mis-quoting
The mis-reading
The mis-identification
Of that GOD word-concept-idea.
This too needs purification
It too needs rehabilitation
From the years of atrophy and neglect
Worse the years of abuse and isolation
Like the hull or keel of a boat
Needs cleaning of its barnacles
Those crustaceous shells from the deep.
And we go silent on the GOD word.
We resist and refrain from its usage.
Taking it in vain, and with it
all its fake baggage.
For a while.
Allowing the old dust to settle
The old theologies to mummify, ossify,
Condemn them to Oxbridge, to a museum
Where the academics and intellectuals can discourse
In their common rooms over port.
Let time intervene in this period of word bans
Let a new post-denomination, post-orthodox, postgenocide
Description emerge.
Let God back into the center stage without controlling the
discourse
With no attribution
No naming
Just remain silent.
Let Him, the no-named One back into the center and
become Present
Just show up and sit on the sidelines
Admit defeat
Admit we know no-thing
Admit there is no discourse left
To describe the indescribable.
No literature or art that might do it justice
Admit our brain death our spiritual demise
That the whole modern enlightenment enterprise went
terribly wrong
That we are becoming half computers, half monsters.
To do that you will need to shut up.
Close the academies seal the folios, stop consulting legal
texts for your next move.
Stop in fact TALKING GOD.
LEARN FROM THE Holy Atheists!
