"I believe in the God of Israel, even when He has done everything to make me cease to believe in Him." So writes Zvi Kolitz in Yosl Rakover Talks to God, the the fictional first hand account of a Jew about to die in the Warsaw Ghetto. This is one of the most powerful theological texts I have ever read. If theodicy (God and the problem of evil) is one of your things, click the link and read the short full text. Among the many overlapping issues that Kolitz contends/wrestles with here is the question of what a mature personal relationship with God might look like.
Emmanuel Levinas, who wrote Loving the Torah More Than God, a short commentary on Kolitz' text wrote: "The simplest and most common reaction [to the Holocaust] would be to decide for atheism. This would also be the reasonable reaction of all whose idea of God until that point was of some kindergarten deity who distributed prizes, applied penalties, or forgave faults and in His goodness treated men as eternal children... only he who has recognized the veiled face of God can demand that it be unveiled (Kolitz 81& 86)." Levinas ends up advocating an allegedly superior religious humanism, where God's absence is God's presence and God "is recognized as being present and inside oneself (Kolitz 83)."
Deep stuff. I can live with paradox, and mysticism, but Leon Wieseltier, (thankfully) less awed by Levinas than myself, writes, "...this is not paradox, it is contradiction... only an intellectual's incredibility." Leon notes that in Yosl Rakover's monologue, God and humanity are not to be muddled, but Levinas' God is "so near that he may be said to be ourselves, and merely the hallowed name of of our highest standard (Kolitz 97)."
All this theophilosophicalizationism is invigorating for "us" intellectual types, but maybe it still keeps the "one who is there" (to use a lovely little abstraction) abstract. While it may seem less mature and sophisticated and respectable, I suspect the following cinematic relationship is more mature than much of our piety and intellectualizing. It carries the intimacy (if not the erudition) of Yosl Rakover, but expects more.
Emmanuel Levinas, who wrote Loving the Torah More Than God, a short commentary on Kolitz' text wrote: "The simplest and most common reaction [to the Holocaust] would be to decide for atheism. This would also be the reasonable reaction of all whose idea of God until that point was of some kindergarten deity who distributed prizes, applied penalties, or forgave faults and in His goodness treated men as eternal children... only he who has recognized the veiled face of God can demand that it be unveiled (Kolitz 81& 86)." Levinas ends up advocating an allegedly superior religious humanism, where God's absence is God's presence and God "is recognized as being present and inside oneself (Kolitz 83)."
Deep stuff. I can live with paradox, and mysticism, but Leon Wieseltier, (thankfully) less awed by Levinas than myself, writes, "...this is not paradox, it is contradiction... only an intellectual's incredibility." Leon notes that in Yosl Rakover's monologue, God and humanity are not to be muddled, but Levinas' God is "so near that he may be said to be ourselves, and merely the hallowed name of of our highest standard (Kolitz 97)."
All this theophilosophicalizationism is invigorating for "us" intellectual types, but maybe it still keeps the "one who is there" (to use a lovely little abstraction) abstract. While it may seem less mature and sophisticated and respectable, I suspect the following cinematic relationship is more mature than much of our piety and intellectualizing. It carries the intimacy (if not the erudition) of Yosl Rakover, but expects more.
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