Neil Gillman. Sacred Fragments: Recovering Theology for the Modern Jew. Jewish Publication Society, 1990.
Neil Gillman teaches theology at Jewish Theological Seminary in New
York City. I audited a class of his when I was a student there. His
book, Sacred Fragments, overlaps a lot with what he discussed
in that class: Gillman said that believers and unbelievers can look at
the same reality and arrive at different (even legitimate) conclusions,
and he talked about such thinkers as Mordechai Kaplan (who saw God as an
impersonal force moving the world to a state of wholeness), Franz
Rosenzweig (who emphasized personal experience of the divine), and
Kabbalah (which posited that God’s Shekinah was exiled from God and that
God could be repaired through observance of the commandments). The
book still has territory that was not covered in class, however. For
example, in the class, Professor Gillman told us that we should consult
his book, Sacred Fragments, for his discussion about the
classic arguments for the existence of God (i.e., the ontological
argument, the cosmological argument that everything has a cause and thus
the universe had a cause, and the argument that the cosmos manifests
design). He did not want to explore them in class because that was not a
topic that particularly interested him. The book also provided me with
background information about philosophical topics, such as
existentialism, and it covered the thoughts of Jewish thinkers whom
Gillman did not talk about in the class, as far as I can remember (i.e.,
Buber, etc.).
Judaism has wrestled with many of the same issues that Christians
have in the field of religion. Is the Bible God’s revelation, when it
arguably contains signs of being the product of human authors with their
own ideologies and agendas? Is the Bible authoritative, containing
God’s commands? Is there even a God, and, if so, how can we know? If
there is a good God, why is there suffering? Is ritual consistent with a
living, vibrant experience of God, or does it hinder that? Judaism
would relate some of these questions to other areas than Christians
would: for example, Judaism would look at the Torah and its laws
specifically. Still, the questions are similar, and so Gillman’s class
and book resonated with me, even though my religion is not Judaism.
Where exactly does Gillman land on these questions? My impression is
that he is usually presenting options rather than telling people what
to think and to do. Here are some things that Jewish thinkers have
thought, and it is up to you to make up your own mind (along with your
community). You may feel that ritual hinders a lively experience of
God, but perhaps it can create opportunities for such an experience to
occur—-it’s something to think about. You have to decide for yourself
if you want to see life as a believer in God or as a non-believer. You
are the one who can determine whether or not you feel commanded by God
to do something. The classic rational arguments for God’s existence may
not prove God’s existence, but perhaps you can still find in them a
justification for belief, plus rationality is good because it can sift
out the absurd. Gillman’s approach looks like subjectivism and
experientialism, but Gillman appears to be open to the possibility that
there is a God in the world, that Israel experienced something on Mount Sinai, and that people now can experience the divine.
I’m the sort of person who looks for something authoritative, for
solid ground to stand on. The thing is, being an adult usually entails
the sort of process that Gillman displays: looking at options, deciding
what makes sense to me, and making a choice.
There is more that I can say: what I thought about Gillman’s approach
to the arguments for the existence of God, the existentialist who
posited a scenario in which Elijah asked God to send fire from heaven to
undercut the prophets of Baal and God did not send the fire, etc. But I’ll stop here.