(Continuación de la tercera parte)

7
The Torah is primarily concerned with behavior. It is the action that defines, not the thought. And so in rabbinic Judaism it is the act of breaking Jewish law in public that results in a person being barred from giving testimony in a Court Of Law . It is the commitment to Law that defines membership of the group once ones genealogy or conversion have gained one initial acceptance. After all, this is the only way one can reliably test a person's affiliation. Anyone can say whatever he or she wants. I can say I believe in men from Mars. I guess I would be prepared to say that I believe in lots of strange things if I thought my life was in danger. Perhaps once, one was frightened to take The Lord's Name in vain. But even then, the Torah knew full well that a Credo was no basis for reliable verification. This is why there is no such statement in the Torah as ' Speak to the Children of Israel and tell them they must believe.' This is a meaningless statement. God is to be experienced. One must attempt to understand.

The Torah talks about 'knowing' God in the way that man 'knows' his wife. The Torah talks about loving God in the way lovers know each other. These terms are not necessarily intellectual terms. One brings a whole lot of sensual and emotional experiences and sensitivities to play in the act of knowing and loving another human being. It does indeed involve the mind and the thought process, but not exclusively. Indeed the Greek way and hence Maimonides's way, to God is through the pure intellect. The intellect in contradistinction to matter. The two eternal substances that are caught in a primordial battle in Greek thought are intertwined and indivisible in biblical Judaism. But I am arguing that it is through a mystical rather than a rationalist position that one can understand God in the Jewish experience, not the intellect.

So the need to prove the existence of God is redundant and irrelevant in Judaism. Whereas the need to experience is essential. ' Taste it and see' says the Psalmist. And yet there is no single way, no single formula which is ' the correct one' to come to God. There may be a revealed ways to behave but there are not prescribed ways to think.

This is not to say that the world of ideas is irrelevant in Judaism. There are indeed ideas that play an important part in our religious tradition. But they play this part in very different way and in a far less precise manner than they do in other Western religious traditions. Theology is the science of the Christian religious world. It is incidental to the Jewish. Just as Maimonides says that one can only say what God is not, one cannot describe the indescribable, so too, Judaism is essentially concerned with avoiding negative ideology. Its approach is not to reject even if one is uncertain about what to accept.

If one looks at the Talmudic statements of a Theological nature, the attack is against the ideological heretic. The Talmudic recounts, at the end of Sanhedrin, those who have no portion of the World To Come. They are the deniers. Those who say There is no Life beyond the Grave. Those who know precisely that the Torah is not the word of God. It is the Atheist rather than the Agnostic, the denier rather than the doubter who creates the problem for Traditional Judaism. It is the person who eats forbidden food as an act of ideological defiance who is rejected far more than the one who gives in to weakness and eats out of self indulgent appetite . We are all in the second category to some extent or another. This is the biblical understanding of the inclination of man. There is a constant struggle. Biblical Judaism sees every person, including King David, as caught in this behavioral battle. The way to survive is by accepting the presence and the influence of the Divine. But this is something to be experienced and lived with. It is not a door one goes through. It is not a state one enters into and then one is saved. It is rather a constant engagement with a constant stream of experiences that reinforce the commitment to the way of living that reinforces the experience of an and the commitment to the Divine. It is not a formula. It is not a Credo. It is an act of devotion and love.