Jeremy Rosen
Do You Have to Believe in God?

Jeremy Rosen | Do You Have to Believe in God? | 09.13.22

- Welcome back, everybody, to my autumn series, which is this time for something different to do with theology and the sort of accepted ideas that all religions have, and although I’m looking at this from a Jewish perspective, what I have to say I think can be taken just as much by any other religion as Judaism. And the subject I’ve chosen to begin with is God. Very controversial issue, because if you ask any two people what they mean by God, they’ll come up with something very different. And yet, so much has been written about God and what belief in God means. What do you mean believe in God? What do you mean by such words as the truth, truth? These are all terms that are used in application to God, but we use them very loosely. And as an individual, we don’t always know what we’re talking about. So we have the idea that God is like some big daddy in the sky who, for example, on the Day of Atonement, or any other day, takes out a big book and slaps it on his lap, surrounded by angels and takes out a quill and writes in it that Jeremy Rosen, for good behaviour, is going to have a good year ahead, or for bad behaviour is going to be wiped off the map.

So on the one hand, we have this idea of God as a kind of a superhuman, dolling out goodies and benefits to us if we are good and punishing us if we are bad. We have this anthropomorphic idea of God being a human being, the finger of God, the hand of God, the voice of God. God gets angry, God gets sad, all these terms. And yet at the same time, we all seem to agree that God is not a human being. And yet, being human beings, naturally enough, we apply human terms to express how we feel towards God, and yet we can never be certain that we feel the same way, just as we can never be certain we taste the same way, or that we hear things the same way, or look at the different ways we look at art. So what is this idea? We use a term omniscient, God knows everything. We have the term omnipotent, God is extremely powerful. And yet, I’m sure you know the famous quip which says, “If God can do anything, can he create a stone which he can’t lift?” Now, I want to look at God from several points of view. I’m going to look at God from a rational point of view, rational, scientific. I want to look at God from a mystical, non-rational point of view. I am not judgmental because I believe each one of us finds our own way either to believe or to disbelieve. And so this is exercising exploration in exploring the subject and seeing where it leads us.

The Bible talks about God as creating the world, very nice, and as God taking a rest, as if God is something that needs to rest after the whole work is over. And the Bible is a story of humans exploring how to relate to God. So, for example, Adam merely receives some instructions, do as you’re told. And when he doesn’t do as he’s told, he feels a bit guilty and so does Eve, and then God comes in and punishes. So this is, if you like, God as transactional, God is telling you, do this, and if you don’t do it, you’ll be punished, except we know very well we’re not always punished for what we do bad and we’re not always rewarded for what we do good. But after Adam, you see that although there’s no attempt to relate to God, when you get to Cain and Abel, all of a sudden they want to relate. And how do they relate? They relate by giving. And this is the kind of, if you like, origin of the idea of sacrifice. It’s rather like a child will give its favourite toy or balloon to its mommy or a friend as a sign of caring. So they brought sacrifices, but clearly some sacrifices were better than others. Is this the beginning of sincerity as opposed to formality? After Cain and Abel who just give, you have the idea of speaking, relating to God? There’s somebody like Enos who, in those days says the Torah, people began to speak and call on God, some sort of verbal relationship. We don’t know what it was. Then you go further and you have Enos and Noah who walked with God. What is walking with God?

Now, since right at the beginning, you have this instruction to take a day off and not to be totally enslaved to the material world. We know that the Torah is a kind of a manual for human behaviour, a sort of a self-help book. And as a result, we start with these early examples of how to relate to God. There’s Abraham who God relates to in some form or another, but then Abraham seems to hear some very strange things that maybe God wants him to kill a child. How do you differentiate that? And you have the example of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, each one of them finding a way of relating to God that clearly is through their own specific personalities. So it seems the Torah is, in a sense, encouraging us to find a way to relate to God through who we are. And indeed, if you look at the first of the 10 commandments, it does not say you must believe in the existence of God. It takes God for granted. It simply says, “I am the Lord your God. You want to relate to me? That’s your business. You don’t want to relate to me? That’s your business too.” This term, “You must believe in God,” doesn’t occur in the Torah. Later on, under the influence of Greek philosophy, where you have to believe and prove things, then you have an interesting nuance between in the Hebrew, (indistinct), that is the difference between believing in, which is I trust you, or alternatively, believing , believing that.

And that sort of approach became the norm within the Western Christian tradition that we have to prove the existence of God. Whereas proof is a very strange thing. I’m not even certain I can prove that I exist, let alone anything else exists. And indeed, many of the so-called proofs of the existence of God on an intellectual level don’t stand up to analysis. I’m going to deal with those shortly. But at this moment, looking back at the Torah, we have seven different names of God. Does this mean there were originally seven gods, or does it mean, as we’re going to see shortly in mystical terms, that God has many facets, and these facets are reflected in us so that when we are happy we reflect that way, sad another way? But we’re still not told what it is we are reflecting to. And the Torah goes on to say that we cannot see God. Moses wants to see God, and God says, “No, you can’t see me. You can get an after effect of me, the impact of, but you can’t see me.” And when God says to Moses, “Take the children of Israel out of Egypt,” and Moses says to God, “Well, what am I going to tell them?” He simply says, or she, or it simply says, , “I will be what I will be. I am what I am.”

In other words, God is unlike anything else, unlike anything in the physical world, because means the past in Hebrew, present, and future, something that is beyond time and space. I’m not certain they understood it that way at the time in the Bible, but that’s how I could look back at it now and see what I think it means, that God is, if you have a belief in God, it’s unlike anything material. So don’t apply material things to it. And that’s indeed what the philosophers, famous philosopher Maimonides said in the first millennium. He said, “You cannot use human language to tell what God is. It’s beyond the human.” But nevertheless, in the Western society in which we live, we like to find ways of making sense of God. So how we make sense of God. Biblically, it was in this energy in the universe that laid down certain moral codes for us to obey. And then there were certain rules about how to worship, to show respect, how to make the idea of God relevant in those days through the temple. But as the temple was destroyed and as Greek philosophy began to influence the way people thought and indeed believed, we suddenly wanted to come up with this idea of defining God. And I find it very difficult to define God. And out of this early definition of God, there came two schools of thought. The school of thought which has survived to this day is that of the prime mover. Something must have started this whole thing off. And that has become very fashionable now.

When I was young and I studied philosophy, we would make fun of such an idea and we would say, well, how do you know there is a prime mover? All you can tell is that so far we haven’t seen anything that has not been caused by something else. But that doesn’t mean to say that it was caused by something else. And besides, even if you say it was caused by something else, how do we know that something else was what we call God? Maybe it was Mickey Mouse in space. So that argument went through a period of being unfashionable. Ironically, this argument is coming back again and is rather popular, even amongst previously atheistic philosophers. If you read Professor Nagel, a brilliant book called “Mind and Cosmos”, he comes to the conclusion we simply can’t explain things, we cannot explain everything. And it’s not fair to expect science to explain everything, and therefore we have to be, in a sense, much more open-minded. And that’s very good and I like that idea, but that still doesn’t tell us very much about what God is. As for the other one, we humans are limited. We have no idea of perfection. Where would we get such an idea from? We must have got it from the idea of God. That doesn’t stand up very much because we have all kinds of ideas that, if you like, we can’t explain satisfactory. How do you explain satisfactorily, a billion? It’s a figure, but do we actually know in our minds what a billion is other than a mark on a document?

So these arguments of proof are not very good, because proof nowadays is, if you like, a mathematical solution, and mathematical solutions are very important, but most of us want more than just mathematical solutions. And as we have moved on from the Bible and we have come to the Talmud, we find that the rabbis have realised that there are some problems with describing what God is. So in the Torah, God is El, Elohim, Adonai, Jehovah, or Jehovah, or HaShem, or Shaddai, all these different terms which scholars might tell you refer to different gods, but others will tell you are different facets of the same thing. And we are particularly worried about the sex of God. We don’t like the idea of God being male and not female, even though in the first chapter of Genesis, God is described in female form, that , that the spirit of God is hovering over the water, and that’s a female verb that is used to describe God. So God could be described in the Bible as female as much as male, but nevertheless, the rabbis came up with a new term, and this is a term that’s not found in the Bible. It is Makom. Makom literally means place, a place, but it can mean every place. In other words, their understanding was that God could be within you and it could be without you, in the world and all the world, and covering the world. In a way you might say it’s like Spinoza’s pantheism, that nature is God, except that they believed that God was more than nature, was nature, but transcended it. And I like this idea of Makom. I like the idea of having a term to describe God that doesn’t specify too much and leaves it open to your imagination.

But after years of philosophy and of trying to find some sort of proof of the existence of God, all of a sudden there was a reaction, and a reaction that said, why are we trying to describe God? We should rather try to be experiencing and feeling God. And so you have the introduction into Judaism of a mystical approach, of a mystical way of understanding God by trying to experiencing it rather than talk about it, rather than prove it. And this is where the Kabbalah, or the mystical tradition enters into the picture and offers an alternative way of looking at God. So if you are a rational philosopher, you can use Aristotle, or Plato, or whoever you wish, or St. Augustine to try and prove the existence of God. But most of us are not big philosophers. We don’t like abstract ideas. We’re practical people. And along comes the Kabbalah and says, yes, you don’t have to Bob and all his highfalutin philosophy, let’s talk of God in terms of an experience. And they have a new name for God. And this new name for God also is a name without gender, Ein Sof, endless, something beyond bounds, something beyond anything we can possibly imagine. But then they said, okay, fine. But if God is beyond anything we can imagine, then how can we human, ordinary people relate to God? How’s that going to make any sense? And how does God relate to us?

God doesn’t use vocal cords to speak, he doesn’t have blood pressure that rises when God is angry. And so they developed something that you might be familiar with. The idea of these 10 sefirot, the so-called 10 emanations of God. Those of you who’ve seen an Atomium in Brussels will know an Atomium looks like these little balls, 10th rolls of them, and they’re interconnected with interconnected, either corridors or channels. So in the concept of sefirot, there are 10, they call them emanations of God. That is to say 10 ways of experiencing God, which are really like 10 transistors. These 10 emanations exist within our world, within us, and they exist beyond us in the divine world. So that imagine a radio set, one of the old fashioned ones in which you had the message being broadcast in the air, is transmitted, we can’t hear it or understand it, transmitted to transistors, and then we can pick up what’s in the transistor through our mechanisms. So these 10 little circles, they all describe characteristics in human beings, whether they are the intellectual characteristics of , different ways of knowledge, intellectually, information, analysis, sensitivity, characteristics in humans, aggressive and passive, procreative, creative. These different elements, according to this system within Kabbalah, exist as channels through which the divine is distilled to make sense to human beings. It’s not a rational concept by any means, but it’s one that helps people understand.

In other words, we can relate to God through these 10 different channels. And sometimes when we are strong, sometimes when we are weak, when we’re happy, when we are sad, when we’re reflective, when we are experiencing something, these different aspects of us are ways of connecting with God in a similar way that we connect to music, and we connect to art, and we connect to nature through these different parts of us. So here you have an alternative way of understanding God and relating to God. And this includes tools that we are familiar with in other religions, but are very much part of ours, meditation, contemplation, repeating words and mantras. All of these things that are found in Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and other traditions, Shintoism, are found within the Jewish tradition. Just learn, go back and read Abraham Abulafia, the great Spanish mystic of a thousand years ago, and you can see this sort of openness to different ways. So we have been brought up to think of God as, so to speak, residing in a synagogue, and that’s the only place we find him. Now, when the temple disappeared, all of a sudden the rabbis had to rethink it and their rethinking it took in a broader spectrum than just formal religious performance. It included individual exploration.

And so we have come to a modern world now in which, by and large, we are faced with what looks like a conflict between religion and science. And that’s only come about because for thousands and thousands of years, religions were the repository of culture and of learning. And for example, Oxford and Cambridge trained you for the priesthood because universities were theological colleges. And these kind of academic institutions were really religious institutions. And it was religion that laid down whether the world was round or whether the world was flat, and laid down and contained all the doctors who used their forms of medicine to cure people and all the scientists of those days. Aristotle was a great scientist and a great philosopher. And in those days, philosophy did mean exploring and finding out and trying to prove what the right thing to do was. But as I suggested, proof is a very weak tool and we’ve moved on. But whereas once, we see this from the mediaeval period, we see it right through past Galileo in the early modern period, we see it really actually in the 19th century, where for the first time, science under Darwin and Huxley were challenging the assumption that the religious version was the only version. And in challenging that, for the first time, it was the Pope who came up with the idea of papal infallibility, that what the Pope says is infallible.

Until that time there was no such notion. The challenge of science was that so many of the things that religion was taking on in those days could now be taken on by other specialists who are not necessarily religious. Think of psychology and psychiatry, and think of Freud. And science was in a sense challenging the assumptions that religion had been making. Whether these religions were religions of God, or creation, or of human behaviour, they were challenging them. And yet, human beings, for some reason, did not, as we thought they would, discard religion altogether. And the question, of course, is why did they not discard religion altogether? So one of the answers that people have been given, of course, is, well, they’ve been conditioned to it for so long. And that’s true. And yet, a lot of people have been conditioned to it have managed to free themselves of that conditioning. The other is that maybe there is something intrinsic in the human being that feels the need for something that we might call spiritual. And then people use that as an argument to say, oh yes, the need, people need to have something, and therefore they create it because it fulfils a need, which may be an argument, but it isn’t the only one. You can’t say the only reason we love is because we’ve had the need to love, or the only reason we respect our parents or have a relationship with them is because we need to. It could well be because we feel we want to.

And so the challenge between what is called science and religion is really, it’s really a battle over territory, a territorial battle, because in the old days, the priests were the doctors and the scientists and the people who related to God. Now, in the world in which we are in now where we see that religion is less popular, because anything, of course, that makes demands or discipline is less popular in the world that we are in, and because religion has a very bad reputation. It has a bad reputation historically, ‘cause look at all those terrible things that religions were responsible for, except of course, even non-religion is responsible for just as many murders and massacres and horrific things that were done. And human beings have a capacity to ruin everything, even football matches and sport. We have this capacity to ruin everything. And so the errors of religion, you might say, are human nature, but nevertheless, there is room, it seems to me, for two things. One of them is to preserve tradition. Traditions have values, as well as having problems. Everything, like any human being, has a good side and a bad side.

So there is an argument which says there is value in keeping a tradition alive, and this tradition contains certain concepts that we call God concepts, but we understand them privately in different ways. And basically what they boil down to is the idea that there’s more to humanity in the world, there’s more than just the physical world, there is a spiritual dimension that many people feel they can tap into and they find it gives them structure and it satisfies an urge and a need that people have, which is fine, so long as you don’t try imposing it on others. And that to my mind is the biggest challenge that I have to my faith, the idea that the behaviour of religious people, as opposed to religion itself, is often so offensive whether people who claim to be religious are behaving in a non-religious way, or whether religion has tried to impose itself on other people. These are the aspects of religion I find highly offensive, and I believe in this modern world of choice that we do have choices, but choice shouldn’t only be in rejecting everything, it should also be in reinterpreting things in order to make them relevant to us as we are. Which is why I would say in any religion, there are so many different houses of worship.

There are so many different kinds of priests and rabbis and imams. We should choose those we can resonate with. And if we find some we don’t agree with, we shouldn’t be frightened to say we don’t agree with or to walk away. But behind this all, the idea of God is an incredibly fluid one. In fact, it’s Steven Pinker, the Harvard philosopher, who said, “We shouldn’t talk about God so much as the idea of God, because the idea is how our minds relate to something and how our minds relate to God.” If we can find a way of relating to God, then that’s fine. But what happens if you can’t find a way to relate to God? Then my answer is there is still value in a tradition and in a structure that gets you to think about your actions that gets you to think about your morals, to think about your background, and this cultural element is a feature of humanity. So that, for example, when we talk about a European common market, we don’t think of France giving up its French culture and Germany giving up the German culture, and Italy giving up the Italian culture. We want to preserve our different cultures, we just want to be able to get on with each other and not fight with each other. And the same thing applies when it comes to how we deal with religion and how we deal with God. To me, God is not a human being. God is a sense, a sense that I get and that I can stimulate, whether it’s through meditation, whether it’s through prayer, whether it’s through song, whether it’s through the whole panoply of human experiences.

You can add a dimension to the physical dimension, you build on the physical. And these are all tools that I use to help me create my idea of God. But if you ask me to describe God, I will certainly not describe God in human terms. I will try to talk about emotions and feelings. I’ll be able to talk about meditation, I’ll be able to talk about how I meditate and how I move my mind away from my material physical body towards something more ethereal. that doesn’t prove anything. That’s not something I can give you a proof for. And just as I can’t get everybody to agree with my taste in music, so I can’t get everybody to agree with how I see the world and how I experience the world. So I’m advocating, in a sense, turning back to the idea that God cannot be described, God can only be experienced. And after all, you know, if you try to describe what love is, what the pleasure of love is, you’ll find it very difficult to come up rationally with words, because words are limited. And when you use words to describe God, you almost always fall short. So when I listen to an atheist talking, a Dawkins, I agree 100% with almost every one of his criticisms of religion, every single one of them. And yet, at the same time, I say these guys are missing something.

Now, they can get on perfectly well without, they can cope and be happy without. I still think they are missing. They are missing a spiritual dimension which you can only achieve if you set out to try to achieve it. It doesn’t come in and hit you on the head and say, “Hi, I’m God.” If it was, then everybody would have to believe in God. And so this idea of trying to prove, or trying to point out the failures of religion really has nothing to do with what I mean by God, and what I mean by God is not necessarily what you’ll believe in by God. And if anybody comes to me and says, “I can prove the existence of God,” I am always willing to say, and I can disprove your proof. So don’t rely on proofs. You can’t prove you love anybody. What? You jump off a building to show you love somebody? It doesn’t prove you love anybody. And so on that basis, it seems to me that we have to clear away a lot of the misunderstandings about what we believe and think God is so that when people often come to me and say, “Can I be Jewish, or can I be religious if I don’t believe in God?” I said, well, first of all, I dunno what you mean by believing in God. What do you do? You wake up one morning and say, yeah, glory, hallelujah. I believe. What’s it mean, I believe?

The the term of belief in the Torah is , which is normally translated belief, means to be certain about something, to trust something, to have confidence in something, not to prove anything. And so you may have confidence, you may feel secure. As they say very often, there’s no atheist in a foxhole, but that’s not very impressive. But when people have feelings and sense something is valid and valuable, I think we should respect it. There’s a whole school of philosophy called As If, I’m sorry, of psychiatry. And As If is that sometimes when you are dealing with a mad person, as described by society, who believes that that person is Napoleon, you should relate to them as if they were Napoleon. And that is a way of getting them to open up to you. So the As If philosophy is a philosophy that we should be prepared to think in terms of God being as if. That is to say that if it’s something that you relate to, then you relate to it. And if it’s not something you relate to, then you don’t relate to it. But in the end, the experience of something like God has to be so subjective that nobody can tell another person, either you do or you don’t, which is why nobody can tell you you must believe in God, otherwise you can’t be a Jew.

Now, it’s true, God is the foundation, the idea of God is the foundation of the Jewish religion and the foundation of many years of the Jewish people, but it’s not the only foundation and it is not defined, and therefore you can leave it as an open issue. The rabbis of the Talmud don’t make belief the criterion. What they are concerned with is somebody who says, “I’m telling you there definitely isn’t,” what they call the , somebody who denies, because denying implies you are laying down the law for somebody else. It might not work for you, and how can you know for certain everything there is about the world since we’re constantly finding out new things and new aspects to it and new theories of creation and big bang and little bang, and black matter and dark matter and everything else? So the denier is the person who says, “I’m not prepared to consider another point of view.” On the other hand, the agnostic is somebody who says, “I’ve got an open mind.” The agnostic is not the same thing as a denier, although some people confuse the two terms. And therefore, somebody who genuinely says, “I don’t know, I don’t know what these things mean.” When, for example, Maimonides says, “You must believe certain things,” he is saying that to a specific audience of people who need handy systems to refer to, particularly at a time when both Christianity and Islam are laying down their alternative systems.

And when they turn to Judaism and said, “Where’s your theology?” and we say, “We didn’t have one,” that’s when we had to create a theology. And that’s when Maimonides created his 13 Principles of Faith, which many people at the time, many great rabbis didn’t agree with. And yet they’ve become a kind of a handy menu for Jewish theology now, but they don’t have this force that you can’t be a Jew if you question, if you challenge. And indeed, I was very privileged in my Yeshiva days to a very, very ultra-orthodox fundamentalist world. I don’t know it would be the same today, but in my youth, I turned to the head of my Yeshiva and said, sir, I have my doubts. What am I going to do? I don’t understand when Maimonides talks about a perfect unity. What is a perfect unity? And he says, “Young man, young man, don’t worry about it. Just get on being a good person. Get on living a spiritual life and things will clarify.” And indeed, the great , the head of Iraqi Jewery a thousand years ago, said very similar things. He said, “We must go on searching throughout our lives. We must go on, there’s no end to study, no end to searching. But if you wait until you have a definitive answer that satisfies you and wait till then to decide whether to behave in a religious or ethical or Jewish manner, then you may never be able to behave in a structured way.

So stick with something first as a base and use that as a base to go out and explore. And that’s also another aspect of religion which I think is very important. No matter what religion you are, use your religion as the base. Don’t accept everything, but then go on questioning and challenging. If you are a philosopher, you’ll do it rationally, and if you are a mystic, you’ll do it mystically. But don’t try to impose ideas on others. And particularly, when it comes to God, stop with trying to treat God as superman in the sky. Now, same time, I accept, as I mentioned before, the idea of the atheist in the foxhole. We humans have a natural tendency to want things, to express, please may I have, I want, I want, I’m in trouble, I need help, I need support. And having an idea of God can be very helpful, it can be very reassuring, so long as it doesn’t prevent you from being proactive in trying to rectify what’s gone wrong, or put right things that need improvement. And so it is a very important tool. Religion is the tool and God is the experience.

So that is my presentation and I look forward now to answering questions, or discussing, or debating, or rectifying anything I’ve said that you might feel is out of place.

Q&A and Comments

And so I turn to question and answers, and start with Rose. Happy to see you back. Thank you. Shelly.

Q: How about God as an ATM machine? A: I pray, I should get what I want. Well, I think that’s very naive. I think it’s very silly if you treat God, but many people do, and I suppose in a sense, they feel that’s doing some good. For example, people very often pray for somebody who’s sick. Do they really believe that God is going to answer every person who prays around the world, no matter what religion, to heal this person who is sick? And if so, why do some people die? But the problem of all such approaches is that somehow we know we’re not going to be able to get what we want. We’re just expressing our hope. And when we say psalms, or pray, or ask for God to cure somebody, we are trying to do something that we can do to be helpful, to put our positive energy into something. But I don’t know that people, well, again, it depends. Some people are more analytical and others are more simplistic. Some people do believe, I’ve had plenty of cases of people who claim they prayed to God and God answered their prayers. And I’m sure that’s probably true, because there’s a 50/50 chance of God either answering their prayers or not answering their prayers. So it’s what you expect. And sometimes saying psalms or praying for somebody is therapeutic and it’s therapeutic for you, even if it might not be therapeutic for them.

Brian Wilkins says, "I love my Jews and believe in God and marvel at his creation. I have no desire to communicate with God through prayer. My belief is that having been created with responsibility to care of his creation.” I agree with you 100%. Our responsibility as humans is to. The question of what prayer is, is a question I’m going to go into in greater detail. But I understand prayer as self-expression. The Hebrew word is lehitpalel, and lehitpalel literally means to express oneself. And so it’s an outpouring in the same way as when I bless my children on a Friday evening at the table and I’m saying, you know, please God take care of them. I’m really saying, I care about you and I want you to do well. The prayer is just a formula. It’s like the words that go with a tune.

Q: Is my above statement disrespectful or selfish juju? A: No, I don’t think it is. It’s your choice. You know, for example, most rabbis of the Talmud didn’t rate prayer so highly. They thought study was more important, both because study leads to practise and because study is a form of meditation when you relate to the text and involve yourself in it in such a way that it takes you beyond the immediate world. And so there are many rabbis who use study as a substitute for prayer. And there are so many different ways, and that’s why I encourage individuals to experiment and to see what works for them.

Miriam asked, “Thanks for being willing to discuss a fascinating subject. The end of Job is not conclusions suggests that God ultimately knowable to man and human mind.” Yes, I think that’s a very good example, Miriam. Yes indeed, this idea that we don’t know the answer and Job admits that we don’t know the answer. And indeed the book of Ecclesiastes, Kohelet also admits we don’t know so many things. So being willing to admit we don’t know is very much part of the biblical tradition. And so is the idea which was adopted by Christianity of the mysterium, or the mystery of life. There is room for mystery, for imagination, for poetry. I mean, think of all the things that rely on non-rational elements in the human being.

Mike says, perfection, mistaken making man against order.“ Yes, God created the world, according to the Bible, out of chaos. chaos, , was built into the system, making choices built into the system. That means we make bad choices, as well as good choices. We, in Judaism, do not believe in original sin, but we do believe that humans have the capacity to do the wrong thing. And we make mistakes all the time. We’re doing it all the time. Everywhere you look around the world at the moment, there’s mistakes. Everywhere you look around the moment, it is chaos. But as the rabbi said, "The world was not created for angels.” It was not meant to be a place of perfection, it’s a place of imperfection. But sometimes imperfection can be beautiful. We can find beauty in something which is not regular. So all these people who were destroyed, so to speak, by God, it’s a way of saying that if we behave badly, people will suffer. If we behave goodly, sometimes people will benefit. But most of the time, life is a mixture of both of these things. We’re doing good and bad all the time. This world was not, even if you believe that God created it, was not created as a perfect union. It’s a magnificent, brilliant institution with things we don’t understand and with so much in nature that is beyond imagination, but we need to have imagination. Just because it’s beyond imagination, it doesn’t need to say it doesn’t have some value. It to meditation, contemplation, can you include Roman Catholic chants which can also invoke the presence of God? I think you can use any kind of chant, Buddhism or other, only I think where the chant has certain theological connotation.

So, for example, if you are a Christian, your meditation is focusing on Jesus, then of course it depends on how you understand Jesus. If you understand Jesus as God, then that is a problem for Jews and it’s a problem for Jewish meditation, but it’s not a problem for Christian meditation. And so whether it’s Jews or Muslims who do not have this representation of God, a representation of God is a problem. So all my contemplations or meditations focus on non-physical representation. I’ll give you an example. One of the tools is what’s called black and white fire. Black and white fire is when you shut your eyes, and when you look into what your eyes are shut, you will see what looks like black and white kind of movement in the distance behind. And that’s an example of something which is not physical, it’s not a representation, but if you focus on it, you transport your mind away from so much of the physical world. And there are lots of examples of that. You can look them up in endless books.

Julian says, “It could be thought of as an interface, a filter of the infinite with a finite.” That’s a nice way of putting it. I like this. It is an interface. That’s a very good way of describing it. And I approve and agree with that. Perhaps if God wanted us to believe in him, he would’ve existed. Well, yes, but you know, the idea of God wanting sounds stupid to me. Want by what? What kind of want? And so, you know, when it comes to something of this kind, the whole question of denying the existence of God is as meaningless as asserting the existence of God. It’s entirely what you feel. Only Rosen will give us this tour through history of interpretation . Thank you so much, Jennifer. Thank you very much.

Q: Is there a specific Jewish way of meditating? A: There are lots of Jewish ways of meditating. I would advise if you are interested in looking up the writings on Rabbi Kaplan. Rabbi Kaplan on meditation. He is a very orthodox rabbi, no longer alive unfortunately, but he gives, Aryeh Kaplan, his name, A-R-Y-E-H, Kaplan, K-A-P-L-A-N. That’s a place to go to explore Jewish meditation.

Thank you, Nanette. Grandma Lorna, we should stick to physical things.

Q: Observe nature, or is that being a creationist? A: No, I think we should observe nature. I think we should see nature as the basis of our lives and the basis of our existence, but it’s not the only thing. There are things beyond nature that we should incorporate too. And that I believe is the major contribution of religion. So, for example, I can look at a beautiful scene at a beautiful sunset and I can feel awe and inspiration. That is not God to me, but it’s, if you like, one step towards the idea of God and away from the idea that the world is just a physical world. Because even that we’re not not certain about at this moment.

Susan Kranz, thank you very much. Bobby Steger, but if you are agnostic, I tend to think you need to have a truly unexpected spiritual surprise that has a profound impact on you and turns you thinking around or lying to accept the existence of God. Well, that may happen. A lot of people go through certain phases of their lives, through certain experiences that suddenly give them a sense of something beyond. I’ve heard of people stepping out of a car crash and suddenly become religious, just as I’ve heard people stepping out of a and saying, “I’m never going back to religion again.” So, yes, there are lots of things that can trigger within us either a religious or a non-religious tradition. And good luck to everybody. Again, as I say, I’m in favour of variety.

The phrase, “We are created in the image of God.” Well, created in the image of God is described itself in the Bible by saying, “Knowing the difference between good and bad.” In other words, God represents morality, ethics. And that’s what differentiates us from animals and other parts of nature. Of course the Bible uses human terminology. That is a problem for us if we don’t take it out of the anthropomorphic. But the image of God means that what God wants us to do is be good people. So Leviticus 19 says , be holy, , because God represents holiness. What is holiness? Nothing is intrinsic holy. It’s treating it as holy or not treating it as holy. It’s up to you. Holy means set apart. Which is why, for example, in the Bible, holy is applied to the temple, but it’s also applied to temple prostitutes and bad people. So being created in the image of God basically means somebody who cares about being a good, ethical person, ideally with a God dimension, but not necessarily.

Q: Why did say after going through, he thought it was good? A: Well, again, good is what, shall we say, God approves of, which is what we are supposed to approve of. So when Torah says something is good, this is something that the Torah approves of. In other words, humans are beautiful things. We are wonderful, we’re not perfect, but creation is a beautiful thing and we are in the image of God, in that we have the capacity to differentiate between ethical behaviour and non-ethical behaviour. David Cohen, my late teacher, Dr. Irving Jacobs, ah, what a magnificent man he was. Very, very special. In Judaism, your task is to keep the mitzvah. Christianity implies you must believe. And yes, that’s another formulation which amounts to what I am saying using different words.

Austin, why I share your dislike to the Orthodox community imposing the practical beliefs on us surely must accept they genuinely believe they’re doing it as a mitzvah. Yes, dislike is the wrong word. I do not dislike. I see myself as part of the Orthodox community. It’s the only place where I can go to pray where I really feel, but I mean the real orthodox, the Haredi. If I had to choose which part of my Jewish soul belongs to a denomination, and I don’t like choosing, I would choose the Haredi world because I love that passion and the way they pray. I don’t like that aspect of them that disregards other people that will not serve the community. So you know, let’s draw a distinction between that. I think they believe very strongly they are doing the word of God and they believe that, but as you know, some of them don’t and some of them do to different degrees and no community is totally homogeneous. Clara, thank you very much. Randy Bellows, trilobites existed 250 million years ago. Dinosaur 150 million.

How do we think God has selected homo sapiens who have been around for only 10,000 years ago? Because you are treating God as a human, as selecting. Why can’t you treat God as the process that allows slow evolution, and the evolution to the point where we make ethical decisions? And who knows? There might come a time when artificial intelligence will make all the decisions for us and we’ll be in a different state altogether. It is a process, and a process, as you say, that’s going on for billions of years. So the idea that we have to treat God’s involvement as we would, you know, building a block out of something, out of LEGO bricks is something which goes back to misunderstanding what I mean by God.

Q: How do you think people in countries in communist Russia, North Korea handle their beliefs and faith whilst it’s absent something they missed? A: Well, yes, I believe. Look at those societies. I don’t think they’re happy societies. I don’t think they’re happy societies I would want to live in and and they have killed just as many people as religions have killed. So there are examples of people who can manage, and let there be choice. If there are people happy living in those societies, by all means, if people are happy living in China, by all means, it just strikes me that most people, given a choice, would rather live somewhere where they have choices, which might include a religious choice. But if people are happy living under Putin, good luck to you, mate.

Thank you, Rabbi, for reassuring me. Thank you, Mona. I’m glad I reassured you. Clive. Hi, Clive. If you do not necessarily believe in being, then what would be the point of worshipping living our life system by being? No, I believe very strongly in being. I don’t know where you’ve got the idea of not being. I think being is essential. That is the definition of God. So the point of worshipping and living our life according to the system is that we need structure, we need help. We need something that tells us. Think before you , think before you act. Try to not become slaves to society and get swept up by taking a break from society. These are all important elements that leading a religious life gives to us. And I value those things, and that’s why I think following specific rules is helpful and why so often people who don’t have a structure get more depressed and why people can cope with adversity very often if they jump out of bed first thing in the morning and they do certain things and follow a particular ritual and repeat it during the course of the day, and keep on thinking, 'cause that’s what repeating does. It gets you to stop and think before you act. And that’s why we have a morning service, afternoon service, and evening service. And even if you don’t go to service, there’s a little meditation, or you can pray at home before you go out. But this all helps.

People question the Shoah. Was there a god? Well, yes. And of course, you know the famous answer, the answer is where was humanity in the Shoah? And there is no answer. And the answer simply is don’t think of God as superman. If you think of God as Superman, God is a disaster, is a failure. And yet, look, we humans, we can continue. Who would’ve thought we would survive, we Jews, and come back from the Holocaust and build a state of Israel? And this to me is just as much a miracle as the horror of murder. And the difference between the Holocaust was simply they used more modern tools, but people have been murdering Jews for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. They’d be murdering other people too. Just as many Jews, just as many Christians are being killed by Christians as Jews are killed, probably many more. So I don’t think that that is necessarily a problem. Carla . Thank you very much.

Q: Ralph, is there a linkage between belief in God’s omnipotence and the simple fact that knowledge is infinite? A: That’s a nice idea. That’s a nice idea. I just don’t like applying any term to God. It does not make sense, because if God is beyond time, then what is knowledge? Knowledge can go forward, backwards. Space can go forward and backwards. Memories go forwards and backwards. We are learning all kinds of things about the different dimensions. And so I like the idea that knowledge is very important. knowledge is a fundamental element in the mystical, the religious tradition.

Thank you very much, Brian. Thank you to Kel12. Philip, second paragraph of expresses reward and punishment. We say it three times a day. Well, that’s true, it does. But first of all, question number one is do we take it as applying to us as individuals or do we take it as applying to the nation, or do we take it as applying that if you have a structured life and if you have a good life, that in itself is going to be a reward? So this whole idea of reward and punishment is something I’m going to come to in one of the proceeding lectures precisely because it is such an interesting issue.

Q: Words has shown there’s an anthropomorphic reading God is he/she, why read in terms of feminine and masculine? A: Well, only because that’s a text in which was written. Any ancient text is written in the context of the time. Every culture, remember, it’s only in recent years we’re talking about difference in approaching gender. So the Torah was a work written in the context of its time in the way they understood and we talk about monarchs and kings as opposed to queens, although there were queens and there were monarchs who were, but nevertheless until recently, the male was the common way of talking.

Q: Linda, is it correct to believe that one has to be belong to the United Synagogue in order to be buried in an orthodox cemetery, unlike the Haredi? A: No, you have to be a member of the United Synagogue to be buried as a member of the United Synagogue. There are plenty of other burial places that don’t require you to be a member of the United Synagogue. There’s the Federation, for example. There’s the Independent, the old Western synagogue burial grounds. So it’s a question of whether you take out some sort of commitment to a burial society, and then you get free burial. Otherwise, you can buy plots in an orthodox synagogue in Bushy and other places. So long as if you are orthodox, you buy in an orthodox place, reform in a reform place, or depends on your identity. So it’s not true to say that one has to belong to the United Synagogue in order to be buried in an orthodox cemetery. If you are Jewish, you can be buried anywhere, and some have restrictions. But that’s true of any group or any business. There’s no orthodox symmetry that is a Jewish cemetery. Dunno what that means.

Q: Bobby, what about those who believe they will be punished in the afterlife? A: They’re aren’t moral beings. Well I’m going to deal with afterlife and life after death. So if you forgive me, I won’t mention it now, but it’s going to be one of the issues we’re going to have to talk about.

Thank you, you sound very much like Kaplan’s position on God. I have a lot of sympathy on Kaplan. Very much, I don’t agree with him when it comes to the importance of Halakhah and sticking to tradition, that to me is absolutely essential, in many respects, even more essential than God. Pamela, ethics and morality are culturally defined. Is all systems considered godly, culturally defined. Yes, there’s a lot of cultural definition. What is good in different places. There are certain common fundamentals. Some people think there are these common fundamentals built in. I don’t agree with that. I think there’s some societies that have cannibalism and think of eating grandma, but you know, nevertheless, there’s a lot of cultural definition. That’s why Jews brought up in Arab culture have a lot in common with the Arab world. Jews brought up in western culture have a lot in common with the western world. We are all influenced culturally. Physics can’t explain how and why the universe was created. Moreover, aside from that, how does conscious thought exists? These things are not sold. They’re still open and we are still looking and we are still searching, and I think we should. And I think everybody should go on searching. It’s when you say, you know, I’m right and everybody else is wrong, I have a problem. Thank you, Sharon, for your nice words.

And so that’s where we come to end, everybody. And so thank you very much and I look forward to seeing you next time.