There is Nothing Final About the Death of God
by Richard L. Rubenstein (April 2010)
Aaron died the next day.
I had given my son permission to die and he had taken it. In spite of the fact that neither he nor Carol, whose background is Southern Baptist, had ever joined a religious community, such permission could only meaningfully be given in the language of religion. In any other language, I might have seemed harsh and perhaps unfeeling. By telling him that God was calling him back, I was relating his dying to the cosmic order of things. I was also offering an implicit but credible theodicy.
[2]
[5]
[vi]
[viii]
In the case of funeral, internment and mourning rituals, for example, the mandatory disposal of human remains is transformed into a ceremony of leave-taking, honoring the deceased, and consoling the mourners at a time when they are least able to rely on their own emotional resources. It is possible, to create secular rituals of mourning and leave-taking, but few non-believers choose such an option. By virtue of their synthetic or private character, secular rituals lack the accumulated wisdom of the race in facing such crises. Whether we believe in a radically transcendent God or regard God as the Holy Nothingness-Das Heilige Nichts- as does this writer, or are deeply skeptical about the existence of God altogether, there are moments in life for which the rites of our inherited traditions of our respective communities are, for most of us, indispensable.
Nor need we be believers to participate in or even lead the rituals of our religious communities. On a number of occasions, I have served as the Doktorvater (the Ph.D. thesis advisor) of ordained ministers of conservative Protestant denominations. They were eminently suited morally, intellectually, and culturally to pursue their vocations. From time to time some of them would express doubts concerning the credibility of their community’s official religious narrative. Nevertheless, most have gone on to distinguished careers in the ministry.
In my own case, when my first book, After Auschwitz, was published,[ix] there were people who thought I was attempting to discredit religious belief and practice. In reality, I was attempting to salvage what I believed could be salvageable. In the Preface to the second edition, I wrote about the first edition:
[x]
That has remained my fundamental conviction to this day.
[xi]
A similar injunction is repeated elsewhere in Scripture, but the passage in Exodus 22: 28-29 is of special interest:
I in turn gave them laws that were not good and rules by which they could not live. When they set aside every first issue of the womb, I defiled them by their very gifts-that I might render them desolate, that they might know that I am the Lord. [xiv]
In accordance with the prescribed ritual, I then declared to the kohen:
I dutifully took out five silver dollars, the symbolic equivalent of the biblical shekels and placed the coins in front of the kohen. The kohen then asked:
Would you rather offer your first-born son, the first-born of his mother, or would you rather redeem him for the five selaim (shekels) which you are bound to give according to the Torah?
There was, of course, only one possible response, but there was also a hint of an older darker response.
Of all the festivals of the religious calendar, none has the power to bring about the participation of even the most secularized Jews as does the Passover meal, the Seder. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur have a solemnity that brings Jews to the synagogue in large numbers; the Seder, customarily a home ritual, is the dominant ritual of Passover. At one level, the Seder recalls the story of Israel’s liberation from Egyptian bondage, but there are other levels that look back to archaic Semitic communion sacrifices and anticipate elements of the Christian Eucharist. When, for example, Paul of Tarsus identified Christ as “our Passover” (I Cor. 5:8) which has been “sacrificed,” he was undoubtedly following a tradition in the primitive Christian Church (John 1:29 and 1 Peter 1: 19-20). As the “lamb of God,” Christ was thus identified with the most archaic sacrificial offering in Judaism. [xvii]The archaic character of the sacrifice is apparent in the account in Exodus:
until the fourteenth day of this month; and all the congregation of Israel shall slaughter it at twilight. They shall take some of the blood, and put it on the two doorposts and the lintel in which they are to eat it. They shall eat the flesh that same night; they shall eat it roasted over the fire, and unleavened bread and with bitter herbs. Do not eat any of it raw, or cooked in any way with water, but roasted- head, legs, and entrails– over the fire. You shall not leave any of it over until morning; if any of it is left until morning, You shall burn it. (Exod. 12:3-10).
The whole community took collective responsibility for the sacrificial slaughter, and all were required to take part in the consumption of the victim. Even the head and the genitals had to be eaten. Moreover, the prohibition against eating the animal raw or cook hints at a practice that was either a past memory and a present temptation or a current temptation among some of the Hebrews or their neighbors.
among the children of Israel, both of man and beast” is to be “consecrated” unto God. In the biblical account of the ten plagues, the final plague visited upon the Egyptians was the slaughter of their first-born sons. As the Seder ritual emphasizes, the Israelite first-born escape because they have obeyed God’s command to smear the blood of the lamb on their doorposts (Exod. 12:13, 12:39). Absent the blood, which serves as evidence that the surrogate lamb had been slaughtered, the biblical account indicates that the Israelite first-born would have met the same fate as the Egyptians.
When he argued that Christians are “justified” by means of Christ’s “blood” (Rom. 5:9), it would appear that he regarded Christ as the perfect paschal lamb (I Cor. 5:8). However, Paul’s paschal lamb is no longer a surrogate. The victim reappears in divine-human form.
Jewish tradition often treated Isaac as if he had actually been slain by Abraham.tween Isaac and Jesus in these traditions. In Jewish sources, Isaac’s trustful obedience even unto death is often stressed. Moreover, he is frequently treated as a vicarious atonement for Israel’s sins. For example, on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, God is implored to forgive rather than slay the household of Israel because of the merits of Isaac’s obedience on Mount Moriah.[xx]
cause of Christian influence. On the contrary, he maintained that the theme entered Christianity from Judaism and that Paul of Tarsus was the mediating link. Although the comparison is not explicit in Paul’s extant writings, his insistence upon Christ as the perfect atonement for the sins of humanity suggests that for Paul as well as for those early fathers of the Church who explicitly take up the comparison, Isaac’s Aqedah is an aborted Golgotha<span style="letter-spacing: 0.5pt">;[xxi] Isaac is depicted as lacking the capacity to redeem mankind because he did not really die on his wooden pyre. By contrast, in Christianity Jesus’ atoning death at the Passover season effects a convergence of redemptive themes: Jesus is the perfect lamb; he is also the perfect Isaac. His sacrifice is alone efficacious. Like the Law, Isaac is said to anticipate redemption but cannot achieve it. Jesus dies for all men’s sins, but most especially for the sin of Adam.
The Bible reflects an enormous amount of intergenerational ambivalence. The story of Abraham is typical. He yearns for the blessing of an heir, yet when the heir is on the point of manhood, Abraham hears God’s command to offer him “as a burnt offering.” (Gen: 22:2) Could there have been more involved for Abraham than selfless obedience? The story of Jephthah and his daughter reveals a comparable ambivalence with a sorrier outcome. (Jud 11:30-11:40).
We would do well not to ignore Oedipus. Oedipus does not want to kill his father and marry his mother. Nevertheless, every step he takes to escape that outcome brings him closer to the fatal encounter at the crossroads. Intergenerational conflict works both ways.
There is nothing final about the death of God.
[3] Richard L. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism, 1st ed. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966)
[vi] Berger, op. cit., p.44.
[viii] See Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960).
[ix] Richard L. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism, 1st ed. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966).
[x] Richard L. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: History, Theology and Contemporary Judaism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), pp. xii-xiii.
[xi] Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Breitler, The Jewish Study Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p.131. Unless otherwise noted, all English translations of Scripture in this essay are from this volume.
[xv] Levenson, op. cit., p. 45 (emphasis by author).
The Passover may originally have been a night, spring, and full moon festival of desert nomads. Other scholars distinguish between an original Canaanite agrarian feast of unleavened bread and the sacrifice of the paschal lamb, which was probably an offering of desert herdsmen.
[xviii] Shalom Spiegel, The Last Trial, trans. Judah Golden (New York: Schocken, 1970).
[xix] Spiegel, op. cit., pp. 33f. Spiegel cites Midrash Shibbole ha-Leket, Inyan Tefillah, 18, ed. S. Buber , 9a.
[xxii] Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962).
This essay was originally published as “Der Todt Gottes ist keineswegs endüldig” in Tobias Daniel Wabbel, ed., Das Heilige Nichts: Gott nach dem Holocaust, (Düsseldorf: Patmos Verlag, 2007). It was then published in French as “La Morte de Dieu N’a Rien de Définitif,” in Les Provinciales, No. 62, March 2009.
is President Emeritus and Distinguished Professor of Religion at the University of Bridgeport and Lawton Distinguished Professor of Religion Emeritus at Florida State University. He is the author of numerous books and articles on Jewish theology, the Holocaust and other issues including After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism, The Cunning of History, My Brother Paul and Dissolving Alliance: The United States and the Future of Europe. His most recent book is Jihad and Genocide (Rowman and Littlefield, 2010)
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