But take the utmost care and watch yourselves scrupulously, so that you do not forget the things that you saw with your own eyes and so that they do not fade from your heart as long as you live.  Deuteronomy 4:9

Eyes – Abraham Herschel said it.  “The essence of Jewish religious thinking does not lie in entertaining a concept of God but in the ability to articulate a memory of moments of illumination by His presence.  Israel is not a people of definers but a people of witnesses.”  Read it again, please.  There is no greater difference between the Greek-Western worldview and the Hebrew-Eastern Semitic worldview than Herschel’s insightful summary.  The West is the world of the mind.  We have a God of the mind; a God of concepts like omnipotence, omniscience and salvation.  Our theologies are systematic, rational exercises which attempt to catalog, categorize and define God within the blueprints of our mental constructs.  We are people of the book, in the worst sense of the term, waiting for rational explanation through more and more detail.  The Greek world knows only one unlimited entity in the universe – thought.  What exists is only what we can ultimately understand.

Herschel points to the West’s intellectual bankruptcy.  God does not come to us in nicely defined, rationally explained, thought categories.  God does not fit Himself into our theological text books.  The Hebrew God breaks all the rules.  He is near, yet transcendent; clothed in human form, yet holy; more terrifying than can be imagined, yet compassionate; invisible, yet revealed; judging, yet merciful, sovereign, yet humble.  No matter where you look, God breaks the molds.  The incarnation is only the paradigm example of an indefinable God. 

Herschel notes that the Jews are a people of witnesses.  That means that their history is the history of God’s selective choice, using Israel for His purposes through a long line of divine-human encounters.  The theology of Judaism is the story, not the definitions.  It is the story of God revealing Himself to a people, chosen by Him.  In this story, the most important thing is the accurate retelling from one generation to the next because this is the story of who God is and it is the only story that we have.  Doctrine is not nearly as important as encounter.  In Jewish thought, the encounter of God with His people is not something that resides only in the past.  It is anchored there, but it extends itself to everyone who comes after the encounter who is also a part of the called people.  We, as Christians, share in this story – the story of all creation.  We are grafted into the community and the continuity of Israel.  This is critically important because it means that God’s personal illumination in His presence with Israel is also our personal illumination.  The story belongs to us.  Therefore, we also take on the necessity of accurately remembering and transmitting this unique encounter to the next generation. 

God’s encounter with Israel is the whole of the Scriptures.  It includes both the Old and the New Testaments.  When Peter proclaimed that the prophecy of Joel was being fulfilled, he drew us into the circle of the story-tellers.  So, the history of Israel is now our history. 

That raises a question for every one of us who claims to follow the Messiah.  Do we know the story?  I don’t mean, “Are we familiar with it?”  I don’t mean, “Do you recognize some of the parts from our childhood Sunday school days?”  I mean, “Do we know the story?”  And, of course, in Hebrew “to know” is to absorb it into the actions of my life. 

So, do you know the story?  Or is your God just a conglomerate of definitions?

Topical Index:  Judaism, Greek worldview, story, witnesses, definitions, eyes, Deuteronomy 4:9