The Minds of God

Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord:  Isaiah 1:18a  KJV

Reason – Despite the later translation corrections of this Hebrew verb (yākaḥ rendered in the NASB as “debate” and in the NIV as “settle”), most believers of a certain age recall this verse in its King James vernacular, “let us reasontogether.”  We won’t explore why those King James appointed translators chose “reason,” but we should notice that such a translation gives support to the idea that God is a God of reason, that is, of logical argument—and the purpose of logical argument is to find the truth.  We should not be surprised when we discover that Western Christianity has embraced this Greek ideal in its proclamation that Church doctrine embraces the Truth of God’s word and any serious disagreement must be because of false ideas.  This kind of thinking presents an epistemology (how we think) that is based on a fundamental principle of logic, the principle of non-contradiction.  Two statements in contradiction with each other cannot both be true.  They may both be false, but if one of them is true, the contradictory one must be false.  Thus, if the statement “God is good” is true, then the statement “God is evil” cannot be true because “good” and “evil” are opposites.  This principle lies behind all kinds of Christian theological reasoning, although it does present some fairly gnarly problems with things like the nature of Christ (fully human and fully divine).  What matters is that most exegesis in Christian circles intends to discover, by reason or otherwise, the truth of a statement—the one truth that make sense of the world.

Not so in rabbinic Judaism—and that fact that the idea of non-contradiction isn’t part of Jewish exegesis is a fundamental and essential difference between Western Christianity and Semitic-Eastern Judaism.  There is a famous midrash in the Talmud on this topic (you can read it and the comments HERE). According to this midrash, contradictory opinions are both true, something that isn’t possible in a Greek world.  Boyarin comments:

“What is unique is the ultimate answer given in this narrative of the Babylonia Talmud and constitutive of a certain Jewish theology: namely, that disagreement itself, or at any rate the appearance of disagreement to humans, is exemplary of the divine mind.  Instead of conducing to an ideal of homonoia, the Babylonia Talmud leads to an idea of polynoia, the many-mindedness, as it were, of God.  This difference is embodied in the famous talmudic statement that a heavenly oracle declared, with respect to the contradictory opinions of the two Houses of Hillel and Shamai, that ‘these and these are the words of the Living God’ (BT Eruvin 13b).”[1]

“The Yavneh in which a voice from heaven declared that these [the words of the House of Hillel} and these words [the words of the House of Shammai] are the words of the Living God’ represents a later version of Yavneh, the Yavneh of the Talmuds and especially of the redaction level of the Babylonian Talmud, in which the notion of a single true Torah has been abandoned.”[2]  (emphasis mine).

Can you appreciate the enormity of this shift in epistemology?  Do you realize that the common but perhaps unconscious quest for certainty in Western thinking does not apply to rabbinic thought?  Is it any wonder that orthodox Jews cannot embrace the single-minded dogma of Christianity?  In fact, Jewish orthodoxy has more in common with the self-contradictory statements of Trinitarian doctrine than with any of the typical exegesis of Scripture.  Isn’t that odd?

Try to put this into place when you encounter midrash.  Try to think Jewishly.  It will, literally, fracture your mind.

Topical Index:  indeterminacy, contradiction, midrash, epistemology, Boyarin, Isaiah 1:18a

[1] Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: the Partition of Judeo-Christianity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p. 162.

[2] Ibid., p. 159.