In Allg. Zeit. des Jud. ii, Nos. 4-9 Holdheim discusses the essential principles of Judaism, arriving at the conclusion that Judaism has no binding dogmas

When it comes to certain things like, for example, consciousness, the ability to grasp it, to pin it down, to say what it is and where it arises, this is almost the wrong way to approach it because it's not a thing like that. It's not another thing in the world alongside the things that consciousness allows us to be aware of. And God is not a thing in the world in the way that a rock or a stone or a tree is a thing in the world, or at least I would begin to want to qualify that as well, but for these purposes, let's say a bicycle is a thing in the world, but God is not a very complicated machine. He's not a very complicated anything of the kind that we know

And so to try to approach God in that way is going to produce no insight into what people mean. And you have to be either a very arrogant or a very confident person to say, “Well, all these people who think that they understand something that I can't see, they're just wrong because I can't see it.” Another way of looking at it would be, “Well, maybe I need to revise my thoughts about what is true”

And I know this sounds like sort of hedging one's bets, but is there a truth that can be stated in words, that is true to what human nature is? So is human nature in other words, something that can be written down in a scientific text and that pins down and exhausts what a human being is? Now, human beings we know exists and we all have experience of them. But in order to convey the realities of what a human being is, encounters and is capable of, you'd have to turn to art. You'd have to turn to the works of Shakespeare. You'd have to turn to narratives. You turn to stories, to great myths which explain our relationship to a divine realm or to the cosmos or to one another. And if you don't have, and I think some people are just born without the capacity to feel what it is that art tells us, what poetry tells us, what music tells us, what rituals tell us, what narratives tell us, then you won't understand why you're missing a very great deal because you're trying to make it all fit onto a very procrustean bed. You're trying to cut off everything that doesn't fit into this one way of looking at things

And to make this clear, in the ancient world, in the ancient Greek world, and these people were by no means fools, I mean, they were the first scientists in the modern sense. They made extraordinary scientific advances, but they didn't think that these advances would tell them the answers to the big questions like: What is a human being? What does consciousness mean? Where is it? Who has it? What is the divine? What do we mean when we talk about the sacred? Which almost everybody experiences and finds a need to talk about the sacred, even if they don't use the term “God”, it doesn't really matter

And so in this ancient Greek world, there were two conceptions of truth, mythos, or muthos as it would be originally, and logos. Mythos has given us the word “myth” and logos has given us the word “logic”. But they believed that the big truths, the really deep truths, the great truths, could only be encompassed by poetry, by narrative, by what falls in the realm of “myth”. Whereas “logic” was the sort of thing that a lawyer would do in a courtroom to settle a dispute and decide how much money was owed by one person to another. So it operated on a much more trivial realm. Now you can say I'm only interested in that trivial realm in which things can be measured and demonstrated by a photograph and so forth. But do you believe in love? Do you think that love is real? If you don't think it's real, I pity you because it's the most staggering experience in life. It has many forms: there's the erotic love one has for a partner. There is the love one has for nature. There is for those of us who sense something greater and divine, there is the love one has for that. But love cannot be demonstrated in laboratory. It cannot be manipulated. It can't be measured in any way. Does that make it unreal? Not at all

So I feel this is just a huge discrepancy between a very narrow idea of what truth is and a broader one. And if you'll permit me, I just want to say something about “truth” there. There are many ways to think about what “truth” is and many types of theory and philosophy about how to think of truth. But there are two that are very important because they're quite different and we can recognize them. “Truth” as correctness, which is really this closing down on a precise form of words or measurement that encompasses what it is that we are looking at. There's something out there, which is the truth, and I'm going to take steps which lead me in a linear fashion towards that truth, and I get closer and closer to that truth, which is an entity somewhere. While the other is that “truth” is a process of discovery, of unveiling, and when I say discovery, I mean literally uncovering, uncovering the accretions that have come between us and a deeper truth that is not discernible by the everyday eye of reason. The everyday eye of reason is very valuable. I very much respect reason and science, and they've served me well for many, many years.

And I worry that nowadays, in fact, both of them are coming under attack. People are discrediting science unless it fits with the narrative of what they would like politically to think is true. That people are discarding reason if they don't find that it leads to the place they want to go. I'm not attacking them. I'm just saying they have limitations. Intuition has limitations too, but it also has great powers to put us in touch with things that science alone won't take us to. Indeed much of science was actually solved not by the scientific method, but by a process of intuitive approach towards a gestalt, a shape, a form, which gave the answer to a mathematician or to a scientist. Imagination is also a very important tool. As was known to the great philosophers of the late 18th and early 19th century, imagination was the way in which one felt one's way into the true reality of something other than oneself. And without imagination, one couldn't reach it

I argue strongly that if there is a God, that God is not omniscient and not omnipotent. But is also not, not omniscient and not omnipotent. What do I mean by that? If you think of these things in a very left hemispheric way, the omniscience would mean that God knows everything that ever has been, ever will be, and all the possibilities. And therefore, the future is known, everything is closed, and the whole business of us leading out our lives is really a sorry charade, because we have no freedom. And as it were, the cosmos is not achieving anything creative. It's just unfolding something that's already there. And omnipotence can be of a similar kind, that it means that God can just do anything, can make, you know, two equal five or whatever. I don't believe that God is of this nature

But I don't think that you can say, well, God is not omniscient or not omnipotent. You can only say he's not, not omniscient and not, not omnipotent. And what I'm getting at here is that those terms don't really apply. It's like, if you ask me, “Well, is God green?” And I say, “Well, no, God's not green. But, you know, he's not not green either.” I mean, it's just, it's the wrong kind of term to use. It's like asking “if God is even?” And it's like, “No, He's not even. But He's not odd either.” It's just the wrong terminology. As famously, Thomas Aquinas pointed out, all religious language is analogical. That is, God is not omnipotent. God is not loving. God is not powerful. God is none of these things, because these are human terms to sort of approximate the kind of thing that God might be like

And maybe the only way that we really have the authority to use these as analogies is because we have Scripture using these terms, so we know they must be accurate at some level, but we have to keep in mind that God is not any of these things. These are just essentially metaphors

People are probably gonna be a bit sort of befuddled by that, but if I'm understanding you correctly, you're meaning something a bit like that? But I am meaning exactly something like that. I'm meaning that you're asking a question, which is the question you could ask of something that is already a creation, a machine or an object, but God is not a machine or an object. God is the terms as it were on which there can be anything. So God is not the first cause in the sense of a first actor who temporarily started a process, but God is the prime cause in the sense that the without which there can be nothing. So the basis on which there can be something. And the questions you can ask of that are different questions

Metaphor is behind all our language, including very much the language of philosophy - of mainstream analytical philosophy and of science. So as I sometimes point out, even the words like abstract and immaterial are themselves entirely metaphorical. The word abstract comes from Latin roots, meaning “to be dragged away from somewhere”. In other words, taken out of its context and physically dragged somewhere else. That is what it comes from. immaterial comes from the root originally, mater, meaning “mother”, and going on from there to mean “wood” as a symbol of things that are material and so forth. So all our thinking, we couldn't get to first base without metaphors. All our thinking is based on metaphor

I think you should be as clear as the subject matter allows, but no clearer than that. And if you try to make it clearer, you are now moving into error. You're moving away from truth towards falsehood. And the really big questions are of this nature that they can't be clarified in that way. And they can't be made consistent with the Law of Non-Contradiction. That all started with, of course, Aristotle. And it has had an unfortunate effect that people are unwilling to see that a thing and its opposite may often obtain. I'm saying that sometimes not only can it be neither, but it might be both. And here again, we have to say the stuff that deals with the everyday is not a good way of dealing with the rarefied area we're going into of consciousness of God and so forth

Let me quote Niels Bohr. The gist of what he was saying was that a thing and its opposite may very well be true. And he had the yin-yang symbol, the taijitu, on his coat of arms. He said that a thing and its contrary are often true. But this is not true of the trivial. For example, if I had coffee this morning, either I had milk in it or I didn't, there's no sense in saying, “Well, it's not really one or the other.” But when you get to the realm of the things we're talking about, they are manifest more by contradiction than by simple statements where the contrary is obviously wrong

מי אני האט געשריבן: ↑דינסטאג נאוועמבער 15, 2022 4:28 pmלגבי די געדאנק פון דעם ״as if״ בנוגע די כבוד פאר א מת לגבי דאווענען בתוך י״א חודש וכו׳, איז מיר געווען אינטרעסאנט צו זעהן דעם טרעילאר פאר John Wick 4. אינעם אָנהויב זעהט מען ווי דער פּראטאגאניסט דזשאַן וויק זיצט אין א קירכע/crypt צו רעדן צו זיין פארשטארבענע ווייב. דער אנטאגאניסט פרעגט אים צי ער גלייבט אז זיין ווייב קען אים הערן? צו וועלכע דזשאַן ענטפערט ״ניין״. דער אנטאגאניסט פרעגט צוריק אז אויב אזוי פארוואס טוהט ער דאס? צו וועלכע דזשאַן ענטפערט, ״אפשר בין איך wrong [זי קען אים יא הערן].״ וידוע די (לכאורה apocryphal) אנעקדאט מיט דער פיזיקער ניעלס בּאָהר ווי א באזוכער האט באמערקט אז ער האט א horseshoe הענגן העכער זיין טוהר, וואס מענטשן גלייבן ברענגט מזל. האט ער אים געפרעגט ״דו גלייבסט אין דעם?!״ האט אים בּאָהר גע׳ענטפערט, ״אוודאי נישט. אבער מ׳זאגט אז דאס ברענגט מזל צום מענטש אפגעזעהן צי ער גלייבט דערין צי נישט.״…

אגב, דאס אז דער פּראטעגאניסט דזשאַן וויק שלאגט זיך פאר זיין לעבן דורכאויס דעם סעריע, ווען ס׳זעהט נישט אויס ווי ער האט פארוואס צו לעבן ויצא שכרה בהפסידה, גייט מיט מיט׳ן פסוק אין איוב (ב ד) פון כל אשר לאיש יתן בעד נפשו.

The philosophical relevance of this grammatical distinction in the present context is this. A derived term is a composite term, since it connotes both the attribute from which the term was originally derived and the bearer, or subject, of this attribute. For example, the term "righteous" is a derived term that connotes both the property of doing righteous deeds and the person who does them. (This example, cited by Efros in his still important work on Maimonides' philosophical terminology, was given by Efodi, a medieval commentator of the Guide.) Clearly, such derived terms cannot be predicated of God, since they imply plurality, or compositeness, in that of which they are predicated. Such terms would make God a bearer of accidental properties; and this is to be shunned at all costs

In Gersonides' present argument, the Avicennian hypothesis is entertained according to which the term 'one' connotes an adventitious accidental attribute such that it can be abstracted from each thing of which it is predicated. If this is so, Gersonides now argues, the thing to which the term 'one' applies can be referred to as such, e.g. 'dog' and not as 'one dog'. The term 'dog' is not a composite, a derived term, in this case, since it does not signify both an attribute and a subject. But, then, a dog would, in this hypothesis, not be one, since we have abstracted from it the accidental property of unity. But this is absurd (Touati, La Pensée 124, n. 83). All the more so in the case of God, the term 'one' does not signify such an adventitious accidental property, such that it would be abstracted from the subject, i.e., God, and leave the subject lacking the property unity

For the same reason we say that the substance of each thing exists; i.e., the term 'exists' does not denote an accidental property in addition to the essence of the thing. This is evident from the preceding discussion; for if the term 'exists' denotes things by virtue of an accidental property in addition to their essences, it would be a genus for all things. But this is impossible, since 'exists' is predicable of every one of the specific differences that differentiate those things that the term 'exists' encompasses. Hence, despite the fact that the terms 'one' and 'exists' are universally predicable throughout the ten categories, they are neither universal genera nor universal accidents. The Scholastics call them "transcendental predicates"

I leave it to others to explore arguments for God’s existence or to probe the meaning of divine “reality,” and I instead concentrate on Peirce’s final step. For him, any conclusions of such argumentation must in the end generate implications for the conduct of human life. Peirce’s rubric, then, is perfectly in line with what was paramount in relation to the classical rabbinic conception of God. Any philosophical exercise related to God’s reality must be presented “not as a proposition of metaphysical theology, but in a form directly applicable to the conduct of life, and full of nutrition for man’s highest growth.” Likewise for the rabbis, rather than a necessary existence, Abraham’s God was a God who visited the sick, just as Adam’s was one who clothed the naked and Moses’ buried the dead. They treat these scriptural narratives as records, not of an abstract Being, but of encounters with a relational God in the Buberian sense of the self-proclaimed ehyeh God, one that is “being there, being present”

Terms like "ground" and "source" stand in contrast to the terms used for the transcendent biblical God of history who is known as a supreme king, a father, a creator, a judge, a maker. When he creates the world, he does so as do males, producing something external to himself. He remains essentially outside of and judges the creative processes he has initiated. As ground and source, God creates as does a mother, in and through her own very substance. As ground of being, God participates in all the joys and sorrows of the drama of creation which is, at the same time, the deepest expression of the divine life. God's unchanging unitary life and that of the cosmos' ever-changing, dynamic multiplicity ultimately reflect a single unitary reality

מי אני האט געשריבן:
צוצוענדיגן בענין זה פון סאשעל קאַנסטראָקשעניזם, איז די יו״ט שבועות האט מיר דער איד צו וועמען מ׳האט געשטעלט די פראגע פון ״זאג נאר, דו גלייבסט אין ג-ט?״, מיר געזאגט אז איך בין א חכם. ווען איך האב אים געזאגט אז עס איז נישט בעצם אזוי און צום מערסטענסט זעהט עס אפשר אויס ווי איך קען און אז מיין מעלה איז צום מערסטענסט אז איך וויל קענען חכמה וכמו שכתב הרבינו יונה בריש פ״ד באבות, האט ער מיר גע׳ענטפערט אז ״דא, וביחס צו אונז, ווערסטו גערעכענט ווי א חכם.״

דאס האט מיר געמאכט טראכטן אז דער רמב״ם ענדיגט דאך צו דעם מו״נ אז די העכסטע סארט שלימות איז שלימות בהשגת שכליית, און נאך העכער ווי שלימות במידות (פּער סע), וויבאלד דאס איז נישט אָנגעוואנדן ביחס צו אנדערע אינעם געזעלשאפט - ״היא לו לבדו [ולא לזולתו] ובעבורה יזכה לקיום הנצחי ובה האדם אדם״ ע״ש. דא האב איך צוגעברענגט אז ווי מער חכמה מ׳איז קונה, אלס מער אנערקענט מען דעם אינפיניטי פון חכמה און אז אין די לימיט האט מען דערפון 0.

ונמצא מזה אז עס זענען לכאורה פארהאן צוויי וועגן פון ווערן גערעכענט א ״חכם״: אַן אבּיעקטיווער וועג און א מער סאבּיעקטיווער וועג עפ״י סאשעל קאַנסטראָקשעניזם. והיינו, די אבּיעקטיווער וועג איז ווי מער דער מענטש האלט נענטער אינעם לימיט צו 0 (וכעין מה שכתב הרמב״ם לגבי שלימות יותר של אדם בהשגת שלולי התוארים מאת הא-ל, במו״נ ח״א פנ״ט). דערנאך איז דא די סאָבּיעקטיווער וועג עפ״י סאשעל קאַנסטראָקשעניזם וואס ווען ער ווערט גערעכענט א חכם ביי די שׁעירד עסאָמפּשענס פונעם געזעלשאפט, איז ער טאקע א ״חכם״.

עס קומט אויס אז לפי די צווייטע וועג איז יא דא א חלק ״זולתו״ אין דעם - פונקט ווי ווערן פארעכענט א ״גוטער מענטש״ ושלם במדות וועט זיך ווענדן לפי וואס די געזעלשאפט מאכט אפ און עסיוּמד.