Is God "one"? The Unity of God
"Shema Yisrael", the credo par excellance of Judaism, states "Hear O Israel, Adonai is Our God, Adonai is One". This bespeaks an absolute commitment to belief in the absolute unity of God. Not only do Jews reject the idea that other gods exist, but Jews also reject the idea that the Divine contains any kind of plurality whatsoever. This is in contrast to Christianity's Nicene Creed, which teaches that although there is one being called God, in that one there are three separate persons (termed the Father, Son and Holy Spirit). Such a belief is foreign to the Jewish mind-set. "The Jewish tenant of the Unity of God also precludes the belief in any other creative force besides Him. Satan, the power of evil and completely independent of God, plays a very important role in Christianity. Judaism knows of no Satan as a creative force of evil opposed to the benevolent creative power of God. Judaism only knows one creator, Who made both the light and the darkness and Who created in man the good inclination and the evil inclination, together with the faculty of free ethical choice." [Trude Weiss-Rosmarin "Judaism and Christianity: The Differences" Jonathan David, p.16]
Maimonides writes that "The second foundation is God's unity, may He be exalted; to wit, that this One, Who is the cause of [the existence of] everything, is one. His oneness is unlike the oneness of a genus or of a species. Nor is it like the oneness of a single composed individual, which can be divided into many units.....Rather, God, may He be exalted, is one with a oneness for which there is no comparison at all.
Maimonides believes that no positive attributes can be assigned to God whatsoever. This is described in detail in his "Guide for the Perplexed." A different position can be found the Tanakh and Talmud, where they assign a number of attributes to God. "Both Levi b. Gershom and Hasdai Crescas argued in favor of the view that if God is to be intelligible, His attributes must be understood as positive predications. They did not think that positive predication compromises the divine unity and perfection. Moreover, Levi b. Gershom believed that positive predicates could be applied to God literally because their primary meaning is derived from their application to God, while their human meaning is secondary." [God, Encyclopaedia Judaica (EJ)]
Both the Maimonidean and the non-Maimonidean view are acceptable within normative Jewish theology.
There is an excellent essay on the Jewish view of God (ethical monotheism) by Dennis Prager that I would like to suggest:
http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/Judaism/mono.html
Dialectical ways of understanding God's nature
There are three opposing tendencies which categorize Jewish theological positions; these three tendencies can generate eight possible viewpoints (listed in the next section) and many in-between positions.
(1) Mystical vs. Rationalist
(2) Immanent vs. Transcendent
(3) Omnipotence vs. Limited theism
Jewish theologians have often explored these tendencies in a dialectical framework. This is to say, with systematic reasoning they have juxtaposed these opposing tendencies, and have developed philosophies to resolve these conflicts.
(1) Mystical vs. Rationalist
Rationalists believe that the ethical and religious-intellectual beliefs imparted by the Torah are attainable by human reason. Rationalism is "a method of inquiry that regards reason as the chief source and test of knowledge and, in contrast to empiricism, tends to discountenance sensory experience. It holds that, because reality itself has an inherently rational structure, there are truths - especially in logic and mathematics but also in ethics and metaphysics - that the intellect can grasp directly." ["Rationalism" Britannica CD, Version 99 © 1994-1999. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.]
"In the period between Sa'adiah and Maimonides, most Jewish writers who speculated on the nature of the Torah continued in the rationalist tradition established by Sa'adiah. These included Bahya ibn Paquda, Joseph ibn Zaddik, Abraham ibn Ezra, and Abraham ibn Daud." [Torah, Encyclopaedia Judaica]
In sharp contrast, mystics believe that human reason will not allow one to discover ultimate religious truths. Rather, many religious truths can only be discovered through a mystical experience, a direct human communion with God. Kabbalists believe that this is achieved through annihilation of individuality, bittul ha-yesh. "Kabbalah may be considered mysticism in so far as it seeks an apprehension of God and creation whose intrinsic elements are beyond the grasp of the intellect, although this is seldom explicitly belittled or rejected by the Kabbalah. Essentially these elements were perceived through contemplation and illumination, which is often presented in the Kabbalah as the transmission of a primeval revelation concerning the nature of the Torah and other religious matters. In essence, the Kabbalah is far removed from the rational and intellectual approach to religion." ["Kabbalah", Encyclopaedia Judaica]
(2) Immanent vs. Transcendent
Biblical and rabbinic literature sometimes describe God as immanent, and other times as transcendent. This would seem to be a paradox: If God is fully transcendent, than God cannot be known in any way; If God is fully immanent, then God has no transcendence, and is not greater than His own creation. However, classical Jewish texts do not actually say that God is fully one or the other; rather, they imply that God has a di-polar nature. God has both transcendent and immanent characteristics, and one or the other is more apparent depending on the situation involved, or the question asked.
To those versed in modern physics, this is analogous to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The uncertainty principle was based on the finding that there is a fundamental limit on what data we can know about any particle (or aggregate piece of matter). The more precisely one determines a particle's velocity, the less accurately that one can determine its position (and vice-versa). However this is not simply a practical limit on observations; the idea here is that no object in the universe really has an absolutely defined velocity and position! While it seems as if these are two separate properties, the reality is that these two properties are both aspects of a greater phenomenon, inherently bound together. As hard as it is to imagine, simply observing one aspect of this duality affects the other aspect; this is an observable physical fact of how the universe operates. God, then, can be understood in a similar sense: immanence and transcendence are not incompatible properties, but are simply different aspects of God's full nature.
The term "transcendence" is often used to mean that God is above and beyond our universe, beyond both space and time. However, this definition is not philosophically or logically rigorous; saying that God is "above" or "beyond" the universe has no precise meaning, and may not have any meaning at all. Since transcendence and immanence are inherently exclusive properties, such speculations may involve paradox. Thus, some religious thinkers have attempted to define a more philosophically rigorous understanding of transcendence.
One alternative to this paradox is to affirm pantheism, the belief that God is identical with the universe, the sum total of everything in existence. There is no transcendent nature to God, no possibility of God being "personal". God is all, and all is God. However, this view has always been considered as outside of normative Jewish theology.
However, there is another view of transcendence which rescues us from the classical paradox. In this view, we can compare the relationship between God and the world to the relationship between a person and the individual molecules and cells of their body. A person is much more than the sum of their parts. One notes that the human mind - which possesses life, consciousness, intelligence and free will - transcends the mere matter of which it is made, which has no properties of mind at all. Similarly, God can be said to be to the universe as the mind is to the body's cells. In this view, God is in some way identical to the universe, yet at the same time transcends it; the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, not just in magnitude, but in kind.
Some modern day philosophers refer to the transcendent aspect of God as God's primordial nature. God is above and beyond what we can comprehend; God is eternal, and envisages all possibilities. This aspect of God is unchanging, independent, and as philosophers like to say, of necessary existence. Similarly, philosophers state that we must deal with the immanent aspect of God: how God acts in, and reacts to, the world. This is sometimes referred to as God's consequent nature. God is said to be conscious, and is in process with the world. This is the aspect of God that is affected by events, the aspect of God that Heschel refers to as the divine pathos. [See "Jewish Theology and Process Thought", p.65]
Note that when religious Jews refer to God as being immanent they only mean that God's immanence is stressed in their theology; they are not necessarily denying that God has a transcendent characteristic (and vice-versa.)
(3) Omnipotence vs. Limited theism
When people ascribe omnipotence to God, or limits to God's power, we find that the term "omnipotent" means different things to different people. It has been used to connote at least five distinct positions - shown below - and so we must take great care to precisely define what we mean by the words "omnipotent" or "limited" before we use these words in describing theological positions.
(a) Omnipotent (strong view): God can not only supersede the laws of physics and probability, but God can also rewrite logic itself (for example, God could create a square circle, or could make one equal two.) Maimonides make a devastating critique of this position in his "Guide for the Perplexed", section 3, chapter xv, and very few Jews hold by this position today.
(b) Omnipotent (standard view):God can intervene in the world by superseding the laws of physics and probability (i.e. God can create miracles), but it is impossible - in fact, it is meaningless - to suggest that God can rewrite the laws of logic. Many Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews hold by this view.
(c) Qualified Omnipotence: It is impossible - in fact, it is meaningless - to suggest that God can rewrite the laws of logic. People in this category believe that God originally could intervene in the world by superseding the laws of physics (i.e. create miracles); in fact God did do so by creating the Universe. However, God then self-obligated Himself not to do so anymore, in order to give mankind free will. Miracles are rare, at best, and always hidden, to prevent man from being overwhelmed by absolute knowledge of God's existence, which could remove free will. This position is affirmed by many Kabbalistic texts. Many Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews hold by this view.
(d) Maimonides's neo-Aristotelian rationalism: Maimonides writes that to the wise man, one sees that what the Bible and Talmud refer to as "angels" are actually metaphors for the various laws of nature; they are the principles by which the physical universe operates. "Guide of the Perplexed" II:4 and II:6.
"For all forces are angels! How blind, how perniciously blind are the naive?! If you told someone who purports to be a sage of Israel that the Deity sends an angel who enters a woman's womb and there forms an embryo, he would think this a miracle and accept it as a mark of the majesty and power of the Deity - despite the fact that he believes an angle to be a body of fire one third the size of the entire world. All this, he thinks, is possible for God. But if you tell him that God placed in the sperm the power of forming and demarcating these organs, and that _this_ is the angel, or that all forms are produced by the Active Intellect - that here is the angel, the "vice-regent of the world" constantly mentioned by the sages - then he will recoil. For he [the naive person] does not understand that the true majesty and power are in the bringing into being of forces which are active in a thing although they cannot be perceived by the senses....Thus the Sages reveal to the aware that the imaginative faculty is also called an angel; and the mind is called a cherub. How beautiful this will appear to the sophisticated mind - and how disturbing to the primitive."
God never interrupts the set laws of nature:
"In the eighth chapter [above] we mentioned to you that they (the sages) did not believe in the periodic change of the Divine Will. Rather, they believed that at the beginning of the fashioning of the phenomena, God instituted into nature that through them there would be fashioned all that would be fashioned. Whether the phenomenon which would be fashioned would be frequent - namely, a natural phenomenon - or would be an infrequent change - namely, a sign - they are all equal." ["Perush ha-Mishnah" (Commentary on the Mishnah), Avot 5:VI]
Maimonides envisioned a connection between the realm of the physical and the intellectual. In this worldview all physical events are the results of "intellects", some of which are human, some of which are "angels" (as described above.) These intellects can interact in such a way as to seemingly violate the laws of nature, to produce miracle). Since God Himself crated the universe and the laws therein, this is how God works in the world. However, God does not actively intervene in a temporal sense. It has been noted that this view veers away from traditional theism, and moves towards deism. This is why some scholars have pointed out that the theology of Aristoteleans such as Maimonides may not be compatible with the classical Jewish theology of the Bible and Talmud. Such critiques are not new, and they were made both by Maimonides' supporters and enemies during the Maimonidean controversy. For further reading on this subject see:
"On Knowing God: Maimonides, Gersonides, and the Philosophy of Religion" Norbert Samuelson, Judaism Vol.18, 1969, p.64-77
"That the God of the Philosophers is not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob", Norbert Samuelson, Harvard Theological Review, Vol.65(1), January 1972, p.1-27
"Is the God of Maimonides Truly Unknowable?" Shubert Spero, Judaism Vol.22, 1973, p.66-78.
"Maimonidean Controversy" entry in "The Encyclopaedia Judaica"
(e) Liberal Jewish theology: In a religious view common in Conservative and Reform Judaism, God is said to act in the world through persuasion, and not by coercion. God makes Himself manifest in the world through inspiration and the creation of possibility, and not by miracles or violations of the laws of nature. See the works of Rabbis Harold Kushner and Milton Steinberg for examples.
