WHATEVER HAPPENED TO YAHWEH?

Such is the nature of comments, and the nature of all things in general, that my friend Jenny’s statement got me thinking about so many other thigns I hadn’t initially been thinking
too much about when I wrote the blog passage to which she was responding.
I began Kabbalah study around the same time I was reading God by Alexander Waugh. The point he makes in the book is an essential point to reading the Hebrew Scriptures, one that slapped me full in the face:
Remember Yahweh? Remember the desert god who lived on a mountain top and told Abraham to sacrifice his child on Mount Moriah JUST BECAUSE HE WANTED TO FIND OUT IF ABRAHAM WOULD DO IT? Remember the guy who helped Rebekah lie to her husband to get Jacob his inheritance, and let Satan bump of Job’s kids for the sake of a
wager? Remember the Yahweh who opened the earth and swallowed any Israelites who argued with Moses and Aaron? The Yahweh who bumped off the Amelakites and sent bears after children because they made fun of the prophet Elisha for being baldheaded?
Remember him? He was vain, megalomanical, often detestable, inscrutable but... ah,not for the faint of heart. And never boring.
What’s more, he was a mythical God. He was A VERY REAL GOD.

The ancient Hebrews told their experience of God mixed with thier own personal prejudices, and this became the Torah, the Prophets and the Writings: the Tanakh. To a Christian, be he Protestant, Catholic, be she either liberal or conservative, this set of writings is called “the Old Testament” a title indicating it’s uselessness, and usually ignored except for
when it comes time to pull an obscure, often racist or sexists comment out of its contexts and into the modern world.

I have said, “Do you remember? Do you remember?” and given a long hosts of the attributes of Yahweh, but most Christians will have to confess they certainly DON’T REMEMBER Yahweh doing these things. The mightiest scholars of Jewish Scripture in the Christian world tend to be laymen, often outside of the ministry or active church participation. Most Christians remain woefully ignorant of Jewish Scripture, which is a mystery considering it composes the bulk of the Bible. We are, quite frankly, embarrassed by Yahweh. We have made for ourselves a god who is all good, all knowing, all the time, without flaw and... completely alien to our experience of life which is full of flaws. The Jews were dealing with the world they knew and divinity as they experienced. Often the writers of the Scriptures were irreverent as we know reverence. Many of them paint God in a flatly nasty light. The authors of Scripture are often far more like the old world equivalents of Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolfe and Tennessee Williams than any priest, or for that matter, modern rabbi. And they were writing with humor. Yes, a few Jerry Falwells may have had the last say, but they did not have the first, and their words are not the ones you hear overwhelmingly.

Why is it important to approach the Bible as a Jew? Firstly, because Jews wrote it and who reads it in a vivid fashion still. Secondly, because this was just the way how Jesus approached Scripture and if we are to understand Christianity, truly, we’d better understand what Jesus talked about. For in the end it was Tanakh he was preaching.
Well, then the question is really: how do we approach this book? I would say approach it as a Jew. If the Bible is repugnant--and in the end analysis even your most conservative Christian will have a problem with Yahweh--it is because it has been read in the wrong way. To an observant Jew the Tanakh is not an old book, a long prologue to the Gospels. It is the Gospel. Studying Torah is salvation. It is God’s gift to the world, and it is alive not when read in a cursory fashion, but when read in a lively way, taking it seriously, seriously enough to debate it, disagree with it, reshape it’s words. In Kabbalah there is the idea of playing with letters. Often in rabbinic tales rabbis make the words of Torah fly about the
room and change patterns. Whatever miraculous or mystic implications those tales may have they possess one practical lesson for anyone who would take the Bible seriously:

Do not be afraid to get your hands dirty!