← Towards a Spiritual Humanistic Judaism · Part III — Formation, prayer and pastoral life
A system of this kind must work at the worst moment or it is a fair-weather instrument. The question for the naturalistic expression developed here is what it can put underneath ageing, illness and bereavement, without a divine plan, a compensating afterlife or a purpose concealed within the losses. Other Spiritual Humanistic Jews may answer those questions through a different theology while sharing the same Jewish structures of accompaniment and memory.
This is generally assumed to be a deficit. It is the reverse, and the argument is the strongest pastoral claim this thesis makes.
A theology holding God to be both good and in control is under permanent pressure to reconcile the illness in front of it with the goodness behind it. That pressure produces the least bearable sentences in pastoral care — everything happens for a reason, God only sends what you can bear, there is a purpose you cannot see yet. These are not failures of tact. They are the honest output of a system with something to defend, deployed at the moment its defence is hardest to hear.
Schulweis names the mechanism at a higher altitude than the bedside. To defend the Subject against innocent suffering, the moral attributes are rendered wholly other, beyond human comprehension or judgement; the Subject is saved and the predicates are gutted, leaving what he calls a naked God, a being in whom faith requires no moral content whatever. And the cost is not confined to theology: ”the denial of the human comprehensibility of God’s moral attributes is accompanied by the denial of human competence to make moral judgment.”9 A theology that can reconcile divine goodness with suffering only by making that goodness morally unintelligible has preserved the Subject at the cost of the predicate — and has made human goodness unintelligible in the same motion.
Predicate holiness declines the trade. With no Subject to acquit there is nothing to explain, which permits the true thing to be said and the room not to be left: this is terrible; I will not tell you that it happened for a reason, and I am not going anywhere.
The governing distinction is between finding and assigning. Meaning can be found within suffering; purpose must not be projected onto it. To find meaning is something the sufferer does, at their own pace and possibly never. To assign purpose is a claim about why the suffering occurred, made from outside, which converts a person’s pain into an instrument of their improvement. The test is narrow and practical: any attempt to explain why the suffering occurred, or to instruct the sufferer in what meaning they must find in it, has crossed the line. Medical information, practical help and a word about immediate safety are a different matter, and are usually what is actually required.
Grief is reframed rather than managed. Ezekiel promises the removal of the lev even, the heart of stone, and its replacement with a lev basar, a heart of flesh; in the prophet the exchange is performed upon us, whereas on this account no one hands it over. A heart of flesh is what loving people does to a person, the accumulated consequence of attachment to mortal things, and it is by construction a heart that can be hurt. Stone does not grieve. Grief exists because love attaches us to mortal beings — though its outward form is never a simple measure of how much someone loved, and no one should read the depth of their feeling off the visibility of their distress.
The tradition’s answer to grief is structural rather than doctrinal, and it is quorum-shaped. Kaddish cannot traditionally be said alone: at the moment a grieving person is least able to sustain themselves, nine other Jews are required to be present. The rule is usually filed as a technicality of prayer; read as a provision about bereavement it is an instruction that a mourner not be left alone with what they are carrying, enforced by making the alternative liturgically impossible. Al ḥet is written in the plural and stays plural when recited privately. Kol Yisra’el arevim zeh ba-zeh states the same thing as a principle. Where a supernatural system answers suffering with an explanation, this one answers it with a room — which is what makes the absence of an explanation survivable, and why kehillá and minyan are load-bearing here rather than ornamental.
The refusal to explain another’s pain is Jewish law rather than a modern correction. Job’s comforters begin well: they sit on the ground for seven days and nights and say nothing, because they see that his grief is very great. Everything goes wrong when they open their mouths, and what emerges is theodicy; at the end of the book it is the explainers, not the sufferer, who are told they have spoken wrongly. The judgement is then codified — those who come to a house of mourning do not speak until the mourner speaks first. A tradition requiring that has already ruled against the sentence beginning at least.
Nor does the inherited tradition force experience into a single register, and its capacity to hold two at once is worth learning from even where its theology is not available. At the worst news anyone receives one says a blessing — baruch dayan ha-emet, whose plain sense names God as the true judge, and which would not be said in that form here. A glass is broken at a wedding. Yizkor sits inside festivals of rejoicing. The mourner’s Kaddish, said daily for eleven months, never mentions death. The seder puts bitter herbs and four cups of wine on one table and requires no one to choose between them.