Daniel
Weiss' claim that God should only, or ideally, be addressed in prayer as an
unparalleled "you" no doubt reminds us of Martin Buber's notion of God as the "Eternal
You." Indeed, Weiss and Buber both insist that the only proper way to address
God is as a You who is unlike any other finite being. In Buber's terms, God is
the eternal You who by nature cannot become an It. Weiss and Buber also share a
concern that the names and attributes used for God in prayer can interfere with
the you-saying that should characterize true prayer. Weiss argues that the use
of "empirical specifying features" to describe God is in principle unnecessary
and that including such descriptions in one's prayer might be tantamount to
idolatry. For Buber, any of one of our images or descriptions of God risks becoming
part of out It-world language, at which point we are not longer discussing God
at all.
However,
Weiss and Buber ultimately take very different stances towards the standard
rabbinic liturgy. Buber, on the one hand, is well-known for having rejected the
authority of Jewish law generally, and the strict rabbinic standardization of
liturgical expression in particular stood for Buber as a primary example of how
rabbinic Judaism is incompatible with genuine religious expression. For Weiss,
on the other hand, the names and descriptions found in the standard liturgy,
while remaining problematic for his monotheism, can be interpreted in ways that
are more conducive to the ethical practice of you-saying that he thinks must be
central to the prayer experience. For Weiss, the standardization of liturgical
description actually serves to strengthen this religious sensibility by making
one cautious about trying to develop "better" descriptions for God.[1]
One significant factor in this difference between Buber's and Weiss' attitude
toward the rabbinic liturgy, I think, is their interpretation of the Hebrew
Bible's special name for God, the Tetragrammaton. One of the spiritually
deadening qualities of the rabbinic liturgy, in Buber's view, is the way it has
obscured the meaning of the Tetragrammaton. In what follows, I will examine
Buber's interpretation of the divine name and how it relates to his own
critique of rabbinic prayer. I will also argue that Buber's interpretation of
the divine name may suggest ways of seeing the positive religious value in the
names and descriptions for God found in the rabbinic liturgy.
For
Buber, divine names found in a variety of human cultures are an integral part
of the human religious experience, but only when uttered with the proper
understanding of their meaning. In fact, on Buber's view, once a divine name is
used, it never really loses its power:
Men have addressed
their eternal You by many names. When they sang of what they had thus named,
they still meant You: the first myths were hymns of praise. Then the names
entered into the It-language; men felt impelled more and more to think of and
to talk about their eternal You as an It. But all names of God remain hallowed
- because they have been used not only to speak of God, but also to
speak to him.[2]
When people
cease to use names for God as a form of direct address but as a referential
tool, then the divine name has lost its power to reach God. But the potential
power of a divine name remains even when it is used as a form of It-language
because that name retains its history as a form of direct address to God in a
given cultural context.
On
Buber's account, the chief reason why a religion loses its spiritual power is
that it loses its ability to directly address God in prayer. At the end of I
and Thou, Buber argues that formal religious rituals, or "cult," are
created by human first to give concrete form to the immediacy of the
divine-human encounter, or "faith," but then come to interfere with that
encounter by squashing spontaneous expression:
The cult, too,
originally supplements the act of relation, by fitting the living prayer, the
immediate You-saying into a special context of great plastic power and
connecting it with the life of the senses. And the cult, too, gradually becomes
a substitute, as the personal prayer is no longer supported but rather pushed
aside by communal prayer; and as the essential deed simply does not permit any
rules, it is supplanted by devotions that follow rules.[3]
What concerned
Buber about this kind of standardization was that it obscured the true nature
of the divine calling for humanity. In the absence of direct encounter with
God, the human tendency, as with all things, is to deal with God as an It by
creating descriptions and names for God that become substitutes for a direct
encounter. Buber associates this kind of God-language with what he calls
"attending to God," a mode of religious life in which a person focuses their
spiritual energies on what God is and serving what they perceive to be God's
needs by maintaining the cult, rather than trying to discern what task God
demands of them in the world. One can attend to God, and speak of God,
without encountering God, which requires speaking to God.
Buber's
view is that a "cult," meaning an organized form of worship, can support faith
if it supports a person's ability to truly pray, that is, to address God
directly:
In true prayer, cult
and faith are unified and purified into living relation. That true prayer lives
in religions testifies to their true life; as long as it lives in them, they
live. Degeneration of religions means degeneration of the prayer in them: the
relational power in them is buried more and more by objecthood; they find it ever
more difficult to say You with their whole undivided being…[4]
If the very
health of a religious tradition depends on its ability to pray, then the task
of rehabilitating religious traditions in the modern West must include a retrieval
of the original meanings of the divine names of that tradition. Unlocking the
original meaning of a divine name of a particular religious tradition would
allow that tradition to return to the original meaning of the divine-human
encounter that gave that tradition its spiritual power.
Something
like this concern is at the heart of Buber's interpretation of the God's
revelation of the Tetragrammaton to Moses in Exodus 3 in his book Moses.
Buber begins his interpretation of the name by dealing with a basic problem in
the Biblical text. Although God tells Moses that the divine name YHWH has not
been revealed before to his ancestors, the book of Genesis contains several
instances when God clearly reveals some name to Abraham, who uses it frequently
in his naming of altars in Canaan.[5]
Modern Biblical scholars explain the contradiction by resorting to the
documentary hypothesis, but Buber is skeptical that the author of the burning
bush story would be unaware or would ignore textual traditions regarding the
use of the of the Tetragrammaton by the patriarchs. Buber explains that Moses'
request for the divine name is not for the actual word or its pronunciation, which
had been known by prior generations, but for the meaning behind the name. For
ancient peoples, Buber argues, the name is not just a word, but rather the very
character of the being named. What has been lost in the degradation of Israelite
slavery is not the word or its pronunciation, but an understanding of the true
nature of God's character. And what Moses wants to know, and to be able to tell
Israel, is what God's character truly is.
The
meaning the name of God given to Moses, eheyeh asher eheyeh, I am that I
am, is not, according to Buber, that God is "eternal being" but rather that God
is a being who is always present to human beings, and particularly to Israel, even in their degradation and suffering.[6]
As Buber notes, the imperfect tense of the verb "to be" has a dynamic quality
to it that suggests "happening, coming into being, being there, being present,
being thus and thus: but not being in an abstract sense."[7]
What God tells Moses to tell Israel is that God is with them. God's presentness
and availability cannot be magically invoked as the Egyptian priests do. The
meaning of the divine name is not that God cannot be described, but that God's
presentness cannot be magically manipulated or controlled. Likewise, the Tetragrammaton
suggests not that God is radically transcendent, but that God is radically
present.
Weiss
worries that the use of divine names suggests that God's limited availability
to a particular historical group. But Buber's interpretation of the divine name
as divine presentness nicely parallels his general claim I and Thou
about the continuing power of a variety of divine names across cultures. God's
various names are signs of direct human contact with the divine, but even when
their true meaning is lost the very presence of the name indicates the possibility
of a divine presence. All divine names teach God's presence in human history
and have the potential to be you-sayings, as long as their true meaning is
understood and they are used in direct address. As Buber explains, the
re-pronouncement of the divine name for the Israelites rekindles the spiritual
power of the divine human relationship:
…since the true name
phoneticises the character of the object, the essential thing in the last
resort is that the speaker shall recognize this essential being in the name,
and direct his full attention upon it. Where that happens, where the magical
requires an aiming of the soul at the being meant, that is, when the 'person'
aimed at is a god or a demon, the fuel is provided into which the lightning of
a religious experience can fall. Then the magical compulsion becomes the
intimacy of prayer, the bundle of utilisable forces bearing a personal name
becomes a Thou, and the demagisation of existence takes place.[8]
In short, the
divine name reveals the divine character, and knowing the meaning of the divine
name makes a divine-human encounter possible because it carries with it the
knowledge of God's true character as being present. But once this name becomes
stale and routine, its spiritual power, its ability to express a true
you-saying, is lost. And this is precisely what Buber believed happened when
pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton became taboo in later generations, a taboo
of that was of course maintained by the rabbis in their standardization of the
liturgy.
The
maintenance of this taboo is just one way in which, according to Buber,
rabbinic Judaism went down a path of spiritual degeneration. Buber's chief
criticism of rabbinic Judaism is that it replaced the immediate relationship
with God with a system of rules that limit what we can say about what God is
and what God commands. In the case prayer in particular, rules that determine
the parameters for prayer, no matter their original spirit, will ultimately
hinder a direct relationship with God. God could only be real to people, Buber
believed, if God could speak directly to them in the concrete situation of
their lives. Therefore the possibility of divine-human encounter in history
depends on people being able to reconsider the meaning of God's mission or
command to them. And being limited in what one can say about God would limit
how one could understand the divine mission anew.
One
of the central rules in rabbinic prayer is the halakhic requirement that a berakha,
the basic formula of rabbinic liturgy, contain the mention of the divine name (shem).[9]
The divine name is thus not only ubiquitous in rabbinic prayer, it is the sine
qua non of the liturgical structure and the prayer experience. However,
because the pronunciation of the name is replaced with adonai, meaning
lord, which has no semantic connection to the divine name, and if anything
depersonalizes the name, the actual recitation of a berakha requires no
cognizance of the divine name's true meaning. Thus for Buber, I would argue,
the problem with rabbinic prayer is not, as it is for Weiss, the presence of a
particular divine name historically associated with a particular people, but
the effective absence of that name.
Buber's
point here may help explain what Weiss means by the strange deixis of rabbinic
prayer. The word that indicates the identity of the "you" in the berakha
formula is not a predicate but God's name. However, it has been a long time
since that word functioned like a name in any linguistic context. Thus the
standard translation of the phrase, adonai eloheinu, "Lord our God,"
seems to say nothing at all. It is not at all clear who is being addressed. And
yet, the name remains there in the berakha, and it is a proper name that
does in fact indicate who is supposed to be addressed in prayer. The
fascination with divine names found in Kabbalah suggests that for centuries the
power of the divine name was at the heart of Jewish spiritual life. Buber's
textual analysis is meant in large part to counter the long tradition of
mystical and philosophical interpretations of the divine name as having
something to do with eternal existence, as opposed to divine presence.
Buber
did not seem to think that his interpretation of the divine could restore the
spiritual power of the rabbinic liturgy, although it certainly could for those
who appreciate the advantages of a standard liturgy in ways Buber did not. To
note perhaps the most significant example, the first berakha of the amidah
begins by identifying God as "our God, and God of our ancestors, God of
Abraham, God of Isaac and God of Jacob." The listing of the patriarchs is clearly
an allusion to God's address to Moses immediately after the revelation of the
name in Exodus 3:14. The point of departure for rabbinic prayer is not so much
the memory of a patriarchal past but rather God's continuing presence to all the
generations of Israel, even when they are suffering enslavement and degradation.
Buber would certainly have us add that the God addressed in prayer is also a
God whose presence is available to all people in all times, no matter what name
they use, and long it is a name that means You.
