1. Judaism centers upon its sublime and simple conception of God. This
lifts it above all other religions and satisfies in unique measure the
longing for truth and inner peace amidst the futility and incessant
changes of earthly existence. This very conception of God is in striking
contrast to that of most other religions. The God of Judaism is not one
god among many, nor one of many powers of life, but is _the One_ and holy
God beyond all comparison. In Him is concentrated all power and the
essence of all things; He is the Author of all existence, the Ruler of
life, who lays down the laws by which man shall live. As the prophet says
to the heathen world: “The gods that have not made the heavens and the
earth, these shall perish from the earth and from under the heavens....
Not like these is the portion of Jacob; for He is the Former of all
things.... The Lord is the true God; He is the living God and the
everlasting King; at His wrath the earth trembleth, and the nations are
not able to abide His indignation.”(124)
2. This lofty conception of the Deity forms the essence of Judaism and was
its shield and buckler in its lifelong contest with the varying forms of
heathenism. From the very first the God of Judaism declared war against
them all, whether at any special time the prevailing form was the worship
of many gods, or the worship of God in the shape of man, the perversion of
the purity of God by sensual concepts, or the division of His unity into
different parts or personalities. The Talmudic saying is most striking:
“From Sinai, the Mount of revelation of the only God, there came forth
_Sinah_, the hostility of the nations toward the Jew as the banner-bearer
of the pure idea of God.”(125) Just as day and night form a natural
contrast, divinely ordained, so do the monotheism of Israel and the
polytheism of the nations constitute a spiritual contrast which can never
be reconciled.
3. The pagan gods, and to some extent the triune God of the Christian
Church, semi-pagan in origin also, are the outcome of the human spirit’s
going astray in its search for God. Instead of leading man upwards to an
ideal which will encompass all material and moral life and lift it to the
highest stage of holiness, paganism led to depravity and discord. The
unrelenting zeal displayed by prophet and law-giver against idolatry had
its chief cause in the immoral and inhuman practices of the pagan
nations—Canaan, Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon—in the worship of their
deities.(126) The deification of the forces of nature brutalized the moral
sense of the pagan world; no vice seemed too horrible, no sacrifice too
atrocious for their cults. Baal, or Moloch, the god of heaven, demanded in
times of distress the sacrifice of a son by the father. Astarte, the
goddess of fecundity, required the “hallowing” of life’s origin, and this
was done by the most terrible of sexual orgies. Such abominations exerted
their seductive influence upon the shepherd tribes of Israel in their new
home in Canaan, and thus aroused the fiercest indignation of prophet and
law-giver, who hurled their vials of wrath against those shocking rites,
those lewd idols, and those who “whored after them.”(127) If Israel was to
be trained to be the priest people of the Only One in such an environment,
tolerance of such practices was out of the question. Thus in the Sinaitic
law God is spoken of as “the jealous God”(128) who punishes unrelentingly
every violation of His laws of purity and holiness.
4. The same sharp contrast of Jewish ethical and spiritual monotheism
remained also when it came in contact with the Græco-Syrian and Roman
culture. Here, too, the myths and customs of the cult and the popular
religion offended by their gross sensuality the chaste spirit of the
Jewish people. Indeed, these were all the more dangerous to the purity of
social life, as they were garbed with the alluring beauty of art and
philosophy.(129) The Jew then felt all the more the imperative duty to
draw a sharp line of demarcation between Judaism with its chaste and
imageless worship and the lascivious, immoral life of paganism.
5. This wide gulf which yawned between Israel’s One and holy God and the
divinities of the nations was not bridged over by the Christian Church
when it appeared on the stage of history and obtained world-dominion. For
Christianity in its turn succeeded by again dragging the Deity into the
world of the senses, adopting the pagan myths of the birth and death of
the gods, and sanctioning image worship. In this way it actually created a
Christian plurality of gods in place of the Græco-Roman pantheon; indeed,
it presented a divine family after the model of the Egyptian and
Babylonian religions,(130) and thus pushed the ever-living God and Father
of mankind into the background. This tendency has never been explained
away, even by the attempts of certain high-minded thinkers among the
Church fathers. Judaism, however, insists, as ever, upon the words of the
Decalogue which condemn all attempts to depict the Deity in human or
sensual form, and through all its teachings there is echoed forth the
voice of Him who spoke through the seer of the Exile: “I am the Lord, that
is My name, and My glory will I not give to another, neither My praise to
graven images.”(131)
6. When Moses came to Pharaoh saying, “Thus speaketh JHVH the God of
Israel, send off My people that they may serve Me,” Pharaoh—so the Midrash
tells—took his list of deities to hand, looked it over, and said, “Behold,
here are enumerated the gods of the nations, but I cannot find thy God
among them.” To this Moses replied, “All the gods known and familiar to
thee are mortal, as thou art; they die, and their tomb is shown. The God
of Israel has nothing in common with them. He is the living, true, and
eternal God who created heaven and earth; no people can withstand His
wrath.”(132) This passage states strikingly the difference between the God
of Judaism and the gods of heathendom. The latter are but deified powers
of nature, and being parts of the world, themselves at one with nature,
they are subject to the power of time and fate. Israel’s God is enthroned
above the world as its moral and spiritual Ruler, the only Being whom we
can conceive as self-existent, as indivisible as truth itself.
7. As long as the pagan conception prevailed, by which the world was
divided into many divine powers, there could be no conception of the idea
of a moral government of the universe, of an all-encompassing purpose of
life. Consequently the great thinkers and moralists of heathendom were
forced to deny the deities, before they could assert either the unity of
the cosmos or a design in life. On the other hand, it was precisely this
recognition of the moral nature of God, as manifested both in human life
and in the cosmic sphere, which brought the Jewish prophets and sages to
their pure monotheism, in which they will ultimately be met by the great
thinkers of all lands and ages. The unity of God brings harmony into the
intellectual and moral world; the division of the godhead into different
powers or personalities leads to discord and spiritual bondage. Such is
the lesson of history, that in polytheism, dualism, or trinitarianism one
of the powers must necessarily limit or obscure another. In this manner
the Christian Trinity led mankind in many ways to the lowering of the
supreme standard of truth, to an infringement on justice, and to
inhumanity to other creeds, and therefore Judaism could regard it only as
a compromise with heathenism.
8. Judaism assumed, then, toward paganism an attitude of rigid exclusion
and opposition which could easily be taken for hostility. This prevailed
especially in the legal systems of the Bible and the rabbis, and was
intended primarily to guard the monotheistic belief from pagan pollution
and to keep it intact. Neither in the Deuteronomic law nor in the late
codes of Maimonides and Joseph Caro is there any toleration for idolatrous
practices, for instruments of idol-worship, or for idolaters.(133) This
attitude gave the enemies of the Jew sufficient occasion for speaking of
the Jewish God as hating the world, as if only national conceit underlay
the earnest rigor of Jewish monotheism.
9. As a matter of fact, since the time of the prophets Judaism has had no
national God in any exclusive sense. While the Law insists upon the
exclusive worship of the one God of Israel, the narratives of the
beginnings in the Bible have a different tenor. They take the lofty
standpoint that the heathen world, while worshiping its many divinities,
had merely lost sight of the true God after whom the heart ever longs and
searches. This implies that a kernel of true piety underlies all the error
and delusion of paganism, which, rightly guided, will lead back to the God
from whom mankind had strayed. The Godhead, divided into gods—as is hinted
even in the Biblical name, _Elohim_—must again become the one God of
humanity. Thus the Jew holds that all worship foreshadows the search for
the true God, and that all humanity shall at one time acknowledge Him for
whom they have so long been searching. Surely the Psalms express, not
national narrowness, but ardent love for humanity when they hail the God
of Israel, the Maker of heaven and earth, as the world’s great King, and
tell how He will judge the nations in justice, while the gods of the
nations will be rejected as “vanities.”(134) Nor does the divine service
of the Jew bear the stamp of clannishness. For more than two thousand
years the central point in the Synagogue liturgy every morning and evening
has been the battle-cry, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is
One.” And so does the conclusion of every service, the _Alenu_, the solemn
prayer of adoration, voice the grand hope of the Jew for the future, that
the time may speedily come when “before the kingdom of Almighty all
idolatry shall vanish, and all the inhabitants of the earth perceive that
unto Him alone every knee must bend, and all flesh recognize Him alone as
God and King.”(135)