Evan Eisenberg: The Transcendent God and Nature

Quotables: Wild Judaism

In looking at the Hebrew view of nature, it is a common mistake to pay more attention to the form—the bare idea of a single transcendent God—than to the content, both legal and poetic. The content of the Bible shows, as the great nineteenth-century naturalist Alexander von Humboldt noted, a greater and more sweeping sense of the grandeur of nature than is found among the Greeks, even at their most “pagan.” (p. 52)

In looking at the Hebrew view of nature, it is a common mistake to pay more attention to the form—the bare idea of a single transcendent God—than to the content, both legal and poetic. The content of the Bible shows, as the great nineteenth-century naturalist Alexander von Humboldt noted, a greater and more sweeping sense of the grandeur of nature than is found among the Greeks, even at their most “pagan.” (p. 52)

…The still, small voice (1 Kings, ch. 19) makes the best case that can be made for a God that is not in nature. Yet nature is not diminished. God is not absent from nature, any more than Shakespeare is absent from The Tempest (any more than Prospero is, for that matter). God is not outside nature so much as unfathomably within it: the essence of nature. 

Forced into an abstract form of transcendence by later rationalists (themselves influenced by Greek thought), this protean God would escape his cage and burst back in to nature time after time in Jewish thought: in Kabbalism, in Hasidism, in the pantheism of Spinoza. Even those among the rabbis and philosophers who insisted on a strict division between God and nature often regarded the earth itself as a living being. (p. 54)

Quoted from: 
 “The Mountain and the Tower: Wilderness and City in the Symbols of Babylon and Israel,” by Evan Eisenberg in Torah of the Earth: Exploring 4,000 Years of Ecology in Jewish Thought, vol. 1, ed. Arthur Waskow (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2000) 

​Jewish Lights Publishing ​

 






​The Ecology of Eden

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