God in Judaism
God in Judaism isn't just a theological concept; it's the very bedrock of a civilization, shaping millennia of identity, law, and thought. From ancient covenants to modern philosophy, the Jewish understanding of the divine is a rich tapestry, woven with threads of transcendence, immanence, and an unwavering commitment to monotheism. But how exactly does a people grapple with a God both utterly beyond and intimately present? Judaism proclaims an absolute, singular God, the sole Creator, incomparable and indivisible, whose essence remains largely unknowable. While traditionally personal and involved, Jewish thought also explores God as an impersonal force or ethical ideal, particularly in modern interpretations. The unpronounceable Tetragrammaton, YHWH, symbolizes God's unique mystery and transcendent nature, guiding how Jews approach the divine in worship and daily life.
AI Summary
God in Judaism isn't just a theological concept; it's the very bedrock of a civilization, shaping millennia of identity, law, and thought. From ancient covenants to modern philosophy, the Jewish understanding of the divine is a rich tapestry, woven with threads of transcendence, immanence, and an unwavering commitment to monotheism. But how exactly does a people grapple with a God both utterly beyond and intimately present?
- Judaism proclaims an absolute, singular God, the sole Creator, incomparable and indivisible, whose essence remains largely unknowable.
- While traditionally personal and involved, Jewish thought also explores God as an impersonal force or ethical ideal, particularly in modern interpretations.
- The unpronounceable Tetragrammaton, YHWH, symbolizes God's unique mystery and transcendent nature, guiding how Jews approach the divine in worship and daily life.
The Unwavering Core: One God
At the heart of Judaism lies an unshakeable belief: there is one God. This isn't just a statement of faith; it's a profound declaration that this singular God—Yahweh—is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the force behind the Exodus from Egypt, and the giver of the Law at Mount Sinai. It’s a foundational truth that permeates every aspect of Jewish life and thought.
This one God is understood in two seemingly contradictory ways simultaneously: transcendent and immanent. Transcendent means utterly separate and independent from the material universe, existing beyond its limits. Yet, God is also immanent—actively involved and present within the very fabric of existence, engaging directly with the world and humanity.
Attributes of the Divine
The Jewish God is characterized by absolute perfection and uniqueness, entirely free from fault or limitation. This divine being is omnipotent, possessing all power; omnipresent, existing everywhere at once; and omniscient, knowing all things. There is no partner, no equal—God is the sole creator of everything that exists.
Crucially, in Judaism, God is never depicted in any image. The Torah strictly forbids making any physical representation of God or ascribing partners to His singular sovereignty. This reinforces the idea that God is utterly unlike anything in the world, beyond human thought and expression—an absolute, indivisible, and incomparable being.
The medieval philosopher Moses Maimonides articulated a highly influential rationalistic theology that came to shape much of traditional Jewish thought. He posited God as the absolute one, the necessarily existing cause and preserver of all creation. Maimonides emphasized God's incorporeality and omnipresence, rejecting any notion of God being bound by physical form or location.
The Sacred Names of God
The most frequent name for God in the Hebrew Bible is the Tetragrammaton, represented by the four Hebrew letters YHWH. Out of profound reverence, Jews traditionally do not pronounce this name. Instead, when reading the Torah, they substitute it with 'Adonai,' meaning 'My Lord,' or refer to God more generally as 'HaShem,' literally 'the Name.'
This practice highlights a deep respect for the divine and acknowledges God's transcendent nature—a name so holy it cannot be uttered. Other revered names for God in Jewish tradition include Elohim, El-Elyon (God Most High), and El Shaddai (God Almighty).
Exploring the Godhead: Unknowable Essence
In Jewish philosophy, the 'Godhead' refers to the elusive essence of God, that aspect which lies beyond actions or properties. It's the ultimate 'whatness' of God, a subject of deep contemplation and, paradoxically, acknowledged unknowability.
Rationalistic View
For Maimonides and other rationalistic Jewish thinkers, very little can be truly known about the Godhead itself, beyond its sheer existence. Even this existence, they argued, can only be asserted in a unique, unequivocal way, distinct from how anything else exists. Maimonides famously stated that 'there is, in truth, no relation in any respect between God and any of God's creatures.'
Kabbalistic View
Within Kabbalistic thought, the mystical tradition of Judaism, the Godhead is often referred to as 'Ein Sof,' meaning 'Without End' or 'Infinite.' This represents the aspect of God that exists before any emanations or revelations, a pure, boundless divinity. Paradoxically, even Kabbalists agree on its ultimate unknowability.
As one Kabbalistic text describes, 'Concerning Ein Sof, there is no aspect anywhere to search or probe; nothing can be known of it, for it is hidden and concealed in the mystery of absolute nothingness.' This reflects a profound humility before the divine mystery, suggesting that the true essence of God is utterly beyond human grasp.
Divine Properties and Human Understanding
Traditional Judaism describes God as the eternal, omnipotent, and omniscient creator, the ultimate source of all morality and ethical principles. Maimonides eloquently stated, 'The foundation of all foundations and the pillar of wisdom is to know that there is a Primary Being who brought into being all existence.'
While often depicted as omniscient, some medieval Jewish philosophers debated the extent of God's foreknowledge, especially concerning human free will. Figures like Gersonides suggested that God knows all possible choices, but not the specific choice an individual will make—preserving the space for human agency.
God is consistently described as omnipotent, with the power to intervene in the world, a concept deeply rooted in the Hebrew Bible. However, some modern Jewish theologians have explored interpretations where God's omnipotence is not absolute in every sense, particularly in relation to human suffering or evil, while still upholding divine power.
Despite the use of masculine imagery and grammatical forms in the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible), traditional Jewish philosophy does not attribute gender to God. Such language is understood metaphorically or poetically, never implying that God possesses a specific physical gender. God is incorporeal, beyond such human distinctions.
The Torah's descriptions of God sometimes employ anthropomorphic language, ascribing human features. Yet, this is universally understood as metaphor. Judaism remains fiercely aniconic, strictly forbidding material representations of God, emphasizing divine incorporeality and incomprehensibility. To attempt to envision God's 'appearance' is considered disrespectful, even heretical.
Conceptions of God: Personal vs. Impersonal
The journey of understanding God in Judaism offers a spectrum of approaches, ranging from a deeply personal relationship to more abstract, philosophical conceptions. These different perspectives highlight the dynamic and evolving nature of Jewish thought.
The Personal God
Most classical Judaism views God as a deeply 'personal God'—meaning that humans can forge a relationship with the divine, and God, in turn, engages with humanity. This is evident in Jewish liturgy, where hymns affirm God as 'my living God...Who hears and answers.' This God is not distant, but passionately engaged and present in the world.
This 'personal' aspect doesn't imply a corporeal or anthropomorphic being, which Jewish sages have often rejected. Instead, 'personality' refers to an inner essence—a psychical, rational, and moral consciousness. While some ancient mystical texts might describe God with limb-like measurements, these are generally understood as profound allegories, not literal descriptions.
Jews believe that God can be experienced even if God cannot be fully understood. As God revealed to Moses, 'I Am that I Am,' signifying an ultimate, indefinable being. Anthropomorphic statements are seen as linguistic metaphors, necessary to even begin to speak of the divine without reducing God to human limitations.
The philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel proposed a powerful idea: that God is in need of human beings. This doesn't diminish God's power, but rather highlights God's accessibility and vulnerability. This perspective fosters a profound spiritual intensity, making God intimately present, concerned, and affected by what happens in the world through human action.
The Non-Personal God
Alongside traditional views, an alternate stream of thought, particularly in modern Judaism, emphasizes a non-personal God. Surveys indicate a significant number of Jews, especially in contemporary contexts, lean towards seeing God as an 'impersonal force' rather than a distinct person.
Baruch Spinoza, excommunicated from his Jewish community, offered a pantheistic view where God is synonymous with Nature itself—everything is God, and God is everything. While controversial in his time, Spinoza's profound philosophical insights later influenced many Jewish thinkers, particularly secular Zionists.
Hermann Cohen, a prominent Neo-Kantian philosopher, rejected Spinoza's view but also saw God as non-personal. For Cohen, God was the ultimate ethical ideal, an archetype of morality to be pursued. Love of God, in this framework, becomes synonymous with the love of morality and the pursuit of ethical living.
Emmanuel Levinas took this further, equating God with ethics itself. He argued that one experiences the presence of God through rendering justice to 'the Other'—the vulnerable human being before you. To know God, for Levinas, is not to comprehend 'what God is,' but to understand 'what God commands' through moral responsibility.
Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, viewed God as a 'power that makes for salvation'—an impersonal, natural force within the universe, rather than a supernatural being. For Kaplan, any experience of truth or goodness is an experience of God. While abstract, he acknowledged that personal God-language can still be valuable for spiritual connection.
Similarly, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi of the Jewish Renewal movement coined the term 'godding.' This concept portrays God as an ongoing process—emerging, growing, adapting, and evolving with creation. He believed that while traditional language is useful, it's crucial to understand God as a dynamic, active force rather than a static entity.
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God in Judaism
The Tetragrammaton (YHWH), the main Hebrew name of God inscribed on the page of a Sephardic manuscript of the Hebrew Bible (1385)
In Judaism, God has been conceived in a variety of ways. Traditionally, Judaism holds that God—that is, the god of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and the national god of the Israelites—delivered them from slavery in Egypt, and gave them the Law of Moses at Mount Sinai as described in the Torah. Jews believe in a monotheistic conception of God ("God is one"), characterized by both transcendence (independence from, and separation from, the material universe) and immanence (active involvement in the material universe).
God is seen as unique and perfect, free from all faults, and is believed to be omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, and unlimited in all attributes, with no partner or equal, serving as the sole creator of everything in existence. In Judaism, God is never portrayed in any image. The names of God used most often in the Hebrew Bible are the un-pronounced Tetragrammaton (Hebrew: יהוה, romanized: YHWH) and Elohim. Other names used to refer to God in traditional Judaism include Adonai, El-Elyon, El Shaddai, and Shekhinah.
According to the rationalistic Jewish theology articulated by the Medieval Jewish philosopher and jurist Moses Maimonides, which later came to dominate much of official and traditional Jewish thought, God is understood as the absolute, indivisible, and incomparable being who is the creator deity—the cause and preserver of all existence. Maimonides affirmed Avicenna's conception of God as the Supreme Being, both omnipresent and incorporeal, necessarily existing for the creation of the universe while rejecting Aristotle's conception of God as the unmoved mover, along with several of the latter's views such as denial of God as creator and affirmation of the eternity of the world. Traditional interpretations of Judaism generally emphasize that God is personal yet also transcendent and able to intervene in the world, while some modern interpretations of Judaism emphasize that God is an impersonal force or ideal rather than a supernatural being concerned with the universe.
Names
God in Judaism
The Mesha Stele bears the earliest known reference (840 BCE) to the Israelite god Yahweh.
The name of God used most often in the Hebrew Bible is the Tetragrammaton (Hebrew: יהוה, romanized: YHWH). Jews traditionally do not pronounce it, and instead refer to God as HaShem, literally "the Name". In prayer, the Tetragrammaton is substituted with the pronunciation Adonai, meaning "My Lord", as demonstrated in a common translation of the Shema: "Hear O Israel: the LORD is our God, the LORD is One" (Deuteronomy 6:4). The correct pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton was lost from Jewish tradition during the Middle Ages, though current scholarly consensus outside of Jewish tradition generally reconstructs the name's original pronunciation as "Yahweh". In fundamentalist interpretations of Judaism, God is always referred to with masculine grammatical articles only.
Godhead
God in Judaism
In Judaism, Godhead refers to the aspect or substratum of God that lies behind God's actions or properties (i.e., it is the essence of God).
Rationalistic conception
In the philosophy of Maimonides and other Jewish-rationalistic philosophers, there is little which can be known about the Godhead, other than its existence, and even this can only be asserted equivocally.
How then can a relation be represented between God and what is other than God when there is no notion comprising in any respect both of the two, inasmuch as existence is, in our opinion, affirmed of God, may God be exalted, and of what is other than God merely by way of absolute equivocation. There is, in truth, no relation in any respect between God and any of God's creatures.
Kabbalistic conception
In Kabbalistic thought, the term "Godhead" usually refers to the concept of Ein Sof (אין סוף), which is the aspect of God that lies beyond the emanations (sephirot). They are considered to be a dynamic and organic unity whose nature depends on humanity. The "knowability" of the Godhead in Kabbalistic thought is no better than what is conceived by rationalist thinkers. As Jacobs (1973) puts it, "Of God as God is in Godself—Ein Sof—nothing can be said at all, and no thought can reach there".
Ein Sof is a place to which forgetting and oblivion pertain. Why? Because concerning all the sefirot, one can search out their reality from the depth of supernal wisdom. From there it is possible to understand one thing from another. However, concerning Ein Sof, there is no aspect anywhere to search or probe; nothing can be known of it, for it is hidden and concealed in the mystery of absolute nothingness.
Properties which are attributed to God
God in Judaism
In modern articulations of traditional Judaism, God has been speculated to be the eternal, omnipotent, and omniscient creator of the universe, as well as the source for one's standards of morality, guiding humanity through ethical principles.
Maimonides describes God in this fashion: "The foundation of all foundations and the pillar of wisdom is to know that there is a Primary Being who brought into being all existence. All the beings of the heavens, the earth, and what is between them came into existence only from the truth of His being."
Jews often describe God as omniscient, although some prominent medieval Jewish philosophers held that God does not have complete foreknowledge of human acts. Gersonides, for example, argued that God knows the choices open to each individual, but that God does not know the choices that an individual will make. Abraham ibn Daud believed that God was not omniscient or omnipotent with respect to human action.
Jews often describe God as omnipotent, and see that idea as rooted in the Hebrew Bible. Some modern Jewish theologians have argued that God is not omnipotent, however, and have found many biblical and classical sources to support this view. The traditional view is that God has the power to intervene in the world.
"That the Lord, He is God in heaven above and upon the earth beneath" (Deut. 4.39) Maimonides infers from this verse that the Holy One is omnipresent and therefore incorporeal, for a corporeal being is incapable of being in two places simultaneously.
"To whom will ye liken me, that I should be equal?" (Isa. 40,25) Maimonides infers from this verse that, "had He been corporeal, He would be like other bodies".
Although God is referred to in the Tanakh with masculine imagery and grammatical forms, traditional Jewish philosophy does not attribute gender to God. Although Jewish aggadic literature and Jewish mysticism do on occasion refer to God using gendered language, for poetic or other reasons, this language was never understood by Jews to imply that God is gender-specific.
Some modern Jewish thinkers take care to articulate God outside of the gender binary, a concept seen as not applicable to God.
Kabbalistic tradition holds that emanations from the divine consist of ten aspects, called sefirot.
The Torah ascribes some human features to God, however, other Jewish religious works describe God as formless and otherworldly. Judaism is aniconic, meaning it lacks material, physical representations of both the natural and supernatural worlds. Furthermore, the worship of idols is strictly forbidden. The traditional view, elaborated by figures such as Maimonides, reckons that God is wholly incomprehensible and therefore impossible to envision, resulting in an historical tradition of "divine incorporeality". As such, attempting to describe God's "appearance" in practical terms is considered disrespectful, and possibly heretical.
Conceptions of God
Personal
The mass revelation at Mount Horeb in an illustration from a Bible card published by the Providence Lithograph Company, 1907
Most of classical Judaism views God as a personal god and as a national god, meaning that individual humans and the nation of Israel both have a relationship with God and vice versa. Rabbi Samuel S. Cohon wrote that "God as conceived by Judaism is not only the First Cause, the Creative Power, and the World Reason, but also the living and loving Father of Men. He is not only cosmic but also personal....Jewish monotheism thinks of God in terms of definite character or personality, while pantheism is content with a view of God as impersonal." This is shown in the Jewish liturgy, such as in the Adon Olam hymn, which includes a "confident affirmation" that "He is my God, my living God...Who hears and answers." Edward Kessler writes that Hebrew Bible "portrays an encounter with a God who cares passionately and who addresses humanity in the quiet moments of its existence." British chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks suggests that God "is not distant in time or detached, but passionately engaged and present".
The word "personal", as applied to God in Judaism, does not connote that God is corporeal or anthropomorphic, views that Jewish sages rejected; rather, "personality" refers not to a physical body, but to "inner essence, psychical, rational, and moral". However, some non-traditional Jewish texts, for example, the Shi'ur Qomah of the Heichalot literature, describe the measurements of limbs and body parts of God.
Jews believe that "God can be experienced" but also that "God cannot be understood", because "God is utterly unlike humankind" (as shown in God's response to Moses when Moses asked for God's name: "I Am that I Am"). Anthropomorphic statements about God "are understood as linguistic metaphors, otherwise it would be impossible to talk about God at all".
A notion that God is in need of human beings has been propounded by Abraham Joshua Heschel. Because God is in search of people, God is accessible and available through time and place to whoever seeks God, leading to a spiritual intensity for the individual as well. This accessibility leads to a God who is present, involved, near, intimate, and concerned for and vulnerable to what happens in this world.
Non-personal
Seal of Hezekiah, 727 to 698. Winged disk representing God
Winged disk reproduced in the Jewish Encyclopedia 1906
Modern Jewish thinkers claim that there is an "alternate stream of tradition exemplified by ... Maimonides", who, along with several other Jewish philosophers, rejected the idea of a personal God. According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life's 2008 U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, Americans who identify as Jewish by religion are twice as likely to favor ideas of God as "an impersonal force" over the idea that "God is a person with whom people can have a relationship".
Modern Jewish thinkers who have rejected the idea of a personal God have sometimes affirmed that God is nature, the ethical ideal, or a force or process in the world.
Baruch Spinoza offers a pantheist view of God. In his thought, God is everything and everything is God. Thus, there can be conceived no substance but God. In this model, one can speak of God and nature interchangeably. Although Spinoza was excommunicated from the Jewish community of Amsterdam, Spinoza's concept of God was revived by later Jews, especially Israeli secular Zionists.
Hermann Cohen rejected Spinoza's idea that God can be found in nature, but agreed that God was not a personal being. Rather, he saw God as an ideal, an archetype of morality. Not only can God not be identified with nature, but God is also incomparable to anything in the world. This is because God is "One", unique and unlike anything else. One loves and worships God through living ethically and obeying His moral law: "love of God is love of morality."
Similarly, for Emmanuel Levinas, God is ethics, so one is brought closer to God when justice is rendered to the Other. This means that one experiences the presence of God through one's relation to other people. To know God is to know what must be done, so it does not make sense to speak of God as what God is, but rather what God commands.
For Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, God is not a person, but rather a force within the universe that is experienced; in fact, anytime something worthwhile is experienced, that is God. God is the sum of all natural processes that allow people to be self-fulfilling, the power that makes for salvation. Thus, Kaplan's God is abstract, not carnate, and intangible. In this model, God exists within this universe; for Kaplan, there is nothing supernatural or otherworldly. One loves this God by seeking out truth and goodness. Kaplan does not view God as a person but acknowledges that using personal God-language can help people feel connected to their heritage and can act as "an affirmation that life has value".
Likewise, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, the founder of the Jewish Renewal movement, views God as a process. To aid in this transition in language, he uses the term "godding", which encapsulates God as a process, as the process that the universe is doing, has been doing, and will continue to do. This term means that God is emerging, growing, adapting, and evolving with creation. Despite this, conventional God-language is still useful in nurturing spiritual experiences and can be a tool to relate to the infinite, although it should not be confused with the real thing.