The Great Shift

by James L. Kugel

  One thing about those early encounters should be obvious. Although they are narrated in the Bible as actual events—God “appeared” to Abraham, “spoke to Moses,” and so forth—they take place in a reality different from our ordinary one; they occur “in a different register,” as I put it once or twice. The tricky thing that these biblical narratives seek to represent is what that other register is like. So they start off by describing things as if they were taking place in the ordinary world: Abraham and Sarah “see” three men, Jacob physically wrestles with a “man” all night long, Manoah’s wife meets someone “like a prophet,” and so forth. At the same time, these people are clearly in a fog: the most obviously strange things pass them right by. Then the illusion that all this is happening in the ordinary world dissolves, and the people are left in that “different register,” in which God speaks to them directly.

  In some passages this other reality is simply assumed. At Mount Sinai, Moses and the seventy elders “saw the God of Israel,” no further qualification needed, nor even any suggestion that this was some kind of special seeing. In a way, this is reminiscent of what was glimpsed of Mesopotamian religion and the “fog of divine beings.” Everyone knew, apparently, that an ilu was not a single god-in-a-body as we might imagine in ordinary reality, but merely an earthly embodiment of a powerful being who simultaneously existed in various other places on earth as well as in some heavenly body, a star or planet or whole constellation, and perhaps as well in some other, utterly nonphysical manifestations. In this other reality, an onlooker could actually notice slight changes in the expression of Marduk’s cultic statue as it was paraded by; it was not a statue at all, but Marduk himself. Indeed, once the craftsmen had finished fashioning that statue, they could symbolically deny what they had just done and proclaim, “This god was born in heaven.”

  I suggested (although there is obviously no evidence to back this up) that the “fog of divine beings” in ancient times goes back to a still-earlier stage, a time when humans first began to contemplate their own existence as something separate, but only barely so, from everything else. The undifferentiated Outside was all around them; in fact, it could sometimes move freely into them, despite their separateness. In every way, it utterly overshadowed their own little selves. The gods, indeed, the whole enchanted world that was this separate, other reality, thus represent a later stage, when that Outside had subdivided into distinct causers, residents of the “upper shelf” of powerful beings who make things happen. Their existence was as obvious to humans as the things that the gods controlled or inhabited (rain or drought, fertility or barrenness, sun and moon and stars); but unlike these, the gods themselves existed in a state of being that was axiomatically not ordinary. The deity whose huge stride was represented by the footprints on the steps of the temple at ‘Ain Dara could also exist in a spindly little statue of the same god kept inside, while Ba‘al (and perhaps YHWH as well) might somehow be both here and somewhere else. This extraordinary reality apparently did not require, as it does today, some special introduction or explanation: it had always been there, an aspect of existence just on the other side of the curtain. When Joshua, Samuel, and the others realized that they were encountering God, they were “surprised but not flabbergasted.” Such things did happen. Indeed, God not only crossed that curtain from time to time; He could also hear the cries of human beings calling to Him from their side. Sometimes He conspicuously, almost visibly, came to their rescue.

  And then things began to change. It did not happen all at once, but gradually Israel’s embodied God became the “the appearance of the likeness of the presence of the LORD” (Ezek 1: 28). His body was now seen—but barely seen—through a much acknowledged screen of as-it-weres. Heaven had always been His abode, but now He took up permanent residence there, managing things on earth by remote control (“Let there be light”) or through an army of helpers. He who had once buttonholed prophets in the street now remained at a distance. His spokesmen, the angels, came down to earth to speak with prophets on His behalf (but it used to be the prophets themselves who were His spokesmen!), while He remained on high. Nevertheless, a few privileged visionaries had actually ascended to a place above the clouds and saw Him enthroned there, surrounded by a flaming entourage of angels. The visionaries came back and told of what they had seen, revealing the secrets of heaven’s various layers.

  These all were actual encounters, the first and the last in the same degree. But clearly, something had been happening inside the human beings to change things. People had once feared any direct encounter with God; now they reached out to Him in regular, statutory prayers that asked for nothing more than some sort of remote contact, not even seeking confirmation that He was listening. At the same time, in certain late psalms as well as in prayers from Qumran, supplicants probed their own “inner depths” or begged God for mystical enlightenment, sometimes thanking Him as well for protection from enemies altogether phantasmagorical. To be sure, this hardly meant that the people as a whole had entered a state of passive self-reflection. In late Second Temple times, Israel yearned for nothing less than the total reestablishment of God’s kingship on earth, presumably to be brought about by an earthly king who would retake control and fix all that had gone awry. But then, with time, the very nature of God’s kingship came to be redefined. It became at times a way of seeing, something like the visionary state of old, which now allowed people to peer through the veil of apparent reality and glimpse God’s rule behind and through it.

  What brought about this gradual but thoroughgoing change in human beings’ encounters with the divine? So many things had happened, people’s whole way of life had so drastically changed in the course of ten centuries, that it may seem altogether inadequate to refer, as I have, to people’s changing sense of self, as if this really clarified anything. Surely something, or rather, a lot of specific somethings, had come along and changed things: technological innovations that made possible new forms of existence;1 Israel’s geopolitical reality,2 which brought with it (and not always in friendly fashion) the steady introduction of foreign practices and new ideas;3 various political and social changes;4 as well as a host of internally generated changes of various sorts, some of which were altogether nonmaterial, emerging from deep inside and taking wing.5 No doubt it was all of these that changed Israel’s apprehension of its God. (In mentioning these I am also rejecting by implication what some others have proposed: I don’t believe this gradual shift was the result of a few significant individuals coming along simultaneously in the space of a few centuries,6 nor of some fundamental change in the functioning of the bicameral brain.7 )

  But to say, “These numerous changes came about and as a result people began conceiving of God in a different way” is likewise incomplete, precisely because it skips over the all-important mediating factor dismissed in the previous paragraph. It was not the material conditions of daily life or mere geopolitics that alone altered Israel’s encounter with God; what was changing along with these—over a period of centuries—was a set of unspoken assumptions about what the self consists of and how it fits into the world. So it was in a substantially reconfigured self (and the self, it should be recalled, is always a human construct) that humans encountered God anew in the late- and post-biblical era. The evidence is in the very texts examined in the previous chapters.

  Before leaving this topic, however, I wish to stress again that this sense of self is not a little detail housed somewhere in the brain, a thing that can be identified and moved beyond. To contemplate our sense of self in any true fashion is ultimately to bump up against our inability to know what it’s like to be a bat, or to be anything substantially different from what we are. Everyone fits into the world in some way or other, but the way a particular person or society does so seems at a certain point to close off the possibility of truly entering a very different way of fitting in. Here, for example, is Clifford Geertz’s description of the Balinese trance, a regular feature of certain public ceremoni
es:

  The Balinese fall into extreme dissociated states in which they perform all sorts of spectacular activities—biting off the heads of living chickens, stabbing themselves with daggers, throwing themselves wildly about, speaking in tongues, performing miraculous feats of equilibration, mimicking sexual intercourse, eating feces, and so on—rather more easily and much more suddenly than most of us fall asleep. Trance states are a crucial part of every ceremony. In some, fifty or sixty people may fall, one after the other (“like a string of firecrackers going off,” as one observer puts it), emerging anywhere from five minutes to several hours later, totally unaware of what they have been doing and convinced, despite the amnesia, that they have had the most extraordinary and deeply satisfying experience a man can have.

  Do we really have any sense of what it feels like to be a Balinese celebrant for having had him so described? Geertz goes on to ask this question in somewhat different terms:

  What does one learn about human nature from this sort of thing and from the thousand similarly peculiar things anthropologists discover, investigate, and describe? That the Balinese are peculiar sorts of beings, South Sea Martians? That they are just the same as we are at base, but with some peculiar, but really incidental, customs we do not happen to have gone in for? That they are innately gifted or even instinctively driven in certain directions rather than others? Or that human nature does not exist and men are pure and simply what their culture makes of them? It is among such interpretations as these, all unsatisfactory, that anthropology has attempted to find its way to a more viable concept of man . . . To entertain the idea that the diversity of custom across time and over space is not a mere matter of garb and appearance, of stage settings and comedic masques, is to entertain also the idea that humanity is as various in its essence as it is in its expression.8

  Geertz’s reflections are those of an anthropologist. He does not consider what has seemed to me the great unknown underlying any sense of self, the actual mechanics (though I’m not happy with this word, I can’t think of another) involved in our conceiving of ourselves and so fitting into the world, a subject which inevitably must lead to the “mystery of cognition” and, even by omission, to whatever is involved in people’s encountering the divine. I am not sure one can say much more than this. Perhaps the one thing that might be added here has been said once or twice already, that the wavelengths of reflected light are indeed “out there,” but they need a brain to become the colors that we see, truly see.

  The Great Shift

  The changes traced over the preceding pages were certainly far-reaching, but it is important to point out that they were, in the broad perspective, transformations rather than wholly new departures. Indeed, we have seen that a transformation on one side of the human encounter with God has often been accompanied by a parallel one on the other side. Thus, as God came to be conceived as increasingly distant and abstract, the human nefesh went from being a general form of self-reference, “me,” to being a special, separate entity inside the human body, an entity uniquely attached to God, and thence to being God’s own property inside us, to be reclaimed after our body’s demise. The same process has continued into more recent times. Our modern, sealed-off individualism has emerged in part thanks to the reconfiguring of what was once the semipermeable mind, and our complicated modern psyche has been purchased for a sky emptied of angels. To understand this is to realize that the basic elements of the human encounter with the divine are still with us, even as its reality is sometimes denied. Indeed, the particular difficulty of many modern Westerners is to find a way of conceiving of something for which they no longer have a name; adrift in today’s version of the self, they cannot imagine trying to see beyond it in order to address an unknown You.

  I was well into the writing of this book when a journal kept by the American writer Flannery O’Connor turned up among her papers and was published posthumously in 2013. O’Connor was a deeply religious Catholic throughout her short life (she died at the age of 39). Her journal is addressed to God—it’s what is called a prayer journal—and the opening page, written when she was 20, has been much on my mind since its publication. Here is what she wrote:

  Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the earth’s shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon. The crescent is very beautiful and perhaps that is all one like I am should or could see; but what I am afraid of, dear God, is that my self shadow will grow so large that it blocks the whole moon, and that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing.

  I do not know you God because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside.

  The image is striking: God is like the moon whose full being is partially obscured by the earth’s shadow, so that all that is left is one glimmering crescent. That crescent is very beautiful, and like many religious people, O’Connor would like to see—to know—more. But the problem, she says, is “my self.” How fine of her to start by separating those two words, as if to make clear that it is not her very existence, not “myself,” that keeps getting in the way, but rather the thing that we carry around in our heads, that bulky and clumsy imagination of who we are that we call our “self.” This self is like the earth’s shadow, she says, gradually encroaching on the moon’s disk; what she fears is that it will ultimately block off the moon’s light entirely, so that “I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing,” that is, I will think that all I am is that shadow-self. Her respelling “myself” in this sentence may just be accidental—this is a private diary, after all, and she was a pretty erratic speller—but I would like to think she meant it to say that there really is more to us (“myself”) than that bulky, God-blocking shadow (“my self shadow”). But like it or not, that self is still a lot of what we have become—it’s what the modern world has made of us—so “Please help me to push myself aside.”

  There is little to be added to this twenty-year-old’s diagnosis, but I should like to end by suggesting that her prayer—“Please help me to push myself aside”—in fact invokes an age-old theme. Going about in our sumptuous capacities as human beings and in a world of our own making has long made it difficult to see anything else; what is human in us inevitably leads us to try to apprehend God in ways consistent with our way of being.

  The Bible says something similar, I think, in describing a brief exchange between King David and the prophet Nathan. David, having completed construction of a magnificent palace for himself in Jerusalem, is suddenly struck by the incongruity of God still dwelling in a flimsy tent, the tabernacle:

  The king said to the prophet Nathan, “Here I am living in a palace made of cedar wood, while the Ark of God resides in a tent!” Nathan said to the king, “Whatever it is that is in your heart, go and do it, since the LORD is with you.” But that very night, the word of the LORD came to Nathan, saying: “Go and say to My servant David, ‘Thus says the LORD: Are you proposing to build Me a house to dwell in? I have not dwelt in a house from the time that I led the people of Israel out of Egypt until this very day, but I have forever been going about in tent and tabernacle.’” (2 Sam 7:1–6)

  God has no need of a kingly palace—this is a strictly human demand. But what sort of a palace is it to be? Since the time of King David (in fact, starting well before then), the divine accommodations have kept changing. And it’s not over yet.

  Acknowledgments

  Behind these pages stand conversations (and a few arguments) with friends and colleagues, stretching over at least the last decade. I wish here to acknowledge my debt to, among others, Gary Anderson, John Barton, Ellen Birnbaum, Marc Brettler, John Collins, Devorah Dimant, Ed Greenstein, Theodore Gross, William Hallo, Matthias Henze, Avi Hurvitz, Jan Joosten, Menahem Kister, Jacob Klein, David Lambert, Jon Levenson, Bernard Levinson, Peter Machinist, Pinchas Mandel, Chaim Milikowsky, Greg Nagy, Hindy Najman, Judith Newman, Carol Newsom, Bill Propp, Elisha Qimron, Lawrence Rhu, Ishay Rosen-Zvi, Lawrence Schiffman, Baru
ch Schwartz, Michael Segal, Bernard Septimus, Aharon Shemesh, Ben Sommer, Michael Stone, Guy Stroumsa, Loren Stuckenbruck, Eibert Tigchelaar, Robert R. Wilson, and Ziony Zevit. Despite this lengthy list, I may have inadvertently left out the names of at least a few other scholars, for which I apologize. More significantly, I must stress that at least some of the foregoing will likely find in this book ideas or arguments with which they disagree; in mentioning them, I do not wish to imply otherwise. Equally important, I alone am responsible for any errors of fact or expression in this book.

  I am indebted once again to my friend and publisher (a rare combination in my experience), Bruce Nichols of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, as well as to Larry Cooper for his production help, and to Melissa Dobson for her careful copyediting. Above all, I am grateful to the members of my own family for their insights and their patience.

  Notes

  In writing this book, I have drawn liberally on the work of contemporary scholars. These notes are intended to express my thanks for, and my debt to, their research, and in some cases as well to take up issues still under discussion. But these notes are mostly intended for specialists. While I do hope that non-specialists may likewise find some of them of interest, I wish to assure all readers that I have quite consciously arranged things so as to leave out nothing essential from the body of the book.