CAN THERE BE JUDAISM WITHOUT BELIEF IN GOD?
Only a third to half of American Jews today believe in an almighty deity. Can there be Judaism without belief in God? Moment asks 14 thinkers—from philosophers to politicians to poets—to weigh in on this ever-present question.
 Adin Steinsaltz
The question “What is Judaism without belief in God” can best be answered through similes. The simplest simile would be that it is like humanity without life: a collection of dead bodies, cemeteries and memorials. Judaism without belief in God is just like that: a combination of obscure historical notions such as the Shoah, a faint attachment to Israel and wonderful material for Woody Allen movies. Unlike most of the people in the world, for whom religion is an entity superimposed on an existing nation, in Judaism there has never been anything that makes any sense of the Jewish people; it was not so in the past, and it is surely not so now, with all the ethnic, social and historical differentiations that exist within our nation. This is also true about Jewishness in general: When one speaks about Judaism as an idea or a culture, it becomes quite ridiculous; it is like an attempt to write literature by using only three or four letters of the alphabet. It can be done as a gimmick, but the result will be neither important nor impressive. It is true, however, that in many parts of the world, Jews subconsciously define themselves as the void that remained after God had left—namely, empty shells, hollow puppets that continue to talk and preach despite having lost their contents long ago.
Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz is a winner of the Israel Prize and recently completed a translation of the Talmud into modern Hebrew.
Rebecca Goldstein
As an atheist who identifies with my Jewishness, I believe this is a very important question. From a purely philosophical point of view, it might seem like a contradiction; Judaism is a religion that at the very least presupposes, as all religions do, a belief in God. But many of us make a distinction between Judaism as a religion and Judaism as a cultural and ethical outlook. Many Jewish secularists have strong emotional ties to Judaism; they are moved by Jewish history and identify with the ethics of its civilization. And although they don’t believe in any supernatural premises, they recognize that they are informed by Jewish values.
The contradictions might seem glaring, but centuries of Jewish history since the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, have proved that Jews are too strong for narrowly defined contradictions. One of the most important responsibilities a person has is to carefully and conscientiously examine her beliefs. She has a moral responsibility to not simply inherit her beliefs, accepting them as she does her name, to not assert propositions about the world just because of the group that she was born into. If an open-minded look at the world makes her conclude that this is a godless universe, does she have to renounce the culture she grew up with, that has done so much to develop a moral outlook and human values? The answer, for me and many others, is no.
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, professor and novelist, is the author of Thirty-Six Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction.
Joe Lieberman
There can be Jews who are good people without belief in God, but ultimately Judaism cannot continue to exist without belief in God because the Jewish historical narrative depends on it. I was raised in a traditional setting, to believe that we’re judged—and this comes from the prophetic writings—by our behavior, not whether we observe this or that ritual, though we should observe those rituals. Judaism without God, in my opinion, will not remain Judaism and will ultimately vanish. My somewhat circular logic is that I accept the truth of the promise that God made to our forefathers and foremothers: that the Jewish people will be eternal. But I also believe that the promise was conditioned on a continuing belief in God.
Senator Joe Lieberman is an Independent senator from Connecticut and author of a new book on the Sabbath, The Gift of Rest.
Robert Putnam
I don’t know whether it’s theologically kosher to be both a Jew and an atheist, but if it isn’t, half the Americans who call themselves Jews aren’t quite legit. Of self-identified Jews in the nationally representative surveys David Campbell and I did for our book American Grace, 50 percent say they have doubts about the existence of God. That figure is much higher among Jews than any other major religious group in America. (Among members of all other faiths, only 10-15 percent express any doubts at all about God’s existence.) Indeed, the fraction of atheists among self-described Jews is not much lower than among so-called “nones,” people who say they have no religious affiliation at all. Of the “nones,” 53 percent have doubts about God’s existence.
Jews are an ethnicity and a community, not just a religion. To be sure, that’s true of other religions, to some extent. Part of what it means to be an Italian, Polish or Irish American is being Catholic, and the Black church is at the core of the African-American community. So Jews are not alone in being partly an ethnic grouping, but community bonds play an unusually prominent role in our religion. I’m a Jew by choice—I converted 50 years ago, and I’m even more satisfied with that choice now than I was a half-century ago. That’s partly because being Jewish is mostly not about beliefs, but about connections with other people, sharing values and a collective destiny. Even for non-observant Jews, Jewish values are embodied in the Torah. Most Jews, unlike most Christians, don’t take the Torah literally, but it’s an exceptional account of the shared history and values of our people. Those values include respect for learning—we’re the “People of the Book”—respect for the individual, and pervasive concern about the fate of the community. It’s not an accident that Jews are among the most generous people in America philanthropically, and not just for Jewish causes; this trait embodies tikkun olam. Sociologically, Jews behave in a way that’s consistent with putting a high value on caring for other people, as well as on respect for learning. Even the atheists among us share those values.
Robert Putnam is the author of Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community and the Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University.
Marcia Falk
Without question, there always has been Judaism without God. For one thing, who decides whether what we do is Judaism or not? Is there some court on high that says, “This is Jewish, and this is not”? Clearly, a large population of Jews in America do not believe in God, though they may not say so. It’s very taboo in America to admit you’re an atheist. We can’t imagine a candidate for president who doesn’t go around God-blessing everything. It’s almost a century since Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, wrote Judaism as a Civilization, and the idea that Judaism has evolved over time is hardly a new concept. Even asking the question, “Can there be Judaism without God?” seems odd. Lots of people who don’t believe in God are going along living and being Jewish, so obviously they exist. People used to ask, “Can Judaism survive without halacha?” And it certainly has in the non-Orthodox movements. Same with God. If you say the community is only those who believe in God, you’ll have a pretty paltry community. What would they ask? Some kind of oath as to what you believe? Obviously that’s oppressive. At the bottom of these questions is a mindset that wants to appeal to an external authority saying what’s kosher and what isn’t. What are we asking for? Are we asking for permission?
Marcia Falk, a poet, translator and liturgist, is the author of The Book of Blessings: New Jewish Prayers for Daily Life, the Sabbath, and the New Moon Festival.
David Klinghoffer
It depends on what you mean by Judaism.
In the Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides talks about words that mean different things in different contexts. There are different meanings for words when they are used in reference to God and when they’re used in reference to people, like “sit” or “stand.” So you have all kinds of philosophies that go by the name Judaism. If you consider Judaism to be what people of Jewish background believe, I’d say, sure, you certainly can have a Jewish person who doesn’t believe in God. But there’s no way to conceive of thousands of years of historical Judaism without a deity, a designer, an ultimate, transcendent truth.
I’ve known a lot of people who do not believe in God who have come to Judaism for other reasons, such as a relationship or a philosophical view that drew them in. One of the strange and miraculous things about Jewish practice is that it seems to engender belief. People wonder, “Why does Chabad ask passersby to put on tefillin?” It seems that there’s this almost magical effect to it. The mitzvah not only provokes spiritual questions, but engenders a longing for belief, and ultimately belief itself. So even though, theologically, Judaism without God doesn’t make sense, I would say that, as a practice, Judaism can begin in non-belief but conclude in belief. For me, authenticity means truth. It means connecting with a revelation that happened in the past. If there’s any hope for Judaism at all, it lies in the belief that Judaism goes back to Moses and Mount Sinai. Otherwise, Judaism is just a fraud, an illusion.
David Klinghoffer is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and most recently edited Signature of Controversy: Responses to Critics of Signature in the Cell.
Felix Posen
There is Judaism without belief in God. Statistics show that a majority of Jews define themselves as secular. I am not a believer, but I never say that I am an atheist, because it is just as impossible to prove the non-existence of God as it is to prove His existence. Judaism is a culture, and that includes religion, of course, since it started as religion, as did all cultures 2,000 to 3,000 years ago without exception. Judaism is an immensely rich subject, particularly in literature. The extent of Jewish literature is unbelievable, and it has never been put into one series of works, which is the Posen Foundation’s single largest project: an anthology of Judaism as culture and civilization on which about 120 scholars have been working for over a decade. We are collecting what has been written for a 3,000-year period, starting with the Talmud and Mishna. The first volumes are strictly religious, because the only writings that existed in the first 1,000 years were essentially religious texts. Some non-religious texts begin to appear in the Greek-Roman period, then in the Renaissance, and they show up more frequently from Spinoza’s time onward. The vast majority are from the past three or four hundred years. The anthology includes fiction, philosophy, sociology, art, architecture—whatever has been produced in a literary form by or for Jews. It will very clearly show the march of Judaism from religion toward secularity. We are not putting a value judgment on it; it is simply historical fact.
Felix Posen is the founder of the Posen Foundation.
Avraham Infeld
Judaism is not a religion and was not a religion until the emancipation and our encounter with modernity. Rather, it’s the culture of the Jewish people. Like most ancient cultures, it was a religious culture, and the relationship between God and the Jewish people as a whole—not the individual Jew—was an integral part of the basis of that culture. Does an individual Jew have to believe in God to be a part of Judaism? I don’t think so. I believe that practicing Judaism demands recognition of the fact that you’re part of a culture with a narrative that has God as a central player, part of a people that have had a love affair with God for thousands of years. The narrative of this relationship is probably the central theme in the culture of this people. Being a people means identifying with a shared memory and narrative and having responsibility for its future, its renaissance, its well being. That’s what Jews are. It’s like asking “Can a Frenchman be French without being Catholic?” Of course he can, but he has to understand that being French was built on the Catholic tradition. We are taught that a Jew—never mind how he sins, even in the sin of apostasy—always remains a Jew. Jewish culture is not based on the individual Jew’s relationship to God, but rather on his relationship to his community and the community’s relationship to God: We pray in the plural. We need a minyan.
One of the most notable biblical converts to Judaism, Ruth, arranges four words to describe her conversion, roughly translated as: “Your people are my people, and your God is my God.” The order is not accidental. Membership in the people is the necessary condition for being a Jew (I don’t know if it’s sufficient), while saying, “your God is my God,” is not a requirement. I grew up in a home that was very much a secular home, where I often heard statements such as “I’m not sure there is a God, I’m not sure we were even in Egypt, but I’m sure He took us out of there.” In one Midrash relating to a verse in Jeremiah, rabbis quote God as saying, “Wouldst that they left Me, but not my teachings.” God is an integral part of my life, but I understand that’s not the case for all Jews. Would I regard David Ben-Gurion as a good Jew? Most decidedly yes. Was God an integral part of his life? I don’t think so.
Avraham Infeld is a senior scholar and advisor at the NADAV Foundation and President Emeritus of Hillel International.
David Wolpe
Yes, there can be Judaism without God, but only briefly, as it cannot reproduce itself. Judaism without God is running on the momentum of past generations. It can last a generation or two, but will disappear without the roots that gave it nourishment. I don’t believe that people will continue to light Shabbat candles because it’s a cultural practice, but they will do it because it’s a mitzvah. Absent a connection to God, Judaism cannot sustain itself. For many people, it’s difficult to believe in God, and yet they feel deeply attached to their Judaism. Transmitting it, however, will be an insurmountable challenge. Judaism without God eliminates large and important sections of our tradition, like prayer. You start out with a lessened tradition and without a compelling reason to continue it. That’s a poor prescription for longevity.
Rabbi David Wolpe is the rabbi of Temple Sinai in Los Angeles, California, and author of the recently published Why Faith Matters.
Jason Rosenhouse
When people describe themselves as Christian, they imply some element of belief. The beliefs may vary, but it would be hard for them to say, “I am a Christian,” if they don’t believe in God. In Judaism, there is a vibrant Jewish community separate from the theological underpinnings of the Torah. You don’t have to believe God made a covenant with our ancestors—where He gave us the land of Israel and commanded us to live by His teachings—to be Jewish. On the other hand, if people don’t believe in God, and everyone is merely going through the motions, is Judaism worth preserving? What if it contributes to polarization and tribalization? Right now, given the way the world is, it feels very meaningful for me to be part of this community and for Jewish culture to be preserved.
Jason Rosenhouse is an associate professor of mathematics at James Madison University, writes EvolutionBlog for the Science Blogs network, and is the author of Among the Creationists: Dispatches from the Anti-Evolution Frontline, forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
Masha Gessen
The concept of Jewishness as a religious affiliation is a recent one. It’s a post-World War II American idea, which will take years to unpack, but essentially it’s a cultural reaction to the need not to think of Jews as an ethnicity. The rest of the world thinks of Jews as an ethnic group, and to maintain a separate and cohesive population it’s useful to have a religion, but it’s not necessary, as other groups have demonstrated. The Roma have adopted whatever religion is dominant in the society in which they’re living, an unusual story for a small population in the diaspora, but possible. Same with the secular Jews of the Soviet Union. For nearly seven decades, Jews maintained a separate identity without religion and without a common language. The common experience of discrimination forged a common identity that bound them together. In the post-Soviet world, what we’re seeing is a very diverse population of Jews; the ones who are here are ethnically secular, their affiliation based on past experience of discrimination. My understanding as a Jew raised secularly is that the question of belief in God is a private question. To be observant of Jewish traditions, you don’t actually have to believe in your heart of hearts in God; you have to believe in the necessity of observing the tradition.
Masha Gessen is a Moscow-based journalist and the author of several books, including Blood Matters: From Inherited Illness to Designer Babies, How the World and I Found Ourselves in the Future of the Gene.
Noah Feldman
Wasn’t this the great question of the 19th century? My initial reaction is that I thought this question had been answered. Certainly there have been multiple attempts to deal with it. In the Middle Ages there were attempts—the Aristotelian God of Maimonides was a naturalized God—but they didn’t think that was incompatible with Jewish belief. It arose again in the Haskalah, which sought to offer a cultural account of Judaism, including a deep understanding of its history, its philosophy and its literary practices, not just religious ones. The Reconstructionist movement has been looking at Judaism as a civilization. And perhaps most importantly, Zionism itself has attempted to transform Judaism into a nationalist movement. So it very much depends on your definition. For theistic Judaism, the belief in God is all-important. The commitments to the commandments flow from the fact that they’re of divine origin; it would be absurd to follow commandments without someone who commanded them. But if you broaden your conception of what you think of as Judaism—either sociologically or otherwise—to include non-theistic Judaism, there are numerous ways to expand the notion of how to exist as a Jew. There is selective engagement with aspects of the religious tradition driven by emotion. You can be deeply religiously committed without being a theist because you can be religiously connected to rituals that move you beyond everyday experiences. You can be a culturally committed Jew, for whom the ritual is symbolic; a diaspora Jew, committed to the practice of Jewish life outside Israel; or a Zionist Jew, connected with Jewish life in Israel. So, while theistic Judaism can’t exist without God, other forms can, have and do.
Noah Feldman is the Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard and a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine.
Leora Batnitzky
It is difficult to conceive of Judaism as a long-term, sustainable tradition without belief in God, or, at the very least, belief in the Jewish people. For example, one of the questions about Zionism is whether or not, as a belief in the Jewish people outside of God, it is sustainable over the generations. I’m not sure it is. I’m not saying that all Jews do believe in God, and I don’t think God fills a void in any kind of easy way, but the notion of God gives some kind of trans-historical, or trans-subjective dimension to why we think we ought to do what we ought to do. The question comes down to what it means to sustain a belief in God in Judaism, and that’s a complicated issue. One interesting example of someone who struggled with this issue is Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan. He rightfully recognized that defining Judaism just in terms of God was problematic, and he also claimed that, in many ways, modern science made notions of God obsolete. But he continually struggled to think of a notion of God that infused Jewish peoplehood with meaning.
The question is, why be Jewish? One thing I think most Jews would agree on—and there aren’t many things—is that it’s not easy to be Jewish alone. It’s communal. So what sustains the community? Answers about history and culture are important, but without a God that somehow transcends human history, Judaism becomes just one cultural option among many. It becomes like ice cream flavors; different people like different flavors, but why should we force our children to like our flavor? Without God, arguments for Jewish continuity—that there should be Jews in the future—end up resorting to ethnic chauvinism.
Leora Batnitzky is chair of the Religion Department at Princeton University and author of How Judaism Became a Religion.
Jack M. Sasson
Especially before the fall of the Ottoman Empire, belief in God was generally not a troubling issue for Mizrachi Jews in the Middle East, as there was little differentiation between the religious and social spheres. People simply believed, sustaining behavioral norms that were shaped distinctively by the ways Jews, Muslims and Christians interpreted the will of God. Some within Judaism were doubtless driven to sharper modes of devotion than others, but these were not cultures in which individuals agonized about the existence of God. Rather they tightened family bonds and kept hope for a safe and more fulfilling future alive through that God. That world of Mizrachi Jews ended a generation or two ago, with the emptying of Jewish communities in all but Iran and Morocco. However, these Jews have worked hard to maintain close-knit and energetic diasporic communities: for example, the Syrian Jewish community in Deal, New Jersey and the Persian community in Los Angeles. The Latin word religio (from which we derive “religion”) has to do with connectives, attaching people together. In that sense, an increasing investment in communal acts—synagogue worship and joyous occasions such as engagement, marriage, bar-mitzvah and brit milla—give moments in which members of the community renew their commitments to each other as well as distribute rewards to loyal members.
Jack M. Sasson is the Mary Jane Werthan Professor of Judaic and Biblical Studies at Vanderbilt University.
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