EXISTENTIALISM IN A JEWISH CONTEXT

A central tenet of existentialism is founded on the assumption that there can be a problematical relationship between faith or moral engagement on the one hand and logical or scientific reason on the other. This accounts for a sense of the absurd and the incoherent. Because of a machine-like modernism there is machination - literally the turning of society and human beings and animals into machine-like entities.

The Christian founder of modern existentialism Søren Kierkegaard, and the atheist Nietzsche dared to proclaim that we have made God absurd, killed the God of organised and even evangelical religion. Martin Buber in his I and Thou and Richard Rubinstein in God After Auschwitz have acknowledged the conundrum of the God who does not seem to rescue the good, the brave, the worthy, the honest.

The answer is to assert the freedom God gives us to assert our will to save ourselves and the good other. God needs us.

Buber, and other Jewish existentialists suggest that God needs us as co-partners in alliance with the biblical prophets, tribal leaders, mystics, even allegorical figures like the forefathers, Joshua, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Amos, Micah, Job to support divine Being. What God or Being-in-the-world (Dasein) gives us is essentially the freedom to create a living faith literally out of faithlessness the erosion of mind, spirit and soul confined to the endless ethical meaninglessness of the Ayn Sof the without-end engendered by pure Perception conceived by pure mind - keter – the crown but always fallible summit of proud homo sapiens.

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