What We Mean When We Talk About “God” with Rabbi Bradley S. Artson (Part 1)

What We Mean When We Talk About “God” with Rabbi Bradley S. Artson (Part 1)

In part one of their conversation Ilia Delio speaks with Rabbi Bradley S. Artson, writer and Jewish process thinker. Rabbi Artson tells us about his journey from atheism to a love for God and describes how process theology helped to reawaken his appreciation for science, shedding light on religious experience. Plus, Ilia and Brad discuss his prayer practice, and consider a more positive spin on tribalism.

ABOUT BRADLEY S. ARTSON

“The world and God are expressions of continuous, dynamic relational change. We label that process as creativity. The mutual commitment to that process is faithfulness, which rises above any faith.”

Rabbi Dr. Bradley Shavit Artson holds the Abner and Roslyn Goldstine Dean's Chair of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies and is Vice President of American Jewish University. Rabbi Artson has long been a passionate advocate for social justice, human dignity, diversity and inclusion. He wrote a book on Jewish teachings on war, peace and nuclear annihilation in the late 80s, became a leading voice advocating for LGBTQ+ marriage and ordination in the 90s, and has published and spoken widely on environmental ethics, special needs inclusion, racial and economic justice, cultural and religious dialogue and cooperation, and working for a just and secure peace for Israel and the Middle East. A member of the Philosophy Department, he is particularly interested in theology, ethics, and the integration of science and religion. He mentors Camp Ramah in California in Ojai and Ramah of Northern California in the Bay Area. He is also dean of the Zacharias Frankel College in Potsdam, Germany, ordaining Conservative rabbis for Europe. A frequent contributor for the Huffington Post and for the Times of Israel, and a public figure Facebook page with over 53,000 likes, he is the author of 12 books and over 250 articles, most recently Renewing the Process of Creation: A Jewish Integration of Science and Spirit. 

Transcript

A HUNGER FOR WHOLENESS TRANSCRIPT | S05E03

What We Mean When We Talk About “God” with Rabbi Bradley S. Artson (Part 1)

Robert: Welcome to Hunger for Wholeness. Today Ilia speaks with writer and process thinker, Rabbi Bradley Artson. To begin, Brad tells us about his journey from atheism to a love for God. He describes how process theology helped to reawaken his appreciation for science, shedding light on religious experience. And later, Ilia and Brad discuss his prayer practice and consider a more positive spin on tribalism.

Ilia: Bradley, it's great to have you here on our podcast called Hunger for Wholeness. We live in a time where I think we have a deep hole in the heart, in the heart of the person, in the heart of the soul of the earth, and longing to fill the hole that's within us. So maybe to begin with, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, your becoming rabbi and your work in Judaism and process theology, which is really interesting.

Bradley: Great. Thank you. Well, it's my pleasure to be here, Ilia, and I'm really happy we can have this conversation. There's something wonderful about living in an age in which people are hungry for wisdom and curiosity and insight, and less worried about the label that it comes packaged in. I think this conversation itself is a reflection of that and I can only imagine that it makes God the universe itself happy to know that the children are actually playing nicely.

Ilia: I love that. Oh, that's great.

Produced by the Center for Christogenesis

Bradley: I grew up pretty anti-religious in the San Francisco Bay Area. Francisco is a great place to be an atheist 'cause there's so much to do. And in college I got interested, but I was always, always very curious and always very connected to nature and to ethical questions, human dignity, what does it mean to belong to this planet? And of course, you know, for many American Jews,

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Judaism isn't a religious identity, it's an identity. And for my family, I think it was that as well. But the nature of the identity keeps dancing around religious things like holidays and like history and like scripture. And I was always very interested in that.

And in college I had a conversionary experience. I joke that I converted to Judaism in everything but name, you know, because I fell in love with God my sophomore year in college. I tell people it could well have been hormonal. I also fell in love with the woman who now 40 years later is still my wife, so might just have been biochemistry. But I did fall in love with God and that impelled me to start picking up lost sparks, Hebrew attending services. I had a roommate in college who was an evangelical Christian and one of the kindest and sweetest people I know. And so, he helped open me to questions of religion, although I couldn't buy into his, but he did kind of open the door to my own, interestingly enough.

Ilia: Interesting.

Bradley: And so that became a growing passion of mine, although not a professional interest. I had planned to go into politics and then did that for a while. I was a legislative aide to the speaker of the California State Assembly. A wonderful man named Willie Brown. Worked for him for two years, and that persuaded me not to go into politics. And my then fiancé, now wife, said, "Well, you've always talked about going to rabbinical school at the end of your career. Why don't you do it now?" And so that's what I did. I've made it a life of listening to her. And then of late I became interested again in my childhood love of science. And so coming to science as an adult, really as a way of appreciating and enhancing the marvel of being alive, that scientific literacy opens us up to how truly spectacular nature is and the divinity that just pulsates under the surface.

Ilia: Yeah. Oh my gosh. Yeah, for sure. That's a beautiful story. That's a wonderful story actually. So from the Godlessness to the God-fullness. From politics to nature and the nature of politics, perhaps.

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Bradley: Right. And not such a big jump as it sounds. If you're interested in being in a universe, in one comprehensive story in which everything fits, that I think is for me, at the heart of the spiritual quest. Like the 3-year-old kid is the same as the tenured philosopher. Just asking why all the time, why is it that way? How does that work? And that motivates science too, as a sense of profound wonder.

Ilia: Absolutely. Yeah, I do think wonder and the desire to know where the desire to discover is so much woven into us. Not so much discovery itself. It's really what's driving, you know, there's something that we long for—there's a longing within us.

Bradley: Right. And the longing, I think I agree, Ilia is not about arriving. It's not, you never stop. It's not that you—because there's a provisionality both to the spirit and to scientific enterprise. You're always trying to account for more data. You're always trying to make things fit together better. You're trying to have a broader vision. And that's true in the realm of spirit too, that, you know, I just celebrated my 65th birthday. I'm not the person I was 10 years ago, five years ago, and I won't be the same person, God willing, that I'll be in five years. There's a provisionality that makes room for expansiveness.

Ilia: Life is so much more dynamic than we really give it credit for. And we're constantly in this flow, kind of a flow and a movement of life. We're constantly being drawn to one thing or another. You know, the funny thing is when we arrive at the very things we desire or seek, we're always kind of disappointed, you know, "Oh, this is it. Or this is the data." I mean, and we're never satisfied—which is so interesting.

Bradley: Don't think there's a way in which I think that's a kind of sign to us that it's not about ownership or possession or arriving, it's the striving and the growing. You know, in process theology, people talk about what's real is becoming. Being is a logical abstraction. There is nothing that is absolute being

Ilia: Right.

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Bradley: There is everything becoming.

Ilia: Yeah.

Bradley: And that becoming is itself on the way.

Ilia: Tell me a little bit how you got into process thought. Well, being in California, maybe being near Claremont.

Bradley: Okay. So I'm going to treat you and your listeners like old friends. Ilia: Okay.

Bradley: At some point, my son Jacob, was diagnosed as autistic. And I want to be clear, autism is not a tragedy and my son is a wonderful human being in part because of his autism. But it did, knowing the way society can make it so difficult was a real challenge. And it, for me, challenged this kind of notion that there's a God fully in control and that everything happens for a reason. Now, I have to tell you and your listeners, most people in such a circumstance would go into therapy. But my mother is a Freudian analyst, so I know how the stew gets made. And I adore my mother and she's an amazing therapist, but I couldn't go to a therapist. So I decided instead to do a doctorate in how does the universe work? Like, how could this happen and what does this mean? How I approached Dr. David Ellenson—should rest in peace, wonderful, wonderful man at Hebrew Union College. And I told him, I have an unusual dissertation I want to work on. I want to write a dissertation on how could this be? And I said to him, you have permission to say no, that's not a dissertation, but you don't have the permission to recommend anything else. I'm not going to write a footnote on someone else's thought. And he said, okay.

So I started reading on science. I started reading neurobiology and cognitive psychology and astronomy and cosmogony, the kinds of things that I think you need to know about the universe to start making sense of it. And in it, I joke about this, but it's only partly a joke. I vented process theology. And then found a book in which apparently there was this guy,

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Whitehead who do it by a hundred years. And I turned to the process people at Claremont and elsewhere, and they were the nicest, most welcoming people who took this newly discovered rabbi. And they welcomed me in. John Cobb, let me come to his house, and I spent a day with him talking about it. And what was clear to me was that process theology, process thought offers a powerful, powerful tool for understanding the universe in a fresh way. And is a powerful hermeneutical tool for explaining why scripture looks the way it does, in particularly way Jewish scripture looks the way it does.

You know, an all knowing perfect God would've given a very different book than Hebrew and Greek scriptures. The scriptures that we have and the fact that in both Judaism and Christianity and Islam, they have an evolving interpretive tradition is because it's becoming. It isn't about it's perfect and we just need to do it because the Bible isn't self interpreting. It's a book that invites people to jump in. And that makes perfect sense with a becoming God as understood in process thought, in a becoming universe, like process thought understands. What I've never gotten is in kind of dominant philosophical and metaphysics, an all knowing, unchanging God wouldn't fit in any of our religious lives or our religious traditions. So, process thought opened that up for me. I think I'm a better reader of scripture and I would've been without it because I bring Whiteheadian tools to the task, and it gives me better responses that fit my life. Like, I don't have to think that God is tormenting my son or you know, I got so many dumb responses from people when I would let them know about Jacob's autism.

You know, one person actually told me that in a past life, Jacob had been a saintly rabbi, and so his soul only needed to return a little tiny bit in this lifetime. It's like, I don't know how that's helpful to anybody. That's certainly not for me, but the idea that God never gives up on Jacob, and that God is sharing the responsibility with Jacob for creating a life of meaning. And our job isn't to make anybody live the life we're supposed to live because the lure is unique for each of us. But our job is to support each other in thriving as we best understand it. Like, that just made so much sense.

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Ilia: Yeah, totally.
Bradley: It turns God into an ally.

Ilia: A partner, a partner in this ongoing creative process. Do you hold, like with Whitehead —do you know as Whitehead says God affects the world and the world affects God. Do you think that we affect God's life?

Bradley: Absolutely. Because the truth is, I think most religious people think that they just don't think they're allowed to think that.

Ilia: Yeah, that's funny.
Bradley: A God who is unaffected by the world is a God who can't love. Ilia: Right.

Bradley: I know a man no longer alive who was married four times, and when his last wife left him, he said to me, I know as a matter of fact that this time it's not my fault because I haven't changed a bit since I met her.

Bradley: And a God who hasn't changed a bit is a God who isn't engaging. Ilia: It's not a God—it's dead.

Bradley: Correct. So, you know, Jewish, Christian, Muslim tradition all agrees that God is a very embodiment of love and justice, but all of those are interactive and responsive. You can't be in a loving relationship if you're not responsive. You can't be a source of justice. So absolutely. I think Whitehead understanding that God both affects the world and is in turn affected by the world is essential.

Ilia: Yeah. So, Abraham Heschel has that beautiful line that God is the most moved mover. Bradley: That's right.

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Ilia: Not the unmoved mover.
Bradley: Well, exactly right. Because it turns out, if there's not a necessity for unmoved

mover, then there's no room for one.

Robert: If a loving God is a God who is moved by creation, then what exactly do we mean when we talk about God? Next, Ilia asks Brad what the name of God means to him from his own Jewish process perspective. Then, Rabbi Bradley shares how he believes religions can learn from each other. And whether there is a possible upside to tribalism. Support for Hunger for Wholeness comes from the Fetzer Institute. Fetzer supports a movement of organizations that are applying spiritual solutions to society's toughest problems. Consider getting involved at fetzer.org.

Ilia: What do you think is going on in the name of God? What does this name really mean for you? You know, what's really taking place here?

Bradley: Let me answer that twice. Ilia: Yeah, sure.

Bradley: Honestly, I think one of the sicknesses of the Western mind is we think that if we can define something, we understand it.

Ilia: Hmm. I completely agree. I like that

Bradley: And what disappears in any attempted definition is the individual. So you didn't ask me what I think godliness is. I can give you definitions of that, but God, I think is someone, and someones don't get reduced to a definition. So I can't tell you about God as God is any more than I could tell you about my wife, as my wife is. I know her in relationship and that means I know the aspects of her that relate to me or to others, or that I witness. But I don't know her objectively. She's not accessible to me in that way, nor is God. So I want to say that first because I want to say that's not unique to God. That's

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true of anything. My dog is sitting here listening in to make sure I don't say anything dumb. And I don't know Molly objectively either. I know her in her relationship, in our connections. So what I do know about God is a vast and profound love, which keeps inviting me to be self surpassing. And I know God as reliable over time, and I know not as a problem fixer, but as a resource of resilience.

Ilia: Yeah.

Bradley: I know God as flashes of insight. Jewish prayer is both liturgical and spontaneous. We have three organized prayers every day, morning, midday, and evening, and that's from a prayer book. But at the end of a silent, organized reading of the prayers, we're asked to just sit and listen. So at the end of pouring out the liturgy, then to create a space to hear, to receive, I have received amazing content over the years. So, I believe in a relational God, not an indifferent God. I do believe in an all powerful God. I don't believe in a coercive God. We, each of us have to channel God into the world.

Ilia: Ah, I like that. We each have to channel God into the world. In other words, God really can't be God in the world without us. Is that...?

Bradley: Well, exactly right. There's a wonderful Jewish proverb that there's no king without a kingdom. And I think that's true for all of us. You know, I can't be a father if my children don't make space for me to be a father. And God can't be God if the cosmos as a whole, not just Jews, not just people, but the Osmos as a whole has to be engaging with God in letting God be God.

Ilia: Did I understand you, that you prayed three times a day? Bradley: Yes.
Ilia: Wow. That is really fantastic.

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Bradley: Liturgically, I pray three times a day. Meaning, there are plenty of spontaneous moments of prayer. Every time I stub my toe, I offer prayer. But Jews are instructed, according to Jewish law, to pray Shacharit, which is the morning prayer; Minchah, the afternoon prayer; Arvit, the evening prayer. These correspond to the sacrifices offered in the temple. There was a morning prayer service, there was an afternoon prayer service, there was an evening service, and so these three times a day correspond to that in the way that prayer has replaced sacrifice.

Ilia: I see. And it kind of is the day, or kind of bring that process of moving through time and space into a new awareness, I guess.

Bradley: Yes. For me, what it does is it helps me stay centered that. It's so easy to get distracted by the chores and the busyness, that you forget that life is a blessing and a miracle. And so, three times a day to have a chance to just stop and pause and breathe. And for me, the liturgy functions like a script for an actor., Like three times a day, I'm invited to be the person for whom these are the appropriate words. And that's kind of a cleansing.

Ilia: Oh, that's so interesting. It's very close, actually, to the Christian tradition as well, I think. That element of drama or enactment, you know, that brings that divine reality into a greater consciousness or awareness in our lives.

Bradley: And I think that's why, look at in the ancient world, worship involved sacrifice. But scholars of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, call it a synagogue service because the model of having a reading at its core and having a liturgy at its core and not killing anyone in the content of the service, except for how long the sermons go, that's a new kind of worship; that synagogue birthed, and then the church and the mosque inherited.

Ilia: Yeah. But in a sense, do you go to a synagogue or you do the prayers at home,

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Bradley: You can do it in a synagogue. I do that during the week. I run a rabbinical school, and so we have services at the rabbinical school, and then if I don't, I pray on my own. And on Saturday, on Shabbat, I do go, I have a wonderful congregation that I'm a member of.

Ilia: You mentioned at the beginning religion, in other words, this living in this reality of being loved and love itself, which is God. So being Jewish or Christian, how do you see the world's religions in relation to the bigger reality of this wellspring of love that we are all a part of?

Bradley: I love that question, and I love what I think is pulsing under it. Every religion is an attempt to enact and articulate a larger reality, which no religion therefore gets perfectly. So every religion is pointing at something in the same way. You get a group of kids with the same parents, and they might have slightly different experiences of their parent, and none of them know the parent objectively. They all know the parent through their experiences of the parent. So for me, that insight helps me—I don't need to argue a Christian out of Christianity or argue a Muslim or a Buddhist out of their Buddhism or Islam because I also recognize that my Judaism is my culture's take on the divine. And that what I then want to do is I want to make sure that what I am not a relativist about is if your religion isn't making you more compassionate, kinder, more patient, more generous, then you're doing it wrong.

Ilia: Or it's not the religion for you.

Bradley: And that's true of every religion. One can use any ideology, any system to become hard and brittle and judgy, and one can use any system to become compassionate and flexible and generous. My job is to help a Christian be a loving, generous, kind Christian. And their job isn't to persuade me to adopt Christianity. Their job is to help me be the best Jew I can be.

Ilia: Absolutely.

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Bradley: And in that regard, we can learn from each other. There are many practices. I meditate and I know that that comes from Hinduism and Buddhism originally. I do Lectio Divina, which is a Christian scriptural practice. Like, there's many things to learn.

Ilia: Right.
Bradley: We travel together without flattening into a kind of bland sameness.

Ilia: Yeah. And that's the beauty of living in our world today with our advanced communications and technology. We know so much more about each other and we can appreciate each other in a richer way. When years ago we lived more tribally and therefore more separate, more closed off for one another. And I think what we begin to see is the beauty that we hold something in common. So we have our distinct ways, and yet there's something that binds us together.

Bradley: Look, I want to push you a little on that. I like tribal. Ilia: Oh, you like tribal?
Bradley: I come from a tribe.
Ilia: Yes, we all do.

Bradley: And I think, you know, there's a falseness to a universalism that pretends that it isn't tribal. Is our tribalism chauvinistic or is our tribalism an expression of the diversity of ways of being human? In which case, our differences unite us just as much as our similarities. Chances are good that what I will learn from you is more from the places where we don't come down in the same place, and instead of being threatened by it, we say to each other. That's so interesting. That's not how I think of it. Tell me what brings you to that space. So, I want to kind of enlighten tribalism. I want a tribalism that isn't exclusive.

Ilia: I would distinguish between open tribalism and closed tribalism.

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Bradley: Great. That works for me a hundred percent.

Ilia: Yeah. I think a closed tribalism is not open to learning from others.

Bradley: That's right. But it's also, you know, one form of closed tribalism is the pretension, well, I'm just being universal. You are the one that's being parochial.

Ilia: Yes. That could be.
Bradley: So I'm just very sensitive to, we all have a particular identity.
Ilia: Absolutely.
Bradley: And that particular identity is precisely how we plug into our humanity.

Ilia: Yeah, I agree. “Universalism,” I don't use that term because it does have this kind of vanilla blending where they had this kind of mass sea of people, not humanity. So the beauty of what makes unitive nature possible is actually the differences.

Bradley: Exactly.

Ilia: So it's precisely because you're Jewish and I'm Christian, that we can come together and kind of see the beauty of these various traditions and the way they're contributing to the overall wholeness of life.

Bradley: And let's push that a little further. No two Christians have exactly the same Christianity, no two Jews—so there are all these ripples. I remember having a conversation with some of my process friends at Claremont in saying it's just as valid to take process as the noun and Jewish or Christian as the adjective than the other way round. So you could say, I'm a processed Jew and that's true, but so a Jewish process. And so, these floating identities, they do all connect us, and each of them become opportunities for exploration. And I love that—the idea that you talk about repeatedly is this, this unity. You know, what

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connects us, it's precisely because nature is such a symphony that it becomes a field of growth for us.

Ilia: Absolutely. You know, and nature is precisely... the beauty of nature is the differentiation of all the various plants and trees and shrubs and they're non-competitive.

Bradley: Right. When I was a kid, I was very interested in science, and so I got an octopus— moss landing, and I kept it in a tank in my garage. His name was Acaobad Clancy. And one of the things that amazed me about him, which also amazes me about the dog, is that despite a very different evolutionary past, we understand each other.

Ilia: Yeah.

Bradley: There's a way in which the octopus would register emotion in colors and skin tone and whatever that were comparable to my own. I knew when he was angry, I knew when he was mad. I knew when he was happy, I knew when he was scared. And the fact that he and I have these analogous emotions and can track each other is astonishing.

Ilia: It is. So it tells us something about the knowing process, which is much more than what the eye can see. There's something much deeper in this knowing process. And I think the new physics is moving in that direction.

Bradley: I think the new physics, the new biology, the new neurobiology, it's not disembodied platonic rationality.

Ilia: No, I agree.
Bradley: It's an embodied way of encountering the world bigger than just reason.

Robert: Next week, Ilia asks Rabbi Bradley, “where are we going?” They also speak about life after death, AI and more. If you haven't yet, be sure to follow Hunger for Wholeness on social media and learn more about our mission at christogenesis.org. I'm Robert Nicastro. Thanks for listening.

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