Can a Jew be an existentialist?
Ask the rabbi.
THE KOHEN’S LOVE
Rabbi Raymond Apple
Q. Why does the kohen praise God who “commanded us to bless His people Israel *in love*”?
A. One possibility: God lovingly commanded the kohanim to pronounce the blessing. He must love the kohanim very greatly to entrust them with this responsibility.
A more probable interpretation: the kohanim must love the people. Kohanim are as likely to have quarrels with others as the rest of us are. But when they bless the congregation they have to rise above any personal issues and love their fellow Jews both collectively and individually.
The congregation must reciprocate and love the kohanim collectively and individually: as the kohen must rise above personal issues, so must the congregation.
A further question: when the kohanim bless the people, who blesses the kohanim?
The answer is implied in the words of the Biblical verse, “They shall place My name upon the Children of Israel, and I shall bless them” (Num. 6:27), i.e., “When they bless the people, God Himself blesses them”.
EXISTENTIALISM
Q. Can a Jew be an existentialist?
A. In order to answer your question I looked up the word in one of the dictionaries in my study. It told me, “Existentialism: a modern philosophical movement stressing the importance of personal experience and responsibility and the demands that they make on the individual, who is seen as a free agent in a deterministic and seemingly meaningless universe”.
There are Jewish existentialists like Buber, Rosenzweig and Herberg, but there is no one existentialism and some versions may not accord with Jewish teaching.
One brand of existentialism has a strongly christological approach; think of the names Kierkegaard chooses for his books, names like “Fear and Trembling”, “The Absurd”, “The Crisis”, based on mistrust of human reason and nature.
The idea that out of despair man comes to God has its reflections in some Jewish sources, but whilst Judaism is fascinated by the nature of human experience it does not as a whole go along with a doctrine that man is lost in a cold, unfeeling world.
Contrast Kierkegaard’s books with those of Abraham Joshua Heschel: “God in Search of Man”, “Man’s Quest for God”, “Man is not Alone”, etc.
As a Jewish philosopher Heschel looks at God and man yearning for one another but finds pathways to God in more “normal” aspects of the human condition such as the feeling of amazed, wondering awe and the mind’s capacity to be stretched.
Rabbi Raymond Apple served for 32 years as the chief minister of the Great Synagogue, Sydney, Australia’s oldest and most prestigious congregation. He is now retired and lives in Jerusalem where he answers interesting questions.
