                           20020426.00

     This is the fourth of the essays that I write about
Leviticus 26, and perhaps also the last one, although I cannot be
certain. The mind has a rhythm of its own which one cannot always
anticipate.  In any event, your being too busy even to read what
I write, let alone to think about it, relieves me of the
constraint of tailoring my thoughts to your understanding.

     It is worth noting that in the story of creation at the
beginning of Genesis, God is undefined: nothing is known about
God, but that he (or it) created the world. Other than that, the
initial account of God is as pneuma (spirit) which hovers over
the waters.  Like a true artist, God is defined by that which he
creates.  He assumes the appearance of man only when he creates
man in his own image.  Only upon the creation of man does God's
human-like nature become apparent.

     If one accepts the radical difference between God as person
at the creation and God as spirit in the burning bush; if one
understands that the God of the burning bush liberated the
Israelites not only from political slavery but also from the
religious slavery which the idol worship of the Pharaoh entailed,
then it is not too far-fetched to suggest that the God of the
burning bush, as the God who was essentially beyond public
worship, also liberated the Israelites from their own public God,
namely from him who drove Adam and Eve from Eden, who drowned the
earth in the Flood, who seduced Abraham to the Moriah summit, who
master-minded the kidnapping and the false imprisonment of
Joseph.

     To replace the God of Eden with the God of the burning bush,
to interpret the flight from Egypt as symbolic of the escape from
a religious personality cult, is consistent with the explanation
that I gave previously of a dialectical God, i.e. of a God who
changes his mind, who takes back what he has given, and who gives
again what he previously took back.  In this instance, God takes
away the image of himself as a person, and replaces this image
with the experience of himself as spirit, or more precisely, with
the experience of God as subject.  (The term spirit (pneuma) is
the awkward attempt to represent as object that which is
essentially unrepresentable, which can be referred to only
indirectly, if at all.)

     It requires only a little insight and no apology to discern
that the visible God of Eden proved to be indispensable to the
popular imagination.  In the complex directives of the
commandments, including those of Leviticus, the God of Eden was
restored with a vengeance, literally and figuratively; and
slavery to the Egyptians was replaced with slavery to the
priests.  The subsequent history of the religion is best
understood as a futile, sometimes wistful, sometimes pathetic
longing for spiritual freedom, for freedom from an objective
divine personage of any sort.

     The appeal to the loyalty of the individual as a member of
"God's chosen people" is an appeal to patriotism, an appeal which
creates the same dilemma for conscience in the religious as in
the secular context.

     The appeal to the loyalty of the individual as a member of
"God's chosen people" is an appeal to patriotism, an appeal which
no less in this context than in others, is the last refuge of a
scoundrel.

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