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Day 5
Rational Redemption
As much as I am happy to be part of the Jewish people preparing for the holiday of Passover, I confess that I am bored by the atmosphere and the questions. I am bored by the kinds of conversations I hear around me, by a level of discourse that doesn’t seem to get beyond an excessive concern with the minutiae of halakhic ritual.
Coupled with the concerns about food, Passover suggests a supernatural model of redemption, which posits that God will break into history and save us just as God did during the Exodus from Egypt. Rather than give weight to our own personal will, responsibility and moral agency, this theological worldview says that the best we can hope for is that God will look down and have mercy on us. It is a way of understanding the holiday that positions us as passive and patient, waiting for an interventionist God to rescue us from our galut realities.
Redemption is not otherworldly salvation at the end of time. It’s not the World to Come or Resurrection of the Dead. Redemption is not something that’s going to happen at the end of days when we’ll all be instructed to pack our bags and welcome the messiah. Redemption is an individual’s growth into a complete human being, a person who fulfills all of his or her aptitudes. Redemption is not an abstract philosophical or theological construct, but a fine-tuning of the human soul that helps us to love more and to be more sensitive. It creates a meaningful pattern of self-fulfillment.
Maimonides maintains that it is precisely because God created human beings with rationality that once we begin to seek righteousness and perform good deeds, we have a natural hunger to continue. Those who, of their own initiative, “come to purify themselves,” are aided by God. God’s “aid,” in this sense, is built into the laws of nature – in this case, into the very essence of human nature. God has structured a universe in which human beings are driven by an innate capacity to act righteously. That is the meaning of divine grace. God is not seen in miraculous breakthroughs, but in the very structure of human reason and human nature.
--David Hartman. Rereading Passover: Redemption and the Rational Mind, hartman.org
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