Walter Ziffer

By JIM GENARO

­At age 81, Walter Ziffer has had quite a bit of time to contemplate the nature of God.

And while the Jewish-studies scholar and Holocaust survivor says that true comprehension of divinity remains elusive to him, he has begun to understand God to be the all-present, active process in nature that drives evolution.

Ziffer, an adjunct professor of philosophy and religion at Mars Hill College, discussed his views on the nature of God at UNC Asheville’s Reuter Center last Thursday, in a talk titled “In Search of God: From History to Metaphor.”

The lecture was part of the Phyllis Freed Sollod Annual Memorial Lecture series, presented by the Center for Jewish Studies.

The presentation also marked the center’s 25th anniversary. About 300 people attended the standing-room-only event.

Ziffer said that in his talk, he hoped to explain “where I stand in my ongoing hunt for God. I have not caught Her yet, but I think I’m on Her trail.”

He said he began his quest to understand the essence of God during the years he was a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp.

“I think it’s no exaggeration that for more than 60 years now, the Holocaust has been riding on my back ... and usually the issue of God’s absence in the Holocaust,” he told the audience.

His experiences of extreme human suffering led him to ponder questions of theodicy, which he defined as “the quandaries associated with the reconciliation of the goodness of God and the existence of evil in the world.”

In brief, Ziffer explained, theodicy addresses a fundamental problem of theology — if God cannot stop evil from happening, then He is not all-powerful; if He chooses not to, then He is cruel.

To get to the heart of this issue, Ziffer turned to the historical roots of the Judeo-Christian conception of God.

He said that for primitive peoples, the idea of God was rooted in the developing consciousness of self.

At some point, Ziffer said, people first began to perceive themselves as distinct individuals. Perhaps this allowed them to begin perceiving an “other,” or perhaps it worked the other way around, he suggested, with a burgeoning awareness of others creating a sense of subjective being that allows for the concept of a self.

Either way, as this individual awareness developed, early humans began extrapolating their own ways of living and being onto the world around them.

As every action a person took had an effect that was the result of a specific intention, it was “small jump” from seeing the “self as the creator of tools to ‘there must have been someone who made’” the sun, moon, earth and other natural objects, Ziffer said.

Furthermore, these objects must have a purpose, just as human actions followed a purpose.
By imagining God in his own image, humans were able to reduce an abstract concept to a level on which it could be named and comprehended, he explained.

“Anthropomorphism is a necessity to make the ultimate understood,” Ziffer added.

As time progressed and the Israelites began to record their myths into a “basic national narrative,” their concept of God became an amalgamation of numerous earlier stories, including ones from neighboring countries.

Tales such as the creation of Adam and Eve, the great flood, and the falling of the Tower of Babel originated in other earlier cultures, but were subsequently included in the Israelites’ narrative and “adapted to Israel’s post-Exodus perspective of the world.

That perspective saw Yahweh, the god of the Israelites, as fundamentally superior to other gods, as evidenced by his victory over the Pharaoh of Egypt, who was considered to be a god as well, Ziffer said.

During the period after the exodus, when the twelve Judaic tribes were at last united, their myths and conceptions of God were blended together. As a result, the god whom the Israelites worshiped became a multi-faceted “composite picture of God,” with many different names, who often was personally involved in the lives and affairs of His people.

“This is the god most of us have learned about in Sunday school, whether in church or synagogue,” Ziffer told the audience.

He noted that in the earlier myths, Yahweh takes a very active role, often appearing in physical form to the prophets.

In later stories, however, God becomes increasingly distant and abstracted. King Solomon is the last person to whom God appears personally in the Old Testament, Ziffer noted. After that, prophets are visited either by angels or by the “word of God.”

“Certainly, the presence of God’s name is a more abstracted concept than the presence of God Himself,” Ziffer added.

The distancing of God from humans is a theme that continues in the Old Testament, as the temple in Jerusalem and the arc contained within it becomes the only direct connection between man and God, he noted. However, even that connection was severed in 586 B.C. when the Babylonians destroyed the temple.

What ensues is an ongoing separation that is best personified in the cry of Jesus on the cross, “My God, my God, why have You abandoned me?” Ziffer said.

This process has continued into modern times. Ziffer told the audience that he considered Copernicus’ discovery that the earth revolves around the sun — not the other way around — as the event that “sounded the death knell” for the world view in which God is entirely focused on the affairs of humans.

Given the scientific, social, and political discoveries and developments that have taken place in modern times, Ziffer said, a greater and more subtle understanding of the nature of God is needed.

“It is, I think, a gigantic hubris on our part ... to suggest a god that somehow resembles us,” he told the audience. “That god is too small for me; this cannot be the true God.”

However, Ziffer said he came across a concept that he feels exemplifies his understanding of the divine: the “élan vital.”

The concept was defined by the French philosopher Henri Bergson in his 1907 book “Creative Evolution.” Élan vital, Ziffer explained, is “the impulse that continually thrusts in many directions — the impetus behind all development, the energy that drives the process of evolution.”

This concept of “thrusting” is key, he explained. It describes an active force behind all natural phenomena, from embryonic development to the unfolding of evolution over millions of years.

He acknowledged that this force “is a reality that we cannot describe in adequate terms.” But he commended the authors of the Old Testament for their insight in ascribing to God a name whose essence means “to be.” The Hebrew word for “be” is one of the four letters that comprise the name of God — the name form which “Yahweh” is derived.

“God is not a what,” Ziffer said. “What we call ‘God’ is a process; it is an awesome process.”

However, Ziffer said that while his conception of God has shifted from that of the personal creator he learned about as a child to a more abstracted principle, he nonetheless maintains his traditional religious practices.

“That’s the Judaic paradox,”  Ziffer told the audience. “We maintain traditions even when we know there’s something that isn’t quite right.”

He explained this paradox with a quote from the Talmud, saying, “Would that they forsake me, but keep my Torah.”

He then addressed a few questions from the audience.

A woman asked if “everything happens for a reason.”

Ziffer replied that, “everything happens for a reason in terms of cause and effect.” But he added that he does not believe there is a final reason for everything.

A man asked how a person can increase his consciousness of God.

Ziffer answered that  to do so, “just keep your eyes and ears open. Be aware of the ways nature functions.”

He suggested looking at stars, reading books, and interacting with other people as activities that can provide a greater understanding of the divine.

“Is there a difference between consciousness and awareness?” a man asked.

Ziffer responded that to answer, he would have to define what the terms meant.

Awareness, he said, means cognition — “I know what’s going on.”

However, consciousness, he added, implies an ethical understanding.

“I think consciousness is something much deeper, that goes beyond pure mechanical cognition."