Huston Smith on Monotheism


Huston Smith writes in The World's Religions on the meaning of God in Judaism:

      Where the Jews differed from their neighbors was not in envisioning the Other as personal but in focusing its personalism in a single, supreme, nature-transcending will . . . the basic contribution of Judaism to the religious thought of the Middle East was monotheism . . . [the other gods] are not Yahweh's rivals; they are God's subordinates. (273-4)

 How is this conception superior to that of the other Mediterranean peoples of the day, for whom "each major power of nature was a distinct deity" (273)?

 Smith answers:

      The significance of this achievement in religious thought lies ultimately in the focus it introduces into life. If God is that to which one gives oneself unreservedly, to have more than one God is to live a life of divided loyalties. If life is to be whole; if one is not to spend one's days darting from one cosmic bureaucrat to another to discover who's in charge that day; if, in short, there is a consistent way in which life is to be lived if it is to move toward fulfillment, a way that can be searched out and approximated, there must be a singleness to the Other that supports this way. That there is, has been the foundation of Jewish belief. "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One" (Deuteronomy 6:4). (274-5)

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