The March/April 2010 volume of Tikkun had a roundtable on God in the twenty-first century occasioned by the publication of Art Green’s new book Radical Judaism. I was asked (along with fifteen other thinkers) to contribute to this roundtable. We each had 750 words. My contribution is here:

The God of a Talmudist
by Aryeh Cohen
[…] The practice of Talmud — the documentation and interrogation, reading and constructing of legal difference and distinction — is not mythic storytelling, but it is grounded in this mythos. This practice, which splits hairs and has caused the hair-pulling of many mystics, is exactly what Akiva taught. The practice is grounded not only in the mythic encounter of Moses with God and Akiva but in Creation itself. Creation is separation and distinction — light from darkness, upper waters from lower waters, land from sea. This is the practice of law — distinguishing categories, creating new categories, creating the world of pure and impure, forbidden and permitted, just and unjust. It is in the practice of the shakla ve-tarya (the give and take of legal and intellectual discourse) that the Kingdom of Heaven, the province of the just and The Just, is created. The God of a talmudist, or at least this talmudist, is the God that generates and is claimed by law, the God that is implicated in and is therefore open to be judged by the categories of law writ large.
Read the whole piece here.