November 12, 2025 GROW: Why Jews Don’t Talk About God and Why They Should: God and Jewish Philosophy

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GROW is back for the new academic year! For our first program in Hebrew College Adult Learning’s free, monthly GROW series, we dive into why Jews don’t like to talk about God with instructor Steven Kepnes, Ph.D.

We hope you will spend an hour with us for this and future programs in our series, to gather, reflect, observe, and wrestle with topics that will deepen your Jewish learning.

Why Jews Don’t Talk About God and Why They Should: God and Jewish Philosophy

Date: Wednesday, November 12, 2025 | 12-1 PM EST/9-10 AM PST | Zoom
Program: Why Jews Don’t Talk About God and Why They Should: God and Jewish Philosophy
Instructor: Steven Kepnes, Ph.D
Cost: FREE

Jews do not like to talk about God. We speak openly about money, sex, and politics, but talking about God — it’s almost like a taboo, we just don’t do it. Now there are some good reasons for this but there are also some bad ones. This is where a dose of Jewish philosophy can really help us understand why it’s vitally important for Jews to talk about God more.

First, the why not. Jews don’t talk about God because God is unseen, transcendent, beyond human speech and thought. Talking about God too glibly is prohibited. “Thou Shalt not Take the Name of God in Vain!” Second, Jews don’t talk about God because Christians do. And Jews, first and foremost, are not Christians! Thirdly, there is the Holocaust. It proved that God either doesn’t exist or doesn’t care. So why talk about God? God doesn’t matter.

But then when you think about it, what is a Jew without God? What is the Torah, Jewish Prayer, Shabbat and the Mitzvot if they are not animated, guided, and commanded by God? We speak of Jewish values like family, human life, social justice, tzedakah, and justice more generally. And we want to believe that these values are true, real, eternal, and worth fighting for. But without God to support and sustain them these values are mere slogans, political platforms, and flimsy sayings waving in the winds of public opinion.

In other words, speaking of the values of Judaism turns out to be a coded way of speaking about God! Speaking about God, then, is a way to strengthen human value, bind Jews together in common purpose, give Jews hope, and infuse our fight for justice with divine spirit and sustaining energy. This is one of the things we can learn from studying Jewish Philosophy (and there are many more!).

Instructor

Steven Kepnes, PhD is a Jewish philosopher and theologian who taught at Colgate University, Hamilton, NY for over 30 years. He is author of 10 books including The Text as Thou: Martin Buber’s Narrative Theology, The Cambridge Companion to Jewish Theology and the forthcoming Reviving Jewish Theology. He also taught at Jewish Theological Seminary in Jerusalem, the Gregorian in Rome and the Shalom Hartman Institute. He is retired and lives now on Cape Cod.