Imagine God not as a benign force infusing the universe with love and sustaining it with mercy, and not as a stern judge smiting sinners from on high with his cosmic zap-gun, but as a grandfatherly figure, kind but, truth be told, somewhat out of it, sitting in a corner, tolerant of the various paths his children have chosen, content when surrounded by his grandchildren, desiring only to be recognized and see his offspring stay connected. It would take an outrageous sin for him to get up out of his chair and say something that might cause even slight discomfort.
According to Gideon Katz, lecturer at Israel's Ben-Gurion University and author of The Pale God: Israeli Secularism and Spinoza's Philosophy of Culture (a slightly edited version of a Hebrew text originally published in 2011), this is the diminished vision of God that implicitly animates the ethos of most Israeli Jews—who, studies have shown, are loosely observant of Jewish law and easy-going, part-time believers in a grandfatherly God. If they have to be classified, they should be called neither religious nor secular but mesorati, or traditionalist, Jews.
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