God

Etz Chayiim

The phrase defies simple translation. The psychologist Erich Fromm takes it to mean: I, God, am in the process of becoming; neither I nor human understanding of Me is yet complete. And you human beings, fashioned in the image of God, are also in the process of becoming.

It may be connected to the phrase in verse 12, "I will be with you" (ki ehyeh immakh). In that case, God's name, God's essence would imply "I am not a far-off God, a remote uncaring philosophical conclusion. I am God who will be with you. You cannot understand My nature, but you will know Me by My presence, and you will walk with Me when you follow My commands."

It is significant that this name of God is not a noun but a verb. The essence of Jewish theology is not the nature of God ("what God is") but the actions of God (the difference that God makes in our lives). What then does God's name mean? It may mean any or more of the following: God exists. God is more than we can comprehend. God, or our understanding of God, is constantly growing. God is present in our lives. God is with us in our efforts to do what is right but difficult.

Maimonides: Life and Thought

Moshe Halbertal

To attribute adjectives to the divinity... impairs not only the pure concept of unity but also the sublimity of God and his absolute otherness from the world. The adjective serves, in effect, as a linguistic bridge between God and the world, incorporating God and the world within a shared category. For example, we understand the existence of God because we analogize it to the existence of some other individual within the universe, and we understand God’s goodness because we identify it with the goodness of people. But if God differs in some absolute sense from the world, adjectives cannot be predicated to Him. His existence differs from that of any other being because it is necessary, not merely possible; God’s precedence in time differs from anything’s precedence in time to anything else, because God is not situated on the axis of time at all.

The inclusive nature of the attribute/adjective transforms religious language into a medium that ignores God’s transcendence from the world. Maimonides therefore takes the view that one can only negate the association of certain attributes with God; one can say, for example, that He is not absent or that He is not multiple, but no positive attributes can be associated with Him... [T]he category of absence or presence, as we know it, does not apply to God; the same is true of unity and multiplicity. Because there is no way to apply positive attributes to God, all that we know about his essence pertains to what He is not. A person who knows God advances through the sequence of negations and comes to know more and more that he does not know[.]

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Most theories of religion start out with defining the religious situation as man’s search for God and maintain the axiom that God is silent, hidden and unconcerned with man’s search for Him. Now, in adopting that axiom, the answer is given before the question is asked. To Biblical thinking, the definition is incomplete and the axiom false.

The Bible speaks not only of man’s search for God but also of God’s search for man. “Thou dost hunt me like a lion,” exclaimed Job (10:16). “From the very first Thou didst single out man and consider him worthy to stand in Thy presence.”1 This is the mysterious paradox of Biblical faith: God is pursuing man.2 It is as if God were unwilling to be alone, and He had chosen man to serve Him. Our seeking Him is not only man’s but also His concern, and must not be considered an exclusively human affair. His will is involved in our yearnings. All of human history as described in the Bible may be summarized in one phrase: God is in search of man. Faith in God is a response to God’s question...

When Adam and Eve hid from His presence, the Lord called: Where art thou (Genesis 3:9). It is a call that goes out again and again. It is a still small echo of a still small voice, not uttered in words, not conveyed in categories of the mind, but ineffable and mysterious, as ineffable and mysterious as the glory that fills the whole world. It is wrapped in silence; concealed and subdued, yet it is as if all things were the frozen echo of the question: Where art thou? Faith comes out of awe, out of an awareness that we are exposed to His presence, out of anxiety to answer the challenge of God, out of an awareness of our being called upon. Religion consists of God’s question and man’s answer.

Arthur Green

[Hasidic Judaism suggests] that God has need for human help in the ongoing redemption of the universe, which is also the redemption/fulfillment of the divine Self. The sacrifice of omnipotence in such a concept, long troubling to Kabbalah's Jewish critics, should pose little difficulty to moderns who, especially in the face of the Holocaust, see little evidence of omnipotence as a divine attribute. On the contrary, a sense of human partnership with God in the redemption that both require should be an exciting model for contemporary theology. In this partnership, as we would read it today, humans are needed to take a fully active role, for it is only they who can act on the material plane. God is the source of inspiration and the ever-renewing center of strength for this ongoing struggle. In fact the separation between what is human action and what is the handiwork of God through human agency seems to be an artificial one. Even though only humanity is active in the uplifting of sparks, we are not alone in our labors.