Nuts & Bolts: God

Etz Chayiim

The phrase "Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh" 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, says that the best way to connect with God is to try and get as far away from human descriptors, human associations, as possible. Even as seemingly uncontroversial a description as “God is wise,” Maimonides suggests, has us conjure up a wise human being — only more so — and that does a disservice to understanding God, Maimonides says — misleads us, because God is on such a different plane, so beyond the human descriptor of “wise,” that to use that descriptor simply leads us astray.

We can say what God is not… God is not narrow-minded; God is not petty; God is not obtuse — God is beyond these attributes — and we can keep going like this until we essentially “know” God through process of elimination. But saying what God is confuses us by boxing God into human boxes. This is an alternative Jewish path to take when seeking to encounter God, to know God.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

The Bible speaks not only of humanity's search for God but also of God’s search for humanity. “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.” This is the mysterious paradox of Biblical faith: God is pursuing us. It is as if God were unwilling to be alone, and God had chosen us to serve God. Our seeking God is not only our but also God's concern, and must not be considered an exclusively human affair. God's 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 us.

Faith in God is a response to God’s question... When Adam and Eve hid from God's presence, the Lord called: Where are you? (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 are you? Faith comes out of awe, out of an awareness that we are exposed to God's 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 our answer.

Adapted from a midrash attributed to Rabbi Isaac Luria, a leading 16th-century Jewish teacher and mystic in Safed, as presented by Howard Schwartz in his book Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism (2004).

At the beginning of time, before time, the divine presence filled the universe. There was nothing else. God, Adonai, the Ein, Sof, that which has no end, inhabited all of existence and beyond. There was just... the infinite. All was perfect.

And yet there was no differentiation, no distinction, just existence. To make room for creation, what was there to do? God had no choice but to withdraw. To make room for creation God first drew in God’s breath, inhaled, contracting God’s self. From that contraction, from that withdrawal, an empty mass was produced, for how could there be anything else without the presence of the Divine?

So in order to effect creation, in order to create the universe, God said, Vayehi or, “Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3).

But, soas not to overwhelm the space in which God was creating, God encased this light into vessels, casks. God sent forth these vessels towards the empty mass, like a fleet of ships, each carrying its cargo of light.

And when these vessels arrived at their destination, the space of creation... they shattered. And creation was effected through the resulting combination of ingredients, shard of vessel, spark of light, shard of vessel, spark of light. Sparks of Light were scattered throughout the newly created universe, like sand, like seeds, like stars, covered by shards of vessels.

This is the universe we now know today—eons later, sparks of light hidden in broken

shards.

As the teaching goes, this is why humanity was created. To gather the sparks no matter where they are hidden. No matter how dark a place, no matter how heavy a condition.

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.

Reb Simcha Paull Raphael

At no point is it really appropriate to speak simply of the Jewish view of the afterlife. Just as Judaism and Jewish culture developed and changed repeatedly through contact with other world civilizations, similarly Jewish afterlife teachings evolved rapidly during the course of four millennia. In almost every era of history we uncover many parallel and sometimes even conflicting ideas on life after death existing side by side.

Rabbinic conceptions of the afterlife became the foundation on which all later Jewish postmortem beliefs were based. [About them we can say:]

1. Rabbinic afterlife teachings were never organized and systematized into a consistent whole. As a result, there are many divergent, contradictory, and often ambiguous notions of the afterlife. Both individual and collective postmortem conceptions are often intertwined and coexist in rabbinic literature.
2. Olam Ha-Ba—the “World to Come”—is the most frequently used term in rabbinic writings on the afterlife. However, it is often unclear whether this refers to a postmortem realm or to a messianic era at the end-of-days. In the early and late rabbinic period, there are traditions in which Olam Ha-Ba is seen as a postmortem realm, but this was never a predominant point of view in rabbinic literature.
3. Rabbinic literature contains ample material on the fate of the individual after death, including discussions about various phenomena of the death experience, encounters with the Angel of Death and other postmortem angelic beings, and tales of ongoing contact between the dead and the living. From both philosophical teachings and folk-level anecdotes, it is clear that the Rabbis believed that after bodily death there continued to be conscious awareness for the individual soul.
4. In rabbinic literature, Gehenna is the realm of postmortem punishment. Both the Talmud and Midrash describe with increasingly lurid detail the nature and topography of this realm. Although there are strands of teachings about eternal punishment, Gehenna is generally understood to be a temporary purgative abode where the soul abides for only twelve months. Inherent in the rabbinic conception of Gehenna is the notion of an individual soul that undergoes a process of postmortem purgation and purification.
5. Rabbinic texts present numerous descriptions of Gan Eden, the postmortem realm of paradise for the righteous. In later midrashim, descriptions of Gan Eden become increasingly elaborate and mythic in nature.
6. Beyond Gan Eden is the realm called tzror ha-hayyim or otzar, a divine storehouse for all souls.
7. Resurrection of the dead was a fundamental eschatological belief in rabbinic Judaism, taking a central place in rabbinic theology.
8. During the rabbinic period, a multistage conception of the afterlife emerges that combines individual and collective postmortem teachings. Gradually, it came to be believed that the individual would first experience the purgations of Gehenna for twelve months, followed by a time of divine bliss in Gan Eden. Then, at the end-of-days there would be a collective resurrection of both body and soul of the dead.