Confusing Metaphor with Reality
Photo by Anthony Tran on Unsplash
"Dear God, When your tooth falls out, does the tooth fairy come and leave you a present?"
This is an actual “Letter to God” that was written by a child. We laugh— how cute, how childish!
But we should be laughing at ourselves as well, because most of us have only a slightly more sophisticated and theologically sound notion of G!D than this child.
The difficulty with providing any kind of imagery for G!D is that people end up confusing metaphor with the reality.
This week’s Parshat Yitro contains the 10 Statements (not commandments, as it’s been erroneously rendered in English) within which we find “Thou shalt not make graven images….”
Why is it such a horror— one of the top 10! —to make a graven image of the Divine?
After all, notice how many different (and frankly contradictory) descriptions the Bible provides for the Holy One: a rock, an outstretched arm, a cloud, a pillar of fire, a friend, a lover, and so on.
Clearly we can describe the Divine in many different ways… verbally.
And thank goodness! Because I believe it’s designed to PUSH us out of our human habit of defining, labelling, naming and then boxing things into neat and clear packages.
With “The Reality Beyond All Names,” we must maintain a feeling of closeness and intimacy, but a thinking that is more mysterious and humble.
We can know/apprehend/”touch” aspects of G!D, but (as a famous medieval Jewish philosopher put it) we cannot totally know G!D or we’d be G!D.
One of the most impactful articles I have ever read is Beyond the Personal God by Daniel C. Matt, translator of The Zohar and Professor of Jewish Mysticism at the Center for Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. The article is taken from his book God and the Big Bang, which I highly recommend.
In his article, he begins by stating: “God is a name we give to the oneness of it all. God is the oneness of the cosmos, the interconnectedness of all there is.
But “God” is a name that we attach to this oneness.”
And then he continues to assert: “Our act of naming, so bold and powerful, betrays our limitations. By naming things, we control them— or we try to...
We need names to navigate through life, but those very names obscure the flowing continuum. Behind each handy name is a teeming reality that resists our neat definitions.”
And so Professor Matt asks the profound question: “How to name the unnameable?
Kabbalah offers a number of possibilities... Eyn Sof, the boundless… the Infinite… It conveys the idea that God is no thing. Rather, as ayin [nothingness], God animates all things and cannot be contained by them…”
The idea that we might call God “nothingness” is shocking!
Yet, Prof. Matt insists, it accords with the prohibition against idolatry.
He notes: “These days, it is rare to find people bowing down to graven images, but we constantly constrict God within mental images, thinking than He or She has a particular form…
In the words of a twelfth-century kabbalist from Barcelona [Judah ben Barzilai, Perush Sefer Yetzirah], whoever thinks that God has an image is fashioning idols and bowing down to them. Idolatry is as much a mental as a physical act.”
This is why mindfulness has also been so helpful to me personally.
Mindfulness challenges us to let go of the way we usually encounter our world – with judgments, categories, opinions, language, fixed ways of thinking.
Mindfulness challenges us to simply “be” with whatever it is that’s happening. Again Prof. Matt urges us “to let go of words, to attune ourselves to qol demamah daqah, ‘the sound of sheer silence’ (I Kings 19:12).
And yet.. we must speak about God, and of course we do in our Torah, in our siddur (prayer book) and in Kabbalah itself with all the sefirot.
Tune in next week for a continuation of this idea and Professor Matt’s thoughts on why humans have such a need for a personal God.
In the meantime, practice being part of Ein Sof and feel how that feels being part of The Infinite…
Shabbat Shalom
