

What Do You Mean When You Say "God"?

First _Experimental_ Smashwords Edition

Elul 5772/2012

Copyright 2012 Shaiya Rothberg

### Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1: Identifying "God"

Chapter 2: The All

Chapter 3: Foundations of the Torah

Chapter 4: Divinity

Chapter 5: Higher Humanity

Chapter 6: God as Person

Chapter 7: Shechinah

Notes

About the Author

### Preface

Why talk about God?

"God" is a word. Sometimes, it gets so loaded with meanings that we forget that the word "God" is not God. It's just a word that people use to say all sorts of things. Does God exist? Is God real? That depends on what you mean when you say "God", and on what your picture of the world is. If you define "God" in reference to things that you believe are real, then God is real. If you define "God" as something that does not exist in the universe as you picture it, then there is no God. If you're reading this book because you're interested in making sense of the word "God" for yourself, I think that this is very important to remember!

Since "God" is a word, it can and has been defined in a mind boggling number of ways. Debates about "whether God exists" are notoriously unproductive. I think that's because most of the time, people are using such different definitions of the word "God" that they don't understand each other. One person is sure that she's proven that "God" exists, just to find that her interlocutor doesn't understand how she's said anything about "God" at all. I suspect that often both sides largely _agree_ about everything; everything, that is, except what they mean when they say "God".

Given that there's so much confusion about what "God" means, why bother to use this word at all? Before I tell you why I use it, it needs to be clear that I claim no logical necessity to use the word "God". You might accept the truth of what I mean when I say God, and then say "but I prefer to call that 'any-name-just-not-God!'" You'll get no argument from me. What matters to me is what is signified by the word God, and what that means for human life. The vision laid out in this book is not about how we use this or that word. It's about transcendence and redemption; it's about realizing the potential of our species to become something greater than we are.

And while it will take me a few chapters to make it clear to you what I mean by "God", and how that works with the Bible and the prayer book, I'll begin here by pointing out the basic intuition that motivates me to talk about God. That intuition is that human beings have the potential to be higher kinds of creatures, and that there is something worthy of our worship and service. We all know glory and transcendence; we've experienced unspeakable beauty and overwhelming love. We've seen the heights that humanity is capable of; things like compassion, knowledge, solidarity, medicine, technology, music, literature and higher states of consciousness. But as a species we are in the grips of a barbaric world order in which millions starve or are murdered and billions live, somehow, without the conditions for dignified human life. Even those of us lucky enough to have been born into plenty and freedom often waste our energies, pursuing thoughts and tasks that we know are destructive to our higher selves.

I talk about God because I need words to express what that unspeakable beauty and overwhelming love mean to me. I need a language to reflect on how those things, and the other things that fill my life with meaning and purpose, fit into the universe and define my place in it. Words like God, divinity, sacred and holy refer to real things that I experience. I need the words in order to reflect on those experiences and figure out how to live more in their light. God language is a language for figuring out what is truly valuable and then transforming ourselves and the world to have more of it.

In this book, I'll tell you what I mean by "God". I hope I'll also teach you a methodology for refining what you mean by God so that God can more powerfully energize your religious life (or whatever you call it). And then together, in light of whatever religion you practice or form of atheism you believe in, we can try to imagine what humanity could become if she was liberated from her present state of exile and destruction.

#### About this book

This book is the product of an ongoing theology workshop at the Conservative Yeshiva in Jerusalem. Through discussion, guided imagination, creative writing and rancorous argument we've played and struggled with the ideas of this theology over the years. The book that has emerged is something between a book of theology and a program (with source texts) for a workshop on theology. I guess I sort of imagine the reader as a workshop all-in-one.

In the spirit of the workshop, the most important ideas are presented in a few different formats. First, you'll meet them in theoretical prose. The aim is to be clear. The style of the writing will be more like how you speak when you want to be understood, and less like the way philosophy is generally written. Then, you'll meet the ideas again, this time in the interpretation of sacred text. That is, I'll use the ideas of the theology to make sense of religious texts like the Zohar and the writings of the Rambam (who is also called Moses Maimonides). Finally, scattered throughout the book, there are exercises for experiential learning. Examples of this kind of thing are guided imagination, creative writing and thought experiments.

The texts for the experiential exercises, as well as quotes from primary texts, will come indented like the words you're reading now.

I hope that these three different formats of presentation (prose, interpretation and experience based learning) will make this book accessible to anyone who really wants to get into it.

Like the workshop, the book is a work-in-progress. This is a first _experimental_ edition. The chapters flow coherently, but I hope to add a few more chapters, filling out the picture, in the coming months. You will find many mistakes (please let me know when you do!). And there will be many more revisions. My plan is that the book you're reading now will be the first of three:

A Theology of ADAM

Book I: God and Prayer

What do you mean when you say "God"?

Constructing a language of God and prayer from the sources of Jewish tradition

Book II: Torah and Meaning

What does it mean to say that "the Torah is the Word of God"?

Constructing a language of revelation from the sources of Jewish tradition

Book III: Israel and Humanity

What does it mean to be Israel?

Jewish particularism, Human Rights and the telos of the human species

The book is structured as follows:

Chapter 1: Identifying "God". In this chapter, we'll explore the things that we mean by the word "God" so that in the following chapters we can ask if these things are real and true.

Chapter 2: God as the All. In this chapter, we'll hear from the faithful shepherd of the Zohar about God as ein sof (without limit) and ayn (nothing). This is the _first revelation_ : God as the source of all things.

Chapter 3: Foundations of the Torah. Here we'll learn from the Rambam what key ideas need to be true in order for Torah life to make sense. And then we'll see why they are in fact true in light of the first revelation (God as the All).

Chapter 4: Divinity (Elohut). God as the All is infinite and powerful. But the All includes evil and death. Why should we love God? I love God because I experience the numinous ultimate good. This is the _second revelation_ : God as the source of meaning and value.

Chapter 5: Higher Humanity. Humanity has the potential to embody the presence of God. But across the planet, she is wounded by mass poverty, violence and oppression. And all of us, individually, are often broken and lost. The praxis of divinity is the liberation of humanity, as individuals, as peoples and as a species, from her present state of exile (galut) and destruction (chorban).

Chapter 6: God as Person. The just and loving God of the Bible and prayer book is a true revelation of divinity and a true personal presence. In this chapter, we'll follow how God as Person arises from the experience of divinity.

Chapter 7: Shechinah. In this chapter, we'll begin to explore what higher humanity might look like, both as a species and in the particular form of the People, Torah and Land of Israel.

Notes: Here and there, I've taken liberties in translating and interpreting the texts. Generally, I've done this for simplicity. Also, while I want to accurately portray the historical meaning of the texts when I talk about what they mean in their own right, I also want to emphasize the parts that I'm using for the theology presented here. In the notes, you'll find details about the translations and interpretations.

#### Acknowledgments

Many people have participated in the workshop at the Conservative Yeshiva over the years, and I think that all of them left a mark on what is here. There are too many people to mention by name, but I am profoundly grateful to all of them. Two people have been particularly important. They are Dr. (and soon to be Rabbi) Ilana Goldhaber-Gordon and Rabbi Joel Levi. While they may not always agree with what is written in this book, their footprints are everywhere in it! And it has been a great pleasure to pursue this project together with them. Also, while he wasn't physically in the workshop, the thinking of Rabbi Dr. Shmuel (Richie) Lewis, our Rosh Yeshivah, has been foundational. We often began with the ideas in his weekly "sichot", and then went off in the direction of this theology from there.

###  Chapter 1: Identifying "God"

#### Introduction

I think that a big part of what people mean when they say "God" is "that which is greater than what I can know". Something simple that lies before us exposed cannot be "God". In this sense, the word "God" is like the word "mysterious": if I know everything about something, then that something is not "mysterious". That's part of what the word "mysterious" means. Similarly, when I say "God", I mean something which is beyond my grasp.

At the same time, if I didn't mean anything at all when I said "God", then this word would be meaningless. If I really don't mean anything, then there's no difference between "God" and gibberish words like "Gog" or "Dod". This is also true of the word "mysterious". I call something mysterious because _I see something_ that somehow says to me "there's interesting and hidden stuff here that you don't see!" If I didn't _see anything_ _that_ _looked_ mysterious, I'd have no cause to use this word.

While we cannot contain God in a definition, we can reflect on what we mean when we use this word. Identifying what we mean when we say "God" is the first step of this theology. In this chapter, I won't argue that the things that I mean when I say God are real or true. The purpose of this chapter is just to figure out what they are. Then, in the following chapters, we can ask whether they are real and true. Let's begin with some exercises. The first exercise is the more important. But the second is more fun.

Exercise: Identifying "God"

This exercise should take about 15 minutes. The goal of the exercise is to bring to your mind some meanings of the word "God". The meanings that we're looking for are the ones that are most important to you. You don't have to believe in God to do this exercise. We're just learning about the meanings of the word.

For many of the exercises in this book, you'll do some writing. It would be great if you did all the writing in the same place (like a notebook or computer file). That way, you'll be able to review your thinking. Write down the chapter, and the name of the exercise, each time you make an entry so that you'll know what goes with what.

Step 1: Choosing a context in which "God" is important.

Try to think of a context in which you've felt that "God" had an important role. Examples of such a "context" are a _time_ that you remember in which God was important, or a quality of your life that involves "God", or a value that you believe in. For some people, there are many such contexts. If you're one of these people, choose one that seems particularly important.

For other people, finding such a context is difficult. These people rarely invoke "God" and aren't sure what other people are talking about when they talk about God. If you're one of these people, try to think of a time when "God" seemed important at least at the time, even if afterwards you're not sure what that means.

Or, if that doesn't work, think of a scene in a book or in a movie that moved you, and in which something to do with God or gods or divine powers was important. That doesn't mean that you buy into any of those ideas. It's just a story. But it's a story in which something to do with "God" was significant to you.

Step 2: Collecting raw data.

OK, once you've got something, give it a title, and write it on the top of a clean page. Then, take a minute, and recall the scene in which God was important. Revisit it in your mind. If it's a quality of life, think about places you know in which that quality is revealed. If it's a scene from a movie, see if you can find that scene online.

Now, take five minutes or longer, and write down everything that comes to your mind when you think about that scene (or time or quality or value). Don't worry if it's embarrassing or doesn't make any sense. This is flow of consciousness and the only person who will read it is you.

Step 3: Analyzing your data.

Read over what you've written. My bet is that some of the most important meanings of the word "God" in your personal vocabulary are written on that page somewhere. Let's try to find them. Ask yourself questions, like this one: "What is here in what I've written that caused me (or the writer of the book) to use the word "God"? Make a list of all the things you find. Which ones are most important?

Take another five minutes and formulate a few sentences expressing what you've found: what are some of the meanings of the word "God" that came up?

This is the end of the exercise. If it worked, you've clarified to yourself some of what you mean when you say "God".

I hope that as you read this book, you'll have new insights about why you're interested in God. It would be useful to jot those insights down here, next to the entry where you wrote up this exercise. Over time, that will make it clearer to you why you care about "God". And I think that being clear on that, on why you care about God in the first place, helps clear up a lot of thorny theological questions.

Exercise: God and the World Wide Web

This exercise can take a few minutes or the rest of the day if you add your own material. (Look around the web and make a playlist of what strikes you most powerfully.) The goal of the exercise is to encounter different representations of godlike qualities.

God is a popular subject. God and godlike characters and forces appear in many books, songs and movies. Below you'll find some of my favorites. Watch or listen to them, and then ask yourself how each piece interprets the idea of God. And then ask yourself what you think about that interpretation. Jot down your answers in a few sentences beneath what you wrote in the previous exercise (above).

Next to the titles are links. If they don't work, or if you're reading a print copy, try searching for them on YouTube.

\- God at the burning bush in Spielberg's film, The Prince of Egypt. Try here.

\- Alanis Morisette as God at the end of the film Dogma. Try here. (Warning: gory pictures.)

\- Alanis Morisette's song "Still" from the soundtrack of Dogma. Try here and here for the song and  here for the lyrics.

\- Cat Stevens (Yusuf Islam): "Changes IV" from the album Teaser and the Firecat. Try here for the song and here for the lyrics.

\- Galadriel in The Fellowship of the Ring. Try here.

\- "Hymn to Her" by The Pretenders. Try here. (Warning: sexy pictures.)

\- "My Sweet Lord" by George Harrison from The Concert for Bangladesh. Try here (lyrics appear below video).

\- "What if God was one of us?" by Joan Osborne. Try here for the song and  here for the lyrics.

-"Redemption Song" by Bob Marley from the album Uprising. Try here (lyrics appear below video). Check out Matisiyahu's version here (which was made as part of a campaign against contemporary slavery).

#### The God of Middle Earth

At this stage, I'll tell you some of the meanings of the word "God" that are particularly important to me. In a sense, what you'll read now are my answers to the questions that I addressed to you above. I'll focus on just one example: Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien. Now, you might think it's funny that a Jewish theology should learn about God from a fantasy novel written by a devout Catholic! Furthermore, the character of Galadriel isn't even a "god" in the story. So why am I choosing this example?

The first reason, really, is that I love Galadriel and Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien, and other fantasy writers like C.S. Lewis of Narnia, are central to my religious identity. But I also have a more didactic reason: I want to free up your imagination vis-à-vis God. Talk about God and the Bible is often somber and formal. I want us to think about God in a lighter and less constrained way. And I don't want you to assume that I believe all sorts of things that you expect that somebody who uses biblical language believes. I probably do believe in some version of those things, but if we don't start with a clean slate, I'll never be able to communicate to you what version that is. Now, nobody thinks that The Lord of the Rings is history or orthodox religious doctrine, and so it comes free of those kinds of sticky strings.

I'll begin with a caveat: there is today a whole discipline of Tolkien studies about which I know next to nothing. If you know these stories well, and have read up on Tolkien's mythology of creation and Middle Earth on the web, you know as much as I do. I only got half way through the Silmarillion (which includes - luckily, at the beginning! - Tolkien's account of creation). If my reading of the story sounds more like the Zohar than Tolkien intended, let's say that my version is a Zoharic spin off. In any case, here it goes:

In the beginning, there was only the One. There was no time and no space. Then, thoughts of creation arose in the One. And from the One's thoughts were born the Holy Ones. These were both distinct from the One who created them, and rooted in it. They were the first revelation of the Many that unfolded from the One. Perhaps these were like the four fundamental forces (gravity, electromagnetism etc.) that emerged from the point of singularity according to the theory of the Big Bang. Once formed, the Holy Ones began to write music following the direction of the One. And that music became a blueprint for the world. And then the One _played_ the music that the Holy Ones had written, and the world came into being. (Compare, "God spoke, and it [the world] came to be" (Psalms 33:9).

But creation was not without discord. One of the Holy Ones succumbed to shame and pride, sought to make himself great, and began to destroy. After time, he was trapped in the abyss, but he had already introduced decay and evil into the music of creation and into the world created through that music. His servant, Sauron, was to become the infamous Dark Lord of Mordor. Sauron was ultimately defeated by the forces of good in Middle Earth.

One of the most powerful of those forces was the Elf Queen Galadriel. Galadriel is not a god in Tolkien's story. But she was mighty enough to rival Sauron the Dark Lord himself, and he's almost godlike, in an evil way. And in one section (that we'll see below), Galadriel undergoes a sort of transfiguration that reveals her as godlike indeed. In general, I think that Tolkien cast Galadriel as so magnificent, and so superior to the other characters in the story, as to render her a demigod. What I want to do now is to highlight which qualities of Galadriel's character imply this lofty status. Since these are what I take to be godlike qualities, they'll help clarify what I mean when I say "God".

The Lord of the Rings tells the story of an epic battle between good and evil for control of the world. The forces of good and evil take on different forms. The Holy Ones, all good except for one, still exist and they seek to guide all life; the good for the good and the evil for evil. Other forms that the forces of the world take on are creatures, like men and elves, and there are also "rings of power". The semi-divine nature of Galadriel, for instance, reflects a combination of the wisdom and power she has gained during the thousands of years that she has lived, and the ring of power of which she is the keeper.

Now, all of these forces and forms are faces of the One: everything is rooted in the One and all things reflect its nature. But the One is not neutral in the battle between good and evil. Even as evil reflects the nature of what is, evil is a sickness and must be overcome. Galadriel represents the purpose of creation. The Dark Lord is its failure.

The story as a whole revolves around one of the rings of power: the most powerful of all. If the Dark Lord gets his hands on the One Ring, he and it will together be more powerful than Galadriel, and evil will conquer the world. Without the ring, he cannot defeat her. Frodo, the bearer of the most powerful One Ring, brings it to Galadriel. But, alas, she cannot wield it: the One Ring is evil and if she were to take it, she would destroy the Dark Lord, but she would become a Dark Queen in his place. The One Ring must be destroyed. Frodo must take it to Mordor, the realm of evil where the ring was made, in order to cast it into the fire that created it. Then the Dark Lord will be destroyed.

Frodo's chances for destroying the ring are desperate at best. He has a group of companions, "the Fellowship of the Ring", but evil will soon divide and destroy their companionship. Just before that happens, the companions arrive at Lothlórien, the Land of the Lady Galadriel. While the companions are in a bad state, they start to feel her healing presence as soon as they enter her land:

The Fellowship of the Ring, Book II, Chapters 6-7.

As soon as he [Frodo] set foot upon the far bank of Silverlode a strange feeling had come upon him, and it deepened as he walked on into the Naith: it seemed to him that he had stepped over a bridge of time into a corner of the Elder Days, and was now walking in a world that was no more. In Rivendell there was memory of ancient things; in Lórien [where Galadriel lives] the ancient things still lived on in the waking world. Evil had been seen and heard there, sorrow had been known; the Elves feared and distrusted the world outside: wolves were howling on the wood's borders: but on the land of Lórien no shadow lay.

The land is ancient and saturated with a powerful and mysterious force of good. No evil can penetrate Galadriel's magical realm.

... **Frodo stood awhile still lost in wonder. It seemed to him that he had stepped through a high window that looked on a vanished world. A light was upon it for which his language had no name. All that he saw was shapely, but the shapes seemed at once clear cut, as if they had been first conceived and drawn at the uncovering of his eyes, and ancient as if they had endured for ever. He saw no colour but those he knew, gold and white and blue and green, but they were fresh and poignant, as if he had at that moment first perceived them and made for them names new and wonderful. In winter here no heart could mourn for summer or for spring. No blemish or sickness or deformity could be seen in anything that grew upon the earth. On the land of Lórien there was no stain.**

He turned and saw that Sam was now standing beside him, looking round with a puzzled expression, and rubbing his eyes as if he was not sure that he was awake...he said...'I feel as if I was 'inside a song', if you take my meaning.'

Frodo sees light and beauty for which he has no language. He sees colors as "fresh and poignant, as if he had at the moment first perceived them and made for them names new and wonderful". Abraham Maslow (who we'll come to in Chapter 5) says that one characteristic that distinguishes the actualized mind is "greater freshness of appreciation, and richness of emotional reaction." Entering Lothlórien, the Land of Lady Galadriel, pushes Frodo to a higher state of consciousness. Sam says that it's "like being in a song".

Haldir [the Elf guide] had gone on and was now climbing to the high flet. As Frodo prepared to follow him, he laid his hand upon the tree beside the ladder: never before had he been so suddenly and so keenly aware of the feel and texture of a tree's skin and of the life within it. He felt a delight in wood and the touch of it, neither as forester nor as carpenter; it was the delight of the living tree itself.

Galadriel's influence elevates Frodo to a new sensitivity for life and feeling. He transcends any utilitarian aim and shares in the happiness of the living spirit around him.

Frodo looked and saw, still at some distance, a hill of many mighty trees, or a city of green towers: which it was he could not tell. Out of it, it seemed to him that the power and light came that held all the land in sway. He longed suddenly to fly like a bird to rest in the green city. Then...he lifted his eyes across the river and all the light went out, and he was back again in the world he knew. Beyond the river the land appeared flat and empty, formless and vague, until far away it rose again like a wall, dark and drear. The sun that lay on Lothlórien had no power to enlighten the shadow of that distant height.

[Haldir the Elf guide explained:]"...In this high place you may see the two powers that are opposed one to another; and ever they strive now in thought [that is, Galadriel and the Dark Lord are ever locked in a telepathic battle]..." He turned and climbed swiftly down, and they followed him.

The city of green towers, out of which "the power and light came that held all the land in sway", is the seat of Galadriel (and, also, the seat of her unimpressive husband, Celeborn). Frodo, Sam and the other companions follow the guide to the city where they meet Galadriel. If you haven't, you should meet her, too, by clicking on the YouTube video linked above. I think Cate Blanchett, under Peter Jackson's direction, plays her terrifically. In that clip is the movie-version of Galadriel's transfiguration (which I mentioned above). We'll read the book-version below.

The companions meet Galadriel right after Gandalf, their leader and protector, has been killed (or so they think!). These are her first words to them:

'I it was who first summoned the White Council [that set up the Fellowship of the Ring]. And if my designs had not gone amiss, it would have been governed by Gandalf the Grey, and then mayhap things would have gone otherwise. But even now there is hope left. I will not give you counsel, saying do this, or do that. For not in doing or contriving, nor in choosing between this course and another, can I avail; but only in knowing what was and is, and in part also what shall be. But this I will say to you: your Quest stands upon the edge of a knife. Stray but a little and it will fail, to the ruin of all. Yet hope remains while all the Company is true.'

Tolkien gives Galadriel's speech a royal flavor: "I it was who first summoned..." And she seems to possess a supernatural wisdom, knowing "what was and is, and in part also what shall be". As we'll see in a moment, her sight penetrates the interior of each member of the fellowship. She telepathically probes and tests them, driving them towards greater perception of who they are and the choices they face. But she doesn't use her power to force their decisions; she will not say, "do this, or do that". The companions remain free to define themselves through their own choices. Galadriel's telepathic exploration begins immediately after she finishes saying the words quoted above:

And with that word ["true"] she held them with her eyes, and in silence looked searchingly at each of them in turn. None save Legolas and Aragorn could long endure her glance. Sam quickly blushed and hung his head.

At length the Lady Galadriel released them from her eyes, and she smiled. `Do not let your hearts be troubled,' she said. 'Tonight you shall sleep in peace.' Then they sighed and felt suddenly weary, as those who have been questioned long and deeply, though no words had been spoken...

That night...the travellers talked of...the Lord and Lady...

`What did you blush for, Sam? 'said Pippin. `You soon broke down. Anyone would have thought you had a guilty conscience. I hope it was nothing worse than a wicked plot to steal one of my blankets.'

`I never thought no such thing,' answered Sam, in no mood for jest. 'If you want to know, I felt as if I hadn't got nothing on, and I didn't like it. She seemed to be looking inside me and asking me what I would do if she gave me the chance of flying back home to the Shire to a nice little hole with \- with a bit of garden of my own.'

`That's funny,' said Merry. 'Almost exactly what I felt myself; only, only well, I don't think I'II say any more,' he ended lamely.

All of them, it seemed, had fared alike: each had felt that he was offered a choice between a shadow full of fear that lay ahead, and something that he greatly desired: clear before his mind it lay, and to get it he had only to turn aside from the road and leave the Quest and the war against Sauron to others.

`And it seemed to me, too,' said Gimli, `that my choice would remain secret and known only to myself.'

'To me it seemed exceedingly strange,' said Boromir. `Maybe it was only a test, and she thought to read our thoughts for her own good purpose; but almost I should have said that she was tempting us, and offering what she pretended to have the power to give. It need not be said that I refused to listen...' But what he thought that the Lady had offered him Boromir did not tell.

And as for Frodo, he would not speak, though Boromir pressed him with questions. `She held you long in her gaze, Ring-bearer,' he said.

`Yes,' said Frodo; `but whatever came into my mind then I will keep there.'

`Well, have a care! ' said Boromir. `I do not feel too sure of this Elvish Lady and her purposes.'

Boromir will try to take the ring from Frodo by force and thus destroy the fellowship. He wanted its power to aggrandize himself and also to defeat the Dark Lord. But the ring has a mind of its own. Had he obtained it, the ring would have conquered him and used him to deliver the ring to its evil master. Driven by pride and stunted by narrow mindedness, Boromir interprets Galadriel's behavior in his own image. He assumes that she's out only for "her own good purpose".

Later on, just before they leave, Frodo and Sam meet Galadriel again. She gives them a look into her magic mirror, and they see strange and terrible things. Frodo sees the roaming eye of the Dark Lord searching for his lost ring:

But suddenly the Mirror went altogether dark, as dark as if a hole had opened in the world of sight, and Frodo looked into emptiness. In the black abyss there appeared a single Eye that slowly grew until it filled nearly all the Mirror. So terrible was it that Frodo stood rooted, unable to cry out or to withdraw his gaze. The Eye was rimmed with fire, but was itself glazed, yellow as a cat's, watchful and intent, and the black slit of its pupil opened on a pit, a window into nothing.

Then the Eye began to rove, searching this way and that; and Frodo knew with certainty and horror that among the many things that it sought he himself was one...

`I know what it was that you last saw,' she [Galadriel] said; `for that is also in my mind...I say to you, Frodo, that even as I speak to you, I perceive the Dark Lord and know his mind, or all of his mind that concerns the Elves. And he gropes ever to see me and my thought. But still the door is closed!'

She lifted up her white arms, and spread out her hands towards the East in a gesture of rejection and denial. Eärendil, the Evening Star, most beloved of the Elves, shone clear above. So bright was it that the figure of the Elven-lady cast a dim shadow on the ground. Its rays glanced upon a ring about her finger; it glittered like polished gold overlaid with silver light, and a white stone in it twinkled as if the Even-star had come down to rest upon her hand. Frodo gazed at the ring with awe; for suddenly it seemed to him that he understood...`Yes,' she said, divining his thought...'This is Nenya, the Ring of Adamant, and I am its keeper...

'You are wise and fearless and fair, Lady Galadriel,' said Frodo. `I will give you the One Ring, if you ask for it. It is too great a matter for me.'...

Galadriel laughed with a sudden clear laugh...[and said:] `And now at last it comes. You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair! '

She lifted up her hand and from the ring that she wore there issued a great light that illuminated her alone and left all else dark. She stood before Frodo seeming now tall beyond measurement, and beautiful beyond enduring, terrible and worshipful. Then she let her hand fall, and the light faded, and suddenly she laughed again, and lo! she was shrunken: a slender elf-woman, clad in simple white, whose gentle voice was soft and sad.

'I pass the test,' she said. `I will diminish, and go into the West and remain Galadriel.'

I think that in these scenes Tolkien casts Galadriel in the visual image of a Goddess. First, when she lifts her arms, and her ring shines, and her silhouette becomes one with the light and shadows of the evening star; and then again, in the form of the Dark Goddess of love and despair. She is "beyond measurement, and beautiful beyond enduring, terrible and worshipful". Given that Tolkien was a religious Christian, these scenes taken together remind me of Christ's Transfiguration. Matthew (17:1-2) says,

After six days Jesus took with him Peter, James and John the brother of James, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. There he was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light.

Luke (9:29) adds that "his face had changed" and in some translations that "his clothes became as bright as a flash of lightning". I don't think that Galadriel is a Christ figure. But these scenes, like many others in The Lord of the Rings, draw on a deeply religious imagination.

#### What's "godlike" in a "demigod"?

So what is godlike about Galadriel? Here are some things that come to my mind:

First, she is the force of good and love. She battles against evil in the name of all life and freedom. And she is powerful and magnificent, beautiful and fascinating. In Tolkien's description, it feels like what we see of Galadriel is as nothing compared to what is hidden. She is shrouded in the mystery and the infinity that arise, together with her supernatural powers, from the depths of the One. Rooted in the music of the Holy Ones, the very offspring of God's Thoughts, Galadriel is the face of what was intended in creation.

Touched by this combination of supreme beauty and goodness, Frodo is driven towards a higher self. His consciousness is sensitized to the color, texture and spirit of life. He is moved towards humility and the protection of all creatures from evil. He achieves greater clarity in understanding himself and greater knowledge of the world.

Frodo spends but a short time in Lothlórien. The elves of Galadriel's Land have been protected and nurtured by her magic for thousands of years. Tolkien's elves, a race of creatures dedicated to creating beauty and seeking the good, look to me like a vision of a higher humanity, a redeemed version of our species; what we might look like if the slaughter and starvation were to cease. Through Galadriel flows the power facilitating that redemption. Thus in my eyes, she symbolizes the potential for goodness and beauty of _our_ species. She draws from the depths of the Creator's overflowing well to pour forth and give life to her land.

These are the kinds of themes that come to my mind when I think of "God". I admit that there's no logical necessity to introduce "God" into the picture. We could talk about all these themes without "God". But if I didn't have words like God, sacred and holy, I'd have to make up new words to express what I mean. "Godlike" reflects a certain combination of qualities that I need a special language to describe. It is a combination of unspeakable beauty and magnificent love, and of power, mystery and infinity. The word "God" refers both to the awe ignited by the immensity of the sky, and to the life-giving passion ignited by beholding a beautiful woman. "God" contains Galadriel and the Holy Ones and their music and the unfathomable One all in one word. (It's one _word_ to rule them all, one _word_ to bind them!)

So one meaning of "God" is that combination of goodness, mystery and power. But that's only half the story. The other half of what "God" means is how I respond to beholding that combination. In the experience of witnessing overwhelming beauty and goodness, there is a call to action: to worship, nurture and protect. If what I behold does not grasp me in a command of service, then it is not "God" that I behold. And that service requires a measure of self-transcendence. It means putting aside my inflated perception of my own importance. And with that "sacrifice" comes a great blessing. That partial relinquishment of self is rewarded with a greater sensitivity to the glory of creation. When the fog of narcissistic self absorption is thinned, the beauty of all things is that much more revealed:

... **he laid his hand upon the tree beside the ladder: never before had he been so suddenly and so keenly aware of the feel and texture of a tree's skin and of the life within it. He felt a delight in wood and the touch of it, neither as forester nor as carpenter; it was the delight of the living tree itself.**

It is in beholding overwhelming goodness, beauty, mystery and power, and in my responses to these things, that the meanings of the word "God" take shape. God is the measuring stick, the goal and the path. And so we return to the fundamental intuition that motivates me to talk about God as I mentioned in the preface above. That intuition is that we have the potential to be higher kinds of creatures, and that there is something worthy of our worship and service.

#### Conclusion

In this chapter, we've explored different meanings of the word "God". I hope that you've clarified for yourself some of the most important meanings that this word has for you. I also hope that I've been able to communicate some of what this word means to me. In the coming chapters, while we'll continue to explore what we mean when we say "God", we'll also move on to the next stage of this theology. The next stage is asking whether what we mean when we say "God" is real and true. In the next chapter, we will take leave of Galadriel and The Lord of the Rings, and move on to the Faithful Shepherd and the Zohar.

### Chapter 2: The All

#### The faithful shepherd on nothing

"The faithful shepherd" or the Raya Meheimna (RM) is the name both of one of the books that makes up the Zohar, and the central character in that book. The faithful shepherd is Moshe Rabbeinu, and he instructs us mostly about the inner secrets of the commandments. In the following two sections, I understand him to be describing a quality of God called by names like ein sof (without limit) and ayn (nothingness). In my thinking, these names refer to the All. Below, I'll explain what I mean by "the All". But first, let's hear the faithful shepherd:

1.

He rules over all and there is none who rules him. He grasps all and nothing grasps him. And he is not called Y-H-V-H, or by any other names, but rather [he is only called by the holy names] when his light spreads over them, but when he departs from them he has, of himself, no name at all: "Deep deep! who can find him?" (Kohelet 7:24)...

He surrounds all the worlds, and nothing surrounds them from every side, above and below and to the four corners, except him. And there is nothing outside his domain. He fills all worlds and there is no other that fills them. He gives all life and there is no god above him to give him life, as it is said: "and you give life to them" (Neh 9:6), and about him, Daniel said "and all the inhabitants of the earth are as nothing and he does his will with the host of the heavens." (Daniel 4:32)

2.

Even this image [of the letters Y-H-V-H] is not of him in his place, but [it describes him] only when he descends to reign over the creatures and he spreads over them, then he reveals himself to them; all of them according to their own appearance and vision and imagination, and that's what is said (Hoshea 12:11) "according to the prophets will I be imagined". And because of this he says "even though I reveal myself to you in your image, to whom can you liken me that I may be compared!?", because before the Holy One Blessed be He created any image in the world, or drew any drawing, he was alone without likeness or form....

Source 1: Zohar Pinchas 3:225a, RM. Source 2: Zohar Bo 1:42a, RM. Trans. based on the Kabbalah Center's online English Zohar.

#### Re-imagining the world

As I understand him, the faithful shepherd says that all things (galaxies, planets, people and everything else) are made of God. Now, there are many meanings of "God" in the Zohar. These different meanings are expressed by different names like Y-H-V-H and Elohim. The aspect of "God" that all things are made of is called ein sof (without limit) or ayn (nothingness). Ayn is in a way like the atoms making up the things in the room around you. Everything you see is made of atoms, but you can't see the atoms by themselves. Each one looks like a solar system or a very cool space ship. And you see zillions of them. But without a microscope, you can only see them in the shapes of other things. The difference between atoms and ayn is that atoms have a shape of their own, even though you can't see it. Ayn has no shape by itself. Its shape is the shape of all things.

Ayn is the substratum of all reality. From it is made everything that we see. All the phenomena of the world, from the way the universe spun out of the big bang to the structure of your brain to the way you feel when you look out over a valley, are manifestations of ayn. All faces are its faces. Everything is a revelation: some aspect of God as ayn is revealed. Nothing exists except ayn. But apart from its various manifestations in the things around us, what we know about ayn is nothing. That's why it's called "without limit" and "nothingness". Ayn is both utterly revealed (when we hold something in our hands we hold a piece of ayn) and utterly concealed (we can have no picture of what ayn looks like beyond the things that we see).

I think that this is a beautiful and dramatic picture of the world. But of what world? Could this be a picture of the real world, the one we live in? I think the answer is yes, but seeing this requires re-imagining the world. Re-imagining doesn't involve believing in things that don't seem true. It's not about contradicting science, for instance. Re-imagining is about reflecting on what we believe exists, and then considering whether we can think about the world differently than we do.

Why would we want to re-imagine? To a large degree, we live what we think; we experience our selves and the world in accordance with the model of reality that we're used to. Our subjective experience is molded by what we assume is possible and impossible, what is real and what isn't. Whether we "believe in God" or not is tied up with our picture of the world. But in spite of the impact it has on our lives, I think that we are mostly unaware of what picture of the world it is that we hold. And we haven't thought about alternatives. People who ask themselves,"do I believe in God?" usually already unconsciously assume a picture of the world that says they don't. And yet if that same person looked at the facts she knows about the world from a different angle, she would see a very different picture. In that alternative picture, she might find that "God" is something she already knows.

The first step in re-imagining is becoming aware of your assumptions. In growing up and forming my picture of the world, my sense of what is real, I received a healthy dose of what I considered science. Today I would call that picture of the world "scientism", rather than "science", and I would locate it in a stream of culture that I'll call Anglo-empiricism. Its gist was that the universe is composed of multiple lifeless objects organized into great machine-like structures. The phenomenon of life is an extension of matter and consists of an ongoing brutal competition for the survival of the fittest. The real things in the world don't think or distinguish between good and evil. The universe is value free. Human beings do think and recognize value. But these are merely subjective human qualities. They don't tell us anything about the real world.

The attitude behind this picture of the world wasn't cocky, but it had tremendous confidence in itself. It reasoned: "Of course, there is much more for science to discover. But we get the basic idea of how things work. Our streets, homes and vehicles are not particularly mysterious, and neither is the world as a whole." This was the spirit of the American public school education that I received. It was a reasonable common-sense take on things, with a dash of logical positivism. (I believe that to this day it is the dominant school of thought among the hobbits of the Shire.)

The habits of thought involved in this picture of the world were and are deeply ingrained in how I perceive the world. They're like a backdrop behind the things and events I see in life. Just as the backdrop in a theatre impacts on how the audience perceives what happens on the stage, so too these usually unconscious assumptions color the world that I see. But here and there, I was exposed to another picture of the world. It lurked in Western pop-Buddhism, and then again in philosophy class: Spinoza, Hegel (in so far as I got anything); and its bedrock to Zohar. This alternative picture is what I think the faithful shepherd is describing. While it is very different from the Anglo-empiricist picture, I don't think that it's less rational or scientific. I think that these two different pictures of the world are largely expressions of different temperaments.

#### The All

If I want to, I can think of the universe and everything in it, and everything that ever was, and everything that ever will be even though I'll never know about it, as one big whole: the All. The All is the set of all things (including things that aren't "things", like numbers). If you say to me: "but what if there was something outside the All?" Then I'll say, "nothing can be outside the All, the All always includes everything by definition." The All connects all that there is together into oneness. There are no disparate things. Everything in the universe, from the laws of gravity to the workings of the mind, is housed in one interrelated and interdependent web. It's all thick and wet together. Each sound, each fact, each thought, each experience of joy or of suffering, reveals another face of the All.

I think that this way of thinking is 1) true and 2) not necessary.

1) It's true in that I can't see how it could be wrong. Arguing about whether everything really is the All or not would be like arguing about whether a particular pebble is "a universe of tiny things" or "a tiny thing in the universe".

2) It's not necessary in that you could also look at the universe as split into two parts (perhaps matter/energy and information). Or you could say that the world is just a lot of disparate things. But one could always ask, "is there a set of all the things that don't form a whole?"

A forest looks very different when you're underneath the trees from how it looks when you you're on high and see it below you in a valley. The Anglo-empiricist picture of the world, and that of the All, are like different perspectives on the trees. They expose the world from different angles, and I see no logical contradiction between them.

But it feels very different to live in one picture rather than the other. For instance, if you're coming from the All as understood in the Zohar, your starting point is that "everything is God". There's no point in talking about whether "God exists" since if anything exists, so does God. What you'll have to do if you're coming from this direction is not to say why God is real but rather why God is important. What's God good for? (Since I'm coming from this direction, after I finish trying to tell you what I mean by the All, I'll try to tell you why I think that God is important.) On the other hand, if you're coming from the world of multiple lifeless objects organized into great machine-like structures, finding "God" is going to be a lot more elusive. The place you meet with religious language is very different depending on which picture of the world you start with.

But living inside different pictures feels different above and beyond questions of religious language. What I'll do now is to describe some ways in which I think about the All. These are not arguments for adopting a position but rather attempts to communicate what it feels like to me in live with the picture of the All. I'll try to communicate this through three short guided imaginations.

If you'd like, get somebody to read these descriptions to you so that you can close your eyes and imagine them.

1. ein sof (without limit)

Look out straight ahead. Look all the way to the horizon in front of you. You can do it from wherever you are. If there are walls between you and the horizon, look through them. See the horizon all the way out in front of you. Now look past the horizon. Look further out to our solar system. You can see it there just like it looks in the planetarium. And now look further than our solar system, let your mind see the many galaxies one after the other as far as you can imagine. Take a minute to do this.

Now stop, come back to where you started. Face the other way. Can you feel the great expanse before you in that direction, too? Pause for a moment and feel its vastness. It is behind you just as it was in front of you; and on your right and on your left. Look up above your head. Now look down beneath you; look through the floor and through the earth and then out the other side. The distance stretches forth down there, as well.

You stand on one point in the expanse of the universe; there is fathomless distance in every direction. Like an unthinkably immense cavern, the All stretches beyond you on every side.

The expanse in which you stand stretches forth not only in space but also in time. Long ago, the universe sprang out of one tiny point, like a whole jungle that hatched from a single egg, and that point was the beginning of all things. Imagine a great timeline, with a glowing circle at its beginning, and you at the end: a timeline that races from the big bang through the emergence of energy and then gases and then matter and then life and evolution and finally you and your family; a timeline whose beginning was the beginning of time itself.

And what "was before" that? The All extends back not only into time but also beyond time. And it extends into the future. The expanse, in which you stand, on your point in space and in time, extends forever in every direction and in every dimension. The All as no limits, it is ein sof.

2. ayn (nothingness)

Look around at the things that surround you. What's there? Are there books? A computer screen? Whatever's there, what is it really? Science tells us that what looks like a simple object is in fact a great cavernous space filled with dancing bits of matter spanning (in proportion to their own size) galaxies of distance. A whole universe of these tiny buzzing constellations together makes up the computer screen or the paper before you right now.

So is it an illusion that the objects around us are filled up with matter and solid as they seem to be? You could say that. But perhaps it would make more sense to say that on one level, they are solid material and on another level, they are vast empty space. If so, then the strange reality is that the world is many different things on many different levels. The sum total of all human knowledge and experience touches on a tiny fraction of what exists.

Look again at the objects around you. Imagine that they are built like Legos from countless tiny constellations of energy stacked one on top of the other. At the heart of each constellation are scales that balance positive and negative energies. These hold each other in a dynamic yet stable embrace, like the black and white lovers appearing in sacred Eastern art.

A small piece of "Guru Drakpoche" as found on http://www.bodetam.org (here with changes)

The scales that balance the positive and negative energies are embodied in protons, neutrons and electrons. And each of these is a universe of tinier things; each one is again a cavernous space.

But that's not what's most unbelievable about this atomic level of existence. The really unfathomable thing about these tiny pieces is that if you put them together in one way, you get a piece of paper; put them together in another, and you get the human mind.

There has never been a greater magic reported in any story, history or fiction, then the magic of materialism in the story told by science. There is stuff so enchanted, or maybe it's a spell so strong, that it can transform inanimate matter into life and mind. The material things that surround us are shrouded in the deepest of mysteries. They are magical worlds within worlds spiraling forever, and somehow out of their depths our own consciousness has emerged.

There is an infinity of the unknown inside and surrounding every object that seems simply to be there. The object you see in front of you is just one face of one level. What you see is like a hologram; it floats in the great sea of other faces and other levels that we will never know. What we fully grasp of the space surrounding the hologram of our perception is nothing, and that's why the All is also called ayn.

3. nothingness without limit

You might read over imaginings one and two above; I'll now try to tie them together.

Look out in front of you. Choose something that you see. What is it? Consider for a moment how far you could look inside it. If you could zoom in and see its molecules and atoms, and then zoom further to see the worlds inside them, you could look deep inside any material object like you can peer into the depths of an infinite well. But not only inside your object, but also beyond it, is the vastness of the universe. Look again straight in front of you. Look through the walls and mountains to the horizon at the edge of the earth. Then look past it, past our planet, into the darkness of space with its bright colors and lights. The All extends in all directions. Its depth is infinite, in front of us and behind us, to the right and to the left, above us and below us, inside and outside all things.

From the expanses of the unknown, the All reveals itself to you, but only in the things that you can recognize. It caters to your senses. From its mind boggling store of information, it tells you only what you need to know. You recognize your body and the objects around you. You can stand on the earth and move through space and time. Like the faithful shepherd said, "he reveals himself to us in our own image". But the All in its dimensions and levels greatly exceeds anything that we can fathom.

And from the nothing surrounding you on every side, emerges the world, as you know it. The world is not a simple solid thing, but one face of the many. In the people and the objects around us, the All takes on concrete shape. But its mystery and infinity saturate everything. The depths that open up if you look inside the simplest thing, and the universe beyond the horizon, echo the empty space surrounding the hologram image that is our experience of the All.

The world arises from the All in powerful feelings and colors. It emerges from the nothingness in shining dancing patterns, all things balanced on the scales of the black and white lovers. The world we behold is forever emerging from the unseen reaches of the All like light emerged from the darkness before creation; like existence sprang forth in the big bang from the unknown.

#### The mysterious origins of the world

I hope that the imaginings above helped clarify what seeing the world as the All feels like. Before returning to the faithful shepherd, I'll offer one more approach to thinking about the All. It fascinates me that human beings often arrive at the same place after following very different paths. The scientific theory of the big bang holds (as far as I understand it) that the universe expanded from a "point of singularity" smaller than a sub-atomic particle. Only when the primordial point began to flow out did space and time come to exist. Most everybody seems to agree that scientifically speaking we know nothing of what happened "before" the point began to expand. I've heard it said that asking beyond that point is not a "scientific question" or that today's science simply doesn't know.

In order to explain the world as we know it, modern science posits an unfathomable beginning. There was a primordial point of potentiality containing all things in a place that was not a place, beyond space and time! And then that point of singularity pulled forth, from inside itself, the universe and everything in it. It must have looked even more impressive than Hermione Granger pulling a whole library out of her magic beaded handbag! Compare the big bang with one of the Zohar's descriptions of the beginnings of all things:

Zohar Yitro (Tosefta) 68b

**In the hidden of hiddens was marked one mark that was not seen and was not revealed, and that mark was marked and not marked, masters of understanding and those with open eyes cannot understand it,** _and it is the existence of everything_ **; that mark is small, not seen and not revealed; the mark needed to embed itself, and thus it made space [literally "a palace"] for itself in which to be embedded; it brought forth that space out of itself, and stretched it a great and mighty stretch in every direction...and that space became filled with light, and from that light flowed many lights...**

Scientific human knowledge marched on, cutting through medieval dogma and superstition, and led us forth into the quantum age of digital humanity. And now, with all sorts of space-age technology in hand, it sends us back to the cult of mystery!

Perhaps the big bang is only an interim conclusion, and today's happy synchronicity between mysticism and science will return to the animosity of the Newtonian past. But as things stand now, both mysticism and science posit that the appropriate context in which to understand the known universe is by reference to its roots in the infinitely unknown.

#### Back to the faithful shepherd

In light of these different ways of thinking about the All, the faithful shepherd's picture of the world feels very much to me like a picture of the real world. When he says,

He surrounds all the worlds, and nothing surrounds them from every side, above and below and to the four corners, except him. And there is nothing outside his domain. He fills all worlds and there is no other that fills them.

he offers his definition of the All, much like I did above. And when he says

he rules over all and there is none who rules him. He grasps all and nothing grasps him,

the shepherd gestures at the unknown beyond our beginnings and beyond our horizons, the unknown which is the great space containing everything that is known. The All lies before the big bang; the All lies in the sub-atomic depths; the All lies beyond the horizon; everything is a face of the All.

... **when he descends to reign over the creatures and he spreads over them, then he reveals himself to them; all of them according to their own appearance and vision and imagination...**

The All is revealed in our minds tailor made for us. It caters to our senses and our very own selves are vessels of its revelation. Everything we know reveals the All but nothing exhausts it, for it is revealed to us in the image of ourselves.

#### Conclusion

In this chapter, I've tried to communicate to you some of the content and the feeling of the picture of the world coming from the All. As I said, I don't think there's anything illogical or that contradicts science in looking at things in this way. It's a matter of perspective. But the perspective from the All is the appropriate backdrop for the meanings of "God" involved in this theology. In the next chapter, we'll focus on the significance of the All for religious consciousness by exploring the Rambam's Laws of the Foundations of the Torah (Hilchot Yesodei Hatorah) in light of the picture of the world laid out here.

### Chapter 3: Foundations of the Torah

#### Introduction

The Rambam's theological project is about systematically making sense of the key ideas of Jewish tradition, and then weaving those ideas together into a coherent picture of the world. Much of my own theology has risen up around the attempt to understand the Rambam and translate his medieval Aristotelian approach into contemporary terms that I find true and compelling. As a result, the key ideas in my theology are sometimes best understood in light of his.

The first section of the Mishneh Torah, the Rambam's great code of Jewish law, is called Hilchot Yesodei Hatorah or "the Laws of the Foundations of the Torah". In this section, the Rambam lays out the conceptual infrastructure of Judaism and his picture of the world. I find much of what the Rambam says religiously compelling. And so I'll follow the Rambam as he defines the core ideas that need to be true in order for Torah life to make sense (in his opinion), and I'll offer my account of why those ideas are in fact true. I'll do that in light of the idea of "God as the All" that we saw in the previous chapter.

Hilchot Yesodei Hatorah

See notes for details about this text.

Ch. One

Halacha 1

The basic principle of all basic principles, and the pillar of all sciences, is to know that there is a first being that brought every existent thing into being. And everything that exists in heaven and on earth, and what is between them, exists only through the truth of His existence.

If you take the first letter of each word in the phrase "the basic principle of all principles and the pillar of all sciences" as they appear in the Hebrew original, they spell Y-H-V-H. And this basic principle, whose formulation the Rambam adorns with the name of God, is that there is a "first being" at the root of all things. Everything that exists shares a common foundation. Existence itself is of one piece: everything exists through the existence of the first being.

There are many levels at which to understand what the Rambam says here. On one level, he expresses himself as the philosophical man of science. The search for the underlying laws of physics, chemistry, biology and so forth assumes that there is uniformity and an inner logic running through the universe. We expect that physics is true everywhere and that the technology that worked yesterday will work again tomorrow. The Rambam calls the uniform underlying logic of the universe the "first" or "primary" being. It's the underlying unity that enables us to find "laws of nature" at all. Perhaps that's why the Rambam says that recognizing the first being is the foundation of "all sciences".

On another level, the Rambam speaks here as an Aristotelian monotheist. He knows based on the science and philosophy of his day, which was a medieval interpretation of Aristotle, that everything exists through a "first being". That's a fact for him like the force of gravity is a fact for us. And as a religious Jew, he's committed to the idea that there is one God who created the world. It is thus natural to identify the "first being" with the "one God". In fact, the Rambam inherited this synthesis of science and religion from his spiritual ancestors. For the Rambam, the existence of the divine first being is both a scientific fact and the first step of his theology.

Why is it so important to believe in the One rather than in the many? There have been many attempts to explain the importance of believing in one God. I've often heard the case made that the oneness of God is necessary for ethics. That strikes me as unlikely and unjustified. But I think that the oneness of God is necessary for the project that the Rambam invites us to join. The Rambam wants us to experience the presence of God in Torah life, and to be motivated by that experience to become higher creatures. He knows that how people picture the world determines how they experience it, and so he's telling us how to picture the world. In my terms, he's telling us that the first step in making sense of the idea of "God" is to adopt the picture of the world coming from the All. I don't think that's necessarily true for all theologies. But it fits well with the one I'm laying out here.

Is there really a first being through which all things exist? I think of the "first being" as the potential for our universe that existed just "before" the big bang. (I've put "before" in quotes because it is taught that time itself began with the big bang. Since I have no idea what that means, I persist in imagining what came "before".) In my imagination, there was an infinite expanse of nothingness before the "point of singularity" posited by the big bang theory emerged. This nothingness is the darkness covering the deep in the story of creation. The nothingness contained the potential for everything in the universe that was to come. I don't mean that the universe is predetermined. There is creativity and new things emerge. But the potential for each thing that eventually emerged must have existed in that nothingness before the big bang, because if did not, how could it have emerged? The potential for all things hovered in the dark nothingness like the spirit of God over the primordial waters.

And that potential for the universe is the foundation of all things. There the point of singularity rested in the darkness before it began to glow. And then it did glow, and ignited, and poured out from within itself energy and matter, galaxies, solar systems, earth and life. And each new stage of emanation could only unfold out of the logic of the previous stage. There is no consciousness without biology, and no biology without chemistry, and no chemistry without physics, and no physics without the first logic that governed how matter and energy emerged from the big bang. From that first logic all things emerged, nested layer upon layer, from atoms to molecules to cells to tissues to organs and to human beings. And thus, it fills up the universe like the waters fill the sea. And that first logic is the "first being in action". It's what happened when the potential began to realize itself. And therefore, as Rambam taught, the first being pulses through all existence and will forever be the root of everything that is.

Halacha 2

If it could be supposed that He does not exist, no other being could possibly exist.

Halacha 3

If, however, it was supposed that all other beings were non-existent, He alone would still exist. Their non-existence would not involve His non-existence. For all beings are in need of Him; but He, blessed be He, is not in need of them nor any of them. Thus His reality is not like their reality.

Halacha 4

This is what the prophet says [Jeremiah 10:10]: "but Y-H-V-H is the true God", that is He alone is real and nothing else has reality like His reality. This is what the Torah says [Deuteronomy 4:35]: "There is nothing aside from Him", that is: there is no other true being like Him.

All of the statements in halachas 2-4 follow from the definition of the first being for the Rambam. Similarly, if the potential, the pre-big-bang essence, of the universe did not exist, neither would anything else. On the other hand, if life had never evolved on earth (ie. if we nullify the existence of some things that exist, like human beings) the first being would still exist.

Halacha 5

This being is the God of the Universe, the Lord of the earth. He controls the sphere with infinite and unbounded power; with a power that is never interrupted; Because the sphere is constantly revolving, and it is impossible for it to revolve without someone causing it to revolve. God, blessed be He, it is, who, without hand or body, causes it to revolve.

All the powers of the world are powers of the first being. The reason this is so for the Rambam involves his Aristotelian world view (that's where the "sphere" comes from). But it also follows from the idea of the first being of the big bang. Since everything is "of the first being", so are all powers.

Halacha 6

Knowing all this is a positive commandment, as it is said [Exodus 20:2]:

"I am Y-H-V-H your Lord".

Anyone who considers that there is another god transgresses a negative commandment, as it is said [Exodus 20:3]: "You shall have no other gods before Me" and denies the essence [of religion] – this doctrine being the great principle upon which everything depends.

Halacha 7

This God is One. He is not two nor more than two but One - One that there is nothing unified like Him in the world...To realize this truth is a positive commandment, as it is said [Deuteronomy 6:4]: Y-H-V-H Our Lord, Y-H-V-H is One."

There are three commandments, two positive and one negative, involved in constructing your picture of the world. You are commanded, says the Rambam, to interpret the world in light of the first being, who is the all powerful creative divine force behind the world. That's the first commandment. The second commandment is not to picture a world with two first beings. And the third commandment is to acknowledge the unique Oneness and unity of God. In my terms: the All is One.

The way you construct your picture of the world is so important that the first three commandments mentioned in the Mishneh Torah (out of 613!) are telling you how to do it. The Rambam knows that if your world consists of great machine-like structures (like those of the Anglo-empiricist), then the God of Jewish tradition is not going to make a whole lot of sense to you. The universe is vast and there are zillions of true ways to construct a picture of it. But not all of those pictures will unlock the transformative power of Jewish religious life for those who use them. The Rambam says that it is an imperative of the system, literally, to learn to see the existence of the universe, and all the powers in it, as expressions of God as first being.

Halacha 8

Behold, it is explicitly stated in the Torah and in the prophets that the Holy One, blessed be He, is not physical body, as it is said [Deuteronomy 4:39]: "Because Y-H-V-H, your Lord, is the Lord in the heavens above and the earth below," and a physical body is not in two places at once. And it is said [Deuteronomy 4:15]: "For you did not see any image," and it is said [Isaiah 40:25]: "To whom can you liken Me, that I might be compared?" And if He were a body, He would be like other things.

Halacha 9

If so, what is the meaning of the expressions employed by the Torah: "Below His feet" [Exodus 24:10], "Written by the finger of God" [ibid. 31:18], "God's hand" [ibid. 9:3], "God's eyes" [Genesis 38:7], "God's ears" [Numbers 11:1], and the like?

All this is according to the way people think, they don't recognize anything but physical bodies, for the Torah speaks in the language of man...

And the truth about God is not something that the human mind can grasp or understand, as scripture says, " [Job 11:7] "Can you find the comprehension of God? Can you find the ultimate bounds of the Almighty?"

[...]

We saw that the Zohar and the big bang theorists are led to a mysterious point of singularity that cannot be explained in any terms that we know. The Rambam, too, posits that the first being is unlike all other things. And since everything we say consists of comparisons between things that we know, we can't say anything about the true nature of the first being. As different as they all are, the Rambam, the Zohar and modern physics all paint the portrait of a universe shrouded in mystery. It's as if the universe simply says to humanity, "you barely know me". Even though we can't see what we can't see, we have always sensed that what we can't see is vast.

Ch. Two

Halacha 1

This glorious and awesome God, it is a commandment to love and fear, as it is said [Deuteronomy 6:5]: "And you shall love Y-H-V-H, your Lord" and as it is said [Deuteronomy 6:13]: "Fear Y-H-V-H, your Lord."

Halacha 2

What is the path to love and fear Him? When a person contemplates His wondrous and great deeds and creations and appreciates His infinite wisdom that surpasses all comparison, he will immediately love, praise, and glorify, yearning with tremendous desire to know the great name, as David said: "My soul thirsts for the Lord, for the living God" [Psalms 42:3].

When he reflects on these same matters, he will immediately recoil in awe and fear, appreciating how he is a tiny, lowly, and dark creature, standing with his flimsy, limited, wisdom before He who is of perfect knowledge, as David stated: "When I see Your heavens, the work of Your fingers...what is man that You should recall Him?" [Psalms 8:4-5]...

I understand why Rambam says that if we adopt his picture of the world, we will stand in awe of God as first being. The universe is in fact an awe-inspiring "sight". And I also understand, somewhat, why he says I would love God as first being. But on the other hand, "He" sounds awfully distant and impersonal. The first being as the potential behind the big bang is the source of the evil of the universe as much as it is the source of good.

God as the All is an important part of why I fear God, but less so of why I love God. In order to get at where my love comes from, we need to move on to the ways in which God is revealed. For both the Zohar and the Rambam, the world itself is a divine revelation. But for both of them, there is another very different revelation that is equally important. The second revelation is the image of God revealed in what is good for human beings. Both the Zohar and the Rambam hold that expanding certain faculties that human being have, like knowledge of truth (for the Rambam) and love (for the Zohar) is our higher divine purpose. Humanity is meant to become something better. And the potential for a higher kind of humanity also becomes part of the portrait of the All. It is another face of God.

The Rambam talks about the face of God revealed by ultimate value later in the Laws of the Foundations of the Torah. We'll follow him there in a few chapters. But first I'll present my own idea of "God as revealed by ultimate value", called "divinity".

### Chapter Four: Divinity (Elohut)

In this chapter, I'll lay out what I mean by divinity. Please note that "divinity" is not the same as "God". In my usage, "God" often connotes a just and loving Person (although not a human person, of course). I call this "God as Person". Unlike "God as Person", divinity doesn't have any particular shape. It is not necessarily personal or impersonal but rather can take on many different images. In this sense, divinity is the raw material from which different images of God are constructed. I'll say what I mean by "God as Person" in Chapter 6.

#### What divinity feels like

"Divinity" is a name that I give to something that I experience. I don't mean that divinity _is_ the experience. There is an "it" that I am experiencing when I experience divinity. I'll say what I think that "it" is, later on. Now, in order to communicate what I mean by divinity, I need to describe my experience. And so I will speak about divinity in the first person: what I feel, what I see, and so forth. That doesn't mean, though, that divinity only exists in my mind. In fact, I'm sure that it extends beyond my mind. And I think that all human beings have the potential to experience it. But before I can explain those claims, I need for you to know what divinity feels like.

A caveat: since divinity is a part of my experience, it can't really be summed up in words. In order to understand this, consider the relationship between a picture and a verbal description of that picture. Words can never capture the picture: there are too many true things that you could say about it; you could never say them all. Trying to render a picture in words is an act of artistic creation. The artist renders the picture into words just as she might paint its likeness on canvas. The words can be true, directing the mind to something essential about the picture. But there would be countless other true ways to describe the picture. Different people who read the words alone would surely imagine very different pictures.

My experience of divinity is like the picture: rendering it into words is an act of art and not a simple description. There is truth in the words that I will offer. But there are countless other true words to say about the experiences I'm trying to describe. Everything I say about my experience of divinity is offered in that spirit: I'm trying to render a three dimensional landscape into paints on a canvas. My goal is to communicate some of what I mean by experiencing the divine.

Before I begin, let me offer an alternative name for divinity. "Divinity" in my usage is synonymous with "the numinous ultimate good". These are very abstract words. I'll try to explain them through describing concrete first person experiences. But I'll tell you now basically what I mean: the "ultimate good" is the meaning of life. It consists of the things that make me feel like my life has meaning and purpose. If I could take stock of everything, the ultimate good would be the set of all things that I think are most important. You might also call it "ultimate value". By "numinous", I mean some of the qualities that motivate me to use words like "divinity" and "God". (I'm borrowing this term from the good Rev. Dr. Rudolph Otto.) These qualities include otherness, power, mystery, infinity and awe. Just like "divinity", the "numinous" and "the ultimate good" refer to experiences that I have. So things like otherness, power etc. are names for things that I experience.

One last abstraction that I hope will help make sense of what follows: I generally divide divinity into six categories: love, justice, beauty, freedom, truth and spirit. These terms, too, are names for things that I experience.

##### Love

If the many things that make life valuable are imagined as threads, then these usually come woven together into a fabric. Each such fabric is a cluster of values that together make some chunk of life important. For example, the fabric of value involved in sharing life with a lover is composed of threads like love, beauty, pleasure, friendship, commitment and support. In my experience, this is a particularly holy fabric. A lot of what I mean by divinity is centered here. I'll try to communicate some of this by describing the way the world looks from the perspective of a peak moment.

There are moments when looking at the face of my lover is as powerful and as mystical an experience as you would expect if you read in a book that one of the characters encountered "a divine revelation". In these moments, her face captures - in a glance, from a certain angle - the essence and the force of everything that matters. Everything good is revealed in her face: in her eyes, solid liquid of color and spirit, and in her lips and skin, and in the way her head, framed in soft brown hair, gently curves back to the ears.

What is there in her face? There is life and consciousness, and wisdom and physical beauty, and lust and passion and pleasure; there is companionship and love and friendship and cooperation and trust and moral responsibility and the intuition of justice, and nurturing, and expanding, and evolving, and collecting memories; there are the children that we've raised, their faces too are for a moment held in hers. And between her face and mine is the face-to-face relation, what the Zohar sees as the essence of humanity, the place where I meets I and human identity begins. A place of mythic proportions, it spans all the way from my mind to hers. We are each separate subjective universes that somehow can also converge.

Some qualities of this moment: First, there is a great intensity of feeling. It is a moment of total enthrallment; I am completely grasped by the meaning that I perceive between her face and mine. These are some of the only moments in which I could claim to do anything 'with all my heart and with all my soul and with everything that I am' (as we say in the Shma). Being so moved is like encountering an overwhelming force. This is part of what I meant by the "power" of the numinous, above.

There is also a mysterious quality in the space that opens up between our two faces. It's like looking into clear and deep waters; you can see down enough to really feel the much greater shrouded depths that you cannot see below. The unseen depths add their gravitas to the shadow and light in the water that stretches beneath you. There is an urge to plunge down as deep as you can go which is tinged with awe since you know that you cannot breathe there. When I look at her face and there see her and me and our children and the world, I find myself gazing into a space without proper dimensions. It's like the way a room looks when you look at it through a prism. Something about it doesn't compute. This is part of the "mystery" of the numinous.

To get at another quality of this experience, let's imagine that the power and meaning awoken in me in this peak moment are an explosion of light. I look at her, and suddenly a tiny ball of light appears between us and then explodes into an array of energy and color like the big bang. That light radiates in all directions. I can't follow it to the end of its rays to see where it goes. It extends off into the horizon. And so the body of light that emerges is immense. It is beyond all proportion. And that immensity connects itself to the power and to the mystery, and I find myself beholding a vision so big it feels like it fills up the universe itself. This feeling is part of what I mean by experiencing "infinity".

Now I'm going to turn the discussion in a completely different direction. I'll ask a scientific question: How can so much meaning and power be released by glancing at a human face for just a moment? I have no idea, of course. But I imagine it like this (please be warned that any similarity between my account and a real scientific one is purely accidental!): my mind contains a bio hard-drive upon which are stored (in bio-stuff) countless strings of symbols, in the same way that the code of a computer program is stored in the plastic of a CD. Those symbols somehow encode my memory, the patterns of my thought, and all the other information necessary for my functioning. I've also got a central processing unit (CPU), a more complex bio-version of the one in my computer. And my CPU is running some kind of operating system software, i.e. MS Homo Sapiens XP. Both my hardware and my software are evolving. And last, I imagine that what it feels like to be that CPU from the inside is what it feels like to be me. My subjective experience is the product of all that whirling information, charged with energy and embedded in matter . That's how I picture my mind happening inside my brain.

Now, my bio hard-drive contains unfathomable amounts of information. And so I see my brain as a colossal bio-digital library; trillions of terabytes (or whatever) \- a vast sea of information. In that info are the codes that are responsible for my mind doing what it does. And so among the stuff encoded there are the patterns that make my life meaningful: love, justice, beauty etc. I imagine that there are countless interwoven patterns in that sea of information: everything from the code for getting my body to walk to the one for reading a page of Zohar. The meanings of a word like "love" are embedded in countless other codes; those that govern what its like to cook, walk, read Harry Potter in bed, and so on infinitely. But as complex and interconnected as they are, there are clear patterns of what makes life meaningful. If all that information was somehow visually spread out before you, you would see patterns in it, like faces and landscapes, and the other things that embody what makes my life meaningful.

So this is what I imagine happens in this peak experience: I look at my wife's face, and the light patterns that my eyes pick up are encoded into electric signals, like a computer code, that my CPU knows how to read. And when it reads those symbols, it goes wild. What that "going wild" feels like is that _everything that matters has been referenced_. It feels like the patterns that encode the good and the beautiful were evoked, and they all lit up and made a lot of noise. And so there is a sort of CPU overload. One could see it as a malfunction: this bio-robot would be easy prey for a saber toothed tiger right now! But, on the other hand, he was blessed by an encounter with the divine.

However it works, in these peak moments I am swallowed up into a holy constellation; I become a detail in a great work of art. My identity and my worth are woven into a larger pattern: a great network of symbols referring to what is good and beautiful. The pattern is charged with meaning and transcendence. Her face across from mine connects me to the matrix and all that power, mystery and infinity is awoken within. No one name could capture all the different qualities of value that are revealed in these moments. I group them all together under the general name "love" only to provide a handle with which to organize and reflect on what I feel.

In her face, I catch a glimpse of a love yet higher than the one that I can know, and the hint of its stunning brilliance rivets my mind to the love that I can see. I can't see that higher love, but it is present in what I see like the unseen depths of the water are present in the water that you can see. It's as if a window onto another dimension has opened up between us, and what I see through that window inspires worship and paying homage. What words are appropriate to describe an infinite mysterious power of beauty and goodness so great as to inspire worship and homage? Words like sacred, holy, divinity and God. And therefore, it is not enough for me to say that love is part of the "ultimate good". That expresses the judgment, but not the feeling, of what love is to me. I want to _pursue_ the "ultimate good", not necessarily to _worship_ it. In order to express the part that inspires worship, I say that love is part of divinity.

##### Justice

Another channel of the numinous ultimate good or divinity is justice. I experience divinity through justice primarily in the form of indignation. When I recognize a creature as a "human being", I assume that they share the whole world of subjectivity that makes me a human being. They love and think and suffer and strive for self-realization more or less like I do. If they didn't, they wouldn't be people in my eyes, but rather robots or animals. And thus, when they are victimized, I recognize an evil whose proportions can be understood simply by imagining that it was happening to me. Between my mind and the injustice that I witness, opens up a window onto another dimension, like the one that opened up between my wife's face and mine. And from that dimension comes an absolute command that the injustice be stopped.

Why do I say it comes from another dimension? Because it feels very different from the moral and political reasoning that it engenders. Trying to understand any concrete question of justice is a deliberative affair. I'm never totally sure that I understand what's going on. Neither am I sure about my definition of "justice". I can't offer a definite verbal expression of what that voice demanding justice says. But when I hear the voice come through that open window, in whatever verbal form it happens to take like "you may not take what you want just because you can", it not only feels binding upon me, it feels like the source of my own self worth. Rejecting that voice would mean emptying my life of its positive meaning.

The obligation to protect and nurture humanity in no way feels like it's a product of my choices. I assume that my experience of justice is the product of how my central nervous system is wired together with the evolution of culture. But nothing in that knowledge detracts from the authority of the cry against violating humanity. It makes no difference what technology opens up the window onto justice. The necessary response to what I see is commitment and service. I don't need any claims about the world beyond the content of my experience to prop up the authority of justice. Everything necessary to recognize the absolute authority of justice is already included in what I can see.

The absolute quality of that call pushes "justice" beyond the "ultimate good" and into the "numinous". There is a kind of infinity here that forces me to look up and behold something more important than myself. And, like love, the way that justice moves me means the experience of encountering a powerful force. Power and infinity invite mystery, the feeling of proximity to an unfathomable beyond. And so I find in justice, too, the qualities of the numinous that motivate using words like the sacred and the holy. Therefore, I recognize justice as a channel of the divine. As above, no claim about the world beyond my experience is required for me to know that justice is divine. Everything I need to know in order for those words to be true is included in what I can see.

##### Beauty

As mentioned above, I imagine that the patterns of love, justice, beauty etc. are imprinted on the data stored in my brain's hard-drive. And they are all interwoven together. So it is no surprise that "beauty" was a big part of the experience of love. And there is beauty in the way that the transcendent voice of justice cascades down from above. But there is also beauty in so many other things. The animate and the inanimate, in matter and in patterns of information, beauty seems to be everywhere. There is something magical and otherworldly about beauty. It causes a subtle pleasure that is as uplifting as it is hard to grasp. The luring and enthralling qualities of beauty, whether in love, justice or just some inanimate thing, direct my gaze to what's on high. The numinous is always a part of what is beautiful. And so beauty is a channel onto the divine.

##### Freedom

Freedom is often understood as the political ideal of liberty. And it is that, for sure. But the real force in my experience of freedom as a channel of divinity is not so much in its political formulation as in the ultimate good embedded in my particular identity. Freedom is what enables me to live as a Jew in Israel, for instance, and much about what matters in my life is involved with that unique identity. Freedom is the space in which self and authenticity find their voices. It is this positive value I experience living in a land sacred to my religion and raising my kids in our archaic holy language that catapults ensuring freedom for all people into the realm of the absolute command of justice. Violating my freedom would mean crushing the organs that sustain my inner life. What I mean by freedom is a combination of justice and the value of my identity. Freedom is the space in which divinity is manifest and part of the divine itself.

##### Truth

What I mean by truth as a category of the divine is mostly about grasping the whole. Surely, there is something alluring about logic and numbers, and their magic too is part of divinity. But the existential force of truth moves me most when I feel that I've understood something basic about the universe. Truth motivates me to use religious language when a bird's eye view on the human condition reveals a critical key to understand and to unlock the good. And thus while there is much sacred truth in science and academics, "truth" is most powerful to me in the semi-mythical realm in which we construct pictures of the world. When the human truths of the Garden of Eden are framed by creation, evolution and the big bang, I feel like I've captured some answers to the big questions. It is here that truth feels like a window onto the divine.

##### Spirit

"Spirit" in my usage is about living embedded in the numinous ultimate goodness of love, justice, beauty, freedom and truth. It's about being a mind housed in matter; about the way that meaning and purpose flow through the window revealing the divine and into the flesh and blood of my embodied mammal existence. When I cleave to divinity and go beyond the borders of my own selfishness and temporality, the transcendence that I experience is the characteristic mark of spirit. This involves loosing myself, just a little, in something larger and more important than me. And that transcendence directs my mind to look out the window. Here is a circular but spiraling path: cleaving to divinity results in transcendence and transcendence is a great motivator for cleaving to divinity. As I understand them, the technologies of religion like prayer and ritual aim at setting me upon the ascending path of spirit towards the divine.

#### The coherence and reality of divinity

Everything above is a partial description or an example of the kinds of value I find in the six categories. The categories themselves are merely notes to stick on noticeable patterns of numinous goodness. Because divinity is an embodied experience, it cannot be captured in words anymore than a landscape can. What I tried to do above is to give you a feeling for the kinds of experience that I mean by divinity. This is no more than an artistic expression, as I said at the outset. It is meant to give you an impressionistic sense of what part of the life of the mind it is that I call the numinous ultimate good.

I cannot offer a coherent definition of divinity or ultimate value. I imagine that the things that I value are so dynamic and complex that no verbal formulation could catch them all in one net, even for a moment. Whatever theory we formulated, there would always be value left out. And anything I give a name to could also be called something else. I expect that no philosophical account of "goodness" could ever be satisfying. The thing is alive, and three dimensional; it cannot be pinned down.

But the fact that divinity cannot be captured in words does not also mean that it feels incoherent. The opposite is the case. When I reflect on the patterns that I see in the things that matter most - love, justice, beauty, freedom, truth and spirit - they all seem to be of one piece: interwoven and mutually supportive. They are like a great mosaic and no part can be understood except by reference to the rest. There is a deep coherency in these patterns of goodness, writ large across the sea of data in my brain.

Of course, there are contradictions and dilemmas. And I am often conflicted and confused. The limitations of my own judgment are always apparent. It's always clear that I could be wrong about almost everything. I might have mixed up who was oppressed and who was oppressor, or whether it was pleasure that I caused or pain. But none of this compromises the underlying coherency that I feel in the set of all things that are ultimately good. In fact, I suspect that my sense that the good is coherent is tied up with my sense that my identity is coherent. In a hypothetical world in which you could not have both the things I mean by "love" and the things I mean by "justice", for instance, I cannot imagine what my identity could look like. In fact, in such a world I can't imagine human life at all.

The knowledge that love is good, that justice is binding and so on is the knowledge of divinity. It is what enables me to identify the numinous ultimate good. The knowledge that I'm talking about is both carnal and rational. At base, I know with my body that things like life and love are good. But this non-rational axiomatic kind of knowledge doesn't appear alone. My sense of the ultimate good is inseparable from countless judgments about what is real and how one thing leads to another. My knowledge that the things I experience as divine are worthy of my worship and service is drawn from everything that I am; mind and body, intellect and emotion, higher and lower, and everything else.

Is divinity real? My dictionary says that "real" comes from "Latin _rēs_ thing". In the way we normally speak, something that is "unreal", which is "no thing", can be disregarded. It makes no sense to say "phenomenon X which does not exist exerts a tremendous influence on its environment". The phenomenon that fills my life with meaning cannot be reasonably described as "no thing". It follows that divinity is real. This is not a truth claim about the existence of a material thing. The realness of divinity is manifest in that justice is binding, beauty is beautiful and so on; it means that the numinous good is worthy of my worship and service. To know the reality of divinity, I don't need to claim anything beyond the contents of my experience. Everything I need to know in order to "believe in the divine" is right here in what I can see.

The reality of divinity is the ground upon which I establish my life, and the criteria by which I judge all things. This is not because I think this position is the most rational. That would be backwards: I measure the value of rationality on the scales of the good that I know. And this is not because I think this position is the most scientific, that it somehow truthfully reflects the universe as

it is, because I measure the value of science and everything else on those same scales. I look out at the world through the prism of divinity as revealed to me in my first person perspective. Given the nature of my experience, I cannot imagine any other way.

#### What is the "it" that divinity is an experience of?

In order to get at the "it" of divinity, we need to return to the All. One result of looking at the universe as the All is that all things are connected. Not only are they connected, but every single thing in the universe reflects every other thing. It's like the mystics say: each place contains all places and each moment contains all moments. The All is One.

What do the verbs "reflect" and "contain" mean in the above sentences? Let's approach this through an example. Every detail of a painting contains and reflects the work as a whole. Imagine a painting in which five people are playing poker. You can see each one of their faces. One looks tense; one is relieved; one looks ambitious, and so forth. If you want to interpret one of the faces in the painting, you cannot ignore the other four. And if one of the faces was absent from the painting, all four remaining faces would be different. Each face reflects the work as a whole. And the work as a whole reflects each face. In this sense, each face "contains" all five faces. That doesn't mean that you can see all five faces in each face. Rather, it means that the meaning of each face is dependent on the other faces. Nothing stands alone.

Now let's take it further. The full meaning of a painting emerges by reference to a culture of painting. And this culture in turn is grasped by reference to human civilization as a whole. Human civilization must be understood in light of evolution; and evolution in light of the phenomenon of life. The larger context of life is the inanimate matter from which it emerged. And matter emerged from the energy emitted by the point of singularity in the big bang. Thus, a full account of the phenomenon of matter must make reference to its origin in that pre-material stuff. And a full account of the energy, the source of matter, must refer to the nothingness from which it emerged.

When we seek the meaning of each of the five faces, we are pushed to grasp its greater context. Each context has a context: the painting, culture, humanity, evolution, life, matter, energy, nothingness; if you follow the meaning of the painting to its end you will find yourself at the point of all beginnings. The snake holds his tail firmly in his mouth. This doesn't mean that everything is the same. Each face in the painting is unique. But each face contains them all.

Divinity is no different from any other phenomenon in the universe: it, too, reflects and contains all things. It, too, is a face of the All. Now, at this stage, you might be thinking, "but divinity is all in your head!" But let's think for a minute about what divinity is exactly. On the outside, from the perspective of science, divinity consists of the material processes going on in my brain when I experience the numinous ultimate good. On the inside, from my first person perspective, divinity is what those material processes feel like.

Now, a full account of the phenomenon of divinity, like all other phenomena, must make reference to its larger context. And so the chain of meaning begins again: consciousness emerges in the brain, the brain arose from evolution, evolution is a phenomenon of life, life emerged from matter, matter emerged from energy, energy emerged from the point, the point from the nothingness behind the big bang. This path, like all the others, leads to the One. And so the "it" of divinity reflects and contains all things, and all things contain and reflect it. The "it" of divinity is the All.

But each face of the All is unique. What's unique about divinity is that it reveals the meaning and purpose of my life. Everything in the universe reveals the All in its unique way, but they do not reveal the value of my life to me. The All is like a giant room and everything in the world is contained inside it. The room is dark. Illuminating the room means revealing what's important about it for my life. If the room is lit, that means that when I look into it, I know what really matters. Everything in the room sits in darkness, except one. Divinity illuminates the room because it reveals to me what really matters. Divinity is the light of the All.

I imagine the light of divinity emerging like this: first, there was nothing. And then everything that wasn't (!) became a tiny point, like the point of light that emerged between my wife's face and mine. And that point exploded into the planets and the stars and their constellations. And on at least one planet, physics gave birth to biology, and biology gave birth to the interiority of the mind. And from the unseen depths of that great space, a universe of subjectivity, emerges a host of experiences glistening with numinous goodness. I can imagine all that shining swirling value, rich in deep colors and powerful emotions, pulsating with ideas and faces and holy stories, human shapes, voices and sounds; it is a great tapestry stretching out before and around me; a tapestry composed of the patterns of ultimate value, illuminating my life and the world.

Imagine the tapestry as a great work of art: it is a colossal mural and on it are painted all the experiences of divinity that you know now, or can remember or imagine. Each and every one is embedded in some instance of your life; they were always in reference to somebody or something or some place. Now, these moments of felt divinity are artistically rendered into shapes, patterns, lines and colors on the mural, which shines and grows dark, adding light and shadow to its tools of expression. The art expresses meanings and relationships by grouping pictures and symbols, and through use of color and contrast. There are portraits and manifestos, signs and words; streams of justice, love and reason; stories mapped out like hieroglyphics. Each instance of value is interconnected with all the others. And the tapestry isn't static: its contents and spirit are in motion, capturing one aspect of the whole, and then another. It's like the moving hieroglyphics that Moses finds in Pharoh's basement in the Prince Of Egypt. The tapestry is evolving as you contemplate it, alive, interactive and dynamic.

#### From first person to third person

Above I said that divinity is a name for something that I experience. It is therefore tricky to talk about it in third person. One mistake to avoid is simply to translate my definition of divinity from first to third person. This mistake sounds like this: "You have defined divinity as the ultimate good. Therefore whatever anybody says is their 'ultimate good' you must logically define as 'divine!'"

The mistake here is confusing the description of something with the thing itself. If I tell you that a "horse" is a four legged animal, and you try to use my inadequate formulation to define some poor dog into a horse, that creature will none the less remain canine! What I call divinity is something I see. But what I see cannot be reduced to what I call it. I cannot know based on words alone whether somebody else experiences the same thing. In order for me to know, I need to feel his or her subjective interior. My judgment as to whether what they see is divine can only come by way of comparison between _what I experience myself_ and what it seems to me that _they are experiencing._

So I'm saying that I recognize as divinity something to which only I have full access. If somebody else wants to feel what I call divinity, they'll need to hang around and offer me descriptions of what they feel. Each time I'll tell them yes or no. They can collect all my answers if they like, but I make no commitment to any linear coherence. In my definition of divinity, I am the perfect autocrat!

But what both you and I mean by a whole host of words, like love and truth and green and bitter and lightheaded and depressed, is no less subjective than what I mean by divinity. You can only know if the other guy who uses those words means the same thing as you by comparing your experience to his. Generally, we assume that other people know what we mean. But that's just shorthand. The bottom line is that we compare what we think they experience to what we experience, and only then do we think that we know what they mean.

So when talking about divinity, my eyes must always remain fixed on my first person experience. But I can communicate what I experience to other people, and I can listen to them describe their experience of the good to me. Now, my commitment to divinity is not predicated on there being agreement. The world strikes me as pretty depraved. If I find myself despised as a divinity-fearing lunatic, so be it. But clearly, it would be preferable to cooperate with the people around me so that we can realize more numinous ultimate good in our collective lives.

How does divinity as I know it compare with other people? I have never met a human being or culture that I could not meaningfully interpret in light of divinity. All human beings seem to have some version of those six things. The basic categories of my experience of the numinous ultimate good are always useful tools for making sense of other peoples' take on value. When I compare their experience to mine, most things make a lot of sense. That doesn't mean that I accept what I see there. Sometimes, I conclude that people are underdeveloped or sick or even evil. What "makes sense" in these cases is that I feel like I know what went wrong.

But before I touch on the contradictions, I need to expand on the overlap. The vast majority of what human beings seem to value corresponds perfectly with the numinous ultimate good that I see. The members of our species who have had their basic needs met, and have not been abused, and who have been socialized into functioning families and societies, clearly value many of the same things. They seek forms of love and beauty, aspire to justice, enjoy their freedom, seek truth and find meaning in it, and generally pursue spiritual transcendence in one way or another.

There are of course billions of versions of these things. But it's not hard to make out the common themes. If we limit our scope to cultures that exist now, the vast majority of what's different about other cultures feels to me like an alternative version of something of my own. If we expand our scope back into history, including eras when human minds were different from today, then the way that love, beauty, and so forth are expressed becomes more foreign. But even in ancient mythology, the basic themes of divinity as I know it are quite clear. If we imagine the collective culture of humanity for the last three or so thousand years as a gigantic map, my experience of divinity will serve me well as a legend. I expect that's because the members of our species are all very similar creatures, at least in any given era of evolution. Consider, for comparison, how colossally different the meaning of "value" would be for another form of life, like a tree or a scorpion.

But I also encounter what appear to be three kinds of contradiction between the numinous ultimate good as I know it and what other people believe. The mildest contradictions are like the following. I can see a clear parallel between the Hindu gods and goddesses and the sefirot of the kabbalah. But I won't import statues of God into my religious practice because the way the Hindus visually represent God is forbidden in Torah tradition. I imagine that these different ways of representing God reflect the inner logic of each religious tradition. While there are people that argue it, I'm not convinced that there is a moral or rational problem with either of these approaches. And so I see them as alternative paths to God. Mild contradictions like this one are local; they evaporate in the bigger picture. My response to them is respectful co-existence.

The next kind of contradiction doesn't evaporate. Here, something that somebody believes strikes me as a failure of rationality. Now, I admit that I cannot define "rationality". But here's the gist of what I mean: The world views that people hold always contain truth claims about the world. Sometimes these truth claims are false. World views that include many false truth claims are often characterized by underdeveloped ways of thinking. For example, sometimes people are unable to see past surfaces, cannot put themselves in somebody else's shoes, and so forth. Children at various stages exemplify these ways of thinking. When I call something a "failure of rationality", I mean childlike thinking and false claims about the world. Let's take an example.

The Nazis argued that various ethnicities were distinct races that did not share the qualities that necessitate respect for human dignity. For example, they argued that all Jews are disease ridden degenerates. These claims involve many things, but among them are false truth claims. While I don't know how to logically prove it, I think it's irrational to think that all Jews are those things. Furthermore, the thinking that characterized Nazi ideology was stereotypical, hysterical and demagogic. The Nazis' claims about their victims are an example of what I call failures of rationality.

While only a few are so destructive, I think that failures of rationality are extremely common everywhere. If we liken the evolution of human civilization to the development of an individual person, I would put us as a race towards the end of adolescence. In any case, billions of human beings have not had the opportunity to develop their critical and rational faculties. Partially as a result, global human culture is saturated with childlike thinking and fantastical truth claims.

In fact, I think conflicts about rationality are behind the third and harshest kind of contradiction that I find: between my sense of justice and that of other people. There are arenas in which I see criminal violations of humanity but some of the "criminals" honestly believe that they are doing justice. I think that the real conflict I have with these honest people is about truth, and not about justice. The world views that justify what I regard as violations of humanity are so deeply layered with childlike thinking and false truth claims that I cannot imagine what would be left of them if all that were removed.

For instance, I'm familiar with world views held by Jews and Arabs who justify criminal acts against each other. These are shot through with demonizing stereotypes and a childish inability to see their own contributions to the conflict. Is there, beneath all that, also a basic intuition about justice that is different from mine? Do they have some alternative version of what I called non-rational axiomatic knowledge? If they do, then I'm not sure how we can reach mutual understanding. I'll remain committed to divinity as I see it, of course. But I won't know how to respond to the conflict that's emerged. But as I said, I suspect that failures of rationality are the real cause of our disagreement. Or they at least play a prominent role. And therefore, my response is clear. In addition to whatever concrete action is necessary, I will seek mutual understanding based on the human potential for rationality that we all share.

And so the bottom line is that my commitment to look out at the world through the prism of divinity as revealed to me is not an obstacle to communication but the foundation for it. My subjective experience of value provides me with a basis upon which to understand other human beings. All the members of our species discover the meaning of their lives in the first person. Whenever we try to communicate, we have one eye on our own experience and one eye on the other person's. There's nothing about the move from first-person to third-person that gives me reason not to trust the numinous ultimate good that the All reveals to me. And so I return to the claim I made above: all the things I need to know in order to believe that divinity is real are given to me in my experience.

#### Conclusion

Divinity is a name for something that I experience. And what I experience is the world. And so the world is enchanted by the presence of divinity. Like the fairy dust in Peter Pan, it illuminates and animates everything it touches. This numinous ultimate good frames the faces and places that I love. It sanctifies my tradition and fills it with holiness. And divinity highlights the path to my higher self. The images of the God that I worship in Jewish prayer are constructed from the raw material of divinity. And for that reason, they really are God. But before we approach the movement from divinity to God, we'll consider in the next chapter how the Rambam's idea of intellect can be understood as a version of divinity as presented here.

### Chapter 5: Higher Humanity

####  Introduction

In the previous chapter, I tried to make clear what I mean by divinity. In this chapter, I'll focus on one particular quality of divinity. That quality is that you can have more or less divinity. If we live our lives in one way, we can have almost no divinity. If we live our lives in another way, we can be swimming in divinity. Since divinity is tied up with our bodies and minds, what we do with these determines how much divinity we have. Everything depends on how we live our lives as individuals, as peoples and as a species.

#### The tree of life and the tree of death

The way I understand what it means to have more or less divinity follows the Zohar and the Rambam. We'll start with a text from the Zohar. The following text talks about how the way we think – the way we use our minds - determines whether we cleave to the tree of life or cleave to the tree of death. In the context of this theology, I'm interpreting the Zohar like this: cleaving to the tree of life means having more divinity, and cleaving to the tree of death means having less divinity. Here's the text of the Zohar (I'll explain more about what I think it means below).

The Secrets of the Torah

Zohar Vayetsei (I:154b ST). See notes for details about this text.

Mishnah.

Children of the High One,

supernal holy ones,

blessed of the world,

the brain of the nut,

gather and know!

Behold! The bird descends every day, and is awakened in the garden. There is a flame of fire in her wings. In her talon, there are three rakes as sharp as swords. Keys to treasures are in her right talon.

She cries aloud, saying: Whoever among you has a shining face, that entered and exited and still grasped the tree of life; that reached its branches, grasped its roots, ate from its fruit - sweeter than honey, bringing life to his soul and healing to his body...

Be careful of wrong consciousness! Of consciousness that gives lie to the tree of life; that defiles the river and the spring, the source of "Israel"; that brings death to the soul and brokenness to the body, one cannot stand at all.

The consciousness that defiles one's source makes a false tree, because that consciousness rises up and trades one soul for another; the tree of life disappears and the tree of death clings to him, and his soul draws from there.

Woe to him that is uprooted by that consciousness from the tree of life, and cleaves to the tree of death! It has no branches; it never sees good; it is dry without moisture at all; its fruit is bitter as wormwood, about it is said, "For he shall be like the juniper tree in the desert, and shall not see when good comes" (Yirmeyah 17:6).

For right consciousness rises up on high, and grasps the tree of life; is strong in its branches; eats of its fruit; all holy things and all blessings flow from it. He inherits life for his soul and healing for his body. About him, it is said: "For he shall be like a tree planted by the waters, that spreads out its roots by the river..." (Ibid. 8)

Everything in the world follows thought and consciousness. About this, scripture says, "make yourselves holy, and you will be holy" (Vayikra 11:44); because all the kinds of holiness that exist in the world become manifest and are drawn forth by right consciousness.

Before I explain further about how I'm reading the above section from the Zohar, I want to introduce a short text by Abraham Maslow into the discussion:

Abraham Maslow on self actualizing people

Selection from "Deficiency motivation and growth motivation (1955). See notes for details about this text.

So far as motivational status is concerned, healthy people have sufficiently gratified their basic needs for safety, belongingness, love, respect and self-esteem so that they are motivated primarily by trends to self-actualization (defined as: ongoing actualization of potentials, capacities and talents; as fulfillment of "mission" - or call, fate, destiny, or vocation; as a fuller knowledge of, and acceptance of, the person's own intrinsic nature; as an unceasing trend toward unity, integration or synergy within the person).

These healthy people are there defined by describing their clinically observed characteristics. These are:

1. Superior perception of reality.

2. Increased acceptance of self, of others and of nature.

3. Increased spontaneity.

4. Increase in problem-centering.

5. Increased detachment and desire for privacy.

6. Increased autonomy, and resistance to enculturation.

7. Greater freshness of appreciation, and richness of emotional reaction.

8. Higher frequency of peak experiences.

9. Increased identification with the human species.

10. Changed (the clinician would say, improved) interpersonal relations.

11. More democratic character structure.

12. Greatly increased creativeness.

13. Certain changes in the value system.

In the above text, Maslow understands the meaning of psychological health in relation to something he calls self-actualization. I think that "self-actualization" basically means becoming a higher version of your self: depending on how you live, you can become different "versions" of you. What determines which versions of you are higher and which are lower? Maslow offers a list of thirteen qualities that distinguish "self-actualizing" people from others. In the terms of this theology, we can simply say that your higher self has more divinity. The version of you that manifests more of the numinous ultimate good (love, beauty, justice, truth, freedom and spirit) than you do now is your higher and more actualized self. Your higher self receives a more powerful flow of divinity that lifts you up, energizes you, and then flows into the world to nurture the creatures around you.

How do we become higher people? What facilitates this greater flow of divinity? Maslow holds that the purpose of psychology is to help us answer these questions. I think that religion, also, largely consists of technologies for working at this task. So we should expect psychology and religion to intersect sometimes. Maslow's idea of self-actualization, and the Zohar's idea of the tree of life, can be an example of such an intersection. The qualities that Maslow mentions above as distinguishing self-actualizing people seem like the kinds of qualities that strengthen the flow of divinity. In Toward a Psychology of Being, Maslow contrasts being motivated by self-actualization with being motivated by deficits. These are of course complicated subjects. And no one approach to psychology tells the whole story. But in spite of all that, his analysis feels right to me: when I feel a powerful flow of divinity, I'm more like the person that Maslow describes as self-actualizing. When that flow dries up, I find myself unproductively trying to make up for a lack of "basic needs for safety, belongingness, love, respect and self-esteem", just like he says.

With this as background, we'll move on to the Zohar. In short, when I live my life in such a way that I feel like I'm drawing closer to a higher self, or at least maintaining whatever height I've got, I'm "cleaving to the tree of life". But when the flow dries up, and I spin around myself trying to fill basic needs in self-destructive (rather than "self actualizing") ways, then I'm cleaving to the tree of death. I think we're always a little bit attached to both trees. The Torah aims our lives at cleaving more to the tree of life and less to the tree of death. Here's the text of the Zohar again:

Mishnah.

Children of the High One,

supernal holy ones,

blessed of the world,

the brain of the nut,

gather and know!

A common theme in the Zohar is that people are asleep. Surrounding us on all sides are immeasurable stores of divinity, and yet we often wander through life with our attention focused on trivial things. God is right in front of our faces, but we're too busy stuck in our day to day ruts to take any notice. But there are peak moments and even whole periods in our lives when we wake up to divinity and become higher people. In my own life, these are times well characterized by Maslow's thirteen qualities listed above.

In this state of higher consciousness, we are "children of the High One", "supernal holy ones", "blessed of the world" and "the brain of the nut". We enjoy the flow of divinity into ourselves and shower it upon those around us. The Zohar calls out to us and says, "gather and know!" because even though we have all tasted our higher selves, they are still very hard to hold onto. We are "the brain of the nut" only for awhile, and then we shrink and harden until we are again just a shell. The sages of the Mishnah, worried that we will doze off and shrink down again, want to make us aware of the ever-present danger.

Behold! The bird descends every day, and is awakened in the garden. There is a flame of fire in her wings. In her talon, there are three rakes as sharp as swords. Keys to treasures are in her right talon.

The bird here is commonly understood as the Shechinah: the imminent presence of God. In this context, I interpret the Shechinah (symbolized by the bird) to be the face of a divinity so great that we can only behold it inside our religious imaginations. The bird is higher than our higher selves; she represents an expression of the numinous ultimate good beyond what we think we could ever really attain. Following her call means seeking the tree of life and higher humanity.

The flame in her wings might symbolize danger, or perhaps vitality and passion. The rakes, sharp as swords, symbolize the attribute of strict-justice; The path to higher humanity requires law, might and courage. These are often symbolized in the Zohar by sharp weapons held in the left hand (as this bird holds her rakes in her left talon). In her right talon, she holds the keys to treasures. These treasures are the joy and deeper meaning that are actualized when we become our higher selves.

She cries aloud, saying: Whoever among you has a shining face, that entered and exited and still grasped the tree of life; that reached its branches, grasped its roots, ate from its fruit - sweeter than honey, bringing life to his soul and healing to his body...

Moses, the man of God, is a central Torah symbol of the realized human mind. When he came down from Sinai, his faced shined. So too, teaches the Zohar, our faces shine when we manifest divinity. The phrase "entered and exited" is a reference to the Talmud (Hagiga 14b) where four sages enter a mystical realm of knowledge but only one comes out whole; to have "entered and exited" means that we have encountered God and remained intact. When we are our higher selves, we draw closer to God without being burned. At these times, the energizing and uplifting flow of the numinous ultimate good illuminates our lives and the world. We grasp onto the tree of life and enjoy its fruits – sweeter than honey. I think all of us have experienced the life-giving and healing power that is released when we loose ourselves in higher pursuits like meditating, grasping deep meaning, seeking justice and creating art. This is Maslow's path of self-actualization to the tree of life.

Be careful of wrong consciousness! Of consciousness that gives lie to the tree of life; that defiles the river and the spring, the source of "Israel"; that brings death to the soul and brokenness to the body, one cannot stand at all.

"Wrong consciousness" leads away from divinity. "Right consciousness" leads towards it. One of my favorite personifications of right and wrong consciousness is Lucy and Edmund who each enter Narnia through the back of the wardrobe. Lucy is filled with excitement and interest about Narnia, and immediately forms loving relationships with the creatures she meets. She leads the four children to Aslan, the great lion, who is Christ for C. S. Lewis (the author of the Narnia series). Unlike Lucy, Edmund stumbles into Narnia thinking bitter thoughts about being slighted by his siblings. Absorbed in anxiety and sterile competitiveness, he barely notices Narnia before he finds himself addicted to the Turkish Delight pushed upon him by the evil witch queen. While the other children are making friends with talking animals, Edmund slips off to betray them all to the dark side.

So we have Christ as a lion and the Shechinah as a bird. The lion and the bird can be approached as symbols for the highest humanity that we can imagine – higher than our higher selves - the image of a humanity that is all divinity. We can't really be as great as that; pure divinity can be seen only in our religious imaginations and it is reserved for our images of God. And that pure divinity calls out to us in the Zohar in the shape of the bird and warns us not to drown our fears in Edmund's Turkish Delight: "Be careful of wrong consciousness!"

The "river" and the "spring" are the flow of divinity into humanity. To "defile" them is to close them down through states of consciousness that are "self-destructive", that is, that distance us from our higher selves. The river and spring flowing with divinity are the "source of Israel" because Israel is a name for Jacob who in the Zohar is the Complete Man, the realized one, ie. another symbol for highest humanity. (In the second book of this theology, "What does it mean to say that the Torah is the Word of God?", we'll see that the symbol called "Jacob" in the Zohar is also called the "Word of God".) In this sense, "Israel" in the world is parallel to the lion in Narnia and to the bird in the garden. Israel is nourished and expanded by the flow of divinity. It languishes when the river and the spring are stopped up. The bird calls to us down here in the world from up there in the garden: grasp the tree of life! Nourish and expand higher humanity!

The consciousness that defiles one's source makes a false tree, because that consciousness rises up and trades one soul for another; the tree of life disappears and the tree of death clings to him, and his soul draws from there.

"His soul draws from there": the dynamic of wrong consciousness becomes a habit, almost a way of life. But it's a tiring life of anxiously and unproductively trying to fill one's deficits in things like love and self-esteem while being strung out on Turkish Delight!

Woe to him that is uprooted by that consciousness from the tree of life, and cleaves to the tree of death! It has no branches; it never sees good; it is dry without moisture at all; its fruit is bitter as wormwood, about it is said, "For he shall be like the juniper tree in the desert, and shall not see when good comes" (Yirmeyah 17:6).

For right consciousness rises up on high, and grasps the tree of life; is strong in its branches; eats of its fruit; all holy things and all blessings flow from it. He inherits life for his soul and healing for his body. About him, it is said: "For he shall be like a tree planted by the waters, that spreads out its roots by the river..." (Ibid. 8)

"All holy things and all blessings flow from it": everything we recognize as holy and a blessing is part of the numinous ultimate good that we know. Divinity is bigger than we are, we are not its owners, but it is given to us to partially know and to cultivate.

Everything in the world follows thought and consciousness. About this, scripture says, "make yourselves holy, and you will be holy" (Vayikra 11:44); because all the kinds of holiness that exist in the world become manifest and are drawn forth by right consciousness.

"Everything in the world follows thought and consciousness": this returns us not only to the power of right consciousness but also to the significance of our pictures of the world. How we think about the world determines to a large extend what kind of world we live in. "Make yourselves holy, and you will be holy": like the bird, you hold the keys to treasures in your right hand (but watch out for the fire on your back!).

#### The Torah path to higher humanity

The central point above is that we can have more or less divinity in our lives. When we have more, we realize our higher selves. When we have less, we are lower sorts of creatures. The Zohar said that the flow of divinity is dependent on our state of consciousness. But how can we control which state of consciousness we have? We can't just up and change our state of consciousness whenever we want. What we think about today reflects what we think about in general. And what we think about in general reflects who we are and what kind of cultural and political reality we live in. In keeping with the Rambam, I approach the Torah as a path for choreographing our individual and collective lives in order to increase the amount of divinity. In this section, we'll follow the Rambam as he lays these ideas out.

#### The Torah path to higher humanity for the individual and the community

Selection from the Guide 3:51.

See notes for details about this text.

A call to attention!

I have shown you that the intellect [divinity] that flows from God unto us is the link that joins us to God.

I've added the word "divinity" in brackets after Rambam's "intellect". What Rambam means by intellect is not what I mean by divinity. However, in the context of this theology, I will read "divinity" every time the Rambam says "intellect"; that is, when the Rambam says "intellect", I'll read him as if he said "divinity" in the sense that I mean it. I know that this may seem strange. I'm reading the Rambam this way for a few reasons.

First, the purpose of my study of the Rambam is not to remain faithful to his ideas as he understood them but rather to draw closer to God. The goal is more divinity, not historical accuracy. In this text, the Rambam lays out a meditative approach to living Torah that I find powerful. If I limited myself to his idea of intellect, it would be hard for me to use his method. It would be hard because I don't believe in intellect as he understood it. Also, I'm not attracted to it. However, when I plug-in divinity instead of intellect, his method speaks to me a lot.

Now, reading the Rambam like this only works because there are some very important similarities between what he means by intellect and what I mean by divinity. You might say that the difference between the two concepts is essentially that divinity includes six categories of value (love, justice, beauty, truth, freedom and spirit) and intellect includes only one: truth. The Rambam values truth, in a rigorous rational and scientific sense, above all things. He holds that truth is ultimate value. And for him like in this theology, ultimate value is what we can know of God.

In fact, my definition of divinity as the numinous ultimate good is an attempt to reformulate the Rambam in terms that I find compelling. He holds that intellect (which is the essence of truth) is ultimate value and thus the revelation of God that teaches us how to live our lives. I hold that divinity is ultimate value and thus the revelation of God that teaches us how to live our lives. In both cases, our experience of ultimate value constitutes revelation. What I've done is to replace his idea of what ultimate value is with my idea of what it is. The ideas of value are different. But the theological logic, that our experience of ultimate value reveals what we can know of God, is the same.

The Rambam says that intellect/divinity "flows from God unto us [and] is the link that joins us to God." This might sound confusing since divinity _is_ God. But God is not only divinity, God is also the All. Divinity "flows from God" because all things flow from God as the All. And divinity "is the link that joins us to God" because it is through our experience of divinity that God reveals to us the meaning of our lives. That is, I'm interpreting "our link to God" as the most important way that we connect to God. We always connect to God as the All, even when we're dead (because our bodies are part of the All). But this may not always feel significant (particularly, if we're dead!). It is God as divinity that fills the world with meaning, and thus divinity is our most important link to God. (For details about how my approach here is different from the Rambam's, see the notes).

You have it in your power to strengthen that bond [to God through intellect/divinity], if you choose to do so, or to weaken it gradually, till it breaks, if you prefer this. It will only become strong when you employ it in the love of God, and seek that love: it will be weakened when you direct your thoughts to other things.

As the Zohar taught above, how much divinity flows into our lives is determined by what we do with our minds and bodies. The Rambam says that we must employ our link to God "in the love of God" if we want to strengthen that link. This goes back to the tree of life and the tree of death. If I organize my life around achieving the goals that I perceive as most important, those serving the numinous ultimate good, I feel uplifted and close to God. When I let my life dilapidate into chasing after this or that narcissistic goal, I feel lost in irritating insignificance. It's not enough to experience that things are good; I need to direct my mind toward appreciating and pursuing the numinous ultimate good as my higher purpose. This is what I understand the Rambam to mean when he says that our link to God becomes stronger when we "employ it in the love of God". When the link is strong, I feel uplifted and close to God; I cleave to the tree of life.

You must know that even if you were the wisest man in respect to the true knowledge of God, you break the bond between you and God whenever you turn entirely your thoughts to the necessary food or any necessary business; you are then not with God, and She is not with you: for that relation between you and She is actually interrupted in those moments. The pious were therefore particular to restrict the time in which they could not meditate upon the name of God, and cautioned others about it, saying, "Let not your minds be vacant from reflections upon God." In the same sense did David say, "I have set the Lord always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved" (Ps. xvi. 8); i.e., I do not turn my thoughts away from God; S/He is like my right hand, which I do not forget even for a moment on account of the ease of its motions, and therefore I shall not be moved, I shall not fail.

Rambam says that the pious made an effort to "meditate upon the name of God". What does it mean to meditate on the name of God? There are many types of Jewish meditation and prayer. Each one of these cultivates a different kind of religious consciousness. But I think that there's something in common to all of them. They all direct our minds beyond the self centered verbal banter that often captivates our attention. I don't know about you, but sadly my head is often filled with what sounds like an endless low quality radio talk show whose unwavering subject matter is...me. "What do we think of Shaiya today and is he really getting what he wants!?"

Sometimes, while I'm engaging in some actually valuable pursuit, a little advertisement pops up at the bottom of my mind's screen and says, "Tune in! Shaiya's really doing great right now!", seducing me to check out the show. But when I do, I find myself arguing with some Fox-news level pundit trashing me, and I furiously argue with him (furious, because he's partly right). Caught in the act (again!), I ask myself (again!): how could this narcissistic garbage have seemed more interesting than what I was doing before? But it's a fact: "Fox radio Shaiya" gets terrific ratings in my brain. And the more I tune in, the greyer the world seems, and the farther away the tree of life grows.

So meditation or prayer means, for me, directing my mind past the self-centered banter. But directing the mind to what? Again, there are countless different approaches to prayer and meditation. And I don't claim deep knowledge of any of them. But it seems to me that whenever I'm praying or meditating, and it works, my mind is directed in one of two directions. The easier direction to describe is toward some symbol of the numinous ultimate good. There are many names of God, for instance, and in the Zohar these may be understood as symbols of divinity (more on that in the chapters to come). At these times, my attention is given to the beauty of beauty, the goodness of love, the command of justice and so forth, not in reference to how they fill my wants, but in reference to how they reveal the glory of God. The prayer book is a central tool for sending my mind in this direction (that is, when praying from it doesn't degenerate into something like reading the phonebook).

The second direction is away from language. In a sense, this direction is no direction: I might focus on what I see when I close my eyes, or what I see when I open them. Or listen to sounds. Or just feel sensations. What matters here is to let the words that constantly run through my head run out, and not to replace them (including words like "wow! I'm free of verbal thoughts right now!"). I think that when I let go of the words, I let go of part of my conscious self, too. In any case, if I manage to let go of language, I often feel an extremely physical rush, like being thrown into deep water. After the rush there is a quiet that can be blissful. This state of consciousness feels so distinct that I think of it as a place. And due to how it feels, and what it does, it is a holy place. I'm not always able, though, to leave my verbal thoughts behind. The paths to this place seem to shift and sometimes disappear.

It seems straight forward to me why the first direction draws me closer to God. Here, my mind transcends the idiot banter and focuses on divinity for its own sake. Below, the Rambam will describe the state of consciousness involved in prayer as "communion with God". Since focusing the mind on divinity is connecting to God, "communion" seems like a good word for expressing this connection. The second direction, away from language, is more enigmatic in my eyes. I've read a fair number of metaphysical descriptions, mystical accounts and even scientific studies as to what happens in meditation. But at least at this stage, I have no clear idea of where "I go" when I enter that space. It's not clear to me why I'm necessarily closer to God there than if somebody hits me over the head with a log.

But I can't argue with the facts. In the holy place beyond words, the presence of the numinous ultimate good is simply more powerful. I don't know why. Maybe from the outside it can be measured in brain waves. And maybe from the inside this "inner witnessing" is closer to the absolute mind of the universe, like I've heard said. In any case, the place is saturated with divinity. And the longer I spend there, unplugged, the longer it takes afterwards for the I-me-my blather to reach full volume. Eventually, it still does. But I dream of a time when I'll use all the energy that I've got for more important things, and there just won't be enough juice left over for the endless talk radio show.

I've learned through experience that these technologies of cleaving to God, through symbols of divinity and through leaving language behind in order to go...somewhere else...lead me towards who I want to be. That surprises the cynic in me, really, because that's exactly what religion promises that these things will do. None the less, as I've mentioned before, it has not been my experience that religious people in general are higher kinds of people. Nor are they lower. Maybe humanity and its culture are just too complicated for simple patterns such as these. But I know that the technologies of religion work when I struggle hard and do them right. And so I believe that through focusing our minds on God, like the Rambam says, we can transcend some of our limitations and draw closer to our higher selves. We'll say more about how this might be done in the context of Jewish prayer in the next chapter.

Now, the Rambam says above that when we're not focused on God, our connection to God is actually interrupted. I'm not sure I would go that far. But it is true that when I find myself stuck in the dynamic of the tree of death, even love and beauty and justice can seem meaningless to me. At these times, it feels almost like there is no ultimate good and thus no divinity. In this sense, my connection to God is interrupted at these times. But that's still different from the Rambam, who seems to see only our time meditating on God as really time with God. In my thinking, I'm especially close to God at these times, but I see nothing exclusive about that. I can also be close to God, if I can manage my mind correctly, when my conscious self is focused on other things. I'll return to this point when interpreting the Rambam's ladder of Jewish mindfulness, below.

Know that that all religious acts such as reading the Law, praying, and the performance of other commandments, serve exclusively as the means of causing us to occupy and fill our mind with the commandments of God, and free it from worldly business; for we are thus, as it were, in communication with God, and undisturbed by any other thing. If we, however, pray with the motion of our lips, and our face toward the wall, but at the same time think of our business; if we read the Law with our tongue, whilst our heart is occupied with the building of our house, and we do not think of what we are reading; if we perform the commandments only with our limbs, we are like those who are engaged in digging in the ground, or hewing wood in the forest, without reflecting on the nature of those acts, or by whom they are commanded, or what is their object. We must not imagine that [in this way] we attain the highest perfection; on the contrary, we are then like those in reference to whom Scripture says, "You are near in their mouth, and far from their insides" (Jer. xii. 2)

The Rambam couldn't be clearer: the purpose of all Jewish ritual practice is to direct our minds to God. Torah life is about transforming our consciousness so that we become higher kinds of human beings that experience more divinity. And we do this by cultivating communion with God by focusing on God in love.

I will now commence to show you the way how to educate and train yourselves in order to attain that great perfection.

[1] The first thing you must do is this: Turn your thoughts away from everything while you read Shema or during the Tefillah, and do not content yourself with being devout when you read the first verse of Shema, or the first blessing of the prayer.

In order to fulfill the Jewish religious obligation of saying "Shma Yisrael", you only need to pay full attention to what you're saying for the first line. For "the prayer", which is also called the Amidah, you need to pay full attention for the first blessing (called the blessing of the ancestors). What does it mean to "pay full attention"? I think that for the Rambam in this context, paying full attention means at least focusing on the commandment at hand and not on lesser things, and at most, filling the mind with God through "meditating on the name" or in some other way. The goal is to enter an alternative state of consciousness in which your mind is more focused on God than it normally is.

So according to the Rambam, the commandments are a spiritual discipline. Doing Jewish rituals is not only about fulfilling obligations (if you believe that you are obligated) but about investing in a project. Prayer and ritual are meant to construct higher states of consciousness in which what is important feels important, what is not important, like narcissistic talk radio, just slips away.

[2] When you have successfully practiced this for many years, try in reading the Law or listening to it, to have all your heart and all your thought occupied with understanding what you read or hear.

Rambam is demanding mindfulness. And at first glance, it appears that he's starting modestly. "Just pay attention for more than the bare minimum" is what he asked for above. And now, all he asks is that when you're learning Torah, you focus your mind - really focus - on the Torah. That seems minimal. And easy enough. Until you try! Then you find, if you're like me, that it's not easy at all. In fact there's nothing harder than directing the mind.

[3] After some time when you have mastered this, accustom yourself to have your mind free from all other thoughts when you read any portion of the other books of the prophets, or when you say any blessing; and to have your attention directed exclusively to the perception and the understanding of what you utter. When you have succeeded in properly performing these acts of divine service, and you have your thought, during their performance, entirely abstracted from worldly affairs, take then care that your thought be not disturbed by thinking of your wants or of superfluous things.

In short, think of worldly matters when you eat, drink, bathe, talk with your spouse and little children, or when you converse with other people. These times, which are frequent and long, I think must suffice to you for reflecting on everything that is necessary as regards business, household, and health. But when you are engaged in the performance of religious duties, have your mind exclusively directed to what you are doing.

When, however, you are alone by yourself, when you are awake on your couch, be careful to meditate in such precious moments on nothing but the intellectual worship of God, viz., to approach Her and to minister before Her in the true manner which I have described to you--not in hollow emotions. This I consider as the highest perfection wise people can attain by the above training.

I think that in this section, the Rambam describes the state of mind of a person who fully lives out the logic of Torah life. He describes three states of consciousness. These are the three states of consciousness cultivated by such a person. There seems to be a clear hierarchy of value between these states for the Rambam. They are all necessary for normal people, but each one is closer to God than the previous. Exceptional people, like Moses, Aharon and Miriam, as well as the patriarchs and the matriarchs, spend all their time in the third and highest state of consciousness (as the Rambam will explain below).

Here are the three states of consciousness:

A: Focusing on day-to-day business while taking care of it.

B: Focusing on the content of religious observance while doing it.

C: Communing with God in an altered state of consciousness (which he calls "intellectual worship" and "approaching and ministering before Her").

The first thing I notice about this list is that it doesn't include "tuning into talk radio All About Me". The Rambam's regime of Torah consciousness assumes that we already have a handle on protecting our minds from self-destructive preoccupations. (" _Self_ destructive", that is, destructive to our attempt to become higher selves). He assumes that we're already making a careful effort, for instance, not to spend our energies on rehearsing angry or competitive dialogs between ourselves and other people; or on anxiously day dreaming about the future; or on reliving past hurts and slights; or on obsessing about getting things that, even if we were to get them, would not give us the satisfaction that we seek; or on time consuming activities whose sole attraction for us is that they shield us from anxiety producing thoughts; or on many other self-destructive things.

In short, the Rambam is assuming that we are already consciously working on mindfulness: we're struggling to learn how to direct our minds to higher things. Becoming able to focus on God at least for the first couple of verses in the Shma, or the first couple of blessings in the Amidah, is training for this kind of mindfulness. When we try to focus for all three paragraphs of Kiryat Shma, we exercise the muscles-of-the-mind needed to turn our mind away from that which does not deserve our attention and towards God. This active self-aware mindfulness is the foundation for all three of the states of consciousness that characterize the realized Torah Jew that the Rambam is describing.

And then, with however much of our energies we've managed to free up from self-destructive pursuits, the Rambam says we should focus on three things: a) getting necessary stuff done, b) focusing on God through religious practice, c) communing with God through an altered state of consciousness. I don't know exactly how the Rambam thought about these three states of consciousness, but they make good sense to me in light of my own experience:

State of consciousness A is pretty straight forward: I think of it as just living our lives, and pursuing our goals, in a positive and constructive state of mind. I think of state of consciousness B as what I called "directing the mind towards symbols of the numinous ultimate good", above. And I think of state C as directing my mind to the holy place that opens up beyond words. These three states, particularly B and C, can overlap. In fact, I think that whenever I'm powerfully feeling religious ritual (state of consciousness B), I'm borrowing some of the qualities that I find in the non-verbal holy place (state of consciousness C). Ultimately, I'd like to feel the B&C combo even while I'm going about my business in state of consciousness A. The Rambam takes that direction, of mixing states B and C together and feeling them even while doing A, to its logical extreme in his vision of the fully realized mind:

[4] And there may be a human individual who, through her apprehension of the true realities and her joy in what she has apprehended, achieves a state that while speaking with others, or attending to her bodily wants, her mind is all that time with God so that her heart is constantly near God, even whilst her body is in the society of people; in the way poetically described in the following words: "I sleep, but my heart waketh: it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh" (Song v. 2): then she has attained not the height of ordinary prophets, but of Moses, our Teacher, of whom Scripture relates: "And Moses alone shall come near before the Lord" (Ex 24:2)...

But a person like myself must not imagine that he is able to lead people to this degree of perfection [level 4]. It is only the next degree to it that can be attained by means of the above-mentioned training [level 3, with states of consciousness A, B and C, described above]. And let us pray to God and beseech Her that S/He clear and remove from our way everything that forms an obstruction and a partition between us and Her, although most of these obstacles are our own creation, as has several times been shown in this treatise: "Your iniquities have separated between you and your God" (Isa. 59:2)

I don't completely identify with the ideal that the Rambam lays out here. First, in this piece I can feel some of the tension between the Rambam's idea of ultimate value and mine. His highest value is meditating on rigorous forms of rational truth, and so interacting with other people, even one's spouse and children, can be an obstacle. I value love and the pleasures that come with it, alongside beauty and freedom and so forth, no less than truth. So not only are other people not an obstacle on the path to God for me, often they are the path. In comparison to Rambam's disciplined and (I think) somewhat narrow commitment to Truth with a capital T, my theory of value is closer to a mystically oriented ethical hedonism! I'm sure he wouldn't like it. While in many places, I can still follow his lead on the logic of Jewish practice by inserting my idea of value instead of his, there are places where my theology doesn't quite fit into his mold. The way he downplays the religious significance of speaking to one's spouse and children is one of those places.

But even if the Rambam's idea of ultimate value was a perfect fit for me, I'm still not sure I identify with the fourth and highest level of consciousness as he lays it out. Maybe it's just too much: I also want to waste time sometimes, and do playful and stupid things. Maybe I'm afraid that if I reached level four, I wouldn't recognize myself, and thus a part of me (that I like) would be dead. Luckily, I'm in no danger of finding myself on level four. Just like he says, level three is the highest I can even imagine, and I'm no where near that now. If I interpret level three in light of my own idea of divinity, and tweak the regimen in the direction of love and pleasure (in the spirit of the Zohar) and less in the direction of truth and discipline (in the spirit of the Rambam), the way the Rambam lays out the third level of higher-self-actualization through Torah makes a lot of sense to me. In fact, I use it as a sort of regulatory ideal.

#### From person to politics

The basic point of this chapter so far has been the idea that we can have more or less divinity in our lives. Having more divinity means having deeper and more positively meaningful lives. It means more fully realizing our potential to manifest things like love, beauty, justice, freedom, truth and spirit. In this light, we interpreted the tree of life and the tree of death in the Zohar, together with Maslow's idea of self-actualization, and the Rambam's ideals of mindfulness and meditation. My discussion has been more like a sketch than a blueprint. But I hope it gets across what I mean when I say that the Torah offers a path to higher humanity.

I called the section above "the Torah path to higher humanity for the individual and the _community_ ". By "community" I mean the people we regularly interact with in our personal lives: family, friends, members of synagogues, the people we work with, the people involved in our schools, and so forth. Everything about our individual lives is tied up with this community, and so I grouped the individual and the community together in the title. The above discussion of Torah consciousness is mostly focused on the individual, though. This emphasis follows the Rambam. I'd be interested in developing a parallel sketch of how community life should be structured to foster higher humanity, but I don't have one yet. So I'll skip to the next level up: the peoples and the species.

#### The Torah path to higher humanity for peoples and for the species

Just as the individual is embedded in her community, so too, the community is lodged inside larger collectives, like peoples or nations, and ultimately, in the human species as a whole. Each level, from the personal to the global, is tied to the others. Achieving higher humanity on any level involves achieving it on all the other levels. It can of course be uneven. But people can't become the highest thing that they can be while their communities and nations are all screwed up. And larger collectives cannot reach as high as they could if many of the individuals who make them up are broken and lost. I imagine that each level - individual, community, people, species - reveals a different face of higher humanity. But, ultimately, they're all tied together.

Today, as a species, we are in a reality of destruction and exile. Millions of human beings suffer and die due to poverty, oppression and exploitation. Criminals lord over vast populations. Fantastic wealth, together with control of the world's resources, are concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority while countless others perish from starvation and preventable illness. If global humanity evolves to even a minimal decency, our era will be remembered perhaps as a time of new beginnings, but as a stage in the pre-history of real civilization; a time in which the global order of the human race was still essentially dysfunctional and barbaric; an international order of apathy, selfishness and cruelty in the face of unfathomable human suffering. As long as humanity is so desperately wounded and divided, we cannot even begin to imagine what heights a higher humanity could achieve. The human potential to manifest divinity - the numinous ultimate good - has hardly begun to be explored.

And so commitment to divinity means commitment to establishing a global regime for the protection and nurturing of human beings. For the individual, the path to higher humanity involves health, psychology and (for some people) religious practice. For the nation and the species, the path to higher humanity involves politics, economics and law. There can be no a-political commitment to God. Commitment to divinity means _protecting humanity_ , that is, protecting human beings from the hands of those who would butcher or oppress them and from the staggering injustice of mass poverty. And commitment to divinity means _nurturing humanity_ , that is, investing in higher culture so as to help people realize more fully their potential to embody the numinous ultimate good. Protecting and nurturing human beings is not just a moral obligation, it is the only path to increasing the amount of divinity in the world.

In Part III of this theology, which I plan to call "Israel and Humanity", I hope to address the politics of divinity in some detail. In the meantime, I'll introduce how the Rambam interprets the Torah as the path to higher humanity for peoples and for the human species as a whole.

The Guide to the Perplexed, Part III, Ch. 27

See notes for details about this text.

THE general object of the Torah is twofold: the well-being of the soul and the well-being of the body.

For the Rambam, the well-being of the body and soul of humanity is the technology through which humanity can realize its highest goal: to flood the world with divinity. But like any technology, it only works if you get it right. The Rambam's approach to getting it right is explicitly political, rational and utilitarian. We can fill the world with God only if we protect and nurture human beings. The human species must adopt the political, legal and economic arrangements necessary to guarantee the well-being of the body and the well-being of the soul of every human being. Only then can we realize the divine potential of our species.

While here the Rambam is talking about the Torah as the constitution of Israel, his vision is explicitly universal. The faculties that enable us to realize our highest purpose, to know God, are shared by all humans. Achieving the well-being of the body and soul is the task set by God for every human individual and for the species as a whole. The Torah is a particular path to achieve that universally human goal. While the Torah as the constitution of Israel will give a unique character to Jewish autonomy, it aims at the same time for a global regime that will provide for the body and soul of every person on the planet. The Rambam teaches that it is the Messiah or Anointed King who will establish this global regime. But while "the Messiah" has supernatural connotations for many religious thinkers, I think that for the Rambam, the Messiah is the symbol of political power in the service of the ultimate political good. The ultimate political good is protecting and nurturing all human beings so that they can embody more ultimate value.

The rational and utilitarian nature of Rambam's thought here is of great importance. The Rambam asks, "Given everything we know through science and philosophy, how can we realistically put an end to our present barbaric state? What political, legal and economic structures are available to protect and nurture human life?" These are not secular questions for him but rather the heart of the Torah path to divinity.

The Rambam's own answers, in the context of his twelfth century world, involve an extremely unattractive monarchic theocracy. I think that his political ideals might not be so different from the ideals of people who really believe in political systems like those in Saudia Arabia or Iran (as opposed to people who just use these regimes to enrich themselves). If I entered a time machine and went to the ideal state as the Rambam imagined it, and then advocated for my idea of human rights there, I would most likely be arrested (but not tortured), tried (by independent and fair judges), and then executed (by sword as promulgated by the Sages).

However, the Rambam's own question "how can we realistically achieve the well-being of the body and soul of humanity", must be answered anew in each generation, in light of what science and philosophy can tell at that time. I have no expertise in these fields and thus cannot really answer such a question. But I'll happily share my amateur opinion with you, none the less: human rights and the international rule of law are the only way. For the foreseeable future, nation-states will wield most real power over most people. And perhaps there's some good in that, because these states (sometimes) allow different cultures to seek higher humanity in their own ways. But all states must use their power to protect and nurture human beings. We must prevent the butchering and starvation of humanity through enforcing international standards and through guaranteeing that the necessary resources to eradicate mass poverty are provided by the forces that control them.

Those committed to divinity must participate in the politics of their own home nation-states in order to direct the power they wield towards these goals. And we must build international standards, and the pressure to keep them, through global civil society (like Human Rights Watch), legal institutions (like the International Criminal Court and regional human rights courts), trade agreements (like those established by the EU), trade unions (like the WFTU), and the various forms of state-to-state peer pressure. And in spite of its many failings, we must improve and strengthen the United Nations, too.

The central political praxis of divinity must be abolishing the present barbaric world order. Humanity cannot realize her divine potential while she is violated and starved. This is the first step of the Rambam's two step path to world redemption: the well-being of the body of humanity. The second step goes on forever. Its meaning will evolve together with the human species. It is the well-being of the soul of humanity. And it is accomplished by ever greater investment in education, science, philosophy, religion, art and all the other forms of higher culture. This investment is the praxis of divinity because it is the cultural forms of higher humanity that turn our minds to God.

The well-being of the soul is promoted by teaching truths to the masses to the best of their abilities. Some of these truths are therefore imparted in a plain form, others allegorically, because most people can't grasp the truth itself.

The Rambam sees truth as ultimate value, and thus teaching the truth is the path to knowledge of God. Since not everybody can understand the rigorous scientific and philosophical kind of truth that the Rambam values most highly, he says that the divine truths must also be taught through allegories that the masses of people can grasp. This reflects his rational and utilitarian approach: he wants to know how we can effectively realize the potential of each human mind to know God. This is the ultimate goal for the social sciences and humanities.

The well-being of the body is established by proper relations between human beings. This we attain in two ways: First by removing all oppression and exploitation from our midst: that is to say, that we do not do every one as he pleases, desires, and is able to do; but every one of us does that which contributes towards the common welfare. Second, by teaching every one of us such good morals as must produce a good social state. [...]

The Rambam's regime for bodily well-being includes not only protection from criminal activity, but also fostering solidarity and moral commitment through education and culture. Below he adds to the well-being of the body things that today are called social and economic rights, such as food, housing, hygiene and so forth.

For it has already been found that humanity has a double perfection: the first perfection is that of the body, and the second perfection is that of the soul. The first consists in being healthy; in the best possible physical condition. This is only possible when the necessary conditions [for dignified human life] are met as they arise, like food and everything else needed for the body, such as housing, hygiene, and so forth. But one person alone cannot procure this at all; it is impossible for a single person to obtain [what's necessary] except through political organization, since humanity, as is well known, is political by nature. The second perfection of humanity consists in realizing the human potential to know God...

It is clear that the second and superior kind of perfection can only be attained when the first perfection has been acquired; for a person that is suffering from great hunger, thirst, heat, or cold, cannot grasp an idea even if communicated by others, much less can she arrive at it by her own reasoning. But when a person is in possession of the first perfection, then she may possibly acquire the second perfection, which is undoubtedly of a superior kind, and is alone the source of eternal life.

... **Scripture clearly mentions the twofold perfection, and tells us that its acquisition is the object of all the divine commandments...**

I'll conclude this chapter on higher humanity with the vision of redemption presented by the Rambam at the very end of his monumental work of Jewish law, the Mishneh Torah:

Mishneh Torah (Sefer Shoftim, Hilchot Melachim, Chapter 12)

See notes for details about this text.

Halacha 4

**The Sages and the prophets did not yearn for the days of the Messiah to have dominion over the world, or rule over the gentiles, or be exalted by the nations, or to eat, drink, and celebrate. Rather, they desired to be free to devote themselves to Torah and her wisdom, with no one to oppress or disturb them, so that they would merit the world to come, as explained in** _Hilchot Teshuvah_ **.**

In the Rambam's writings, the "world to come" and "eternal life" (that he mentions above in connection with the perfection of the soul) mean a whole complex of things. One thing that they signify is the altered state of consciousness labeled "level 4" above. Level 4 was the total identification of the human mind with divinity, so that one becomes like Moses and Miriam: in communion with God at all times. This is the Rambam's ideal of radical enlightenment.

Halacha 5

In that era, there will be neither famine nor war, neither jealousy nor strife. Blessings will be abundant, comforts within the reach of all. The one preoccupation of the whole world will be to know God. Thus they will become greatly wise, and will know hidden and deep matters; grasping the knowledge of their Creator to the utmost capacity of the human mind, as it is written, (Isaiah 11:9), "[They will not hurt nor destroy in all My holy mountain] for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea."

#### Conclusion

This chapter has been about increasing the amount of divinity in the world. Given that divinity is everything that's most important and meaningful in life, increasing divinity is naturally the highest aspiration. We saw that the Torah serves as a path to increasing divinity. It offers technologies, for the individual and the community, and for the nation and the species, for becoming a higher humanity more saturated with divinity. The Torah is one particular way to do the most important and universally human task: to strive for more love, justice, beauty, freedom, truth and spirit.

### Chapter 6: God as Person

#### From divinity to God

In the previous chapters, we've explored the idea of divinity. But what we've seen isn't enough to make sense of "God" as S/he appears in the Bible and prayer book. Divinity is scattered throughout all of human life so it doesn't have a shape of its own. God as a character in Jewish sacred literature does often have a shape: the just and loving Person. I've said a number of times that the image of God is constructed from the raw material of divinity. In this chapter, I hope to explain how that works.

But first, a comment on the gender of God. Since God involves the image of a Person, it matters what Her gender is. Personally, it's much easier for me to connect with a Goddess than with a God. It feels natural for me to seek Her presence. Vis-à-vis a male God, I'm more likely to seek an argument. Of course, it's true that God is revealed in different genders, roles and images, as the Zohar makes clear. But it makes an important psychological difference which ones we use when. I'll use the feminine when referring to God because it is most powerful for me. I hope, though, that if thinking of God as male works better for you, you'll reverse the pronouns in your head.

The short answer to the question, "how do you get from divinity to God", is that "God" is a way of picturing divinity. Divinity, like the world, is too big for us to see all at once. When we try to get a handle on things that are too big for us to see, we create symbolic pictures of them in our minds. For example, I can't see all of Israel at once. But I can form a mental picture of the country. My picture is a sort of map with images of people and places. In fact, it's a little like Google Earth. I call this picture "symbolic" because the details that make it up are signs that refer to things other than themselves. So there is an image of a secular looking crowd where Tel Aviv would go on the map, and that image represents all the myriad things in Tel Aviv. The symbol that my mind uses (the secular crowd) is simple compared to the actual memories I have of Tel Aviv, and these in their turn are no more than an impressionistic sketch compared to the vastness of everything that's actually in the city. Symbols are like pictures in that they express much more than you could say in words. And they are like caricatures in that they powerfully express certain qualities that they exaggerate while ignoring many other qualities of that to which they refer.

Similarly, when I imagined the tapestry of value in Chapter 3, the image in my mind was a symbolic map of numinous goodness. In the tapestry, faces of people that I love symbolized the way that love in countless contexts makes my life meaningful. The image of God is also a symbolic map. It's a way of seeing divinity even though divinity is too big to see. Symbolic maps are true but partial. They reveal true things about what we're trying to see. But we could always imagine a different symbolic map that would reveal other true things.

The truth is that everything in the world is too big for us to see. We don't pay attention to every aspect of anything, but only to the things that matter to us. If we paid attention to all the details that we can see, everything would be useless. I don't use up my attention on every color and texture of my printer, for instance, but only on the parts that matter: where the paper goes, where the button is, and so forth. It's only because I ignore so much about it that it's a "printer" at all. For a small child, it is a toy with many moving parts (a fact to which my partially maimed printer can testify!). For an ant, it's not a separate object but a mountain-like rise in the topography of this region. All of the things we see in the world are half symbols: we work with images that focus on what interests us. None of the things in our world are simply there.

This is a very important but counter intuitive truth. We're accustomed to thinking that the world really is the way we picture it. And it is, partially. I think that if you really understand and internalize to what extent everything we see is mediated by symbols, you'll come to think differently about what's real and what's not. My printer is real to me, but it is not a printer for the ant. To a very large extent, we live in the world constructed by the symbols that we use to navigate it. And therefore, to argue that "God" is a symbolic picture of divinity is not to argue that God is not real. If you train your mind to access divinity through that shape, then God is real. As real, in fact, as the objects that surround you. Many of the objects surrounding me right now are books. Is God as real as these books? Absolutely! In order to get at this, let's try the following thought exercise.

Imagine that you are in the beit midrash (study hall) of the Conservative Yeshiva in Jerusalem. Next to you sits a termite. Let's compare what you see to what the termite sees.

What would you see in the beit midrash? You would see people, tables, chairs and most importantly, books! You would see hundreds of sacred books, organized by subject, containing thousands of years of spiritual practice, legal reasoning, and other holy pursuits.

And what would the termite "see"? Really, I have no idea. But let's pretend he can "see" the books. But of course, he doesn't see books. He sees...meals. For the termite, there are no "books". And for us, the books are real.

In order to make this analogy fit a little better, let's pretend that we're dealing with intelligent alien termites. These termites are smarter than human beings. They communicate, and transmit their culture from generation to generation, through a sophisticated musical language played through tapping their legs as they march around and munch. Termite communication consists of tap-dances played by a group of termites like a symphony. The symphony usually contains a story or a legal code. Just 100 termites produce a symphony of such complexity that no human composer could rival it, and termites routinely tap in thousands.

But termites never use typographical symbols of any kind. Really, these are unthinkable; information is transmitted only through tap-dance. Termite scientists can grasp the significance of typographical symbols for humans. But the way we commit our most hallowed masterpieces to decomposing foodstuffs strikes them as comical and bizarre. Tap-dance encodes much greater sums of information than contained in all the human texts ever written, and it is transmitted flawlessly over eons. In their visceral day to day experience, "books" will never be anything but lunch. The typographical symbols on the page are to them as significant as the patterns in the dust on the floor of your storage space.

Now, what exactly is the difference between you and the termites? You both agree that there is something there on the shelf. You interpret it as "books" and the termite as "dinner". Neither of you just up and fabricated the existence of the something on the shelf. But to be fair to the termites, "books" are a complex symbol found in codes read by your operating-system software (MS Homo Sapiens XP), not the termites'. The meaning of "books" is dependent on lots of other things that are foreign to termites: typographical symbols, human language, being able to hold a book in you hands, and so on.

Everything about us is mediated by symbols like these. Even our identity, the way that we think of ourselves as individual human beings, is a symbolic construction. In the operation of our minds, we have a symbol called "I" that represents ourselves. What if the symbol for "I" in the termite mind didn't refer to one bug body but rather to a thousand termites together? Or to a lineage of termites? Or to a part in a tap-dance symphony? What if the termite had no symbol at all that referred only to "him"? What a different world he/they would live in! Let's say that when a given million termites said "I", they all meant a part in the symphony. Would that music then be alive? Would we say that it lives through the termites like we live through our cells? Would we say that the song has a body and feelings? Different creatures (and different people) are interested in different aspects of the world, and they connect the dots between things in different ways. The things you care about, and the way you connect the dots between them, draw the picture of the world in which you live.

Given all this, what is real about the book? We've seen that the book is not simply a book any more than my printer is simply a printer. There's stuff there, but it could be seen as food and not literature. It could be seen as a mountain and not a separate object. When I look at the shelf and see a book, I'm using a symbolic picture, a short cut, to organize reality. Bookness only involves a tiny percentage of the actual qualities of what's on the shelf. These are the qualities that interest me, so it's as if they're all that's there. I perceive the world through symbolically schematizing it. There _is_ a book on the shelf, but it is half fact and half symbol. If my brain did not mediate the world through symbolic pictures, everything would be a chaotic useless meaningless mess.

Let's take one more example. When I think of a person, I think of her face. It's like the whole personality of a person can be "seen" in the space between forehead and chin! In fact, who a person is unfolds over millions of actions in decades of time. Behind the eyes, there is no empty space for spirit as we imagine, rather her whole head is filled with blood and scary looking organs. What makes a person a person is the way the nervous system is wired, and how their blood is pumped, and the layers and layers of informational processes going on in their brain. But I can't and don't want to see all that. I take one look at her face, half fact and half symbol, and I know something true and real about who she is.

Now let's compare the analogy of the termite with the question of God's existence. I connect the dots so that God exists, the atheist connects the dots differently and so there is no God. But in the debate between you and the termite, you both agreed that there was something on the shelf. What's the something on the shelf vis-à-vis God? What do the atheist and I both see but interpret differently?

What we both see is that love is good, justice commanding, beauty beautiful, that our dignity depends on our freedom, that the meaning of our lives involves seeking a true perspective on the whole, and that we seek spiritual transcendence. We also share the experience of the numinous: there are many things in our lives marked by mystery, infinity, power and awe. How can I be so sure that the atheist experiences those things too? I believe that all human beings do, unless they are badly damaged. In any case, I've never met a person who appeared normally socialized and who did not seem to experience some version of these things.

Now, I interpret these experiences to be divinity. But I can't see divinity all at once; it's too big. And so I use a symbolic picture of divinity, a short cut, to stand in for divinity like a face stands in for a person. I organize the categories of divinity around the form of a just and loving Other. Divinity itself is composed of billions of experiences embedded in everything I've ever done. I can't see all that, and if I could, it would be chaos. But my brain is terrific at organizing such things into symbolic pictures to which I relate in a meaningful way. These are the "things" that populate my world. Just as the book really is a book and behind the face there is a person, God too is real. "Real", that is to say: half fact and half symbol.

How does the atheist interpret his experience of value so that it does not result in God? That depends on the atheist. Generally, though, secularists part ways with me already vis-à-vis the ultimate good. They approach their experience of value from a third person perspective and say "all this is just the way my mammal brain has been programmed. Who says that love is really good and that justice is really binding?" They say that the All is value free, and their own value commitments are arbitrary and subjective.

Now, there's no truth claim here that I reject. It's a matter of perspective. I do think, though, that the atheist (as defined here) falls into a performative contradiction: he does one thing and says another. All normal decent people live as if value is real. Their lives reflect their commitment to the goodness of love, the authority of justice and so forth. They only void the reality of these things when it comes to philosophy. Here, rather than recognize their experience of the good as the anchor of their world, they fish about for some other anchor in logic or in science. They live as if the good that they know first person is the most important thing but when they construct their picture of the world they leave it out. It is a strange choice, in my opinion, to define the terms that you use to reflect on your picture of the world (words like "real") in such a way as to void the reality of everything that is most important in your life.

I presented my approach in Chapter 4. In a nutshell, I treat the goodness of love, the authority of justice, the beauty of beauty and so forth _as facts_. It's clear to me that these experiences are the product of the evolution of my species. But once I look through the window of the mind and see the numinous ultimate good, my commitment to it has nothing to do with the technology making the window possible. If I can see my boy on Skype, what difference does it make whether the internet connection runs through Paris or Singapore? Must the plastic screen solute before I know that I love the boy behind that face? I don't need anything scientific or logical to be true in order to recognize divinity. I just have to take my most basic first person experiences at face value. Things that are not "real" are "no thing", and thus cannot affect the world. Divinity is the most powerful thing that I know and it therefore can only be "real".

So God is true and real for people who access divinity through Her image. Perhaps the central logic of Torah life is seeking to live in the presence of God. Our daily religious practice revolves around reciting Her words to us and our words to Her. Our days and our weeks, our life cycles and our family life, are all choreographed around the epic holy story of exile and redemption, intimacy and alienation, involving God and Her People Israel.

This choreography can be understood as a method for constructing the minds of human beings who are able to feel God's presence. It's a program for forming people who interpret their world and their selves in light of God. This has nothing to do with "faith" in the sense of believing in something without rational foundation. I have no use for such faith, although I see that it can be deeply meaningful for other people. What I mean by God is an interpretation of the world that I experience, not a belief in the existence of something of which I have no experience. But in order to experience God, I need to think about the world in a particular way. The Torah organizes my mind so that I can see that She is there.

Why is it so important that S/he be there? The point of focusing on God is to become more like Her. By cleaving to divinity, I possess and am possessed by the numinous ultimate good. Now, I don't find that as a rule religious people, Jewish or otherwise, are more like God than atheists. I do find, however, that when I more powerfully experience God's presence, I tend to be a person I have more respect for: more loving and generous, less angry, more patient and less frustrated. I am most like God when I feel Her presence.

I think I've reached the limit of what I can say in abstraction about how God emerges from divinity. I'll pick up this discussion again after considering a concrete example.

#### The God of King David

It is roughly three thousand years ago, and David ben Yishai, the King of Unified Israel, has gathered his subjects together in ancient Jerusalem. (For my purposes, it makes no difference if this is history or sacred myth.) I imagine him in a high grassy area framed with stone structures overlooking the rocky and steep Nachal Kidron. At this ceremony, in addition to anointing Shlomo, David will present his son with the plans God revealed to him for the Temple (1Chr29:12,19) and with the tremendous wealth of materials he collected for this purpose.

David gathers all the noblemen and priests, dignitaries and generals and so forth. I imagine that the scribes and prophets were also there. Standing around David was thus the Israelite religious, priestly and literary intelligentsia; people whose inner life was responsible for much the Bible. Maybe a thousand of them were there that day. David blesses and addresses God in front of the congregation (1Chr29:10-19):

10 **Wherefore David blessed Y-H-V-H before all the congregation:**

and David said, Blessed be you Y-H-V-H God of Israel our father, for ever and ever.

11 **Yours, Y-H-V-H, is the greatness (gedulah), and the might (gevurah), and the majesty/beauty (tiferet), and the victory/brilliance (netsach), and the splendor/glory (hod): for all (kol) that is in the heaven and [all] in the earth [is yours]; yours is the kingdom, Y-H-V-H, and you are exalted as head above all.**

12 **Both riches and honor come of you, and you reign over all; and in your hand is power and might; and in your hand it is to make great, and to give strength to all.** 13 **Now therefore, our God, we thank you, and praise your glorious name.**

14 **But who am I, and what is my people, that we have power to offer so willingly? for all things come of you and of your own have we given you.** 15 **For we are strangers before you, and sojourners, as were all our fathers: our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding.** 16 **Y-H-V-H our God, all this store that we have prepared to build you a house for your holy name comes of your hand, and is all your own.**

"And David blessed God before all the congregation, and David said blessed be You Y-H-V-H..." David speaks to God and calls Him "You". I imagine that he powerfully felt and meant what he said, and so did the congregation around him. Which way did David face when he said "You"? Did he look up, stretching his hands to the sky? Or perhaps he closed his eyes and faced inside?

When I speak to "you", I need to mentally face toward you. And that means I need to have something to face; a face-e, as it were. If there is no image or presence of any kind associated with "you", then I don't think that I can speak _to_ you. I believe that David felt some presence that served as his face-e when he turned to God and said "You". And so too for all those ancient Israelites, in their sandals and robes with kafiyot or big kippot or turbans or other shmatas on their heads; they must have _faced something_. How did they see or feel God's presence?

Let's see what we can learn from what David says. He describes attributes of God one by one: greatness (gedulah), might (gevurah), majesty/beauty (tiferet), victory/brilliance (netsach) and splendor/glory (hod). It's pretty clear that these are human attributes. And so I expect that these biblical folk imagined some vaguely human presence or form. Perhaps the image of God sitting on the throne from Isaiah 6:1 flashed before their eyes. Maybe it was the "human appearance" on the chariot in Ezeqiel 1:26. Or the fiery white haired old man in Daniel 7:9. Or maybe there was no visual image but just a feeling of presence. They could feel that the divine speaker behind all those prophetic visions was near.

Whatever they saw or felt, I believe that it was woven from their life experiences. Perhaps when David said "beauty" he saw a flash of Batsheva. Or maybe just the imprint of his response to her beauty flickered in his mind. And maybe when he said "might", he saw Jonathan in battle. I'm sure that traces of swords and battles flickered inside when he said "glory" and "victory". Only the most powerfully charged images that David knew could produce the power of religious experience that I believe he had. To feel the love and awe of God through evoking Her human-like attributes, David and the Israelites must have gathered the most significant _greatness_ and _might_ and _beauty_ and _majesty_ and _victory_ and _brilliance_ and _splendor_ and _glory_ that they had ever known. Woven from symbolic traces of the people, places and things that they loved and feared most of all, the divine face-e of the Israelites would have been majestic indeed.

Weaving wisps of memory into the image of God might sound like a lot of work. But the Israelites didn't start from scratch every time they felt God's presence. They were trained by their biblical culture in the discipline of experiencing divinity as God. When David called out God's attributes before the congregation, these were already vested with the energy and color and texture of the most powerful experiences of value that these ancient people knew. Their prayers and their imaginations, their stories and their politics and their self-understandings, and their truest sense of the real world, were all wrapped-around and built-upon the felt presence of S/he who all those attributes describe; S/he who spoke and the world came into being.

#### God as Person

The God of the prayer book

What King David and the Israelites did we are meant to do when we pray. Let's consider the way the image of God in the prayer book can evoke an experience of divinity in the one who prays. You could say that when the prayer picks up the prayer book, she's faced with two sets of symbols of divinity. One set is in the book. This consists of an elaborate and extremely beautiful portrait of the God of Israel. The portrait is woven from holy _names_ like Elokim and Y-H-V-H (each name with its own rich associations); _events_ like creation, redemption, revelation, exile and return; _words_ like "let there be light" and "where is your brother?" and "I am the God of your fathers"; _images_ like the parting of the sea, the burning mountain, the tribulations of the desert; _attributes_ like loving, just, beautiful and compassionate (and jealous and wrathful); _ideals_ like equity and faithfulness; and _symbols_ for divine presence like fire, voice, wind, cloud, the human shape hovering over the throne in the sky and the mighty warrior lifting up the downtrodden. The prayer book consists of thousands of symbols, drawn from the great sea of Jewish intertextuality, and woven into a magnificent portrait of God.

The other set of symbols is the prayer's personal experience. Examples of these are the six categories of ultimate value and the images, events and ideas that embody them in the prayer's life. In order for the prayer book to do its work, the one who prays has to integrate these two sets of symbols. When King David said "majesty", he felt something very powerful. The word majesty was for him both a symbol of God and personally very important. Only when the two sets of symbols are intertwined can the image of God in the book become Her true presence. That's why I believe that when David evoked the divine-human image of God before the congregation, in his bio-CPU there were wisps of reference to the data in his memory that encoded Jonathan and Batsheva.

#### The ontology of God

"Ontology" is the philosophy of being. I'm using it as a name for questions like "what's really here?" and "what are these things ultimately made of?" In discussing the ontology of divinity in Chapter 3, I argued that divinity is actually present when I experience it. That's because divinity is a name for the dance of information, matter and energy that occurs in my brain when I experience the numinous ultimate good. My experience is the place that divinity exists. Since my experience is of the world, divinity is in the world. It is not only present but it enchants it and fills it with meaning.

The ontology of the image of God is the same as divinity. In fact, whenever divinity is present, it is through a symbolic picture. My mind is too weak to access divinity except through one symbol or another. I only have so much working memory. In chapter 3, I described beholding my wife's face as a peak moment of experiencing divinity. In that example, her face was such a symbolic picture. But always in every case, my experience of divinity is mediated through symbols.

In my experience, divinity and its symbolic forms cannot be divided. The contents of a film were, once upon a time, contained in many tiny images in a chain. Divinity is like that too only it comes not only in images, but also in tastes and feelings and units of time. Whenever I experience the numinous ultimate good, some event or image acts as a symbol. These direct my bio-CPU to patterns of information in which I behold the good and the beautiful. My experience of divinity is a combination of the things themselves (like my wife's face) and the meanings that they symbolize.

Standing before God as Person in prayer is an imaginative exercise in which I seek to evoke an experience of divinity. If I do, then S/he is really there. It's true that God could also have taken the form of a tree or a river. Jewish sacred literature is filled with such images. But each symbolic picture reveals divinity from a different angle. God as Person reveals one true face of divinity, and thus one true face of the All. In Her presence, I feel qualities of divinity that otherwise I can't access. Evoking in your mind the image of God as Person is a sacred technology passed down from those ancient Israelites: it opens the door to faces of divinity that otherwise would remain locked away.

#### Images of God

So, God as Person is revealed to me through a constellation of symbols drawn from Jewish tradition and integrated with my own experience of divinity. When I direct my religious imagination to Her in order to experience Her presence, I gather symbols laden with feeling from every corner of the great bio-digital-library housed in my brain. Every once in a while, I'm blessed with a peak moment in prayer like the peak moment of seeing my wife's face that I described in Chapter 3. These are moments in which it feels like everything that matters has been referenced, and I can feel the weight of love, justice, beauty etc. as if they were all right here.

Sometimes during the Amidah prayer, I'll imagine that standing in front of me is the Goddess of Israel. I can't quite see Her but I can sense Her shape and presence: Her hair, the outline of Her figure, the hint of Her eyes. I feel the presence of a mysterious force in the vague shape of a woman who bears all the beauty and the goodness and the truth that I can imagine being in the presence of. The grandeur and elegance of the words of Shma Yisrael are Hers, and the prayer of the Amidah are my response. She stands before me and I dress Her in holy words: God of Avraham, God of Yitschak and God of Yaakov; Her right arm of loving-kindness, Her left arm of strict-justice, Her chest of compassion and majesty.

In these moments I can sense the presence of S/he who speaks the world into being; S/he who bears the memory of all that's been said between Israel and God, of all that's transpired, from Moshe's intimate meetings and confrontations to David's wars and inner struggles; through exile from the land and return and exile and return again; and through the fault lines and inspiration of my own life history. Her presence arises from the words of the Amidah, from their shape and sound and meanings, and in turn Her presence releases powers locked in those ancient words: salvation, holiness, wisdom, wholeness, forgiveness, redemption, healing, blessing, ingathering, justice, victory over evil, return to Jerusalem, and many more words; words that reach up towards a higher self and a higher Israel and humanity; words of possessing and being possessed by the divine.

At other times, Her image emerges from the shape of the Land. I'll imagine the sacred space of the beit midrash, crowned by books with silver and gold in their bindings, expanding out into the holy city, then into the fields and forests and other cities of the Land of Israel all around; She is a great energy emerging from the soil in an almost human form; She is animated by the spirit of countless living souls in the patterns of their lives; She rises up from the Land with its flesh and its struggle and its story; a Land whose very hills and valleys are symbols for divinity like Narnia or the Garden of Eden. The sacred words tell Her story and cast Her presence. She is the woman of the Song of Songs; one of Her steps a hundred years of Jewish lives; She lived the many centuries of life and war, civilization and chaos, in which were born bible and talmud, midrash and zohar; Her inner life is intermingled with ours; Her thoughts and feelings revealed in streams of psukim and parashot, sugiyot and maamarim; Her spirit bound to the living flesh of Her People Israel.

In all these symbolic pictures - my wife's face, beauty, the call of justice, the Goddess of the Amidah, the Goddess of the Land - divinity is revealed to me. Can I measure and compare divinity? I think the answer is yes: the more deeply I experience the presence of divinity, the more that it is there. But it would be easy to make a mistake here: divinity is not measured in units of emotion. Words like "enthralled" that I use to describe divinity include a powerful emotional element. And divinity is all about emotion. But it is not reducible to emotion. So a quieter less passionate experience of divinity might be deeper than an emotional one. I have no measuring stick. But I think it's clear that there are lesser and greater revelations that I've had.

At the same time, each revelation of divinity is unique. Each reveals some particular face of the meaning of humanity. The unique face of each revelation is embodied in the particular experience that that revelation was. Everything about the experience is part of its meaning. When the Goddess of the Land, for instance, arises from the earth, S/he contains in Herself everything that the earth contains. I don't actually hear all the sounds or smell all the smells, but they are all referenced. And therefore, Her meaning in the theatre of my mind includes those sounds and smells. And Her meaning involves also all the physical sensations, images, words and ideas that Her presence invokes in me. Each revelation of God is a work of art produced by the mind.

The mind as artist, "bringing God to a theatre in you", has at its disposal everything that consciousness can offer: it does not and should not limit itself to any one department. It uses color, sound and sensation. It can use real memory, or make up its own. Your Brain Film Productions has all the best virtual reality technology: " _From the people who brought you, The Real World, comes a block buster prequel: The Holy One Blessed Be She!'_ Each experience reveals a unique face of God. Everything in that experience is part of what it means. What makes all of these experiences revelations of divinity is that in them I experience the numinous ultimate good. There are no limits on what that experience can contain: divinity can be truly revealed to me in anything that I can think or feel.

#### Does God have a mind?

I've been exploring God as Person. But is God really a person? Does God have a mind?

The first thing we need to understand in order to answer this question is that the brain can produce selves. What is a self? In chapter 3, I imagined that a self is what it feels like to be a bio-CPU from the inside. But at this stage, I need to change a little bit the way that I'm imagining the self. In his book, I Am a Strange Loop, the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter describes the self as a magnificent spiraling constellation of self-referencing information (a strange loop). As we grow and internalize new things, our selves expand in depth and complexity. He also argues that our brains can house more than one self. The fact that I can fight with my wife even when she's not there suggests that he's right. My internal version of her can even surprise me. How is that possible? The brain is simply capable of housing more than one magnificent spiraling constellation of self-referencing information. In certain disorders, it's not clear which one is in charge.

But healthy people house many selves, too. I think of these constellations as a little like computer programs. Running on your brain is a program that constitutes you. I can install a light version of your program onto my brain and carry you around. As I get to know you better, the version of you in me gets more robust. It seems likely to me that we use the versions we have of each other to communicate. When I perceive the others closest to me, I make use of the version of them that's in me. What I see is again half fact and half symbol.

Once I've accepted that my brain can house multiple selves, I need to adjust my model of the human bio-robo-computer. My experience is not the inside of a physical CPU but the inside of a virtual one. Have you ever used a virtual CD drive? Let's say you have a program that only works when a CD is in your CD drive. There are programs that can pretend that they are a CD drive with a CD inside so well as to trick your CD dependent program. The qualities of being a physical CD Drive are reproduced in the patterns of information contained in the tricky software. In order to make room for the other selves housed in my brain, I'll imagine my self as what it feels like to be a virtual CPU. My brain is the actual hardware CPU, and it can run many virtual CPU's inside it.

Bio-robo-computers or not, I believe that Hofstadter is right that we contain multiple selves. The brain is capable of constructing and housing personalities. And so it is also capable of supplying God as Person, a symbolic picture of divinity, with real personality. That's what I believe is happening when I feel God's presence. I feel the presence of an Other because She is there. When the prophets heard God speaking to them, S/he was. I think that the biblical prophets had extremely robust "selves of God" software running on their brains. Since their minds were artistic geniuses raised in a culture of prophecy, in them S/he became a full fledged personal self with no holds barred. While infinitely less impressive, I think that the technology making Her presence possible for me is basically the same. Her mind awakening in us is the same as what we are: a science experiment come alive.

So I can truly encounter God's personality in my mind. The ability of the brain to produce selves is one of the technologies available to the Your Brain Film Productions crew. Personal presence, like images and sensations and all the other symbols of the numinous good, are inseparable from divinity itself. Every aspect of each revelation of divinity is part of what that revelation means. God's real personality, courtesy of my brain, is a symbol embodying and revealing divinity like the holy names and biblical images. Each symbol encodes unique meaning for humanity. The personal presence of God housed in my brain is a key unlocking truth about value that would otherwise be sealed away. The inter-subjective place where I meets I, where our identities are born, is forever the root of what matters most to human beings. Thus, prophetic tradition teaches that when you want to contact God, it is wise to do it personally.

#### Conclusion

The bottom line of all this is that before you are two sets of symbols. One set consists of the symbols portraying God as found in Jewish inter-textuality (or in whatever tradition of God that you're into). The other set consists of your experience of the numinous ultimate good. If you've already invested in religion, then these two sets partially overlap. In order to experience God, you need to weave those symbols into a rendition of God and then to direct your mind to them in prayer or meditation. The point of this Chapter is that when you do that, what you see is really God. She's there, She can be personal, and She is the face of the All that reveals to you the meaning and purpose of your life. If you cleave to Her, She will raise you up in transcendence, expanding your mind and energizing you to seek the good.

And on Her shoulders are drawn markings like the branches of the Tree of Life, to mark that She is the Tree of Life, as is written (Proverbs 3:18) "She is a tree of life for those who grasp Her, and those that support Her find happiness." From Her right, the Written Torah is given, and from Her left, the Oral Torah. Where are they given? At two tablets, about them it is written (Song of Songs 4:5), "Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle".

(Tikkunei Zohar 6 - the tikkunim at the end of the book. God is in the feminine in the original.)

### Chapter 7: Shechinah

#### Falling in love with God

And the word of the LORD came to me, saying: Go, and cry in the ears of Jerusalem, saying: Thus saith the LORD: I remember for thee the affection of thy youth, the love of thine betrothal; how thou wentest after Me in the wilderness, in a land that was not sown. (Jer. 2:1-2)

The prophet Jeremiah interprets the relationship between God and Israel as a marriage, what was to become a dominate metaphor through which Jews understand their connection to God. Throughout biblical and rabbinic literature, God and Israel are two lovers struggling for intimacy in spite of the obstacles dividing between them. The covenant at Sinai has been understood as the moment when God betrothed us as a nation to be His bride. Perhaps the prophet is thinking of Sinai when he says "the love of thine betrothal" which was followed by the wandering after God "in the wilderness, in a land that was not sown".

But how does one fall in love with God? We generally fall in love with other human beings and usually with people with whom we share culture. So how does one _fall in love_ with the creator of the world? Was it the rhythm of the shaking of Mount Sinai? Or the way the mountain burned and smoked? These things seem too foreign, to other worldly, too _non-human,_ to fall in love with.

Perhaps we need to consider a distinction, common in many streams of Jewish tradition, between God as radically Other and transcendent and another more immanent aspect of God often called the "Shechinah". The root of this word is shin kaf nun which means "to dwell". Already in Rabbinic literature, the "presence" of God is called the Shechinah. The distinction between the transcendent vs. the immanent aspect of God may illuminate a difficult episode in Exodus.

The Holy Story tells that after God and Israel were united at Sinai Israel sinned through the golden calf. God's response has something of the betrayed and angry Middle Eastern husband in it when He suggests that the time has come to kill off the entire people of Israel (save Moses himself, Exodus 32:10). That's not surprising given that the Biblical punishment both for idolatry (the simple meaning of the golden calf) and for adultery (the metaphorical meaning) is death. Moses insists that if God wants to kill Israel, He must kill Moses, also; and so God recants (ibid. 32:32). God and Moses then renegotiate the ground rules for the Creator – Israel relationship. There will be a mechanism (the thirteen attributes of God's mercy) for working it so that the Jews will survive afer they sin and be able to make repentance (ibid. 34:6-9).

Now, in the middle of all this drama a struggle takes place between God and Moses. After God agrees to let the Jews live, He announces that He'll send an angel to live among them, rather than Himself, because His own presence is too dangerous: "and I will send an angel before thee...for I will not go up in the midst of thee, for thou art a stiffnecked people: lest I consume thee on the way" (ibid. 32:2-4). The people immediately mourn this terrible news, but Moses takes a more active position. Check out this interaction:

[Moses:] Now therefore, I pray thee, if I have found favour in thy sight, show me now thy way, that I may know thee, that I may find favour in thy sight, and consider that this nation is thy people.

[God:] And He said, My presence shall go with thee, and I will give thee rest.

[Moses:] And he said to Him, If thy presence go not with me, carry us not up from here. For in what shall it be known here that I and thy people have found favour in thy sight? is it not in that thou goest with us? so shall we be differentiated, I and thy people, from all the people that are upon the face of the earth. (ibid. 33:13-16).

One reading of these difficult passages is that Moses and God are hashing out God's statement that He would no longer dwell among Israel but rather would send an angel. And Moses says: "if thy presence go not with me, carry us not up from here". From the context, going "up from here" means going to the Promised Land. Moses is saying, "if You God will not be immanently present, dwelling among the People Israel, then I quit!" Or, in the marital terms of Jeremiah, "either You, oh All Powerful One, live with me at home, or I divorce You! I won't remain in a estranged relationship."

Scripture is distinguishing between two aspects of God. There's God the creator and God as a presence among the People. God can be removed or immanently dwelling among His People. Its intuitive to identify this indwelling aspect of God with the rabbinic Shechinah. If so, it seems that the presence of the Shechinah is critical to our 'marriage' with God: Moses will rejecting the covenant with God if God removes the Shechinah. Perhaps it was with the Shechinah that we really fell in love.

And so how was it possible to love something as _Other_ as God? It turns out that we fell in love with the aspect of God closest to ourselves. The Shechinah is so close to us, in fact, that the Rabbis teach that when the People of Israel go into exile, the Shechinah goes with them. The Zohar takes it further: the Shechinah is the name for the divine aspect of the Jewish People. In the Zohar, both we and the transcendent aspect of God fell in love with the Shechinah. For God, She represents Israel. For Israel, She represents God. She is where Israel and God meet. And we could never have fallen in love with God without Her.

Did we fall in love with ourselves? In a sense, yes. We share love with others, but others who are closely related to ourselves. This is a limitation, but it is a human limitation that characterizes something fundamental about the way human beings work. We fell in love with an aspect of God closely related to us. And thus we can recognize in the Shechinah something that we strive to become; to assimilate our real selves to Her higher reflection of what, if we were more perfect, we might resemble. From here we can understand the commandment of hidamut laShem or imitating God. We'll return to this later. First, we'll try to get a better sense of what the Shechinah looks like.

#### The Shechinah: the Face of God Emerging from the Sacrificial System

The Body of the Shechinah

In Rabbi Yehudah Halevi's book, The Kuzari, The King of the Kuzars asks the Rabbi for an explanation of God's speech, appearing in the holy writings, where She says things like "My fires", "My bread" and "My sacrifices". God eats bread and meat!? One might have expected the Rabbi to explain that these are metaphors for the masses and that God transcends all need for food and drink. But such a philosophical answer will not suffice for this Rabbi, the fruit of R .Yehudah Halevi's imagination. His answer as will surprise those raised on Maimonidean rationalism. The Rabbi lays out how She is manifest in the material world.

The Kuzari 2:25-30

(trans. based on Hartwig Hirschfeld at www.sacred-texts.com)

25. Al Khazari: Enough on this subject. Now I should like an explanation of what I read about the sacrifices. Reason cannot accept such expressions as: My offering, My bread for My sacrifices made by fire, 'for a sweet savour unto Me' (Num. xxviii. 2), employed in connexion with the sacrifices, describing them as being God's offering, bread, and incense.

26. The Rabbi: The expression: _By My fires_ removes all difficulty. It states that offering, bread and sweet savour, which are ascribed to Me, in reality belong to My fires, i.e. to the fire which was kindled at God's behest, and fed by the offerings. The remaining pieces were food for the priests. The deeper signification of this was to create a well arranged system, upon which the King should rest in a qualitative, but not local sense.

As a symbol of the Divine Influence, consider the reasoning soul that dwells in the perishable body. If its physical and nobler faculties are properly distributed and arranged, raising it high above the animal world, then it is a worthy dwelling for King Reason, who will guide and direct it, and remain with it as long as the harmony is undisturbed. As soon, however, as this is impaired, he departs from it.

A fool may imagine that Reason requires food, drink, and scents, because he sees himself preserved as long as these are forthcoming, but would perish if deprived of them _._ This is not the case ... [the body] is so arranged and prepared, as to become fit to receive the guidance of the reasoning soul, which is an independent substance, and nearly approaches the angelic, of which it is stated: 'Its dwelling is not with flesh' (Dan. ii. 11). It inhabits the body as ruler and guide, not in the sense of space, nor does it partake of this food, because it is exalted above it. [...]

[The Rabbi offers a detailed account of how the various aspects of the tabernacle were parallel to the parts of the body. Just as consciousness emerges in a healthy body, so too, the Shechinah emerges in the healthy "body" of the tabernacle. The text is too detailed to quote in full, but here's a chart that sums it up:]

First, the Rabbi explains that the point of the sacrificial system "was to create a well arranged system, upon which the King should rest in a qualitative, but not local sense". That is, God will rest in the "well arranged system" of the sacrifices. It is the Shechinah, or the immanent aspect of God, that will do the resting. But it will be done in an "qualitative" but not a "local" sense. What might this mean? One way to understand this distinction is between matter, which is either here or there, and information, which can be present in many places at once.

Let's take an example of information: 2+2=4. I call this equation "information" because it tells us something but it is not a physical thing. For instance: I'm thinking "2+2=4" and I imagine that you are, too. If so, the equation is two places at once: in your head and in my head. Matter isn't supposed to do that: it is either here or there. So 2+2 is not materially local to my head or yours. But 2+2=4 _is_ in my head, because I'm thinking it, and all my thoughts are in my head. In what sense is 2+2=4 "in my head"? I think this is what it means to rest in a qualitative but not local sense. Similarly, the Shechinah rests in a qualitative but not a local sense in the well-arranged system of the sacrifices.

The Rabbi compares the way that Shechinah rests in the sacrificial system by drawing a parallel to the way that Reason dwells in the body. Rabbi Yehudah Halevi probably has in mind a Medieval idea of reason as a planetary broadcast of truth that human beings can receive like radios receive radio signals. However, for our purposes, I'll read "reason" as a name for what we mean by words like "inner life", "mind" and "consciousness". What I mean by these words is the total of what we experience insider our head: all of our thoughts, emotions and so forth. Certainly, thinking "2+2=4" would be included here. So the Shechinah rests in the well arranged system of the sacrifices like consciousness rests in the healthy body.

Just as mind becomes manifest in the body, so too the Shechinah becomes manifest in the sacrificial system in the Mishkan (the tabernacle in the desert) _._ In fact, he's quite explicit in describing the sacrificial system as a body. It sounds very much like the Shechinah and the Mishkan together form a mind and body like a human being; a living consciousness and the biological vessel that houses that consciousness.

The heart of the Shechinah's body is the Ark and Keruvim (the two winged figures that stand facing each other on the cover of the Ark of the Covenant). This heart is the center of the body and its principle of organization. The other processes alive in the Mishkan work around this life-giving center. The tents and posts of the tabernacle are the skin and bones of the Shechinah. The alters and candelabrum, where sacrifices and oils are received by fire, are Her digestive organs, receiving food and producing blood. These produce three kinds of fire: the revealed fire of the outer alter where meat sacrifices are received, producing food for the body; the fine fire of the golden alter inside the Holy Place where spices are received, producing nobler sustenance for the heart; and the illuminating fire emerging from the candelabra, also inside the Holy Place, where oil is received, producing the light of wisdom.

The priests and prophets who frequent the tabernacle are the head of the Shechinah's body: the priests are Torah wisdom while the prophets are divine secrets. The Levites are the arms and legs that moved the Mishkan through the desert as the Children of Israel made their way from Egypt to the Promised Land. Just as blood flows from place to place inside a living human body, giving life and enabling consciousness, so too Priests, Prophets and Levites flow through the Mishkan, establishing the well arranged system in which the divine consciousness emerges and dwells. In the same way, consciousness becomes manifest in a human being when all the parts and processes of her "well arranged order" are functional. Both consciousness and the Shechinah are non-material entities that are present in a qualitative but not a local sense in appropriate bodies. If the bodies are destroyed, they depart.

For this reason, one might say that she eats "for consciousness". But it is not consciousness that eats, but rather the body eats, and the body's health makes consciousness possible. Let's take again the example of 2+2=4. A person may think 2+2=4 only as long as she sustains the life of her body by eating. If she does not eat, she will cease to think 2+2=4. But this equation will not be lost from the world just from this particular body. God also doesn't eat. If the sacrificial system is disrupted, God will still exist. But She won't be manifest in the form of the Shechinah which dwells in the sacrificial system. And thus, God calls the meats and breads of the sacrifice "Mine", for they make the Mishkan capable of being a resting place for God's presence.

Now, for R. Yehudah Halevi, the sacrificial system is the center of a larger organism called Israel. After the unique initial period of the Miskan in the desert, the sacrifices move to the Temple of Jerusalem at the center of the People living in the Land according to the Law. I'll call this the "fullness of Israel" or "Israel X 3": People, Torah, Land. Even while the Ark of the Covenant and the Keruvim are the heart of the sacrificial system, the sacrificial system itself is the heart of the larger "well arranged system" or "body" composed of Israel as People, Land and Torah. I doubt that Rihal would have included a Jewish Diaspora among the nations as part of his ideal vision. But I don't mean that Jewish life outside the Land is not part of the larger body of Israel X 3, but rather that the Land is critical to the organic whole which is Israel. The Shechinah is the inner life of the of Israel as a whole.

Rihal emphasizes that Torah life is not a philosophy but rather an organic whole. For Rihal, the meaning of Torah life is embedded in the bodies through which it lives. The fullness of Israel is expressed in the fullness of Jewish experience; in society and culture; law, politics and leisure; agriculture and industry; worship, music and art. The reduction of Torah to a set of ideas is like replacing an actual lover with a treatise on the nature of love. With this as background, we'll now explore further what it means that the Shechinah is the mind of the fullness of Israel.

#### Ruevenism

Let's imagine the existence of a particular person; we'll call him Reuven ben Yaakov. Rueven is a "well arranged system", that is, a body, and all his parts and processes are in working order. Now I'll make a claim about Reuven that is parallel to Rihal's claim about the sacrificial system: since Rueven is healthy and functioning, an "inner spirit", "mind" or "consciousness" emerges in Reuven. I'll call this "Ruevenism".

Now, there can be two approaches to this claim of Ruevenism. One is a truth claim; the other is a tautology. The truth claim goes like this: "Ruevenism is a particular form of consciousness that either does or does not manifest in Reuven's body. We can test Rueven to see if he contains what we've defined as Reuvenism." Based on this model, Rihal's claim about the Shechinah in the body of Israel X 3 is either true or false. To know, we'll need to know what the signs of Shechinah manifestation are, and then to examine the Jews to see if She's there or not.

The tautological approach to Ruevenism goes like this: "Ruevenism is the name of the inner life of Reuven. Rueven is composed of a brain and body and these are such that they produce Rueven's unique inner experience. 'Ruevenism' is what that inner life consists of". Based on this model, Rihal's claim about the Shechinah Israel is true. If the "Shechinah" is the name for the inner life of the Jewish People living Torah, then when they live Torah, She's there. It's also clear, based on this approach, that the Shechinah is only manifest in physical Israel X 3 like Rueven's particular mind is only manifest in his particular body.

I'm not sure which approach better matches Rihal's original intention, but I will adopt the tautological approach and use it to offer another way of thinking about the Shechinah. She is the name for the inner life or communal spirit of the Jews living Torah. If so, then, rationally speaking, we know that the Shechinah is real. Jews do have a communal inner life. But the danger of defining the Shechinah in this tautological manner is of trivializing Rihal's approach. In what sense is the Shechinah divine? Why is She important? In order to answer these questions we need to return to Rueven ben Yakov.

I defined Ruevenism in a tautological fashion: whatever's going on inside Rueven's head is Ruevenism. It follows that if Rueven is a shmuck, Ruevenism will be none too impressive. And thus while the tautological approach results in being sure that Ruevenism really exits, it's less clear why we should care. For that reason, I need to introduce an additional concept: "higher Ruevenism". Higher Ruevenism is Ruevenism re-imagined through value judgments. Ruevenism is Rueven's inner life; higher Ruevenism is an improved version of Ruevenism, cleansed of Rueven's failures; Rueven imagined as a better man than he is.

Higher Ruevenism may thus be understood as one's "higher self" (as long as one's name is Rueven!). The idea of a higher self might be accused of being a mere abstraction, but I think that not only do all reflective people assume such a thing, it plays a transformative role in their lives. We intuitively distinguish between qualities that we're glad that we have and those that we'd like to transcend. We know we could be better than we are; more loving and supportive, more effective in our endeavors; living more in the 'light' of the good and the beautiful and less in the 'dark' of anxiety and narcissism. This self-knowledge reflects our most intimate knowledge of ourselves. Our higher selves are intertwined with both what we are and what we value. Such a self is forever partially reality and partially imagination. It is reality in that our higher selves reflect faculties that we have: we imagine ourselves further down a path that we walk, at least a little, in our real lives.

At this stage, let's recast the Shechinah as the _higher self_ of Israel X 3, as _higher_ Ruevenism is to Rueven. In order to get a sense of the Shechinah as like _higher_ Ruevenism, imagine the Jews doing a better job at being Jews than they are presently doing. Follow your imagination as far as it goes before its drops off into what strikes you as irrelevant fantasy: what would the Jews look like if they were really living Torah the way you imagine they should. Let's push that a little further: what might the Jews look like if human beings as a species had moved a little further forward in the march of evolution. When you've added a little fantasy to our higher selves, we're getting closer to what I mean by the Shechinah.

#### The Shechinah between Human and Divine: the Higher Self of Israel

Human: From Here to There

Imagine the following manifestation of the fullness of Israel. It's a few thousand years from now. The human race has evolved to a stage when they've stopped butchering each other. The populations of the world have ceased destroying the environment. There is some reasonably just world federal government. Basic services are available to all: education and health, transportation and housing: humanity pooled its resources to provide a hospitable environment for human life. It turned out that investing resources in the poorest areas resulted in a healthy and productive world human population producing quantities of wealth unknown in previous eras. People found that the more they invested in the wellbeing and culture of their citizens, the richer, more vibrant and more beautiful their societies became. Throughout the world, human beings are raised from their earliest days in a rich tapestry of music, art, science, philosophy, religion, literature, ethics, meditation and sports.

The result was a fundamental shift in the evolution of human consciousness. Traditions of spiritual practice and education enabled people to mold their inner lives so that these are now quite different than ours. People learned to direct their thoughts and emotions towards that which they perceive as _valuable_. They focus their attentions on seeking the good and the beautiful. Already as young children, they're taught to shield their minds from patterns that drag human beings towards narcissistic, violent and exploitative tendencies. Not generally motivated by jealousy, rage, anxiety or hate, people stopped continually destroying their own creative powers, or those of others. In comparison to our world, they have at their disposal hugely more creative energy in each individual and society than we do. Heights of accomplishment are achieved in every area of human endeavor that in our world today would seem almost supernatural.

In the Land of Israel live some millions of Jews, alongside others such as Arab Muslims and Christians. The Jews live cleaving to God and Torah and rooted in the Land. Steeped in the Holy Story, they live with the biblical themes etched into the valleys and hill sides, and into the ruins of ancient holy sites; David anointing Solomon at the rocky face of a spring on the slope of _this_ hill, Abraham and Isaac walking towards the alter on Mount God-will-be-seen. The Land is enchanted, pulsating with the power of those events; history and myth embracing each other in the steps of an ancient walking meditation. In this valley, sages birthed mishnah and midrash; in these caves others pressed oil and waged war; on these hills walked Amos or Hoshea, Isaiah or Jeremiah. Wandering around the Land you'd meet Jews at these locations.

The legal and political life of the Jews is organically a part of Torah life like the way they live in the Land. A liberal social-democracy, variant streams of culture and ideology struggle for fuller expression in the collective life of the Jews, which forms a politically and culturally autonomous state confederated with Palestine and others in the regional branch of the world federal government. (You don't think that a modern Torah state would be a liberal social-democracy? Read up on R. Chaim Hirschensohn, 1857-1935). As Jews struggle with Jews over the meaning of the Torah state, streams of thought and value emerge, each reflecting a unique prism of tradition. Social and political discourse is rich in biblical poetry and narrative, halachic argumentation, midrash and zohar.

The Israeli cultural scene is a sea of meaning and energy flowing forward and back as waves above and currents below lift ancient long hidden treasures from the deep and swirl them through contemporary winds, in and out of bays and twisting rivers, dropping them on new sea beds, decorated with the colors and textures of changing times. Mystics and rationalists, musicians and poets, historians and legislators, educators and wandering sages, read and reread the Holy Story in all its chapters and voices, recasting the past and finding themselves in sacred text and tradition. Like the other families of the earth, investment in human resources having yielded wealth previously unknown, the opportunities for learning and training, research and application, would seem to us unlimited. Wherever you turn, there are art and self expression, study and creation.

I imagine a robust quality of _collectivity_ in the life of this Jewish civilization. While individuals and communities freely live out the inner logic of their disparate understandings of life and tradition, there would be a certain common energy pulsating throughout the different schools and streams, charging them with life energy and prodding them forward along their varied paths of self understanding. Rihal, talking about a time more redeemed than the one I'm describing, characterizes the shared inner spirit of Israel as a certain kind of _tasting_ and _seeing_ of God throughout the People and the Land:

...it is written "Taste and _see_ that Hashem is good" (Ps. 34:9). Hashem is therefore rightly called the "God of Israel" (Sam. 1:5:8), because such _sight_ is not found among the Gentiles. And He is called the "God of the Land" (Kings 2:17:27), because it has a special power in its air, soil and climate, and its heavens assist, which together with the things dependent on it, like working the land, lead to the success of this _kind of seeing_ (of Hashem). And those who follow the Divine Law [the masses of Jews] follow also the possessors of this sight [the prophets], and their soul rests in their words [the souls of the masses rest in the words of the prophets]...for it is as if they themselves prophesize, as it is said, 'the words of truth will be recognized'.

(Kuzari 4:17.)

Notice his use of Israel X 3: "God of Israel" (People), "God of the Land" (Land), "those who follow the Divine Law" (Torah) in explicating the elements of Torah life that make _tasting and seeing_ Y-H-V-H possible.

As I spin this vision of a partially redeemed fullness of Israel, Israel X 3, it's clear to me what its sources are in me. Just as Rueven is intuitively aware of the faces of his own higher self, so I reflect on the strengths and weakness of Israel today and intuit what higher Israel might be like. And this collective inner spirit of the higher Israel thousands of years from today draws close to what I imagine the Shechinah to be. But this is still not enough: everything said up to now has been human and the Shechinah is divine _._ And thus we must amend again what we mean by "Shechinah".

#### Divine: From I to You or She Is Not I

We need to take it higher: higher than the higher self. One understanding of "culture" is that it is the way human beings weave _value_ into their lives: Law, religion, literature, music, art, family structure and social norms, diet, recreation, taste and fashion; all these weave our ideals of value into the concreteness of life. Through culture we touch value and find meaning and our place in the world. It is reflection on culture that gives birth to the image of the higher self of Israel: where do we realize our potential to be good and beautiful? Where do we fail? When we take it higher, we delve further into the ideals of Torah life, and we see goodness and beauty and transcendence that are so high and absolute that we can yearn for them but no long can we imagine ourselves embodying them. Our higher higher self is so high that it is no longer an extension of our "I" and has become a "You"; an Other, One that we may strive to know but not to attain.

Here then, is my final approach to the "Shechinah": I started by suggesting that the Shechinah, the _mind_ emerging in the sacrificial system, is the inner self of Israel X 3. But then that was amended to become the _higher_ self of Israel. And then that was amended to become _higher_ than the higher self, so high that She is longer what we could become and is transformed from "I" to "You". Her image is still partially ours, but She so transcends us that She is truly Other.

And so a long time ago, we the People Israel gathered together at the heart of our myth and history in the desert of Sinai. We gazed up to the heavens, and into the depths of the value embodied in the culture of Torah, and we saw the image of the Shechinah. She was Other, majestically transcending anything we could hope to become, perfectly embodying ultimate value in Her divine goodness and beauty. And yet She was _She_ , a partially human image in spite of Her divinity, higher than our higher selves, but still close enough that we could love Her. And so we fell in love with God, and became Israel.

###  Notes

The notes are incomplete. More to come...

### Notes to Chapter 3: Foundations of the Torah

A note about the quotes brought from the Rambam. Regarding quotes brought from the Guide to the Perplexed: I can't read the original Arabic, so my rendering of the text is based only on translations. I usually begin with Friedlander's translation because it is pretty and online at www.sacred-texts.com. I generally assume, though, that S. Pines' translation is more accurate and so I compare the two and favor Pines where there seems to be a real difference. Sometimes I also use M. Shvartz's Hebrew translation. Regarding other originally Arabic texts, like the Commentary on the Mishnah, I usually start with whatever English translation I can find (like Gorfinkle on Eight Chapters), and then make changes based on the Hebrew translations (such as Y. Kappach). For translating the Mishneh Torah, originally written in Hebrew, I translate it myself while making use of E. Touger's English translation (online at www.chabad.org.)

### Notes to Chapter 5: Higher Humanity

The Secrets of the Torah: Zohar Vayetsei (I:154b ST).

The translation here is based on Kabbalah Center's Online Zohar: http://www.zohar.com/zohar.php?vol=9&sec=331, but with many changes.

I translated garmeh as "his body" in some places. While garmeh might just mean "his self", it feels to me like the juxtaposition of garmeh to nafsha (soul) echoes the common medieval distinction between body and soul.

Later on, in the commentary, I interpreted the phrases "high holy ones" and so forth as referring to our higher selves. In academic literature such phrases are often read as code words for the authors of the Zohar and their circles as opposed to everybody else. I expect that the academics know what they're talking about, but I'm suspicious that this is an overly cynical reading. I think the authors of the Zohar are not just congratulating themselves, but are also out to transform the world by saturating it with the presence of God. In any case, I left elitism out of my interpretation because I'm after what the Zohar should mean in contemporary religious life and not what it meant historically. I interpreted the "entering and exiting" in a similarly non-elitist fashion.

#### Maslow

I brought this text from http://www.panarchy.org/maslow/being.1955.html. I changed the punctuation and added some quotation marks for clarity.

#### The Torah path to higher humanity for the individual and the community: Selection from the Guide 3:51.

The translation here is based on M. Friedlander at www.sacred-texts.com. I changed "emanates" to "flow" because they have similar meanings and "flow" is the word I used above. I also numbered the states of consciousness that the Rambam presents and changed the paragraph structure for clarity.

In the interpretation, I talk about how divinity, even though it is God, "flows to us from God", because it flows to us from God as the All. And I said that divinity is also part of God. For the Rambam, however, intellect is not God, but just the closest thing to God that we can know. In general, the Rambam pushes God one step away from our knowledge. Everything we know about God is really about God's actions and not about God Herself. However, in what may be a less precise and more popular formulation, in some places the Rambam does refer to intellect as God. For instance, in the seventh chapter of Eight Chapters, he seems to refer to the Active intellect as the Holy One Blessed be He. I prefer to keep God close, and so I treat intellect/divinity not as the closest thing to God, but as God Herself. This is more in the spirit of the Zohar than in the spirit of the Rambam (although the above reference to Eight Chapters would suggest that it's not totally foreign to the Rambam, either).

Later on, I follow Friedlander's translation that the purpose of Jewish religious practice is to be "in communion with God". Pines translates to be "occupied" with God. M. Shvartz uses a similar word in the Hebrew ( _la'asok_ ). I expect that "occupied" is more accurate than "communion", but it's not as poetic. And it fits better with my theology.

Later on, in the third higher state of consciousness, I changed "wife" to "spouse". This change is actually necessitated for coherence after I changed the gender of Rambam's perfected individual from "he" to "she" (since the reader doesn't expect the Rambam to be talking about same sex couples in which "she" has a "wife"). I made both changes to avoid the chauvinistic nature of the Rambam's use of terms which assumes that men cleave to God and women take care of day to day business. I'm not sure, really, how chauvinistic the Rambam's view was. I think he might have been aware that women are intellectually equal to men, even if social circumstances don't permit them to realize their intellectual potential. Since intellect is our link to God, equal intellectual potential would mean that men and women are equal before God. In any case, the lessons that I seek to draw from the Rambam apply equally to men and women.

I included the matriarchs with the three Levite siblings and the patriarchs as examples of the highest state of human consciousness. I assume that the Rambam here follows the rabbinic traditions that the matriarchs were also prophets.

#### The Guide to the Perplexed, Part III, Ch. 27.

This translation began with Friedlander tr. [1904], at sacred-texts.com. I've changed the paragraphs, added emphasis, and changed the translation here and there in light of other versions.

In regard to the universalistic emphasis in my interpretation, I'm reading the Guide III 27 in light of the Rambam's clearly universally human focus in the Guide II 40, in his description of redemption in Hilchot Melachim, and in other places. I'm reading all that into III 27 for brevity.

#### The vision of redemption in hilchot melachim

The end of the last paragraph is usually translated as something more like this:

...Hence Israelites will be very wise and know hidden and deep matters, grasping the knowledge of their Creator to the utmost capacity of the human mind...

However, I was thrilled to discover the Machon Mamreh version of the Mishneh Torah here:

<http://www.mechon-mamre.org/i/e512n.htm>. Following Machon Mamreh, I translated like this instead:

...Thus they [ie. all humanity, which is the subject of the previous line] will become greatly wise, and will know hidden and deep matters; grasping the knowledge of their Creator to the utmost capacity of the human mind...

It could also be translated like this:

Thus they will be/ there will be great sages, who will know hidden and deep matters...

I don't know anything about manuscripts of the Mishneh Torah, but I assume that the guys at Machon Mamrei are pretty serious. In any case, I much prefer their version of the text. In the regular printed edition, the Rambam seems to suggest that Jews will be wiser than other people. That's a childish ideal, and one that does not seem to me to fit the Rambam's system of thought. He does here and there say supremacist things about Judaism. But he also says that everybody has to tow the official line even when it's not true and the official line in Judaism (like most other religions) has always been "I'm the best". I don't believe he meant it. In fact, I feel sure that the Rambam held Islamic philosophers in higher regard than he did Jewish ones, and I expect that he imagined that there would be non-Jewish sages equal to the Jewish ones in the Messianic future, also. So the Machon Mamreh version makes more sense to me.

In the context of the twelfth century, the Rambam surely believed that sucking up to the supremacist claims often made by religions about themselves was politically necessary. In our age, I think, it is not only unnecessary but profoundly narrow minded and dangerous. We must first and foremost guard against the failures that we ourselves are most likely to fall into. Clearly, anybody coming from a biblical heritage has to watch out for ethnocentric fundamentalism.

### About the Author

Shaiya Rothberg grew up in New Jersey and made aliyah to Israel in 1988. Today he lives in Jerusalem with his wife Gittit, and three sons, Amos, Binyamin and Yotam. He holds a PhD in Jewish Thought from Hebrew University and a B.A. in Talmud and Jewish Philosophy from Bar Ilan University. Shaiya teaches Bible, Kabbalah and Jewish Philosophy at the Conservative Yeshiva in Jerusalem.

Contact Shaiya online at:

shaiyarothberg@gmail.com

<http://www.facebook.com/shaiyarothberg>

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