God Inside and Out. Rami Shapiro. Many years ago during an interfaith gathering near Dallas, a Lutheran pastor said to me: At the

Transcription

1 God Inside and Out Rami Shapiro Many years ago during an interfaith gathering near Dallas, a Lutheran pastor said to me: At the heart of Christianity rests a question a challenge really the answer to which holds the key to your salvation. The question is put to Peter by Jesus, but it is meant for each of us. The question Jesus asks is this: Who do you say I am? (Mark 8:29). Peter answered, You are the Messiah. While I suspect you would answer this question differently, what I m really curious about is whether there is such an essential question at the heart of Judaism, and what might that question be? An answer to the pastor s query popped into my head immediately: the question at the heart of Judaism as I understand it is the question Moses puts to God at the burning bush: Suppose I do go to the Israelites and tell them that the God of their ancestors has sent me. They will want to know Your name. What shall I tell them? (Exodus 3:13). Moses question is the opposite of Jesus question. Jesus wants to know whom Peter thinks Jesus is; Moses wants to know whom God thinks God is. God s answer? Tell them Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh. Tell them, Ehyeh has sent me to you (Exodus 3:14). Ehyeh: God from the Inside Usually translated into English as I am or I will be, Ehyeh is not so much a name as it is a glimpse into the very nature of God as God understands God. A name is a noun or more accurately a proper noun, yet Ehyeh isn t a noun at all but a verb: the first-person singular imperfect form of the Hebrew root hei yod hei ( happen ). A more insightful, albeit less 1

2 elegant, rendering of Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh might be I-ing or I-happening forever I-happening. Ehyeh, the name God first offers the Israelites through Moses, is less a name and more God s sense of God s own existing, God s happening, God s I-ing. God is a never-ending and forever fluid process of self-happening or I-ing. Translating Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh as I am that I am erases the fluid, dynamic nature of God. Alternative translations such as I will be what I will be or I am becoming what I am becoming, while making it clearer that God s self-understanding is unfixed and fluid at the moment, still give the impression that God is something even if that something is in a state of transition or as yet unrealized. My rendering of Ehyeh as I-happening and I-ing strives to get beyond any notion of metamorphosis or change from one state or another, to reveal God as a process: not God changing, but God as change itself. One can almost hear God saying to Moses: I can t tell you who I am, because I am never fixed, and hence beyond naming at all. I am not this or that or the other, but the process of existing that happens as this and that and the other and whatever comes next. I am not a being, or even a supreme being, but being itself, the activity of happening. YHVH: God from the Outside Immediately after revealing God as Ehyeh (Exodus 3:14), God offers Moses an alternative: Say to the Israelites, YHVH, the God of your fathers the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob has sent me to you. YHVH is My eternal name, the name you shall call Me from generation to generation (Exodus 3:15). Ehyeh reflects God s self-understanding: God from the inside. YHVH is how God wants to be known from the outside. Ehyeh is how God understands God; YHVH is how we are to understand God. Yet the two are in fact one. 2

3 Like Ehyeh, YHVH comes from the Hebrew root hei-vav-hei, from which we derive the verb to happen. YHVH, no less than Ehyeh, preserves the sense of God as a verb rather than a noun. But each is a different form of the verb. Ehyeh is the first-person singular imperfect, simple form (what grammarians call the kal declension) of hei-vav-hei, while YHVH is the thirdperson singular imperfect, causative form (what grammarians call the hifil declension) of the same verb. The simple form denotes simple action undertaken; the causative form denotes action brought about. Seeing the Divine from the inside, God says Ehyeh, revealing that all happening is the happening of the infinite and fluid I-ing. Seeing the Divine from the outside, we say YHVH, affirming that God is the cause of all happening. But take care: saying that YHVH is the cause of all happening allows us the conceit that the cause of a happening and the happening itself are two different things. But this is not the case. Something happens only when the conditions for that something to happen are fully present. The conditions don t cause the event; they manifest as the event. Without the conditions necessary for an event to happen, the event cannot happen; with the conditions necessary for an event to happen, the event must happen. The conditions and the happening are really one and the same. Both Ehyeh and YHVH are imperfect forms of the verb to happen. Grammatically speaking, imperfect denotes action that is without end. As imperfect forms, both Ehyeh and YHVH reveal that God is endless happening. Ehyeh is the endless happening of God perceived from the inside God I-ing, if you will. YHVH is the endless happening of God perceived from the outside God happening. Hence, when God says I, YHVH, do not change (Malachi 3:6), do not imagine God saying I am unchanging. Rather, understand God to be saying, I, YHVH, do not change; I, YHVH, am change itself. 3

4 Ehyeh One more Hebrew word for God is necessary if we are to better understand the nature of God inside and out, and that word is Ehyeh. Unlike Ehyeh and YHVH, each of which is a different form of the verb to happen, Ehyeh is a noun. And, unlike Ehyeh and YHVH, which are both singular verbs, Ehyeh is the plural form of the singular El, God. And, unlike Ehyeh and YHVH, which are each identified as names, Ehyeh is not a name of God but simply the word God itself. As such, Ehyeh can refer to the God of the Hebrew people or the God of other peoples, as we find in the Ten Commandments: You shall have no other Ehyeh besides me (Exodus 20:3). While there are exceptions (Genesis 35:7, for example), for the most part when Ehyeh refers to the Hebrew God it is paired with a singular form of a verb. Take, for example, the opening verse of Genesis: In the beginning Ehyeh created the heavens and the earth (Genesis 1:1). Ehyeh is plural, but the verb with which it is paired (bara, created ) is singular. The implication is that despite its plural form, Ehyeh is to be understood as a single God. While this notion of Ehyeh as the generic term for the singular God of the Israelites renders the word s grammatical form irrelevant, in the hands of the kabbalist Rabbi Moshe Cordovero ( ) it is a hint to our deeper understanding of Ehyeh/YHVH as the singular God manifesting as the multiplicity of nature. Cordovero s method of discovery is the rabbinic hermeneutic of gematria. According to gematria, each Hebrew letter carries a mathematical value and hence every Hebrew word carries an arithmetic sum. As a system of biblical commentary, gematria holds that words and phrases with the same numerical value reveal something about each other, and may in some cases be considered synonyms. Cordovero explains that the Hebrew words Ehyeh (God) 4

5 and ha-teva ( nature ) share the numerical value eighty-six, revealing the fact that nature is God manifesting in the physical plane. 1 Ehyeh is the process of divine happening as seen from God s perspective, from the inside. YHVH is the process of divine happening as seen from our perspective, from the outside. Ehyeh is nature, the happening of YHVH as we perceive it through our five senses and the technologies we invent to enhance those senses. Nature is the plural happenings of the singular happening that is YHVH. Given the numeric equivalency of Ehyeh and ha-teva, God and nature, we can say with Moses Cordovero that nature is the happening of God. This is why, the Jewish mystic might argue, we speak of YHVH Ehyeh (conventionally translated as Lord God): the infinite and formless YHVH happening as the finite and multi-formed world of Ehyeh/ha teva/nature. Since YHVH is singular and Ehyeh is plural, YHVH Ehyeh reminds us to see the myriad forms of nature as expressions of the singular happening of God. As Rabbi Aaron Halevi Horowitz of Staroselye ( ) taught, In truth, the worlds do not have any essence of their own, because everything is God s blessed power alone, and in truth there is nothing devoid of God and nothing beside God whatsoever. 2 Or, to put this most simply, ein od mi-l vado, there is nothing other than God (Deuteronomy 4:35)! Ein Od Mi-l vado: There is Nothing Other Than God Knowing God as YHVH, the process of all happening, the psalmist writes: Where can I escape Your Spirit? Where might I flee from Your presence? If I ascend skyward, You are there; if I bed down in the depths of the earth, You are there. If I wing my way eastward or travel to the distant west, there too Your hand will guide me; Your right hand would grasp me. If I say to myself, Certainly thick shadows will hide me, You make the night as noon. 5

6 Darkness obscures nothing from You; for You night shines as day; darkness and light are the same for You. (Psalm 139:7 12). Well over a millennium later, the twelfth-century mystic Rabbi Samuel ben Kalonymous expanded on the psalmist s understanding, writing: You surround everything and fill everything; You are the reality of everything and in everything. There is nothing beyond You and nothing above You. Nothing outside You and nothing inside You. 3 Both Rabbi Kalonymous and the psalmist are speaking of YHVH, God from the outside, God happening as the natural world they perceive around them. But what if we could change perspectives and hear Ehyeh speaking from the inside? What would we hear then? I suspect we would hear the following: I surround everything and fill everything; I am the reality of everything and in everything. There is nothing beyond Me and nothing above Me, nothing outside Me and nothing inside Me. I form light and I create darkness. I make peace and I create evil. I, Ehyeh, am YHVH the singular source of all reality (Isaiah 45:7, adapted). The central position of this essay, the non-duality of Ehyeh/YHVH/Ehyeh/nature, is shared by a number of mystically inclined rabbis. Here are four: God is found in all things and things are found in God and there is nothing devoid of Divinity, heaven forbid. Everything is in God, and God is in everything, and beyond everything, and there is nothing other than God. (Rabbi Moshe Cordovero, ( ) 4 God is One in all the worlds and the entire creation, an absolutely simple Oneness, and all things are reduced to nothing, and there is naught else besides God. (Rabbi Ḥayyim of Volozhin, ) 5 Everything is God, blessed be He, who makes everything be, and in truth the world of seemingly separate entities is entirely annulled. (Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, ) 6 The absolute reality of God, while extending beyond the conceptual borders of existence, also fills the entire expanse of existence as we know it. There is no 6

7 space possible for any other existences or realities we may identify the objects in our physical universe, the metaphysical truths we contemplate our very selves do not exist in their own reality; they exist only as an extension of divine energy. (Rabbi Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson, ) 7 Experiencing Is Believing Thus far all of this is fairly abstract, but if it were to stay abstract it would be of little use to us and especially to those of us who wish to see ourselves as happenings of YHVH Ehyeh who yearn to slip into the deepest levels of our being to discover the be-ing of Ehyeh (which is what I mean by experiencing God inside and out). So let s take another look at the non-duality of Ehyeh/YHVH/Ehyeh/nature from a more experiential perspective. In his book I and Thou, Martin Buber ( ) speaks of the twofold attitude of man. Despite the book s title these two attitudes are not made up of separate words, I and Thou, and I and It, but of hyphenated words: I-Thou and I-It. There is no separation between I and Thou, or between I and It, and in fact each arises with the other leading us to make a distinction not only between Thou and It, but between the two I s that arise with them. If Thou is said, the I of the combination I-Thou is said along with it. If It is said, the I of the combination I-It is said along with it. 8 In other words, there is no I separate from a Thou or an It. 9 Our sense of self is determined by our sense of other. When we see the other as an It, we understand ourselves as an It; when we see the other as Thou, we understand ourselves as Thou. When we understand all others as manifestations of God, we understand ourselves as manifestations of God as well. The I and the It of I-It are distinct from one another. The It is a thing, bounded by space/time, and because it is so bounded, the I of I-It can be no less so. I experiences It as other. Things are very different in the realm of I-Thou: When Thou is spoken, the speaker has 7

8 no things for his object. For where there is a thing there is another thing. Every It is bounded by others; It exists only through being bounded by others. But when Thou is spoken there is no thing. Thou has no bounds. 10 Let s go into this carefully. If Thou has no bounds, there can be no separation of I and Thou. Indeed, if Thou is boundless, then the I that arises with it is no less so. Two entities without bounds are not in fact two at all, but one single phenomenon that can be experienced in two ways: one inside and the other outside. While Buber does not say so, I suggest that in the context of our names of God revealed to Moses at the burning bush, the I of I-Thou is Ehyeh and the Thou of I-Thou is YHVH. Pushing this a bit further, listen to Buber s account of experiencing a tree. He begins with an analysis of the tree as It, a stiff column in a shock of light, or splash of green shot with the delicate blue and silver of the background. He then experiences the tree as a happening with roots sucking water from the soil, and leaves breathing life from the air. He then goes on to classify the tree by genus and species. Looking deeper he perceives not only this particular tree, but the laws of nature (we might speak of these as the will of YHVH, the way YHVH manifests as Ehyeh/nature) that make tree-ing possible and this particular tree actual. And, looking deeper still, he perceives the tree as pure numerical relation dictated by the laws of physics. In all this, the tree remains my object, occupies space and time, and has its nature and constitution. 11 In other words, the tree is and remains an It. There is, however, the possibility of a deeper encounter with the tree, an encounter that leads Buber beyond I-It to I-Thou: I become bound up in relation to it. The tree is now no longer It. 12 8

9 Seeing the tree as Thou isn t at the expense of everything else Buber knows about this tree. Nothing is lost in this new expanded consciousness. But nothing is gained either. By this I mean Buber is not finding something else in the tree, some spirit or soul, residing beneath the bark or hidden in the number. I encounter no soul or dryad of the tree, but the tree itself. 13 What is the tree itself? It is YHVH Ehyeh, a unique, precious, and not to be exploited manifesting of the divine happening. And who enters into relation with Thou? Ehyeh, the I-ing of God. I am not saying Buber himself would agree to my reading of his text or my understanding of his experience. I am simply appropriating his language to articulate my own understanding and experience. From I-Thou to I-I Buber and I both experience the I and Thou of I-Thou as boundless. While he may not wish to take the next step from I-Thou to what call I-I, I cannot help but do so. If I and Thou have no boundaries, they are simply two ways of speaking the same reality. As Buber moves beyond the tree as It to encounter the tree as Thou, the I of Buber moves beyond I-It to I-Thou, beyond the bounded I of self, to the unbounded I of Self or God. The Thou that is YHVH Ehyeh/ha-teva carries with it the I of Ehyeh. When you understand reality as YHVH Ehyeh/ha-teva, you realize there are no fixed forms, no nouns only verbs, only happenings. There is no tree only God tree-ing. There is no lion only God lion-ing. There is no you only God you-ing. When you imagine the world as It, the I doing the imagining becomes just one more fixed object in competition with all others for survival. When you imagine the world as Thou, the I realizes itself as a unique manifestation of YHVH Ehyeh/ha-teva whose flourishing depends 9

10 not on competition with other living beings but cooperation with them. When you realize YHVH Ehyeh/ha-teva is all that is, the I of I-It and the I of I-Thou dissolves into the pure awareness of I- I, Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh. Inside-Outside Just as Buber would have us see I-It and I--Thou as combined words, 14 so I would have us see I-I in the same way. The first I of I-I is Ehyeh; the second is YHVH. Or vice versa if you prefer. At the level of I--I there is no distinction, no boundary, no self, no other, no It, no Thou, and only I. Ehyeh, YHVH and Ehyeh are combined words. You can t have Ehyeh without YHVH, nor can you have YHVH without Ehyeh. There are only Ehyeh-YHVH happenings as YHVH- Ehyeh. When you perceive reality as Ehyeh-YHVH, you perceive the whole without form and are yourself formless. When you perceive reality as YHVH-Ehyeh you perceive the whole as form and are yourself formed. One way to approach this is with reference to a Möbius strip, a topological form that while appearing two-sided is in fact one-sided. While at any given point along the strip there appears to be two sides, the strip as a whole is single-sided. When we perceive the two-ness of reality, we speak of YHVH-Ehyeh/ha-teva. When we perceive the oneness of reality we speak of Ehyeh-YHVH. This I suspect is the realization Abraham Abulafia had and sought to articulate when he said, Behold you are God and God is you; for you are so intimately adhering to God that you cannot by any means be separate from God for you are God. See now that I, even I, am God. God is I and I am God. 15 Alles iz Gott (Everything Is God) 10

11 The Hasidic rebbe Levi Yitzḥak of Berditchev ( ) articulated the non-duality of God in, with, and as all reality this way: Only You! Where can I find You? Where could I not find You? You! You! You! Only You! Wherever I go You! Whenever I stand still You! If all goes well with me You! Heaven forbid, if it goes badly You! You! You! You! Only You! To the East You! To the West You! To the North You! To the South You! To Heaven You! To Earth You! Below You! Above You! You! You! You! Only You! 16 All there is, is You, Thou, YHVH and when you truly know this, from the inside, you know all there is, is Ehyeh as well. Does Levi Yitzḥak mean to say you are God? I don t know, but I do. You are God, just not all of God. As a wave is not other than the ocean, so you are not other than YHVH happening as you at this very moment. And, just as no wave is all of the ocean, while the ocean is all of the wave so you are not all of God, but God is all of you. God as Thou is YHVH. God as I is Ehyeh. These are not two Gods, but two ways of God-ing. This may be difficult to grasp. Indeed, it is impossible to grasp because Ehyeh is not an object that can be grasped, but the eternal ungraspable subject. Ehyeh is never somewhere other 11

12 than here and now. You can never point to Ehyeh and say: there it is. You can only be Ehyeh manifesting, and in such a state you can only say hinneini, Here I am. Hinneini (Here I Am) When you are fully present to the Happen-ing that is happening in, with, and as all reality, all you can say is hinneini, here I am. Ehyeh speaking hinneini isn t locating itself in time and space, but engaging with time and space as aspects of itself. Ehyeh speaking hinneni isn t addressing a Thou or an It, but only Itself, which includes and transcends Thou and It. Ehyeh is the realization that I is all there is, and that hinneini is the act of being present to all as all. When trying to explain this to older children I give each a foot-long piece of cotton rope. I ask them to tie a knot in the rope, and we explore the relationship between the knot and the rope. They are, of course, one and the same. The knot is the rope in a specific configuration, but that configuration is not separate from or other than the rope. I then ask them to tie a second knot and a third. Each of these is different from the others, but none is other than the rope. The rope is YHVH; the knots are Ehyeh. Since they are not separate, we may speak of the rope with its knots as YHVH Ehyeh. We then imagine each knot to be self-conscious. We imagine each knot seeing the other two knots as other than itself. If it sees the others as objects to be used for its own advantage, it is encountering the world as I-It. If it sees the others as subjects in their own right that is, as expressions of the rope no less worthy of respect that itself it is encountering them as I-Thou. We then imagine that the rope itself is self-aware, that the rope itself could say I. Knowing itself as the first knot, it could only say hinneini: here I am. Knowing itself as the second knot it would say the same thing, hinneini: here I am. The same would be the case no 12

13 matter how many knots the rope knotted, and the same with the unknotted rope between the knots. The rope would see everything as itself, everything as Ehyeh happening as YHVH Ehyeh. While it is true that each knot is unique, it is also true that all knots are the rope alone, the singular Ehyeh, the infinite and eternal subject, the singular I-I manifesting as and addressing each manifestation not as Thou or It but as hinneini here I am yet again! Does This Matter? Does any of this matter? I think it matters profoundly. The more we understand reality as Ehyeh/YHVH/Ehyeh/ha-teva, the less we live in a world of us and them, or worse, us against them. The more we see all life as the happening of God, the less we can speak of others as apart from God and the more we see them as a part of God. And, if by chance or grace we awake as Ehyeh, as the singular I-I speaking through all things as all things saying hinneini, here I am, then we are free to love neighbor and stranger as ourselves (Leviticus 19:18, 34), and live our lives as a blessing to all the families of the earth (Genesis 12:3). Is This Jewish? I have shared this understanding of Ehyeh/YHVH/Ehyeh/ha-teva for over forty years, and when I do someone almost always asks: Is this Judaism? It certainly isn t the Judaism I was taught! It wasn t the Judaism I was taught, either. I was taught that God is a supernatural Other, an object to whom we pray and whom we seek to placate. I was taught that this God chose the Jews from among all peoples to be His (sic) special people, to receive His one and only revelation (Torah/Talmud), and to inherit His special land, Eretz Yisrael. But what I was taught is not what I came to experience and know to be true. 13

14 What I have shared in this essay isn t something I believe. It is something I have experienced; it is something I know to be true. But this doesn t make it Jewish. What makes my understanding Jewish, what gives it an authentic place in the spectrum of Jewish teachings about God, is that its roots are in the Torah and its branches in the interpretations of Torah found in the writings of some of our greatest rabbis, mystics, and philosophers. So while I admit, sadly, this isn t the Judaism I was taught, I state confidently that it is the Judaism I teach. 1 Moshe Cordovero, Pardeis Rimmonim, trans. Elyakim Getz (Monfalcone, Italy: Providence University Press, 2010), sha ar 12, chap. 2, p. 66a. 2 Aaron Halevi Horowitz of Staroselye, Sha arei Ha-yiḥud V ha-emunah (ed. Shklov, 5600 [1839/1840]), p. 2b. See Louis Jacobs, Seeker of Unity: The Life and Work of Aaron of Staroselye (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2006), p Samuel ben Kalonymous, Shir Ha-yichud/Song of Unity, cited in Jay Michaelson, Everything Is God (Boston: Trumpeter Books, 2009), p Moshe Cordovero, Eilima Rabbati (1881; rpt. Jerusalem: Aḥuzat Yisrael, 5734 [1973/1974]), p. 25a. 5 Hayyim of Volozhin, Sefer Nefesh Ha-ḥayyim (ed. Vilnius, 1824), sha ar gimmel, chap Rabbi Schneur Zalman, Likkutei Torah: Shir Ha-shirim (Brooklyn, NY: Kehot Publication Society, 1979), p. 41a. 7 Menachem Mendel Schneerson, Toward a Meaningful Life, ed. Simon Jacobson (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1995), p Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Scribner, 1958), p. 19. The italics are in the original. 9 Martin Buber, I and Thou, p Ibid. 11 Ibid., p Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., p See Moshe Idel, The Mystical Experience of Abraham Abulafia (New York: SUNY Press, 1988), pp Translation by Reb Zalman Schachter Shalomi in Zalman Schachter Shalomi and Netanel Miles-Yepez, A Merciful God: Stories and Teachings of the Holy Rebbe, Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev (Boulder, CO: Albion Andalus, 2010), p,