What if it was all true?
Not factual mind you, but really true; true in the sense that it speaks to the very fabric of creation and our reality.
What if there really was a God who made a covenant with the people of Israel – not because God “chose” us but because we chose Him?
And what if because of that covenant, there really was a special relationship between God and the Jewish people? What if God really did and continues to make Himself manifest in this world through these people?
And let me be clear here, I am not talking about the Sesame Street God we grew up with. I am not even talking about the God of the Bible, which is obviously an oversimplified portrait drawn to speak to the masses.
DOES GOD exist, and if so, how does He interface with the universe? (credit: (Davide Cantelli/Unsplash)I am talking about the real God, the God that is so large that He doesn’t even fit into any one religion; a God so fantastic that it would be impossible to even speak of Him if we did not revert to a kindergartener’s vocabulary.
And what if the prophets really did prophesy? Again, not a childish notion of prophecy, but what if the prophets had a unique ability to raise their consciousness to be in sync with the Divine and, by doing so, were able to communicate to us real truths and a real pathos about the nature of the universe?
What if the saga of the Jewish people through history was really a language or perhaps a means of pedagogy in which God communicated to humanity as a whole? What if the position of the Land of Israel in the crossroads between Asia and Africa and the election of Israel and not some isolated tribe on an island was meant to serve as a beacon to the known world?
What would those lessons be? What would be the real-life implications if you accepted this? How would you live your life differently? How would you treat your family differently? Loved ones? Strangers? Would your value system change? Your allocation of time or money? If you really truly, wholeheartedly believed in a God that asked you to be a champion of the poor, would your current spending habits be the same? Would you volunteer more? Spend less time endlessly scrolling on your phone? Would your life have a new meaning?
I believe that the mistake most of us make in our discussion of religion and God is our arch sin. We are introduced to these concepts when we are in preschool and never allow ourselves to develop more sophisticated notions.
Jews don’t learn how to understand God
WE LEARN, “HaShem is here, HaShem is there, HaShem is truly everywhere” (we will ignore the problematic theological issues at the moment), and then we learn how to read the siddur (prayer book), scripture, Mishna and then Talmud, each requiring a different skill set, while at there same time memorizing volumes of Halacha (Jewish law). Because of this curriculum, we never get back to a proper mature discussion of actual theology. Thus we remain in the toddler phase of our understanding of God, asking only simple questions and getting frustrated when we do not receive simple answers.
We think of prayer as an ATM and fail to understand its true nature as a means of communing with the eternal. We think of the mitzvot as magical rituals and do not get that they are a means to make the transcendent nature of our covenant into something eminent and attainable. We have simplistic notions of justice, a myopic anthropocentric understanding of the world, and throw tantrums when things do not play out the way we think they should.
Let me suggest it is “in fact” all true in the truest sense possible. For too long we have been clutching to infantile ideas about Judaism and fail to see it for what it really is. We take fantastic stories from the Bible and rabbinic literature literally, and then beat up and ostracize the best of us who try to explain that they are merely vehicles to share truth. But by mistaking the vehicle for the message, we have sanctified the vehicle and thrown away the very lesson we are meant to take away. We fail to realize what Maimonides pointed out 800 years ago, that in our zealous attempt to protect Judaism by deifying every word of the rabbis, we have in reality mocked Judaism and made it look like a fairy tale.
The God people doubt is not the true God. They are too ignorant of Him to actually doubt Him but the puerile God that still lives in nursery rhymes. The real God, the One who “burns in my heart and is shut up in my bones” is the One we should venerate. It is He to Whom my soul yearns and to Him that I ache to experience and worship. And we worship Him, not because He needs it but because there can be no greater self-actualization for a human being than connecting to Him.
We should study Torah not because it is informational but because it is transformational. Through it we better understand God and the structure of the universe; and if we understand that we too are part of that universe, we will then get a better understanding of ourselves.
The sages tell us that God looked into the Torah and created the world. In other words, the Torah is the blueprint of the universe. Are we meant to understand that literally or can we now understand its true meaning – that embedded in the Torah are the essential truths of the universe? And if Judaism is a language in which God communicates to us, can we not accept that science and math are also languages in which God speaks? The psalmist surely understood it that way, so why must we be more frum (religious) than him?
The reality is that if you are looking for a real understanding of God and Judaism, allow yourself to think more deeply and look under the covers a little bit. Allow yourself to accept that by grounding Torah into facts, you are minimizing it and misunderstanding it. Torah is so much greater than that. By freeing Torah from the three-dimensional, you might be surprised to find out that there is a heck of a lot going on right under your nose.
The writer holds a doctorate in Jewish philosophy and teaches in post-high school yeshivot and midrashot in Jerusalem.
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