Beyond Heresy

Thank G‑d for atheists. If not for their scorn, how shallow our god would be! As one chassidic master told his disciple in reference to a certain heretic, "His heresy is closer to the truth than your faith."

Personally, I agree with the heretics. The god the world believes in does not exist—a god who peers in through the clouds at a world he sometime made and plays with it as a child plays in the sand...

Such a god is no more than another of Man's toys. A man has a house, he has a car, a job, a wife and children. So he must also have a god, and he creates one in his image.

This man, his world is a myth and so is his god. G‑d is not a figment of the human mind, we are an artifact of His.

What then, is the G‑d in which I do believe? Can I say it in the words of this language? If I stretch its grammar and bend its syntax out of shape, perhaps. Here, then, is a presentation of my G‑d, a G‑d closer to atheism than most people's theism:

If you can define it, it is not G‑d.

If there could be more than one, it is not G‑d.

If it could be denied, it is not G‑d. If it can be proven, it is not G‑d.

If there could be anything else, it is not G‑d. If it will not allow anything else to be, it is not G‑d.

There is no name for G‑d and yet there are so many names. The most powerful of all names is the secret, ineffable name.

There is nothing more secret than that name; it is the secret of all secrets. Other secrets are secrets because they are revealed only to a select few, because they are transmitted in whispered riddles and puzzles, because they contain power that an elite wishes to withhold. But would they be told, they would no longer be secret; and so, they were never truly secrets at all.

Then there are secrets that must be withheld because they will be distorted and misunderstood. They cannot be told except to those that know intimately the place in the soul from which they come. Within their context they are glorious wonders, beams of light. Leaving their bounds they become bizarre and wild, the arsenal of false messiahs. And so, they are held secret, until the time comes that the outside has become the inside.

G‑d is not an is. Rather, is is G‑d. G‑d's name is a true secret. So secret that it is outside as much as it is inside for all to know—and yet it remains a secret. The small child knows it before he is taught, the adult constructs his world on its foundation and no sentient being can begin to think without its knowledge—and yet, still, it remains a closed, sealed secret. For as much as all humanity will say to one another the secret and all the philosophers of the world will philosophize its meaning, they will come no closer to understanding. On the contrary, every word they speak whisks them further away, every grain of understanding conceals even more. G‑d's name is seen by those with open eyes and lost to those that understand.

Why can't we say what G‑d is? Because G‑d is not an is. Rather, is is G‑d.

That is His name, His principal name to the prophets: a conjugation of the verb to be. And as soon as I write more, the meaning is lost. In perfect stillness, we can know; staring in utter quietness at the source of the river of being at its zero-point of emergence, not trying to understand, only to know the source beyond the source of that point, in the not-being of chochmah, the capacity to see what-is. But immediately as we are swept down the river of let-me-comprehend, the noise of words and semantics drown out the quietness and steal away our vision of both the point and its source.

That point of wisdom, at its very source, that is the G‑d of Abraham that he called by the name of Isness; the G‑d who spoke to Moses and said, "I am being who I am being"; the G‑d of Maimonides, without whom there is nothing and yet needs none of them to exist, who cannot be said to be or not be, because all being extends from His simple oneness; the G‑d of the Kabbalists who used the metaphor of infinite light as a codeword for the unbounded is-source and described all things as no more than shimmerings of that light. The Is that all of us would recognize we stand within, were it not for our ego's claim to sole dominion of is, was and will be. That is our G‑d to whom we pray each day, to whom we say, "You."

Can is be defined?

Can there be more than one is?

Who is the fool that can deny is? Who is the fool that needs to prove it?

There is nothing else but is—all else is but a fiction of the isness. Is will allow for infinite iterations of is, yet the Is itself never changes.

No great mind has left this earth without contemplating the is. Yet only one made the great leap of the absurd: To take possession of the is as his own. To enter into a relationship with the very Isness of reality as a person relating to his friend. To call it You, Mine and Ours. To say to it, "Hey, there's a world here which is Yours. There is time and space, there is life; there are the passions of my heart, my fear of death and my struggle to live; there is an entire humanity like me, each with a story, each living as though he were the vortex of existence; there is a wondrous nature, visions of majestic awe and rhythms of mesmerizing beauty. All extends from Your isness, for there is nothing else but You. Let me find You in this world of Yours. Be here!"

In Abraham's time, the many forces of nature and human passions were the Elokim. The Is was aloft and transcendent, the property of ascetic mystics, removed from the world. Abraham "called in the name of Isness, G‑d of the world." He declared, "Isness is the Elokim!" In nature, in history, in human life, in justice and in the most visceral experiences of life, he drew the Is.

And so, Abraham rescued life from its existential prison. He extended the isness back towards itself, folding inward all of reality, to find the point within the river, to see the vision within all things. To make the isness and its articulation of life into one. And so, he redeemed both our world and the Isness itself.

He redeemed our world because everywhere he brought the isness became as real as the isness itself. He redeemed the human soul, because he found there, more than any other place, the key to the essence of all that is.

He redeemed the Is because he unlocked its essence, beyond any name, even the most secret of names. Beyond a static is-that-just-is, exposing an essence-core of utter freedom liberated even from the non-form of isness. Freedom to choose to desire being that-which-is, yet to remain nonetheless unlimited by that modality. And in that freedom, He found a matching partner in the human form in which He had breathed His inner essence, this radical being that chooses on earth what it will be and what it will not

To debate whether Is is, is foolish nonsense. That Is can be called You, that is a matter of conviction.

Arghh! The words are just not there, no matter how I play with them! They become just another cerebral game, another cold instrument of the philosopher's laboratory, as cold as a stainless steel scalpel across the steaming tissue of a beating heart. Trash the words! All of them! They are idols, neat wrappings of the human mind in which to imagine we have captured boundless light. G‑d is not an idea and words will not capture Him!

We know one another very well, the You and the i. It is there inside, inside you as well, if you will care to know it. But the words, they are just not there.

Listen Israel, [the secret name] is our G‑d, [the secret name] is to be made one. Until, "On that day, the Isness will be one and His name will be one." We will speak the secret, and we will understand.