This post is dedicated to the elevation of the soul of Dalya Davida bas Yisroel.
G-d said to Moses, "Ehyeh asher ehyeh (I will be what I will be)," and He said, "So shall you say to the children of Israel, 'Ehyeh (I will be) has sent me to you.'"
I will be what I will be: “I will be” with them in this predicament “that I will be” with them in their subjugation by other kingdoms.
Exodus 3:14 with Rashi’s commentary
I. Leonard Cohen is Wrong
You, the one reading these words, exist both subjectively and objectively.
This alone is a surfeit of mystery for a lifetime of contemplation. How can the same person who exists in a private, unknowable inner realm, who has self-awareness and self-directedness, factually move a saltshaker from one side of the table to the other? Even stranger—how can you speak, and thereby convey something of that veiled and silent place across inanimate media, breath moving air, to enter someone else’s inner world? Of course, materialist science is silent on the issue.
Since G-d is inside you rather than a great, terrible objectivity, traditional “religion” has less to do with the “belief in G-d” than many assume. If you are here, G-d is here; that is just the type of thing the word refers to. Thus, intellectual atheism cannot reject the G-d that’s inside you, since you are not your intellect and G-d is not an idea. This, of course, means that the G-d the philosophical theist affirms is not the G-d that’s inside you, either. This is fun to say because it makes certain traditionalists squirm. However, it raises several immediate questions. I believe the central one is this:
It’s very nice to view yourself as the Protagonist, and G-d as found within yourself, but what do we make of the truth claims, even competing and contradictory truth claims, about G-d?
The mystical temptation is to say that nothing can be made of them. No one can speak to your experience of G-d. “Speaking” denotes communication in the outer world, the one that is smaller than and external to the reality of the self of the Protagonist. That external world can never contain your infinitude. No words can capture you, so no words can capture G-d. Thus, we should respect each other’s mystical silence, realizing that our separation is only external. We should realize that “truth claims” are, at best, unimportant and, at worst, a backward misunderstanding of all that is real. Only those who have lost touch with their soul must seek out a G-d who is merely true in the context of the external world. We must trust that the truth of G-d that cannot be conveyed nevertheless embraces all and that people will remember their souls and thereby remember G-d. Perhaps the best we can do is remove some of the intellectual and spiritual barriers to discovering their souls.
However, we find in this one of the paradoxes with which we grow so familiar in this series of posts. The tendency of Western religions to make truth claims, and even some exclusive truth claims, was born in Judaism. Within Judaism, the core claims are founded on the ultimate mystical/prophetic event, the prophecy by which all prophecies are judged, the revelation at Mount Sinai. Just as holiness in Judaism is found not in apartness but in unity, the core mystical event in Jewish history, when the entire nation met G-d, is its historical objective differentiator from other claims to truth. What should be Judaism’s most private, inmost moment, secluded on a mountaintop for a select group of acolytes or even Moses alone in his mind, becomes its shared collective touchstone. When G-d speaking commandments at Mount Sinai is compared in the Jewish tradition to marriage, it is in both the private/unknowable and technical/legal/mundane senses. This is the special Jewish mystery concerning the nature of mystery—it is above-board, on the books, communal.
This is what (Rabbi?) Leonard Cohen misunderstands about Judaism in his classic rant.
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