Beyond the Personal Godby Daniel C. MattDaniel Matt, translator of The Zohar, is Professor of Jewish Mysticism at the Center for Jewish Studies, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, Ca. This essay is taken from a recently completed book, "God and the Big Bang." God is a name we give to the oneness of it all.The act of naming is quintessentially human. Adam named all the animals, including himself. The rabbis imagine God passing all the animals in front of Adam, asking him, "What is this one called?" And this one? Adam responds, "Ox, camel, donkey, horse." Then the first human being provides his own name, and finally he provides God with a name: YHVH.(1) God is the oneness of the cosmos, the interconnectedness of all there is. But "God is a name that we attach to this oneness. "God" is the all-inclusive name, the name, Ha-shem. Our act of naming, so bold and powerful, betrays our limitations. By naming things, we control them---or we try to. With our resounding names we can call other people, and call upon them: commanding, cajoling, imploring them. By defining things, we classify them, bestowing or imposing order on the welter that surrounds us. But as we define things, we confine them and confine our understanding. The very meaningfulness of our names constricts the reality we are naming. The names that Adam, Eve and their descendants have assigned to things are useful and necessary but misleading. We cannot function in this world without names and labels, yet we cannot perceive all that is there, if we remain entranced by names. My wife's name, Ana, is deeply meaningful to me because it reminds me of what I feel for her, which is beyond words. If I want to see her, I can speak her name: "Ana, could you come here for a minute?" But the moment she comes into the room, her name dissolves in her presence. I am looking out the window at a tree. My eye follows a branch and focuses on a leaf. "Leaf." The name is mentally satisfying. I have found the appropriate label; I know what I am seeing. But the appropriateness of the name lulls me into thinking that there really is a separate object there called a leaf, as if the leaf were not part of a continuum: blade-veins-stem-stipule-twig- branch-limb-bough-trunk-root. So the name "leaf" is misleading. Maybe I should just stick with "tree?" But is there really a separate, self-contained thing I can call by that name? Down below, the roots absorb water and minerals from the soil. Up above, the chlorophyll in the leaves traps and stores the energy of sunlight. The leaf is not separate from the tree; the tree is not separate from the earth and the atmosphere. Nothing is entirely separate from anything else. We need names to navigate through life, but those very names obscure the flowing continuum. Behind each handy name is a teeming reality that resists our neat definitions. And if this is true of the names we assign to the ten thousand and more things of this world, how much more so with our names for God, the oneness of it all. Naming the UnnamableHow to name the unnamable? The Kabbalah offers a number of possibilities. One is Ein Sof, the boundless---literally, "there is no end." Ein Sof is the Infinite, the God beyond God. The originality and radical nature of this name are attested by an anonymous kabbalist who admits that Ein Sof is not even hinted at in the Bible or in the Talmud.(2) The negation ayn ("there is no") accords with the insight of Maimonides that it is more accurate to say what God is not than what God is. To say that God is powerful makes Him sound like some kind of muscleman. "God is wise" sounds too much like the description of a human sage. Better to say that God is neither weak nor stupid. Even the bland statement "God exists" is misleading, because divine existence is unlike anything we conceive. God exists but not through existence.(3) The best theology is negative theology: Know that the description of God by means of negations is the correct description, a description that is not affected by an indulgence in facile language. Negative attributes conduct the mind toward the utmost reach that one may attain in the apprehension of God.... You come nearer to the apprehension of God with every increase in negations.(4) The kabbalists adopt Maimonides' negative style of theology and take it to an extreme. Among their new names for God, Eyn Sof is the most famous but not the most radical. Having carved away all that is false, they discover a paradox of a name: ayin, Nothingness. We encounter this bizarre term among Christian mystics as well: John Scotus Erigena calls God nihil; Meister Eckhart, nichts; St. John of the Cross, nada. What does it mean to call God Nothingness? It does not mean that God does not exist. In the words of a fourteenth-century kabbalist, David ben Abraham Halavan, Nothingness (ayin) is more existent than all the being of the world. But since it is simple, and all simple things are complex compared with its simplicity, in comparison it is called ayin. David ben Avraham's mystical Christian contemporaries concur. The Byzantine theologian Gregory Palamas writes, "He is not being, if that which is not God is being." Eckhart says, "God's nichts fills the entire world; His something though is nowhere."(5) Ayin is a name for the nameless. It conveys the idea that God is no thing, neither this nor that. Rather, as ayin, God animates all things and cannot be contained by them. The paradox is that ayin embraces "everything" and "nothing." This nothingness is oneness, undifferentiated oneness, overwhelming the distinctions between things. God is the oneness that is no particular thing, no thingness, Nothingness with a capital N. Ayin is not empty or barren; it is fertile and overflowing, engendering the myriad forms of life. According to Jewish, Christian and Islamic medieval philosophy, the world was created "out of nothing" (yesh me'ayin, ex nihilo, min la shai). The mystics turn this formula on its head, reinterpreting it to mean that the universe emanated out of divine nothingness. Nothingness is a shocking name for God; yet it accords with one of the most basic commands of the Torah: the prohibition against idolatry. "You shall not have any other gods before Me." These days, it is rare to find people bowing down to graven images, but we constantly constrict God within mental images, thinking that He or She has a particular form. God is worshiped as Mother or Father, as Provider, Judge, Ruler. These metaphors reassure us and inspire us to act ethically. But when the metaphor hardens into a fixed image, we lose more than we have gained. Our awareness of God becomes limited to the particular image we focus on. The infinite nature of God is reduced, desecrated. In the words of a twelfth-century kabbalist from Barcelona, whoever thinks that God has an image is fashioning idols and bowing down to them.(6) Idolatry is as much a mental as a physical act. Ayin is an antidote to idolatry. It forces us to surrender our comfortable, confining images; it melts them down. This "Nichts of the Jews," writes the seventeenth-century poet Henry Vaughan, exposes "the naked divinity without a cover."(7) But how can we think or speak of God without images and conceptions? We can't. Even ayin is a conception. The images it evokes may be vast---a limitless ocean, the expanse of outer space---but they are images nonetheless. The value of nothingness is that it dissolves all images and conceptions, including itself. Names and images of God enable us to approach the divine, but they can't quite get us there. They keep us at a safe distance. The words and pictures indicate the reality but cannot convey it. To experience the divine, we need to leave names and images aside. We must renounce the idolatry of worshiping the image, of worshiping the name. On the threshold, we are challenged to let go of words, to attune ourselves to qol demamah daqah, "the sound of sheer silence" (I Kings 19:12). Relating to God's NamesIn the Bible God is almost a person, and He is called by personal names: Shaddai, Elohim, YHVH. YHVH is such a personal God that He is in love with Israel and jealous of other gods who might lure His beloved away. The mystical names Eyn Sof and ayin, the Infinite and Nothingness, are impersonal, and this impersonality has certain implications. If I relate to God as YHVH, it is hard not to imagine a specific being with definite characteristics. I may believe that YHVH is everywhere, but it is equally possible to think that YHVH is somehow separate from everything. This accords with the biblical notion that God is separate from nature and does not overlap the world. God brought the world into being; God did not become the world. In the words of Saint Augustine, the works of creation "were made from nothing by Thee, not of Thee."(8) I have a covenantal relationship with YHVH, and essential to this relationship is the fact that our identities are separate. Though I am created in the image of God, we relate to each other as other. The impersonal names Ein Sof and ayin suggest a different kind of relationship. Or, one might say, they undermine the very notion of relationship. How can I relate to the boundless? The boundless includes me. Neither I nor anything else in the cosmos is separate from the Infinite. Everyone and everything is part of It. There is a deep need for a personal God, for a personal relationship to God. The Jewish mystics themselves felt and acknowledged this need. This, in fact, is one of the key differences between them and the Jewish philosophers, for many of whom God remains abstract. The mystics say very little about Eyn Sof, which is how it should be in speaking of the infinite. But they go on and on about the ten sefirot, the various aspects and attributes of God, which constitute a list of divine names. There is not much to say about the first sefirah: it is ayin, undifferentiated oneness, roughly the same as infinity. It is usually referred to as Keter, "Crown." The other nine sefirot emanate out of this pool of infinite nothingness. These various divine qualities include Wisdom, Understanding, Grace, Rigor, Beauty, and several more. The sefirotic God is described far more graphically and anthro- pomorphically than the God of the Bible. Here we find what appears to be an androgynous divine body, complete with arms, legs, and sexual organs. The sefirot interact constantly with each other and with the world. The tenth sefirah, in particular, Shekhinah, is intimately involved with humanity. As the feminine divine "presence," She accompanies Israel in exile, communes with righteous individuals, and mollifies the occasional outbursts of her masculine partner, the Holy One, blessed be He. The goal of religion, according to the Kabbalah, is to unite this divine couple, thereby assuring a flow of blessing and emanation to the world. Shekhinah is perhaps the most intriguing of all the sefirot. She is not only a partner of masculine divinity; she represents a partial corrective to patriarchal religion. The Goddess may have been expunged from the official religion of biblical and rabbinic Judaism, but She reemerges as Shekhinah in medieval Kabbalah. This new flowering is a testament to the Goddess's enduring hold on the religious consciousness and an example of "the revenge of myth."99) Rendered kosher by the Kabbalah, Shekhinah became immensely popular. The kabbalists were not, however, proto-feminists. Shekhinah is relegated to the last rung of the sefirotic ladder; she is subservient to the Holy One, blessed be He. Shekhinah is generally passive and receptive. She transmits the flow of divine emanation but is said to have "nothing at all of her own." The image of Shekhinah in the Kabbalah is a masculine product, fashioned by men for men. Still, it is significant that She plays such a prominent role in the divine economy. She is clearly one of the main characters in the Zohar, which devotes more space to her than to any other sefirah. She fascinated the Zohar's male author, who realized something radically obvious: that God is not adequately described in masculine terms. But does God really have gender and personality? While Shekhinah and the other sefirot embody the male and female personality of God, Eyn Sof transcends and denies it. The sefirot fulfill the human need for a personal God and a personal relationship with Him and Her, while in the background lurks the Boundless. The sefirot constitute a set of divine archetypes, in whose ideal image we are created. But is God really like that? Ultimately, according to the Zohar, the mystic discovers that the sefirot have no independent existence apart from Eyn Sof: "When one contemplates..., there is nothing but the High Spark."(10) Are the sefirot simply a human projection? As the Zohar puts it, they appear to exist only mi-sitra di-lan,"from our perspective."(11) What is this deep need for a personal God --- a God we can name? Part of the answer has to do with the painful awareness of our own mortality. We yearn for the comfort of a cosmic parent who will always be there for us. Perhaps She will let us live a little longer. At least, we can look forward to resting eternally in His bosom. Even if the sun will eventually burn out, in about five billion years, there must be something that endures forever, some ultimate one on whom we can rely. It's comforting to feel that someone out there is watching over us, caring for us, that we have a Mother or Father in Heaven. But this belief is continually contradicted by the suffering that tinges our lives. Those who believe in a personal God who knows and cares have to rationalize earthquakes and fire and the death of children---or else insulate themselves from whatever facts threaten to deface their fragile portrait of God. We experience many things that mock the notion of a personal God; yet we insist on maintaining our personal relationship to Her or Him. This stubbornness is due not only to our awareness of mortality, or our need to be cared about. There is a more fundamental connection between the self and a personal God. The two notions---or illusions---are intertwined. Reimagining the Self and Reimagining God What is the self? It's hard to pin down. Let's begin with the observation that we have not always had one. An infant makes no clear distinction between subject and object, between itself and the external world. In its primal state of being there is no defined center of self. The "self" seems to pass into objects, and objects into it. These objects are not permanent, but only perceptual pictures that appear, dissolve, and reappear.(12) The infant lives a symbiotic relation with its mother's body that blurs any sharp boundary between the two. Whether we remember it or not, there was a time in each of our lives---just a few decades ago---when we didn't yet know how to differentiate between internal and external, between self and other. Separateness was not yet a category for us. Then one day, we spoke the magic word "I," and everything changed. The primal meaning of "I" is "not you." As Buber wrote, "Man becomes an I through a You... The I-consciousness...for a long time...appears only woven into the relation to a You, discernible as that which reaches for but is not a You."(13) As we grow, we each retrace the journey of the human species; ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. The Talmud relates that Adam originally extended "from one end of the universe to the other."(14) The first human being had no clear-cut sense of a separate self. His consciousness was unbounded; he was one with the cosmos. Only after eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil---after learning to make distinctions---was he reduced to mortal, puny size. His cosmic consciousness contracted, and he became aware of his limited self. We could not survive or function in the world without a separate sense of self, without an ego. If we didn't recognize the boundary between our body and the outside world, we would soon drown or be burned, be bitten by a snake, eaten by a lion, or run over by a car. Humans, of course, are not unique in this regard. No living thing can survive unless it distinguishes between self and other. Our experience of consciousness is subjective; yet it is a physical property, a biological feature, of the brain. Conscious experience is caused by electrochemical interactions between billions of neurons. Every tenth of a second, a stream of oscillating networks of neurons forms and falls away. The cooperative states among these networks gives rise to consciousness.(15) While it appears to be continuous, in fact, consciousness is discontinuous and gappy. There is no permanent, abiding, essential self. We have learned to imagine that at our core there is a separate, conscious entity, but this is a fiction, a wondrous and necessary fiction, a constructed feature of our mental landscape. It is not that we are less than a self; we are more. We are part of the oneness. The Story of the SelfOver our lifetime, in collaboration with our family and friends, we have woven a story about ourselves---a story that defines who we are. The ego cannot be understood or expressed except in relation to an audience, and this audience's responses---real or imagined---continually shape the way in which we define ourselves, the story we tell. We do not consciously and deliberately figure out what narratives to tell and how to tell them. For the most part, we don't spin our tales; they spin us. Our narrative selfhood is their product, not their source. These streams of narrative issue forth as if from a single source. To those around us, it seems that a unified agent has authored the story, that there is a center of narrative gravity. This apparent center, this apparent self, is an enormously helpful simplification, but it is an abstraction, not a thing in the brain. Though fictional, it is remarkably robust, almost tangible.(16) Before the self emerges, there is no Ôother.' The mental construct of the self sets the stage for all relationships: with other human beings, with other objects, and with an other,' personal God. God, the oneness, is there all along. But as the ego splits itself off from this oneness, it invents and discovers all the Others,' the isolated fragments of oneness. The ego affirms its aloneness by projecting and naming the other. Its most spectacular projection, its greatest affirmation, is a personal God. The ego and its personal God are interdependent, mutually reinforcing. If I am a self, I need a personal God. Such a God anchors me, convinces me of my self. When I say, "I believe in God," I may intend various things, but one thing I am conveying is a deep need of my ego: that someone believe in me, believe that I exist as a separate self. So that I can believe in my separate self. A personal God redeems me by securing my sense of self. Conversely, such a God needs our affirmation. The Midrash cites Rabbi Shim'on ben Yohai's interpretation of a verse in Isaiah: "You are my witnesses,' says YHVH, and I am God'": "When you are my witnesses, I am God. When you are not my witnesses, I am not, as it were, God."(17) The personal God and the ego participate in a secret covenant; one might call it a conspiracy. God's personality and mine share a pact of mutual admiration and sustenance. We confirm each other's apparent separateness. The mystical oneness of God undermines my separate sense of self. I am part of God's oneness. The separateness of my ego and the personality of God are illusory mirror images. Who is made in whose image? Through eons of evolution, out of the oneness of it all, we have been fashioned, emerging as a conscious self. That self has projected a personal God in our own image, a God to whom we attribute our own creation. The ego is a marvelous fiction, a necessary illusion. We don't really possess it; we are possessed by it. Not having one is unimaginable, an unbearable thought. If selves did not exist, anarchy and madness would rush in to fill the vacuum. There are good reasons for preserving the myth of the self as a particular, concrete thing, rather than an abstraction. That is why society invests such an enormous amount of time and energy in constructing a self that can accept moral responsibility. We need the ego. Madness and anarchy are not attractive alternatives. To put it less dramatically, if the phone rings we answer it and identify "who we are." As long as we live in the world, we cannot manage for very long without the self. A personal God is appropriate for the ego. To the extent that I see my self as a separate entity, I can relate to such a God. This God reinforces the fragile ego, lending it stability and meaning. But the otherness of God and self can be maintained only by a tension that links them together. Though the ego insists on keeping its distance, something within is drawn across the divide. "As a deer pants for brooks of water, so my nefesh longs for you, O God."(18) Through a clouded lens the self dimly sees that it is part of something greater. It gropes for the oneness that remains just out of reach---a oneness obscured by having been projected as a divine you, by having been fashioned in a personal image. The part yearns to rejoin the whole. In rare, eternal moments, the self realizes it is no longer a fragment. It discovers a consciousness that is transpersonal: the entire universe becoming aware of itself. The image of a personal God gives way to oneness. Toward OnenessWe are fashioned in the image of oneness. We reflect oneness; we each refract it through the prism of our particularity. Each of us is a fraction of infinity. But a fraction of infinity is itself infinite. Even in our fractured state, we manifest infinity. Each of us is a particular expression of the oneness of the cosmos. I am a unique creation; yet my most basic physical substance, my quarks and atoms, are identical with the substance of an antelope, a redwood, a distant star. You can't feel oneness all the time. You'd never get anything done. Worse than that, you'd kill yourself. If you're driving down the road, you don't want to become one with anything moving in the opposite lane. The challenge is to balance oneness and separateness, to acknowledge both. We usually remain convinced that we are separate, independent beings. But occasionally---at a waterfall, reading a book, taking a walk, hugging someone we love---we glimpse a trace of infinity; something inside us remembers the oneness. According to one Hasidic teaching, God is delighted "when we become aware that only God exists." But another teaching advocates individuality: "God does not derive as much delight from us when we are all one entity, as when we are individuals....For God desires us so that He can receive added delight from the detailed individuality within our separate bodies."(19) Each person expresses the oneness in her own way. What really delights God is the variety, the immense spectrum of being. In the words of the Ba'al Shem Tov, "God wants to be served in all possible ways."(20) Divinity pervades the universe: sparks in every single thing, energy latent in each subatomic particle. We can raise the sparks, restoring the world to God. We become aware that whatever we do or see or touch or imagine is part of the oneness, a pattern of energy. Religion is transformed from a list of do's and don'ts into a spiritual adventure. The simplest, most mundane activity becomes an opportunity to expand awareness, to exercise compassion. God is not some separate being up there. She is right here, in the bark of a tree, in a friend's voice, in a stranger's eye. The world is teeming with God. Since God is in everything, one can serve God through everything, by raising the sparks. In looking for the spark, we discover that what is ordinary is spectacular. The holy deed is doing what needs to be done. God is not somewhere else, hidden from us, but rather, right here, hidden from us. Enslaved by our routines, we rush from one chore to the next, from event to event, rarely allowing ourselves to pause and open. Our sense of wonder has shriveled, victimized by our pace of life. How, then, can we find God? A clue is provided by one of the many names of Shekhinah. She is called ocean, well, garden, apple orchard. She is also called zot, which means simply "this." God is right here, in this very moment, fresh and unexpected, taking you by surprise. God is this. NOTES
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