How do you describe something perfect with imperfect language? How do you truly describe God with our human tongue? You can’t, really. All we can do is attempt to speak of God in the only way we know how. That is the beauty of it—God can never truly be known because with our need to translate Him into language, both out loud and in our heads, we are immediately reducing our true understanding. Perhaps our first breath is our only truly aware moment in our lives; before our minds are cluttered with human-made language and thought.
Heschel points out that in Hebrew אחד means “one” and “unique,” and it is the 2nd definition that is present in the Sh’ma. If that is so, it further illustrates why God cannot be described, for how do you describe something but in relation to others? If God is unique you can’t truly describe Him in relation to anything else and be spot-on. I believe that when we describe God we are describing our limited understanding, and to an extent, our hope of what God is. We hope that God is merciful and kind, but these are human qualities and to say that God possesses human qualities is to say that God is not unique. But, then we also have the quandary of humans being created in the image of God; if you believe the Torah to literally be God’s word, transcribed to Moses on Mt. Sinai, how can you believe that God is also unique if we, as humans, are made in God’s image? But, if you instead are able to step back and view the Torah as man-made and inspired by God, I think that it is perfectly logical to still believe that God is unique and that we are also made in God’s image. Because we understand that the qualities we are ascribing to God to be human qualities and that our hope is that these qualities that we see and value in ourselves are God-like qualities. God is still one, unique—אחד—because we still do not truly know God. And perhaps what makes God unique is that he is MORE than these qualities we ascribe to Him. God is more and beyond and we cannot know. We will never know what is beyond the event horizon of a black hole and we will never know how God is more than us.
“To think of God is not to find Him as an object in our minds, but to find ourselves in Him. Religion begins where experience ends, and the end of experience is a perception of our being perceived.”
--A.J. Heschel, Man Is Not Alone, p. 127
"The task is not to know the unknown but to be penetrated with it; not to know but to be known to Him, to expose ourselves to Him rather than Him to us; not to judge and to assert but to listen and to be judged by Him.
--Man Is Not Alone, p.129
Who I Am
- JD
- I am a committed Reform Jew interested in spirituality, mitzvot, Torah, and coming to observance as I understand it.
2 comments:
"...but these are human qualities and to say that God possesses human qualities is to say that God is not unique."
I am intrigued by this idea and yet I wonder...
Is it that G-d has human qualities and is therefore not unique--or is it that humans have the potential to have G-d-like qualities? And we, as humans, then become unique amongst all that lives? G-d remains unique in the fact that G-d alone holds the essense of these characteristics and qualities. Humans, in the image of G-d, have only potential. Thoughts?
I like your take on it. I was coming at it from the perspective that our language fails in trying to describe God, but I think that you bring it around to a better point.
Post a Comment