A person should know

A person should know that 'His glory fills the whole world' and there is no place unoccupied by God.  He fills all worlds and surrounds all worlds.  Even a person who engages in business with heathens cannot excuse himself from saying that he cannot serve God because of the coarseness and corporeailty which continuously affects him.... For our Sages, may their memory be for a blessing, have already revealed to us that in all physical matters and in all Gentile languages, one can find God there.  For without God they would have no life or existence at all.

Likkueti Moharan, Rebbe Nachman - 1:33:2

There is no God in Judaism

There is the impression, in watching Rabbi David Aaron talk about his conception of God,that he is playing with us a bit. When he says that God is not mentioned in the bible, he is fooling with the tradition.


There is a perfectly functional word for God in Hebrew, elohim, and it is used to distraction all over the place. But it is not considered the paramount name for the divinity. What Rabbi Aaron is talking about are some interpretations about the name God reveals to Moses, HaShem, the name that can't be pronounced. This is the divinity that is about non duality. There is not Him and Us; there is only a kind of oneness that transcends the human conception of oneness.


What Aaron is getting at here is that when you say the name God, all sorts of images come to mind (usually of an old man somewhere, or a being someplace that is not here). So he invites us to toss out the word, because it has too much baggage. There is a place in the Jewish tradition for a broader view of the divine: as the unfolding nature of reality, of the past, the present, the future, all at one time and in every place.


This kind of "God" gets to skip away from all kinds of troubling aspects of traditional monotheism. If this "God" concept picks up a few of its own theological conundrums, some hard nuts to crack, then it says more about the way we think, than about a non dual God.

אֵין עוֹד, מִלְּבַדּוֹ

I recite the 18 benedictions every morning and most afternoons.


This is in Hebrew, of course, with a tallit (prayer shawl) over my head and a kippah (a large one) on my skull. I look upon these prayers as meditations more than prayer, although there is an element of supplication here as well. For the most part, it is just a moment to acknowledge two things: my importance as a single human being with worth, value, and merit; and equally and opposite, to discover that I am just a fleck of dust in the universe; that I am at the mercy of greater, higher, universal powers.


At these moments, I can feel the tug of something greater than myself. You can call it God (or HaShem, as I do) or the pull of the Infinite, Eyn Sof, or even the desire, strong, thwarted, ardent, to merge with the Oneness Of All Things.


Regardless, I'm often moved to tears by this experience. All my life I have been a religious rationalist. Now I find myself weeping at the expansiveness of it all. I find myself filled by a desire that appears to originate outside of me.


אֵין עוֹד, מִלְּבַדּוֹ


Eyn od milvado. I repeat this Hebrew refain like a mantra. There is none beside God.