Showing posts with label Rabbi David Aaron. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rabbi David Aaron. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

The Silly and the Profound : Endless Light by Rabbi David Aaron


Rabbi David Aaron writes popular books about Kabbalah, and his Endless Light does not deviate from this path.  So for a reader looking for a book with some academic rigor, this is the wrong book for you.  Rabbi Aaron also lapses into obvious and simple stories to illustrate his points, a habit that can become annoying, and make the reader feel that he is dumbing things down far beyond the necessary level.
 
Rabbi Aaron's text has good points as well.  He takes very difficult and at times abstract concepts like tzimtzum, the contraction that created the universe in the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria, and makes some apt and lovely comparisons to romantic love and love toward one's children.  He takes the lofty ideas of this concept and brings them down to earth in ways that we can understand. 

He also makes strides in divorcing concepts that have very entrenched definitions.  For instance God is rendered HaShem. He is thus able to move the idea of God away from the old man in the sky image, and make the divine more a monist or pantheistic idea (although kept in reasonable check). He also firmly ties these ideas with Halakah, i.e. Jewish ritual practice.  For him, there is no meaningful Kabbalah without Torah.

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

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.