Seeing God

Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one. -Deuteronomy 6:4

Many people, without realizing, end up with two gods:

One god is an impersonal one, an all-encompassing, transcendent force.

But then, at times of trouble, they cry out to another, personal god, with whom they have an intimate relationship.

Our faith is all about knowing that these two are one. The same G-d who is beyond all things, He is the same one who hears your cries and counts your tears. The same G-d who is the force behind all existence and transcends even that, He is the same G-d who cares about what is cooking in your kitchen and how you treat your fellow human being.

G-d cannot be defined, even as transcendent. He is beyond all things and within them at once.

-Rabbi Tzvi Freeman
"Two Are One"
Chabad.org

Observant Jews say the Shema twice a day in obedience and devotion to God. In saying the Shema, a Jew declares that God is One and there is no other God but the God of Israel. This can be a bit of a challenge for some Christians who relate to God the Father as God, but also relate to Jesus, the Son of God as God, and to the Holy Spirit of God as God. Jews tend to see Christianity's conceptualization of the Trinity as polytheism; worshiping three "gods".

Yet, as Rabbi Freeman points out, even strict ethical monotheists can fall into the trap of worshiping two gods. Rabbi Freeman is talking about people who tend to conceptualize the One God in two different ways, depending on their needs, but Jewish mysticism also relates to more than one aspect of God.

As in Freeman's analysis, we tend to conceive of two "gods"; the God who manifests Himself to us in our universe, which we think of as the Shekhinah, and the invisible, eternal, immortal, infinite, all-powerful, Creator God who is far, far beyond all human understanding, which we call Ayn Sof. In doing this, is mystic Judaism creating polytheism?

I seriously doubt it. The problem isn't God, it's us. God isn't something we can subdivide or compartmentalize as we would any other thing in our experience. God is One. We just don't have the means by which to comprehend, let alone experience the "oneness" of God. Rabbi Freeman makes this point thus:

Faith is not the result of experience.

On the contrary, faith is an act that comes from within and creates experience.

Things happen because you trust they will.

The world, the universe, all of Creation simply exists. It doesn't have categories or types or organizations as such...not until we apply an order upon things. We do this to try and understand our world and our experience. God even approves of this activity when we perform it:

And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto the man to see what he would call them; and whatsoever the man would call every living creature, that was to be the name thereof. And the man gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field... -Genesis 2:19-20

Part of humanity taking dominion over the world God created for us was to impose our organization upon everything in that Creation.

But God is not part of Creation. God is unique and He presents a unique challenge and puzzle for human beings. What do we think of God? How do we relate to Him? How do we use our human senses, and our human brain, and our human feelings, to understand and connect to God?

In Christianity, the answer is simple (or so it seems): love Jesus Christ as lord and savior. He lived, died, and lived as a human being, so the Jewish Messiah makes God a much more relatable "object" than God the Father.

Oops. Now we're back at "God is Two": God the unknowable, unreachable, Father, and God the Son, who we have imagined to be ultimately reachable, relatable, connectible, and all too human.

Really?

I turned around to see the voice that was speaking to me. And when I turned I saw seven golden lampstands, and among the lampstands was someone like a son of man, dressed in a robe reaching down to his feet and with a golden sash around his chest. The hair on his head was white like wool, as white as snow, and his eyes were like blazing fire. His feet were like bronze glowing in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of rushing waters. In his right hand he held seven stars, and coming out of his mouth was a sharp, double-edged sword. His face was like the sun shining in all its brilliance. When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. -Revelation 1:12-17

Not exactly the warm and fuzzy teddy bear many churches have turned the King of Kings into in modern times. Sure, the rest of verse lets Jesus tell John to not be afraid, but as we see, John had every reason to be afraid.

So can we relate to God as God? Do human beings have the "equipment" to even perceive God as He is and to honor and worship God as One. Jewish mysticism and just about every other mystic tradition is devoted to connecting to God in His realms as He is, but there's also a more straightforward and simple approach, again, as presented by Rabbi Freeman:

Belief is not enough - you need Trust.

A believer can be a thief and a murderer.

Trust in G-d changes the way you live.

James says it this way:

You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that - and shudder. -James 2:19

Normally, you get to know someone through a series of experiences and eventually learn to trust them. We can't do that with God because we can't experience Him as we experience a human being. Both James and Rabbi Freeman tell us that faith and trust are the doorway by which we must reach God. We don't need to understand Him, although we may want to. We don't need to conceive of Him in all his eternal and majestic glory, although we may desire it. We need to have faith and to trust Him. This isn't blind trust. We can see. Our eyes are wide open. It's just that, like John in his Revelation, like Ezekiel in his vision, and like those others who have been privileged to have a mystic encounter in a world beyond our own, we don't always comprehend what and who we see. However, He is God and He is One and we can trust in Him, though He is as far beyond us as the heavens are beyond the earth.

Trust is how we can see God.

In the early part of the twentieth century, another Jewish philosopher, Hermann Cohen, suggested that the essential feature of monotheism is not that there is only one God but that the one God is unique. By unique he means that God is unlike and therefore not comparable to anything else in the universe; in short, God is and will always remain in a category by Himself. As Isaiah says in 40:25, "To whom then will you liken Me, that I should be equal?"

from Maimonides: A Guide for Today's Perplexed
by Kenneth Seeskin

The road is long and often, we travel in the dark.