Two Worlds
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Genesis 1:1 NASB
The heavens and the earth – God is in Heaven, right? Well, not exactly. You see, if we believe that God is transcendent, that implies He is other than His creation, and that means Heaven, which is also part of creation, is not His home. This is a problem; not because of the issue of creation but because of the issue of transcendence. A truly transcendent God is literally unknowable to us. All of our categories are human and God isn’t any of them. Even words like omniscient, omnipotent, perfect, eternal, typically used to describe God, are really human words understood in human context. Aquinas invented the via negativa (what God is not) in order to address this issue (God is not limited, is not flawed, is not temporal). But that really doesn’t help. Knowing what God isn’t doesn’t tell us anything positive about Him, and without some positive connection, God remains in the dark (to use a human expression).
Rabbi Ismael and Rabbi Akiva set this whole problem in motion long before Aquinas.
“. . . How do Rabbi Ismael and Rabbi Akiva draw the lines between what Franz Rosenzweig saw as the three fundamental entities, God, humanity, and world? For Rabbi Ishmael, there is a clear line to be drawn between God on the one side, and humanity and world together on the other side. The human being is ben adam, the earthly creature (from adamah, earth). God is ‘transcendent’ or ‘other.’ In the terminology we have been using until now, God is the only transcendent entity. The boundary between earth and heaven is fixed and impermeable. Even to speak of God as on the ‘heavenly’ side of the boundary is metaphorical . . . Humans must find their way of expressing themselves, their strategy for coping, and their frame of reference within limitations posed by this earthly realm. Derekh eretz is an essential component of the program for right conduct. . .
For Rabbi Akiva, the picture is more complex. Even if we follow Heschel and ascribe to Rabbi Akiva the Platonic-dualistic outlook that Rabbi Abbahu articulated, it is the created world itself that is invested with this duality. ‘Heaven-and-earth’ is the biblical-rabbinic idiom describing the whole of creation. God created two worlds, ‘this world’ and the ‘world to come,’ which correspond to each other. To be sure, in all expressions of Platonic dualism (including the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah, which draws heavily on Akivan proto-mysticism), the heavenly realm is closer to the original impetus of creation and therefore is invested more heavily with divine content. But there is a continuous flow from the one to the other. The boundary of heaven and earth is permeable. The heavenly Torah embodies the supernal wisdom. Even if the earthly Torah is only a ‘fallen fruit’ of its heavenly prototype, still every letter and crown in it is the living word of God. The Shekhinah is truly present in certain sites more than others—on the heavenly throne, between the cherubim of the Tabernacle—yet the Shekhinah also suffers exile, and God truly participates in the sufferings of Israel. Thus, transcendence is a dimension of the whole heaven-and-earth continuum and system of correspondences . . . yet God is immanent on all levels of the continuum, . . By relating to God Who is immanent in the Torah, the mitzvot, in the miracles of daily living (which are pointers to their heavenly prototypes), we transcend the mere facticity of our earthly existence. This is . . . the ‘transcendental’ perspective.[1]
What did you learn? Well, first, you learned to correct your idea of heaven and earth. But you also learned that Akiva’s explanation puts God in our world, and we desperately need Him in our world. Torah and the whole concept of the Jewish way of life is about God’s involvement with us, about God’s human face. That’s why Yeshua can say, “If you’ve seen me, you’ve see the Father.” He doesn’t mean that you’ve seen the transcendent being. The Torah tells us that no human can see God’s transcendence and live. What he means is that God is also immanent and we can see Him in the actions and attitudes of human beings in this world and the next. Heaven and earth might be impenetrably removed from the transcendent God, but that doesn’t mean He can’t show up here in a way we can understand.
Topical Index: heaven and earth, transcendence, immanence, Genesis 1:1
[1] Gordon Tucker, in Abraham Heschel, Heavenly Torah as Refracted through the Generations (ed. and trans. by Gordon Tucker, Continuum International Publishing Group, New York, 2007), p. 260.
