Before the Beginning

In the beginning God created heaven and earth Genesis 1:1 (Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, The Living Torah)

God created – The Bible starts with creation.  It does not start with the divine essence before creation.  In fact, it says nothing about God’s essence before God created.  Everything in the Bible is conditioned on the interaction between God and His creation.  Why is this important?  It is important because it squashes the human penchant (and arrogance) of theological and mystical speculation before the beginning—and after the end.  As Rothschild notes:

“An adequate Biblical ontology . . . must be based on . . . the divine concern.  God and the world in relation, and not God in isolation, is the subject matter of human experience and thought.  Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as theology(the logos about God).  Heschel calls the Bible ‘God’s anthropology’ rather than ‘man’s theology’ since it deals with man as standing in relation to God and under his demand and not with the divine nature or essence.  And just as Biblical ontology cannot deal with God apart from the world, it is also unable to look at the world in isolation from God.  The divine concern is, therefore, a more basic category than being.”[1]

I like the work of Abraham Heschel very much.  His thought is incredibly insightful and deeply spiritual.  It is fascinating that he was professor of Jewish mysticism at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.  Since Heschel’s work is so clearly anchored in biblical material and so clearly focused on the divine-human relationship, his examination into mysticism comes as a surprise to me.  On that subject he wrote the following:

“Like the vital power in ourselves that give us the ability to fight and endure, to dare and to conquer, which drives us to experience the bitter and the perilous, there is an urge in wistful souls to starve rather than be fed on sham and distortion.”[2]

“To the cabbalists God is as real as life, and as nobody would be satisfied with mere knowing or reading about life, so they are not content to suppose or to prove logically that there is a God; they want to feel and to enjoy Him; not only to obey, but to approach Him.  They want to taste the whole wheat of spirit before it is ground by the millstones of reason.  They would rather be overwhelmed by the symbols of the inconceivable than wield the definitions of the superficial.”[3]

“Stirred by a yearning after the unattainable, they want to make the distant near, the abstract concrete, to transform the soul into a vessel for the transcendent, to grasp with the senses what is hidden from the mind, to express in symbols what the tongue cannot speak, what the reason cannot conceive, to experience as a reality what vaguely dawns in intuitions.”[4]

“His desire is not only to know more than what ordinary reason has to offer, but to be more than what he is . . .”[5]

“Nothing here is final.  The worldly is subservient to the otherworldly. . . this world is the reality of the spirit in a state of trance.”[6]

“ . . . the spiritual is not an idea to which one can relate his will, but a realm which can even be affected by our deeds.”[7]

With these excerpts, we might wonder how mysticism could play any real part in spiritual life without violating the separation between the divine and the human.  We might ask how mysticism can function when its subject matter seems to be before the beginning.  That urge for spiritual TRUTH, for knowing more than we can comprehend, is so strong in us, so tempting, that we often put aside the more base considerations to chase the dream.  Ivory towers are so antiseptically peaceful.

But they aren’t attached to the gutters of our lives, are they?

“The idea of pathos, which forms the main theme of Heschel’s penetrating study of prophetic consciousness . . . expresses the conviction that the Deity cannot be understood through a knowledge of timeless qualities of goodness and perfection, but only by sensing the living acts of God’s concern and his dynamic attentiveness in relation to man, who is the passionate object of his interest.  [God} is moved and affected by the actions of men and reacts to them in joy and sorrow, pleasure and wrath.”[8]

Topical Index: mysticism, beginning, Genesis 1:1, Heschel

[1] Fritz A. Rothschild, “Introduction,” in Abraham Heschel  Between God and Man: An Interpretation of Judaism (Free Press Paperbacks, 1959), p. 24.

[2] Abraham Heschel, The Mystical Element in Judaism (Varda Books, 2017), p. 3.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid., p. 4.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., p. 5.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Fritz A. Rothschild, Op. Cit., p. 24.