Radical Judaism_ Rethinking God and Tradition - Arthur Green [3]
What is the nature of this experience? It is as varied as the countless individual human beings in the world, and potentially as multifarious as the moments in each of those human lives. In the midst of life, our ordinariness is interrupted. This may take place as we touch one of the edges of life, in a great confrontation with the new life of a child, or of an approaching death. We may see it in wonders of nature, sunrises and sunsets, mountains and oceans. It may happen to us in the course of loving and deeply entering into union with another, or in profound aloneness. Sometimes, however, such a moment of holy and awesome presence comes upon us without any apparent provocation at all. It may come as a deep inner stillness, quieting all the background noise that usually fills our inner chambers, or it may be quite the opposite, a loud rush and excitement that fills us to overflowing. It may seem to come from within or without, or perhaps both at once. The realization of such moments fills us with a sense of magnificence, of smallness, and of belonging, all at once. Our hearts well up with love for the world around us and awe at its grandeur. The experience is usually one that renders us speechless. But then we feel lucky and blessed if we have enough ties to a tradition that gives us language, that enables us to say, “The whole earth is filled with God's glory!”
For me God is not an intellectual proposition but rather the ground of life itself. It is the name I give to the reality I encounter in the kind of moment I have been describing, one that feels more authentic and deeply perceptive of truth than any other. I believe with complete faith that every human being is capable of such experience, and that these moments place us in contact with the elusive inner essence of being that I call “God.” It is out of such moments that religion is born, our human response to the dizzying depths of an encounter we cannot — and yet so need to — name. I returned to tradition, the one of my ancestors and my early attempts at faith, because it gave me a language with which to name that inner “place.” I find myself less convinced by the dogmatic truth claims of tradition than powerfully attracted to the richness of its language, both in word and in symbolic gesture. Through the profound echo chamber of countless generations, tradition offers a way to respond, to channel the love and awe that rise up within us at such times, and to give a name to the holy mystery by which our lives are bounded.
I was about twenty years old when I began studying the Zohar (the thirteenth-century classic of medieval Kabbalah) and the teachings of the early Hasidic masters (of eighteenth-century Eastern Europe). This encounter with the mystical tradition saved Judaism for me. Without it I would have wandered away. These works, almost all composed in homiletical form, are the living antithesis to systematic theology. Often they were first offered as oral teachings, appropriate to a certain sacred or personal moment. Only later were they written down, in somewhat disembodied form. But they are endlessly rich in insights, insights into the soul, the human condition, and sometimes even the cosmic order. They are marked by the transforming awareness of a mysterious divine presence, to be found everywhere and in each moment, once we open our eyes to it. The combination of deep conviction and playful religious creativity in those sources immediately touched my soul, and continues to do so nearly a half-century later. The essential insights of Hasidism— that God is to be sought and found everywhere and in each moment, that our response to this deeper truth is both a daily practice and a lifelong adventure, and that our ongoing discovery of God can uplift and transform both soul and world — soon became my truths. The best semisystematic work where I found them presented in those early years was