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By Root 464 0

to say it in capsule form, of RaShI rather than that of either Maimonides or the Zohar. Here the God-idea was carried in the most ancient of metaphors, those of Father and King, stripped of all the later subtleties and refinements. The liturgy, mostly derived from a Judaism that historically preceded both philosophy and Kabbalah, retained its key role in shaping the popular Jewish imagination. Knowing little of either the philosophical or the mystical tradition, most modern Jews thought of Judaism's God in rather naive and childlike terms. Once they came to reflect on the faith they had inherited, this Judaism unsurprisingly was rejected. Jews came to be among the most highly secularized populations of the modern era.54

Yet the ever-evolving and ever-revealing One finds its ways. Awareness of the One burrows through the labyrinth of the human religious imagination across all the cultural divides that once defined us. The story as I have told it up to this point is entirely a Western one, running from the religious world of the ancient Near East, through the Hebrew Bible, and thence into Judaism, also shaping both Christianity and Islam. These three religions exist in an intertwined relationship throughout history, influencing and borrowing from one another in more irregular and complex ways than had once been imagined. For today's picture, however, we have to step beyond this Western-dominated view and notice other streams of influence. In our times the borrowing and adaptation that once came into the Jewish imagination through Greco-Islamic channels seems to be taking place again in the very fascinating and new encounter between Judaism and the religious languages of India, Japan, and Tibet. Westerners, including many Jews who think they cannot “believe in God,” meaning that they reject the naive images of the deity absorbed in childhood, find themselves attracted to deep meditations on the oneness of Being adapted for Westerners from both Buddhist and Vedantic teachings.55 These insights are being brought home by returning Jewish voyagers and integrated into our tradition much as the garbled teachings of Plato and Aristotle were, so many centuries ago. So far this has been taking place mostly in the personal practice of theological amateurs, but the time has come for serious thinkers to take note of it and find the proper language for what I believe can be a welcome renewal of deeper Jewish faith, one coming about through influence from unexpected quarters.

In this context, the time has arrived for Jewish panentheism to step out of the closet, as it were. This faith that understands yihud ha-shem, the divine unity, to refer to the underlying oneness of all being has long existed in Jewish circles, though clothed in the earlier and scripturally reinforced language of personalism. Implicit in the Zohar, where the energy of existence is constantly flowing into all creatures from the inexhaustible source of Being called eyn sof, a Jewish panentheism is described most fully in the early texts of Hasidism that I have mentioned. There it is quite explicit in the theological literature, though again often obscured in the more popular face that Hasidism tried to show. As the movement survived initial persecution and grew to find acceptance as a form of ultra-Orthodoxy, it jettisoned its more daring and innovative theological stances.56 Hillel Zeitlin (1874-1942), the neo-Hasidic thinker whose work has so influenced me, tried to revive it. His contemporary Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935) was quite close to him in this matter. More recent Jewish theological voices, much consumed with other “local” and pressing Jewish issues (Holocaust and survival, statehood and diaspora, law and authority), expressed little interest in this essential question of reconceiving the relationship between God and world.57

Today, in the face of the newly emerging dialogue between classically “Eastern” and “Western” modes of religious thought, there is a new focus on the quest for alternatives to personalist theism. I understand this as yet another