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By Root 440 0

moment in the ongoing call from within to push our understanding forward, to participate in the evolving process of divine self-manifestation in the human mind and spirit. We are now witness to a renewed discussion of states of mind that were well understood by Jewish mystics of prior ages, though discussed in abstruse Kabbalistic language. Now they are presented to us in Indian or Buddhist religious categories, another set of culturally unfamiliar garments. We need to build bridges that will allow contemporary seekers to overcome these problems of language, much as Hasidism once did in rendering the Kabbalistic tradition accessible through simplification. The Judaism emerging from such a process would clearly assert the holiness of all life, seeing the face of God both in the uniqueness of each individual creature and in the underlying and mysterious unity of all. The worship of the personified “God” needs to be clearly described as a symbolic way to express this truth and to deepen its expression through the rich echo chambers of a traditional religious language.

Here too I turn to Kabbalah for a way to say this within the context of Judaism. The Zohar understands well that the personal God-figure, in both its male and female articulations (tif'eret and malkhut) is a series of symbolic constructions, less than the divine absolute. In encouraging speculation that goes beyond the God of biblical memory and even seeks out the origins (in fact, the “birth”) of that God in the recondite mythology of the uppermost sefirot, the mystics were creating a theological position that they rarely dared to articulate clearly.58 The personal God is a symbolic bridge between transcendent mystery (that which by definition the mind cannot grasp) and a humanity that constantly reaches forth toward it. Because that “reaching” needs to be undertaken by the whole of the human self, including emotion and body as well as mind, the “bridge” needs to be one to which we can most wholly respond, a projection of our own form. The mysterious reality beyond, that which the Kabbalist would call ‘atiqa, “the Ancient One,” or eyn sof, “the Endless,” exists before and after our reaching out, and is none other than the underlying oneness of Being.

At long last, I return to the urgency with which I opened this discussion. I am indeed a neo-Hasidic Jew, and the insight of the Ba'al Shem is one that has become my own. The intimations of holiness I encounter in both time and space serve as windows through which I catch brief glimpses of an underlying cosmic unity, insights into a deeper truth about being. The panentheistic reading of Judaism I offer here is a theology that seeks to be honest to such moments of experience. But I offer it also as a vehicle through which to transform the way we live on earth. All of existence is holy. Every creature, whether alive and sensate or “inanimate,” is nothing other than the sacred presence of Y-H-W-H, hidden and revealed through yet another of its endless masks. No creature is truly separate from my own self, since I too am but one of those masks of God. My “self” is nothing other than a manifestation of the single Self of being, having ever so temporarily arranged its molecules in a pattern that allows for this particular manifestation. My love and reverence for all creatures, including all the human and nonhuman others I encounter, derives from the awareness that we are all one in Y-H-W-H. This awareness calls upon me to know and to care for those others, as I partake in and celebrate the diversity through which our shared inner Self becomes present in the world.

But to become fully at home in Judaism these insights into qedushat ha-hayyim (the sanctity of all life) and oneness will have to adapt themselves to the Jewish language of intimacy as well. Even though I understand that God is no true Other to the soul, and I see us on the path toward a monistic consciousness, I continue to speak the Jewish language of love. This language includes both “Behold, thou art fair, My beloved” (Song of Songs 1:16) and “Blessed