are You Y-H-W-H, our God, eternal and universal Ruler.” My call for devotion to this language is no mere traditionalism or nostalgia for a naive faith once held. I write as a mystic and a monist, one who believes in (and in rare and precious moments has come to know) the essential truth that there is only one Being, and that all distinctions between self and other and between God, world, and soul represent partial betrayals of that truth. In my liturgical and communal religious life, however, I continue to speak this dualistic religious language. I do so because I remain a Westerner. I continue to live most of my life, as we all do, on a plane of duality, in a life experience where the distinction between you and me and the borders between us are pretty important things to remember. My task is to educate and awaken that self (the “lesser” mind of qatnut, to use the Hasidic term), in my own being as well as in others, to the reality of the single Truth. It is the self who lives on that plane who has to be taught and reminded, day by day and moment by moment, that the world of multiplicity and fragmentation is not ultimate reality. That self is the one who has to be brought across the bridge. In order to do that teaching, I need to employ a language that such a self can understand, one that will seduce and uplift the ordinary human mind. Simply to proclaim and repeat the monist abstraction to one who lives in duality will not do. For this purpose we have been given the great gift of human intimacy, the “mirror of love,” if you will, to hold up as a bridge between the worlds of the two and the One. To remind the self of the greatest moments of intimacy and expansion it has known, to take the passion and longing that are such real parts of our shared humanity and to use them as channels toward that deeper truth, is to follow a path taken by mystics over many centuries. The God who is the object of our love, precisely because we bring ourselves forward in that love with such openheartedness and vulnerability, is the One who can lead us beyond the duality that “I love you” implies, toward that place where there is only One. Who more than the Ba'al Shem Tov stands to remind us that all love, even all of eros, is the fallen fruit of the great single love of God that animates the cosmos?59 The language of love is a way in which soul and mind can address one another, each calling the other along to the great journey. “Deep calls to deep” (Ps. 42:8), to say it in the language of midrash: one aspect of human depth calls out to the other.
This same phrase, “deep calls unto deep,” also offers us a hint as to how a contemporary understanding might view the old struggle between vertical and internal religious language. We would see both of them as aspects of consciousness, the highly complex human mind pushing and churning within itself to attain a higher (or more profound) grasp of being, both in its oneness and in its infinite complexity. To do this the mind has to combine its most sophisticated tools of abstract analysis with its most primitive instinctual rootedness in the One, its “reptilian brain.” (In Kabbalistic language, where it is much easier to say this, the united male/female person, tif'eret/malkhut, has to go back to his/her deepest contemplative roots in binah, the inner womb of being, in order to receive the infinite grace of ‘atiqa, the ultimate source of divine light, the God beyond all “gods.”)
The union of intimacy and abstraction I have described above is expressed in Judaism's special devotion to the name of God, the four-letter name referred to as shem ha-meforash, which I have represented here by the letters Y-H-W-H. God's “explicit” name is one that may never be written or pronounced. The name, as I suggested earlier, is an impossible configuration, a pseudo-noun, created out of the verb “to be,” and should probably best be translated “was/is/will be.” But the sounds that form the name also indicate abstraction. There is no firm consonant among them; the y, the w, and the h are all nothing more than shapings