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By Root 454 0

” means that all the many words that will come to exist, both within the Torah text and in the on flowing stream of conversation about it in all generations, constituting the Oral Torah, are present in the divine silence that precedes and underlies them. In that silence there is not yet any division between words and letters, between schools of thought or points of view on any question that will ever emerge within Torah. I would expand this to claim that the divine silence also reaches beyond the divide between religions, taking us back to that inner place that precedes and underlies them all. It is important to recall that aleph, as the first letter of the alphabet, also represents the number 1 in the Hebrew counting system. Here Torah, as the divine word that is one with its Source, takes us back to that which we were seeking: a Jewish language for expressing the oneness of all that is. God is the underlying One behind and within all existence. Torah is the underlying One behind and within all language. The oneness underlying “Creation” and the oneness underlying “revelation” are the same One.

The Torah of Eden

What could it possibly mean to speak of Torah as “God's word” or “revelation” in the religious context I am offering here? I challenge myself yet again, as I do frequently, asking whether my mystical language is not merely an obfuscation of my disbelief. God is Y-H-W-H, the wholeness of Being, the energy that makes for existence, the engine that drives the evolutionary process. This is a God of silence, not a speaker, surely not of the Hebrew text of Torah as it stands before us. The Hebrew language is a late dialect of West Semitic, a part of the human evolution of language, not the sacred tongue as our ancestors knew it, employed by God not only for the giving of Torah but for the creation of the world itself. The text was written and edited by human beings over the course of centuries, rather than dictated from the mountaintop. The personified God, I have admitted quite clearly, is a mythical projection. A literal belief in a God who speaks the words of Torah is indeed far from what I have in mind.

And yet I have already identified God as a speaker. In saying that the creative force within Being calls out “Where are you?” to every human being, surely a call that is not in words and comes from a place deeper than language, I have already begun to build the bridge that will carry us from silence to Torah. Let us return now to the accounts of “Creation,” old and new. In the old tale, God calls out to Adam: “Ayekah?” — “Where are you?” Making the shift from the old to the new “Creation” story, I have chosen to read this as the call of God from within, the animating spirit of the whole great evolutionary journey, calling out to every human to participate fully in it, each in our distinctive way. It is our ability to hear and respond to this call, transformed because of the evolution of the human brain, including conscience, that lets us dare claim to be tselem elohim, the image of God, in a way other than the rest of creation. “The power of the Maker is in the made,” say the Hasidic masters, referring to the stamp of God on all of Creation.26 As a panentheist or radical immanentist, I would go farther still. All beings are part of the indivisible One, each a unique manifestation of HaWaYaH, the force of existence. But the distinctiveness of humanity and the unique way each human reflects divinity27 also needs to be maintained. In one pocket, to paraphrase a Hasidic master, carry the message: “We humans are animals: flesh and blood, dust and ashes.” But in the other pocket: “For You have made us little lower than the angels” (Ps. 8:6). Soaring spirits, ever climbing ladders to an inner “heaven.”

The rabbis long ago noted that the ayekah (“Where are you?”) of Eden needs merely to be revocalized to produce the mournful ekhah (“How does the city sit solitary!”) that opens the book of Lamentations, which is to say that all the destructions, holocausts, and lesser sufferings of human history could be foretold