Radical Judaism_ Rethinking God and Tradition - Arthur Green [52]
I am suggesting that the silently spoken divine “Where are you?” is the essence of revelation. To be a religious human being is to recognize that call and to seek to respond to it. It is given new iteration in Sinai's two commandments “I am” and “Worship nothing else,” but it essentially remains unchanged. All the rest of Torah (here used in the broadest sense), with all of its shaping and patterning of our lives, with all its intricacies and ambiguities of language, is a traditional storehouse out of which we form and enrich our response to that challenge. The question addressed to us is indeed a silent one, but it calls forth from us all of our most refined and subtle uses of language.29
In speaking this way, I need to remind the reader, I am not proclaiming the existence of a silent divine realm “somewhere” other than everywhere, throughout existence, manifesting itself deep within the human psyche, perhaps also in the collective memory of humanity. Where is language born within the individual? Is there some memory cell, not yet discovered or known to consciousness, that can take us back to infantile memory, to the time before we had language, before we were able to shape the cacophony of our shouts into words? Might the same be possible for humanity as a whole, as we follow the links in our newly revealed DNA maps back to ancestors who could not yet speak? Is there a preverbal human locked away within us, hidden behind our complex, civilizing masks of language? Might this be what leads to the profundity of primal scream therapy or, as read by many a Hasidic master, of the wordless niggun or the shofar sound, penetrating to places deeper, more ancient within us than words can reach?
Those who practice meditation come to taste the profundities of inner silence. This is an age in which we seek silence. The louder and more deafening the din of our fast-paced lives, the more we hear of people signing on to silent weekends or even thirty- or forty-day silent retreats, reminding us of Elijah's time on Mount Horeb. The ta'anit dibbur, or “verbal fast,” is an old Jewish tradition that waits to be revived in our day. Only amid our own silence will we be able to “hear” the silent call that comes from the beyond that lies within us. The recovery of silence is probably the greatest gift that we Jews have to gain from our contact with the sacred traditions of the East, where silence has been cultivated so well.
Mitzvah: Responding to the Call
All of religion can be seen as a series of ongoing and evolving human responses to the silent “Where are you?” that we hear or feel welling up inside us. In this sense I understand the silent Self of Being indeed to be the immanent, indwelling “commander” of the mitzvot, “commandments” that make up so much of Jewish life.30 But this claim is in need of some serious examination and unpacking. What does the innermost One “want” in calling out to us? (Yes, my rereading of our post-Darwinian reality as a quest for meaning demands such a seemingly unscientific question. To put it perhaps more comfortably for some readers: “In the economy of the natural order, is there some reason why human beings should feel a sense of demand to reciprocate for the many gifts of life?”) First, it wants us to be aware, to attain the deepest understanding we can of the evolving oneness of being, and to live in faithfulness to that awareness. Only in this way can we do our assigned work of continuing evolution,