Radical Judaism_ Rethinking God and Tradition - Arthur Green [70]
This reference to coupling and birth brings us to the second innovation of the mystics. In some of their teachings, including the highly influential Zohar, it is not clear that God “creates” a world entirely separate from the divine Self. Behind frequent masks of apologetics and denial, one gets a sense that the mystics’ true faith was in emanation, the constant outflow of divine energy into all of being, linked to a needed backflow of sacred energy, through the human and specifically the Kabbalists’ own channel, to replenish its source in the One. God and person are linked by something much more than a human sense of “creattureliness” and gratitude toward our Creator. They are rather two antipodes in a closed circuit of energy, each of them sending the needed charge back to the other in order to sustain the cosmic system that embraces them both. Viewed differently, one might say that existence is a great adventure. It is the One who “embarks” upon that journey or adventure, leading to existence as we know it. In that process, the One comes to be present in iconic (today we might say “holographic”) form and is present within each step of the process and each being that comes to exist along the way. But the goal of that process, which we could easily depict as taking “evolutionary” form, is the emergence of humans, those who can, through their covenanted and devotional activity, channel the light back to its Source.
All of this language belongs to the old tale of Creation. But as moderns we are far from being literal “believers” in this still-beloved tale. I began this book by recognizing the length and complexity of our evolutionary journey. Our civilization has been transformed over the past century and a half in no small part by our acceptance of a new tale of origins, and today it is in the context of this account that we need to find a language for human dignity and the unique value of each human life. The history of living creatures, beginning with the origins of life itself, has been the object of both scientific research and quasi-scientific speculation over the course of the entire period since the Darwinian revolution began to take hold. An area of special interest has been physical anthropology, focusing on the evolution of our human ancestors out of those primates to whom we are most closely biologically related. Part of this work involves defining the “human.” At what point, and in which skeletal remains, do we recognize someone we can clearly call a “human” ancestor? Do we consider Homo erectus a “human” ancestor? Homo sapiens? Or only what is now called Homo sapiens sapiens? What are the criteria for defining this “humanity”? Is there a clear line we can draw between our regard for fellow members of our own species and that which we feel — and what we do — for the rest of the natural order?
I once again address this question within the conceptual framework that I laid out in the first chapter, one that seeks to reframe contemporary scientific understanding in language and insight drawn from our mystical tradition. On the biblical verse “[God] blew the breath of life into [Adam's] nostrils,” the mystics comment: “One who blows into something blows from within his own self.”19 The cosmology I outline here understands “God” as the One, the inner force of all being, present within each thing that exists, as it is present within each moment of time. It extends (or “blows”) its own Self, if you will, into each of us. The emergence of each new life form, or even existence form, is a new “garbing” of the eternal One or a new breath blown forth from the inexhaustible Source. In that sense all creatures are the “image” of God, for they all embody the divine reality. But the human developed, in the course of our own evolution,