I have divided myself into God and me; I become the worshiped and I worship myself. Why not? God is I. Why not worship my Self? The universal God—He is also my Self. It is all fun. There is no other purpose.
—VIVEKANANDA1
Hashem is here, Hashem is there, Hashem is truly everywhere. Up, up, down, down, right, left, and all around. Here, there, and everywhere, is where He can be found.
—JEWISH NURSERY RHYME
I don’t believe in the same God that you don’t believe in!
—RABBI ZALMAN SCHACHTER-SHALOMI2
What is the relationship of nondual Judaism to “ordinary” Judaism? The first two chapters of this book have explained the nondual view and its roots—but how does it relate to (and transform) Judaism as it is conventionally understood today? The next three chapters will attempt to answer this question, focusing on the three pillars of Jewish life: God, Torah, and Israel. In this chapter, we will explore the meaning of “God” in the nondual Jewish context and question whether the word should be used at all. In the next chapter, we will explore the “Torah” of nondual Judaism; namely, if everything is God, what’s the point of Jewish practice, of following a Torah, whether understood traditionally or not? And then in chapter 5, we’ll look at nondual Judaism in relation to Jewish community, history, and messianism—to “Israel” writ large.
Throughout these chapters, there are two important basic principles: first, that nonduality is one among many possible Jewish theologies, and second, that nondual Judaism does not dictate a single Jewish practice. The first principle we have already explored: there are dualistic Jewish theologies, agnostic Jewish theologies, and many others; nondualism is but one view among many. The second principle will become clear in the chapters to come: nonduality is compatible with many forms of Judaism, from Hasidism to Reform, from cultural/nationalistic to spiritual/universal; it is compatible with atheistic Judaism, with notions of Judaism as an ethnicity, and with many forms of Judaism with which I personally may disagree. One of Judaism’s great strengths is its focus on “deed rather than creed.” One can remain entirely within the Orthodox fold, for example, while holding all sorts of seemingly heretical notions, because with only a few exceptions, “Orthodox” describes practice, not doctrine (despite its literal meaning of “right belief”). Conversely, one may hold very traditional conceptions of God and Torah, while practicing as a very progressive Conservative Jew, or Reform Jew, and so on.
Likewise, the nondual “creed” is compatible with many philosophies of “deed.” Some nondual Jews practice the mitzvot, and others do not. Some are liberal, egalitarian, and progressive, and others are conservative, nationalistic, and traditional regarding gender roles. Some are Jewish particularists, emphasizing the unique role of Israel, while others see the Jewish path as but one among many. Some are pious Hasidim, and some heretics, even antinomians. The nondual view does not compel one particular view of Jewish tradition, practice, or purpose.
It does, however, demand certain questions be asked. If the world of phenomena is but the surface level of an ultimately nondual Reality, what is the point of busying oneself with meat and dairy dishes, or reading from the Torah? If the phenomenal world is illusion, what significance could there be to the mitzvot, or, for that matter, to ethics? Conversely, if YHVH is the reality of our lives, is a religious life required? What changes, and what remains? How are dualistic statements of Jewish texts to be understood? And what of God? We’ll start with the last question first.
THE APOPHATIC WAY: NEGATIVE THEOLOGY AND THE GOD BEYOND GOD
Far or forgot to me is near;
Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame and fame.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON, “BRAHMA”3
So what about God? If the God we want is the benevolent Parent who cares, then it would seem that nonduality denies this God, replacing It (or Him, or Her) with a kind of transparent, pantheistic, and even useless concept. This may well be a “fortunate fall,” since naive, limited God-concepts may seem, at best, to be quaint and outdated, or at worst, dangerous and infantile (consider the work of Franz Kafka, Philip Roth, Shalom Auslander, or, for that matter, the theological writing of Rachel Adler, Daniel Boyarin, or Jerome Segal; I return to this question in chapter 5). But in fact, things are not as they seem, for two fundamental reasons: first, the nondual God is not useless at all, and second, it is only half of the story.
Let’s explore, first, the “uselessness” of the nondual God, as expressed in terms of negative (“apophatic”) theology. There is a tendency for nonduality to seem intellectual, as if it is purely a theological enterprise. As I will return to again and again in this book, however, this is not so. “The truth will set you free”—spiritually, emotionally, even physically. It can revitalize how life is experienced. And if there’s one thing nondual theology is useful for, it’s negative theology: telling us that we don’t know what we think we know. Think you know the purpose of life? You don’t. Think you know what God wants, or is, or what the word even means? You don’t. And as soon as you don’t have to know anything, two things happen: first, the dangers of dogma and religious oppression disappear, and second, the world opens up.
Try it. The promise-keeper of Israel, the smiter of enemies, the Judge, the Father, the Mother, the peacemaker, the ethical voice—not It.
How about that wonderful sense that you get when you make the world a little less painful for someone who is suffering? No, that’s not God either; what about the sense you get when you’ve done something awful? Isn’t that part of Ein Sof too?
Maybe the sacred feeling you get in meaningful spiritual ritual—nope.
Or the joy of victory when your team/nation/army/tribe wins its battle—not that either.
All these are myths, projections, hopes, and yearnings. Some are beautiful, others quite hideous, but none is “It” because “It” is all of these and none of them, everything and nothing. “God is not light nor life nor love nor nature nor spirit nor semblance nor anything we can put into words,” says Meister Eckhart.4 Asked to describe Awareness, Nisargadatta replied, “Only by negation, as uncaused, independent, unrelated, undivided, uncomposed, unshakable, unquestionable, unreachable by effort. Every positive definition is from memory and therefore inapplicable.”5
Here’s a simple way to remember it: As long as God is everything and/or nothing, we are doing fine. It’s when we think God is something that we’ve gotten into trouble.
Good? Powerful? Male? Ineffable? Concepts, projections. Even “Being” is only half of the picture. In the Kabbalistic understanding, attributes (including the name “God”) belong to the realm of the sefirot, not the Ein Sof. Tiferet is the Holy One, Blessed be He, the God of Israel. But the Ein Sof is refracted in that mode and nine (really ninety-nine) others. And if we ask carefully what it is we actually know, we disabuse ourselves of all the lofty, lousy, and divisive ideas we project up into the heavens. How do you know that God wants a gentler world, but doesn’t want child sacrifice? You don’t: you just want it one way and not the other. How do you know that God loves Israel, and not the Palestinians—or, alternatively, that God loves all people equally, regardless of nationality? You don’t. How do you know that God did or didn’t write the Torah? You get the point.
Thus the non-knowledge of negative theology is really something. Suppose you went through the day holding every conceptual idea a bit more lightly: politics, fashion preferences, how people are supposed to behave. It’s not that you wouldn’t have these ideas, and act on them sometimes—it’s just that you’d not be so sure. Would that lead to more conflict, or less? Would you be more open to the impressions of the world, to the daily music of humanity, to the power of Nature, or less? Would you be more detached, or more engaged? Surrendering assumptions about God yields a much-needed surrender of certainty.
Experientially, this transparent God is similar to the notion of the “Witness” one cultivates in meditation, which simply sees and observes everything. The Witness is not a commentary on life, not a story about how things should be, not a judge or a character. It is an antidote to the ego’s endless stories and commentaries: I want to be like this person, I want to be loved in this way, that person is wrong, I like this, I don’t like that. Indeed, the basic, animal response of like it/dislike it/don’t care (what Buddhism calls vedana) arises with every perception we have, however subtly. All animals do it; it’s a basic survival mechanism. But we take it to extremes. Like the food, don’t like the sauce; like his shirt, but the pants are wrong. No percept is too insignificant to be imbued with a pointless note of preference.
Preference is like a cloud, occluding the reality of things, and it leads to the delusions of the ego and to suffering. It’s not that the selfish ego, the yetzer hara, is bad; it’s necessary to survive, as the rabbis say.6 But it distorts the world. Good is what meets my desire, bad is what doesn’t. And worse yet, not just Good—but God.
Here is another way to express it, seemingly banal but in fact so radical that it may overturn monotheism itself: Everything happens as it must—not as it should.
Traditional theism posits a governor of the universe, who causes things to be as they should. This immediately leads to all the old problems of theodicy. Did God “intend” for the earthquake to kill innocents? For a child to be born with disease? In the traditional monotheistic frame, such questions must be reconciled with a conception of God as good, and since the days of Job, the project has been an arduous one. Presumably, it must once have provided great solace to imagine a God who judges. Indeed, the Hebrew psalms rhapsodize about the rivers clapping hands and the forests rejoicing because God is coming to judge the earth. In a world of moral anarchy and religions of might, the yearning for rectitude must have been more intense than we postmoderns can imagine. And the god of this yearning? An all-powerful, all-just Father, who would set right the wrongs of earthly existence.
That this god is a projection of our deepest wants and fears is not to belittle it: after all, what is deeper than these stirrings of the heart? To say that God is a father figure perhaps smacks of Freudian reductionism—but only if one has never explored the recesses of consciousness, the dark places in which the self is built. Father figures, among others, are essential to our lives. But such projections will always run afoul of reality. The wicked are not always punished, the good not always rewarded. No wonder the principle of schar v’onesh (reward and punishment) became a signal definition of faith in the Jewish tradition: only faith can maintain it.
Because this Father God is so dearly beloved, generations of theologians have labored to square the circle. Perhaps, as in Job, all evil is but a test of the righteous. Or perhaps we are rewarded and punished after death, in invisible heavens and hells. Who knows, maybe “everything really happens for a reason,” as the Panglosses and Pollyannas of both religion and New Age spirituality tell us. Or, maybe, as Harold Kushner’s best-selling and confessedly heretical Why Bad Things Happen to Good People suggests, God is good, but not all-powerful after all. And of course, the righteous Father God is only one of many images. God/dess is also the Compassionate Mother, the sensualist, the ethical stirring of the soul, and reality is edited accordingly.
Human beings provide such explanations not only despite the facts, but often directly because of them. Studies such as When Prophecy Fails7 have shown that religious faith often increases, rather than decreases, when a theology or prophecy fails to accord with reality. Now the faithful can be tested; now there is a creed, an orthodoxy, a sect of true believers. This, too, has its nobility; the Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig once observed that if the Sambatyon, the mystical river which is said to cease flowing on the Sabbath, flowed through Frankfurt, then obviously everyone would be religious—and piety would have no value. God, Rosenzweig said, desires only the free.
Freedom, though, means growing up religiously. Popular religion tends to have very basic theological ideas of reward and punishment, right and wrong; it takes its myths seriously, and often concludes that only one version of the story can be correct. It meets very basic needs for comfort, meaning, and ethical guidance. But at some point, we ought to outgrow it.
But there are more reflective alternatives: monasteries instead of megachurches, Sufi rituals instead of fundamentalist fatwas, meditation instead of superstition, and, in the Jewish tradition, a variety of forms including Talmudic text study, Biblical exegesis, philosophical reflection, contemplative practice, and Kabbalistic speculation, and institutions like the yeshiva, mystical fellowships, the kloiz, or contemporary intentional communities. Contrary to the ludicrous and uninformed generalizations of some of today’s “neo-atheists,” these forms have been part of religion since the beginning. They are ill-suited to popular consumption, because they require investments of time and effort, not to mention the interest to do the work, and the financial circumstances to enable it. But they do exist, and they always have.
So, yes, the nondual God-concept is different from that of popular monotheism, just as Teilhard de Chardin’s “cosmic Christ” is different from televangelism and Ramana’s Self is different from the Hindu pantheon. This is just as one would expect; until very recently, nondual Judaism was an elite form of Jewish thought, not a popular one. It afflicts the comfortable more than it comforts the afflicted, and as we will see in part 2, its form of liberation takes work (avodah) to cultivate and maintain.
Today, however, the myths and creeds of popular religion have come under increasing (and deserved) attack, and many people have rightly left them behind. If religion is to survive for the benefit of mankind, and not for its destruction, reflective religious forms such as nonduality can no longer be confined to the elite.
Notice, too, that while nondual Judaism may take more avodah in some respects, it also lightens the burden considerably: when the nondual Ein Sof is understood, much of the convoluted labor of religion simply fall away. All the religionist’s explanation and justification, from the ridiculous to Rosenzweig, results from the monotheist’s positing of an external moral or aesthetic order, which cannot be demonstrated and which flies in the face of reality. And all of it vanishes in the nondual moment. From the nondual perspective, What Is is What Is, and the religious question becomes not why God has done or allowed a certain thing to come to pass, but how we as human beings are to relate to what has come to pass. “What’s going on right now, and can I be with it,” said Eckhart Tolle on Oprah, when asked, like Hillel, to summarize his philosophy. Most of the time, this maxim carries with it a rather predictable contemporary consciousness: being more present, more alive, more awake. But take it to its logical extreme, and it is a radical demand. What if “what’s going on right now” is a hospital visit with a child? What if it is confronting AIDS in Africa? What if it is even the simplest sadness, which nonetheless slams our pretensions to the floor and devastates us, despite all the spirituality in the world?
Now “can I be with it” is an imperative to look reality clearly in the eyes, not a platitude. Can I truly see this, not accepting it morally, but accepting its truth, with the perspective of: yes, God, yes, you are here as well; yes, in this darkness; yes, in this injustice; yes, in this evil. To repeat Surya Das’s similarly pithy encapsulation of his philosophy, the imperative is “to see the light in everyone and everything, in every moment.”8 Everything—not just summer days, but dark nights of the soul. Everyone—not just friends and family, but also those who cause harm to others and to the planet. Everyone means everyone. Wittgenstein said that what we are really saying when we say that “God is X” is “I value X.” How profound, then, to say that God is everything.
Profound—but not easy. The apparently beatific aphorisms of nonduality actually conceal great spiritual labor. Nondualists are relieved of the monotheistic burden of explanation, but we take on the burden of integration. I cannot ascribe this random, terrible occurrence to Satan. I cannot explain it away by saying that God works in mysterious ways. And I do not possess a cosmology that makes everything all right in the world to come. No: this happened, life is random, and fairness is a human ideal, not a natural law. Now, what do I do next?
As a personal matter—for religion can only be personal, if it is to be authentic—I find it somehow inhuman to explain away the reality of evil and suffering, and far more honest to see it for what it is. Thank God, I have so far experienced only a small amount of death and suffering among my loved ones, but that which I have experienced, I don’t want to ascribe to any kind of purpose or plan whatsoever. I don’t seek a “should” to distract from the “is.” When the “is” is lovely, I celebrate it; when it is tragic, I cry. Sometimes I maintain equanimity, and sometimes I don’t—and this, to me, feels human.
In the Hanhagot Yesharot (“Upright Practices”), R. Menachem Nahum of Chernobyl asks us to:
Believe with a whole and strong faith that God both fills all the worlds and surrounds them, that God is both within and beyond them all . . . Believe with a whole and strong faith that “the whole earth is full of God’s glory” and that “there is no place devoid of Him” . . . His divine Self wears all things as one wears a cloak, as Scripture teaches “You give life to them all” (Neh. 9:6). This applies even to the forces of evil, in accord with the secret of “His kingdom rules over all” (Ps. 103:19). All life is sustained by the flow that issues forth from God. Were the life-flow to cease, even for a moment, the thing sustained would become but an empty breath, as though it had never been.9
All the world is but a cloak for God—including the forces of evil. What R. Menachem Nahum calls the “life-flow” of God, a nontheist might simply call the system of causality and the laws of the universe. The point is that there is nothing that is not part of the system. This is not a flaw, not an aberration; this, alas, is what Is.
Everything happens as it must, not as it should. This happened; it happened because the causes and conditions were present to cause it to happen. When I drop a stone to the floor, it must fall, and it must make a sound. When the conditions are present, the person must fall in love, or fall ill, or fall from grace. Life happens, shit happens, joy happens, anger happens, and all of it happens exactly as it must. There are no uncaused phenomena, no quantum misinterpretations rescuing the illusion of free will; everything happens simply and exquisitely as it must.
This understanding is a significant shift from monotheistic conceptions of God ordering the world. And now the spiritual work is different. When something unfortunate happens, the monotheist explains what has taken place with recourse to some higher purpose. The nondualist does not offer any such explanation, but instead invites a deeper kind of acceptance. Inside, outside, nothing is happening without conditions, nothing is not happening despite conditions; everything is God unfolding. Can I be with it, and not run away into explanation or rationale?
As we will see in chapter 9, this is not a lazy “acceptance”—I am also charged with moral imperatives to continue my work of pursuing justice. “Shoulds” remain in the world of the relative, and some are more praiseworthy than others. But the normativity of “should” applies only to our ethical decisions. Our usual tales of “should”—I am right to be angry, I am entitled to be disappointed—are seen through. There is nothing justified or unjustified; there is only what happens due to conditions. And, I have noticed, with the loosening of the bounds of explanation comes a taste of the world to come. There is a wonderful Zen story about an enlightened master who learns that his son has died, and who is seen by his students to be crying. The students, knowing that their master has transcended desire and does not suffer, ask why he is crying. The master answers, “Because I am sad.”
Sadness is present, tears flow. Everything happens as it must. This is a taste of liberation.
The “should” is a wish, transcendent but not immanent; the “must” is truly omnipresent. The “must” can be uttered at any moment, as a mantra or a zikr, a reminder. “This happens as it should” seems often to be obscene. It reinforces my ego, my judgments, my evaluations of good or ill. It adheres to just and selfish desires alike, without discrimination, and with the bombastic potency of authority. It can deify desire as much as inspire justice. But when I remember the “must-ness” of any moment, traffic jam or symphony, bliss or frustration, I remember in the holy sense of remembering: I remember Who is really here, and What is really happening. I remember what my work is in the world: to relate to the One in wisdom and love. I remember, and while nothing has changed, everything has changed; the how, not the what.
This is the liberation of nonduality: not that anything changes in the world, but that the inflection of perception shifts; there is a relaxation of demand, and an abiding joyfulness in the simplest, most mundane experiences of breathing, sitting, eating. Perhaps such spirituality really is hedonism, because there is no finer pleasure, and none more accessible, than the everyday intercourse with Being itself. This is the God beyond the God of our projections.
How little time we spend being honest that we want to love. What a misdirection, to mold these yearnings into “shoulds” and “oughts” about the world. What is important about petitionary prayer, to God or Christ or Krishna, is the soul-stirring authenticity it may evoke, not the theology it implies. What is wrong about cruelty is suffering, not a violation of some Divine order.
Seeing what Is enables this honesty. The Witness doesn’t try to shade the truth; it only notices, and asks whether we can accept the truth or not. Holocausts, wars, earthquakes, and famines; from the perspective of nonduality, all of them simply are. What are you going to do about them? Likewise in our own lives: births and deaths, romances and separations, all of them just are, without elaboration or explaining away. In this bare observation, the Witness enables a response unclouded by the smoke of philosophy. It is not apathy; it is clarity, vision. And from that place of balance, love and compassion arise naturally, without any effort. By seeing clearly, we allow love to unfold.
But now let us allow the pendulum to swing back. For I love not only the Ein Sof; I also love God, the Compassionate One, the Friend, the Father, the Mother. Must I part with these images and archetypes, in the name of “growing up”? In fact, in the nondual view, they are all right here.
THE CATAPHATIC WAY: POSITIVE THEOLOGY AND THE RETURN OF GOD
Monotheism is not the whole picture.
—RABBI DAVID AARON10
The unspeakable is only one half of God. In Kabbalistic language, it is the ayin: nothingness, empty, featureless, transparent, unknowable. But recall that emptiness is the starting point, not the endpoint. The Ein Sof births the sefirot, the God of attributes and characteristics.11 Nirvana appears as samsara. And thus, in Ramakrishna’s words, “God with form is just as true as God without form.”12 That All is One is only an intermediate stage of the spiritual path. In Chabad language, the next step is the return to the “lower” from the perspective of the “higher,” the samsara that is one with nirvana, the multiplicity that is one with unity.
Skillful religionists know that at different times in our lives, we need different faces of God. On a meditation retreat, for example, it is often good to discard all images of the Divine, even the notion of “Divine” itself, and approach the ineffability of nonduality. In a hospital, however, this can be extremely unhelpful; there we may need God as healer, as listener, as rock of strength. And in times of emotional pain, we may need some of each. I love that my religious consciousness allows my heart to pine for the God of my ancestors and connect with Him (and Her) through ritual and the body.
This is how God returns—not as It, but as You. Ontologically, there is perhaps no difference between the two. But as Martin Buber most famously explained, the difference between It and You is a fundamental one of attitude. Buber began as a rigorous nondualist, compiling an anthology of unitive mystical experiences (Ecstatic Confessions) and writing his own essays on nonduality (such as Daniel). Later, though, he came to see that unitive mysticism was insufficient.13 It failed to account for multiplicity, and for the fact that the phenomenon of the self is constituted by relation. When I encounter You, “I” am formed; “I” emerge in the encounter itself. And when I choose to regard you (or You) as merely an It, as an object, a thing, “I” harden, “I” objectify, “I” dominate.
The attitude of It-ing is the materialist reduction of beings to quantities and commodities. The attitude of You-ing is to recognize their sanctity, their uniqueness, and, perhaps paradoxically, their otherness. Not a dualistic otherness, exactly—but an otherness when You are viewed from the perspective of the I. The You is not about characteristics or quantities; You are not European, or female, or tall, or smart. You are precisely the You which cannot be so demarcated and described. And, as the capitalization suggests, “You” is the only way we can properly address God. God as “It” involves some attribution of characteristics to the infinite, a theology and projection. But God as “You” is a mode of relation to Being. By choosing to address the world as You, by seeing fit to label Being as God, as the Beloved, as the Friend, the primal “Yes” is uttered. Yes to the world, and Yes to myth and to image. The No of negative theology remains—No to the reality of image, No to projection, No to definition, No to limit. But it is accompanied by the Yes, the re-embrace of image, projection, definition, limit, intimacy.
Perhaps you have noticed the irony that the traditions which most embrace nonduality also embrace polytheism. Hinduism is the greatest example, accommodating within itself both the rigorous philosophical nondualism of Advaita Vedanta and an effulgent pantheon of deities, incarnations, and mythological figures.14 But in the Jewish tradition too, precisely those mystical strands which most emphasize the Ein Sof as the totality of all existence also depict the dynamic partzufim (countenances) and sefirot of the Divine realm, mythologizing the latter not merely as Neoplatonic emanations but as characters in the heavenly novel, with personalities, narratives, sex lives, and names which multiply these prisms of Divine light into a radiance of infinite permutation.
On first blush, this would seem to be a contradiction. Why would precisely those traditions which emphasize that all is one multiply into infinity the faces and manifestations of God, gods, and goddesses? Surely these traditions should be the most iconoclastic, denying, in Zen-like form, every predicate attached to God, insisting on pure transcendence, pure otherness, and the ineffable oneness of the absolute, correct?
The resolution of this apparent contradiction is the crux of nondual Judaism as Judaism. It is no less than the most radical endpoint of nondual contemplation itself: that samsara is nirvana, that apparent is real, that God and the world interpenetrate, and are one. So let us explore it.
Presumably the first step along all of our spiritual paths is becoming aware, however dimly, of the numinous elements and experiences of our lives. Perhaps these insights occur in the context of religion, or perhaps of family, art, or activism. But the form is less important than the content: we experience wonder, awe, and love; we are outraged at suffering, injustice, and evil. Eventually, we come to cherish these experiences, understand our values, and, perhaps, interpret our lives according to myths and symbols inherited from our culture. Thus is born, in myriad different ways, the most basic forms of religious consciousness.
At this first stage, religion may take on many forms. It may not have a theology at all; it may simply be a love of life, or an appreciation for spirits and magic. Or it may evolve into polytheism, or a primitive monotheism that praises one god over others. In all cases, certain objects and places are sacred, certain myths are held to be true, and certain values are upheld.
Eventually, a second, more reflective stage arises—and comes to reject the earlier stage. Now, the philosophical theology of a Maimonides or an Aquinas comes to critique and reinterpret the old myths. This is a good thing: the unreflective religiosity that still holds sway in much of the world today, which posits a father figure in the sky who gets angry, judges, and forgives, has been the cause of great unreason and great violence. As today’s “new atheists” have pointed out, the old beliefs, held in an unreflective way, are often as unwise as they are untenable. So reflective religion audits our theologies: God does not have a body, God does not change, God does not have any attributes at all.
Over time, the second stage matures into the via negativa, denying all attribution to God, and forcing us to let go of even our most cherished images. This is crucial work, even though along the way the notion of “God” becomes entirely empty of content. This is God as ayin, Emptiness alone. It is absolutely essential to do this work before progressing onward; only in this way can the omnipresent be truly everywhere, rather than just in the places we like. If you have an idea of God, God negates your idea. If you have an image with limits, prepare to surrender it. Thus, gradually, reflection and discernment lead to a radical letting go, a total surrender which melts our idols into light. God becomes the All, and the Nothing, and becomes the One looking through your eyes right now.
And yet, there is still one further step, in which the “God beyond God” circles back to God, because “God” is seen as but another mask, just like your or my sense of self. To be honest, I think most of us rush here too quickly—I know I do—but it’s understandable. After all, God-as-Emptiness seems to deny our lived experience, and the reason we got involved in religion in the first place. I love resting in Being, identical with Emptiness—but I don’t pray to it. The Ein Sof doesn’t “hear” or “not hear”—it is everything and nothing! The reason I use the word “God” in the first place is because it captures a way of relating to the world. So there is a tendency to want our images back, even though we have not yet fully seen through them.
Yet logic, and perhaps Spirit, still draws us on. If Ein Sof is infinite, then does that not also include all of the manifest, finite world? Is not the very veil of illusion also Ein Sof? Or, in Kabbalistic language, isn’t the tzimtzum also God—is not Elohim also YHVH?
Yes, every concept is a mask, and all masks are illusory, but many are helpful in translating nonsense into sense. And since all masks are illusory, all masks are permitted. From the perspective of nonduality, polytheism and polymorphism become not theological propositions, if they were ever intended to be so, but representations of the variety of experience, the plurality of modes in which the world presents itself to consciousness. Now “God” appears as judge, conqueror, creator, gardener, nursemaid, lover, and king, because “God” is known in all those ways and more. Even the most traditional of prayers recognize the many faces of the One, because, as the individual soul becomes more attuned to the tempos and tenors of existence itself, the modes of divinity multiply.
With this understanding, polytheism and theological polymorphism are more consonant with nonduality than traditional monotheism is, because they recognize that whatever the ultimate is, it cannot be expressed in a single manifestation. Again, this is not necessarily radical: the psalmist knew this, the ancient Israelites knew this, and anyone who is willing to be curious about spirit can know it as well. The pious may label some of these instantiations of the divine as demons, or foreign gods, or worse, but to the nondualist, they are all, from the sublime to the sinister, pathways of knowledge of the one.15 As Vivekananda wrote:
If the buffaloes desire to worship God, they, in keeping with their own nature, will see Him as a huge buffalo; if a fish wishes to worship God, its concept of Him would inevitably be a big fish; and man must think of Him as man. Suppose man, the buffalo, and the fish represent so many different vessels; that these vessels all go to the sea of God to be filled, each according to its shape and capacity. In man the water takes the shape of man; in the buffalo the shape of the buffalo; and in the fish the shape of the fish; but in each of these vessels is the same water of the sea of God.16
We have at our disposal thousands of myths, symbols, and other linguistic technologies that enable us to speak obliquely of the unspeakable. And the more deeply we know ineffability, the more amenable we are to multiple forms of approximation. So nonduality and polytheism exist not in uneasy tension, but as complements of one another. Ein Sof dances as God, YHVH, Christ, Vishnu, Kali, Astarte, Beloved, and King, precisely because the Ein Sof transcends all of these appellations. God is everything precisely because God is nothing.
Every time we ascribe an attribute to God—including pleasant ones such as good, creative, holy—we make a mistake, limiting the unlimited. Yet every time we deny an attribute to the Infinite, the same error appears. The error of idolatry, as it is traditionally understood in Jewish texts, is less one of attribution than of separation: to suppose that God is this but not that. God is in the fire, but not in the water; in the stone of the idol, but not in the stone cast aside. The error is at once presuming too much (i.e., this image is of God) and too little (i.e., this image, but not that one). And it is one that arises all the time, when we say, “God is in the heavens, but not in the earth,” or “God is in the feeling of peace, but not the feeling of anger.”
Naturally, which images we use will depend upon our cultural conditioning. I recall one visionary experience, during which I perceived something dimly like a wing, or the ear of an elephant—who knows what the mind or inner eye had really seen—and then proceeded to “fill in” the whole rest of the elephant head, and enjoy a long (if Jewishly troubling) communion with Ganesh, the Remover of Obstacles. Hours later, after the experience was long over, I reflected that the same image might easily have been interpreted as one of the kanfei Shechinah, the wings of the Divine Presence, or the wing of archangel Gabriel, or any number of other mythic structures. I had only “seen” Ganesh because Ganesh had been on my mind. Experientially, the act of interpretation was instant, barely divorced from the perception, but conceptually, it was distinct from the experience itself. Even “wing” or “ear” is concept, overlaid on the bare perception by a mind eager to make sense of the insensible. Kal v’chomer—how much more so—the other great error of idolatry: experiencing power, and then believing the power to be one’s own.
So, yes, mystics around the world report different things, different experiences, different visions. But these differences do not deny an underlying unity precedent to reported experience, which of necessity includes interpretation. Even the most sublime of theophanies is an interpretation as well as a revelation. In mysticism, all concept is symbol that exists not to represent the known but rather to stand in synecdoche for the unknown.
Consequently, the Zen ox-herder’s “return to the market” from the experience of nothingness is an embrace of manifestation necessarily more deeply ecumenical than any naive religion that precedes such knowledge. As I return to my cherished symbols, to challah and wine, candles and songs, I do so with no pretension or desire that they are in any way superior to other symbols, or more accurate, or more holy. Yes, some symbols are better than others, relatively speaking; better candles than guns. But their worth is evaluated in a consequentialist way, in terms of the kinds of life they engender. In terms of the absolute, they are all technologies, nothing more; they are fingers that gesture at the moon, and also, if I may extend the metaphor, reflect the moonlight into hand and home. Could challah and kiddush be communion wafers and wine instead? Of course. Are they in fact descended from loaves baked for Astarte? Most likely. But it doesn’t matter. This is an antifoundationalist religion, as the postmodern pragmatist Richard Rorty would describe it: one without claims of priority, but with an affirmation of utility. I take up these tools not because they are God-given or superior to others, but because these tools work, especially for someone who grew up with them. They work because they have been used for thousands of years, refined by tradition, and imbued with value and mystery I cannot understand. For many people, they do not work, and ultimately that is fine as well. I choose these tools because I love them, and nothing more. No theology, no history, and community only, for me, in a secondary role. I love them; that is enough.
Likewise images like the Friend and the Lover and the Father. These concepts are powerful. Yes, as described in the last section, they are projections; but they work. Of course “God” is a projection of a father (and Goddess a mother), with all the baggage that entails. But what could be more valuable, more powerful, or more accurate, than such fundamental psychological realities?
With the deep ecumenism of the nondual view, it becomes clear that what animates so many of the religious conflicts of our time is less the religious experience than the mythic way in which it is understood. These are not fingers pointing at the moon, the fundamentalist insists; this is the moon, and something else is not.
But the boundless does not know such lines.
THE SANCTIFICATION OF THE WORLD
Earth’s crammed with Heaven,
And every common bush afire with God
—ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING, “AURORA LEIGH”
When someone asks me who they are or what God is, I smile inside and whisper to the Light: “There you go again pretending.”
—ADYASHANTI17
So, while nonduality ultimately effaces images of the Divine, it reembraces even more of them. Nonduality does not posit that “God” is a character in the play of life. Recall, God does not exist—God is existence Itself. And then all masks return.
There is one final step of the path: the re-embrace of the manifest world itself, of multiplicity. Many nondualists, including some Hasidim, have tended toward “acosmism,” the view that the material world simply does not exist, or is at least of no significance. Many Chabad texts speak of bittul b’mitziut, or annihilation in (or of) existence, and as we saw already, R. Aharon insists that God after the creation of the world is exactly the same, and just as alone, as before it.18 In this regard, nondual Judaism is not unlike the many religious views that “understand everyday life to be disvalued with reference to some ultimate reality.”19
But it does not end there. Nonduality eventually re-embraces not just the masks of God, but the very material world itself. Bittul b’mitziut means seeing both ayin and yesh, holding both contradictory perspectives simultaneously: h. ibbur shenei hafakhim, the coincidence of opposites.20 What the scholar Rachel Elior calls the “paradoxical ascent to God” could also be termed as the “paradoxical descent of God” into multiplicity: God as both/and, both ultimate and relative. For the distinction between ultimate and relative is, itself, relative.
As we will see in chapter 8, this is how R. Aharon understands hamshachat or Ein Sof, the extension of the light of the Ein Sof into the material world: all continues as before, only now it is only God doing it. It is how the Chabad sages understand dirah b’tachtonim, the dwelling of God “below.” And it is the nondual inflection of l’shem yichud kudsha brich hu v’shechintei, which is to see unity in plurality, emptiness in form, God in the world. In all these formulations, nondual Judaism is a panentheistic re-wonderment at the world. As Rabbi Shlomo of Lutsk says in his introduction to the Maggid Dvarav L’Yaakov:
It is important to know that the whole earth is full of God’s glory and there is no place empty of Him, and that God is in all the worlds, etc. This idea can be sensed in everything, for the life-force of the Creator is everywhere.21
Historically, scholars debate whether more Hasidim were this-worldly, as Martin Buber wished to claim, or other-worldly, as Gershom Scholem maintained; that is, whether they were pantheistic or acosmic. But experientially, seeing that “the life-force of the creator is everywhere” enables a simultaneous embrace and annihilation, a re-appreciation and re-valuing of precisely those energies which monotheism sought earlier to displace. As the Zen saying goes, “Before zazen, there are mountains; during zazen, no mountains; after zazen, there are mountains.” The mountains return, as mountains and as emptiness. In the conjunction is nonduality’s affirmation of the world.
In other words, God is not in heaven—God, when nondual Judaism is done right, is right here, right now, just as it is, only perhaps a little more luminous. The world as it appears is God’s erotic play (Kabbalah), Indra’s Web (Hinduism), Kali’s dance (Hinduism again), the amorous hide-and-seek game of Lover and Beloved (Sufism). Identity is not to be privileged over difference; multiplicity is as much a dance of the Divine as unity.
This is the Tanya’s “lower unity,” the seeing of the world as God. It is similar to how Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism emphasize that “nothing of samsara is different from nirvana, nothing of nirvana is different from samsara . . . There is not the slightest difference between the two.”22 This is not simply paradox. It is to understand that existence and non-existence are two ways of seeing the same reality.23 The incarnation of the spiritual as the physical, in what Chabad texts call hit’asqut im hahutzah be-ofen shel hitlabshut, engagement with the external in the manner of garbing, or even hitlabshut mohin de-gadlut be-mohin de-katnut, the garbing of expansive consciousness in diminished consciousness.24 Confusion is enlightenment! The very mind you have, right now, is enlightened mind—God is doing the dance of you.
To hold both of these perspectives, nirvana and samsara, absolute and relative, in a dialectical relationship, is the goal of hitkallelut, the incorporation of all things in the infinite essence, and hashva’ah, total equality or equanimity of view. One of the Kabbalistic symbols of hitkallelut is that of the circle (iggul) and line (yosher).25 The circle knows no boundary, no distinction, no polarity, no duality. The line is that which divides, into left and right, light and dark, true and false, sacred and profane, ultimate and relative. The circle has no history, no time; it is the sacred eternity of the liminal. The line is all linearity, direction, history—but also ethics, memory, and self.26 Most of us live most of our lives in linear time, and so the necessary work is to enter the realm of the timeless, the eternal now, the sacred circle. But true hitkallelut is the circle and the line combined. Nonduality is the union of union and duality.
Thus nonduality brings back the everyday sensuality of surfaces, touches, smells; the feel of fabric, rough or smooth, the contact of finger with tabletop, kal v’chomer with flesh. Of warmth and of cold. And, too, of the play of manifestation in our own human conditions: the sadnesses and joys of human experience, loving, losing, surrendering.
In its other-worldliness, Western religion can, at times, devalue the world of phenomena. It is so focused on God that it forgets the world, and it criticizes those who love it as “pagan,” as too entranced by the world of appearances. But from a nondual perspective, this world, in its particular phenomena, embodied, emotioned, and ever new in its complexity, Is. Thus the nondual is at home with sucking the marrow out of life, with drinking from the well of life’s blessings while cultivating a gratitude so rich it can ache, with the sensual, the pagan, the atheistic, and the orgiastic. It is with Henry Miller, himself both a sensualist and, in his later years, a nondualist who helped found Esalen in California. It is with William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the union of rational and sensual, ordered and chaotic. It is with Oscar Wilde, who reveled in surface and deplored piety and “substance.” It is with Zen iconoclasts from Ikkyu to Leonard Cohen, both of whom embrace both enlightenment and sensuality. It is with the stage manager in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, who rejects both the ephemeral distractions of the living and the fatalism of the dead, insisting on a productive tension between the two perspectives. And it is with the sculptor, the painter, the artist, and the poet, who find mystery not in the abstract but the concrete. This is nonduality: a re-embrace of the world as ripples on the pond—ripples only, perhaps, but ripples, beautiful, reflecting light.
As with eros, so too with ethics. Sometimes the Light is awful; it denies, oppresses, despoils. The Light is also in darkness, and it is easy to call it evil. If we take seriously the meaningfulness of this world, we must own its injustices and horrors, not only the delights of touch and taste. This is why nondual Judaism is so irreducibly Jewish, because in its reappropriation of the world of relativity, it finds Judaism’s ancient and historic priorities: social justice, righteousness, and this-worldly ritual. Yes, God is in the world, but as Heschel articulated more poetically than anyone (especially in his early poetic work, such as the anthology now available as The Ineffable Name of God: Man), that means God suffers with those who are suffering, God’s face shines and is hidden, God’s revelation is contained in the interpersonal. Heschel’s humanism is a nondual one: it begins with the intoxication of God in All, and progresses to its consequences.
One of the biblical verses quoted often by nondual Hasidim is the Divine exhortation to “make a tabernacle [mishkan], so that I may dwell within them.”27 In the Hasidic reading, this mishkan is not the historical tabernacle in the desert, but any dwelling place for the infinite which we make here in finitude. In general, Judaism is a householder religion concerned with the proper ordering of society; it is nearly (though not entirely) univocal in its affirmation of this-worldly experience and the importance of sanctifying that experience for divine service (avodah). The Jewish revelation spends but a few words on theophany, yet offers chapters on tort law and hygiene. The Jewish paradise is a community that cares for its needy. Thus, while renunciation and solitude remain indispensable steps along the spiritual path—one must not “integrate” too quickly—and eventually, nondual Judaism leads to a re-embrace of the world.
By way of parallel, consider the Buddha’s first noble truth—that suffering exists—not as a pre-emptiness notion, but as a post-emptiness one. Yes, nothing is “real.” But to the extent anything is “real,” suffering exists—and our work begins there. Just as there is action without an agent, enlightenment without one who gets enlightened, there is suffering even if there is “no one” to suffer. As in Buber’s turn to dialogical philosophy, to multiplicity and relation, which came after years of monism and mysticism, there is the understanding that we are all one; but in our manifestation, we are two, we are many, we are responsible. Bittul b’mitziut: both nothing and everything, and in “everything,” differentiation.
In erasing the notion of essential difference, nonduality transcends; it denies the mythic God, effaces the world, sees everything as a dream of the mind. But in erasing all difference, it returns to all of these and more. The masks of God are seen anew, and the play of emptiness dancing is celebrated with joy, clarity, and responsibility. Not for the nondualist the life-denying, eros-repressing hierarchies and authoritarian systems which claim that the sacred is only accessible by a single means—usually one mediated by authority. Eros is everywhere, and nowhere, and each moment is an opportunity for the uniting of immanent and transcendent, the goddess and the god, and in that uniting, a transcendence even of the notion of transcendence. To call the entirety of existence a cosmic dance is an invitation, not a negation: Come and Dance with Me.
May it be that the re-embrace of the world is also the speedy redemption of the Shechinah, for so many generations thought of as other than God, wandering in the exile because of our mistaken notions of separation. May it be so—and what better way than asking Her to dance?