VI     

EVEN THOUGH, AS we said before, the man of faith is provoked, like Adam the first, by the cosmos about which he is inquisitive, the covenant, not the cosmos, provides him with an answer to his questions. The covenantal confrontation is indispensable for the man of faith. In his longing for God, he is many a time disenchanted with the cosmic revelation and lives through moments of despair. Naturally, he is inspired by the great joy experienced when he gets a glimpse of the Truly Real hiding behind the magnificent cosmic facade. However, he is also tormented by the stress and exasperation felt when the Truly Real seems to disappear from the cosmic scene. Of course, God speaks through His works: , “The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth His handiwork.” Yet, let me ask, what kind of a tale do the heavens tell? Is it a personal tale addressed to someone, or is it a tale which is not intended for any audience? Do the heavens sing the glory of the Creator without troubling themselves to find out whether someone is listening to this great song, or are they really interested in man, the listener? I believe that the answer to this question is obvious. If the tale of the heavens were a personal one, addressed to man, then there would be no need for another encounter with God. Since God in His infinite wisdom arranged for the apocalyptic-covenantal meeting with man, we may conclude that the message of the heavens is at best an equivocal one.

As a matter of fact, at the level of his cosmic confrontation with God, man is faced with an exasperating paradox. On the one hand, he beholds God in every nook and corner of creation, in the flowering of the plant, in the rushing of the tide, and in the movement of his own muscle, as if God were at hand close to and beside man, engaging him in a friendly dialogue. And yet the very moment man turns his face to God, he finds Him remote, un-approachable, enveloped in transcendence and mystery. Did not Isaiah behold God , exalted and enthroned above creation, and at the same time , the train of his skirts filling the Temple, the great universe, from the flying nebulae to one’s most intimate heartbeat? Did not the angels sing , holy, holy, holy, transcendent, transcendent, transcendent, yet He is the Lord of the hosts, who resides in every infinitesimal particle of creation and the whole universe is replete with His glory? In short, the cosmic experience is antithetic and tantalizing. It exhausts itself in the awesome dichotomy of God’s involvement in the drama of creation, and His exaltedness above and remoteness from this very drama. This dichotomy cancels the intimacy and immediacy from one’s relationship with God and renders the personal approach to God complicated and difficult. God, as the cosmic ruler, is beheld in His boundless majesty reigning supreme over creation, His will crystallized in the natural law, His word determining the behavioral patterns of nature. He is everywhere but at the same time above and outside of everything. When man who just beheld God’s presence turns around to address himself to the Master of creation in the intimate accents of the “Thou,” he finds the Master and Creator gone, enveloped in the cloud of mystery, winking to him from the awesome “beyond.” Therefore, the man of faith, in order to redeem himself from his loneliness and misery, must meet God at a personal covenantal level, where he can be near Him and feel free in His presence. Abraham, the knight of faith, according to our tradition, sought and discovered God in the starlit heavens of Mesopotamia. Yet, he felt an intense loneliness and could not find solace in the silent companionship of God, whose image was reflected in the boundless stretches of the cosmos. Only when he met God on earth as Father, Brother, and Friend—not only along the uncharted astral routes—did he feel redeemed. Our sages said that before Abraham appeared majestas dei was reflected only by the distant heavens, and it was a mute nature which “spoke” of the glory of God. It was Abraham who “crowned” Him the God of earth, i.e., the God of men.1

Majestic man, even when he belongs to the group of homines religiosi and feels a distinct need for transcendental experiences, is gratified by his encounter with God within the framework of the cosmic drama. Since majestic man is incapable of breaking out of the cosmic cycle, he cannot interpret his transcendental adventure in anything but cosmic categories. Therefore, the divine name of E-lohim, which denotes God being the source of the cosmic dynamics, sufficed to characterize the relationship prevailing between majestic man and his Creator addressing Himself to him through the cosmic occurrence.

However, covenantal man of faith, craving for a personal and intimate relation with God, could not find it in the cosmic E-lohim encounter and had to shift his transcendental experience to a different level at which the finite “I” meets the infinite He “face-to-face.” This strange communal relation between man and God is symbolized by the Tetragrammaton,* which therefore appears in the Biblical account of Adam the second.

* This distinction between E-lohim and the Tetragrammaton was developed in detail by Judah Halevi.

1.Bereshit Rabbah, 59; Rashi, Genesis 24:7. I intentionally used the term “cosmic” instead of “cosmological.” While one may speak of the cosmic confrontation of man and God as an experiential reality, it is hard to speak of a cosmological experience. When God is apprehended in reality it is an experience; when God is comprehended through reality it is just an intellectual performance. Therefore, one must not equate the cosmic experience, no matter how inadequate it is, with Judah Halevi’s “God of Aristotle.” As we mentioned in the text, the cosmic experience is part of the patriarchial tradition. The Halakhah has granted full recognition to this experience, which is reflected in many of our benedictions.

The trouble with all rational demonstrations of the existence of God, with which the history of philosophy abounds, consists in their being exactly what they were meant to be by those who formulated them: abstract logical demonstrations divorced from the living primal experiences in which these demonstrations are rooted. For instance, the cosmic experience was transformed into a cosmological proof, the ontic experience into an ontological proof, et cetera. Instead of stating that the most elementary existential awareness as a subjective “I exist” and an objective “the world around me exists” awareness is unattainable as long as the ultimate reality of God is not part of this awareness, the theologians engaged in formal postulating and deducing in an experiential vacuum. Because of this, they exposed themselves to Hume’s and Kant’s biting criticism that logical categories are applicable only within the limits of the human scientific experience.

Does the loving bride in the embrace of her beloved ask for proof that he is alive and real? Must the prayerful soul clinging in passionate love and ecstasy to her Beloved demonstrate that He exists? So asked Soren Kierkegaard sarcastically when told that Anselm of Canterbury, the father of the very abstract and complex ontological proof, spent many days in prayer and supplication that he be presented with rational evidence of the existence of God.

Maimonides’ term (Yesode ha-Torah, 1:1) transcends the bounds of the abstract logos and passes over into the realm of the boundless intimate and impassioned experience where postulate and deduction, discursive knowledge and intuitive thinking, conception and perception, subject and object, are one. Only in paragraph five, after the aboriginal experience of God had been established by him as a firm reality (in paragraph one), does he introduce the Aristotelian cosmological proof of the unmoved mover.