God as the Breath of Life
Each year as Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur draw closer – as I imagine standing in shul, chanting the powerful words and melody of Avinu Malkeinu – I am reminded of just how far I feel from that understanding of God, from the theology of “our Father, our King.” For despite my connection to the language of teshuvah (repentance), as well as to the inspiring holiday nusach, I cannot affirm the literal meaning of the theology expressed on the high holidays, and indeed in the liturgies for daily and Shabbat prayer.
God determining and controlling all events, God sitting in judgment and doling out reward and punishment, God standing transcendent beyond this world – these are the dominant images of biblical and rabbinic theology. They permeate the canonical language of Jewish prayer. This theology never resonated with me, never felt authentic to my spiritual quest. I could not believe in the God of heavenly transcendence, the highly anthropomorphic deity of classical Judaism. I always identified with the long history of Jewish thinkers who boldly sought to reinterpret this model.
Dissatisfied with a literal understanding of scripture, many prominent theologians, from Philo of Alexandria onward, expressed a figurative and allegorical interpretation of that fatherly and kingly imagery, that dominant conception of determinism and omnipotence.
Perhaps the otherness of God as an enthroned king may be reinterpreted in a decidedly non-literal way. Perhaps the kingship of God may represent the manner in which our lives are guided by the imperative and urgency of religious commandment, by the call to engage in transformative social justice. Maybe we can adapt that image to evoke a sacred enthronement of the divine presence in nature, in ritual, in our very human hearts.
I am drawn to a theology of radical Oneness, a spiritual view inspired by the mystics, one in which Divinity is the totality of existence. For me, God is not beyond this world but within it. Divinity is the great force of life, the cosmic breath that dwells at the center of all being, the pulse of energy that runs through the cosmos, filling reality with a thousand streams of light. There, in the paths and corners of the mundane, we find the luminal presence of God; we are awakened to an overwhelming sense of the sacred, the Holy of Holies relocated from the ancient Temple into the human heart and the beauty of the ordinary.
The God I believe in is immanent and one with the world we know, present in the here and now, in the process of creativity, in the sublime moments of pure love, and in the very ordinary rhythms of daily life. As the Zohar said more than 700 years ago: Leit atar panui minei – there is no place that is devoid of God.
And yet, our experience of that fundamental Oneness still does allow for a sensation of transcendence, the intuition that the divine core is beyond our grasp. But instead of the heavens above, I suggest that it is the Beyond within – transcendence relocated into the immanence of this world.
God is the ever-present force of life in which we flourish, and yet we are perpetually mystified by that presence, ever aware that there is something profound that transcends and eludes our human perception.
We stand before the wonder of the world, and we feel the great mystery deep in our bones. The enigma of our living and our dying calls out to us; we feel the evanescence of our bodies, we search for meaning and purpose on a fragile bridge over the nothingness of unknowing.
The darkness over the face of the deep: This is our existential soul-ache, the neverending intuition that there is more to life than we see at first glance. The mystery is as real as our senses of touch and taste; we know that there is radiance and redemption beneath the surface of our experience. That glow is the hidden light of divine presence, concealed there from time immemorial. As the ancient legend teaches, that perfect illumination was clothed in the Torah. It was housed in the wondrous chambers of sacred language, in the shapes and meanings of scripture and its transmission. In each generation, the student of Torah discovers the light of those words anew; the very self of God is encountered again and again, the moment of learning an event of revelation.
The concrete markers of time and space lead us in and out of our ability to perceive this complete unity. With the entrance of Shabbat, the dining room transformed from an ordinary space into a zone of sanctity, we discover the flow of divine energy in our midst, always there, unceasing. But we cannot feel that completion in all moments; it is a spiritual state of mind and heart opened to us when we have made our souls ready, when we have attempted to live our lives with mindfulness, with attention directed to God.
The Jewish mystics teach that all of life is interconnected. We are all part of one organic whole. The wonders of nature, the transformation of the imagination before a great painting or poem, the sparkling text of the Torah, the open hand of a friend – these are all pieces of the oneness of God. There is no real separation, no divide between God, the world, and our human selves. We need only look beyond the veils that cover our spiritual sight to understand the deep meaning of the biblical phrase ein od milvado. In its original context, this meant that there is no other God besides the God of Israel. But the chasidic mystics read it in a boldly different way: There is nothing other than God! Divinity is all that exists. We are all but faces and traces of the great ineffable one, the pure mystery of existence that circulates through the cosmos like blood through the body.
To adapt some of the imagery used by the medieval kabbalists, God may be characterized as the ever-unfolding voice of reality, the spirit-breath that whispers and hums beneath the surface of things, slowly rising to articulation through the phenomena and happenings of this world. The nuances of the earth, the diversity of human expression and personality, the multilayered interpretations of the texts that inspire us – these are the coming-to-speech of divinity. They are the manifestations of the primordial divine word, first hidden in the mysterious chasm of cosmic memory, and then disclosed from the darkness in the present wonders of life.
The history of humanity, the history of nature – these are the never-ending vibrations of God’s voice. Divine revelation is the ongoing music of existence, and our souls are opened to that tone by lifting the barriers from our rigidly protected hearts to the unexpected glow of the sacred. We become keilim, instruments, of the divine melody. Rising from the first breath, the life-force of God moves forward from the hidden to the revealed, from the inwardness of breath to the music of sound, the meaning of a world spoken into being.
This is the great power of niggunim, the wordless contemplative melodies we chant in prayer. The niggun returns us to that place before language, before thought. The sounds reverberate in our souls, rousing primal memory, the perfect absorption in God that precedes all worldly form. Before the separateness of letters and words, there is pure breath and tone – song that may lead us to the moment where end meets beginning, where redemption arches back to complete the circle of creation.
Dr. Eitan Fishbane is assistant professor of Jewish thought at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. He is the author of As Light Before Dawn: The Inner World of a Medieval Kabbalist (Stanford University Press, 2009). A longer version of this essay will appear in New Voices in Jewish Theology, edited by Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove (Jewish Lights Publishing, 2009).
