God

God

More has been written about, than even love.

You capture our imagination, our heart and certainly our minds.

As we speak, according to Jim Clifton author of “God Is Alive and Well” (CEO of Gallop polls, 84% of the world believes in you, though we cannot see or know you.

Well I stand corrected – you see, an enigma is a very hard thing to know.

However, you in your great kindness and mercy, compassion and love, revealed a new Wisdom, beginning with the Holy Baal Shem Tov, which reveals the truth – your very essence.

One of the things your “inventor,” Abraham discovered, is that unlike the pagan deities, you are formless, shapeless – in fact, the ancient Romans, steeped in paganism, called us Jews “atheists” – for to believe the unbelievable, was unbelievable.

But you yourself told us, even when you were revealed at that awesome Sinaic revelation “No shape or form did you see.”

So we saw something, without a form – how can you categorize something without a shape?

To begin, everything apart from you, consists of both a body and soul – true, angel’s bodies are made of fire and air, and ours of earth, water, fire and air; but then again, a body denoted, as a universe, which is its home, is a limited being; within a time-space reality (in fact, this simple accurate description of a universe, was Eisenstein’s great discovery/correlation of the interdependence of time and space.)

Now to understand God, we must begin with understanding ourselves – as Chassidus explains the verse “From myself, I will know God.”

For though our body bears no resemblance to you who has no shape, no form, yet our soul does.

As the Rebbe says in Basi Ligani as we are you, we can know you!

As Kabbalah teaches, our minds can never know you, but our heart can.

As Chassidus teaches, to paraphrase the saying “If I knew you, I would be you:” when my soul detaches from my body in the sublime enrapture of prayer, when my spirit soars aloft in the ecstasy of meditation in Shemoina Asrie, when the coarseness of my “I,” dissolves in the grandeur of Yours, it is then, I truly, not only feel you, but become you!

You see, a soul is effectively data – not dead data – but living data – there are different forms of living data, but let’s use a paradigm to clarify:

Soon cars as we know it will be a thing of the past – already you can buy cars that parallel park, that park in your garage and many are the cars already designed (though not yet sold) that all you will need to do, is tell it where to go and it will happily drive you there.

So there are three major components to this car, the chassis – within its body, you could be in it – the gps, without its ability to navigate, you couldn’t get driven around; but then there is the fuel – you see, fuel is so important when you wish to actually move a chassis, as it has natural inertia.

Our bodies are the chassis for our soul, but unlike data, which has no passion, our data has great passion, hence people are passionate about their beliefs.

Of course, as we know from Tanya, we have primarily two souls (animal instincts and Divine) but for the purpose of knowing you, we shall focus on our Divine – a “chip off the old block” (not to be irreverent or anything.)

You see, dear reader, you and God on a soul level are really one (Vayahkhel, Nun-Bies) your sensitivity is no different from His (as the verse states, “For I am compassionate”; as known, there is a Biblical commandment (from the first taught by Maimonides) to imitate God, who is compassionate, sensitive etc.)

One of the soul characteristics of Jews, is sensitivity, compassion, kindness; which as the Baal Shem Tov teaches on the verse “Isaac looked like his father Abraham” the Jew’s soul, mirrors his fathers, and just as God is compassion, so to us.

In other words, we begin to have a definition of God

“Unconditional Love.”