The Highest Wisdom and Beauty
Our perception of how one serves God is influenced by our concept of God… All progress in knowledge and wisdom helps elevate the holy light of Torah allowing it to shine with a purer radiance. [1]
Many people inherit ideas that ascribe human traits to the Creator; or, at another extreme are atheist materialists; or who see the Highest Wisdom as a disinterested “Will” or “Spirit” to whom human life and choice is insignificant; the world impairs sanctity so that one must “die if thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek,” with God. These errors, leading to despair of earthly life and its potential for joy and revelation can be and has been made even by those who see the radiance of an Eternal One [2]. This essay would be a mutual learning so that we may learn to appreciate the way of Judaism and the role of Jews and Torah in healing a bewildered world… the ultimate doing and rectification.
Rav Kook states our condition and challenge clearly: “when a generation advances in knowledge and makes significant strides in science and philosophy, and yet remains with a primitive understanding of God, widespread rejection of religion is a foregone result” [3]. All of the Eternal One’s radiance is in the Torah and one finds and cleaves to the Highest Wisdom by broad learning that measures itself by the teachings of Torah which contains all wisdom as the Rishonim taught and great modern scientists have explained [4].
The second sentence in the epigraph above anchors and fulfills the first: our service of Hashem is in the Temple service, Avodat on and for the land, and in prayer. Of all these forms of service it is written “he whose work exceeds his wisdom, his wisdom will endure” [5]. And by the grace of the Eternal One, “he who learns in order to teach will be granted both to learn and to teach. But he who learns in order to practice, will be granted to learn, to teach and to practice” [6]. It is the integrity of Israel that fulfills the principle that “not learning but doing is the main thing,” like the repeated ascents, building, eating and living of Jews to Homesh and other sites in the land, each of them “a daughter of Jerusalem.” The learning in these essays is part of a prayer, and hope to advance the day to fully practice. Until that day, “whether God’s kingdom is recognized or not depends completely on the deeds of man” notwithstanding that all things and forces originate with the Creator, including man’s faculty of free will and possession of inclinations to evil as well as good: “the world is rectified only by man, not by itself.” Innumerable influences affect us from our physical and non-physical environment but we too affect it and each of us has a specific “service assignment and challenge” of tikkun and illumination [7].
The One who created space, time and all things “is One, Alone and Unique…the Jew has his assigned task, to bear witness to God’s unity in all its aspects…Existence, Authority and Providence” [8]. The central prayer of Judaism is key to Ramchal’s discussion of this process: “when we recite the Shema it causes sanctity and light to be transmitted to all creation,” this is among the ways that Jews “bring spiritual light into the material, raising physical phenomenon above their original level, receiving additional holiness and radiance to the extent that is fitting for each one in the world…God‘s incomprehensible wisdom determined that each thing would have its own limit, no more and no less” to receive the sanctifying radiance of knowledge of His Unity [9]. “God is One…He is unified, and there exists no unity similar to His in the world” writes Rambam, offering principles to serve as a “foothold for a person of understanding to develop a love for God.” Centuries later, Ramchal wrote that “the first verse of the Shema is a confession that everything depends on this Unity…every possible influence” direct and indirect, and that its three sections express this love, accept His unique sovereignty, commandments and recall the Exodus from Egypt which was a “permanent rectification and redemption of evil because of all the good we may attain as a result” [10]. We walk toward a perfected world by teaching, learning and practicing which requires the secure establishment of “the gates of Israel.”
The radiance or illumination of tikkun of which Rav Luzzato so often writes is present in the segulah the holiness of Israel inherited from the patriarchs and confirmed in them as a nation at Sinai, a holiness Rav Kook saw even in most of the early generations of modern pioneers of Zion who had little service, explicit reverence or awe. He related this to the holiness of the people of the First Temple period when Torah was still being written and prophecy received but idol worship was a recurring problem. Given this apparent paradox he noted the Zohar’s comment that “the Pre-Messianic generation would be good on the inside and bad on the outside” [11]. One may also adduce his comment on the two levels of teshuva (“repentance” and “return,” physical and spiritual) as noted by an apparent repetition in a chapter speaking of the eternal unity of all of Israel, “standing today all of you, before Hashem your God” from tribal elders to children, from chiefs to hewers of wood and drawers of water, men, and women, Jews from birth and proselytes: “whoever is here, and whoever is not here today” (29:9-18), the model for inclusion based on faith, knowledge, teaching and service. Rav Kook notes the two levels in the near repetition of the phrase, “you will return up to Hashem your God” and “you will return to” with the use of different pronouns indicating that “the first teshuva is a physical return to the land, language and national essence…this is approaching but not fully attaining…After this initial return,” he explains, the Jewish people will merit divine assistance to return to (el) your God with all your heart and soul.” The sages affirm that even the desire to improve is meritorious he wrote [12]. So we hope and pray are the desire to learn, teach, return and pray.
“The most powerful desire of the soul is to realize this hidden light” that is only hinted at by all God’s holy names…ways and paths, sephirot and holy attributes. Indeed, Rambam writes that even the ten levels (“which are not levels in a spatial sense”) of angels, though alive, and though able to “recognize and know the Creator with very immense knowledge… are unable to conceive the true nature of the Creator as He really is…for His knowledge and His life are one…He is the Knower, the Subject of Knowledge and He is the Knowledge itself; all is One” [13].
We have reviewed these teachings as part of our service and perfection in hopes that we may grow into full light of understanding and living right; for “we live in such times of violence and immorality that the world deserves to have been destroyed” ten times over [14]. A great deal of the deepening confusion, madness and terror of the world since the Temple was destroyed and Jews made a minority in the Land (by about 350 CE) is the worshipping of false gods and the cults this has produced; the magic, the egomania, the deceit and lust for power, the “stealing of minds.” “When a generation advances in general knowledge and makes significant strides in science and philosophy, and yet remains with a primitive understanding of God, widespread rejection of religion is a foregone conclusion” [15]. Modernism and postmodernism arise from ignorance and confusion about first things and an inability to apply the gathering evidence from natural science that supports the Torah understanding of creation, ‘nature and nurture,” innate and environmental influences whose interchange Ramchal, and the books of Moshe so well describe. When love, awe and service in the cause of God’s unity, providence and structuring authority are recognized, as they increasingly are in Israel, “all your children will be students of Hashem” (Isaiah 54:13). Then the holy light, “the full cup of blessing and salvation, kos shel Bracha u’ yeshua will lead “our love for this world [to] the good that we can benefit others.” Serving the Eternal will cease to be an idolatrous concept linked to idolatrous conceptions and anthropomorphic expressions of the Holy One [16].
In a brilliant modern novel, an elderly official, a cultured and thoughtful commander of a border town carries on a multi-year excavation of nearby ruins, long buried in sand. He is intrigued by characters painted in script on wooden slips and tries endlessly to arrange them and gain understanding of their meaning and his place in history. As an intellectual only, a humane secularist with a horror of cruelty and thirst for understanding, he can feel only perplexed, indeed, a bit foolish in his “thirst for the water.” “Lacking civilized vices with which to fill up my leisure, he muses with typical self-deprecation, “I pamper my melancholy and try to find in the vacuity of the desert a special historical poignancy. Vain, idle, misguided! How fortunate no one sees me!” [17]. His thoughtfulness and thirst are undercut by a “primitive understanding of God” which leaves the Creator out of the ‘given.’ In fact, the familiar sensitive humanist’s wistful nostalgia and sense of sweet, impotent “poignancy” leaves him alarmed but wholly unable to restrain the overt barbarism of the civilized “Bureau” that forces him, body and soul, to confront the horror of a material world and worldview without awe for the Creator. Only those who learn the lesson and follow the path of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and look to the full return of the Children of Israel will survive the nightmare of lies and brutality, the desolation of the seed, endless war and horror into which the world already has largely slipped. All the creative, constructing energies of the universe are organized around and their pattern shown in the nation organized around the Temple service on the Temple Mount.
To see this is to learn and teach for service to the wisdom, beauty and unity of the Highest Wisdom and to work for the radiance that repairs this broken world and all its lost and suffering creatures. Knowledge is the form of the soul in which we resemble the Creator who beckons from an abode we cannot ever reach in this life but which “alone brings grace and truth to life’s unquiet dream” [18]. As the full Shema teaches, the path is accessible through remembrance and the Torah “whose words are intrinsically holy” for it is true: ayn od Milvado.
1. Rav Avraham Yitzhak HaKohen Kook, “How Do We Serve God” on Torah portion Ha’azinu, adapted from Ikvei HaTzon (1906) by Rav Chanan Morrison, Gold from the Land of Israel (Jerusalem 2006), 347
2. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Adonais” (1821), verses 464-5, 460-95
3. Rav Kook op. cit. 346
4. Dr. Gerald L. Schroeder, the Science of God: the Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom (NY 1997); the Hidden Face of God (NY 2001)
5. Pirke Avot 3:12
6. ibid. 4:6
7. Ramchal, Derekh Hashem, 4.4.3, “the Shema and its Blessings” (1978 Feldheim; 1997 revised edition), see also 2.3.2-7, “On providence and free will” and 4.2.1-5 on prayer and reverent Torah study and personal rectification as service; in 4.4.7 Ramchal discusses the “round about ways” (gilgulim) of the interaction between supernal, environmental and individual forces, what Shelley called “an unremitting interchange” of human thought with “the everlasting universe of things” (Mont Blanc 1816).
8. Ramchal (Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzato, 1706-47) DH op. cit. 4.4.1
9. ibid. 4.4.5, cf. Shelley’s elegy for John Keats, “Adonais” in which he writes that the “Light, Beauty and sustaining Love in which all things work and move…burns bright or dim [according] as each are mirrors of the fire for which all thirst,” what Ramchal and other Jewish sages term “the Light of God’s Countenance,” the perfect Unity of “the Highest Wisdom.” As the title “Adonais” suggests, Shelley was engaged (1821) in efforts to use Neo-Platonism to synthesize Scriptural wisdom with pagan symbols as a way to approach “the Spirit of Beauty” that “gives grace and truth to life’s unquiet dream” (“Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” 1816) 36. Though these titles, Shelley’s syncretic thought and terms like “the white radiance of Eternity” often resemble Jewish concepts like “knowledge is the form of the soul” in which we were created and can comprehend the One, there is no known evidence that he read Rav Luzzato though clearly his thought was suffused with Torah studies. In his penultimate major poem, Hellas Shelley has a Jewish sage, ironically named Ahasuerus counsel an embattled Sultan “to look on that which cannot change: the One, the Unborn and the Undying” and “the Fathomless” yet has him then propound an enlightenment view in which the faculties of mind, “thought, passion, will, reason, imagination” take the place of the One (Hellas 762-806)
10. Rambam, Yesodei HaTorah (“Foundations of Torah”) 1:7, 2:2; Ramchal op. cit. 4.4.6-10; see the third passage of the Shema that includes this derekh and the use of tzitzit as a remembrance and caution against the straying of the eyes and heart after ideologies and material pleasures for their own sake.
11. Morrison, op. cit 124-6, Rav Kook on “Innate and Acquired Holiness” in portion Beshalach. Olat Re’iyah and Igrot HaRe’iyah; and 339-41, “Two Levels of Teshuvah” on portion Nitzavim, Deut. 30:1-10
12. ibid. and Rav Kook citing Pesikta Rabbati 44
13. Yesodei HaTorah 2.6-8, 10, cf. Isaiah 55:8-13, humility before the profound conception of the Eternal activates joy, abundance and remembrance.
14. Gold from the Land of Israel, 282-4, Rav Kook on “Two Paths to Purity,” portion Matot in Ein Ayah ms. 1906-34, published Jerusalem 1995
15. Rambam, Sefer HaMitzvoth II, 32, lo ta’aseh against necromancy, time-deciding, “capturing the eyes” and “stealing the mind” which his words describe as what we term “virtual reality” and its substitution for life. Kook in Gold from the Land of Israel 346, “How do we Serve God?”
16. ibid. 347-53
17. J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980; Penguin 1982), 14-17 passim
18. Percy B. Shelley, “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” (1816), verse 11; Shelley had a true seeker’s desire but “the primitive understanding of God” against which he understandably raged and rebelled, as well as the pride of a Hellenist and aristocrat kept him from rectifying directly. His short life’s intense but “round about” journey toward the “One Spirit” that appears in all his major works indicates the pathos, ingenuity, horror and terror of the West. He is the quintessential Romantic, thoughtful and introspective modernist who finds despair in the “wandering mazes” of mental gymnastics, of spiritual quest evaluated by the self’s own reason and appetites; lack of mentoring is a constant Romantic theme and lament, a lack that proper Torah study and observance supplies, an antidote to the progressive exaltation of youth over experience and age. The Torah is not just an educational book; it “rewards the effort that people put into it” and “must lead to rectification [through] reverence for the study itself,” Ramchal 4.2.4-7