Excerpts from as well as Articles & Dialogues on Published & Forthcoming Books
Daily Wisdom: Divine Imagination
God is the possibility of possibility – limitless imagination. The first of the ten commandments is “I am God.” When this God is asked to identify himself, He responds, “I will be what I will be.” That is, ”˜You cannot capture me in the frozen image of any time or place. To do so would be to destroy me.’ It would be to violate the second commandment against idolatry. Idolatry is the freezing of God in a static image. To freeze God in an image is to violate the invitation of the imagination. It is to limit possibility.
The Temple modeled after the Biblical myth tabernacle in the desert is the product of imagination. In a wonderfully paradoxical set of mystical texts, Bezalel, the master craftsman of the book of Exodus, receives no clear blueprint from God or Moses on how to build the tabernacle. And yet he builds it in accordance with “God’s will.” For the Kabbalists, this is a hidden allusion to the power of holy imagination to intuit cosmic truth.
When the mystics suggest that Bezalel is “taught by God,” they speak in code. The artist is “wise of heart,” “filled with the spirit of wisdom, intuition and intimate understanding.” All of these draw their inspiration from the breath of divine imagination.
Dr. Marc Gafni
The Erotic and the Holy
Whether the relationship is that of a servant to his master or a lover and his beloved or a relationship between partners or even friends, they are all “relating” to God.
Sacred hermeneutic is ultimately an erotic act according to the mystics in which the God in the interpreter meets the God and the text and realizes that they are one.
R. Kook, twentieth century philosopher mystic, teaches that every generation is part of the unfolding revelation of divinity. Each generation, picking up from where the last one left off, moves closer to understanding the full depth and divinity of sacred rites and passages. In this sense the “covenant between me and the children of Israel” is not only between God and the people – but “between” the children of Israel”. and their children ….and their children – a covenant between generations. Israel means for me, borrowing a reading from my teacher Mordechai Lainer of Izbica, based on a close and creative reading of the original Hebrew, Yashar El; the direct apprehension of the divine.
Even though you and I might deeply believe that the most important function we can perform is to offer auhentic transformative spirituality, the fact is, much of what we have to do, in our capacity to bring decent spirituality into the world, is actually to offer more benign and helpful modes of translation. In other words, even if we ourselves are practicing, or offering, authentic transformative spirituality, nonetheless much of what we must first do is provide most people with a more adequate way to translate their condition. We must start with helpful translations, before we can effectively offer authentic transformations.
God is called in biblical myth “Shadai,” translated by the wisdom masters as, “He who said to his world, ”˜Dai’ – enough.” Two meanings well up from the word. The first is that the creative process was stopped when God said enough. Divinity turned to humanity and said, “I have done enough. You – each one of you – be my partners in completing the work of creation.” Have you ever created something, conceived of a project and then handed over responsibility for it to another. You have to really trust that person to “entrust” to them Your creation. The phrase “Raba Emunatecha” – from the Hebrew liturgy, literally means “Your trust is great.” I read it to mean that God’s trust IN US is great. God entrusts creation into our hands.
Love implies not only freedom but responsibility – awesome responsibility. Remember Master Menachem Mendel who was asked by his students, “Rebbe (teacher), where is God?” The master responds, “God is only where you let him in.”