perceptions

I’m still trying to process what happened last week (see previous post) and I came across a book by Rabbi Irwin Kula. In speaking on our perceptions of God he brings up a conversation he had with a scientist which the scientist tells him he doesn’t believe in God. Rabbi Kula responds with “Thats ok, I don’t believe in the God that you don’t believe in either.” He makes the point that in order to reject something you must have an image to reject. For the scientist it was the image of God he was taught growing up, a God who sits in the heavens and judges his every move. The irony in this was that he was no different from the fundamentalist that believes in a judging, angry God, ready to strike him down with a lighting bolt. They’re the same in that they both have the same deffiniton of God. We each have a projection of God. The scientist who trying to explain string theory will tell you not to take this literally in the same way neither are our scared projections to be taken literally.  Rabbi Kula goes on to say that, “Definitions of God should never be confused with God anymore than the description of an orange can capture the taste of an orange.

It’s interesting to look at different  religions names for divinity. In Judaism the most common one is also the most mysterious, it of course is YHWH. Which in English is all consonants and no vowels while in Hebrew it’s all vowels and no consonants. Both ways are unpronounceable, when you try to say it you hear the sound of breath. a simple exhale. It’s supposed to teach us that the name of God is not meant to be spoken. It’s meant to be breathed. The name YHWH comes from the same root in Hebrew as the word becoming. God is always becoming, We will never understand reality in all it’s dimensions. But somehow this not knowing causes us this worried feeling which is why our perceptions get the better of us. Rabbi Kula put its this way, “the challenge is to remember, even in our moments of turbulence, that God is always just outside of our perception, just ahead of where we are.”

Advertisement

~ by thevorlon on September 27, 2009.