QUESTIONS AS THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
Questions are the beginning of wisdom, contrary to Elijah De Vidas’s famous claim that fear (or awe) is. Our questions guide us towards the paths we walk looking for answers.
I’m having the pleasure of reading R. Burt Jacobson’s just published posthumous work on the Baal Shem Tov Living in the Presence. His core or guiding question in his search is “How might the life and teachings of the Baal Shem Tov offer me a loving and joyous path to God anchored in my ancestral religion?” (p.173).
It’s a wonderful question. It captures the desire to be deeply connected to the divine, within an ancestral context and elevates the importance of love and joy. Love and joy don’t always have a central part of the question of the path to the divine. Too often this path is a path of asceticism in a battle against the flesh that is perceived to be the source of sin. It’s also a call for a path that isn’t dominated by the question of how rigid can I be in following all the rules and laws. It’s a wonderful question.
It is also not the question I ever ask myself about my spiritual path. My question is something like “how do I find my path to alignment or right relationship with the more than human world (or all of creation if you prefer) anchored in my ancestral tradition?”
Jacobson’s question is certainly the more common one for a Jewish religious seeker. I would feel more comfortable as a Jew if I could ask his question instead of mine, that’s for sure. But that’s not how it occurs to me. I think a core task of the spiritual seeker is to discover the questions that burn inside of them. I don’t think we get to choose our questions, it’s much more like the questions choose us and we know we have arrived at a fruitful question or questions by a profound sense of felt rightness.
Why doesn’t Jacobson’s question speak to me? I simply have never felt or believed in some kind of God who is outside the system in any sense. I emphatically don’t give any primacy to God over the world. I also completely reject the idea that the world is God and thus, in some ultimate sense, is an illusion. I will be interested to see to what extent Jacobson embraces this idea; he has flirted with it in what I’ve read so far. (I’m about 1/3 through the book). This orientation leads me away from the mainstream of Jewish thought. I would wish it were different, but again we don’t get to choose the core questions that motivate us; the questions choose us.
My question leads me to being much more comfortable with and informed by teachers like Wendell Berry or Robin Kimmerer who barely mention God but spend lots of energy describing the more than human world and our relationship with her (man, I don’t want to type “it” which is what sounds right in my head and is probably grammatically correct in English.) It also leads me to be more oriented towards what we might call indigenous religious practice which also is always oriented towards the more than human world.
Now this orientation towards the more than human world can take the form of a certain kind of unequal marriage that we find in the panentheism of both the Hebrew Bible and of early Hasidism. In both cases God is given precedence for sure.
In the Hebrew Bible right relationship with the divine is known and manifested in the more than human world, just as wrong relationship with the divine is manifested in the more than human world. Be in right relationship with the divine and get rain in season and bountiful crops. Be in wrong relationship and no rain in season, famine and exile from the land.
In early Hasidism and some neo-Hasidism such as R. Arthur Green’s and R. David Seidenberg’s, the more than human world is viewed as a path to the divine. Thus you have a series of wonderful stories about learning to speak with the birds and how the grasses pray to the divine. It’s clear in the Hebrew Bible, some forms of Hasidism and neo-Hasidism that the path to the divine can be located in the more than human world.
Of course, this remains an unequal marriage. God has a higher valuation in this orientation. How could it not, I can almost hear the proponents say, we are talking about God, the ultimate purpose and creator of the universe.
But at least the more than human world is valued and seen as a partner of some sort. Our mainstream orientation towards the more than human world is to see it as some kind of an it whom we can abuse for whatever purpose we want. We regard the world as exactly on par with some broken down toy that we should throw away. Then we resent it that we can’t simply ignore it when it comes in the form of hurricanes or blizzards or droughts or floods or heat waves.
Only for me what counts is the system as a whole, the miracle of life. I don’t see this miracle as coming from an omniscient or eternal God who is outside the system. I think of it more as coming from some crazy unpredictable combination of the smallest specks of existence. Life is a blessing.
