 |
||||||||||||||||||||
         |
|
EXCERPTS FROM ART GREEN'S APPEARANCE ON NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO'S FRESH AIR WITH TERRY GROSS Kabbalists believe that embedded within the very fabric of the material world is a deep inner structure. And that structure, in its essence, is God. According to Dr. Art Green, student, teacher and writer on Kabbalah for more than 40 years, this is the central message of the Jewish mystical tradition. In his most recent book on the subject, Ehyeh: A Kabbalah for Tomorrow (Jewish Lights Publishing, 2002), Green, Rector of the Hebrew College Rabbinical School and the recently appointed Irving Brudnick Professor of Philosophy and Religion, puts it this way: "Kabbalah teaches that there is a secret unity of being hidden within the multiplicity and diversity of life." At the very least, this belief raises two questions: Why is this Oneness of Being—or God—hidden from us, and how do we go about penetrating the surface of things to encounter its presence? Green explored these questions and more in a wide-ranging discussion of Kabbalah broadcast on December 13, 2004, on National Public Radio's Fresh Air with Terry Gross. Excerpted below are two segments that focus, respectively, on the hidden manifestation of God and Kabbalists' efforts to perceive it. THE HIDDEN LIGHT ART GREEN: There were two Hasidic Masters who were asked, "What does it mean to be a Hasid? What's the real work of Hasidism?" One of them said, "A Hasid is a person who understands that all is God, all is God. That's the essence of Hasidism. That's the essential teaching, everything else is commentary." Another one was asked, "What does it mean to be a Hasid?" He said, "To work on yourself. Working on yourself is what it's all about." Now if you can ask the question: If all is God, what's the work? Why isn't this just sort of a Timothy Leary tune in, turn on, drop out? Why do you have to work at it? What's the struggle? All is God, but it's all hidden, and it's all hidden, because people aren't prepared for the great light that is contained in that insight that all is God. We are meant to live in this world. We're meant to remain creatures of this world, to do—to live in the body, to produce new generations, to raise children, to teach, to pass on a tradition. In order to do those things, we have to sustain ourselves and, therefore, work in the world and earn money in order to put bread on the table. All those kinds of things require us to be very earthly creatures, and we couldn't do that if we saw the great light that's contained in "all is God." We wouldn't stay here. We would climb the mountaintop, perhaps, and go there. We would retreat into a kind of lost place of ecstasy, and that's not what we're supposed to do in the world. We are wanted to be in this world and to continue life, and therefore, it has to be kept hidden, and yet it has to be revealed for those of us who seek it with all our energies. One of the Hasidic Masters says that God has done us the favor of making the divine presence absolutely invisible to us until we turn the full light of all of our resources on it, and then we can find it. GROSS: In Buddhism, there's a concept of enlightenment, and you meditate, you study Zen koans, you do all kinds of things. And it's a kind of path to pursuing enlightenment. And until you've reached that state, you are more caught in earthliness and in being bound to the more trivial aspects of life. And I'm wondering, when you study Kabbalah, is there a similar notion that there is this point where you have reached enlightenment and the presence of God beneath the surface of things becomes more clear? Is there this kind of level that some people reach and other people don't? GREEN: No, I can say rather clearly, the Jewish tradition doesn't believe in that. The Jewish mystics talk about moments of great understanding, but even the person who has reached the most profound levels can fall and can have moments of smallness or moments of ordinary mind where all of those insights go away and have to be discovered again. The image of Isaac re-digging the wells that his father, Abraham, had dug—the wells became stuffed up, and he had to re-dig them—becomes very important in the discussions of this. There is no sense of permanent enlightenment and from there on, you can never sin or you can never misperceive God. On the contrary. You climb the mountain, you get to the heights of Mt. Sinai, but then there are also valleys and ordinary days when you lose that consciousness. And that seems to be the pattern that the Jewish experience generally talks about. It may be because we were not a monastic tradition, we didn't have monks who then retreated into the mountaintop, they had the answer. But it rather became moments of enlightenment and moments of ordinary mind go back and forth. "The life force ebbs and flows," the Hasidic Masters like to say. There's an energy of God, there's a life force that surges into you, but it comes and goes. SEEKING THE LIGHT GREEN: It has been that way for a very long time. It was actually the Muslims who first referred to the Jews as "the people of the book," and they were very accurate in that description. Judaism, remember, is a religion that says, the Word of God, the presence of God, comes to us in the form of word, comes to us in the Torah. In Christianity, the Word becomes flesh in the person of Jesus. In Judaism, the Word remains word, and therefore involvement with God is involvement with language, involvement with words. Remember, we are the people who have a mythology that God created the world through speaking. Other ancient peoples talked about how the gods copulated and created the world or God took dust and created the world. In the legend of Genesis, God said, "Let there be light, and there was light." Words are infinitely important in the Jewish spiritual mentality, and I think that has everything to do with such diverse outcomes as the nature of Kabbalah and the psyche of modern Jews, who are very much, even if alienated from tradition—very often people of words, people who are close to plays with language and deeper understandings of language. That's very typical of what you might call Jewish mentality. GROSS: There are many ways in which the Kabbalah's imagery and its comprehension of life and God is different from the Hebrew Bible's, the Old Testament. Let's look at some of those ways. You mentioned that the idea of God creating the heaven and Earth in seven days, as described in the Bible, is not something that the Kabbalists believe. The Kabbalistic literature also talks about angels and demons struggling. What are those stories like, and where do they come from? GREEN: Well, please understand the Kabbalist would never say that he doesn't believe in God creating the world in seven days. Of course he believes it, but you have to understand it in a deeper way. The seven days stand for something. The seven days represent here seven aspects of the divine self, and each of them is manifest in a certain energy of God. And those energies are each referred to as a day; therefore, the temporal language of seven days really is symbolic of something that transcends time and is a reflection of the inner nature of the Godhead. You see, there is never a rejection of the prior tradition. There is, rather, a reinterpretation and adapting of the prior tradition. But the Kabbalists are very much concerned with what I will call levels of consciousness. That's really the key to understanding Kabbalah. The mind has many levels of consciousness that can be present at once. And you need to move from one level of mind to a deeper one and then to yet a deeper one beyond that. One of those would be called by the Kabbalists the world of the angels. Now they portray these worlds in vertical terms. They say, "It's our physical world. There's a world above it, which is the world of the angels. There's a world beyond that, which is the world in which the presence of God dwells." But I have come to understand all of that vertical language, what I call the vertical metaphor in religion—God lives up there in the heavens, and we live down here on Earth—I've come to understand all of that vertical language as better interpreted internally. You're really not talking about a journey up. You're talking about a journey inward, into deeper levels of the mind. So as you enter into a certain deeper level of mind, you feel what I would call a sense of angelic presence. You sense the glory. You, as it were, hear the angelic chorus singing "Holy, holy, holy" to God, which is the essential act of the angels proclaiming divine holiness. And it's really a way of talking about opening up deeper levels of mind to religious perception, and that, in some sense, is what the Kabbalistic enterprise is all about.
Arthur Green's 'Guide' Delves into Kabbalah This transcript was provided by Fresh Air with Terry Gross, produced in Philadelphia by WHYY. |
||||||||||||||||||
long relationship with Hebrew College and tradition of giving within the Jewish community. In 2003, Betty and Irving Brudnick were awarded the College's Philip W. Lown Distinguished Service Award for their lifelong commitment to Jewish education, philanthropy and social action. Supporters and lay leaders of numerous Jewish, academic, social service and health care institutions, the couple also created the Betty and Irving Brudnick Fellowship as part of the Hebrew College Fellows Program in 2001, in addition to generously supporting Phase One of the College's new campus.