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| May 17, 2013, 2:43 pm

Judaism’s revolutionary method for Divine connection: The concrete, not the concept

How do we deal with a God that is so transcendent that human beings have no ability to access Him?

This is a question humans have been asking since the dawn of time. We have an innate desire to connect with the Divine and many of us strive towards spirituality. We want to feel that we are connecting with something higher, something beyond the mundane physical world we inhabit.

Over history there have been many approaches to answering this question. Idolatry tries to bring God into the universe by taking a physical object and giving it the properties of a deity. Philosophy argues that a transcendent God is completely inaccessible, and the best we can do is recognize the actions of the Divine through studying His creations. Christianity suggests that God impregnated a woman to create a physical son of God. By connecting with God the Son, Christianity claims, one connects with God.

Judaism has an entirely different approach to this dilemma. If we follow the progression of the stories in the Torah, we notice that originally God was very close to mankind. Adam and the Garden of Eden story shows this clearly. God spoke to Noah and gave him clear directions. The same applies to the patriarchs and Moses. As the Hebrews begin to form into a nation as the people of God, however, it becomes impossible for each individual to have the same sort of relationship with God as did Abraham and Moses. Instead we find the story of a collective Divine revelation at Sinai. Here God talks to all of the Israelites as one.

One might have thought that when God reveals Himself to mankind and talks to them in a collective manner, the message should contain deep esoteric truths. Why, in fact, didn’t God reveal at Sinai the answers to mankind’s deepest questions and yearnings?

The answer, it seems to me, is that asking people to follow rules and rituals is more profound than revealing esoteric ideas and deep philosophical concepts. In the end, any type of idea or concept depends on the ability of the individual to grasp it.

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