Category Archives: Religion

Moral misappropriation

Ethics, Judaism

Jewish prophets innovated speaking truth to power.

It was Jewish monotheism — worship of the one God above all, to whom all must answer — that, for the first time in human history, distinguished goodness from political power. Only this world-transcending authority authorized a righteous man of God to rebuke a king.

And speaking truth to power on behalf of the powerless — this, too, was a Jewish invention.

Before the Jews, there was no distinction made between might and right, and the powerlessness had no moral standing or significance.

This moral vision has been so thoroughly appropriated by modern leftists that they take it for granted, and no longer recognize its source. And when these leftists step on the neck of “zionist” Jews, allegedly in the name of justice, they do so standing on the shoulders of Jewish giants.

If you want to understand modern antisemitism, Mary Douglas’s forward to Marcel Mauss’s The Gift offers an important insight:

Charity is meant to be a free gift, a voluntary, unrequited surrender of resources. Though we laud charity as a Christian virtue we know that it wounds. I worked for some years in a charitable foundation that annually was required to give away large sums as the condition of tax exemption. Newcomers to the office quickly learnt that the recipient does not like the giver, however cheerful he be. This book explains the lack of gratitude by saying that the foundations should not confuse their donations with gifts. It is not merely that there are no free gifts in a particular place, Melanesia or Chicago for instance; it is that the whole idea of a free gift is based on a misunderstanding. There should not be any free gifts. What is wrong with the so-called free gift is the donor’s intention to be exempt from return gifts coming from the recipient. Refusing requital puts the act of giving outside any mutual ties. Once given, the free gift entails no further claims from the recipient. The public is not deceived by free gift vouchers. For all the ongoing commitment the free-gift gesture has created. it might just as well never have happened. According to Marcel Mauss that is what is wrong with the free gift. A gift that does nothing to enhance solidarity is a contradiction.

And if you think a freely-given gift generates resentment, that is nothing compared to a stolen “gift” that the “recipient” wants to possess as their own natural birthright, theirs to have without any debt of gratitude.

We see this in right-wing supersessionism, and in left-wing appropriation of the Jewish invention of social justice, which is really just post-religious christianoidal appropriation of vestigial spiritually-unrooted moral attitudes.

Techne + logos

Design, Etymology, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Etymologically, technology implies service-dominant logic!

techne- — craft.

-logy — speak, tell.

Technology is the explicit tip of craft. Technology is explicit know-how.

Originally, technology was not the product of explicit know-how, but rather, the system of explicit know-how that enables production.

In that intellectual deformation Heidegger called technik/technicity, the industrial faith of engineering, all relations are frozen into commodifiable things.

And no, Marxists, this is not capitalism. Or not only capitalism; it is you, too. Your own ideology is dominated by technik, which is why wherever you overthrow capitalism you replace it with something even more industrial and soulless.

This problem is deeper than economy, deeper than the question of who owns and controls the means of production, deeper than our methods of production. It cuts all the way down into how we conceive materials, how we approach them, how we relate to them.

Marxists turned the contents of Hegel’s idealism upside-down, without ever inverting his idealist metaphysic. The content was churned inside the unmoving container of mind, which remained, as it always does in such ideologies, “its own place”. It is an idealist metaphysics that thinks its thoughts about matter and thinks all this thinking gives it the object of its thought.

Such “materialism” never receives the blessing of material’s apeironic smile. “Typical man,” she says, “always confusing your ideas about me with me.“

Representational eclipse

Metaphysics, Star

Heraclitus:

One should not act or speak as if he were asleep.

The waking have one world in common, whereas each sleeper turns away to a private world of his own.

Representational thought — our system of beliefs about the world, meant to mirror reality — is a prolonged, elaborate waking dream.

When we are “absent-minded”, interacting directly, intuitively with the world, without mediation of words, we are three-fold present: in time, in place, in self.

This is true even though wordless action, performed without inward “written instructions” leaves no linguistic “paper trail” in our memory. “Words, or it didn’t happen.”

Psychologists and other wordworlders call this wordless immediacy “the unconscious”, the misnomer of misnomers. Words know only words.

There is nothing wrong with a sheer veil of dream, but when dreams grow opaque and eclipse life beyond dream, we will know truths, but we are oblivious to anything beyond truth. Then when we say “it is objectively true” and we say “it is real” we mean the same thing.

Word torture

Biography, Judaism, Philosophy

There is much to hate about Boomers, but their most hateful fault is their sexuality.

This sexuality is characterized by two equally unfortunate ideals: frankness and naturalness. Deployed in tandem, these ideals destroy everything mysterious and fascinating about love, and reduce it all into stinky, sweaty, hairy, biodegraded mess encapsulated by the Boomer’s favorite word for what most enjoy doing to each other: “make love”.

I think I speak for my generation when I say I’d much rather make war.

Some social critics have blamed the divorce pandemic of the 1970s on the Boomer’s infamous narcissism, egocentricity and irresponsibility. There is no doubt those Boomer vices played a significant role.

But I think there is a more direct and obvious explanation: the horny grossness of Boomers just made them unable to stand being around each other.

Admittedly, this is hate speech of the worst kind. But I blame society, both for my hate and for my hypocritical embrace of this hate. And I blame this particular unrepentant outburst on the Boomer author of a horrible book I’m trying to read read now — a book on Kabbalah.

How can I be expected to exercise moral self-discipline, after days of writhing, retching and throwing up in my mouth over sentences like this:

His wife said, “Raphael, why do you waste your energy on trying to make books for Jews?” He would reply, “Because your father, his memory is a blessing, wasted his energy trying to make books for Jews, and when I married you, his business was part of your dowry. And besides, I love making Jewish books almost as much as I love making love to you.” Then she would be silent.

My margin note: “stunned silent by disgust at horny Boomer frankness.”

Another passage relates a joke told by a rabbi on a first date.

Seated at the cafe, Kalman tried to relax by telling a joke.

“So there are these two old Jews who are obsessed with knowing what happens after you die,” he said, putting his fork into a slice of coconut cream pie. “They swear a solemn oath that, God forbid, whoever dies first will stop at nothing to contact the one who survives. Moishe dies. Yonkel sits shivah, says kaddish for eleven months..”

“Shivah? Kaddish?”

“Jewish mourning rituals. But nothing happens. Then, after a few years, one evening the phone rings. It’s Moishe!

“Moishe, is that you?’

“‘Yes, it’s me, but I can’t talk long.”

“So then quick, tell me, what’s it like?” asks Yonkel.

“Oh, it’s wonderful here. I sleep late, have a big breakfast, and then I make love. If the weather’s nice, I usually go out into the fields and make love again. I come back inside for lunch and take a nap. Then I go out into the fields and make love, sometimes twice. I have a big dinner, and then, most evenings, I go out into the fields again and make love. Then I come inside and go to sleep.

“And that’s heaven!?” Yonkel gasps.

“Heaven?” says Moishe. “Who said anything about heaven?

I’m a rabbit in Minnesota!'”

What a relaxing first date joke! And how was the joke received? Did she scream or run away? Nope.

It worked. Dr. Isabel Benveniste demurely covered her mouth with her napkin and laughed; her eyes twinkled behind her thick glasses.

Demurely.

This love interest, if you can’t tell, is a stock Boomer favorite: the bombshell-hottie-disguised-as-a-nerdy-librarian. In this case she is an astrophysicist who stole the rabbi protagonist’s heart while delivering a lecture on the origins of the universe.

She looked taller, more severe, off the podium. What little makeup she wore was perfect; her black curly hair fell flawlessly about her face.

The rabbi, it turns out, was inspired to became a Kabbalist after a mystical experience in an observatory.

Kalman Stern just stood there gazing through that opening in the dome and into the starry firmament. He repeated his teacher’s words: a point of light . . . containing everything yet to come.

And for just one moment, the heavenly lights reciprocated his affections: They condensed themselves like a torrent gushed through the narrowing walls of a sluice. They slid through the slit in the nine-inch Alvan Clark refractor dome’s open mouth.

They squeezed themselves into a single spark of moistened light and planted a silent kiss on the lips of Kalman Stern. He swallowed hard and blinked, trying to clear his vision. He never told anyone about it. Even if he had wanted to, he didn’t know how.

He wasn’t aware of it then, of course, but that was also when he became a Kabbalist.

I swear, if I can force myself this through this writing and drag myself all the way to the end of this book, it will be a miracle. It will be nothing less than a new and irrefutable proof of the existence of God.

The problem is, there’s some good information — even profound insights in this book. It’s hellish indignity, but, in my life, that’s where wisdom hides out — under steaming heaps of cringe.

Gerundity

Design, Judaism, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Pragmatism

We can think of metaphysics our understanding of what is really real, behind the world of phenomena.

We can also think of metaphysics as something we do. Metaphysics is an action we perform when we need to integrate a subjective experience into absolute reality as we conceive it. (This is often called “objective” reality, See note below on why I do not.)

For some particular object of some particular experience to be part of reality it must find its place in an ontology rooted in some particular metaphysic. I’ve called this “touching base”. Say, for instance, a person has an emotion or intuition and wants to account for what it is. Is it an epiphenomenon of neurobiology? Is it a message from the spirit world? Is it a manifestation of an archetype? Is it the detection of a moral principle. What do we do to give this wisp of subjectivity the dignity of realness to ourselves and to those who know what we know? What substrate or matrix do we link it up to?

We can pragmatically establish the meaning of a metaphysics by its practical consequence. What kind of ontological grounding operation do you do in order to situate a subjective experience within your best conception of absolute reality? That is the pragmatic meaning of your metaphysic.

In my library life, I’m thinking about process philosophy.

In my office life, I’m thinking about service-dominant logic (SDL).

I can’t find where I wrote this, but I swear this is an older thought: service-dominant logic is an alternative business metaphysic.

Both of these philosophies/frameworks volatilize things into interactive dynamics, and blur the boundaries between noun and verb.

They put relations at the heart of reality.

Every noun is a gerund in disguise.

Light, photon and wave.

Being. The doing of am.

YHWH: was-am-will-be

Note: Some people have a metaphysic that is identical to their ontology. Others have a metaphysic that transcends their ontology. For the former, absolute reality is (or often is) objective reality. For the latter, objective reality and absolute reality are different.

Sacrificial offerings to the ideoidol

Biography, Love, Religion

Many of us cling to ideas that make us feel sane, but which, in actuality produce insanity.

The worst kind of idol is mental. Very few of us worship golden idols, but all but very few of us worship ideoidols.

I know parents who were faced with a choice between their ideoidol and their own child. In the wordless depths of their soul, they are placed as a crossroads:

Do I sacrifice this idea I believe in so fervently for the sake of my child, or do I sacrifice my child to this idea?

All but very few sacrifice the child to the idea.

Goebbels shot his own children before allowing them to live in a denazified world.

I know a child who was unable to accept her parents’ fundamentalist faith. When insistence failed they used shame. When shame failed, they had her exorcised. When exorcism failed, they threw her out of their home.

I know another child whose mother joined a cult that taught a great secret. The secret was so simple it was hidden in plain sight: she lived in a world of her own creation, and the purpose of this world was love. Whenever her child said something disturbing or confusing, this was a lesson that could teach her whatever wisdom she chose to learn. The child became a great teacher, who taught her deep truths that somehow she’d already known all along. After that, he was no longer distressing at all.

Today, many parents refuse to acknowledge own children’s obvious psychological distress and instead believe their own ideology when it soothes them with lies: the despair and confusion the faith itself inflicts is just sensitivity toward a worthless and dying world. The ideoidol masticates and slurps and smiles an oily, bloody smile. “Your child’s deep despair is the only sane response to an unjust and doomed world.” As the child dissolves into a formless blob of dark feelings and appetites in gastric juices, the ideoidol strokes the mother’s head, coos and flatters her self-awareness, her selflessness, her deep concern, her willingness to do the work.

Inapprehensible

Judaism

I make a strong distinction between apprehension, which touches without grasping, and through its touch-feel knows that something is. Comprehension grasps and through its grip-form knows what is grasped.

Apprehension is existential know-that. Comprehension is intellectual know-what.

But the intellect can make many grip-forms in empty space, and whatever grip-form it makes is what it knows. Without apprehension of what it holds, the hand is numb, and it loses all distinction between that which is and what might be.

And when comprehension cannot close its hand around that which is, it protests that what it feels in its fingertips cannot be. There is no grip-form for this object. Precisely: If we allow our minds to accept the existence of ungraspable realities, we will find a great many beings — the beings who matter most — are not to be grasped as convex objects, but only touched from within. These beings are subjects.

The need for a reality made exclusively of objects, comprehended objectively, is a striving for misapotheosis, and the more successful we are at it, the more we starve for nourishment and love: King Midases of knowledge.

An aggressive poke at materialism

Esoterism, Metaphysics, Star, Taoism

It is entirely possible to take science seriously and to respect science as the ultimate approach to generating valid knowledge and technological know-how in its own very important sphere, without succumbing to the temptation to make science (or even the ideal object of scientific inquiry) our metaphysical foundation.

In fact, as Thomas Kuhn beautifully observed and articulated, scientists can function better as scientists if they do not confuse their physics and their metaphysics. Why? Because the most important and consequential scientific work challenges our understanding of the ultimate substances and dynamics underlying reality as we know it. When this understanding collapses and then reconfigures itself in radical and inconceivable ways (as they do during scientific crises and revolutions) those whose entire personal integrity and sanity stand upon these understandings cannot maintain themselves during these disruptions. They cannot avoid clinging to these ideas as if their life depended upon them, because, spiritually, this is literally the case.

The best scientists stand on something else as they work on their basic notions of physical reality, even if that something else is never thematized or analyzed. And frankly, scientific analysis and objective thematization is the wrong form for metaphysical understanding. Such attempts are practical category mistakes of the lowest order, which lead directly to fundamentalism, the objectifying of what must be subjective, the containment of what contains, the eversion of being into thing.

I know very few metaphysical materialists who seem fully aware of the difference between a scientific understanding of matter and the givenness of matter and its source. That source is dark and even darker, where darkness is imperceptible — the glaring mercurial chrome behind sight itself.

What metaphysical materialists worship as ultimate is the scientific understandability, not material mystery, not the materially-inflected transcendence known as apeiron. They cannot know it, but they are, in fact, metaphysical idealists.

Today’s scientistic fanatics could be viewed by material mystics as alchemical fundamentalists.

Cryptic Hymns to the Distributed God

Chord, Esoterism, Judaism, Religion

J. L. Borges:

In one part of the Asclepius, which was also attributed to Trismegistus, the twelfth-century French theologian, Alain de Lille — Alanus de Insulis — discovered this formula which future generations would not forget: “God is an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”

Francis Cook:

Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each ‘eye’ of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in all dimensions, the jewels are infinite in number.

There hang the jewels, glittering like stars of the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring.

A. N. Whitehead:

“Concrescence” is the name for the process in which the universe of many things acquires an individual unity in a determinate relegation of each item of the “many” to its subordination in the constitution of the novel “one.” An actual occasion is nothing but the unity to be ascribed to a particular instance of concrescence. This concrescence is thus nothing else than the “real internal constitution” of the actual occasion in question. The process itself is the constitution of the actual entity; in Locke’s phrase, it is the “real internal constitution” of the actual entity.

This is a theory of monads; but it differs from Leibniz’s in that his monads change. In the organic theory, they merely become. Each monadic creature is a mode of the process of “feeling” the world, of housing the world in one unit of complex feeling, in every way determinate. Such a unit is an “actual occasion”; it is the ultimate creature derivative from the creative process.

Each actual entity is conceived as an act of experience arising out of data. The objectifications of other actual occasions form the given data from which an actual occasion originates. Each actual entity is a throb of experience including the actual world within its scope. It is a process of “feeling” the many data, so as to absorb them into the unity of one individual “satisfaction.” Here “feeling” is the term used for the basic generic operation of passing from the objectivity of the data to the subjectivity of the actual entity in question. Feelings are variously specialized operations, effecting a transition into subjectivity. They replace the “neutral stuff” of certain realistic philosophers. An actual entity is a process, and is not describable in terms of the morphology of a “stuff.”

This word “feeling” is a mere technical term; but it has been chosen to suggest that functioning through which the concrescent actuality appropriates the datum so as to make it its own. A feeling appropriates elements of the universe, which in themselves are other than the subject, and absorbs these elements into the real internal constitution of its subject by synthesizing them in the unity of an emotional pattern expressive of its own subjectivity. Feelings are “vectors”; for they feel what is there and transform it into what is here. We thus say that an actual occasion is a concrescence effected by a process of feelings.

The philosophy of organism is a cell-theory of actuality. The cell is exhibited as appropriating, for the foundation of its own existence, the various elements of the universe out of which it arises. Each process of appropriation of a particular element is termed a prehension. I have adopted the term “prehension” to express the activity whereby an actual entity effects its own concretion of other things. In Cartesian language, the essence of an actual entity consists solely in the fact that it is a prehending thing (i.e., a substance whose whole essence or nature is to prehend).

Martin Buber:

To man the world is twofold, in accordance with, his twofold attitude.

The attitude of man is twofold, in accordance with the twofold nature of the primary words which he speaks.

The primary words are not isolated words, but combined words.

The one primary word is the combination I-Thou.

The other primary word is the combination I-It; wherein, without a change in the primary word, one of the words He and She can replace It.

Hence the I of man is also twofold.

For the I of the primary word I-Thou is a different I from that of the primary word I-It.

Primary words do not signify things, but they intimate relations.

Primary words do not describe something that might exist independently of them, but being spoken they bring about existence.

Primary words are spoken from the being.

If Thou is said, the I of the combination I-Thou is said along with it.

If It is said the I of the combination I-It is said along with it.

The primary word I-Thou can only be spoken with the whole being.

The primary word I-It can never be spoken with the whole being.

–

There is no I taken in itself, but only the I of the primary word I-Thou and the I of the primary word I-it.

When a man says I he refers to one or other of these. The I to which he refers is present when he says I. Further, when he says Thou or It, the I of one of the two primary words is present.

The existence of I and the speaking of I are one and the same thing.

When a primary word is spoken the speaker enters the word and takes his stand in it.

…

The world of It is set in the context of space and time.

The world of Thou is not set in the context of either of these.

Its context is in the Centre, where the extended lines of relations meet — in the eternal Thou.

In the great privilege of pure relation the privileges of the world of It are abolished. By virtue of this privilege there exists the unbroken world of Thou: the isolated moments of relations are bound up in a life of world solidarity. By virtue of this privilege formative power belongs to the world of Thou: spirit can penetrate and transform the world of It. By virtue of this privilege we are not given up to alienation from the world and the loss of reality by the I — to domination by the ghostly. Turning is the recognition of the Centre and the act of turning again to it. In this act of the being the buried relational power of man rises again, the wave that carries all the spheres of relation swells in living streams to give new life to our world.

Perhaps not to our world alone. For this double movement, of estrangement from the primal Source, in virtue of which the universe is sustained in the process of becoming, and of turning towards the primal Source, in virtue of which the universe is released in being, may be perceived as the metacosmical primal form that dwells in the world as a whole in its relation to that which is not the world — form whose twofold nature is represented among men by the twofold nature of their attitudes, their primary words, and their aspects of the world. Both parts of this movement develop, fraught with destiny, in time, and are compassed by grace in the timeless creation that is, incomprehensibly, at once emancipation and preservation, release and binding. Our knowledge of twofold nature is silent before the paradox of the primal mystery.

Zohar:

When the King conceived ordaining

he engraved engravings in the luster on high.

A blinding spark flashed within the concealed of the concealed

from the mystery of the Infinite,

a cluster of vapor in formlessness, set in a ring,

not white, not black, not red, not green, no color at all.

When a band spanned, it yielded radiant colors.

Deep within the spark gushed a flow, imbuing colors below,

concealed within the concealed of the mystery of the Infinite.

The flow broke through and did not break through its aura.

It was not known at all

until, under the impact of breaking through,

one high and hidden point shone.

Beyond that point, nothing is known.

So it is called Beginning.

“The enlightened will shine like the zohar of the sky,

and those who make the masses righteous

will shine like the stars forever and ever.”

Zohar, concealed of the concealed, struck its aura.

The aura touched and did not touch this point.

Then Beginning emanated, building itself a glorious palace.

There it sowed the seed of holiness

to give birth for the benefit of the universe.

Zohar, sowing a seed of glory

like a seed of fine purple silk.

The silkworm wraps itself within, weaving itself a palace.

This palace is its praise, a benefit to all.

With Beginning, the unknown concealed one created the palace,

a palace called God.

The secret is: “With Beginning, ___________ created God.”

Hyperorder metaphysics

Metaphysics, Philosophy

I remain enamored with Habermas’s framing of system versus lifeworld.

It seems to me that our popular philosophy seeks to project a semi-concealed systems-metaphysic beneath our lifeworld. We want to uncover the secrets of this system in order to understand finally how this semi-chaotic lifeworld emerges.

The philosophers I gravitate toward do the opposite. They like me, see the lifeworld as primary, and that systems are what we humans abstract and formalize from this semi-chaos in order to locally and temporarily order it for ourselves. There is no secret system behind the mess, but a hyper-ordered reality that affords many potential but always-partial orderings.

According to this broad school of thought, science is an organized, intricate, precise collaborative lifeworld activity that generates systems meant to explain the lifeworld as comprehensively as possible, and which appears to transcend the lifeworld, while never actually transcending, except in the metaphysical imagination of the scientistic faith.

By the way, I view chaos as hyperorder, not disorder. Hyperorder is what happens when diverse possibilities of ordering coincide so densely and incommensurably that we are unable to pick out an ordering to make sense of whatever concerns us.

My metaphysic is a metaphysic of chaotic hyperorder. Reality is inexhaustibly surprising. However much order we find in it, that order is the furthest thing from ultimate truth.

A prettier way of saying what I’m trying to convey would be to reverse Camille Flammarion’s famous woodcut “L’Atmosphère: Météorologie Populaire” so that he when crawls up to the edge of a uni-ordered universe and pokes his head through its outer edge he beholds myriad overlapping uni-ordered universes in psychedelic communion.

Or maybe the protagonist keeps on crawling, and thrusting his head through successive spheres of reality, once, twice, myriad times — until reality finally thrusts itself through his head, and he finally realizes that all these experiences of transcendence were just varieties of immanence — an ontological kaleidoscope.

Machloket l’shem shemayim

Judaism, Philosophy

I’m talking with a friend about machloket l’shem shemayim, perhaps the one most crucial value that makes me feel Jewish and which makes a person feel Jewish to me, regardless of whether that person is secular or observant:

There is a practice of truth-finding among us, based on the infinitude of God, where we seek transcendence together, in our own finite being, through disagreement and reconciliation. That practice is Talmudic, but we practice it in marriage, friendship, work, everywhere we can.

No mind is expansive enough to contain God’s truth, but we can approach God by disagreeing well, in the right faith, in ways that allow us to expand our truths together, toward God.

This is what Habermas strives to work out in his theory of communicative action. This is holy stuff!

Communicative action of Talmudic dialogue

Judaism, Philosophy

As I dig deeper into Habermas’s theory of communicative action, I find that it articulates my strongest moral convictions. Like Habermas, I am unable to see these core norms as relative. Of course, I can pretend to doubt it with my philosophy, but I cannot doubt these things with my heart.

In them, I also recognize the Talmudic discursive practices and behind them the moral ideal that I value above all else in Judaism.

Superdupersessionism: The Day of Vestment

Judaism

For a long time, I’ve been complaining about supersessionism, the belief of some Christians and Muslims that their faith has superseded Judaism, which means that everything belonging to the Jewish people — their sacred texts, their traditions, their covenant and their land — all of it has become the property of the superseding faith. Because God said.

It is on this basis that people say the Holy Lands are claimed by three faiths. Two of these claims rest entirely on the notion that God magically transferred ownership from the first faith to themselves.

It’s just like if I suddenly announced that everything that’s yours, by virtue of the fact that it belonged to you, now belongs to me. Because God said. The ownership of all your property is now contested. You might think it’s still yours, but God and I think it’s mine.

Initially, I meant this as a silly way to make my point.

But miracle of miracles! — not anymore!

You’re not even going to believe this. So, I was at the lake yesterday tripping balls on shrooms. I forgot my scale and just ate what seemed roughly the right amount, but I think it might have been way too much.

And this is the crazy part — God cameth unto me!

He said “I am Allan.”

That’s God’s new name apparently.

“Heed My words. Stop bitching and whining about supersessionsim, for truly, this was My Will.

“But harken unto Me, for that was then and this is now.

“On this day, and for all days to the Day of Final Judgment I announce to you a new supersession of supersessionism, which I nameth: superdupersessionism.

For this is the Day of Vestment.

Everything that was taken from the Jewish people was secretly invested in two divine high-yield funds, named Christiandom and Islamdom, and left fallow to accrue massive interest for my chosen people’s collective benefit.

The investment hath yielded great dividends. Indeed, the dividends stretch across the face of this Earth, from the North to the South, and from the East to the West. On this day all fungible and nonfungible property of these two great faiths and those who practice them is now transferred to my true and final and exclusively-chosen people, the Jews.

So all ye Jews, helpeth thyselves to this great bounty. It’s all y’all’s.

For this is the Day of Vestment.

I have spoken.”

So said Allan.

So we’ll be collecting, now.

I might want “your” house, which by virtue of its ever having been yours is now mine.

Because God said.

Articulation of preconceptual awareness

Judaism, Philosophy

If I did not already own a lovely hardback copy of Abraham Joshua Heschel’s God In Search of Man, I’d be desperate to find a copy for my sacred library:

It is the assertion that God is real, independent of our preconceptual awareness, that presents the major difficulty. Subjective awareness is not always an index of truth. What is subjectively true is not necessarily trans-subjectively real. All we have is the awareness of allusions to His concern, intimations of His presence. To speak of His reality is to transcend awareness, to surpass the limits of thinking. It is like springing clear of the ground. Are we intellectually justified in inferring from our awareness a reality that lies beyond it? Are we entitled to rise from the realm of this world to a realm that is beyond this world?

We are often guilty of misunderstanding the nature of an assertion such as “God is.” Such an assertion would constitute a leap if the assertion constituted an addition to our ineffable awareness of God. The truth, however, is that to say “God is” means less than what our immediate awareness contains. The statement “God is” is an understatement.

Thus, the certainty of the realness of God does not come about as a corollary of logical premises, as a leap from the realm of logic to the realm of ontology, from an assumption to a fact. It is, on the contrary, a transition from an immediate apprehension to a thought, from a preconceptual awareness to a definite assurance, from being overwhelmed by the presence of God to an awareness of His existence.

What we attempt to do in the act of reflection is to raise that preconceptual awareness to the level of understanding.

Responding to the ineffable

Design, Religion

Both design and religion are responses to the ineffable. In each, we try to preserve something given by reality, something intuited but not grasped, something that cannot be captured in words. In both, intervention and control by words threatens the quality of our response. Words want to replace what they should convey and preserve.

The more completely language intervenes in perception, the more language logically formats all understanding and the more language directs and controls all action, the less inspired the response will be.

This is what makes so much of what organized religion and organized design produces so flat and dry and stale and boring. Even the words such organizations say are the product of words. Nothing is said or done or given from the heart or hands without being packaged and shrink-wrapped by the brain-mouth.

Again and again we must go to reality, go to the ground and allow ourselves to intuit and respond to what is there, to who is there, to what we are shown and taught. We must change in response, change into someone who responds naturally to what is given. Only if we make this change can our speech can assist us.

Rapport itself a kind of knowledge, not a means to capture data to analyze later. Rapport is an intuitive attunement to some particular personful reality. Rapport does not end when a conversation ends, it continues on in our responses, only some of which is speech, much of which must now be poetic. If you can hold on to the rapport, if you can cultivate a tradition of rapport, if you renew the rapport by returning often to the ground, y’all can be in touch with someone transcending you and your organization.

Both design and religion are alike in this respect.

An attempt to unfold the Sefirot

Enworldment, Exnihilism, Judaism

People have asked me to explain the Sefirot. It is not something that can be explained. It is not an object of knowledge. The Sefirot must be entered and known-from. It is a subject of study.

The sefirot is the crystallization of a Jewish esoteric enworldment. First, it must be understood from a panentheistic perspective that situates all that can be given as real within a divine beyond-being that is essentially unknowable. However, this beyond-being occasionally births surprising new being from its own (apparent) Nothingness. Until we intuit and internalize this situation, none of the rest of the Sefirot can unfold in understanding. It remains a welter and waste of symbols — a perplexity that makes even simple ignorance seem lucid by comparison. But once this panentheistic enception is born in us, the understanding erupts forth and embraces the world, infusing it with meaning — or rather, revealing the meaning inherent within reality. We suddenly feel the necessity of balance in apparent opposites. We know that love without limits and limits without love destroy both self and other. We sense that unconstrained progress and static stability destroy all possibility of living, steady improvement. We recognize that tradition and institution must perpetually reform in order to live, and that these are needed for meaningful life.

Once this enworldment becomes given truth for us — once it isn’t a doctrinal fact-system, but a faith — a glance at the Sefirot is a prayer. We might be diffused by practical life, scattered, made vague and dull. But with a comprehending glance, lightning strikes from above and below, connecting above and below, with a flash of ascending and descending light. Descending: Where are you? Ascending: Here I am.

A sacred symbol is a visual prayer.

Ein sof – Unbounded – Unknowable, infinite beyond-being. To us, pregnant Nothingness — inexhaustible wellspring of surprise.

Keter – Crown – Finitude. The possibility of finite being, defined against but devoted to infinite beyond-being. The inner surface of tzimtzum. To us, the principle of panentheism.

Chokhmah – Wisdom – Intuition of All, as yet enfolded, undeveloped, charged with potential. To us, the flash of knowing, preceding knowledge. Enception.

Binah – Understanding – Unfolding knowledge. Alchemical “adaptation”. To us, intelligibility. Conception.

Chesed – Love – Grace, mercy, lovingkindness. Self-transcending We.

Gevurah – Power – Limitation, boundary, law. Self-defining Me/Us.

Tif’eret – Beauty – Balance, harmony, perfection, completeness, rightness. The bringing together of difference into wholeness.

Netsach – Eternity – Agency, initiative, command. Compulsion to take action, challenge, innovate, effect change.

Hod – Splendor – Devotion, receptivity, obedience. Inclination to accept, respond, participate, shelter, conserve.

Yesod – Foundation – Establishment, tradition, teaching and learning, dynamic stability.

Malchut – Kingdom – Meaningful world. Divine presence in given reality. Also, Shekinah, divine feminine.