I must admit that that I was having a difficult time of it in coming up with an appropriate answer to my own question. Namely, because of all of the responses I have received on the several forums I posted on, few were the number who actually addressed the question – and that was a serious distraction for me. The original question was:
“How can one define (describe) God in both personal and spiritually meaningful terms that demonstrate a comprehensive understanding of God’s true nature and His relationship to His creation?”
In discussing this problem with a few friends, we ran headlong into a paradox.
R. Yanki Tauber wrote the following,
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… the Torah commands: And you shall know today, and take unto your heart, that G-d is the L-rd, in the heavens above and the earth below, there is none else (Deuteronomy 4:35). Maimonides thus begins his codification of the entire body of Jewish law with this first and most basic imperative of a life consistent with its Creator's desire: “The foundation of all foundations, and the pillar of all wisdom, is to know that there is a First Existence, who brings all existences into being; that all existences of heaven and earth and between them, derive existence only from the truth of His existence.”
G-d expressly told us that He wants us to know Him -- to perceive Him with our mind and its finite tools of logic; to perceive Him as the first and ultimate existence (for the only logical alternative to existence is non-existence, and G-d is certainly not non-existent), and at the same time to understand that this only describes Him in relation to our existence, not Him as He is.
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The paradox being that we are to know God, but we can only know Him on our own terms – not His!
This is how the 15th century Rabbi Meir ibnGabbai explains it:
Quote:
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Rebbe explains the deeper significance of the second Halachah of Maimonides' opening chapter, in which he goes on to write: Should it arise upon the mind that He is non-existent, then nothing else can possibly exist. Many have puzzled over this seemingly strange passage. At first glance, it seems entirely superfluous: if the point is that without G-d nothing would exist, this is already clear from the first Halachah ("all existences... derive existence only from the truth of His existence"). And why give any credence to the hypothesis that G-d does not exist? And what is the meaning of the curious phrase "Should it arise upon the mind"? But Maimonides, the Rebbe explains, wishes to allude to a higher understanding of G-d, one that transcends the conception of G-d as First Existence he discussed in the first Halachah. Should you rise above the terms of logic imposed by your mind, Maimonides is saying, you will appreciate that He is not an existence, and that, on this level, indeed nothing else can possibly exist. For we, and all of creation, exist only in terms of G-d's relationship with us; if G-d had not chosen to allow for such a relationship (a relationship in which He would inevitably be perceived by us as an existence) the very term "existence," and the myriad of realities it defines, would not have been. Put another way: we exist only on the level on which G-d projects His reality to us as the First Existence; on the level on which He is as He is, we indeed have no existence.
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He also says,
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Just as He [God] has power in the realm of the infinite, so, too, He has power in the realm of the finite. For should you attribute infinite power to Him but dis-attribute finite power to Him, you are diminishing His perfection." I [Rabbi Tauber] then understood that the word "infinite" is an oxymoron: if something is not finite, then it is not truly infinite either, for it is confined to a certain area of reality -- the area that lies outside of the realm of the finite. To be truly infinite, a thing must transcend both the finite and the infinite and permeate them both, so that it is neither locked in nor locked out of their respective domains.
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The Bible starts us out with the most basic material for understanding who and what God is. That is, He has an existence that can be both perceived and an existence that is beyond perception (even comprehension). Even in while residing in heaven we have a glimpse of His form (
Job 1:6-8;
Isa 6:1-4; Da 7:9, 13 &22;
Rev 4:2), even as the angles in heaven have a perceived form, including Satan (
Job 1:6-8;
Isa 6:5-8,
Rev 5:2, 7:2, etc.). Of course, there are the many theophanies of God recorded in the holy text, which supplies God with a very tangible “reality” within our finite universe. Also, we must remember is that even heaven is a created place and that it shall be removed (Re 21:1). Therefore, it should not come as a surprise that all of the objects and occupants of heaven should also have (or exhibit) physical forms, including the dead in Christ (See
Rev 7).
However, even with these descriptions of spiritual things, we are left without an adequate vocabulary to describe a man or an angel, much less God. That is, we do not understand the relationship between our soul, our spirit or our bodies (we cannot really describe these human elements), although we know and understand our bodies the best (
1Th 5:23). We do not know nor understand how these three separate, independent elements unite to form a single, unique, integrated (oneness) human being, where, if we remove any one element we cease to exist as a living person. As to “knowing God”: We are left with a process.
Is it “wrong” to conceptualize God as a corporal being? Of course not. That is the elementary expression of God in relation to His creation. I submit, however, that it should be our starting point in growing in spiritual knowledge. No matter how far we mature spiritually, we continually fall short of conceptualizing God according to His true reality/mode of existence, which co-exists in both inside and outside the finite, that is, He is the embodiment of the infinite. His true nature exists outside of our logic (reason) or experience (emotions). What we are left with is (hopefully) a growing desire and ability to abstract our knowledge and experience of God into concepts that push our finite boundaries further into the spiritual universe, so that the finite and infinite begin to merge into a single reality. See:
1Cor 2:6-3:4
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