Eight times in Parashat Re’eh we read of “the place where God will choose to establish His name”.
This is a formulation so unusual that it would attract notice if encountered once. Finding it eight times in one parashah demands attention.
The making of an image of God, as we know, is prohibited. And in this parashah the Israelites are even commanded to destroy all of the physical representations associated with the gods of the peoples they are to dispossess. That suggests the degree to which physical representations pose a risk, regardless of their source.
According to our text God will apparently designate a specific place where He will communicate with Israel and to which sacrifices are to be brought. But the presence of God, to the extent that it is in any way apparent in that place, is neither physical nor is it represented physically.
What can it mean that God establishes His name in that place? And why is it that a name can be established but not a representation?
In his commentary on Parashat Shelach Rabbi Jonathan Sacks makes an interesting point:
“Judaism is radically aniconic. We do not see God; we hear Him. Knowing, in Judaism, is not modelled on the metaphor of sight but rather of sound.”
Sacks, Jonathan. Covenant & Conversation: Numbers (Kindle Locations 2585-2586). The Toby Press. Kindle Edition.
We do not see a name. We hear it.
In Re’eh we learn that God creates a place of hearing, not one of seeing.
How can we think about this distinction?
I think we can go back to Genesis and walk backward from the material world that God created through the earlier steps of creation.
Before there was matter (the firmament) there was light.
Before there was light there was speech.
Before there was speech there was the spirit of God which in some translations “hovered” over the face of the waters and in others it “murmured”.
As the earth was at that time “unformed” matter, so might murmuring be thought of as unformed speech.
And before there was unformed speech; before there was sound; there was only God.
God chooses to create and that creation breaks the utter singularity of cosmic silence.
We might call that today a big bang. To God we might imagine it as no more than the unvocalized aleph that midrash tells us was the only thing heard by all the people at Sinai. The faintest of ripples in the unbroken stillness of precreation.
Sound is the bridge between the infinite and the finite. The most nearly infinite sound; the most Godly sound; is the sound of God’s name. Yet it is so close to the infinite that we cannot speak it.
It is unspoken speech.
As it is said in another tradition: the Tao that can be named is not the Tao. Because any attempt at expression requires a movement away from the infinite.
It is the dimensionless transition between the infinite and the finite that is the realm of God’s name.
We confront the issue of sound versus sight in Exodus 33:20 in which God says “…man cannot see me and live”.
We tend to focus on the word “live” in that sentence because elsewhere it appears that Moses speaks to God “face to face” and yet Moses clearly lives. But the truly consequential statement is “…man cannot see me…”
Anything that a person can “see” is, in some respect, material. And matter, which is created, cannot be the Creator.
As Rupert Spira might say, infinite awareness (which he uses as a synonym for God) cannot be an object; rather, it stands as the singular subject to which all else appears as object.
To rephrase the Taoist statement: that which can been seen is not God.
If a man believes that something he can see is God, he is not “alive” in the sense of a being that came to life by the agency of God’s soundless breath, as we read in Genesis 2:7.
The question is: on what side of the “matter threshold” is human life to be lived?
Is the true life of man to be lived in the region between the Creator and the material world; in the realm of light and sound; clearly touching and including the material but also approaching the infinite?
Or, is human life only to be lived in the material realm, bounded by the most subtle forms of matter but then devolving into matter more and more dense; further and further from the Creator?
Could it be that occupying only the material dimension of creation is not “living” in the sense that the Creator would wish and that one who can “see” God cannot be alive to the more subtle realms between matter and its Source?
Knowing God does not depend on seeing. Objects by their nature must misrepresent.
As Douglas Harding put it: the issue in not what God is. The issue is that God is.
The Kabbalistic system of sefirot, which occupy placeless place in the dimensionless unfolding of creation; between Ain Sof and Malchut; is the world of the truly living man, for whom image is irrevelant and for whom name is place.
©Charles R. Lightner