Panentheism

Greetings to the Honorable Rabbi,
This is about panentheism (not pantheism)

One of the reasons the rabbi calls pantheism “nonsense” is that it is a semantic difference from atheism. Indeed, there is no real difference. The rabbi also calls pantheism that way, and it is not clear why.

Unlike pantheism, panentheism represents an infinite deity, with nature being just one dimension of it. Very different from pantheism/atheism.

What it means for us:
A. Everything is one.
on. There is “above nature.” Nature is the screen we know, but hides the rest.
The remaining screens (“spiritual screens”) are rooted in the final branch – “nature.”

What does this actually mean?
Let’s assume that the Israeli people’s distancing from their God reaches its peak in the mid-20th century, through assimilation or secularism or Zionism outside the framework of religious belief (it turns out that both the religious and the ultra-Orthodox are right, as an explanation for the Holocaust).
The rabbi offers alternatives in his book:
1. The “thin” view – there is no divine intervention at all. The Nazis chose to be cruel, and the Jews are unlucky.
2. “Classical religious” view – God guides history in all these events.
3. Another religious perception – God does intervene and steers history, but in the Holocaust there was a specific “concealment.”

The panentheist can offer:
There is infinite light (Divine abundance that is all good, that permeates all of reality). In this world, abundance is expressed, for example, in the oxygen molecules that we breathe. If we pollute the Earth, we will not breathe Divine oxygen.

Just as there are natural (physical) laws, so there are “spiritual-unitarian” laws, which, as mentioned, are rooted in the laws of nature (the laws of nature are subject to them). When the people of Israel move away from the Light of Infinity (which part of its purpose is to attain and discover), the spiritual laws cause nature to act against the people of Israel (nature, as mentioned, is a branch of the laws of the spirit).

How was it expressed, say, in the Holocaust?
The people of Israel, who are supposed to lead creation closer to their God, are actually moving away from Him. The spiritual laws are causing the cruel nature of the Germans to erupt within them. That is, from the perspective of nature, the German mind will cling to completely natural-animal behavior, behind which are theories such as “survival of the fittest”, etc.
This exactly reflects the expression “Israel among the nations is a dog among the limbs.” When there is a problem with blood flow in the heart, it will have an effect on the “limb” that represents Germany.

In a “pantheistic” (atheistic) world, on the other hand, there should be no “spiritual” influence between two extremes (say, Jewish-German), because everything is just physical nature.

Questions that may arise:
1. Did the Germans actually not have a free choice?
There may have been room for choice, but God (the Jews in their behavior) hardened their hearts.
Just as it is difficult to accuse soldiers of “murder” who killed prisoners of the other side. Did they have a free choice? Yes, but apparently their hearts were already inclined towards choosing to kill the prisoners, due to the mental state they were in during war (to the best of my knowledge, this also happened to IDF fighters during several of Israel’s wars).

2. So is God actually “infinite light” or “infinite system”?
Not really.
The concept of the Creator is divided into two –
A. The Illuminator (as the Rabbi described in his book According to the Lubavitcher Rebbe). This is about God Himself – “the essence of the Creator”, about whom it is said, “No thought can comprehend it at all.” We have no idea what it is, nor can we grasp it at all. Moreover, it is apparently forbidden to deal with it at all.

on. The Light (“Infinite Light”) – the divine abundance that is all good, and it makes up all the worlds (the last of which is our nature), that when we achieve it (probably with a certain scope of free choice), then we are in the optimal state. And that is actually the whole essence of our life – to pursue the Light of Infinity (a never-ending journey :)) – to know God.

3. Where does private supervision come into all this?
Because everything is one, just as Israel among the nations is a “dog in limbs,” so are the Jews in the same boat. The fact that the spiritual devotion of the people of Israel to the infinite light is in a bad state, thus it harms everyone.
Just like if equipment is stolen in the army because one soldier messed up, the entire platoon is punished (and rightly so).

Best regards,