Question

Truthfully, I had planned to respond to Rabbi Michael Abraham’s books only after reading all three of them, but since tempers are running high I will allow myself to respond here, even though I have read only the first of them (and Rabbi Shilat’s article, and Rabbi Michi’s response to Rabbi Shilat). Perhaps later I will return and respond at greater length and in a more orderly way.
 
Rabbi Michi, with talent and wisdom, takes us on a long journey in which he tries to conquer the secrets of the universe by means of his intellect—a human intellect. In his response to Rabbi Shilat he writes, “A logical contradiction is unacceptable regarding any subject, including God.” Meaning, in his view, God is limited by the laws of logic.
 
To me this is like a group of fireflies climbing Mount Everest, each one trying to illuminate one small corner of the great mountain. What tools do these tiny creatures have to light up the highest mountain in the world, to understand what it is in its essence? So too, and far more so, is the relation between us and the Infinite. After all, the fireflies and the mountain are both made of matter, whereas we human beings and God admit of no comparison at all. What ability do we have to grasp what God is, and what are the laws by which He acts? Even if the human intellect is fine and sharp, it is nothing more than a tiny beam of light that can illuminate only a thin fragment of the Infinite. The ratio between the little light produced by the firefly and the Himalayas is greater than the ratio between the light of human intellect and the truth of His existence, for the former is finite whereas the latter is infinite.
 
Therefore, one must recognize that our relation to God is not one of wisdom but one of faith. This is not the place to explain at length what faith is, but just to give a sense of it I will refer to Abraham Joshua Heschel’s excellent book, God in Search of Man: the encounter with God is “the encounter with the ineffable”; “the encounter with reality does not take place on the level of concepts and does not pass through the channels of secular categories. Concepts are secondary thoughts. Every conceptualization is in fact symbolization; it is the fitting of reality to human thought” (p. 91). And in a somewhat more cumbersome but apt formulation: “Knowledge of God is not acquired by engaging in the question of His existence, whose aim is to decide whether God is real or merely a product of human imagination. God cannot be seen as a secondary thought, as an explanation for the source of the universe. Either God is first and last, or He is nothing more than one more concept among concepts” (p. 95).
 
For Rabbi Michi, God is just one more concept among the concepts of logic. As though He, may He be blessed, is obliged to fit within the boundaries of logic, and if He does not fit within them then supposedly His existence has no meaning. But that is not so. A god that fits into the concepts of logic, into the boundaries of language, is not God but an idol. “He is the place of the world, and the world is not His place” (Genesis Rabbah 68:9). Logic is part of creation; it does not determine the Creator.
 
I could bring mountains of quotations from many thinkers, but I will move to the words of our teacher, our master the Rabbi, who explains:
“In the greatness of faith everything is understood, for nothing is prevented; everything is possible in the supreme realm above every name and logic, where the secret of faith lies, greater than all gods; there are freedom and supreme liberty from every positive impossibility. All these contractions come only in the place where narrow wisdom and limited faith begin, but supreme wisdom delights itself with free faith, soaring above all heavens, playing before Him at all times…” (Shemonah Kevatzim, 6:50).
The way to reach God is faith, and faith is above wisdom. “The Torah begins with bet and not aleph, with wisdom and not with crown, with the second order of all-encompassing divine thought, and not the first, which transcends every book and story” (Letter 44, p. 51). Rabbi Michi is wise in the wisdom of Torah and wise in the wisdom of science and logic, but all these belong to the letter bet—“with wisdom and not with crown, with the second order of thought, and not the first.” Faith is the first thought, and it stands above the level of wisdom and logic.
“In the supreme realm above every name and logic,” the laws of logic do not apply; “there the secret of faith lies… there are freedom and supreme liberty.” “All these contractions”—the laws of logic and rational proofs, which Rabbi Michi discusses in his book (the first one; I have not yet had time to read the others)—“come only in the place where narrow wisdom and limited faith begin.” But above them comes “free faith, soaring above all heavens.”
 
Regarding this level, Rabbi Kook states:
“From the perspective of the root of roots, the light of the Infinite in its fullness, there is no place for any impossibility, even those absolute impossibilities built on the foundations of the laws of time and space, such as the reversal of past into future and part into whole, or even past before future, and a part greater than the whole, the diagonal of a square equal to or shorter than the straight line—all these are necessary impediments only within the sphere of time and space, which are constituted by the constricting limitations of the residue that was revealed only after the concealment of the light of the Infinite from that whole area, that is, that future capacity within which the most general principles of the fitness of worlds are liable to be included and constructed. When one rises above beginning and end, above time and space, there is no impediment—but neither is there language and tongue, speech and logic, question and value. Therefore even this absolute impossibility of a God like Him, or the cessation of His own existence, are not matters for expression at all, for above every value from which our whole treasury of spiritual expression is drawn there is no description—not of existence and not of nonexistence, not of value and not of image, not of equality and not of inequality. However, we testify that all this impossibility of description exists only because of strength and power, because of being higher than every described or undescribed being. And the proof is that only after many weakenings, after many concealments and immense and manifold contractions, do values begin to be revealed. First the values of non-value—‘there is none comparable to You’—and afterward the values that compare and liken through images and parables, through the great power of prophets to liken form to its Maker. In the foundation of the residue, the place of made chaos, created nothingness, created zero, and emanated void, there the foundation was prepared for the limiting impediment of impossibilities, which emerged and were revealed before us in the forms of basic geometrical, numerical, and geometric impossibilities. And the soul that animates them is the spirit of the living God in the might of the Holy of Holies, above every manifestation of the preparation of all worlds forever…” (Shemonah Kevatzim 7:41).
 
And the listeners will be pleased.