I conceive of God as an entity, a figure, a persona, who created the world at some point and somehow, and revealed Himself to the Jewish people, as I understand it, through sight and sound—in a revelation “external” to human consciousness.
They tried to explain to me that God is not a persona, not a figure, and not some kind of “boss” of the world, but rather the soul of the world, the essence of the world, the wisdom of the world. It’s hard for me to say exactly, because I have trouble fully understanding the claims. I assume the Rabbi knows the article “Sufferings Purge,” which is the basis for those claims.
As for me, I don’t understand how such a God, who to me seems like too abstract an idea (even for God), gets to the point of telling human beings what He wants.
Following that heretical article that came out in Otniel sometime at the beginning of the spring, one of my friends wrote the following text in the name of Rabbi Giora Nadler (I don’t know him): “Our teacher Moses grasped reality and understood being, and that is what he wrote. We call this composition Torah, that is, the book of the commandments, which are in fact the laws of being. The questioner may ask: if so, then God did not speak to Moses; rather, Moses understood the Torah on his own. This is a materialistic question, for that is the meaning of the concept ‘the word of God.’ Moses understood the Torah—the laws of being—through prophecy.”
As I understand it, this may refine divinity of crude idolatrous conceptions, but it also empties the concept of God and religion of content.
If I’m not doing a good job explaining the opposing position, that is mainly because I don’t understand it, and I’m mostly trying to convey it to the Rabbi, who may perhaps understand from what was said, or connect it to a similar position that he does understand.
And if I’m also not explaining clearly the childish-naive view (according to my friends) that I’m presenting, then I’m probably really less smart than I think…

I’m familiar with these statements, but I don’t really understand them. I tend to calm myself by assuming that those who say them probably don’t understand them either. As far as I’m concerned, all of this is just empty verbiage, meaningless word games.
As I see it, there are only two possibilities: 1. A personal God (that is, some kind of entity), or 2. A pantheistic God (He is the universe itself). “The soul of the universe” is just words. Because again I ask: is that soul some kind of being, or is it the natural whole itself?
The first possibility is what is usually called belief in God (theism), and the second is atheism in disguise (a very thin disguise). If the totality of nature is God, then there is no God. They’re just calling the totality of nature by a name, and that’s all. There is no one to worship and no one to obey. In short, complete nonsense.

Elad, Elad, Elad

When you said:
“I myself don’t understand how such a God, who to me seems like too abstract an idea (even for God), gets to the point of telling human beings what He wants.”
—> my answer is: This is philosophy, brother. Before getting involved in this, you need to be strong and have faith in the power of God.
God tells human beings what He wants from them because He created them in order to benefit them…. In two words: all the kindness He does with us, He wants us also to “invest” something of ourselves so that He can bestow more upon us. So that not everything should be by kindness alone, but by merit.

And when you said:
“Following that heretical article that came out in Otniel sometime at the beginning of the spring, one of my friends wrote the following text in the name of Rabbi Giora Nadler (I don’t know him): ‘Our teacher Moses grasped reality and understood being, and that is what he wrote. We call this composition Torah, that is, the book of the commandments, which are in fact the laws of being. The questioner may ask: if so, then God did not speak to Moses; rather, Moses understood the Torah on his own. This is a materialistic question, for that is the meaning of the concept the word of God. Moses understood the Torah—the laws of being—through prophecy.’
As I understand it, this may refine divinity of crude idolatrous conceptions, but it also empties the concept of God and religion of content.
If I’m not doing a good job explaining the opposing position, that is mainly because I don’t understand it, and I’m mostly trying to convey it to the Rabbi, who may perhaps understand from what was said, or connect it to a similar position that he does understand.”
———————>——–>—–>There are several contradictions and flaws here, and in my opinion if you had analyzed everything you said and compared it to what is written in the Torah, you would have found them yourself. For example:
How could Moses know on his own what was created on each day of the world?
How could Moses promise the children of Israel that they would leave Egypt?
How could Moses promise that they would have manna and water and meat… and a pillar of cloud and a pillar of fire?
How could Moses promise that they would receive the Promised Land?
If Moses understood the Torah on his own, then why would he need prophecy? But not only did he need prophecy, so did the seventy elders.

And your worst mistake is that you say God did not give Moses the Torah, but rather Moses our teacher understood the Torah through prophecy. And what is prophecy? Prophecy is speech and the transmission of information..

And furthermore, how can you on the one hand say that God is spiritual, and on the other hand deny that by saying that Moses understood the Torah on his own and that this is the word of God, while saying that this is a materialistic question…
The Rabbi said it in two brief words, and he was precise: “complete nonsense.”

In summary, God is spiritual and created the world and us in order to benefit us by merit and not only by kindness. And He told us His will in the Torah so that we would know what to do without harming ourselves.

Two of my friends, whom I asked to lay out their doctrine here so it would be easier for us to clarify it, answered me privately. Both gave the same answer: that there is a third possibility, that God contains the world.
I think that is equivalent to saying that God contracted Himself and created the world, but now one can, as I understand it, speak of the world as one part of God and “the rest of God” as a part that is seemingly external to the world.

This is more of the same meaningless babble, what people in that camp call panentheism (as distinct from pantheism).
Practically speaking, I’d be happy to hear what it means to say that we are part of Him: do we have the ability to make independent decisions? Or are we an organ in the divine organism, with only Him making decisions? If the second option is correct, then we’re back to pantheistic idealism (the view that the world does not exist), and then it’s unclear who here is even asking the question. Let him decide for himself whether he exists and decide what to do in the world. What does that have to do with us? And if we make decisions and act independently, then what is the meaning of the claim that we are part of Him? If my hand can make decisions independently, then it is not an organ of mine in any relevant sense, but an independent being. This is all just empty verbiage.

“Do we have the ability to make independent decisions?”

Yes.
We have a layer of independence, and the deeper we reach into it, the more we discover that we are all one—God.
Reality is unified; there is no separation. It’s just that we need, with the help of free choice, to reveal this.
It may also be that beyond this there is also an “external divinity,” but that’s not something relevant right now. The main thing is the inside—the revelation of God within us (by the way, this is also a verse in the Torah, that God breathed divinity into us).

I’d recommend trying a bit to open your mind and give this approach a chance.
You can read here
https://haravkuk.com/%d7%9e%d7%94%d7%99-%d7%a9%d7%99%d7%98%d7%aa-%d7%93%d7%a2%d7%aa-%d7%90%d7%9c%d7%95%d7%94%d7%99%d7%9d/