חדש באתר: עוזר בינה מלאכותית המבוסס על כתביו ושיעוריו של הרב מיכאל אברהם

Q&A: Panentheism

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This is an English translation (via GPT-5.4). Read the original Hebrew version.

Panentheism

Question

Hello Rabbi, I remember that in a weekly lecture you spoke about Rabbi Kook’s thought and argued that his conception of God is not essentially different from Spinoza’s. (Panentheism versus pantheism.) Could you explain exactly what you meant, or point me to a place where you wrote about this? And do you in fact define Rabbi Kook’s view as heresy?

Answer

I don’t remember. I’m not sufficiently familiar with his thought to determine that. I do know that there are interpretations of his thought that see him as a pantheist (everything is divinity), basically a continuation of the Hasidic approach that holds that the contraction is not to be understood literally. Others try to explain subtleties in this difference, and thus define panentheism (everything is in divinity) as opposed to pantheism (everything is divinity). That distinction is not clear to me (and I suspect it isn’t clear to those who raise it either). If we are part of Him or His limbs, then once again we have returned to pantheism and to the view that the contraction is not literal. And if the intention is that He acts within us and gives us life or something like that, then I do not understand what is novel about this approach. Perhaps the intention is that His relation to the world is like that between a soul and a body (as in the well-known passage in Tractate Berakhot); that may be different, but in my opinion those who propose this would not really stand behind its implications (for example, that He chooses and thinks, and not us).
Therefore all this sounds to me like word games that may reflect different states of consciousness, but they have no real substantive content.

Discussion on Answer

David Shemer (2018-10-02)

Why do you think it’s the same thing? To say that everything = God is to limit God to what I think and grasp as “everything”… whereas to say that “everything” is in divinity is simply not to limit God within the limits of my consciousness, but always to leave room within me that remembers that the divine essence exists essentially beyond all awareness and perception. Is that the same thing?

Michi (2018-10-02)

It’s the same with respect to His connection to us and to our existence. We are identical with Him, and we have no independent existence. Except that beyond us there is in Him some additional component or components.

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