Sunday, August 11, 2013

Renaissance [5]

All new horizons begin with a sense of the ineffable. Everything newly born, everything purely good, everything real. It is that overwhelming elation that inspires all new undertakings. Only it can give the strength of spirit necessary to blaze a new trail and create something totally new and yet undiscovered.

We started our lives as children with the constant sense of the ineffable. A child is amazed by all that he discovers. The world and all its’ phenomenon are an endless source of wonder that causes him to be in a constant striving to unravel the secrets that ineffable reality hides. We tend to get exasperated by a child’s fascination with the menial and mundane; but within that exasperation is a tinge of jealousy, a slight longing for that time when we were so…open to wonder.

 “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. ....get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.” 
 
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

Later, as we grew and felt acquainted with our immediate surroundings and they stopped arousing within us the sense of the ineffable, we then felt an indescribable calling, a challenge to conquer the world, an indescribable call to growth, maturity, and success. Some hear that call for a while, but then become deaf to its' siren. Not those whose humanity is laced with the mystical. Their openness to the mystical ameliorates their humanity and facilitates it being constantly fertile. Every great endeavor in history resulted from an indefinable need to reveal something beyond all that has been already defined.


And of course, all true love begins with a sense of the ineffable. A sensing of sweetness, of  indescribable longing, a feeling of completion that the beloved causes within that has been the subject of countless magical words that have all failed to truly describe the experience of utter love.

And only those lucky ones that have “dreamed a dream in time gone by, when hope was high and life worth living ,[and] dreamed that love would never die” are all too often the truly unlucky ones, who know that it never pays to dream, for they know the ineffable feeling of emptiness and pain over loss and death.

But, of course, ‘tis only that ineffable pain…that breeds the new vistas of rebirth and life that come thereafter.

When the night has been too lonely
and the road has been too long…
Just remember in the winter
Far beneath the bitter snows
Lies the seed that with the sun's love
In the spring becomes the rose.
                                            --- Amanda McBroom
                                    
But most importantly, an authentic, penetrating connection with G-d…begins and is only able to be developed and enhanced with a sense of the ineffable.

Because to really forge a bond with Him, one must have the constant sense of wonder and sincerity of a child [1], the unquenchable thrust to growth of robust youth [2], and the unyielding passion of a lover that knows that “Purity of the heart is to will one thing” [3](Kierkegaard).

Birth…Growth and daring to search for innovation…Love…The bond with God.

In King Solomon’s words:

All night long on my bed
    I looked for the one my heart loves;
    I looked for him but did not find him.
I will get up now and go about the city,
    through its streets and squares;
I will search for the one my heart loves.
    So I looked for him but did not find him.
The watchmen found me
    as they made their rounds in the city.
    “Have you seen the one my heart loves?”
Scarcely had I passed them
    when I found the one my heart loves.
I held him and would not let him go
    till I had brought him to my mother’s house,
    to the room of the one who conceived me.

                                         Song of Songs 3






[2] Tanya, Chapters 15, 47
[3] 

2 comments:

  1. B"H

    Very good and your approach makes it very easy for Jews without a great philosophical knowledge to understand.

    Miriam

    ReplyDelete