God and the Raging Soul

One who spends rigorous and existentially challenging minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years searching for God, starving for a ray of His visage, begging for a glimpse of His truth, thirsting for sensual confirmation of His Being, striving to empirically experience His closeness, and stubbornly clinging to the lowest threads hanging down from His luminous garments while staring at the stark, cold, empty, world of tears, agony, and gas chambers can feel nothing but resentment, anger, and insult when reading

Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough. 

Wallace Stevens

Only an atheist too proud and enticed or an agnostic too weary to continue raging could see the path to the Divine as "a single shawl/Wrapped tightly round us." Only someone that never tried or stopped attempting to fearlessly climb above the vacuum of fleeting moments of happiness and the crevices of serene fulfillment can so smugly grin at those who know the heavy price of those rare, stunning moments of touching Infinity.

Religion is not, at the outset, a refuge of grace and mercy for the despondent and desperate, an enchanted stream for crushed spirits, but a raging, clamorous torrent of man’s consciousness with all its crises, pangs, and torments. Yes, it is true that during the third Sabbath meal at dusk, as the day of rest declines and man’s soul yearns for its Creator and is afraid to depart from that realm of holiness whose name is Sabbath, into the dark and frightening, secular workday week, we sing the psalm "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; He leadeth me beside the still waters" (Ps. 23), etc., etc., and we believe with our entire hearts in the words of the psalmist. However, this psalm only describes the ultimate destination of homo religiosus, not the path leading to that destination. For the path that eventually will lead to the "green pastures" and to the "still waters" is not the royal road, but a narrow, twisting footway that threads its course along the steep mountain slope, as the terrible abyss yawns at the traveler’s feet. Many see "the Lord passing by; and a great and strong wind rending mountains and shattering rocks… and after the wind an earthquake… and after the earthquake a fire" but only a few prove worthy of hearing "the still small voice" (I Kings 19:11-12). "Out of the straights have I called, O Lord" (Ps. 118:5). "Out of the depths I have called unto Thee, O Lord" (Ps. 130:1). Out of the straits of inner oppositions and incongruities, spiritual doubts and uncertainties, out of the depths of a psyche rent with antinomies and contradictions, out of the bottomless pit of a soul that struggles with its own torments I have called, I have called unto Thee, O Lord.

And when the Torah testifies that Israel, in the end, would repent out of anguish and agony… "In your distress when all these things are come upon you… and you will return unto the Lord your God" (Deut. 4:30), it had in mind not only physical pain, but also spiritual suffering. The pangs of searching and groping, the tortures of spiritual crises and exhausting treks of the soul purify and sanctify man, cleanse his thoughts, and purge them of the husks of superficiality and the dross of vulgarity. Out of these torments there emerges a new understanding of the world, a powerful spiritual enthusiasm that shakes the very foundations of man’s existence. He arises from the agonies, purged and refined, possessed of a pure heart and a new spirit. "It is a time of agony unto Jacob, but out of it shall he be saved" (Jer. 30:7) – i.e., from out of the very midst of the agony itself he will attain eternal salvation and redemption. The spiritual stature and countenance of the man of God are chiseled and formed by the pangs of redemption themselves. 

                                 --Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man

My Soul Thirsts for You

A Psalm of David, when he was in the wilderness of Judah.

 O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you;
    my soul thirsts for you;
my flesh faints for you,
    as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.
So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary,
    beholding your power and glory.
 Because your steadfast love is better than life.

                                     --Psalm 63

King David composed this psalm in the Judean Desert, while exiled from Jerusalem, therefore he was in a state of longing. Spiritually as well: when a divine soul finds itself in this world, it is in a desert. While it may attain a lofty degree of comprehension of G‑dliness, thus finding itself in a Judean desert, its present spiritual state cannot at all compare to its former spiritual state, before its descent into this world. Hence its thirst for God.

You are aware of only one unrest; 

Oh, never learn to know the other! 

Two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast, 

And one is striving to forsake its brother. 

Unto the world in grossly loving zest, 

With clinging tendrils, one adheres; 

The other rises forcibly in quest

Of rarefied ancestral spheres.

                                               --Goethe, Faust

                                                                      

When Kierkegaard wrote about the sickness unto death, he was not remarking on a bronchial infection.

                                          --David Berlinski, The Devil's Delusion

Is there, is there balm in Gilead?

Quoth the raven,

                                 Nevermore...

                                                         --Poe   

                                                                       

Those Unheard are Sweeter....PART 3

Never have I dealt with anything more difficult than my own soul, which sometimes helps me and sometimes opposes me.

                  ― Imam al-Ghazali

 It is foolish to think that we will enter heaven without entering into ourselves.
                        ― Teresa of Ávila

                            I Must Speak of Myself                                                                                                                                                                                                                           I must speak of myself a great deal.
          Matters of my essential being must become extremely clear to me.
          When I understand myself, I will understand everything—the world and life—until my understanding will reach the Source of life.

                        ―Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Kook

1. Why are the mystics so preoccupied with themselves and their own souls?

     Should their eyes not be better lifted upward toward God?





   2.   One of the most enchantingly ambiguous verses in Psalms is from chapter 27:


                                    לְךָ אָמַר לִבִּי בַּקְּשׁוּ פָנָי, אֶת פָּנֶיךָ ה' אֲבַקֵּשׁ

It has been translated variously as:

-->  My heart says of You, “Seek His face!”
    Your face, Lord, I will seek.

--> When You said, “Seek My face,”
 My heart said to You, “Your face, Lord, I will seek.”

--> On Your behalf, my heart says, "Seek My presence." Your presence, O Lord, I will seek.

All the translations convey that our heart commands us to seek God's Face.

But there is an extraordinarily deep translation from Rashi. The Hebrew word for "face" has also the connotation "my interior", "my inner being." (For indeed, the face shows what a person is experiencing in his interior...)

Hence the translation can be read, "On Your behalf, my heart says "Seek my  interior", and by doing so it is Your Face, O Lord, that I seek."

In other words, by seeking the inner essence of one's own heart, one's own soul--one is indeed seeking the Source of life....One enters Heaven by finding the Heaven within....

What does that mean?

 3.  Let us return to the lovers' sweet silence.

Words like violence
Break the silence....
Words are very unnecessary
They can only do harm

What harm can words do?


Speech is a contracting of the soul to radiate a specific form and idea. The sum total of who I am includes countless thoughts, emotions, reactions, etc. When I choose to talk, I am emanating one particular aspect of myself to another. That is what communication and talking means. As a single ray shining from the orb of the sun, words are a radiation from my soul to another.


Awkward and empty silences ensue when there is no shining outwards from one soul to the other, and hence the others' looming presence is felt to be almost like a challenge and an uncomfortable encroachment upon one's being.

Frustrating silence happens when one can't find the means to bridge the gap that separates between two people, to radiate from myself to a willing receiver, though the desire to do so is very strong.

Comfortable silence is when two people enjoy each other's company, enjoy existing as parallel companion souls; the other's being is a comfort and a joy, and therefore no communication is necessary.

Painful silence is suffered when no other is found to receive a deep, raging soul's radiation.

What is the utter bliss and sweetness in lovers' silence?

True lovers are not looking to radiate any particular aspect of their souls. They also are not content remaining as two separate, parallel people, soothed by each other's presence. 

They are looking to fuse. They are yearning to fuse their essences to become one. They throw all pretenses to the sea, and with the wave of a magic wand dissolve all the world's boundaries to fuse and become as one.

Their silence does that. The silence itself is the vehicle that brings about the fusion. It is more than a communication. The two souls' merging together is the unheard melody, the voice of gentle quiet, the inner scream of the two hearts beating as one. The silence is the conduit through which the souls pass to fuse.

We had bliss of sheer knowing without any word.

In the stillness of voices, our souls spoke and heard.

That stillness still lives. It’s the only thing real.

I can sense it with shut eyes, and let my heart feel. 

                            --Anonymous



4.  That is the seduction of the shofar.

Usually, we speak and God speaks.

We speak to God words of prayer. And God, too, is constantly speaking.[1]
The reality we experience is His speech, as those that have listening ears know.

But once in a while, we need to seduce our Beloved. Enter a state of silence with Him, without talking. And He for a moment suspends creation from being.

And we become as One.

On Your behalf, my heart says "Seek my interior", and by doing so it is Your Face, O Lord, that I seek.

That is the shofar.

May we all be inscribed in the book of the living for a happy and sweet year. And may all sweet silences be empirically and sensually experienced with all the force and clarity of the shofar.

---

[1] Genesis chapter 1 teaches that God spoke the world into existence, "And the Lord said, let etc..." Kabbalah teaches that every moment He is still saying those words of creation. And the world and all of reality is really nothing other than His "speech." Just as human speech is the soul condensing itself into a particular, defined expression, created reality is Gods Infinite Light radiating a small emanation from Himself to become the world.