Immanence and Transcendence

Immanence and Transcendence

  First a word about  the name I chose for  my WordPress.com launching as this is my first entry. I chose Maimonides, (also called the Great Eagle”Ha Nesher ha Gadol”), and attached “rodefemet” after his name, because he was always a “truth seeker” and forever championed our God given reason. I chose him because he was so amazingly endowed with it, but also because he was equally endowed with a hugely passionate and compassionate heart. In contrast there are many very much endowed with one or the other but not both equally to such a great extent. One example of his great heart, which moves me deeply as a descendant of Sephardi, from southern Italy, is the letter he wrote at age 27. In it he passionately defended those of the Jewish Community in Morocco, as well as those in the Iberian Peninsular, who’d been forced into fake conversions in the face of death by the new Muslim Almohad rulers.  He is defending them against an anonymous scholar who ,from the safety of his abode outside Almohad reach, had called for treating them as the scum of the earth and as cast off by God, declaring that they ought also to be cast off by the Jewish people. Maimonides position re this came from his personal experience and that of his family who had had to flee the Iberian peninsular when he was a young boy. It should also be applied, I believe, to the later Sephardi when expelled from Spain and Portugal and their centuries of brutal persecution by the Inquisition, and their being forced to fake conversions or be killed or even watch their children be killed in front of them.  I also chose Maimonides because he was a compassionate physician spending late hours into the night treating his people as well as a philosopher. Many wondered how he even found the time for all his brilliant writings.

Now on to my first topic, “Immanence and Transcendence”

For the past several years, deep in my soul, at times obsessively, and often with tears, I have been struggling with these two concepts as they apply to our understanding of God, limited as it is re this Mystery of all Existence. Ever since my mom died, holding on to faith in general had become harder than ever. Two years ago, I addressed this for the first time with a Clergy member, a Rabbi who happened to be a Reconstructionist one. (I actually don’t like putting people, whether artists or thinkers, in categories but let’s just say he was on that more liberal end of the Jewish spectrum of thought, which I’ve discovered, happily, is a very wide range in accordance with Judaism’s deep honoring of freedom, both in life as well as in thought. (At least so it hit me, coming from my perspective of being raised in the ultra conservative end of Catholicism, maybe analogous to the ultra orthodox end of Judaism.) I was a Philosophy Major in a college program whose perspective was almost exclusively grounded in the thought of Aristotle,(as well as his precursors and influences, namely, Socrates, and Plato) and Maimonides and Aquinas. These later two thinkers had sought to integrate Aristotelian thought with their Biblical thought and Faith, the first primarily in the 12th century, and the second in the 13th.  Aquinas also had access to and borrowed from his predecessor Maimonides, including  from his thinking on Creation. With this strong grounding in their beautifully rational thinking, intellectually, my Faith had remained secure, through my later more secular studies in psychology, including a masters in Existential Psychology and the major Existential philosophers, followed by Medical School and Psychiatry Residency. However, after my mom died, an emotional numbness enveloped me and spilled over into religious emptiness, estrangement and inability to feel God’s Presence, nor that He existed, even though philosophically, my reasoning could not deny it. Biblically, especially from the Psalms, as exemplified e.g. in Psalm 104 and many others, as well as in abundant passages from writers like Isaiah, I’d had a strong sense of and love of God’s Immanence and had always felt His Presence most deeply in His Creation, in crashing ocean waves perennially rolling in, in looming majestic mountains, in rumbling thunders and explosive lightning flashes, and most especially in the beauty of the human soul, made in His Image and Likeness. (Indeed, years earlier, what had first drawn me to psychiatry, was reading these words by another Jewish sage, Father Raphael Simon, a Trappist monk, who’d formerly been a psychiatrist practicing in NYC, “Psychiatry is concerned with everything that touches the  human heart.” ) Just as the Bible had, Philosophy too had added to my sense of Immanence because as Prime Mover and First Cause of all Existence, this creative action is continual and a Presence in and through all Existence sustaining it or it would cease to exist. But still, when my mom died, when my son was four, coincidentally the same age I’d been separated from her till adulthood, all seemed to go dark and numb. I also was very preoccupied by necessity with both work and motherhood, raising my son and supporting my family, especially after my husband had become increasingly more disabled. But two years ago, my son was about to leave for college. Having been separated from my mom from age four to young adulthood I could not recall any early family life. This is another long story, but I believe it played a role in the even greater emotional loss of Faith at this time, when the nest of my own adult family was emptying. I expressed this in many ways at that time but will leave this for now.

  Back to the Rabbi who kindly gave me the opportunity to discuss my Faith struggles. I  first connected with him merely by accident as a Professor at one of the 5 colleges my son had been accepted to. He was a professor in an area of study in which my son was both interested and talented and was considering as a major. His answers to my initial faith questions had brought me to tears, actually had shocked me and had felt (albeit implicitly and that I had intuited more from what he didn’t say and possibly erroneously)  like an affirmation purely of Immanence and a denial of God’s Ontological Existence, as an Other whose Existence was affirmed by reason as per Maimonides and Who then entered a relational covenant with us, revealing Himself far more intimately through his inspired biblical writers than reason’s philosophical concepts alone could ever have ascertained. As Maimonides has expressed, reason is never wrong, it just can’t take us far enough. However, the Rabbi Professor’s answers also felt very liberating and freeing on my mind to think more on its own and to explore outside of the philosophic and religious traditions in which I had primarily studied. And above all his humanly beautiful complete honesty, kindness and generosity with his very limited time to engage closely and so helpfully with my questions both re my son’s college choices relative to his field which my son was interested in as well as re my faith questions, led me to deeply respect whatever faith and philosophical springboard the way he lived his life was based on. Swimming in this freer religious environment, I became freer from the overly binding religious notions inculcated in me as a child, which were without my awareness, causing my increasing  avoidance of spirituality bound to any religiously cast tradition. Without my realizing it, religion had become like a locked room with a sign on it ,”Danger, explosives, poison”. When I found myself in that room through my questions yet without consciously choosing to enter, yes, the sign proved true, as my childhood traumas, caused by the very name of religion and God, re-erupted in my face. But the sign was only partially true. I also found in that room,  Light, Love, Healing, Beauty, Truth and that God is also in the darkest places. Didn’t Moses, one closest to God and who never left Him, die in the desert? And one Hasidic writer wrote, ” There’s nothing so whole as a broken heart.” I reentered a more faithfilled, prayerful, meditative life. In my search, I started reading two major Jewish thinkers Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan. As expected, I felt completely at home with Heschel’s thought and though loving much of Kaplan’s, was also equally conflicted re other aspects of it, especially, in contrast to Heschel, his not feeling that in prayer, there was any Other listening to our hearts as we poor them out. This felt like throwing out the Psalms. The Rabbi I had approached had assuaged my conflict temporarily by saying there was no reason one could not read both these authors side by side as indeed they had both taught side by side at Jewish Theological Seminary.  However, as time went on teaching side by side was not the integration my mind kept requiring. It felt more like laying their books side by side, touching in my bookcase and pronouncing, “There, all differences are hereby reconciled.” Sort of like an intellectual Kol Nidre, where we just declare all conflicts, like all vows are nullified. Not that the Rabbi whom I respect meant to say that! And actually, reading them side by side became a good prerequisite to any future serious effort on my part towards integration! But the opposing views continued pervasively to war in my brain, with anguish and often tearfully. I increasingly started to feel, at least from where I was coming,  like something huge was missing from Kaplan’s and other Recon thinkers concept of God, even though I respected them deeply. I missed the sense of Transcendence which felt all but obliterated by their almost exclusive focus on Immanence. I felt deeply saddened, often tearful, as though the unspoken, non- explicit but very sad premise of their thinking was that God really doesn’t exist. This, even though many of my closest moments with God had always been on mountain tops, on rocky ocean shores with crashing waves eternally rolling in.

  But then, after almost two years and many an internet search, I suddenly struck gold discovering an amazingly brilliant author, Rabbi Milton Steinberg and his book, “Anatomy of Faith”. (I should probably also mention here that also during these two years, I searched my mom’s maiden name, Porto, and found it on several well documented lists of Sephardic  names,  So I paid for research re my mother’s southern Italian ancestry which revealed extremely well documented Sephardi lineage, 10 out of 13 names goingback to the 1600’s also being Sephardi and many of these relatives on Inquisition murder lists as well as 5 dying in Hitler’s death camps, including a Lorenzo Porto. Rabbi Barbara Aiello whose team does the research, told me I am definitely a Bat Annusim” translation ” a daughter  of the forced ones”. I started to go to Synagogue, and to identify with and and return to my ancestors’ faith and traditions that they were so cruelly forced by the Inquisition  to abandon or to follow only in hiding. My mom had not been aware of any Jewish ancestry, but I had always recalled her saying what her family told her, namely that though her father, Domenico Porto, had emigrated from Caiazza a small town outside of Naples, the family name had originally way back come from Spain or Portugal and this was because the Kingdom of Naples had been taken over by Spain. (This one distant memory, which resurfaced over the last several years,  is what had lead me to find Porto on Sephardic lists. Much more on this saga at another time!)

Rabbi Milton Steinberg was a student of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan who called him his most brilliant student. Steinberg joined the Reconstructionist Jewish affiliation. He knew his teacher’s thinking well,always deeply respected him and his thought, yet also critiqued his beloved teacher for his disinterest in metaphysics and his emphasis on Immanence to the exclusion of Transcendence. Of Kaplanian theology he writes, “being a theology without metaphysics, it is not really a theology at all.” He also writes of thinkers who express radical Immanence alone as well as those who express radical Transcendence alone, e.g. Barth, that both camps “inflate a half truth and in doing so, have perverted even their other half.” This felt like music to my ears and I had to read his thought further. I could not believe it but he was right up my ally of intuition re the need to integrate both Transcendence and Immanence as well as the need for metaphysics in theology. He expressed so well what I’d always deeply felt but not studied explicitly and had heretofore only expressed as ,”I don’t care who succeeds or doesn’t in integrating Immanence and Transcendence, I just know I want and need them both.” But if God gave me a mind and we are to love Him with all our resources, then I had no choice but to read on. I do wonder with all my queries over the last two years with both my congregational Rabbi and the initial Professor Rabbi, though I remain forever grateful for all their helpful teaching, guidance, wisdom and generous kindness(chesed) with their time, why neither ever referred me to the thought of this brilliant Rabbi, another Recon like them. Such a huge loss that he died so young at age 46 on 3/20/1950. I know I’m a neophyte but I like to think that had he lived longer, he could have been more of an ongoing influence on Recon and Jewish thought in general and maybe even helped bridge gaps between other more traditionally theological thought at the opposite end  of the Jewish spectrum.

(I can’t help seeing somewhat of a parallel here with another great mind, Spinoza, who expressed Immanence squared..on steroids. I think the extreme herem put on him is tragic, though also very understandable, given the precarious, fragile, easily extinguished “safety” of the political situation of this so traumatized Sephardi community. But if he’d been able to keep discoursing, arguing, challenging the other sages and thinkers within his community, kept in their theological and philosophical dialogue, maybe a deeper synthesis could have emerged and both could have benefited greatly. That this couldn’t happen, is tragic for him but also a tragic effect of the past and ongoing traumas put on his Sephardi community. The brilliance of his mind belongs to us and should have stayed with us, not gone to the usurping conquerors who created the horrid conditions which lost him to us. I find his character extremely sympathetic both for this and other reasons. Marooned from both his family and community and with no identity, he refused to depend on anyone financially. He sued his sister for his inheritance and won but gave all back. All he’d wanted was his mom’s bed, a symbol of being back in his family, belonging to his mom, and his community.)

God is indeed immanent to his creation, but we do not identify Him with His creation as does pantheism. And if He is not His creation, he must exist as Other, as Transcendent. “The moment God is merely identified with the world and conceived as being Immanent but not Transcendent, He is dissolved into the world. This is the atheism and pantheism which religion so vigorously contends against.” Surprisingly to me, this is a quote from Kaplan’s Diary, March 30th, 1913 JTS Box 1, Vol 1, as quoted by Mel Scult, who goes on, “Nevertheless, Kaplan maintained that it is only in terms of Immanence that God is meaningful in our lives.” But isn’t the listening One we come before with our open hearts equally meaningful? Someone tell me how does Immanence contradict an ontological Transcendent Other, Who listens to our hearts, the One  before Whom we come, even if with silent hearts but knowing He sees and loves the whole of us.  (Here the reader is referred to page 10 of “Man’s Quest for God” by Abraham Joshua Heschel, for a beautiful passage which captures the essence of his thought re this.) All I know is I need them both and I don’t see them as in any way mutually opposed. Our first human connections are to an other, a parent,a person, not to a force…”oh mom, you’re just a force squirting out milk, an impersonal fountain, not a beautiful face looking at us, mirroring back to us, as object relational psychologists would say. Beautiful as this is, isn’t God so much more, not less. (And the ahavah raba, called the quintessential Jewish prayer, certainly seems to express this.) I grant all efforts to describe God, all metaphors, attributes or whatever one calls these attempts are per Maimonides “imbecility” and a “bunch of straw” as  Aquinas called all he’d written of God after what he’d “seen” in prayer at the end of his life. Nevertheless, for me, personal is far better than force as a metaphor for what is an ineffable Mystery.. Trauma survivors, especially need to be heard to reconnect with the human family as trauma disconnects them, leaving them so estranged and we are all survivors to some degree, especially as per our Jewish history, on top of our personal histories. There’s a reason we gave the Psalms, our Jewish treasures, to the world; should we now throw them out? But how can we say them honestly if we don’t believe we’re being heard? There’s also a reason mysticism so flourished in Safed, mostly in suffering Sephardi exiled by the Inquisition. And there’s a reason one of my favorite Hasidic mystics, Menahem Nahum was otphaned by a very young age, as well as the Bal Shem Tov, being orphaned by age 5, when his dad died after his mom had already passed a few years prior.

This “journey” is by no means complete, and will be forever ongoing, I suspect. as should the search for truth be a life long pursuit. I have recently started to read,”As a Driven Leaf” also by Steinberg. I get tearful at the agnostic Abuyah’s dying words to his young son Elisha, who’d already lost his mom at childbirth and is thus becoming an orphan at the young age of 12. “Have I made a mistake with you, my child? You are a Jew after all… now you’ll have to make your own choice without me. I have been of two inclinations, one by birth, the other by preference… I am concerned with only one thing, I hope you will be wholehearted, NOT TORN IN TWO. ..” Such tear inducing words for me. This is me for sure… is it some of Rabbi Milton too? Is it maybe some of all of us? I need to read on in the book and follow his life searching for truth….rodef emet. More later! More later also on Milton Steinberg’s thinking in “Anatomy of Faith” especially but not exclusively as pertaining to the topic of Imminence and Transcendence.

A final note: What does  the word”Israel” mean? “One who struggles with God!”

And I can’t resist ending with a quote from the Rebbe Menahem Nahum of Chernobyl, Ukraine: “God’s glory is manifest in His many garments; the whole earth is a garbing of God. It is He who is within all the garments.”