From the page: ” For example, the Zohar (the masterpiece of Kabbalah) reads the opening verse of the Torah not as In the beginning God created…, but rather: With beginning, [the Unnamable One] created God. This sounds shocking or heretical. But the point is that our usual understanding of God is pretty childish. What we think of as God is only one limited aspect of the infinite divine reality, which transcends and explodes all names.
Understanding God
Ultimately, God is Ein Sof, the Infinite. But, being finite creatures, it’s hard for us to comprehend or relate to Infinity. We need mental images of God. Yet all images are inadequate; so Kabbalah insists that we not limit ourselves to any one image or set of images. For example, most religious texts portray God almost exclusively in masculine terms. Kabbalah fills out the picture by showing that God is equally male and female: God as Father or King is balanced by the figure of Shekhinah, the feminine Divine Presence. There is a dynamic relationship between the He and She of God, and it’s up to us to unite the divine couple by living virtuously, ethically, and spiritually.
Finding God
The Jewish mystics speak of divine sparks hidden within all things. God is not someone up there running the show; God is the energy that animates all material existence. We can discover and “raise” the sparks by cultivating our awareness, by looking for spiritual opportunities. One of Shekhinah’s many names is the Secret of the Possible. The challenge is to actualize the divine potential in ourselves and in the world by choosing how to live lovingly and wisely. We can start by quieting our cluttered, busy mind with a few minutes of silence each day. Then it’s easier to identify the sparks, the possibilities of transformation.
Daniel MattGarden of Eden in Our Lives
We all know the famous story near the beginning of Genesis about the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. It’s clear that God expels Adam and Eve from the garden. But the Zohar asks a startling question: Who threw whom out of the Garden? Through a very artistic and radical reading of the text, the Zohar suggests that Adam expelled God from the Garden! “
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