Finally, what is my purpose in life? Empowered Immanence means that I can generate God's immanence in this world - but how? Revealing Judaism's secret sauce for living your best life.

A FAITH GARDEN:

Spiritual Serenity

This podcast is being released before the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur – a day designated for personal reflection, introspection, and Teshuva. Teshuva is often translated as repentance – as regretting past mistakes, but in Hebrew it really means the personal commitment to return to a better way and quality of life. The goal of Yom Kippur is a renewed commitment to live my best life, which of course begs the question: what is that best life? Coincidentally, I posed that question at the end of the prior podcast, so the timing is perfect to explore whether Judaism provides an inspirational message for Yom Kippur and beyond.

So what is Judaism’s framework of meaning? I’ve suggested that Judaism paints a picture of Empowered Immanence: the idea that you and I are challenged to generate God’s Immanence – God’s presence – in this world through our actions. God wants us to use our gift of a conscious soul to repair and improve our world; to find that Godliness in our own voice. What Judaism, perhaps uniquely, emphasizes is that this best life isn’t supernatural – its achievable by every one of us. Even the patriarchs and matriarchs lived messy, mistake-ridden lives that should feel familiar to us. Thus, the Bible states “Lo Bashamayim Hee” which literally means, it isn’t in heaven, or never think your best life is out of reach. Judaism doesn’t expect us to be angels and Judaism doesn’t ignore human nature. For Judaism, Divine immanence is created by our actions in this world. In Judaism’s framework of meaning, I have the potential to pull God into the world, to bring God close. In Hebrew, this feeling of closeness is called D’vekut – which reflects the bottom-up nature of Empowered Immanence because it literally means that I cling to Godliness in this world. Do you remember the story of Biblical Jacob? Even after a life of incredible challenges and personal exile, Jacob wrestles with an angel and stubbornly refuses to let go. This is the challenge of D’vekut: can we still cling to Godliness today, as we are constantly bombarded with destructive news updates and distractions?

But hold on – we still haven’t addressed the next step in this idea. Empowered Immanence describes the mechanism for making God a force in the world, but it doesn’t explain what I’m supposed to do to generate that immanence. What’s Judaism’s picture of my best life? What actions and values are at the core of Judaism’s framework of meaning? We haven’t explained “how” I create this immanence? The answers to these questions illuminate why Judaism revolutionized our world.

The revelations of Judaism’s prophets have a central theme: God created us for the purpose of enhancing social justice in this world. These ancient prophets refused to be silent in the face of interpersonal injustice. Thousands of years before the Enlightenment, Judaism’s remarkable spokesmen and spokeswomen dreamed of a nation constructed on a foundation of systemic kindness. In other words, interpersonal kindness and justice are the essential fabric of Judaism’s framework of meaning. And putting interpersonal kindness and justice into practice – in my own relationships, and in society at large – is the way we generate God’s immanence in this world.

No one in recent memory could articulate this Jewish worldview with greater clarity than the late Rabbi of the United Kingdom, Jonathan Sacks. He echoes these Jewish prophets of old when he writes that “we should look for the Divine presence in compassion, generosity, kindness, understanding, forgiveness… the opening of soul to soul. We create space for God by feeding the hungry, healing the sick, housing the homeless and fighting for justice. God lives in empathy and interpersonal understanding.”

Listen to those words carefully: “look for the Divine presence in…” “create space for God…” and “God lives in…” When we choose to behave and relate to others through these Biblical values, we materialize, we actualize, God’s influence in this world.

Remember that the Bible’s Shema formula of “HaShem Elokeinu; HaShem Echad.” “God is our God; God is One” teaches that despite the radical otherness of God we can still create a relationship with God. In Judaism, we bridge that gap, we overcome our sense of spiritual isolation, when we live with compassion and forgiveness; when we feed the hungry, house the homeless, and fight for justice; when we heal the sick and work hard at empathy and understanding. When I’m engaged in this Tikun Olam, in this work of interpersonal repair, I feel closer to God – I feel I’ve bridged that Divine/human gap because I’ve brought God and the values ascribed to God into my life. The greatest summary of this Empowered Immanence was attributed to the Hasidic master, Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, who preached that, “God lives, where we let God in.”

And this feeling of closeness to God is real. By analogy, I’ve experienced the same phenomenon in my married life. My wife cares about me. A lot. She often gives me advice that she believes will improve our lives. Too often, I ignore that advice. But when I listen to her and put it into action, I feel real relationship enhancement – I feel good that I did something beneficial and a renewed emotional closeness to her. Because I have the freedom to do stupid things, she doesn’t control my well-being, but she sure cares about it. And her caring takes on a different nature when I actually put it into practice. It has impact. It changes me. She becomes a force in my life. Judaism’s framework of meaning taps into the same relationship phenomenon. Even in our era of Hester Panim, of the Divine hidden face, when God’s active role in the world may seem so distant, you and I can make God a continuing force here on earth. I’m not the first to suggest this marriage analogy. The prophet Hoshea poetically romanticized this action-based relationship, revealing that God wants to “marry you… through acts of justice and fairness; and marry you through acts of kindness and compassion.”

In the first podcast, I promised to search for a humble faith, meaning, a faith that would not exaggerate what we know for certain. I believe that Empowered Immanence articulates that humble faith. The psychologist Eric Fromm emphasizes that the healthiest relationships are humble ones that are not conditioned on my attempts to change the other person. It takes humility to respect and accept differences and not base my relationship on the ways I want to remake or change you. This same humility and respect underlie Empowered Immanence. I accept God’s unknowable essence and nature – and resist the urge to simply turn God into whatever I want God to be. I accept the Certainty of Uncertainty; I accept and live with the unsolvable mystery of the non-physical God. And yet even with those humble limitations, I nonetheless find purpose, meaning and relationship in the faith that God willed a spark of the Divine within me.

There is much more to say about how Judaism is a uniquely action-oriented framework of meaning. On the one hand, Judaism distills a life of action into simple aphorisms – think of Leviticus’s “love your neighbor as you love yourself” or Hillel the Elder, who summarized Judaism’s framework of meaning as: “what is hateful to you, do not do to others.” But Judaism also created and developed a detailed scaffolding of laws and customs – a way of life called the Halacha – that translates those meta-themes into specific actions, rituals and rules. I will discuss the underappreciated value of that scaffolding and it’s central role in Judaism’s remarkable longevity, in a future podcast.

Let me end with a deeper dive into Empowered Immanence. Immanence means that God becomes a force in our physical world. There are actually two dimensions to immanence – external and internal. As I’ve just described, we have the power to make God a force in the world outside of us through Tikun Olam, but we can also make God a force within us. External immanence describes the effects that inspired actions have on others. External immanence makes a real difference in other people’s lives. However, there is another kind of immanence and that is internal immanence. This one’s more personal. Internal immanence makes a difference in my life. I generate internal immanence through my image of God consciousness when I am mindful of what I am doing – meaning that I combine action with awareness. This is action at its highest human level. Consider this example: have you ever read a book and found that you just finished 10 pages without any concentration and don’t really know what just happened? And then other times you read 10 pages and soak it all in – you feel like the author was writing to you, or even through you, when you read with this level of mindfulness. Your consciousness appreciates, understands, and processes the words and style so comprehensively. In both cases, you were reading but in the latter you’re in an awareness zone. This combination of action with deliberation is what Judaism calls “Kavanah.” Kavanah – mindful action – introduces another dimension of immanence. The reality of life is that we cannot live every moment in this mindful zone. Instead, we all function to a great degree on routines, habits, and rules – some formal and some cultural. To get through the day we have do many many things without thinking about them. And returning to a theme discussed in an earlier podcast, our technology-driven, multi-tasking existence has reconditioned our brains to make such mindfulness – such Kavanah – seem nearly impossible. So, in addition to the mountain Judaism wants me to climb in pursuing social justice, I must strive for mindfulness in my actions. When I undertake Tikun Olam with understanding and mindfulness, I have not only brought God into this world; I’ve brought God into myself. My soul reflects the Divine light. It’s a breathtaking idea. This freedom only exists because I possess the image of God within me – and so mindful action fully expresses that image of God and allows me to fuse my consciousness with Godliness – to create internal Immanence, making God a force within me. Holistic immanence, encompassing both internal and external Godliness, is the fulfillment of the prophetic vision: doing good with a full heart and full understanding.

As you can probably tell, my discovery of Judaism’s core ideas excited me. The idea that Judaism injects humanistic equality into our rough and tumble hierarchical universe resonates for me, and inspires me towards kindness, caring and love. Empowered Immanence provides a meaningful and spiritually fulfilling goal. Empowered Immanence is the first step to finding a place for God in today’s world. But we need to really explore that God/human relationship in greater depth because the God idea itself is in need of resuscitation. As noted earlier, the God idea has run aground on the rocks of post-modernism, along with the notion that God can play a key role in my life. And if that ship hasn’t sunk, it is badly damaged. So next up, my contemporary view of God’s role in our world.