Kabbalah’s key teachings encourage us to know God through creation. God is One, without limit and without end. So limitless that God is, in fact, the only being. Everything that exists is a facet of God. Everyday reality is a series of surface views of reality’s deep structure — God. Creation is simply God’s ongoing flow, God’s manifestation in the world’s forms. As we learn about those forms — nature, society, and consciousness — God is revealed to us.
Arthur Green hopes that Kabbalah can inspire us to see all creation in the image of God. Not just human beings, as a famous Biblical story (Genesis 1:27) teaches.
Today, riding the train through Super Natural British Columbia, it is easy to agree with Professor Green. Semi-arid desert heat blows past me. Parched trees grip the ground with twisted roots; bighorn sheep feast on the tough limbs. Osprey, herons and bald eagles hunt at the slim oases. We humans are tiny dots on this grand landscape, emerging now and then from a backcountry tent. I’m caught up in the grandeur of eroding cliffs in glacier-carved canyons. All around me, creation is ongoing.
But who am I kidding, really? I’m on the railroad, built for commerce; funded by trapping, logging and mining. Industries that over-fill human needs. Beaver families murdered, bear habitats destroyed, chipmunk dens razed. And not necessarily through malice, but simply because people desire what is fashionable. Why shouldn’t we? As social beings, we get creative ideas for building, dressing and problem solving from one another.
Most of us have no idea how to see other creatures as facets of God. We lack empathy; our habits block us. Today I saw a fly crouched between train cars, smartly and bravely sheltering from the wind. Odds are high I’m the only passenger who thought to speak with it.
Granted, few people know how. Why? A failure of imagination. With Kabbalistic insight, it’s easy to imagine other species as God in material guise. But it takes a gradual, radical retraining to imagine them as bundles of thought and feeling. To assume we can empathize with them, and allow our minds to reach towards them.
As Green says: it takes revelation to recognize creation as the flow of God. If learning is revelation, we have an endless journey ahead!
Images: Photos by Charles Kaplan and Laura Duhan Kaplan
Hi Reb Laura: hope all’s well by you!
I love it: Failure of imagination is spot on diagnosis. But the irony and the challenge is how imagination can lead to isight and revelation, not of fancy, but of deep truths. As in Einstein’s exercise in imagining himself bicycle riding next to a beam of light led to insights on the very nature of light. But those insights were then vigorously tested mathematically. What is our vigor with which we test the insights revealed by our imagination?
I like this writing a great deal. I’m glad to see that I am not alone in speaking to many life forms. I watch animals and how they respond, how their ears may turn, or antenna, or how they may begin to smell. I recently spent time at Southlands with a few horses. I did not know that one was blind. I was talking very, very gently into one of it’s ears and petting it ever so softly. The way this large creature responded was so touching. We are all a manifestation of that original creator.
Jessica, thank you so much. You move through life with reflective wonder. I’m glad you and the horse got to meet one another.
Sandra says you _must_ take the Icefields Parkway down to Banff. I don’t know if your schedule permits that.
Wonder is wherever you find it.
Charles, thanks so much! It’s the plan for today.
Sally and I are walking down on a narrow path in the woods. About 150 feet away from us, we see a bear. I pick up my arms and say “bear” very loudly. She, the bear, looks up and most likely thinks, “people”! She runs into the woods. We are just stunded. She, the bear, is very smart!
Good Shabbos
That is an amazing story. You said just the right thing!