There is a place beyond which words cannot go. Try as we might, words can only allude to our most deeply felt emotions: Wonder, marvel, awe. Designed to help us communicate about ideas, facts, and values, words lose their power when it comes to the depths of human feelings, to an almost mystical connection to other living things and to life itself. Words get us to the shore, but to move to the depths we have to discard our words for other modes of expression.
If powerful emotions are always deeper than words can express, then how much more so something that is beyond human comprehension and limitation! God, the source of all emotion, the creator of life and of the universe is far beyond the ability of mortals to comprehend, let alone to describe. Our words simply fall flat when trying to describe the One who is beyond human understanding, the one who is our source, our master, and our meaning.
Yet speak of God we must. It is our crowning glory to be able to speak. Since human beings are able to communicate across the generations and around the world through the medium of language, we rely on words to carry an insight they cannot completely explicate. The words become the outer garment that shows the form and the motion of the invisible spirit within. We must use words; yet we must remember that the words are only helpful in pointing to a reality that begins beyond the place the words cannot go.
This understanding of language, as expressing what eludes containment, is fundamental to a Jewish approach to God. God isn’t simply at one end of the spectrum, with simple molecules and atoms at the other. There is no chain of being leading from inanimate through single celled plants to simple animals to humanity to God. God isn’t just farther along the spectrum; God is off the spectrum. In the words of the hymn Adon Olam, “Peerless and unique is God, with none at all to be compared.”
Since God is beyond all comparison, and since words correspond to human experiences and perceptions, it follows that no word or set of words can fully express God’s unique, incomparable nature. Hence, within Judaism, we use many different words to attempt to describe God (since no single word fully does the job), and we rely on many different words to highlight several different aspects of God. God is called the Merciful, the Sovereign of the Universe, the Creator, the Holy One, the Ancient of Days, and much, much more.
These different names help provide a label, giving us a handle to know yet another way that God relates to us, to humanity, and to all creation. Today’s Torah portion uses an unusual phrase to describe God, El Elohei Ruhot, God, Source of the Breath of all Flesh.
What a powerful metaphor to see God through! God is the source of breath, that reliable, cyclical in and out of air on which our lives depend. Nothing makes us feel quite so fresh as a deep clear breath of air, and nothing can make us miserable quite so quickly as troubled breathing. Beyond the air itself is the way our bodies feel while breathing: The filling up as our lungs expand conveys a sense of health and well-being. When angry or frightened, a few deep breaths can fortify us and calm our mood.
God is the potent source of that ethereal energy. As we breathe in and out, we rely on the divine inspiration (and exhalation) that connects us with God as the Source of breath.
But we can take this image of God one step further. The four-letter name of God, the one that is never pronounced, is made of four Hebrew letters, corresponding to Y and H and W and H. Those four letters, it should be noted, are all vowels in biblical Hebrew. So the most potent name of God, the one revealed to Moses at the burning bush, is simply vowels, the sound of breathing itself.
God is not only the Source of Breath, but also breath itself. Our breath—like our God—is something we cannot see or touch, but is our very essence. Our connection to life is through this intangible but constant presence. With breath, we can run, learn, love and live. Without it we become mere corpses.
So God is, among other metaphors, recognized through our breath. Taking in and breathing out, we share with other living things in the visible participation in the rhythm of life.
God is never farther away than the next breath. And never less reliable than the air that we breath.
Shabbat shalom