#BlogElul 5: Know

Knowing is something that I feel safe with.  What do I know?  What don’t I know?  What can I know?  What do I need to know?

Having spent the majority of my life in academia, knowing and knowledge has been central to how I see and interact with the world.  Some of my earliest and fondest memories are about being taught, over many years, how to look words up in the dictionary. 

My parents did not baby-talk to me when I was young, so I was often confronted with words that I didn’t know or understand.  At first my parents would define them for me, but as I got older I was told to, “Look it up in the dictionary.” 

“But I don’t know how to spell it,” would be my almost constant reply.  At first I would be given the first three or four letters, and then slowly I was taught how to sound it out and search in the dictionary.  Don’t give up if you can’t find the word right away.  Was that a ‘c’ or an ‘s’, and ‘i’ or an ‘e’, and yes there are annoying silent letters, like psychiatrist, or letters that don’t sound like you expect, like that phase that English goes through with ‘ph’. 

I will tell you right now, if it wasn’t for spell-check I would still be doomed to getting back papers that dripped with the blood of many dead pens at all the things I spelled wrong when I rushed too much.  But given time, even back in the dark days of handwritten papers, I knew how to look up words. 

Learning was not just important, but vital, to my sense of being.

                   I have always wanted to KNOW all that can be KNOWN.

That which is UNKNOWN to me fills me with the desire to KNOW more.

But there is that which is truly UNKNOWABLE, beyond all human KNOWLEDGE and understanding.

That last bit is what has often been scary to me.  I think that, really without knowing it, I had for a long time believed in the ‘God of the Gaps’ idea.  That if I kept working to know more and more I would know enough to get ahold of, to KNOW G*d.  This is the idea that we can find and prove G*d.   And if we can’t, then is there really a G*D?

But does this fit with the fact that we don’t even know the name of G*d?

I have read and heard many different translations of how G*d name him/her/itself in the burning bush, but I think the one I liked best was what I heard Dr. Avivah Zornberg give (http://www.onbeing.org/program/exodus-cargo-hidden-stories/96) :

Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh, and literally it just means, I will be who I will be. …God is being evasive. God is saying, I'm not giving you a handle. You want a handle of some kind to hold on to, to say, "Now I've got him." That's a name. And instead he answers, "I am the very principle of becoming, of allowing the possible to happen."

And that led me on to words of Abraham Joshua Heschel:

to become aware of the ineffable is to part company with words...the tangent to the curve of human experience lies beyond the limits of language. the world of things we perceive is but a veil. It’s flutter is music, its ornament science, but what it conceals is inscrutable. It’s silence remains unbroken; no words can carry it away. Sometimes we wish the world could cry and tell us about that which made it pregnant with fear--filling grandeur.
Sometimes we wish our own heart would speak of that which made it heavy with wonder.

To let go, and know that there are there in fact things that I will not know, cannot know, will never know, maybe not even when my spirit returns to the Eternal.