Who/What is G!d?

As best you can, describe your concept/understanding of G!d and your relationship to G!d. How do you communicate with Him/Her/It? How do you experience G!d in your daily life?


Think about his question.... unless you have a very narrow concept of G!d, this is not exactly an easy question to answer, much less briefly. My spouse suggested I simply reply, “G!d is Love.” Maybe that would work for many people, but in my own quest for and experience of G!d, that is not nearly a sufficient answer. So, after great thought, here is my feeble attempt to describe the indescribable......


I believe that theology is more about the human understanding of the relationship between G!d and the individual than it is about G!d per se. For me, statements describing G!d, faith, and theology are best framed within an ongoing quest to understand the nature of my relationship with the universe and its Creator. Perhaps it is the very elusive nature of my searching and my limited and finite ability to adequately describe the relationship which is expressed in Exodus 33:20 when Moses is told that humans may not see G!d and live. How could we ever possibly “see,” that is, to understand or give words to the Infinite, the Sacred, the Numinous, the Holy?

Fortunately, as in human interactions, the significance of the relationship is not based on a complete and logical understanding of it. For me, it is this quest for relationship with the Sacred and Holy which has driven and shaped my ongoing discovery and experience of G!d. In this most ardent pursuit, I am grateful to have been gifted a trace here, a thread there, all fleeting moments. Even the unquenchable yearning to continue the journey and questioning at all costs is grace and blessing. For it is in pondering the Imponderable that I come to find myself in my deepest core of consciousness and being-ness, and feel my soul draw near to G!d as I understand, experience, and relate to G!d.

My relational encounters with G!d have happened in nature, through chanting and leyning and textual study, in synchronicity and moments of utter awe, within friendships and community, conversation, prayer, and dreams. Yet my experience and understanding of G!d should always be considered partial, unfinished, evolving, unfolding, and as a very finite attempt to comprehend the Infinite, the Source of All, the Great Mystery of Being.

The word Elohim is the most common name for G!d in the Hebrew Bible. In the opening of the Zohar, this Hebrew word is deconstructed, reading it as two separate words: mi and eileh, “who” and “these.” On the one hand, all we can say about God is mi: “Who are You? And what do You want of me?” On the other hand, we are given the freedom to engage imaginatively in dialogue: “Eileh, these are the ways in which I experience the Divine.”

This speaks exactly to my experience of G!d through the decades, and it is by these lifetime of encounters that I endeavor to shape my life. Like any human relationship, my connections with G!d are born of understanding and experience that has matured over time, full of color and texture and depth, contradictions, anthropomorphism, emotions, and sometimes even messy and conflicted.

From early on, Jews have defined themselves more by way of their grapplings and wresting with G!d than by any other way. I have always identified with Yisrael, which literally means “G!d-wrestler”, and with Ivrim, the word from which we derive “Hebrew”, and literally means “those who cross boundaries.”

One wonders if the 15th century theologian, Joseph Albo, didn’t have it right; that, “If I knew G!d, I would be G!d.” At the end of the day, what we can know with certainty is that theology, and definitely Jewish theology, is internally pluralistic, deeply personal, and necessarily incomplete. Spirituality invites a life of engagement and dialogue, and ongoing commitment to spiritual expansion and growth.

At a quantum level, everything including myself are packets of vibrating energy. Those packets of energy do not change based on if they are in a human or in a chair; they differ only in their frequency signatures. They are both simply packets of energy, vibrating, recurrent patterns that we perceive as stable. Yet everything is dynamic, in the process of continuous change. We are all vibrating, changing, developing, dynamic patterns of light, connected to the entire cosmos, which is also interconnected, shifting patterns of energy. There is a oneness that is bigger even than the biosphere.

It follows, then, that G!d is the grand integration of all Becoming. G!d is Holy Process, as expressed in Ehy!h Asher Ehy!h, I-Will-Be-What-I-Will-Be, this Holy Vibration which is the Source of All Vibration and the capacity of everything to relate to everything else. The Sh’ma speaks to this as well. We must HEAR because G!d is Vibration, Energy, Sound, The Sound that Vibrated all of life into Being-ness.

G!d as Holy Process is the continual unfolding of relationships. We, too, are Holy Process of Becoming, the sum total of everything that brought us to this moment, plus our capacities to grow and choose, and become better, vibrating at higher, sacred, holy frequencies. All of that meets us in this moment, and at this moment the future offers us infinite potential. The Divine urges us to make the best possible choice. And in this way, G!d is the pervasive Becoming Ground of All Being.

This is the G!d I encounter and experience daily—One Who loves, Who relates, Who invites me to make decisions to be my Best Self, the G!d Who already permeates everything, the G!d Who, like me, is in the process of becoming. I encounter and dialogue with this One through all the previous forms I mentioned under prayer and spiritual practices.

The G!d I believe in is present in the here and now, in the process of creativity, in the sublime moments of pure love, and in the very ordinary rhythms of daily life. Again, the Zohar reminds us that Leit atar panui minei, “There is no place that is devoid of G!d.” Long before that, the Psalmist wrote the same sentiment and it is recorded in our TaNaKh as Psalm 139.

G!d is the great force of life, the Cosmic Breath and Vibration that dwells at the center of all Being, the pulse of energy that runs through the cosmos, filling reality with a thousand streams of light. There, in the paths and corners of the mundane, we find the luminal presence of G!d. There, we are awakened to an overwhelming sense of the sacred, the Holy of Holies relocated from the ancient Temple into the human heart and the beauty of the ordinary.

All of life is interconnected. We are all part of one organic whole. The wonders of nature, the transformation of the imagination before a great painting or poem, the luminous text of Torah, the open hand of a loved one—these are all pieces of the oneness of G!d. We are all but faces and traces of Sacred Holy Process, the pure mystery of existence that circulates through the cosmos like blood courses through our bodies, like fish swimming in the Ocean that is G!d.

In the Aleinu prayer, we recite that G!d is, “in the heavens above and on the earth below, there is no other” (from Deuteronomy 4:39). Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi takes this “There is no other,” to mean that not only is there no other G!d, but there is no other of any kind. G!d is All.

In this sense, everything we experience, everything we are, every being we encounter, every speck of sand, is part of the Divine. Yet at the same time, this affirmation of divine presence, in its very nature as an affirmation and definition, limits the unlimited and binds the boundless. With this keen awareness, I am then ready to find G!d in every moment.

The Sh’ma, for me, is one of the most profound theological statements that exists through all of our recorded history. There is a fundamental Unity, a Oneness, to all of existence. Each person, each experience, each moment is inextricably part of a single, unbroken Whole. Nothing stands apart, nothing is disconnected, nothing is out of place. G!d is One.

At the same time, my lived reality is fragmented, fractured, disordered. G!d is One, and G!d is not-yet-One. G!d is in the brokenness, and G!d is in the impulse to overcome the brokenness, and restore wholeness that lies latent within creation. However, to write more of the profoundness of the Sh’ma is outside of the limits of this reply. Perhaps on another day....