This is a post I started writing years ago. It is again relevant to my current theological work, so I’m going to try to finish it.

After I wrote about 1, 0, ∞ in response to something Getzel said about Buddhism, I was talking to Jason and he said, basically:

“Yeah that’s great. Only that’s not what one means.”

How upsetting.

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh, you’ve got it right with zero and infinity. But one doesn’t fit.”

“But… sure it does…” but I was scrambling to figure out how I could prove this.

“No, because one implies other. It implies a distinction from something else. It’s not all encompassing unity, its unity of something in the face of something else.”

Then he had to go. And I was left to ponder whether I’d made a horrible (in my mind) mistake and should give up amateur philosophizing altogether and go be a farmer somewhere.

Today I read something that brought me back to the question and gives me new confidence that I might be in someway not incorrect about my understanding of the essential sameness of One, Zero and Infinity. I was reading the 4th installment of a series of lessons on daily prayers, Pray and Mean It written by Cantor Jack Chomsky of Congregation Tifereth Israel of Columbus Ohio. This installment was on the Aleinu prayer in which we, before leaving our prayer service and going out into the world, acknowledge our obligation and renew our commitment to pay homage to HaKadosh Boruch Hu, give thanks for and acknowledgment to our special relationship with The Creator, and express a hope that one day all peoples will be united in acknowledgment of The One True God. Lots of people have moral issues with the content of this prayer. I am not one of them… and I am not going to go into that right now. But the last line, which has always struck me as extraordinarily significant, struck me particularly sharply on this occasion:

“Bayom HaHu Yihieh Adonai Echad uShemo Echad”

“On that day, God will be One and God’s Name will be One.”

In this vision, on the day when everyone unites together in praise of Adonai, then the words that we say in the Shema, that God is One, will actually be true. In True Unity, when everything, everything is united, you have a ONE that is not as distinct from another. The true Echad, the ONEness of God is the ONEness of everything, ein od… there is nothing else.

To my mind, this is evokes Spinoza. As I understand it, Spinoza’s vision of God was the unity of everything, the universe itself as a unified conscious entity. This is God. Of course, Spinoza is condemned by many in the Jewish world as a pantheist and therefore an atheist. If everything is God, then nothing is God. This objection is similar to Jason’s desire to distinguish 1 from 0 and ∞, which is perhaps the root of a deep problem people have with theology. There is a strong desire to separate God from not-God, to be able to hold up God and point and identify “This, and not that, is God.” This is reflected in attitudes of both theists and non-theists alike. For theists, they are comforted by the idea of God as a discrete being. For non-theists, they are comforted by the notion that all theists are invested in this idea of a discrete being, Whose existence they can easily deny. The imaginary invisible friend named God which may just as well be the Our Noodly Master, The Flying Spaghetti Monster.

My view is a bit different from Spinoza’s, or at least differently focused. I’m less concerned with the entirety of the natural world or universe, and more concerned with the conscious aspect, the self-regarding existence part. The macro-scale principle of Being contemplating Itself, of which I believe we, as humans, are a microcosmic reflection. My sense is that the experience which we call God originates in something akin to the unification of all consciousness of SELF, which is comprised of the collective consciousness of humanity and something beyond that, some larger intentionality, pattern-maker, dot-connector, that is the consciousness of the universe.

There is a more detailed and fleshed out version of this theological vision in the works, which also includes insights into the practical elements of religion and prayer, and why this theology isn’t necessarily cold, intellectual and emotionless when approached properly… but this is not the space for it. Not yet.

Coming back to 1, to unity, this 1 doesn’t have to be distinct from, in the face of, anything else. You could try to say that it is the conscious as distinct from the non-conscious, but the distinction is irrelevant. What the 1 here signifies, rather than a demarkation, is the melding of seemingly distinct elements into a unified whole… a whole that is infinite, and at the same time empty and clear. It is SELF and it is lack of self. Boundaryless connection, radical honesty, self seeing self with nothing in the way.

This is actually going somewhere, don’t worry.

I’ve been wanting to post about this here for a while… might as well use the momentum.

I remember a Saturday afternoon in Jerusalem last year spent with my friend Paul (Yankele) from Yeshiva. We sat in the living room of some classmates and talked for hours. The subject of much of the conversation was how much we had come to like Shabbat.

Here’s the thing about Shabbat for a halachically observant Jew… it comes. And you have to let go of everything. You simply have to. It is required. You put down your phone, you put away your money, you put on nice clothes, light candles, walk to shul, and you can’t worry. Whatever you might be worried about, there’s nothing that you can do about it for the next 25 hours. All you can do for right now is look around you, breathe in and breathe out, praise God, eat, rest, laugh, hug, talk, study… Shabbat forces you to take a break. It gives you an excuse to be with people, to not stray too far. You have to be where you are. Shabbat forces you to appreciate the world as it is at this moment.

On Shabbat, we don’t change things. It is not our place. This is the day we let go and leave everything up to Not Us.

There are a lot of laws of Shabbat observance, mostly about what one is not allowed to do. There is a set of laws about what is called muktze, dealing with the category of things that one is not allowed to touch or handle on Shabbat. You are not supposed to handle anything on Shabbat that doesn’t have a legitimate Shabbat use. You are also not supposed to pick any plants, anything attached to the ground. You are not supposed to write. You are not supposed to engage in commerce or touch money, or even discuss commerce. Though there is some debate about this, most accept that you are not supposed to use electricity on Shabbat. You are not supposed to make fire or cook.

A lot of people have a problem with these laws. They see these laws, they see the whole thing, as unnecessarily restrictive, bothersome and annoying, and not conducive to what they regard as “rest,” which they equate with enjoyment. I didn’t get it either until about the middle of my first year in Yeshiva. I was walking to shul Friday evening. It was not yet Shabbat but I had davened Mincha already and lit my candles and consciously accepted shabbat early. I was walking down Derech Beit Lechem and all of Jerusalem smelled like honeysuckle. I love honeysuckle. I love the smell, and the flowers are beautiful, and they remind me of the happy parts of my childhood. As I passed a honeysuckle bush, I had an urge to pick one. But I couldn’t. Because it was Shabbat (for me) already and you don’t pick things on shabbat. And so I stepped back, and I looked. And it was so beautiful.

And suddenly everything was so beautiful. I stepped back and I saw a vision of the world on Shabbat… a world where you don’t touch the pictures. You don’t mess with it, you just live in it. That is what Shabbat is. It’s the day on which you just live, and you don’t touch the things that you don’t need to just live. Why touch them if they are just going to take you out of the space? Why carry your phone if it will just tempt you to try to control things? Why carry money if it will lead you to do business, or to even think about business, and worry about how much you can or cannot acquire? It is healthy, I would say even necessary, to have a day where you let go of the desire to control the world, to make marks and changes, to have an impact. Six days out of the week you have for that. One day, you can just let it go. One day you can reassess your place in the grand scheme and realize that the world won’t end if you don’t have your cellphone.

Shabbat is about acceptance. And that is rest in a very true sense.

The kids I think of as my baby cousins are the ones who, about 15 years ago I realized, didn’t know who Mr. Hooper was. At 28 and a half years old, it is getting more and more difficult to deny the fact that I am, in fact, an adult… maybe even a grownup. Any my baby cousins… well, they are clearly no longer babies. They are in high school and college and even graduated, some of them. And they now inhabit many of the same worlds of culture and media as do I. They’ve caught up with the online world I’ve watched develop through my own adolescence and young adulthood, and I’m encountering them on Facebook and Twitter, giving me a window into their lives, and them a window into mine, that was once screened from mutual view by the venetian blinds of age discrepancy. Now the blinds are open, which leaves me pondering a glaring question about my own status as a member of the first wave of the Internet Age.

We all remember when our parents and even *gasp* our grandparents started to figure out email and AIM and slowly started to trickle onto Facebook. Many of us felt threatened, invaded, even a bit disgusted at the prospect of sharing online space with the generations above us. We were embarrassed by their clumsy mass-emails, forwarded jokes, tactless comments, as they tested the waters of this new pool we’d grown up splashing about in. Even for those of us whose parents were part of the development of the technologies we used with such dexterity, it was our generation that made a culture of the internet, who made it a home. Our parents’ halting forays into this world seemed child-like to us as we are reminded of our first clumsy websites written in awkward HTML with blinking text and primitive clipart at age 13 or so.

So for my 12-year-old cousin Sam, my 18-year-old cousin Daniel, or even my 22-year-old cousin Rebecca, what is it that they see when they notice a friend request from their older cousin Gella? How do they experience my comments on their statuses and pictures? Do they have the same awkward feeling we had when Mom or Dad or Uncle Paul wanted to be our internet buddies? Do they cringe at our ability to see the pictures of where they’ve been, what they’ve done and with whom, with whom they are currently in a relationship, the sort of language they use with their friends? Are we, the former young and hip internet generation the old fogeys of this world already?

I can’t help but ponder the differences in how we developed with the internet, we and the internet growing up together like classmates, learning as we went. We who started with Bulletin Boards and IRC and Prodigy and listservs, we who remember the start of AOL, we who learned to type on Apple IIe computers in elementary school… whereas these kids today, they are coming into maturity a world in which the Internet is already grown up and established. They learned URL along with ABC. And whereas we grew up in an Internet of which our parents were largely ignorant, they are growing up in an Internet which their parents have learned to regard, to use, and to try to monitor. It’s a different world for them, but I’m troubled by the question of how different.

When I first saw my kid cousins had gotten themselves Facebook accounts, I must admit, I had mixed feelings. A combination of “Oh, isn’t that cute!” and “They’re growing up so fast!” and “I’d better watch what I say” and, I’ll confess, a measure of the same sense of invasion that I felt when Mom figured out how to create her own profile. I find myself now, somewhat pathetically, wondering if I am the embarrassment to Sam that Grandma was to me when she sent that first IM, formatted like a letter, opened and sealed with salutations “Dear Gella” and “Love Grandma.” We are not clumsy, we know what we are doing. But do we know better or not as well as the young’uns now joining our ranks?

I have no answers.