You CAN get to know God – Rabbi Yehoshua Simons

The Torah says that Hashem has a hand. But isn't this just a metaphor? The Torah also says that Hashem loves us. But how can he have an imperfect human emotion? And what has this got to do with our relationship with him? If we can truly desire, know, and love, so can Hashem, right? This is not the difference between us. In this video series, my goal is to release your mind and soul to be able to freely think about Hashem in the way the Torah talks about him. Now we are really taking off. We're leaving the solar system altogether and heading out into the stars. In the last episode, we reached yet another ceiling. And we lamented, isn't it annoying? Isn't it saddening? Isn't it deeply depressing that no matter how much closer we seem to be able to get to Hashem in our in our learning, we always encounter another ceiling. and it feels like the seesaw is a roller coaster and we can never truly get his feelings all the way up to his very self. Seems like there's a disconnect. That's not true. And in this episode, we're going to show that indeed, not only can we get to be in an intimate relationship with a level of God, even the highest level, but with Hashem himself, and that is the very purpose of what the Balmtov life's mission and teachings were to achieve. So let's pause for a moment and reflect. The Bashimtov recorded in a letter to his brother-in-law that he once ascended [music] into the chamber of the Messiah and asked, "When will you come?" And the Mashiach replied, "When your wellsp springs spread to the outside." Now this is talking about outside the cabalist cave, outside the outside the mind of a rebber and reaching even the non-Jews deep in the jungle. So what teachings are we talking about that have to get this far? What is the Msiah about? That we should serve Hashem with joy that Hashem recreates the world every moment like the famous teachings of the Bashmtov. Is this what really needs to reach the can't be. It can't be. It can't just be that. As beautiful as those ideas are, firstly, they're not revolutionary, and secondly, everybody knows them by now. Are these really the ideas that the Messiah is waiting for to spread to the ends of the earth? It must be something much more mashiahic than that. Surely, surely it's bringing to the bringing Hashem himself. This is the purpose of the Torah. And this is repeated over and over by the students of the best, especially the kabad rabbim who tell us that every word and every letter of the Torah reveals him. So no, we are not back to square one. We are never back to square one. And the middlebi of the school of the bashmtov helps us understand all this. Starting with Simpson by giving us a mushel of our own soul. He gives us a mushel in chapter 13 of the soul's vitality in the body. He explains that the soul is affected by the body, right? It feels the body's pain when the body is injured. But he says explicitly there that the feeling that the soul experiences does not change the soul in its essence and this is what I was trying to explain previously. If we replace the word essence which is hard to understand with something more familiar the word self i.e. We are talking about your very self. Who you actually are at the very very core. You are always you. Who you are, the real deep essententral you is unchanging. No matter what you do, no matter what you feel, experience, you are still who you are. The same person, the same identity, whatever word you want to use, you are you. And that you remains the same even as your experiences come and go. It's very hard to talk about, but we are talking about something so close and personal to everyone. Talking about your very self, who you're referring to when you say I or me that this should be something that you are familiar with. Don't let the philosophical terms confuse you. This is called your essence in philosophy discussed at length in the Mor in Cabala and even in secular philosophy. And as the Rambam says in the essence can express but this does not in any way reflect any change within or of the essence itself. This is true of you as well as Hashem as we shall see. This is the key to putting it all together. When we questions, we need to be clear what is the question? What are we asking? Are we asking what is or we asking who he is? These are two very different types of questions. The what question is a difficult one, maybe even an impossible one. It's the same kind of question as asking what is a person or what is the I that is me. Philosophers have struggled with this for centuries. Concepts like consciousness, qualia, subjectivity, the self, all of these are attempts to describe the same core mystery. And we intuitively realize that it can't be fully grasped because whatever you use to examine it, your intellect, your language, your categories are already expressions, tools that come after the self. You're trying to use part of yourself to analyze the whole of yourself. So the question what is essence becomes inherently paradoxical. But the question of who, who is the one that feels, knows, chooses, loves, that's deeply meaningful and answerable. You can know who you are and you can know who Hashem is because we are both selves, selves, however you say it. We are both real. Our essence is not an idea or category. It is the one who has ideas, the one who relates, who expresses. And so we don't need to get lost in the what of atmouth to understand what matters most. We just need to know just as we have a self that can express without being altered by those expressions, so too with Hashem. This is not just a similarity. This is the mushel and the nima that we were talking about. At this point of the discussion, one might ask about Simsum. It sounds like this implies that Hashem's connection to us is not authentic as Hashem limited himself at this stage. He originally could express himself through infinite spirat, but now he limits himself to 10 that he emanated. Therefore, imagining that he loves us, the sphere of sounds a bit silly. Even if his love is infinite, which is of course true, the sphere of is truly infinite, love itself seems infinitely small and insignificant to him. Not to mention that he loves us and our righteous deeds which are far more insignificant still. So the seam clarifies that a simp is much greater than your typical mushel. Like when a teacher explains a lesson to a student by putting it into a much more simplified version. It's much greater than that. It's infinitely greater than that. In fact, so much so that the braum rightly calls it a homonym. But the seam does clarify that it's not completely different. It's different only in scale far far greater. And still it's a perfect mushroom even if it's an infinite one. Also by the way he and basically all ofus clarifies another misconception. We are not insignificant to him. Even if love is yes love is completely insignificant to him. If he could have us without love he would. Love as a creation so that he could have us because that's what we need. But his need for us is as essential as his own essence is to him. And therefore one can say that he created love in order to have us like I just said rather than the other way around i.e. the famous idea that he created us because he likes to do said it's exactly the opposite. It's exactly the other way around. And this is what I meant earlier when I said that the difference between us and Hashem is not in whether he can feel, will or act. The difference lies in the scale and the distance. His self is infinitely greater than ours. But the structure essence that expresses without change that's not foreign to us is exactly how we work too. And that's why we can relate to him. The difference between us and Hashem is not that we can love and he cannot sham. It's that his love is infinitely more real, more essential, more true than ours because our love is a mushel for his. And so when we learn about the unity of Hashem, that he is one, unchanging, indivisible, this does not mean that he doesn't love or choose or care. It means that all of those things are flowing perfectly from his essence, just as they do from ours, but even more so in an even more unified way and an even more infinite way. The good news is that we don't even need to wrestle with a complex philosophical question of what is utm, what is essence in order to know that Hashem truly loves us. That's not required to understand the basic truth that we're establishing here. We've already seen that his essence just like your own can express without undergoing any change whatsoever. And if that's true, then his love, his care, his presence are completely real and completely consistent with his oneness. This holds true for you, too. Your essence remains unchanged even as you express love, pain, joy, or longing. You're still you after all of that, and he is still him after all of that, too. So understanding the what of essence is certainly a curiosity, let's say, for intellectuals. And this video series is of course here to provide a way to prove Hashem's expressions are real from a rigorous theological standpoint. But for 99% of the Bashto's beloved simple Jews trying to understand Hashem and his Torah, we don't need to understand that question. We just need to know that his expressions like ours are his expressing himself and thus real in the same way that ours are. But again, infinitely more. We can relate to him simply. He is a someone, not a something, a who, not a what. Going back to the theology though, much ofus about focuses on this elusive what asking what it means for something to be beyond description, beyond category, and beyond limitation. And people often make a critical mistake. They hear that Hashem's essence is unknowable and beyond all relation. And they assume, therefore, that this must mean that his love or emotions aren't real, that they're not truly him. But this is not what the teachings are saying. It's a confusion between the indescribability of the what and the reality of the who. Yes, Atsmos is itself beyond being defined, beyond being limited, even beyond being beyond like we said, but that doesn't mean that his expressions are somehow disconnected or inauthentic or untrue. So, let's recap. In this episode, we asked some of the deepest questions of all. What is essence? Who is Hashem? In the next episode, we will find out how essence can actually be revealed through expressions. How we can get to know him through Torah. Stay tuned.