"The Torah begins with God pre-existing everything else. Though it is not unequivocally clear from the verses, our tradition understands the subsequent creation to be out of nothing, yesh me-ayin. This leads to a paradox: only subjects can act, speak and create – action necessarily implies the presence of a subject. But before creation the concept of a subject is incoherent. The paradox of creation ex nihilo is a way of pointing to a notion of God who is not a subject, to whom we cannot ascribe speech, thoughts, actions, evaluations or emotions. God is transcendent; He is beyond the world and our comprehension, not subject to the categories and constraints through which we make sense of things, outside of time and space. In fact, this is no idea at all. We can literally say and think nothing about Absolute Transcendence; all we can do is point to it as the mystery that lies beyond the scope of our understanding."
Posted on: Sun, 16 Jun 2013 02:57:53 +0000
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