Weakness, Strength and Time

I will admit to something that many critics say about adherents to religions: I am motivated to believe in G-d because I am weak. Or rather, because I KNOW I am weak. They do not know they are weak, or at least they live like they don't know it. They do not fully embrace the true reality of that.

Man is the measure of all things?

How can anyone not comprehend the full futility of such a thought? And yet this is how people live. Waiting for that inevitable moment, perhaps their last moment, when they understand.

When they understand that they FUCKED UP.

That they were fiddling, not while Rome burned, but while they themselves burned. While Time burned. And now they have run out of time to unfuck it.

You are utterly weak and silly, and you don't know where in the realms of all possible realities you are. Not really. You think you are in control, but you're not.

Knowledge of weakness is actually a strength. One of the best kinds to have.

***

Two powerful dynamics fight within me, but they are not truly fighting. They are building on each other. It only appears to be a battle. One is founded on knowledge of weakness, the other is founded on knowledge of strength.

Knowledge of weakness leads me more and more to depend on the One who is strong, who is guidance. I am not by myself true or pure or perfect or strong, but the One IS.

Faith, not the mere belief in some set of propositions but the complete belief that I am in G-d's hand at all times, this comes from knowledge of weakness. My weakness. My faith is not in a set of position statements. It is faith in the One. Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad. My experience has taught me the abundant benefits of this faith.

If knowledge of weakness is easy to understand, what is knowledge of strength?

To say "strength" is perhaps not the best word. What I am reaching for is absolute severity towards everything in religion that is of human origin. When King Josiah tore down the idols, as it says in the Book of Kings, this was not a statement of his personal strength. This was him embracing absolute severity towards human religion posing as divine. Of course that was easy to identify in the form of polytheisms of various kinds, idols. Of course people rarely have a problem tearing down other people's idols. The strength I am referring to is the strength to challenge your own idols, test them in the fire. Faith is not strong when you just accept what you are told, but when you don't, and you believe in G-d anyway even if you do not believe the human religion you have been given.

What I am trying to get at is, when people first come to faith they often just accept whatever position statements their particular flavor of religion has. They nestle down in the reassurance of that faith, and in that community of faith. I did the same thing in the beginning. When I was a Christian, I felt that the idea that a man was G-d didn't make complete sense, and wasn't even consistent with the Torah, but I set that aside. This was the form of belief that existed in my community. I could not set it aside forever though, thankfully.

People come to faith, whether Christianity Judaism or Islam, and they settle. They come to reconcile their weakness, to find a refuge from their weakness, and far be it from me to say that they don't actually find it. May G-d be merciful to us all.

Having settled, what they don't do is, they don't go pick up a torch and set fire to their own idols. They don't burn away the human trappings of their own faith. To do so is viewed as the opposite of faith, but it actually requires MORE faith. Much more faith.

This I say: G-d alone, and all the rest to the fire. I only want what is absolutely and completely from G-d. 

This is knowledge of strength. The knowledge that you CAN do it without human institutions and crutches, and that indeed you MUST. If you claim to love G-d as much as Deuteronomy says you should, with your whole heart and soul and mind and strength, then you must be willing to walk away from human religion. Your faith must not be in human religion nor human community, but in G-d alone.

This I have learned by faith: that I am led on a narrow road which leaves more and more of this world behind me. Like the symbol of blind justice, I must too be blind to the world and to human sensibilities. He is utterly unlike us, and we too must become unlike us. Human crutches, idols and incense and candles, these appeal to our human nature. God with a human face, this appeals to our nature. Idolatry appeals to human nature. That is a nature we must transcend.

Think on the passage from the Torah that says that even if your own wife or child, your brother or sister, starts following other gods, you yourself must be the first to report them and you yourself must be the one to cast the first stone at their stoning. Ponder that a second, the audacity of that. When Aaron's sons offer unclean incense to G-d and they are consumed by fire from G-d, G-d pointedly tells Aaron you must not cry. You must not cry for them, ever. THAT is transcending human nature. Where you no longer see people, you no longer see your own personal love, where all you see is G-d. You are blind to all but G-d. The audacity of that. The purity of it.

THAT is strength. To almost everyone, that would also be absolutely inhuman. But subtract the sting of violent death from it, and understand its meaning. I have not traveled very far in this strength, but I know it's direction.

Did you think that you would remain the same, with your little human life? That G-d would not transform you? He means to, to transform you into something no human eye could see nor mind comprehend. Who can measure the Children of G-d?

But you have to go all in. I feel I need to, anyway.

Then I, justified, will behold Your face;
awake, I am filled with the vision of You.

~Psalm 17:15

**************Postscript***************

I am also brought to mind that G-d said He was going to kill Ezekiel's wife, and that Ezekiel is forbidden to mourn it. And that this was a symbol of the destruction that was going to come upon all Israel.

For which a lot of normal people, their response to that would be to say that G-d is a huge meanie and that is a reason for disbelieving in a deity that would do and say such things.

Relative to Ezekiel (and Aaron) being forbidden to mourn, Ezekiel and Aaron and a few others were in a position that few human beings have ever been in. They were the interface, the ambassadors, between G-d and humanity. They are agents of G-d. They are in a position where their devotion to G-d must be absolute, where they must see the actions of G-d, even seemingly terrible actions, as absolutely the only course things can take. They are set apart, and that setting-apart has a price. You think being a prophet is all gravy?

Suppose you were the executioner for a great empire. And the next person up on the chopping block is the person you love the most. And it is commanded that you do your duty. You've got conflicting motivations, don't you? The last thing you want to do, is your duty. You would rather fall on your own headsman's axe than do it. And as a human being subservient to a human emperor, you might in fact choose to die rather than obey.

Well G-d is not a human emperor. G-d is G-d. If He commands something, it is because it MUST happen.

G-d says in Deuteronomy that we must love Him with all our heart, soul and strength. Meaning, we love Him way more than any person or thing in existence, or even our own life. Why would G-d command that? Is He just selfish?

No. It may be hard for people to understand what I am saying, but to love a lesser or derivative level of reality more than the source is fundamental ignorance. Is fundamental darkness. G-d created Ezekiel's wife, created everything about her. Any thing lovable about her, was from Him. How should he love her more than Him, especially with him being a prophet and all, and responsible for the teaching of Israel?

Also bear in mind that destruction that comes from G-d is essentially medical in intent. Now lets take Sodom and Gomorrah as examples: how is the destruction of everyone in those cities, as in the case of many cities in Canaan which were utterly destroyed by the Israelites, how is that medical in intent?

Allowing Sodom to continue would mean many generations living in abject darkness, cut off from all true goodness. Innocent children would be born and would continue to be born into a nightmare of sin and evil. Indeed in the story of the Flood, the whole world was exactly like that and all future generations of human beings would have been born into darkest darkness had G-d left them alone. This was not His will, His compassion for future generations compelled Him to destroy that one.

A Navi, a prophet, or a high priest like Aaron, cannot put his own emotions above his duty to G-d. As part of that duty to G-d, he may in fact be called upon to announce destruction.  

That destruction has an important, a corrective purpose, a medical purpose, and the Navi cannot side emotionally with a mankind that has brought that correction upon itself. His loyalty is to G-d alone. He cannot cry at it, any more than the surgeon can cry when the scalpel cuts.

That is a hard saying. But then again, people in the position that Ezekiel and Aaron were in, are an infinitesimally small minority on Earth. For everyone else, cry away.