Old Testament Emptiness

Via Negativa reveals some intriguing analysis and deep thinking about the Old Testament in this recent post (h/t Amba).

This observation especially caught my eye:

Desert or wilderness (tohu) is portrayed as part of a separate order that in some sense (as the tohu-wa-bohu of Genesis 1:2) predates and gives rise to Creation; thus, it is a place of testing and renewal (for Jacob/Israel, David, Elijah, etc.) and an image almost of Emptiness in the Buddhist sense.

The desert of Exodus is a state of being. It is the place where God as partner is revealed: the relationship between this God and the human being is both formalized and foresaken, tested and strengthened.

(As the theologian Arthur Green notes, the first set of tablets is made for Moses by God. Moses sees the orgiastic revelry taking place as he comes down from the mountain, and smashes the tablets. God says, "Hew some tablets like the first ones; I'll write on them." These are the tablets that last, and it is this model of the human-God relationship -- the human being and God as co-creators and co-actors -- that grows and lasts.)

The most Buddhist thing about the desert is its Emptiness, with a capital E: things, relationships, the Jewish people themselves, the actual presence of God, emerge from nothingness, from moment to moment, totally beyond law, custom, reason -- in a realm unto itself.

The desert is a place of internal exile, where sustenance falls from the sky, where God speaks and appears, where strange fire consumes, where laws are born.

It's a state of Becoming. Of Coming to Be.

This is why the desert is a collective enlightenment experience: the Jews peer into the void, and see the Web of Causation at work.

--T.A.

Comments

[Richard Lawrence Cohen]

The few times I've been in the desert, I've understood why monotheism arose in that kind of landscape. Looking at a red hill or butte against a pure blazing blue sky with a morning moon sinking, you can feel the presence of something that made it all and is eternally watching over it.

[amba]

I who do not confine myself within my Jewishness, and have never yet felt compelled to "make Aliyah," adored the desert (in California, Arizona and New Mexico) at first sight, and have sometimes wondered whether there is some collective memory at work there. The following comically chauvinistic dream would suggest there's something to that:

I am in Israel, walking along a flat road in a desert of reddish-yellow sand. I see Ed Koch coming towards me and I give him the radical raised-fist solidarity salute.