TEACHER The active metaphor here is that G?d has set lessons all around us, and it’s our job to discover them; imagine everything in the Universe labeled with a great big “LEARN HERE” sticker. No one of us really knows…
Tag: 365 Names Of God
2011’s Big Project, continued in 2018.
365 Names: “Shekhina”
THE SHEKHINA, or “Presence (of G?d),” comes from the Hebrew root meaning “to dwell” (it’s the same root as “mishkan,” the portable desert G?d-tent AKA “Tabernacle”). There’s a seamless distinction between the Presence of G?d and G?d Itself. Tradition teaches…
365 Names (sort of): The Fragility
“THIS IS WHY SOME PEOPLE drink,” I told my friend, provoking him into loud laughter. We were talking about THE FRAGILITY: that immediate realization of the tenuousness of life, and its property of drastically changing in a cold heartbeat through…
365 Names: “The Presence”
THE PRESENCE is a more experiential-than-otherwise Divine descriptor. It attempts to portray the ineffable (nameless/wordless) quality of that-which-some-people-call-God, or what Freud’s friend Romain Rolland termed the “oceanic feeling” of being One with the Universe. It has the advantage of being…
365 Names: G?d
G?D IS MY GO-TO Name for the that-which-some-people-call-God concept. It’s adapted from the traditionalist Jewish spelling “G-d,” with a twist: the “?” denotes Its Greatly Unknowable aspect. There is no way I (or anyone) could reasonably explain or even talk…
365 Names of God: “King Alpha”
KING ALPHA From the 1970 song “Rivers of Babylon” by The Melodians comes this Rastafarian take on Psalms 19 and 137 (but mostly 137). Although the group may intend King Alpha to refer to the Ethiopian king and Rasta hero…
365 Names of God: “Supreme Being”
SUPREME BEING WHENEVER I HEAR this Name, I think of the part played by Sir Ralph Richardson in the 1981 Terry Gilliam film Time Bandits: a dapper, suit-wearing, businesslike, no-nonsense-on-my-watch sort of G?d. The Name may also refer to the…
365 Names of God: “The Light of Eternal Mind”
THE LIGHT OF ETERNAL MIND is how Moses (Charlton Heston) described G?d to Zipporah (Yvonne DeCarlo) and Joshua (John Derek) after seeing the Burning Bush in Cecil B. DeMille’s at-times unintentionally amusing but classic The Ten Commandments. It’s a potent…
365 Names of God: Goddess
GODDESS IS USUALLY THE NAME invoked by people who see the word “God” — and especially Its biblical avatar — as male-gendered and wrathful. “Goddess” is sometimes also characterized as the Nurturer, the Comforter, the Creatrix, the Great Mother; the…
365 Names of God: “The Divine”
THE DIVINE This Name tends to be used in circles where the word “God” might cause people discomfort for one reason or another. I’ve mostly seen it in New Age contexts as a non-anthropomorphic gambit to refer to an intentionless…
365 Names of God: “The Mystery”
THE MYSTERY is what I decided in 2010 to use instead of the word “God,” since it then encapsulated everything-I-knew-I-didn’t-know-about-G?d (including why I spell it with a question mark). It’s just too big, you know? And mysterious. And incomprehensible. And…
365 Names of God: Not-Two
NOT-TWO One of our living-room Torah participants laid this Name on me a while ago. As a fierce non-dualist myself (meaning that I see the Universe as one whole Being rather than an assembly of parts), I instantly took to…