The general way people understand God is that there’s existence, and then there’s God in existence. Within that existence God has created little you and me. And so here we are in existence, standing alongside Almighty God. With that picture before our eyes, we cannot help but feeling very small, insignificant, threatened. Everything—all creation and we along with it—looks so puny and petty compared to God. That’s why many shirk away from that God and deny His existence. They simply cannot deal with the comparison, with feeling like nothing next to God. They then ask, “Do we have to surrender to God, and just religiously accept the ideology that we are nothing?” Certain religious paths would answer, “Yes, we are nothing, and this world is nothing. And that is the highest realization to strive for—personal annihilation.”
However, for those who are not willing to believe that we are nothing, the alternative approach is the flip side of the coin—God is nothing—because in order to believe in myself I can’t believe in God.
Imagining a God in existence either leads to a philosophy of absolute surrender, total effacement of the human being and life in this world, or—for those not willing to accept that—it leads to atheism. By the way, the atheist, by denying God, is actually partly right—in existence there is no God.
Torah teaches that God is not in existence but rather God is existence and beyond. We do not exist alongside God, we exist within Him; we are aspects of Him. He is the context of our lives, the source of all being, the soul of our souls. When we experience the mystery and miracle of existing at all we get a taste of God.
