The Torah instructs us to know God, which implies that we surely can know and not just simply believe.
Faith to most people means: “I don’t know for sure; I can’t ever know for sure, but I believe.” This is blind faith, and it is a kind of wishful thinking that, hopefully, there is a God.
But this approach is contrary to Judaism. The Hebrew word used in Jewish literature – emunah – is often mistranslated as “faith.” In fact, this word is actually connected to the word amen which means “true,” and to the word ameen which mean “reliable/trustworthy.” And so, the word emunah actually conveys certainty. And therefore emunah is far from blind faith. Emunah is not about believing that God exists, its’ about knowing God with certainty as a self-evident truth to us. Just as we are sure that we exist, we can reach a surety that God exists.
Emunah – is not faith but certainty. But it’s not a certainty deduced by logic. It’s a certainty that comes from a higher place than logic.
What we know logically can always be disputed by someone smarter than us, which will cause us at least some doubt. But when it comes to God, can we ever arrive at a truth that is beyond a shadow of a doubt? Can we ever have the certainty of knowing something that no clever logical argument can diminish?
The French philosopher, René Descartes, asked this question and responded, “I think, therefore I am.”
What he meant was that the one thing I know for sure is that I know at all. What I know is questionable but that I know is an undeniable given. Knowing that I know is a sure fact. Self-awareness is simply self-evident.
Torah, however, adds that there is another truth that I can know as a self-evident, undeniable given. I not only know that I know but I also know that knowing didn’t start with me and doesn’t end with me. I am not the source of knowing. I didn’t invent self-awareness. Nor did I teach myself how to know myself. I also know that I am not the totality of all self-awareness; the be all and end all of all self-knowing. There are billions of people other than me who are also tapped into the ultimate shared source of self-knowing. Experiencing this self-evident truth is what it means to know God –who is referred in the Kabbalah as the Soul of souls. In other words, God is the One Greater Self whose self-awareness encompasses and includes us all. My self-awareness and your self-awareness are part of one greater self-awareness.
Many people think that God is some all-powerful “guy in the sky.” He is someone somewhere over there, infinitely far away and, therefore, He is forever unknowable.
But, according to Kabbalah, the unified field of self-knowing, self-aware consciousness is who we call God. God is the one universal self whom we are all a part of.
Torah wisdom teaches that God is the knower, the knowing and the known. He is the subject, the verb and the object of all knowing. In other words, there is nothing but God. He is the one and only self, aware of Himself. God is awareness aware of Himself as awareness. We too are self-aware; we are awareness aware of ourselves as awareness. To better understand this lets explore experientially what really is the self. When you close your eyes what do you experience? You experience yourself as a field of pure self-awareness consciousness. You don’t have awareness. You are awareness; awareness aware of awareness. Now focus your awareness on your body, the room you are in and the time passing. Notice that your body, the room and the passing time are not awareness rather they exist within your awareness. Like in a dream. Now realize that there is no way of proving that whatever you are aware of actually exists outside of your awareness – similar to a dream. But if your body, time and space exist within you – and you are awareness – then you actually transcend all the conditions that separates you from me. And therefore in truth, you and I actually share one self. We are all, so to speak, part of one unified field of shared self-awareness.
In other words, when you experience yourself as pure awareness transcending whatever time and space you are aware of, then you experience that the true you is beyond all the factors that separates you from others. When you reach this level of self-awareness, you experience yourself at one with all self-awareness. And that’s called knowing God.
Emunah is knowing God in this self-evident way. Emunah is when you reach a level of self-awareness whereby you are aware of yourself as part of a Greater Self Awareness that you share with all of humanity. God is the one and only self, aware of Himself, and our self-awareness is a part of His self-awareness.
When you are truly self-aware, you experience yourself as part of a flow of a greater self-awareness which doesn’t start or end with you. It becomes self-evident to you that your individual self-knowing is actually an episode in the story of the One Universal Self, knowing Himself. God is the Mastermind of your mind, the Soul of your soul. You and I are a part of Him and our self-awareness is a subset of His.
God is like an ocean of self-awareness and we are like drops of water in that ocean. When we taste a drop of the ocean, we know what the entire ocean tastes like. So, too, when we truly taste the mystery of self-knowing, we get a taste of knowing God.
In the future, we will know that there is nothing but God, and we are part of Him. Indeed, the Prophet Isaiah tells us that in the future “the world will be filled with the knowledge of God like the waters fill the ocean.”
But the ocean is its waters. And that’s the profound point to be understood. In the future we will know that there is nothing but God, the Knower, Knowing and Known (awareness fully aware of awareness) and we are part of Him. Truly knowing ourselves as part of a greater universal self-knowing is how we truly know God as the One Self we share with all others – the Soul of all souls.
When you are truly self-aware, knowing God is self-evident. That’s the true meaning of emunah.
