Thou Art That by David Kudler

Author:David Kudler [David Kudler]
Language: eng
Format: epub

Figure 8. Martin Buber (Israel, c. 1950)

Now, the counter-story to that is the brief but interesting dialogue I had with Martin Buber when he was in New York in 1954. He was lecturing at Columbia and I raised my hand and said, “There’s a word being used here this evening that I don’t understand.”

He said, “What’s the word?”

I said, “God.”

“You don’t understand what God means?” he replied.

I said, “I don’t know what you mean by God. You’ve told us that God has hidden his face, that we are in exile. I’ve just come from India, where people are experiencing God all the time.”

And do you know what Buber said? “Do you mean to compare?” There you have revealed two sides of looking at the idea of God.

If you choose to have a God who is not comparable to any other God, then you must affirm and, as it were, stick with that God. When the God opens to transcendence, so does the believer. When the God closes, so does the believer. But then you may be face to face with something you cannot handle. The best thing one can do with the Bible is to read it spiritually rather than historically. Read the Bible in your own way, and take the message because it says something special to each reader, based on his or her own experience. The gift of God comes in your own terms. God, pure and in Himself, is too much. Carl Jung said, “Religion is a system to defend us against the experience of God.” It may be a species of impudence to think that the way you understand God is the way God is.

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