The final line "God is not absent. We just need to find the right time." resonated for me with your final words on this week's Lightning podcast re Heidegger's view that 'being' is independent of our reliance on division of time and space into equal units. This need to withdraw from fixed space and time to make room for being then reminded me of one of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks' commentaries on the deaths of Nadav and Avihu in Leviticus 10. Rabbi Sacks sees this as the outcome of their not practicing the human equivalent of tzimtzum when approaching the holy in time and space. Here's the text from that commentary that seems to fit here:
"During the creation of man, God must do more than create homo sapiens. He must efface Himself (what the Kabbalists called tzimtzum) to create space for human action. No single act more profoundly indicates the love and generosity implicit in creation. [For us,] the holy is that point of time and space in which the Presence of God is encountered by tzimtzum – self-renunciation – ON THE PART OF MANKIND. Just as God makes space for man by an act of self-limitation, so man makes space for God by an act of self-limitation."
By emulating God in our own practice of tzimtzum may we also "find the right time" to encounter the holy, and to make space for miracles.
The final line "God is not absent. We just need to find the right time." resonated for me with your final words on this week's Lightning podcast re Heidegger's view that 'being' is independent of our reliance on division of time and space into equal units. This need to withdraw from fixed space and time to make room for being then reminded me of one of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks' commentaries on the deaths of Nadav and Avihu in Leviticus 10. Rabbi Sacks sees this as the outcome of their not practicing the human equivalent of tzimtzum when approaching the holy in time and space. Here's the text from that commentary that seems to fit here:
"During the creation of man, God must do more than create homo sapiens. He must efface Himself (what the Kabbalists called tzimtzum) to create space for human action. No single act more profoundly indicates the love and generosity implicit in creation. [For us,] the holy is that point of time and space in which the Presence of God is encountered by tzimtzum – self-renunciation – ON THE PART OF MANKIND. Just as God makes space for man by an act of self-limitation, so man makes space for God by an act of self-limitation."
By emulating God in our own practice of tzimtzum may we also "find the right time" to encounter the holy, and to make space for miracles.