Religious thought rests on two foundations the belief that there exists a dimension of being beyond that which the senses can grasp, and the perceived validity of a sacred tradition that supplies the content and meaning of the relationships that necessarily flow from the existence of this ungraspable dimension.
Jewish religious thought is founded in the existence of One God, creator of heaven and earth, and in the acknowledged eternal validity of a sacred body of tradition, transmitted by divine self-revelation, which teaches man the religious duty demanded of him in expression of his faith that God exists.
In Jewish tradition, the meaning of the sacred rests, in part, on the eternal validity attributed to the divine imperative, as scripture transmits it, but also on a claim to man’s freedom in interpreting that imperative, both its revealed content and its concealed purposes. For, after all, the meaning of the holiness of God and of the eternality of the Torah is found in the very numberlessness of their meanings and in the infinitude of their aspects, and in the impossibility that time and space can delimit their understanding, interpretation, and relevance. To God and His Torah Jewish tradition renders infinitude and eternality, but at no time has it made the assertion that the revealed face of scripture, dealing with our daily conduct in this world of deeds, is identical  or congruent with its holy source. Nor has it ever asserted that, at some point in history, the meaning of tradition or source might be exhausted. On the contrary, the tradition of Judaism has always been that, from epoch to epoch,  the divine words are likely to be interpreted under a new aspect, for the language of the Torah is the language of divine revelation and, as such, reflects layer on layer on layer of meaning.¹ From the beginning, it was assumed that there were many facets to the divine discourse and, in consequence, that behind the obvious literal meaning of the words of scripture (their pshatt) lay hidden meanings that would probably come to light and comprehension at different times in the course of history. A second and inter-connected, assumption was expressed in the words of Isaiah 32:15 "..till a spirit from on high is poured out on us...", in other words, under certain conditions the Divinity may reveal Himself afresh to exceptionally fitted persons, or to the wider public, and in so doing illuminate new meanings held within the pshatt and disclose new lodes of religious experience.

Taking the historical-philological approach to this concept of multiple meaning, we see that no religious  idea-system that has remained operative over a long period of time, having met and coped with a succession of  historical circumstances and ever-changing realities, has ever retained its original power and essence without those circumstances and realities having left their deep mark on it.   There is no point, therefore, in expecting any system of religious thought to show a continuous uniformity and a single face throughout all its historical mutations; nor must it be taken for granted that, at some point in time, its spirit will fail, to remain inert and set from then on. Rather, expecting turning points, expecting changes brought about by junctures of  historical and spiritual movements, one should trace how the system’s  basic perceptions alter over time and what effect those alterations have produced on principle and on detail.

 An extension of this line of approach is that creative religious thought cannot tolerate for any length of time a status quo of no change, cannot rest content with clichés, hackneyed basic concepts, with ideas and images coined at some point in its past. On the contrary, at a juncture of history when all dimensions of existence are in movement, including the immediate cultural environment, religious thought, too, feels the need for new channels of expression and new definitions of purpose and meaning, while yet holding to the broad plain between tradition and innovation.

 Although Jewish religious tradition claimed eternal validity for the divine imperative and fixed the visible forms of worship belonging to this world of deeds in unequivocal detail; although it specified duties and prohibitions, sizes and proportions, time and place, and demanded commitment to Torah and commandments all this in fulfilment of the explicit divine imperative, it nevertheless and notwithstanding, conceded an almost limitless freedom for reflection about the meaning and purpose of worship, about the spiritual context of things, about the  identity of the object of human worship and the nature of the Divinity’s concealed being.

 This liberty to renew and innovate, the acknowledgement by Jewish religious thought that changing times will always provoke new questions of meaning and interpretation, its recognition that exegetical responsa cannot stand still, and that spiritual inspiration and new readings of the texts have their place in understanding the biblical story, all this means that within Jewish tradition there is no one, single approach to the meaning of Torah, just as there is no uniform conceptualisation of godhead nor a single definition of God’s being. Put another way, though the formulae and practices of divine worship remain fixed and sacred, there has come about the freedom to impart new content to its purposes and ideas. By virtue of this acceptance of the ever-shifting, ever-renewing interpretation and context of scripture, each generation has reshaped the image of God in its own spirit, and the content of its religious life has changed accordingly. Another consequence of this freedom to pose new questions on matters of  faith and opinion has been a rich spiritual-religious creativity of  thought and composition.

 Exploring the products of this creativity and the nature of the substantial shifts and permutations in the meaning of divine worship in Jewish thought, we must pay attention not only to the overt effects over time of cultural developments, but also to those layers of experience that, not subject to rational formulation, nonetheless deeply influenced the character of religious thinking. An overview of all the changes that religious creativity passed through reveals, to my eyes, that the essential changes emerged from two preoccupations --- with recasting the image of God and with the reshaping of patterns of worship and textual interpretation, which derived from this new imagination.

 We can capture the phases of this spiritual creativity in the ‘literatures’ (or ‘libraries’) that sprang up to give expression to the new thinking. By ‘literatures’ I mean the changing traditions, new compositions, or new series of books, generated by creative circles at various stages of Jewish cultural history, when, having re-explored the fundamental questions and texts of Judaism and emerged with a new conceptual system and new hermeneutic principles, thinkers were ready to give voice to a new era in the Jewish conceptualisation of God.

 It is in the nature of things that these literatures are not of even importance, quality, scope, and historical significance and there are, of course, huge disparities in their duration and range of influence.  What entitles us to group them under one heading is that, in addition to their new conceptual universe, each announces a significant shift in Jewish thinking, each reflects a phase in the evolution of the Jewish spiritual identity (at the core of which is a reconceptualisation of the Godhead) and each expresses a new perception of the essence of the religious obligation laid on mankind.

I have selected only those literatures whose originality of thinking and creativity give them outstanding importance, I sketch the portrait of each with the brevity and degree of generalisation imposed by the space available to me here. The literatures are presented in chronological order even though the time sequence is barely relevant. As Isaiah Berlin said, “Only seldom are chronological frontiers significant landmarks in the history of ideas.”

Images of God in Jewish Literature
The biblical texts transmit God’s self-revelation to his people --- God the Creator delighting in his creation, the Law-Giver and Issuer of Commandments, the God of history, actively directing the world and intervening in the course of human existence. In contrast, there is also God, remote from His created world  and beyond the comprehension of man. The Bible conceives of God as the supreme exaltation of the moral will. Separate from the world of existence and set far above man and nature, nonetheless, all existence, in all its realisations and forms, is but the multi-faceted expression of Him. The fundamental premise of the biblical books is God’s absolute transcendence: they perceive Him as an absolute unity no other power shares His dominion.

 As for the mutual relations between God and man, it is the Bible’s assumption that they issue from the force of God’s will: He creates man, instructs him in His commandments, guides his steps, listens to what he has to say, watches over him. Over against Him, man has the obligations to God  stemming from the gratitude of created to Creator; he is required to submit to God’s will as conveyed in the Torah and the commandments. His worship of God is confined to the earthly sphere and proceeds from belief in a single God whose place is the celestial sphere, from awe of His exaltedness, but also from the moral duty each individual owes God. Human history is the testing ground for the degree to which God’s will is realised on earth; humanity and its history are the content of His reality and the paramount manifestation of His existence.²

The apocrypha and apocalyptic books were composed between the fourth century B.C.E. and the second century C.E.. Displaying at the one time a remythification of the concept of God and the assumption that revelation is a continuing process, this literature offers its own story of the Creation and a new point of view on the concealed meaning of history.³ Taking on itself the liberty of retelling and re-elucidating the biblical story, and even of retelling the story of the Creation and endowing it with a mythic, angelological character, the apocryphal literature presupposes an unmediated relationship between man and God and lays the foundations for a new metahistorical, determinist approach (the approach affirming that both history and the future have a known,  pre-determined meaning and direction) that ties the genesis of the world directly to the end of days. The apocryphal literature introduces a ‘new edition’ of the divine discourse, proposes alternative sources of authority, such as visions, dreams, and angelic messages, and assumes that man has the capacity to ascend to the heavens, be granted divine revelation, decipher the hidden meanings connecting past, present and future, and return to earth to bear witness to the sights he has seen and the knowledge he has acquired.⁴

The perception of God and the world that we find in the Qumranic literature (associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls sect), which was written down between the late second century/early first century B.C.E. and 68 C.E. is a dualistic one. The ‘spirit of light’ opposes the ‘spirit of darkness’, the ‘Prince of Light’ contends with the ‘Prince of Belial’, the ‘abode of light’ with the ‘source of darkness’; existence is divided between the ‘Sons of Light’ and the ‘Sons of Darkness’; a key role is accorded to the angels and God is depicted over against them.⁵ The product most probably of secessionist priestly circles, this literature devotes many lines to polemic against the contemporary Temple and Temple priesthood. Both occupy a central place in the authors’ religious world and in their expectations of spiritual and cultic developments to come.

The Qumranic works visualise the angels as the counterparts of the priests in the longed-for Temple on earth, as active participants with members of the Sect in prayer and ritual on earth. Members of the Sect are required to maintain strict segregation from the body of the people, for the Sect’s vision of the world is apocalyptic and eschatological (from Gk. eskhatos = last, final; to live in an awareness of things coming to an end, of finality; an understanding that looks back on a history completing itself). their historiosophy (the true meaning of the path of history, the concealed meaning of manifest developments) and cosmology is dualistic, and the presence of angels amongst them demands their meticulous attention to ritual cleanness and uncleanness.

The angels appear to stand for three conceptions. First, for the eternal, metahistorical order of things which is the guarantor of the genesis-end of days nexus and which, in contradistinction to the reality rejected by the Sect, overarches the boundaries of chaotic earth-bound existence. Second, they represent the link to
the cult in the celestial Temple, depicted in contrast to the longed-for Temple on earth, and by virtue of which the angels are called “the priests of the inner Sanctum”. Third, they form a link to the earthly and celestial camps of the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness, who are destined to fight the War of the End of Days.⁶

A second element in Qumranic literature consists in the commentaries on books of the Bible, whose purpose is to disclose the eschatological and dualistic meaning hidden, so the Sect perceived it, beneath the biblical text and revealing God to be an apocalyptic warrior directing the War of ‘the End’. The Sect’s code of conduct, its worldview, its interpretations of Torah all are shaped by the members’ conviction of the imminence of the End of Days.

Halakhic literature (Mishnah and Talmud) the fruit of the deliberations of several schools and generations of sages and written down over the course of the first five centuries C.E. makes its purpose to interpret the scriptural word of God concerning this world, to clarify God’s law, and to adjust it to current needs and circumstances. In this literature the notions of a continuing revelation and of an apocalyptic historiosophy have no place: it sets its face against all sectarian interests. For this reason it unites all its efforts to elucidating the details of worship and cult to be observed by the whole community of Israel on earth, and for this reason it devotes profound study and teaching, halakhic negotiation, and binding adjudications, to the goal of establishing norms and sustaining traditions.⁷

The Hekhalot literature (Hekhalot = heavenly temples), composed in the first centuries following the destruction of the Second Temple [in 70 C.E.], embodies a transcendental, mystical approach, in which the focus of religious life is  heaven rather than earth and its gaze is turned to the upper worlds, the celestial hierarchy, and the image of God. Drawing inspiration and sustenance from the vision of Ezekiel and from the ‘Going into the Orchard’ (the exploration of Paradise in spirit), and addressing itself to men of sublime spirituality, this body of literature proceeds from the premise that divine being has both a formal-visual dimension, Shiur Qomah (the infinite measure of the Divine stature), that can be apprehended by humans and which is linked to the Vision of the Chariot, and also a concealed dimension that is bound to a complicated system of impenetrable ‘names’.⁸ The premise of these beliefs is that under certain conditions, man may ascend to heaven in a mystic vision, gaze on the Hekhalot and the angels at worship, enter into intercourse with them, learn the concealed names and apprehend godhead, acquire celestial knowledge, behold God,and return to bear witness to vision and its interpretation. Scant heed is given to the scriptural texts or to the written tradition; the focus is rather on beholding God and on teaching ‘the measure of His stature’, on learning His many names and penetrating His secrets, and on rehearsing the details of the celestial hierarchy. The profound interest devoted to the angels stems perhaps from their perceived role as divine witnesses, witnesses to the eternal order of things and to the existence of a reality surpassing the bounds of the arbitrary reality on earth, and witnesses to the continuity of the Temple cult in the Hekhalot of heaven, quite unaffected by the destruction of the earthly Temple.⁹

The Jewish philosophical literature of around the turn of the millennium sprang from the belated encounter of Jewish scholars with the great schools which shaped religious thinking in the Middle Ages the Kalam (an Islamic school of philosophy), Aristotelianism, Neoplatonism.¹⁰ The influence of this encounter made itself felt in the centres of Jewish cultural creativity, in historical circumstances of internal and external conflict, which compelled Jews to directly confront, and respond to, new questions. Aristotelianism did not admit of metaphysical experience but only of sense-experience and of criteria drawn from intellectual inquiry and rational understanding. Its confrontation with the Torah worldview, a worldview fed by prophetic revelation, faith, and historical and cultic tradition, generated a rich literature that combined elements of conflict-seeking and truth-seeking, of polemic and criticism, and even attempts at adaptation and adjustment between the  disparate approaches of Torah and of Greek philosophy. One also finds attempts to wrestle in theological terms with questions such as the historical status of Jewry and the conundrum of its continued existence, the validity and verification of revelation, the degree of reliance to be placed on intellect and experience rather than on super-intellectual authority when exploring religious thought.

 In direct contrast to the religious experience of a historical religion animated by the  idea of a self-revealing God, the Neoplatonic idea of divinity is rooted in God's infinite oneness and envisions an unknowable, impersonal infinity. The Aristotelian conceptions of divinity, prophecy and the status of divine commandments was also directly opposed to the way the historical, revelation-based religions understood these ideas, for the Aristotelian philosopher believes in an everlasting God who is the cause of the world, but not by right of willed purposeful creation. For the Aristotelian, the world turns by force of the very nature of God, a God who is nothing but a self-knowing intelligence, who knows nothing of the particulars of earthly reality, who has no will, does not issue commandments or watch over, who neither rewards nor punishes.

 Jewish philosophy attempted to point out ways to reconcile the Torah’s teaching about God with the tenets of non-Jewish philosophy on God’s essential nature. It attempted to reconcile the concept of impersonality, based on oneness,  on absolute incorporeality, on God as an absolute abstraction, with the personal God of revealed religion, in whom there is creation, volition, and providence. The philosophical worldview aspired to remove God from reality and its categories, to see in God an abstract and changeless being, utterly unrelated to existences bound to time and place, to development and change. The oneness of God was deemed to be the oneness of an eternal, constant, lawful regularity. The perfection of God led to the claim that no will or aspiration may be ascribed to Him, since a desire for something, or an aspiration towards something, implies an admission of a shortfall from perfection. The absolute transcendence of the supreme source of reality was established by setting an absolute barrier between the source and its derivations or creations, and by claiming that God surpasses all description or apprehension. Furthermore, God was definable only by what he was not, for man does not possess the categories by which to define the uniqueness, eternality, and oneness of God. At the same time, the acknowledgement that apprehension of God was unattainable developed into a dialectical postulate, or a dialectical means of approaching ever nearer the unattainable. That is, the very understanding that the meaning of God's uniqueness and essence were inapprehensible, the very affirmation of the disparity between human and divine reality and the exhaustive examination of that disparity, was a way of approaching nearer to God.¹¹

 Medieval philosophy conceived of man as an intellectual being, whose supreme purpose was to know the universal, eternal truths, for it was through knowledge that man fulfilled himself. However, man's knowledge of universal and eternal truth was in fact self-knowledge. Man is a microcosm, his being reflects all being, and so his knowledge of being is self-knowledge. Philosophers termed God "the active intelligence", claiming that to mentally apprehend Him is to truly worship Him. True religious apprehension of God comes by virtue of a purified intellectual acknowledgement, not by force of obedience and discipline. The aspiration to perfection of intellect, to attaining  pure apprehension of God by taking distance from immediate experience, the aspiration to universal truth here we have the content of the vita contemplativa, the contemplative life, namely, withdrawal from the world and rejection of corporeality. This was the religious life as philosophers visualised it.

The literature of Kabbalah dates from the end of the twelfth century onward. It postulates a mystical, two-part master-view of God’s existence: one part or aspect, infinite, concealed, incomprehensible essence, the other, defined by name, proportions, and boundaries of reference, and relatively accessible. Together the two aspects, Ein Sof ('infinity') and the 'Ten Sefirot’ (Hebrew sefirah is not connected to ‘sphere’, from the Greek sphaira, but to Heb. sappir (sapphire) and hence ‘radiance’), make up a dynamic unity, that is, they explain divine being as the oneness of an endless flow and as the sum total of processes passing between opposite poles. Composing the divine oneness is a multitude of forces whose status varies both by virtue of the processes/flows within the Divinity and by virtue of human worship. These forces are linked closely to human experience. They divide between 'male and female', ‘upper and lower’, ‘the chariot’ ‘the seven days of building’, ‘the tree of Sefirot', ‘primordial man’ and many other divisions, and the complex interactions between them are described as ‘unifications’ and  ‘copulations’.¹² In the Kabbalistic conceptualisation of the universe, all these forces, in all their manifold classifications and with all their manifold actions, are reflected in the whole of existence, for there is congruence between the 613 parts of the Divine Chariot, the 613 parts of the body, and the 613 commandments. Every action or intention with respect to one part in effect acts on all of them. The origin of the world is in the dynamic of the life of God, and God’s life is connected to the actions taken in this world of ours. Kabbalistic tradition interpreted numerous biblical passages as not referring to the created world but to the concerns of the divine domain and to the action of the Sefirot in the upper worlds. It was even claimed that the grounds for the commandments also point towards the world of the Sefirot and their interaction. Kabbalists attached great importance to the multi-layered quality of scriptural language. It derived from the nature of divine speech, they said, and insisted on the different ways biblical language could be disintegrated and reintegrated to pierce through the pshatt into the depths of words, into their innermost secrets and mysteries.

 Later Kabbalistic writings saw the Divinity as a process within which developments and happenings occur, connected to the various stages of the formation of the upperworlds. These developments bear the names ‘withdrawal’, ‘direct light’ and ‘returning light’, ‘the shattering of the vessels’, ‘restoration’, ‘sparks rising’, and ‘birth of the countenances’, and are perceived as elements in the complex cosmic whole, tying the beginning of form to the end of days.¹³ Great stress was laid on the duality between the existence of the ‘outer shell’ and of holiness. Kabbalah debated the struggle waged between them, both in the upper worlds and in that of man, a struggle whose outcome is decisively influenced by mankind’s worship of God and which itself determines the fate of all being.

 For the fabric of man-God relations Kabbalist thinkers proposed new conceptual categories which attributed unprecedented importance to man’s influence both on divine processes and events in the upper worlds, and on his own fate, which was indirectly affected by what happened in the upper worlds.¹⁴

The Sabbatian literature, composed in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, betokened a spiritual reawakening, this time originating among the Kabbalists of Safed (in Turkish-ruled Palestine). Into the body of traditional messianic ideas the Safed Kabbalists wove mystic notions that made the imminence of the Messiah’s coming closely and mystically dependent on obedience to the commandments and on the fine detail of kavvanah (mystical intention) in prayer. All of existence languishes in exile after the ‘shattering of the vessels’ and the divine sparks are scattered and dispersed, held captive by the ‘shell’. The sparks can, however, be redeemed from captivity by the people of Israel undergoing tikkun, (restoration or restitution), which entailed strict observance of the commandments, kavvanah, prayer, lone vigils and mystical unification, and self-mortification. The prevailing assumption was that the process of tikkun was nearing its end and that the appearance of the Messiah would signal the completion of the process of cosmic redemption taking place in the Divinity.¹⁵ In the seventeenth century such ideas wielded enormous influence and formed the background to the reawakening of messianic yearnings and the emergence of claimants to Messiah-hood. In 1664, in Izmir, Shabtai Tzvi (1626-1676) proclaimed himself Messiah and spoke of the ‘divine secret’ vouchsafed him. In 1665 Nathan of Gaza received a vision revealing Tzvi to be indeed the Messiah. He, Nathan, called for a mass movement of repentance and mystical awakening in order to bring the approaching redemption even nearer; he composed special prayers and sent envoys to Jewish communities to broadcast word of the Coming and the time of the Redemption. All over the Jewish world, Jews responded in a wave of mass enthusiasm, only to be dealt a shattering blow when Tzvi was arrested by the alarmed Turkish authorities and forced to recant in favour of conversion to Islam. Tzvi’s believers then faced the painful choice between either admitting to unfounded expectations and to belief in a false messiah who had renounced his faith, or maintaining loyalty to their messianic faith in the expectation that at some future time the hidden meaning of these events would come to light and their concealed theological justification made apparent. Many chose the second path. They turned the events of Tzvi’s life into a metaphysical biography, found Kabbalistic explanations for his life and personality, and conferred mystical significance on his apostasy, as one element in the continuing messianic mission that was part of the general struggle being fought against the ‘shells’.

 Sabbatian theology drew a distinction between the ‘God of Israel’ and Ein Sof, claiming that the former is the God of the true religion whereas the latter, sunk in the depths of His infinitude, stands opposed to the process of Creation. Nor does creation come under the providence of the First Cause but under that of the God of Israel, who assumed form only after the Withdrawal (tsimtsum). Striving to elucidate the meaning of Tzvi’s apostasy, the Sabbatians found a new interpretation for the Lurian theory of Withdrawal based on the dialectical opposition of two lights, both originating in Ein Sof --- ‘the light which thought can attain’ and ‘the light which thought cannot attain’. The first light was Holiness and the forces contributing to the process of creation. The second light was the ‘shell’ and the forces of destruction opposed to creation. After the Withdrawal, which took place within ‘the light  which thought can attain’, a part remained, described as ‘a great and deep chasm’ under the control of ‘the light which thought cannot attain’, and which became the domain of the demonic worlds of the ‘shells’, whose whole purpose is to destroy every product of ‘the light which thought can attain’. It is the task of the Messiah, whose soul carries sparks of the thought-accessible light, even though his soul is trapped in the domain of the light unattainable by thought, to fight to break through into the domain of ‘the shells’ and illuminate it by virtue of ‘the light which thought can attain’ and thus bring about the restoration (tikkun) of the shells and the fulfilment of redemption. The Messiah’s struggle will differ from that of any other agent, in that whereas all others act through the agency of the commandments of Torah, in the domain of existence created by ‘the light which thought can attain’, he, the Messiah, bound to the ‘light which thought cannot attain’, has never been subjected to the authority of Torah. This conception made it possible to defend all Shabtai Tzvi’s alien acts, even his acceptance of conversion. It gave rise to an extreme dualistic theology.¹⁶

The Hasidic writings of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries took the Kabbalistic inheritance and combined it with a new conceptualisation of God into a comprehensively dialectical worldview. This worldview was intended to bridge the divide between the divine processes depicted in Lurianic Kabbalah, and human consciousness and thought processes.¹⁷ Its starting point was the postulate that within every thing in the world is the animating life-force of God, the very basis of its being. The equal immanence of God in every thing and the never-failing presence of the divine life-force in all dimensions of existence, at all times and in every place, in every deed and in every thought, these became the criteria by which the totality of human experience was evaluated. Corporeal reality is perceived as a garment worn in the light of Ein Sof, or as the visible expression of divine immanence. From this derives a worldview that ascribes to existence a dual nature. At one and the same time reality is perceived as divine essence and physical manifestation, as spiritual inliness and external materiality, as the oneness of God and the multiplicity of material things, as Ayin (nothingness) and as Yesh (substance, being). Reality has two contradictory aspects, each conditional on the other and unified within the other.¹⁸

Hasidic thinking created a multilayered conceptual system that, in one sweep solved the mystery of divine being and human sense apprehension by interpreting both  the processes of divine creation and the processes of human thought  in terms of the one metamorphic conceptual system. Concepts drawn from mystical sources to describe the nature of God, such as ‘abundance’, ‘life force’, ‘greatness and littleness’, Ayin and Yesh, ‘running hither and thither’, ‘withdrawal’, and ‘emanation/expansion’, ‘divine sparks’ and ‘shell’, are applied in Hasidic writings both to the upper worlds and to the world of man and his thoughts and deeds. Concepts, which in Kabbalistic theogony related to endlessly repeating processes taking place in the upper worlds, served Hasidic thinkers as fundamental concepts for understanding the true meaning of reality and were considered to represent endless, metamorphic processes occurring in human and divine thought alike. Godhead is revealed as ‘a unity of opposites’,  ‘abundance and regression’, ‘emanation and withdrawal’, ‘emitting and vanishing’, and always in a state of dynamic movement and chcalled ‘running hither and thither’ which spanned all worlds. Whereas God endlessly overturns his being from Ayin to Yesh and from Yesh to Ayin, Hasidic worship of God requires of man that from Yesh he become Ayin “for the purpose of the creation of the worlds from Ayin to Yesh was so that he might turn back from being Yesh to being Ayin.”¹⁹ Hasidism took the basic concepts of the Kabbalist dialectic, where they were exclusively used to represent the contradictory basic terms existing within the being of God, and applied them also to the domains of human existence in general and to the mystical conduct of the tzaddik (Hasidic charismatic rabbi-leader) in particular. ‘Annihilation of Yesh’, ‘shedding corporeality’, and ‘turning the I to Ayin’ became the building blocks of Hasidic thinking. To expose the visualised duality of being and to turn Yesh to Ayin became the guiding ideal of all worship of the divine. It was the tzaddik who carried this ideal to its fulfilment, who completed the divine circle of opposites, and who turned the divine nothingness of Ayin to corporeal Yesh.²⁰

From the presence of opposite elements within the being of God Hasidism infers that the processes by which form emerged from Ein Sof, processes in which all existence has its origin, were permeated by a dynamic duality. This led Hasidic thinkers to conclude that existence itself is composed of ever-changing opposites. Hasidism places the numberless divine transitions between immateriality and materiality, from Ayin to Yesh and from Yesh to Ayin, at the very core of its system of thought. It makes them the very foundation of its conceptualisation both of God and of reality, of its thinking both about the role of the tzaddik and about man’s worship of God.

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The literatures discussed to this point are not, of course, the entire Jewish library. There is also piyyut and poetry, the writings on Mussar  (moralising tracts), and hanhagot (descriptions of the personal practices of Hasidic masters), not to mention the literature of the Jewish Enlightenment and contemporary Jewish writing. However, my intention has not been to cover the entire product of Jewish religious literary-theological creativity but to highlight how numerous its facets are.

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We see, thus, that from exploration of the image of God has sprung  a whole succession of theoretical postulates concerning the interpretation of reality. The prime agent of theological change and of developments in the form and content of religious worship has been the shifting definition of godhead. The variety of the names and appellations by which the Divinity has been called down the generations, and the multiplicity of the  conceptualisations of man-God relations furnish the clearest evidence that each generation has conceived His nature in its own way, recreated Him in its own religious and spiritual image, and contributed, each generation in its own fashion, to the expansion and reinterpretation of the concept of God that we find in the Bible. The sheer number of enigmatic designations applied by Jews to their God --- 'The measure of the stature’ (Shiur Qomah), ‘God of the spirits’, ‘Master of mysteries’, ‘As it were like us but greater than all’, ‘His countenance is as the image of the soul, as the form of the spirit’; add to these ‘Ten Sefirot of nothingness’, ‘Ayin’, ‘Ein Sof ‘, and ‘Sefirot', ‘Emanation’, ‘Shattering’, ‘Primordial man’, and ‘Countenances’, ‘The whole earth is filled with his glory’, ‘Unity of opposites’, ‘Crown’, ‘Wonder’, ‘Active intelligence’, ‘Direct light’, ‘Returning light’, ‘Light which thought can attain’, ‘Triple bonded in faith’ and many, many others --- this abundance demonstrates that there has never been a single uniform perception of God nor a single image of Him. Each age has reshaped God and godhead in the light of its own awakened spirituality and under the influence of the cultural developments around it. The multiplicity of titles also points to the new questions being asked about the relations of God to man and to the world, and the changing categories in which the image of God and the concept of godhead has been defined. Concepts of revelation, principles of scriptural interpretation, sources of authority --- these too we find in rich variety. Seen in overview, this profusion should convince us just how strong is the creative force in religious thinking. Another lesson to be learnt is the complexity of the interconnections and interrelationships linking Jewish religious thought to mythic, anthropomorphic, apocalyptic, and symbolic idea-systems, as well as to mystical philosophy, not too mention the innumerable influences of historical and cultural setting.

 A change of substance in the conceptualisation of God has often been the result of a shift in the limits of human apprehension. New reaches of apprehension, for example,  might be ascribed to man , enabling him to penetrate further into the totality of God. The validity of mystical inspiration might receive acknowledgement. The significance of the spiritual experiences and divine manifestations happening to, and around, exceptionally gifted individuals, who practised the exploration of the universe via meditation, might be admitted to legitimacy. Little by little such shifts add new dimensions to the prevailing conceptualisation of God and formed a starting point for deeper understanding of the meanings concealed within the sacred tradition. celestial manifestations, mystical inspiration, apocalyptic vision or prophetic apprehension, esoteric tradition or charismatic awakening --- these are what furnish bold thinkers both with the inspiration for their new envisionings of godhead and with their validation. Tradition gave a multitude of names to these forms of inner spiritual experience which discovered new meanings: ‘going into the orchard’, ‘ descending to the chariot’, ‘divine  revelation’, ‘celestial manifestation’, ‘the ascent of the spirit’, ‘revelation of the holy spirit’, hearing ‘the celestial mentors’, hearing ‘the divine voice’, ‘dream manifestation’, ‘employment of the names’, ecstatic ‘exaltation’, ‘shedding corporeality’, and ‘wondering excitement’. All were deemed to be emanations of lovingkindness from above. All conferred the privilege of, and the sanction for, making a rereading of the layers concealed beneath the pshatt, for redefining the nature of God, or to reveal a new truth.

 Frequently, a shift in the conception of God carries with it change to the principles of scriptural interpretation and to the forms of worship deriving from them. Forms of prayer change and even man’s perception of himself. In other words, there is a strong correlation between change in the image of God, change to patterns of worship, and change to man’s self-perception, so that change in the first of them often reflects a change to the latter, and vice versa. When God is perceived as a mythical being or a mythological creator, man is required to retell the myth, shape his life in conformity with the amended myth, and even give cultic expression to it. When God is perceived as legislator and issuer of commandments, religious life will be devoted to realising and obeying His laws and man will be perceived as the recipient of commandments. Should God be perceived as Ayin or as one for whom, in the final analysis, the world does not exist and Yesh and Ayin are equal in his eyes, man aspires to nothingness, to ‘shedding his corporeality’, ‘to make himself equal’, ‘to annihilate his Yesh’. Is God defined as ‘the measure of the stature’ and conceived of as a complex of infinite proportions and incomprehensible names? --- then man will devote his worship to learning the proportions of the divine stature and rehearsing its names. Is it the ‘visible’ nature of God that is emphasised? --- then man will aspire to ‘to see the king in all his beauty’, to gaze on, behold and contemplate the celestial spectacle. Where the word of God is emphasised and God is perceived as maker, issuer of commandments, speaker (of the word), man responds by making and by speech and perceives himself as attentive to the word of God and as obto the meaning of the divine, tradition-transmitted statement. Where celestial existence is conceived of as ‘the chariot’ and as an exalted angelic hierarchy song-extolling God ‘seated in his chariot’, man yearns to ‘descend to the chariot’ or ‘ ascend to the chariot’, to listen to the angels, learn their secrets, and ‘see the king in all his beauty’. If man, however, is offered the cosmic dualism of  ‘the spirit of light’ and ‘the spirit of darkness’ and even an assured dualistic predestination, and God is conceived of  in the nature of an apocalyptic warrior going out at the end of days with the ‘Sons of Light’ to wage war on the ‘Sons of Darkness’, then man too prays to a warrior God, declares war for his own part on the powers of darkness and the prince of Belial, decrees social segregation of the ‘Sons of Light’ from the ‘Sons of Darkness’ in their earthly embodiments, and draws up a precise code of conduct to ensure that this mutual separation is realised. If God is perceived as pure intelligence or as abstract intellect, the purpose of worship is defined as intellectual study, philosophical understanding, and devising intellectual abstractions. Should, on the other hand, God be conceived of as a system of Sefirot, man is called upon to make the Sefirot the core of his thoughts and deeds and the object of his prayers. Should the divine being be viewed as shattered consequent on the ‘shattering of the vessels’ and the scattering of the ‘sparks’, then human worship is viewed as ‘restoration’ and as ‘uplifting the sparks’. And where the Godhead is depicted in the image of  the exiled shekhinah, man is called on to identify with the ‘exile of the shekhinah’, and to ‘go into exile’, sharing its exiled state, and also ‘to redeem it from its captivity’, ‘to raise it from its exile among the shells’, and to contribute to its redemption.

 Thus, from exploration of the image of God has sprung  a whole succession of theoretical postulates regarding the interpretation of reality. The redefinitions of the nature of God have both reflected and generated changes to religious worship and to the way mankind is perceived. Each such development opens the door to an ongoing dialogue between, on the one hand, historical revelation, the traditional texts, and the prevalent conceptualisation of God and, on the other hand, renewed, continuing revelation, redefinition of godhead, and reinterpretation of the written word. The interaction between, on one side, norm, law and current ritual practice, and, on the other side, the new meaning imputed to norms in the light of the latest revelation, together with the historiosophical or mystical interpretation of the law and the new purposes of the ritual --- these are what have moulded the character of Jewish religious creativity. Meditation on the image of God has been an activity as far-reaching as the reach of the meditator’s imagination and inspiration, for the ascent from contemplation of the concrete world to the realms of the imagination has been also in part a search for consolation and explanation, an expression of  the expectation that there are other dimensions to existence, an expression of the hope for change. The creators of religious thought have wanted to break out of the concrete world, to burst through the unidimensionality of human experience, and to attain the world that lay beyond the limitations of time and place. A succession of attempts to depict the nature of God, to perceive the abstract behind the concrete, to burst the limits of language, to decipher the hidden depths beneath the pshatt, to contemplate the reaches of eternity beyond time, to grasp the concealed lawfulness of visible reality, this is what we should see in the multiplicity of meanings ascribed to the concept of God and in the resulting reinspirations of the forms of human worship.