Judaism - together with other religions - has a basic message : an invention or rather a discovery, that is obscured mostly even for the average religious Jews. Namely the equation between God and Being, Reality. (See later in Aristotle (VIth century) : "Judgment is knowledge united to existence: the verb "is" contains it." or in the XIIIth century in the work of Thomas of Aquino: "Unum convertitur in esse" - "The One can be substituted by Being") In Hebrew it is a form of the verb "to be" , spelled "yehoweh" - that hints to an entity lording every existing being, creating, making, constructing them as a personified Higher Power. This word (or Word - or Name) is a causative continous adverbial form, that could be rendered literally as "Existentiator". "Haya", "howe" and "yihye" are the past, the present, and the future form of the verb "to be", and "yehoweh" thus simply means "make-be-er", "making-to-be"., or existentiator (with another word Creator or Maker, correctly translated but with another stem.)
Why is it important that the Jewish god is Being itself? Because it transcends the thousand year old philosophical dispute on the "existence of god" (since existence is included inherently in the "god"-word in this concept.) They (the "knowers of this reality-G-d",) do not say that "G-d has wanted us to give almonds to the poor". They say instead that the Existentiator wants us - as the one that brings Charity into existence - to be charitable. So it is more self-evident that someone, wishing a change in reality, turns to the Lord of Existence, than to turn to an entity whose name is not containing its essence (like the word "god" that is not denoting anything outside cultural constructs, as Carnap has pointed out not so long ago.) The Name of the Father is hinting at the secret of "becoming" or changing or "becoming other". I repeat, because it is important :
If I say, that "god wants me to do this or that", then I have to disregard the subconscious doubts pertaining to the question as to what is the inherent relation of my deeds or decisions or will and of the entity designed by the word "g-o-d". But if I say, that the Existentiator (the Maker) "says" that I should "be" such and such or I should make this or that - than the relation is clear: even my characteristics are in the hands of this Creative Entity, consequently (even though there is no warrant, that my wish will be fullfilled and I will be always charitable when I should, since this would be a grandiose - e.g. immoral - demand anyway) the statement itself is not illegitim: the Lord of Being tells me to construct "Reminder Symbols" like for instance the Shabbat (that word means "sitting" or "resting" in Hebrew, the opposite of creating, making-to-be.)
The Existentiator Yehoweh is a causative verb aiming to express precisely that instance, that philosophers and theologians (discussing creation "ex nihilo") try to express when they refer to "dialectical processes" or " experience" or even "nature" or "genetic" or "construct" or "real" or "existential" etc. in their different - inventive - systems as the essence balancing between Being and Nought (No-thing). Why is it that these concepts (Being, Echo-reflexion - Symbol, Sign) are not only central to most philosophical system, but also in many different religion : (like the Far-Eastern Khmers' and the Indonesian Bataks' "Creator" - Boo Nungpo-nungthai and Mula-Djadi respectively - or Greeks' Demiourgos, or the South-African Ibos' creator, Tshinekeh, and their 22 Gla-Gla signs or the Finno-Ugrian Shamans "warming, echoing oscillations" or the Viking creative myth on the echoer rainbow, or the Chinese Tao's echoing mirroring lake as serenity's symbol etc.) ? Who among the followers of all these conceptual and symbolic traditions would be interested in acknowleding the importance of the parallel concepts of Judaism?
The Being (or Nothing and Knowledge/Symbol/Sign and Ego and Self ) as "unconsciously godly "funding words of philosophy. God has the name of Nothing in the writings of Basilios, Valentinos, Justinos, Plotionos, Pseudo-Dyonysios, Anselmus, Gregory of Nusa, and in those of last century's Nachman Krochmal, Schleiermacher and since Sartre at many other writers. It has the name Existence in the Middle Ages in the books of Al-Kindi, Al-Farabi, Al-Sidjustani, Al-Ghasali, Ibn Roshd-Averroes, at Duns Scotus, and Mulla Sadra. Many times God is identified with Self (Me) - as in the teaching of the Vedantic Atmanism, or in the writings of Montanos, Augustinus, Thomas of Aquino, Ibn Mansur, the last-century Samuel Hirsch - or with Conscience, Reason (Origenes, Augustinus, Ibn-Sinna-Avicenna, Al-Ghasali, Yahya Suhravardi and Eighteenth century's Baal Shem Tov and Nineteenth-century's Keats and their modern descendants), sometimes it is equated with Language and writing itself (like in the case of the Logos of Arios, or Abu-Bakr and his "kalam"'s "door-of-symbols" or Abulafia"s tseroof, an anarchic letter-association therapy, or the Sign-like Netherworld of Ahmed Sirhindri - all this shows (mentioning just names taken from a regular philosophical history book) that Being (Existence) is central in philosophy. This concept of Being has become central again after the Ancients (Parmenides, Aristotle) and after the Middle Ages (Th. of Aquino and Master Eckhardt) when, at the hands of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Sprengler and Jaspers, Husserl and Heidegger (up until today's Derrida) slowly the Enlightenment and the technical civilizations' thinking has basically put in doubt the tenets of Christianity (with its unknown Jewish sources) and the "talking of God" has become obsolete and impossible.
About the author: Uri Kozmos is the pen name of George Uri Kozma (b.1954), a Hungarian cartoonist-interpreter-writer.
images not loading? | error messages? | broken links? | suggestions? | criticism?