„A thirst for the living God.”

A thirst for the living God.

***

It is impossible to find a well-founded standing for the spirit except in the divine air. Knowledge, feeling, imagination, and will, and their inner and outer movements, all require of human beings that they be divine specifically. Then they will find their fullness, their balanced relation that sets the mind at rest. If a person seeks for himself even a little less than this greatness, he is immediately tossed like a ship storm-tossed at sea; raging waves opposing one another will always deprive him of rest; from wave to wave he is thrown and knows no peace. If he is able to sink into some thick mire of coarseness of spirit and grossness of feeling, he may succeed in dimming the light of his life for some period of time, until within himself he imagines that he has already found rest. But the days will not be long; the spirit will break free of its confines, and the slingshot madness will begin its work with full force.

Our place of rest is only in God!

But God is above all the existence from which any feeling or idea could enter within us from Him, and all that is above every feeling and idea within us is, in relation to us, nothingness and void, and in nothingness and void the mind cannot rest. Therefore, for the most part, one finds Torah scholars who seek God weary and exhausted in spirit. When the soul yearns for the most luminous light, it is not content with that light found from righteousness even in the best of deeds, nor with that light found from truth even in the clearest of studies, nor with beauty even in the most glorious of visions; then the world becomes loathsome in its eyes: it so expands within itself that the entire world, with all its physicality and spirituality together, with all its material and spiritual revelations, seems to it a distressful house, and its air becomes a suffocation to it. They seek what is above their strength, what is, in relation to them, nothingness; and conversely there is no capacity, even in the will, to will nothingness into being. Therefore the power of will and all the strength of life at times weakens in people whose inner aim is the seeking of God.

One must show the way of how one enters the palace, through the gate. The gate is the divinity revealed in the world, in the world in all its beauty and glory, in every spirit and soul, in every living thing and creeping thing, in every plant and flower, in every nation and kingdom, in the sea and its waves, in the canopies of the sky and the splendor of the luminaries, in the talents of every conversation, in the ideas of every writer, in the imaginings of every poet, in the reflections of every thinker, in the feeling of every one who feels, and in the storm of might of every hero.

The supreme divinity, which we long to reach, to be absorbed within it, to be gathered to its light, and which we are unable to attain to this measure of the fulfillment of our longing, itself descends for our sake into the world and within it, and we find it and take delight in its love, finding calm and peace in its rest. And at intervals it visits us with a supreme flash from the radiance of above, from a supreme light beyond all idea and thought. The heavens are opened, and we see visions of God, but we know that this is a temporary state for us; the flash will pass, and we descend to dwell not within the sanctuary, but in the courts of the Lord.

And when the demand for light comes to the highest point, then it begins to draw a great abundance of light from the concealed luminary that is within it, deep within, and from its innermost depth it is revealed to it that everything draws light from the most supreme source, and that all the worlds and all that is in them are nothing but revelations that appear to us as a kind of particular sparks from the revelation of the supreme light, but which in themselves are all one unit, one revelation, in which is included all the beauty, all the light, all the truth, and all the good. These revelations proceed in their course and are elevated, becoming ever more prominent to the eyes of all, that they are in truth revelations of the all-good. And the abundance that streams in the all-good, which lifts the root of the soul to its heights, which diminishes in its eyes the material and spiritual world with all its majesty and glory, that very abundance renews for it all the worlds, and all creatures put on a new form, and every sight of life arouses joy and salvation, and every good deed gladdens the heart, and every study broadens the mind. The narrow straits of all these do not press upon the breadth of the soul, which immediately observes, and sees that all those small sparks are ever elevated, ever gathering and bound together in the bundle of full life.