Echad

I am lying next to a woman whose effect on me I cannot measure.  I love this person like I never thought I could love.  It is way later than I am usually up, but I get the day off tomorrow.  I stayed up late watching "man movies" and decompressing from a couple of hard conversations She and I had today, and she went early to rest, preparing for a day she will spend doing God's work with girls who may never know what loving them costs her.  I lie here humbled by the beautiful simplicity of her breathing.  This is holy.

...the Lord tells us in Deuteronomy 6:4 that he is one.  I fall under the spell of his oneness.  In a confused world, only one people ever had the brass to make this claim, that their God is one and is the only one.  I am enchanted by the chutzpah that they showed.  See, among other things, the rise of Judaism from the fertile crescent region is a historical problem.  That a people should have risen, from the morass of nature and ancestor worship that overwhelmed what would one day be Israel, to believe as they did was and is a historical scandal.  Yet the alternative explanations for this rise offered by our best anthropologies are pale and lack any explanatory power for why a people should ever insist, not only that the one God is theirs, but that he had acted uniquely in history by choosing them.  Quite simply the best answer for it is that a being who revealed himself to the Israelites simply as "the one who is" did more or less all that the torah records.  His effect on this people was incalculable.  His choice of them was extraordinary.  The hebrews were a small and disunited people.  There was nothing to commend them to his concern.  So in the face of his choice, any Jew who had sense would be moved to worship.  The sense of his radical freedom and power in choosing the lowly and raising them up has a name in Hebrew:  k'vod.  Glory. 

But his uniqueness and singularity would come to make trouble for the Israelites.  After all, when you disagree with the only God there is, to whom can You go?   That was what sent Saul to the endor witch.  It is hard to have one God.  It is hard to commit what used to belong to oneself (even a plurality of gods offers a consumer's choice!) to someone else.  God's uniqueness makes him so alien and, at times, terrifying.  It is hard to go from not trusting to trusting.  It is hard to forsake all others. 

But doing so means agreeing with the truly real.  I kneel, however reluctantly before the one God and I feel k'vod--the weight that comes with forsaking what isn't and connecting to the one who is. 

It is the weight that descends even in my room right now as I choose oneness with the singularity that is my wife; as I wrestle and struggle and cry out for blessing and stumble from not trusting towards trusting.  And as I kneel before the one God and thank him for each breath I hear entering her lungs.  K'vod.

Location : 902-954 SW 16th Ave, Gainesville, FL 32601,

Posted via Droid

Location : 902-954 SW 16th Ave, Gainesville, FL 32601,

Posted via Droid

Location : 902-954 SW 16th Ave, Gainesville, FL 32601,

Posted via Droid