The Essence

Religion has nothing to do with the Existence of G-d; and G-d has nothing to do with the Existence of Religion

To begin with, since the human mind cannot grasp even a rudimentary understanding of the Divine, the G-d concept cannot be anything but metaphoric. Thus, when we say the “Hand of G-d” for example, we are speaking about Divine intervention.

What’s more, atheists like Dawkins scoff at the term “Essence of G-d” and say they don’t get it; but that’s okay because no one else does either. Rabbi Sholom Lipskar, a well-known Torah scholar and Jewish leader in South Florida, explains that the affable name of G-d as given in the Bible representing His “essence” means “infinite light”. Additionally, since G-d has chosen to reveal certain things about His existence in relation to creation, there are certain inferences that we can draw regarding our smallness, the nature of our relationship with Him and the character of Scripture.

First of all, we need to put our limited knowledge of G-d in perspective. This is very difficult for the die hard atheists because they are convinced that there is nothing greater than they are with respect to Intellectual supremacy. However, think for a moment about the difference in intelligence between the host human and the clusters of bacteria that live on the skin and in the bowels. The social distance is so great that we have no concern for the life paths of these organisms. In making a comparison, the intellectual gap between the Almighty and us is infinitely greater. Moreover, human beings and the microbes are both finite limited beings, so that in the presence of the infinite light, there is no difference between them. Yet He is totally involved in our lives with love and caring much more so than the bacteria, which exist solely as an adjunct to sustain human life.

Secondly, when it comes to any subject matter, the opinion of an ignoramus means nothing. What we know about our Creator is exactly what He revealed in scripture (Torah). To be sure, there are those who say that the Torah is the culmination of Jewish cultural mythology or folk lore, but as we go further we shall see that no human mind could have conceived it because it is unlimited. The information contained in the biblical text and the recording of the oral law in the Talmud is so vast that even the most able scholar could not master all of it in a thousand lifetimes.

Yet there are scientific investigators like Dawkins who claim to have reached the “inescapable” conclusion that all of the knowledge expounded upon and passed down from generation to generation for three thousand five hundred years is false and that all of the greatest minds that ever lived were immersed in wasteful psychotic delusion. When it comes to credibility, certainly such eminent scientists would have to agree that the opinion of someone who has spent a lifetime of learning and evaluating a subject with an inquisitive mind is greatly more reliable than that of a person with a little knowledge and a lot of ego.