“I have never needed God”
Translated by Lisa Katz
I have never needed God
as a personal savior
in my practical life
syllogisms about His existence
were never music to my ears
but always seemed vague
missing a dimension although I didn’t know how to say this.
Neither a philosophical God nor a biblical God
suddenly appears among His creations
amid revelations of wisdom in Jerusalem, His city.
And certainly not in disclosures of pious inner principles
and also not among poets, unfortunately.
Astronomical bodies at night and mystical landscapes in Sharafat for example
and Beit Jala
bear His between-the-lines existence,
His inklings.
The expression of an ultra-Orthodox man’s eyes in Mea She’arim —
this too —
and even the purifying surrender of a sly and seasoned merchant, irreligious now in Geula,
when you reproach him.
Something like “Reprove a wise man and he will love you.”
And you, when you cleanse yourself of anxious constraints about your environment
after taking hash or grass.
Springs of purity whose origins you’re unaware of
bubble in coursing blood, in glands, in milk
and some paradisiacal primeval revelation,
and your almost subconscious innerness
your being suddenly revealed —
Is this clear enough to you, heredity? Genes?
Or existential uniqueness, a maintained infancy that knocks you out with a sense of a refreshing genesis.
Everything becomes clear in a great light.
You shed revulsion and resistance,
a great love germinates within you —
this gloriousness this wonder
comprised of
absolutes of —
objective truth, complete justice, decency
honor internalized
honesty and complex wisdom enhanced down to the last detail.
Ho, complete, divine purity.
Suddenly you polish a syllogism of your own
for decisive proof of His existence:
God is an idea —
ideas don’t have material existence
but they exist nonetheless
so God exists definitively as the spirit of an idea,
the biblical assertion “He has no body and no bodily form”
is clear to me now as an exegesis
that sits well with philosophy.
Translated from the Hebrew
