Fundamental Principles of reality | Part Three

Fundamental Principles of reality | Part Three

“The Way of G-d”Part 1: “The Fundamental Principles of Reality”

Part 1: “The Fundamental Principles of Reality”

Ch. 1: “The Creator”
Paragraph 5

By Rabbi Yaakov Feldman

Next is that G-d’s being is “simple” 1. That’s to say that while we and everything else around us are a mélange of many distinct and dependent capacities and elements, G-d isn’t. His being is a single pure and indivisible reality 2.

He’s certainly depicted as exhibiting many separate mental, personal, and supernal traits and capacities — after all He’s said to have a will of His own, to be wise, capable, and perfect, among other things — but still and all His own being is singular, pure and indivisibly simple 3. In other words, He’s simply G-d, but He expresses His being in many ways.

It’s just that we need to use such terminology when we refer to Him 4. In fact, how could we not describe Him in such terms? To say that He has none of those traits would seem to deny His omnipotence and would disparage Him in our eyes.

The point is that in His essence He’s inexplicably pure and indivisible; we just can’t fathom that since it’s so out of our experience which is space-, time-, and material-bound 5. In fact, Ramchal warns never to “draw an analogy between what we see in created beings and G-d’s own being, as the two are wholly disparate and we can’t assess one from the other”. Can there be any two things more polar opposite than Creator and created being?

His being “simple” in essence is another one of those things that we need to depend on the Tradition to know 6. We can, though, rely on certain logical deductions to bolster our faith in the fact that there’s a creative, purposeful Being above the laws of nature, who is without lacks, imperfections, multiplicity, and relativity. As otherwise nothing else subject to those less than perfect traits could come about or continue to exist.