My Ineffable Father

I have never really known my father.

My parents divorced when I was an infant, and even when I saw my father regularly, I found him hard to draw close to. Over time, I adjusted, and I can say that I grew to love my father. But when I was ten, at the point when our connection was strongest, my father abruptly disappeared. I knew where he lived, and I knew his phone number. But for reasons that went unexplained, he simply stopped calling.

Soon after I turned sixteen, in a moment of adolescent invincibility, I broke the silence between us and invited my father to dinner. This was to be a showdown in which I would demand to know why my father had vanished. However, when we met, I was reluctant to challenge him. Reunited with my father, I didn’t want to push him away. But I knew that if I failed to confront him, my newly discovered power would mean nothing. As dessert came, with a timorous voice, I asked my question.

My father paused, then started awkwardly as he told me, “Contacting you became too much of a burden on me and my family.”

This was my father’s “Anokhi,” the self-revelation through which he illumined the depth of his absence. My father’s words confronted me with the reality that his abandoning me was a choice, not an unavoidable circumstance. In the aftermath of that shocking and sad moment, I launched my spiritual life, as I began my search for a surrogate source of love and safety.

Amazingly, I avoided the all too predictable teenage paths toward self-destruction. Instead, I discovered vitality in an emerging sense of wonder. Music, art and poetry, the surging of desire, and moments of Jewish living provided me with hopeful experiences of contemplation and joy. In the language of Heschel, I had discovered moments of “mystery.”

It was only much later that I recognized my teenage experiences as containing intimations of the Divine, for, at the time, I was unwilling to identify such experiences of mystery or wonder as partaking of God’s being. Living with my father’s absence had conditioned me to view God’s presence as likewise impossibly remote. But since I couldn’t deny the power of my experiences, I stumbled upon a tentative resolution. I would not countenance any proof of God’s existence as manifest in the world, but I would acknowledge an overarching structure to my life. And so, I committed myself to wrestling with the idea of God, even if I was unsure if God really existed.

Without realizing it, the combination of my spiritual hunger and my father’s abandonment compelled me to wrestle with a classic Jewish paradox: a God who is most “present” in absence. For reasons I cannot explain, I have always been drawn to seeking out the reality of God. But for a Jew, to approach God is to confront the quality of divine ineffability, God’s quality of being known and unknowable at the same time. Every Jewish seeker relives the moment when God declares to Moses, “No human being shall see My face and live!” There is a part of me that will always be drawn to this statement because it is so familiar, my father and God sharing the central attribute of being hidden. But it is also full of promise, for it implies that to yearn for God is to discover the intimacy of divine presence.

In modern literature and philosophy, I found solidarity in the array of thinkers who wrestle with the presence and absence of God. I have looked to the spectrum of thought from Camus to Levinas in order to articulate a ground of ultimate meaning in the face of divine eclipse. In this sense, I am like so many seekers of the last sixty years. But something happened. With increasing distance from my father, my familiar and complacent understanding of God’s absence gave way to yearning. Over time, I tired of seeking knowledge about the divine realm and increasingly desired to be known and embraced by God...