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6 More than Immanent F WE ASSERT a strong Absolute, we demean our nonOrthodox appreciation of human religious creativitYi yet, to move to the other extreme, if we substantially weaken our Absolute by equating it with some aspect of human existence, we deny ourselves a firm ground of values. A survey of eight contemporary strategies that Jews have used to reduce God to utter immanence~identified with some aspeet of creation-will show them to be self-defeating and in need of supplementation. Two terminological understandings will help in this enterprise. Any discussion of God's neHrness and availability quickly brings us to word "spirituality;'! which easily brings to mind unctuous and self-righteous souls or! in our of proliferating faiths, gullible and other-worldly types. I use the term in a positive sense, not only because of its currency but because its experiential connotations have a valuabJe therapeutic function. Against all theologies that know only in abstraction and distance, talk of spirituality reminds tIS that religion is more a matter of personal piety than rarified ratiocination. And against a Jewish concentration on observance and the calls for Jewish spirituality renew the classic Jewish instruction that God is close enough to be addressed as "Youll--m the singular- -and is best served in fervent love. I also want to continue the use of the term "God" so as not to let its many troubling associations distract us from our subtle task: to allow into consciousness the two-sidcdness of our of the ground of om its intimate nearness ami its qualitative distinctiveness. We have no metaphor that smoothly signals this duality. The familiarity of religious immanence increases the difficulty of speaking of what beyond immanence yet accompanies it. When we come to this issue in the analysis, I shall employ two terms to end, "otherness" and "transcendence." The former points to the One suHiciently different tram us as to rightly be able to set our standards-~what I have heretofore been calling our weak Absolute-who is also the close-enough-Other to stand in intimate relationship with us. lAs a non-rationalist, I do not find the similar phenomenological language of Emanuel Levinas, the French Jewish directly helpful here.l However, when immanence threatens to dissolve distinctions of worth and I need to 82 6 More than Immanent F WE ASSERT a strong Absolute, we demean our nonOrthodox appreciation of human religious creativitYi yet, to move to the other extreme, if we substantially weaken our Absolute by equating it with some aspect of human existence, we deny ourselves a firm ground of values. A survey of eight contemporary strategies that Jews have used to reduce God to utter immanence~identified with some aspeet of creation-will show them to be self-defeating and in need of supplementation. Two terminological understandings will help in this enterprise. Any discussion of God's neHrness and availability quickly brings us to word "spirituality;'! which easily brings to mind unctuous and self-righteous souls or! in our of proliferating faiths, gullible and other-worldly types. I use the term in a positive sense, not only because of its currency but because its experiential connotations have a valuabJe therapeutic function. Against all theologies that know only in abstraction and distance, talk of spirituality reminds tIS that religion is more a matter of personal piety than rarified ratiocination. And against a Jewish concentration on observance and the calls for Jewish spirituality renew the classic Jewish instruction that God is close enough to be addressed as "Youll--m the singular- -and is best served in fervent love. I also want to continue the use of the term "God" so as not to let its many troubling associations distract us from our subtle task: to allow into consciousness the two-sidcdness of our of the ground of om its intimate nearness ami its qualitative distinctiveness. We have no metaphor that smoothly signals this duality. The familiarity of religious immanence increases the difficulty of speaking of what beyond immanence yet accompanies it. When we come to this issue in the analysis, I shall employ two terms to end, "otherness" and "transcendence." The former points to the One suHiciently different tram us as to rightly be able to set our standards-~what I have heretofore been calling our weak Absolute-who is also the close-enough-Other to stand in intimate relationship with us. lAs a non-rationalist, I do not find the similar phenomenological language of Emanuel Levinas, the...

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