Radical Amazement

To see a world in a grain of sand, and Heaven in a Wild Flower

Updated April 2006

In his beautiful book God in Search of Man, Abraham Heschel writes, “[T]he problem of religious philosophy is not how does man arrive at an understanding of God, but rather how can we arrive at an understanding of God.”(p.5)

The shift is subtle, and yet to my mind extremely important, and in truth really does encapsulate, for me, the problem with my own spiritual undertakings. Religious philosophy must be personal. In order for it to have any meaning, in order for it to truly propel us towards the Sacred, it cannot merely be gedankenexperiment dealing with humanity in abstraction. It must be personal, dealing with you and me as individual people, actual individuals upon this mortal coil struggling to know God. It must deal with our daily situations, our foibles, our strengths, etc. Heschel wants to draw God out of the ether, and in order to do so we have to lay claim to our right to seize God. Not merely the right. Not merely man’s right. Our right-yours and mine. His work is about you and me, here and now.

In his discourse on the sense of Mystery, Heschel gives us a quote from the book of Job:
But where shall wisdom be found?
Where s the place of understanding?
Man does not know the way to it;
It is not found in the land of the living.
The deep says, “It is not in me”
The sea says, “It is not with me . . .”
Whence then comes wisdom?
And where is the place of understanding?
It is hidden from the eyes of all living;
And concealed from the birds of the air.
Destruction and Death say:
“We have heard a rumor of it with our ears.”
-Job 28:12-14, 20-22

Curious as to the context of and the rest of the passage, I looked it up. My translation reads:
God understand the way to it
And he alone knows where it dwells,
For he views the ends of the earth
And sees everything under the heavens.
When he established the force of the wind
And measured out the waters,
When he made a decree for the rain
And a path for the thunderstorm,
Then he looked at wisdom and appraised it;
He confirmed it and tested it.
And he said to man,
“The fear of the Lord, that is wisdom, and to shun evil is understanding.”
-Job 28:23-28

I, like many before me, have always had trouble with this idea of fearing God. I cannot believe that I am supposed to think of God as tyrannical or terrifying. But Heschel talks early on in his work about man’s position relative to God, and instead of casting us in a position of traditional fear, he uses another term: “radical amazement”. Not merely awe, not merely inspiration, and certainly not merely fear, radical amazement is the soul-transforming perception of God that overwhelms all the senses, that fills the perceiver with wondrous awe, that propels us to move deeper into the body of God.

“Radical amazement refers to all of reality; not only to what we see, but also the very act of seeing as well as to our own selves, to the selves that see and are amazed at their ability to see.” (p 46)

“What fills us with radical amazement is not the relations in which everything is embedded but the fact that even the minimum of perception is a maximum of enigma. The most incomprehensible fact is the fact that we comprehend at all.” (p. 47)

The passage from Job indicates that we cannot search out an understanding of God here on Earth. Understanding of God does not exist here in any particular place or form (this is, of course, congruent with Kabbalah, wherein understanding, “Binah” is completely transcendent and only her daughters are available to us here in Malkuth). If we are to have any wisdom or understanding of God, we must seek him out not only here but also beyond. We must be open to god in many forms, in may guises, on many levels. God is not in the sea or in the deep or in the land of the living-God pervades these places but is not contained by them. To find God, we must stand alone in our radical amazement, completely devoid of our thinking, interpreting, analytical selves and stand open to the utter sublimity of God. As Emerson writes, “Standing on the bare ground, - my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, - all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.” (Emerson, Nature, Chapter 1.)

In his book Sefer Yetzirah, Aryeh Kaplan mentions that good and evil are considered directions: that which leads towards God is good, and that which leads away from God is evil. Heschel himself writes, “Indifference to the sublime wonder of living is the root of sin.” (p. 43) If we allow ourselves to be forever changed by God’s wonders, by the very miracle of life, if we allow ourselves to experience the indwelling of God each moment as a matter of course, is this process in and of itself a shunning of evil? I wonder, then, if we can interpret this as saying that radical amazement of God is the beginning of wisdom, and the conscious journey towards the presence of God, the good work (tikkun olam, tzedakah, the mitzvoth) that brings us toward the Holy, and the permitting of God’s wonders to affect us is the beginnings of understanding?

Here I can begin to see how I am to make my journey towards God personal and how I can begin to love God and not merely the idea of God. The situations that spur radical amazement will differ for each of us: the birth of a child, a sunrise, a star filled sky, that feeling is deep connection to another being . . . they might all be thresholds beyond which hold the possibility for our radical amazement of God. For my part, I have but to find those moments and surrender myself unto God that he may find me and speak. For God is never absent; it is only I who wander.

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