Parashat Nitzavim opens with a declaration: “You stand this day, all of you, before the Lord your God” (Deuteronomy 29:9). Standing before God is also the foundational experience of the High Holidays that lie ahead. But how does one “stand before” God, who has no body?
Generations of Jewish thinkers, rabbis and philosophers have each, in their own way, grappled with this question. People are visual, physical — making it difficult to conceive of a God who is not.
The Zohar has an unusual take on this question:
Rabbi Judah opened: “Her husband is known in the gates, as he sits among the elders of the land” (Proverbs 31:23). Come and see: The Holy One, Blessed be He, is exalted in his glory, for He is hidden and concealed in the highest heights beyond the world. From the day the world was created, there has been no one who could comprehend His wisdom or stand before Him, because He is hidden and concealed, elevated above all heights. All beings, celestial and terrestrial, cannot cleave to Him, until they all say: “Blessed be the glory of the Lord from His place” (Ezekiel 3:12) … because He is not known, and there is no one who can stand before Him. And yet you say, “Her husband is known in the gates”?! Rather, certainly “Her husband is known in the gates” — this refers to the Holy One, Blessed be He, who becomes known and can be conceived according to what each person conceives in their heart, to the extent that one can conceive by the spirit of wisdom. According to what one conceives in their heart, so is He known in their heart. Therefore, “known in the gates” — in those gates. But to be known as He truly is — there is no one who can cleave to Him or know Him.
Zohar, 2:26a
Explore this passage in context on Sefaria.
Like a classic sermon, this teaching takes a single verse from scripture and cracks it open. This one opens with the well-known verse from Proverbs (31:23): “Her husband is known in the gates, as he sits among the elders of the land.” According to the traditional rabbinic interpretations of this chapter that long predate the Zohar, the husband is God. But Rabbi Judah here wonders how it is possible to “know” the husband, that is, to know God. After all, isn’t God sublime and transcendent? Isn’t God so distant that even the angels, according to the prophet Ezekiel’s vision, thought of God as being elsewhere, hidden and unknowable?
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This puts the Zohar in stark contrast with the great rationalist Jewish thinker Moses Maimonides, who taught that God has no form or shape. He wrote: “… the truth of the matter is that the human mind cannot understand, attain or investigate God’s appearance” (Mishneh Torah, Yesodei Ha’Torah, 1:9). According to Maimonides, there is no way to locate or imagine God.
The Zohar’s response to this unyielding theological stance is surprising. Indeed, says Rabbi Judah, there is no way to describe and imagine God as God truly is, properly and precisely, yet there is still value to trying — to giving ourselves over to imagination, even to fantasy.
The Zohar, in its characteristic way, rereads the verse, interpreting the word “gates” (Hebrew: she’arim), whose simple meaning is physical city gates, according to its linguistic similarity in Hebrew to the word hash’arot, which means conjectures. Thus, “Her husband is known in the gates” comes to mean that God can be known to human beings through conjecture and imagination.
Since each person’s imagination differs from every other’s, he adds that each and every person imagines God according to what they comprehend and according to what they “conceive in their heart.” All perceive God differently, but all of those images and “conjectures” are legitimate. Precisely because God is infinite, the ways in which God can be imagined are infinite.
The Zohar’s innovation is to permit people to imagine God, to conceive in their mind something of God’s form when standing before the divine — provided they know and recognize that what they imagine is not God’s entirety. This does not mean the image is a fiction. There is something true and significant in the way each of us imagines God, even if what we imagine is only a pale reflection of the greater truth. This is an essential theological insight of the Zohar, part of what makes its conception of Jewish religion vibrant, pulsating with life.
Ultimately, it is a pragmatic approach to theology — a compromise with human limitation — that is vital if we are truly to fulfill the goals set forth both in this parashah and in the High Holiday season, of standing before God.
This piece was originally published as part of A Year of Zohar: Kabbalah for Everyone, an original series produced by My Jewish Learning and Sefaria. Sign up for the entire series here.
