Perhaps the first or most basic question of philosophy is “what is real?” The ancient philosopher Aristotle wrote, “All men by nature desire to know,” and knowing presupposes an object of knowledge… The quest of discovering “what is real” is the subject matter of “metaphysics,” or the study of what makes up reality…
The ancient pagan philosophers gazed upon the cosmos in wonder, asking what “stuff” (or power) constituted or underlay all the particulars of experience. They sought to understand not just what this or that particular thing was, but what everything was, the entire totality of all that exists. They sought the “one” in the “many” things of life, the arche (ἀρχῇ) or “unifying principle” that made the “uni-verse.” They also were puzzled by the phenomena of change: how something change over time and yet still be the same thing?
Jewish metaphysics began well over a thousand years before the ancient Greeks, though it did not arise through speculative reasoning about the nature of the world but by means of an encounter with the personal Creator of Reality, the great “I AM” (i.e., ehyeh: אהיה) who is the Source and origin of all that is real. Unlike ancient Greek cosmology that reduced the ego to a mechanistic process and unlike Hindu pantheistic philosophy that reduced the ego to an illusion, ancient Jewish metaphysics revealed that Personhood is the central feature of Reality itself, and indeed, that the structure of the “I” that constitutes the person is grounded in the Divine “I” that created everything yesh me’ayin, “out of nothing.” Human beings, in other words, are not the result of impersonal or blind processes (whether spiritual as in Hinduism or mechanical, as in naturalism), since the Source of all that exists – and that includes human beings and the structures of consciousness – is a Person who uniquely created and providentially governs all things. The LORD (יהוה) is alone the transcendent and unsurpassed Creator of all things, and there are no other so-called gods besides Him (Deut. 32:39; Isa. 45:21-22). Hear, O Israel, the LORD is our God, the LORD is One” (Deut. 6:4).
Now since the LORD is the personal Creator and sustainer of every soul, He reveals His moral will to creatures made in his image and likeness, first by means of the inner witness of the conscience, but also by means of direct encounter with the Divine Presence as mediated by his authorized prophets, the first of whom was Abraham (and his sons Isaac and Jacob), and then through Moses and the elders of Israel at Sinai after the great Exodus from Egypt. The essence of the message at Sinai was the divine commandment to be righteous and to understand the sacredness of life itself: “You must be holy, for I, the LORD your God am holy” (Lev. 19:2). The meaning of life is to be tzaddik (צדיק), a righteous person who lives in faithful covenant relationship with the one true God and Redeemer over all. The Hebrew prophets reinforced this fundamental idea and were commissioned by God to call the Jewish people back to the covenant relationship they had with the LORD — a covenant likened to that of betrothal and marriage (Isa. 54:5). Faithfulness to the covenant was the predominant duty of the tzaddik – to love the LORD with all all the heart, soul, and strength, as it is to this day…
Hebrew Lesson:
