Eros
Imagined continued from last page
Nachman,
the core human movement which gives birth to our spirit is the evolution
(within the same root structure) from adama to adameh. Adamah is ground,
earth, Gaia. Yet it can also be read as adameh, “I will imagine.”
Man emerges from Nature to live what philosopher Joseph Soloveitchik
called “a fantasy-aroused existence.”
Imagination is not a detail of our lives nor merely a methodological
tool. It is the very essence of who we are. We generally regard ourselves
as thinking animals, homo sapiens. Descartes' “I think, therefore
I am” is hardwired into our cultural genes. Yet, biblical myth
offers an alternative understanding of the concept of “humanness.”
The closest Hebrew word to the English “human” or the Latin
“homo” is “adam.” The word “Adam”
derives from the Hebrew root meaning imagination (d'mayon). The
stunning implication is that the human being is not primarily homo
sapien, but what I will call “homo imaginus.”
At the very dawn of human existence, man is described as being created
in the divine image. “Divine image” does not mean a fixed
and idolatrous copy of divinity. God has no fixed form. God is, instead,
the possibility of possibility. Consequently, the human being's
creation in the divine image needs to be understood in two ways. First,
humanity is not so much “made in God's image” as we
are “made in God's imagination, a product of the divine fantasy.”
Second, as human beings we ourselves participate in divine imagination
- homo imaginus.
How different is this understanding from the bleak depression of modern
existential thinking! Our longing for the good is dismissed by Sartre
as a “useless passion.” Human imagining, writes Camus, condemns
us to misery, for it is absurd. We long for goodness, beauty, and
kindness in a world perpetually marred by ugliness, evil, and injustice.
But for the biblical mystic, our erotic imaginings of a world of justice
and peace marks the immanence of God in our lives. Our creative discontent,
that which drives us to imagine an alternative reality, is the image/imagination
of God, of Shechina, beating in our breast. The cosmos is pregnant
with hints that guide our imaginings. We are called to heal the world
in the image of our most beautiful imaginings. The eros of imagination
is the elixir of God running through the universe.
Eros