“I have never needed God”

I have never needed God

as a personal savior

in my practical life

syllogisms about His existence

were never music to my ears

but always seemed vague

missing a dimension although I didn’t know how to say this.

Neither a philosophical God nor a biblical God

suddenly appears among His creations

amid revelations of wisdom in Jerusalem, His city.

And certainly not in disclosures of pious inner principles

and also not among poets, unfortunately.

Astronomical bodies at night and mystical landscapes in Sharafat for example

and Beit Jala

bear His between-the-lines existence,

His inklings.

The expression of an ultra-Orthodox man’s eyes in Mea She’arim — 

this too — 

and even the purifying surrender of a sly and seasoned merchant, irreligious now in Geula,

when you reproach him.

Something like “Reprove a wise man and he will love you.”

And you, when you cleanse yourself of anxious constraints about your environment

after taking hash or grass.

Springs of purity whose origins you’re unaware of

bubble in coursing blood, in glands, in milk

and some paradisiacal primeval revelation,

and your almost subconscious innerness

your being suddenly revealed — 

Is this clear enough to you, heredity? Genes?

Or existential uniqueness, a maintained infancy that knocks you out with a sense of a refreshing genesis.

Everything becomes clear in a great light.

You shed revulsion and resistance,

a great love germinates within you — 

this gloriousness this wonder

comprised of

absolutes of — 

objective truth, complete justice, decency

honor internalized

honesty and complex wisdom enhanced down to the last detail.

Ho, complete, divine purity.

Suddenly you polish a syllogism of your own

for decisive proof of His existence:

God is an idea — 

ideas don’t have material existence

but they exist nonetheless

so God exists definitively as the spirit of an idea,

the biblical assertion “He has no body and no bodily form”

is clear to me now as an exegesis

that sits well with philosophy.