The Knot at the Root
"The Same Root" argued that yichud, da'at, eros and God form a chain that holds only if each link is a cleaving rather than an identity, and it suggested that God may be the attraction itself. It ended with a test for any longing: whether it can hear an answer it did not write, accept a boundary, and bless what it cannot keep. This sequel takes up the question that the test leaves open, put by a congregant: if God is a connection rather than an object, what does one love? The essay argues that the question assumes love must take a direct object, and that the tradition never supplied one. Maimonides' negative theology denies God the status of an object; the Sifrei asks outright, "I do not know how one loves God," and answers by routing love through words, ways and people. The real danger the objection senses is love of love, which Augustine confessed and Dovber Schneuri diagnosed as ecstasy that watches itself. Against it the essay proposes that a connection is loved as a medium, a bond and an addressee. Three images carry the argument: "with all your heart" read as with both inclinations; "in Your light we see light" (Psalm 36:10), read beside Polanyi's from-to structure of knowing, the neurological body schema and sympathetic resonance in a string; and the Talmud's teaching that what Moses saw of God was the knot of the tefillin (Berakhot 7a). The midrash (Sifrei, Mekhilta, Shir HaShirim Rabbah) and the Hasidic masters (Me'or Einayim, Degel Machaneh Ephraim, Tanya, Rebbe Nachman) supply the textual ground. The liturgy, read with the Nefesh HaChaim, answers "whom do we pray to?" and corrects the thesis: God is addressed in the bond, while the essence remains hidden. Three practices follow, attending through, keeping faith and repair, and are carried into the therapeutic alliance. Love of God, on this account, has a vocative, an instrumental, a comitative and a facing, but no accusative.