In a world where selling is everything, who is the best? The one who can sell ice to Eskimos, or the one who can sell nothing to everybody? A tribute to the patriarch… of marketing.
In the marketing hall of fame, there is one name that is conspicuously absent. Maybe it’s because Madison Avenue wasn’t around in his day. Or maybe it’s because everybody is so busy fighting over the product, they never give a second thought to the genius that brought it to market in the first place.
Whatever the reason, it’s time for hats off (or hats on, as the case may be) to Abraham. That’s right. The biblical patriarch, Abraham.
True, he had a great product, ethical monotheism. True there was no competition in his niche, only cheap knock-offs (idols). But when you get right down to it, is there any way to launch a ‘product’ like this?
To market successfully, first you have to understand the ‘product’ itself. Does anyone understand G-d? Strike one. Next you have to be able to describe the features so you can determine the advantages and benefits of your ‘product’. Does G-d have any features? Strike two. Next is packaging. Does it fit in a box? Do we have a nice photo? Obviously not.
But somehow he pulled it off. The proof is that of the 6.5 billion plus people on the planet, about half claim their faith to be that of Abraham. They have bought in. Let’s zoom in for a closer look at the issues in context. 
About 3800 years ago, Abraham Inc.’s engineering department in Mesopotamia (ie, his mind), after a number of decades in development, patented a prototype. It was a working model, a concept of reality. There’s one G-d. That’s the only true reality and everything else is dependent on it.
So what is this Being like? G-d is not bound by time, space, matter, energy, form, substance, structure, process, action or reaction. Hmmm. It wasn’t born, it doesn’t die, it’s neither here nor there, not big or small, isn’t made of anything, can’t be seen, smelled, heard or felt. You can’t eat it, ride it, wear it or put it over your head to block the sun, wind and rain.
 Even the things you "can" say about Him, don’t quite apply. He is infinitely good, kind, wise, and just. But His goodness, kindness, wisdom and justice are unfathomable, that is, not comprehensible to our finite minds. Maybe we can just call Him the Creator but, in essence, He is way beyond that, too. Ultimately being the Creator is small change for a Being before whom galaxies and grains of sand are equally miniscule.
So let’s give up for now on understanding the ‘product’ and move on to marketing. I guess we need to come up with a slogan. How about “It’s the real thing”? Well that won’t work because the Creator is not a thing, although He is real. Why not “You’re in good hands with…”? That won’t work because being non-physical, He doesn’t have hands, although He does take care.
Abraham, purist that he was, would not dilute the message in order to sell his concept, although some of his followers down the road did. One “Abrahamic” religion tried to turn G-d into a person. That wasn’t so Abrahamic. After all, the patriarch himself was ready to be burned to death rather than accept that one born of woman is G-d. Another “Abrahamic” religion advocates forced conversion. Abraham’s style was quite the opposite. He sought to educate rather than indoctrinate the public, reaching out to pagans using dialogue and hospitality to influence society.[1]
The purity of Abraham’s message was a selling point, but at the same time, a sour point as well. G-d is a Creator and He is not a Creator; He exists but is not a thing; is a no thing but not a nothing; is here but not spatial; is now but not temporal, etc., etc. The paradoxical nature of extreme divinity cannot be rationalized away. The eastern mystics have adopted the paradoxical, but denied the material, espousing asceticism and transcendence as the best man can achieve. But their way diverges from Abraham’s as well, for that patriarch’s path was to do goodness and kindness in the "material" world, and thereby achieve a yet loftier goal of making the world a dwelling place for G-d.
 With the advent of quantum physics some 80 years ago, a new era was launched in science. Paradigms started shifting and it’s taken until now to penetrate the popular mind through new technologies, arts and media. Today’s science is all about consciousness and connectedness. Physics sees the ultimate ground of reality as an indivisible wholeness without parts that interacts with individual observers at a conscious level, allowing the cosmos and all its phenomena to emerge from a potential to an actual state.
Over the decades, many scientists turned to eastern mysticism for cognitive tools to deal with the fundamental paradoxes of reality. Perhaps if they would have had access to Chassidic philosophy, a modern expression of Abraham’s message in its purity, they would have been better served. Over the years many great physicists, from Isaac Newton[2] to John Wheeler[3] , have turned to Torah sources for deep answers to existential questions.
The re-enchantment of science is not vacuous or spurious. It is a necessary step in the evolution of our understanding of nature as we progress beyond the strictly materialistic and rational paradigms that ironically brought us to these new margins of reality. Moreover, as the cosmological anthropic principle becomes more firmly entrenched in the science, we will need to look more deeply into why we are here.[4] For science will only be able to tell us "that" we are necessary to nature and its laws and "how" that is so.[5] As to *why* humans are integral to the cosmos as a whole, science must remain necessarily silent, as we turn to other ways of knowing for the ultimate answers.
Oddly, that other way of knowing is not so far removed from the foundations of science, since it is the one and the same Abraham Principle[6] that underlies both the causal reasoning of science on the one hand, and the recognition of an unknowable ultimate Being, on the other.
[1] "Maamar" of the previous Rebbe, "Vayita Eishel" (5701 - 1940)
[2] See for example this recent discovery of a letter of Newton’s calculating the end of days based on the Book of Daniel.
[3] For details, see my correspondence with Prof. Wheeler on Chabad.org.
[4] See this interesting article by Craig Feinstein in the July 2007 issue of Progress in Physics and on his blog.
[5] See my article Why Ask Why?
[6] See this article on Chabad.org or better yet, follow the sequence of articles in order on this topic by clicking the Abraham Principle link on the left navigation.
|
