Becoming Lord of Matter By Submitting to Matter
Yahweh as Life-Force, & the Covenant as a Cast on a Broken Soul
If Yahweh is equated with life force and vitality—irrepressible, protean, unbound by rationality, hesitancy, or need for consistency—then the Blessing Jacob strives for throughout Genesis corresponds simply with more life force. Life force is given to those who have enough to strive for more.
Jacob had enough life force to know he wanted more, needed more, didn’t have nearly enough. Compared to poor Esau, the simple man, who has so little life force that he traded his birthright (= life) for a bowl of soup.
To those that have, will be given; from those that don’t have, will be taken even the little that they have.
The correlation is drawn throughout Genesis (and also in Job?) between life force, luck (blessedness), and adversity as a kind of implicit (hidden) continuum. Needless to say, when you have lots of adversity, you need luck; but the reverse is less easily seen: if you want luck, you need adversity.
Joseph is born lucky as a charismatic dreamer. Yahweh is with him, which is presumably why he never calls on Yahweh. Yet his very blessedness (being his father Jacob’s favorite) causes resentment from his brothers, and so misfortune follows him (he is sold into Egyptian slavery; his charisma also causes Potiphar’s wife to try and seduce him, and to frame him when she fails).
Each misfortune that befalls Joseph leads to greater fortune, and this is the proof of his life force. The “art” (really instinctive grace) of the dreamer (charismatic) is to turn bad luck into good. Adversity is opportunity for growth.
Real luck has nothing to do with having only good things happen to you, for where’s the opportunity in that? Yahweh, the life force, seeks only to expand and increase, to be fruitful and multiply. The very force of expansion both creates its own adversity (resistance) and (if persistent enough, as Jacob is) is miraculously increased by it. It is like a flame that burns brighter in the wind, having sufficient power to steal the oxygen from the wind.
The biblical framing of Yahweh as moral, holy, just, righteous, law-giving, may all be attributable to the overlays of redaction, reformation, canonization that came after the original accounts. (Even the Tanakh or Old Testament only came to exist a couple of centuries after Christ.) If so, these overlays only added confusion to the mix, by insisting on exactly the sort of frame (is there any other kind?) that irrepressible life force aspiring towards the infinite cannot—will not—be contained by.
The result was a Yahweh (or a Jacob, in His image) that dares those who try to know Him (just as He dares Job, having been dared by his own doubting thought, in the form of Satan) to continue to expect righteousness or justice, despite His constant demonstrations of the opposite: unruliness, irascibility, and an almost (or not almost, absolutely) childish lack of inhibition or moral (i.e. social) boundaries.
“It is thus because I say so” is Yahweh’s essential “commandment.” For every impulse He gives in to forces the scribes to reformat their Torah around His unruliness. No wonder Moses smashes the tablets, and no wonder his people grumbled for forty years in the wilderness, following a leader who didn’t have a clue where he was going, following a God who acts only on impulse and never by design (much less dogma).
My experience of “Dave” at his best was similar, even indistinguishable: a force of Nature that one would be a fool to try to follow, but can only pit oneself against and hope to survive it. Which is to say, the only way to follow such a godly example of the aspiring-to-be-infinite is to ignore the specifics of the example and act also on sheer impulse, even at the risk of—or somewhat contingent upon—a willful denial of its “authority.”
By its nature, the infinite cannot tolerate becoming an authority, because to do so—and to be trustworthy—would be to be bound by the same rules it was providing to others. The dark side of “I do what I am, take it or leave it” is co-created by the followers who miss (or flinch from) the challenge of autonomous revolt, as the only form of reverence fitting to the free-associating life force personified. As such, it ends up as “Do what I say, but never, ever dare to try to do what I do!” (starting with that fruit).
An analogy: Man is to God as a tiny splinter (the shortest head of a bramble thorn, say) is to a gardener. It is pretty much invisible, almost infinitesimal in comparison to the body it has penetrated. Yet it is impossible to ignore, and extremely hard to remove.
But perhaps a thorn in a lion’s paw is really the best analogy?