You can do arithmetic with Roman numerals, but it isn’t easy. Try multiplying MCLVII by MMDCCCIX. Calculus? As Tony Soprano might say, fuhgeddaboudit! You can also do arithmetic with the Hebrew alphabet. Aleph, the first letter, is one, bet is two, and so on, until you get to the tenth letter, yud. The next letters go in increments of ten, which only takes you to seventy. After that you have to switch to the next four letters, which are 100, 200, 300, 400. Now you’re out of letters, and out of luck. Both these systems are so cumbersome they are almost impossible to use for anything but the simplest calculations.

Why? Because they’re missing that great invention of the Arab mathematicians, the zero. That little circle, along with the next number, one, makes our entire information revolution possible. It is at the core of the codes on the computers that enable us to accomplish so much (and to waste such an inordinate amount of time).

Think of it! Here’s a number that’s not a number. Here’s a value that has no value, an integer that isn’t. All the zero does is take up space. But since that space can indicate anything from nothing to numbers whose size we can only abbreviate, it makes our complex mathematical system possible.

It’s the same thing with the Jewish concept of God. Abstract monotheism, we call it. The one God part, revolutionary as it was, is by now an axiom, a given. But the abstract part, the invisible, unknowable part, is at least as revolutionary and at least as important. It is an incredible idea that carries a message of profound possibilities that we are just beginning to explore.

In many ways, our God is a zero, nothing. The greatest Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages, Maimonides, created a concept called “negative theology.” There is nothing affirmative we can say about God, he taught, because we just don’t know and can’t know. All we can say are negatives: God is not unjust; God is not capricious; God is not visible; God is not lacking any thing or any attribute...

God is an abstraction. Does God have a face? No. Does God have a home? No. Does God think, pray, get a runny nose (or even have a nose), worry, put on a sweater when it gets cold, play divine music on a celestial MP3 player? No, no, no, no, no, and no. Factor in our core prohibition against idolatry and we see why it couldn’t be otherwise. An idol is an object, a thing. A thing can be something physical, or an idea, or a feeling, or anything else within our human experience. We are supposed to worship only that which we can not experience, only that which is not a thing.

Tough stuff, I know. But stay with me. It was tough for our people to understand this radical new idea of God, too. The Shema itself is partly a record of their struggle. One way of translating Adonai Eloheynu, Adonai Echad, is, “The Eternal is our God, alone.” It not only says that there is only one God that we Jews worship, it also says that our God is alone, unique, that there are no other gods that exist. This was a negation of the thinking of the entire pagan world. It needn’t have been made a part of our worship, and a central part at that, unless there was significant internal as well as external opposition to be overcome. [After Dennis Rushkoff, “Nothing Sacred”, pg. 20.]

As difficult as this was for our people to grasp, it was next to impossible for others. The Greeks called us atheists. The God we believed in was so unlike the concrete idols that represented their gods and goddesses that we appeared to believe in nothing. They were right. We did. We believed in no thing. In a universe of things, our God, our no thing was unique.

Even the terms we used to designate God became more and more abstract over time. In the Torah there are multiple names for God: Adonai, Elohim, El, El Shaddai, Adonai Tzva’ot, and others. In the time of the Temple in Jerusalem, the High Priest, the Kohain Gadol, was supposed to utter the secret name of God aloud only once a year, on Yom Kippur. Later, four letters were used to designate God: yod, hei, vav, hei, not pronounced, but written with the vowels of another word, Adonai, Master, or Lord, and pronounced that way.

Traditional Jews today will speak of HaShem, the Name, and purposely misspell and mispronounce some of the earlier names, saying Eilokim, for instance, instead of Elohim. In the prayerbooks, the four letters became only two: yod, yod. When writing God in English, many people write it G dash D. There is even a discussion as to whether or not one can delete anything with one of God’s names in it from a computer file. I believe the jury is still out on that one.

Our natural inclination is to replace the abstract with the concrete, to fill in the hole, the zero, the placeholder with some sort of thing. Tough stuff? This level of abstraction drove even the best of us batty. “Let me see your face,” Moses pleaded with God. “No,” said God, “that is something no human being can do. I will put you in the cleft of that rock, and cover it with my hand, and pass by, and then remove my hand so that you can see my back, but you may not see my face.” [After Exodus 33.] Translation: We cannot see God as cause. We can only see the effects of God’s having been here.

Such an austere, cold, abstract conception of God is very difficult to maintain. We hunger for a loving God, a divine parent who cares for us and watches over us. We yearn for a benevolent God, one who answers prayer, guarantees justice, heals the sick, gives solace to the troubled. But we are looking in the wrong place. If an abstract, unknowable, invisible God cannot give us the comfort and support we so sorely need, then who can?

Ask Elijah, the prophet for whom we open the door at our Passover seders, the prophet who is the legendary harbinger of the Messiah. Ask Elijah, a worthy successor to Moses. The legends of each of them have a great deal in common. Just as Moses stayed on the mountain forty days and forty nights, Elijah walked for forty days and forty nights to get to the same mountain. He too, went into a cave, possibly the same cave, the same cleft in the rock that sheltered Moses. Elijah was told to come out of the cave and stand on the mountain, as was Moses before him. Yet again, the divine presence passed by. But this time there was an added dimension to the lesson:

Where is God’s still, small voice? In us! It is wrapped up in the concrete, totally existent “thing-ness” of ordinary human beings, each and every one of us. This is where we meet God; this is where God wants to be met. The more abstract God is, the more room there is for that still, small voice to be heard. Is God in our abstractions or in the wind or quake or fire? God may be there, or may not. We will never know. We will never see God’s face, we human beings. But we do see God’s back, the effects of what God has created, and on this planet at least, we are indeed the pinnacle of that creation.

We are the ones who must bring the solace, the support, the caring, the love, the concrete human kindnesses that are not and cannot and should not be given by the one, abstract God. That is our job. What does God want of us? Why are we here? In the words of an eminent theologian, 8-year-old Danny Dutton of Chula Vista, California, who was asked to write about God for a third grade assignment,

We are here to teach, to be mothers and fathers to our children. We are here to take care of things on earth, a vocation we have not yet learned very well. But at God’s behest we are still here, still trying.

Yes, God is a zero, an empty set of quotation marks, a door held open through which we believe the sacred enters. Someday Elijah may be the one to come through that door, perhaps followed by the Messiah, perhaps even followed by the wind, earthquake, and fire of the Divine Presence. In the meantime, we are the ones who must walk through the door, listening to the still, small voice of the sacred that is in each of us. With the blessing of the one and abstract God, may we create a concrete world of blessing and of peace.