God Alone – But Is He Lonely?

We just celebrated the single moment in time where an individual is close to God – there, on a distant mountaintop.

Moses, though, notwithstanding that glorious proximity at Sinai was human, in every sense subordinate to a Master. Nothing equal in any way. He stays for 40 days, descends to the desert and scales the mountain again — engaging with God anew to receive a second set of Tablets. These, the only instances since Creation that God connected thusly, in an I, Thou relationship, with a member of mankind.

Consider this, though. There has never been a Mrs. God. No significant other. No other Gods with whom to interact. No children in the conventional sense. No confidante or advisor on God’s plain. Moses did, yes, sometimes talk God down from his anger – but with  no human-like expression of gratitude for the persuasiveness he presented.  God and Moses weren’t friends or peers in any meaningful way.

Of course, we must, necessarily, imagine God in human terms. Given the human limitations of our understanding of Him, we anthropomorphize God and His conduct to try to fathom His realm, His thinking and His very manner.

And if we would seek to comprehend how God chose to create the gradations of both earthly and heavenly figures for His world order, we might query the reason for God’s seeming desire for aloneness. This being a continuous aloneness, even given His relationship with Moses at that brief moment so long ago. Or apart from His supposed interaction with those subordinate and ethereal angels (with whom God never actually engaged in the Torah itself). So why did God create a world for Himself of almost infinite aloneness relegating God to possibly saying to Himself: “I’m not alone. My people dedicate themselves to Me.”

And yes, perhaps God’s “aloneness” somehow subsides when mankind bows, even if that genuflection is essentially demanded of them.  Meaning, would God still maintain mankind’s engagement with Him if He didn’t insist on it sacrificing or praying to Him?

In the Torah God largely doesn’t talks about Himself, beyond describing His occasional anger, or His satisfaction with the days of creation. There are no expressions of joy as in the instance of humans. Loners can of course find joy when alone, but seemingly not nearly as when people interact with another. Did God not recognize when He designed the world that His isolation would likely limit His own personal joy? That said, does His isolation withhold from God a capacity to better understand the nature of the very mankind He created?

Or are these, perhaps, the vapid musings of the earthbound individuals who God intentionally created with limitations designed to keep His existence behind a stone wall? But is He lonely? Or perhaps He simply wants us to endure the mystery designed to maintain His inapproachability.

Did Moses, better than we, understand God’s nature when he stood atop Sinai and interacted with Him? And does God even want the rest of us to wonder about it, or to just be relegated to abiding the profound mystery of it all?