its water." "Oh, you little fools," he exclaimed with a smile, but
suddenly his smile vanished in serious thought. "Am I not as foolish as
these children?" he said to himself. "How can I with my small brain hope
to grasp the infinite nature of God?"

All efforts of philosophy to define the essence of God are futile. "Canst
thou by searching find out God?" Zophar asks of his friend Job.(174) Both
Philo and Maimonides maintain that we can know of God only that He _is_;
we can never fathom His innermost being or know what He is. Both find this
unknowability of God expressed in the words spoken to Moses: "If I
withdraw My hand, thou shall see My back--that is, the effects of God's
power and wisdom--but My face--the real essence of God--thou shalt not
see."(175)

2. Still, a divinity void of all essential qualities fails to satisfy the
religious soul. Man demands to know what God is--at least, what God is to
him. In the first word of the Decalogue God speaks through His people
Israel to the religious consciousness of all men at all times, beginning,
"I am the Lord, _thy_ God." This word _I_ lifts God at once above all
beings and powers of the cosmos, in fact, above all other existence, for
it expresses His unique self-consciousness. This attribute above all is
possessed by no being in the world of nature, and only by man, who is the
image of his Maker. According to the Midrash, all creation was hushed when
the Lord spoke on Sinai, "_I_ am the Lord."(176) God is not merely the
supreme Being, but also the supreme Self-consciousness. As man, in spite
of all his limitations and helplessness, still towers high above all his
fellow creatures by virtue of his free will and self-conscious action, so
God, who knows no bounds to His wisdom and power, surpasses all beings and
forces of the universe, for He rules over all as the one completely
self-conscious Mind and Will. In both the visible and invisible realms He
manifests Himself as the absolutely free Personality, moral and spiritual,
who allots to every thing its existence, form, and purpose. For this
reason Scripture calls Him "the living God and everlasting King."(177)

3. Judaism, accordingly, teaches us to recognize God, above all, as
revealing Himself in self-conscious activity, as determining all that
happens by His absolutely free will, and thus as showing man how to walk
as a free moral agent. In relation to the world, His work or workshop, He
is the self-conscious Master