Knowing without containing

In every course of life, know Him: this is the invitation of da’ehu in Proverbs 3:6. The Hebrew verb yada’ has a broad field of meaning that includes recognition, understanding, acquaintance, and relationship. Knowing God cannot be confined to collecting statements. [1, 5]

Even between people, knowledge grows through fidelity, attention, and shared life. A description may be accurate while remaining incomplete. A person is never exhausted by a dossier.

With God, the difference is more radical. We cannot stand outside the Creator and inspect Him as one object alongside others. The relationship does not give us possession of His essence.

The Godward Way therefore distinguishes knowing through relationship from containing through representation. Trust can be real without being an inventory of what God is. Devotion can have an address without a picture.

In the Tanya, chapter 3, da’at is explained through binding and connection. It describes an involvement that gives understanding force within the person. The same chapter explicitly uses sustained contemplation of divine greatness. Its teaching supports committed connection, while its method retains a stronger conceptual element than the practice developed here.⁶

This distinction frees us from a false choice. We need neither dismiss thought nor allow every thought about God to become a substitute for Him. Ideas can prepare attention. They can correct confusion. Then, at the moment of offering, we need not keep holding them in the foreground.

Think of learning a piece of music. Technical understanding matters. Yet a performance cannot consist entirely in reciting the instructions that made it possible. Knowledge may continue in an enacted form after commentary becomes quiet.

Prayer can acquire a similar simplicity. What was first explained becomes lived. The heart need not narrate every return.

This simplicity is easily misunderstood as vagueness. It is actually quite exact about one thing: the offering has a recipient. What becomes less elaborate is our attempt to define Him.

Practice: read a short passage that helps you trust. Close the book. Do not immediately summarize it. Allow its invitation to become an act of orientation. If a useful insight remains, receive it; if no sentence remains, you have not necessarily lost what the reading opened.