imaginary family values presents

yesh omrim

a blog that reclines to the left

Logo

Quiquid latine dictum, altum videtur

25 August 2003

In the course of an otherwise interesting commentary on last week’s parsha, Rabbi Avraham Fischer says:

[Someone who feels very distant from God] must continue to pursue Hashem, to revere Him from the position of beholding the “mysterium tremendun” [sic] and to obey His commands.

Reading this, I wondered: why, in the course of a d’var Torah written for an Orthodox Jewish audience, does this rabbi use the language of the Roman Catholic Church?

As far as I can tell from Google, “mysterium tremendum” was first used by Rudolph Otto, in his book The Idea of the Holy (1923), referring to God as a Wholly Other Being who inspires a numinous dread. The phrase also appears in an oft-quoted sentence from Martin Buber: “God is the mysterium tremendum that appears and overthrows, but he is also the mystery of the self-evident, nearer to me than my I.”

OK, so I think I understand what he means now, and it’s not like “mysterium tremendum” is some term that the Vatican came up with that refers to the Trinity. But I am still left with two questions:

  1. Why should a person in this situation regard God specifically as the “mysterium tremendum?” Why not, say, the mystery of the self-evident? This issue probably deserves a page in and of itself, but instead the matter is just referred to in passing in the next-to-last paragraph of the drash.
  2. Why can’t R. Fischer just say what he means in plain Yiddish?