Cirrus@Austlit

'Recently I was interviewing a rabbi for part of my master’s thesis. I asked her how she imagined God, and she provided me with a list of concepts from different theologians. The one that stood out to me most was the idea of God as a vessel that catches overflowing emotion. When you feel so overcome with joy or sadness that you can’t contain it in your body, it flows out and God is there to hold it. She also talked about the body as ‘the house of the soul’. The combination of these two concepts was immediately soothing for me, not just because they imagine God as tender and caring, but also because they imagine the body and the self as something porous, not a finite, closed-of thing. Too many feelings? You don’t actually need to hold onto them all at once. Too many conflicting facets of identity? No worries. Just put some of them outside for a bit.'  (Introduction)