Ibn Paquda, Kevin Kelly, Google, Purim, Tzimtzum
On Being the Best vs Being the Only
“Hear, Oh Israel, the Lord our God is One.” (Deuteronomy 6:4)
Ibn Paquda offers a compelling interpretation of the famous Jewish prayer, the Shema.
The Lord = Affirming that God exists
Our God = Affirming that God is in relationship with us
Is One = Affirming that God is in all that is.
Kevin Kelly teaches “Don’t be the best, be the only.” This wonderful advice is similar to Peter Thiel’s “Don’t compete” or “Competition is for losers.” But there is one thing better than being the only and that’s being both the best and being the only.
To put it in Paquda’s terms, God is both the best and the only. God is #1 and unique. YHWH means God is the Lord of everything. Echad means God is one of a kind. And the bridge between these two aspects of “one”—one as in #1 and one as in unique—is “our God” (Eloheinu).
Let’s relate these theological concepts to the realm of business. Is it better to be an industry leader or a “category king?” Is it better to win in a crowded red ocean or enjoy the unpopulated expanse of a blue ocean? Blue ocean strategy means less competition, but with less competition also comes complacency as well as a nagging question: “Are we winning here because we have the best absolute offering or only because, on a relative basis, we have no competition?” Consider the current polarization around Google. It enjoys a profound moat thanks to having a monopoly in search; but its historically innovative culture is now threatened by its very success. Perhaps it is driven by fear of downside risk rather than proactive vision and principle. Monopoly isn’t bad for one’s competitors, its also bad for one’s own soul. Competition forces us to stay sharp. But theologically again, God has no competitors because God is the only; but God also enjoys the benefit of knowing that being the only isn’t only a consolation prize—God is also the best.
Such phrasing is exactly the kind of thinking that Heidegger snubs “onto-theology.” For Heidegger the history of Western religion can be characterized as the conflation of two meanings of “prime” in Aristotle’s definition of God as “prime mover”: God as chronologically first and ontologically superior. Nonetheless, I find Paquda’s path, and the medieval theological expositions on the nature of God to be meaningful and even poetic. They fall into rigidity only when we hold fast to them as scientific system, rather than as meditative offering.
II.
The three stages of Shema correspond to a Hegelian Dialectic: God exists (thesis); God exists for us (antithesis); God both exists and exists for us (synthesis). The first step corresponds to the God of Sinai and Exodus, a God who appears from without and overpowers us. The second step corresponds to the God of Megillat Esther and Purim, a God who is absent and non-obvious. In step one, we have no room to earn the realization of God’s existence—it is simply bestowed on us. In step two, we cultivate an understanding of God through our own experience, opened up in the hollow where God no longer dominates. God of Exodus = God is the best. God of Purim = God is ours. Synthesis: God is both the best and ours, i.e., the only. At Sinai, we see God’s face and die from the event. On Purim, we see God’s hidden face, and live. The mysterious teaching of Purim is that the apparent absence of God is God’s face. “Things merely are.” This is “Hashem echad” (“God is one”).
III.
Shema is a pilgrimage through the objectivity of God to the subjectivity of religious experience and back to the integration of the two. Or in Kabbalistic terms, the divine movement from above —> human movement from below —> non-dual realization that God is both. God is both the presence of God and the absence of God.
IV.
Why does God apparently withdraw from the world? This is the core question of tzimtzum theology. One possibility is that God wants us to realize value rather than merely receive it. By God, all value is already realized. By us, it is unrealized. Unrealized value means uncertainty and volatility. These qualities are the price we pay for our ability to feel like agents and partners in creation with God. Thus, Purim, which is a story of risk and danger is also a story of reward and salvation. The world is transmuted into unrealized value so that we might be the ones to realize it. God must sacrifice appearing as “the best” (the God who rules with outstretched arm and mighty hand) and become “the only” (the God whose hidden face is manifest in everyday life).
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Slight tangent: as a former longtime (2005-2020) Googler I can confirm that Google's culture-undermining decisions have been driven by fear of downside risk. But that fear was of two kinds, which can help us better understand the costs of being "on top".
Fear #1 was of leaving revenue on the table due to embarrassing mistakes. The more complex and powerful your products get, the more mistake vectors open up, and for every new one the instinctive managerial response is to add a veto point to check for that kind of mistake... which ends in extreme vetocracy. I used to serve on a "launch committee" where engineers would come in supplication to get the >10 different approvals they needed to make any significant change to anything.
Fear #2 was that a prospective competitor would find a new superpower that would take all our revenue, or all our revenue growth potential, away. This led to costly decisions like launching Google Plus (out of fear that otherwise Facebook would take all our search traffic) and secretly internally developing a censored search engine for China called Dragonfly (out of fear that otherwise Baidu would take all our growth potential).
So the lesson is a bit broader than "monopolists lose their souls": it's more like "alpha dogs lose their souls" or "uneasy lies the head that wears the crown". To keep your integrity when you've achieved extreme success, whether monopolistic or not, requires a stringent discipline of avoiding hedonic adaptation and focusing on your own strengths. A sincerely held service-oriented mission can help with this; Google used to have that but largely abandoned it, despite having set up its stock ownership structure to prevent short-term investor greed from pushing it away from the founders' vision. That should be a sobering lesson on how hard this sort of discipline can be.
God is ALL that is. Anything else is illusion.