Today, dear friends, we have an unsettled disquisition on the assurance of reality.

“My rock, my redeemer.”

What do we mean when we call God a rock?

Reliable Rocks?

Surely a rock is the most reliable thing we can think of. We can lean on it, sit on it, stand on top of it to fight off our enemies, and hide behind it even when bullets and arrows are whizzing our way. The Psalmist speaks of taking refuge in craggy fastnesses, as David hid when pursued by King Saul: “God lifts me up on a rock / בְּצוּר יְרוֹמְמֵנִי /betzur yeromemeni” (Ps. 27:5).

But time, aided by wind and water, crushes massive rocks into dust. When the ancients contemplated ruins of earlier civilizations than their own, even they knew that a rock’s life is limited, and Shakespeare voiced this knowledge in Sonnet 55: “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments of princes / Shall outlive this powerful rhyme.”

Now that atoms have become divisible, our physicists can contemplate a new world of subatomic instability, a roiling sea of turbulence beneath the harsh facade of a concrete wall.

Oh, you rocks. Like humanity, you turn to dust.

Reality Rocks?

So here’s another thought. The 18th-century British philosopher George Berkeley held “that reality consists exclusively of minds and their ideas” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy online). Dr. Johson (isn’t he everyone’s favorite figure in English literature?) didn’t agree. Boswell wrote:

… we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that everything in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it,–“I refute it thus.”

There we have it. When we call God a rock, we can say that God is the proof that matter matters, that existence exists, that you (dear reader) are not a figment of my imagination nor I of yours, but that we each possess a measure of reality. Ice cream is real, so let’s celebrate. When we say (in Aleinu, quoting Deut. 4:39) “Nothing else is /אֵ֖ין עֽוֹד / ein od,” we can understand this to mean that God is the source and proof of all existence.

Oh, the joy of these philosophical-theological-ontological-epistemological points! Though sometimes the joy is mitigated by an unsettling sense that the profound insight may in fact be a throwaway pun.

Or Does It?

I’d like to have seen the elderly Dr. Johnson (he was in his 50s), master of encyclopedic knowledge, stubbing his stubborn toe on a rock. Ho, ho, Berkeley is refuted, and who can ever argue with Dr. J.? And yet, and yet, you may feel something in your brain, but that doesn’t prove it’s real. What about those stories of amputees who have feeling in their severed limbs?

I shall take refuge in my rock, hoping it proves that I am right, and if you have a proof, dear reader, I hope you will share it.