Similarly the appellation, _Makom_, "Space," is explained by both Philo and the rabbis as denoting "Him who encompasses the world, but whom the world cannot encompass."(202) An utterance such as this, well-nigh pantheistic in tone, leads directly to theories like those of Spinoza or of David Nieto, the well-known London Rabbi, who was largely under Spinozistic influence(203) and who still was in accord with Jewish thought. Certainly, as long as Jewish monotheism conceives of God as self-conscious Intellect and freely acting Will, it can easily accept the principle of divine immanence.
12. We accept, then, the fact that man, child-like, invests God with human qualities,--a view advanced by Abraham ben David of Posquieres in opposition to Maimonides.(204) Still, the thinkers of Judaism have ever labored to divest the Deity of every vestige of sensuousness, of likeness to man, in fact, of every limitation to action or to free will. Every conception which merges God into the world or identifies Him with it and thus makes Him subject to necessity, is incompatible with the Jewish idea of God, which enthrones Him above the universe as its free and sovereign Master. "Am I a God near at hand, saith the Lord, and not a God afar off? Can any hide himself in secret places that I shall not see him? saith the Lord. Do I not fill heaven and earth?"(205) "To whom will you liken Me, that I should be equal?"(206)
1. From the very beginning no Jewish doctrine was so firmly proclaimed and so heroically defended as the belief in the One and Only God. This constitutes the essence and foundation of Judaism. However slowly the people learned that there could be no gods beside the One God, and that consequently all the pagan deities were but "naught and vanity," the Judaism of the Torah starts with the proclamation of the Only One, and later Judaism marches through the nations and ages of history with a never-silent protest against polytheism of every kind, against every division of the Godhead into parts, powers, or persons.
2. It is perfectly clear that divine pedagogy could not well have demanded of a people immature and untrained in religion, like Israel in the wilderness period, the immediate belief in the only one God and in none else. Such a belief is the result of a long mental process; it is attained only after centuries of severe struggle and crisis. Instead of this, the Decalogue of Sinai demanded of the people that they worship only the God of the Covenant who had delivered them from Egypt to render them His people.(207) But, as they yielded more and more to the seductive worship of the gods of the Canaanites and their other neighbors, the law became more rigid in prohibiting such idolatrous practices, and the prophets poured forth their unscathing wrath against the "stiff-necked people" and endeavored by unceasing warnings and threats to win them for the pure truth of monotheism.(208)