DEUT136 Everyone knows that the Bible often speaks of both loving and fearing God. There is also a third approach that biblical authors consider critical: knowing God. The prophet Ezekiel is so taken with this theme that he mentions it over sixty times. For the rabbis, the Torah itself commands this: "Know then this day, and take it to heart, that Adonai is God in the heaven above and the earth below and there is no other" [this verse]. If that sentiment sounds familiar, it is because the Hebrew is used in the summary prayer of our traditional Jewish service: Alenu leshabe'ah la-adon ha-kol. It is incumbent upon us to praise the Master of all things. The command "to know" immediately arouses our contemporary craving for precise definition, one that concisely explains what our spiritual geniuses mean by "knowing God." Unfortunately, such knowledge is not to be. When it comes to matters of belief, our teachers have discovered that religious reality is inevitably greater than any of their attempts to express them in a few pithy remarks. Thus they shift into highly symbolic rhetoric and continue to multiply the symbols in the hope that their number and variety eventually reveal what they had in mind. So it is with "knowing God."