THE THEOLOGICAL Uncertainty Principle emerges from the teachings of Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Leiner (1800-1854) – henceforth RMY – and his son Rabbi Ya’acov Leiner, both of Ishbica.

Let us consider the following commentary offered by RMY in his work Mei Hashiloah (henceforth MH) on Parshat Yitro: “‘I [anochi] am the Lord your God.’ The verse does not state ani, for if it stated ani that would imply that the Holy One blessed be He revealed then the totality of His light to Israel, precluding the possibility of further delving into his words, for everything is already revealed. The letter kaf [of anochi], however, denotes that the revelation is not complete but rather an estimation and comparison to the light that God will reveal in the future.”

The kaf of anochi is the kaf hadimayon, the kaf of comparison.

The correct translation of the verse would be “I am as the Lord...”! Even the revelation at Sinai, the paradigm of all subsequent revelations, must be comprehended as a partial and incomplete picture of the divine as “as if.”

This came to me as a true shock, given my previously held belief that the revelation at Sinai was perfect and that subsequent Jewish history is an effort to recapture the clarity of that pristine and intimate moment with God. The MH not only claims that God’s revelation is imperfect, but that it must be so.

“The reason that commandment of ‘thou shall not make for yourself a graven image’ [follows the commandment of anochi]... is because a graven image is cut according to specific dimensions, perfect, lacking nothing... this is to teach us that nothing is revealed to man completely.”

If one were to claim perfect clarity and understanding, he would be transgressing the second commandment of constructing a graven image. Certainty and perfect understanding exist only in the idolatrous worldview where the gods are of distinct and finite dimensions. RMY equates certainty with idolatry.

Total comprehension of the divine leaves no room for human development and is a distortion of the revelation.

This is because God and His will are infinite, and we mortals are finite with limited capacity to understand.

Insisting upon perfect knowledge of God and His will is necessarily idolatrous in that the “perfect perception,” at the end of the day, turns out to be but a projection of ourselves.

We will be guilty of creating God in our own image.

In his commentary above on Parshat Yitro, RMY draws a sharp distinction between “God as He is” and “God as He is perceived.” The space between those two is occupied by uncertainty. I refer to this as the Theological Uncertainty Principle.
The ramifications of the Ishbica approach are monumental on both the individual-religious and meta-narrative planes. On the individual-religious plane, prior to this approach we generally equated certainty and steadfast faith as being more “religious.” In fact, according to the Theological Uncertainty Principle of the MHS and Ya’acov Leiner, the opposite is true. Uncertainty is an essential part of the God-created spiritual topography that we inhabit. It is precisely in the landscape of uncertainty where we develop as religious beings.

On the meta-narrative level, Ishbica teaches us that a system with pretensions to explain all in the most certain terms must be naïve and ignorant of the complex and constantly changing world in which we live. Our meta-narrative must contain a principle that is diametrically opposed to the very nature of meta-narratives: uncertainty. The Theological Uncertainty Principle renders a Jewish tradition not obsessed with reconstructing eras of perceived perfection, rather engaged in the constantly changing present with its infinite possibilities and surprises.
Rabbi HERZL HEFTER, Rabbi at Yeshiva Hamivtar, IS BELIEF IN REVELATION POSSIBLE IN THE POSTMODERN AGE?

(Yediot: 2013); p. 431, 433
Postmodernism doesn’t have a solid definition, and many quills have been broken trying to define it. Many postmodernists themselves are opposed to attempts to define their weltanschauung. For the purpose of our inquiry, we can at least say that postmodernism is the stance that claims there is no single ‘truth’, because that which we call ‘truth’ is actually a cultural-social construct, man-made. We can also describe postmodernism as a radical thrust towards freedom - the freedom of man to determine himself and his values.
...Many educators, most educators, utterly negate and repudiate this notion of postmodernism completely… however, in my eyes there is something much more radical amiss.
I feel that postmodernism, deconstructivism are a sort of ‘shattering of the vessels’, although this breakdown potentially grants us a far-reaching, vast freedom, and in the religious sense - a freedom to believe, even sans ‘proofs’ and such.
...perhaps postmodernism can turn out to be our Yetsiat Mitsrayim, in the most radical sense of the term.
In this postmodern world is buried, in my opinion, an option for a very elevated and advanced belief. What excites me is not the notion that God is some special, enormous entity, but rather the notion that God is not this ‘thing’; God is the essence of purity, the essence of freedom, the infinite; as Maimonides wrote - he exists, although is not in existence…
7. R. Shagar, Shattered Vessels (Yeshivat Siah Yitzhak, Efrata: 2004); p. 20 n.7, 25
…and then comes the day of death, those whom he supported are also gone, and nothing remains, together with this we still believe that there is some everlasting worth to our actions. Similar to postmodernists, R. Nahman intimately knew that the final questions, the metaphysical questions, are beyond the purview of language. However, contra the postmodernists who concluded that the questions are ultimately meaningless - nonsense… R. Nahman opens new vistas for possibilities of deep faith...
...
In this manner we can now read the following words of R. Kook: “why does deconstruction occur? Because divinity gives according to its [unlimited] power, and the receiver is limited, therefore the good bestowed is limited… and unable to receive all the good bestowed lest they burst and shatter. And therefore the receiver strives all it can to return to its root place in which it can receive in an unlimited sense… to join the creator on the level of wholeness…”
...the shattering creates the possibility for rebuilding reality anew.
The logic behind the transition between postmodernism to mysticism is simple, it is actually a small epistemological shift from a pluralistic point of view, with word games in which no truth is discerned… to a point of view of unio mystica that declares that all is truth and all is within God, and that ‘no venue is free from God.’
English

The Doctrine of Tzimtzum shelo kepshuto
and its Power- Tamar Ross
According to this understanding, God’s monolithic unity before creation and after creation remains exactly the same; ontologically nothing has changed. But as a result of the spontaneous activity of the divine life, there ensued a covering over or concealment of some aspect of God’s all-pervasive presence, thereby engendering an illusory realm of appearance...
By way of illustration, the act of divine tzimtzum was likened by some to the situation of a teacher who conceals the full scope of his knowledge so that some limited portion of it may be revealed to his student. Just as the wisdom of the teacher is unaffected by this concealment, so too all forms of existence gain a sense of their selfhood as a result of the hiding of God’s all-pervasive presence, yet God’s all-embracing monolithic unity remains the same. All appearances of diversity and particularization – while real enough – are swallowed up by His infinite unity, just as drops of water are contained by the sea and indistinguishable from the surrounding waters...
Proponents of this view might easily conclude that if all that distinguishes between Creator and created being is the illusion of selfhood, truly the unity between man and God is but a hair’s breadth away...
Precisely because nothing of God’s absolute and infinite unity filters down to our world, the highest object of the religious life is to pierce our illusory sense of separate existence, and merge – to whatever extent possible – with that undifferentiated unity which is God’s. This is accomplished by drawing that unity into this world,eradicating its "reality" by eradicating our false sense of independent selfhood.
http://thetorah.com/the-challenge-of-biblical-criticism/tzimtzum-shelo-kepshuto/

Langugage Game: Wittgenstein argued that a word or even a sentence has meaning only as a result of the "rule" of the "game" being played. Depending on the context, for example, the utterance "Water!" could be an order, the answer to a question, or some other form of communication. (Wikipedia)

Tamar Ross and the "Theology of Cumulative Revelation"
If literal meanings are problematic, we must reject the formulations, qualify them, or bring logical argument and empiric evidence in order to resolve the difficulties they raise. I suggest that this is the wrong way to proceed: it entails a misconception of what traditional descriptions mean to the believer in the context of religious life. When an Orthodox Jew says 'I believe in Torah from Heaven', her primary concern is not to discuss facts or establish history, but to make a statement on an entirely different plane. It reflects her wish to establish a much stronger claim that will regulate her entire life. .. . Does this understanding of the function of religious truth statements mean that she regards the divine origin of Torah as less true than scientific beliefs? No... the considerations brought to bear in determining the validity of such religious statements is taken from within the religious framework itself (Tamar Ross, "Expanding the Palace of the Torah")

On a rational plane, I therefore set out to release the doctrine of revelation from the simplistic dictation metaphor by pointing out that God does not speak through vocal cords but rather through the dynamics of history and the developing human understanding triggered in its wake. Acknowledging that the Torah and halakha were born in a broader socio-cultural context, I argued, need not bear any contradiction to religious claims of divine authorship. Given God’s options of deputized speech and illocutionary acts, it is perfectly possible to view the Torah as a document that is all human and all divine at one and the same time. (Tamar Ross, "The Implications of Feminization of Theology", 126)

Those of a more mystic propensity will view them (successive hearings of God's Torah more abstractly, as a gradual exposure of the metaphysical divine essence on its earthly level. ... I am contending that unfreezing our concept of revelation-- moving away trom the simplistic metaphor of God dictating the entire Torah to Moses does not require a nontraditional theological framework.(Tamar Ross, "Expanding the Palace of the Torah")
I do believe that traditionalists confronting the radical implications of contemporary scientific and moral insights, and seeking to incorporate these into their religious way of life without forfeiting its credibility or normative force, will intuitively gravitate towards some of the more promising implications that the postmodern sensibility holds for traditional Jewish belief when informed by a mystic sensibility. The sympathy of so-called 'secularists' for more fluid forms of New Age spirituality and the rise of HaBaKookism' (an amalgam of more individualized anti-establishment modes of religiosity gleaned from the writings of Habad, Bratzlav and R. Kook) amongst some segments of religious youth in Israel are testimony to this trend. (Religious Belief in a Postmodern Age, 239)