God is Everywhere. / Where is God?

This week's Torah portion, Yitro, is a big one! After Moses receives leadership advice from his Midianite father-in-law, the Israelites encamp at the base of Mount Sinai and Moses ascends the mountain where he receives the Ten Commandments from God. Between thunder and lightning, the blare of the shofar, and a smoking mountain, the revelatory moment of Exodus is certainly dramatic.

I've always thought that this -- the dramatic revelation -- was what connected the haftarah of Isaiah 6 to this parasha. As that text opens, Isaiah himself seems to be "tripping" and experiencing a revelation of his own in the heavens: 

"In the year that King Uzziah died, I beheld my Lord seated on a high and lofty throne; and the skirts of God's robe filled the Temple. Seraphs (fiery angels) stood in attendance on God. Each of them had six wings: with two he covered his face, with two he covered his legs, and with two he would fly." (Isaiah 6:1-2)

However, reading the two texts -- Exodus 20 and Isaiah 6 -- side by side this week, I noticed another interesting point of connection between them, in addition to their supranatural revelatory nature. In Exodus 20:21, we read: "b'chol-hamakom asher azkir et-sh'mi, avo eilecha uveirachticha," "in every place where I cause My name to be mentioned, I will come to you and bless you." This is a surprising statement for the Torah to make in the immediate wake of its emphasis on Mount Sinai as a special place: this verse explicitly claims that God will be present not only at the holy mountain, but everywhere -- literally "in every place."

Meanwhile, as the haftarah continues, the famous line of Isaiah 6:3 features angels turning and calling towards one another: "Kadosh kadosh kadosh adonai tzevaot, m'lo chol-ha'aretz k'vodo," "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts! The entire earth is filled with God's presence." Once again, we might expect Isaiah to be telling us, based on his own mystical vision, that one must journey through the heavens in order to encounter Divine beings. Instead, this quote hammers precisely the opposite point: that God's presence can be found everywhere.

Last Shabbat, I was fortunate enough to attend the Hadar National Shabbaton on the east coast. In addition to reconnecting with lots of folks with Kavana connections from many years ago (shout-outs to Ilana Mantell, Joel Goldstein, Rachel Jacobson, and a number of Jewish Emergent Network colleagues!), it was a pleasure to bask in a weekend of great davening, rich Torah learning, and vibrant new Jewish music.

On Friday evening, Rabbi Shai Held gave a Dvar Torah that has stuck with me all week, and which picks up on the Isaiah verse I've cited above. He considered the Kedusha of the Musaf Amidah, the call-and-response section of the "extra" standing prayer we recite on Shabbat day. The first line that the whole congregation is prompted to say is "Kadosh kadosh kadosh adonai tzevaot, m'lo chol-ha'aretz k'vodo," "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts! The entire earth is filled with God's presence." This, Rabbi Held claimed, is a firm assertion that the composers of the prayer wanted to make (echoing the one we've seen above in Parashat Yitro) that God is everywhere.

Next, he pointed out that it's possible to read liturgy so often that the words become rote and we can easily lose sight of what's surprising about them. Continuing, the very next line of the Kedusha features the angels asking one another "ayei m'kom k'vodo," "where is the place of God's presence?" -- in other words, where is God? Rabbi Held points out that this order doesn't feel at all logical; anyone who is paying attention would typically expect a question to be followed by an answer, rather than an answer followed by a question. The non-intuitive order of these two lines should guide us -- the reciters of this prayer -- to note the tension that exists between these two ideas: that God is everywhere, and also, that it can feel like God is absent (or at least we need to go searching in order to locate God's presence).

Last week, in his Kavana newsletter Dvar Torah about Parashat Beshallach, our very own Rabbi Jay LeVine argued that wherever there are binaries in our Jewish tradition, our goal is to engage in a "vibrant oscillation" between the two poles. Rabbi Held makes a similar argument to that here: that although it flies in the face of Aristotelian logic to assert both that God is everywhere and that we cannot locate God, our liturgy is set up to support us in entertaining both of these ideas and holding them both to be true simultaneously. 

Held's particular way of dealing with the disconnect between these two poles is to argue that the gap between them is the space where we human beings must operate. When what's happening in the world around us leads us to doubt or question God's manifest presence, then we must be the ones to reconcile and close the gap. In other words, it is incumbent upon us to manifest God's presence in the world. We do this by showing love and compassion to one another, through moral behavior, and through our fulfillment of mitzvot... essentially, by taking the Revelation from Mount Sinai and spreading it everywhere we go in the world. Only through our own human actions can we ensure that every place is a place of holiness, and a place where God's presence can dwell. 

The truth is that at this particular moment in time, God often feels quite far away from our world. It's easy to spot examples all around us of immorality and injustice, gross abuses of power, violence and violations of human dignity; it can be much harder to feel God's presence! In the face of this seeming absence, this reading of our Torah portion, haftarah, and the liturgy prompts us to ask ourselves the key questions: What can we do to ensure that Revelation -- that is, morality, Torah, and God's very presence -- is not relegated to the top of the mountain with Moses, nor to God's heavenly throne-room as in Isaiah's vision? How can we help ensure that godliness and divinity reach every corner of the world, such that God's presence is manifest "in every place"? 

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum