Where is God? Where do I have to be to connect to God? What kind of emotional state do I need to be in to feel that God is with me? How do I have to shift so that God can enter?
Where is God? Exactly where you are. Not waiting for you in some other special imagined perfect place. Wherever you are, just as you are right now, that’s where God is.
Sham. “There.” Vayityatzev imo sham. God stood with Moshe sham, there, where he was, where the people were, after the Golden Calf, broken and messed up and sinful (Exodus 34:5).
Not perfect. We think God will only be with us if we deserve it, if we earn it, if we are righteous, if we somehow get to that deep contemplative connected space beyond this world, if we don’t make mistakes, if we do it all right.
Is that a divine trait – to keep us waiting, to be strict and rigid about performance, to judge us mercilessly and not allow entrance without impossible qualifications?
No. What is divine is vayityatzev imo sham. God stood staunchly with him there. To stay, to stand firmly next to someone no matter what, to be imo, “with him,” that quality of with-ness, of accompaniment and loyalty and fierce love that will not be deterred – that is divine. Imo. With him. With you. Right here next to you, as you are, not moving, standing firm, supporting you and loving you, holding your hand. That is how God is with us.
The tragedy is that we don’t recognize it, don’t feel it, that we block it, are convinced we don’t deserve it, don’t let it in.
Because we ourselves are not sham, not “there,” where we are. We ourselves are not standing where we are. We are always trying to get away, to shift, to change, to fix, to improve, to get to that other place where things might be better, where the access to God and Self may be easier.
Notice that the phrase in our verse has no subject – “He stood with him there.” Who stood with whom? God stood with Moshe there or Moshe stood with God there? Perhaps it is the same thing. The moment we stand with ourselves sham, “there,” where we are in this moment, that is the same moment that God stands with us.
That’s all it takes. It is a slight but profound re-orientation. Not a shift to a different place, a “better” way of being. On the contrary, it is a relaxing into being where we are, an acceptance, a letting go into the present, into presence with what is, with ourselves exactly as we are in this moment.
When we do that, we feel again that we are with God and God is with us because we ourselves are “standing with” as God does. We become like God towards ourselves, no longer abandoning ourselves, no longer rejecting and judging, harshly criticizing and wishing we were different. We take on that divine quality of “standing with,” fiercely and gently standing with ourselves sham, there, as we are, and as we do, we feel God’s own presence in our bodies, standing with us, always. It was only our own self abandonment that hid it from us for a moment.
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Very nice inspiring text. Thank you for writing and posting it.
It seems to me to be unusual for you not to have also the meditation offered when you write an essay: maybe your group did not meet this week and there is no recording ?
Just curious. I usually listen to the meditation and do not read the essay.
שבת שלום!