Our parsha begins with the words vayikra el moshe. God called to Moshe (Leviticus 1:1). This calling action is not really necessary. God could simply have begun speaking without calling first as is standard elsewhere in the Torah. A call is something extra, something unusual, not just speech, but an invitation to connection – come here, I want to be with you. Rashi says that this call is lashon hibah, the language of affection (Rashi on Leviticus 1:1). Before God gives Moshe instructions, God first wants to let him know how dear he is, that It’s not just about the content of the speech, but about the relationship.
A Different Direction of Calling
God called to Moshe. This direction of calling is counter-intuitive for us. Most of the time, we think of the calling between God and us as being done in the opposite direction, not by God, but by us. Min hametzer karati yah. Out of my narrow straits I call out to God (Psalm 118:5). I call, not God. We are the ones wanting something, standing there begging, yearning, calling, searching, longing, desiring.
What happens if you consider the other direction? What happens if you imagine that God is actually seeking you, calling out to you, looking for you, trying to get your attention, wanting to connect to you? Can you feel the shift in that, how you might be able to relax and surrender a little, a sense of relief and presence, like – oh, God is already right here, calling to me. I don’t have to try so hard. The Christian mystic Meister Eckhart says it this way: “I often think it is my work to find You, and in the tangle of my life I stumble into brambles of doubt and pits of uncertainties and wonder where You are hiding, and then I remember: You seek and I am found” (Meister Eckhart’s Book of the Heart, p. 34). You seek and I am found.
A Parable
A mashal, a parable: It is like a lover who comes to his beloved’s house knocking on her door looking for her, only to find that she has stepped out in search of him. As in the Song of Songs, the lovers keep missing one another.
But what if we, the beloved, stood still for a moment in our home, in our bodies, and allowed ourselves to be called to, to be sought, to be loved, to be found by that divine force in the universe that already does love us? We have been running around looking everywhere, and now we come home to center, come into some stillness so we can hear what’s here. Calling off the search mission for a moment, sitting quietly and tuning in to God’s affectionate call to you. It’s always been there, slowing down enough now to hear it. Letting the noise and restlessness of the searching energy relax inside you and opening yourself to receiving from God’s shefa, from that continuous divine overflow of love and grace into our world. You don’t have to make that happen. You don’t have to beg or go on your knees or knock on doors or be good or save the world. It happens without you. Just let yourself be found, let yourself be touched by that call, open your ears and your heart and let it in, let God in.
God’s Desire For You
What I’m trying to say is that It’s not just us wanting God. God wants us, too, perhaps even more than we want God. I invite you to get some inkling of the intensity of that divine desire for you. I’m not sure we can completely fathom it. Maybe it’s akin to the strongest sensation of love you have ever felt for someone in your life, even for an instant, or maybe it’s proportional to the gaping hole in you that has always longed for some inexpressible something to satiate you, maybe it’s a mirror of that longing in God – “as face answers to face in water” (Proverbs 27:19) – or maybe it’s a love that sits inside you in an ever deepening place that continues to unfold, your divine capacity for an ever stronger loving presence. Maybe God’s desire is something like that. Opening to taste a drop of that, like honey down your throat, like a blanket embracing you, like a net holding you up, like ground under your feet. Ta’amu ure’u ki tov Hashem. Taste and see how good God is (Psalm 34:9).
Our Preciousness
Another way to put it is that we are precious to God. The word vayikra has a small alef at the end. What that does is to highlight the word yakar in the middle, yakar, meaning precious. God calls out to let you know how precious you are, that you matter, that you are a unique gem that has never been seen before and will never be seen again. You were made to be you, your own precious self. What does it feel like to imagine God viewing you this way, to heed the divine invitation and claim your own preciousness? As rare and delicate, like an exquisite exotic flower. How would you hold such a precious flower? With such gentleness and care, with such awe and wonder. What if you held yourself that way, treated yourself that way?
Our Feeling of Smallness
We usually don’t see ourselves that way. We are so often full of shame and insecurity, doubt and self loathing. Even in our moments of okayness, we are far from understanding our true preciousness. For Moshe, too, it was hard. In the end of last week’s parsha, when the mishkan was complete and God’s glory filled it, the Torah says that Moshe was unable to enter the sacred space (Exodus 40:35). He did not feel equal to it, too small and undeserving to imagine that God would want him there.
The little alef at the end of the word vayikra is perhaps a symbolic representation of that feeling of smallness in Moshe and in ourselves, hiding behind the other letters in shame, not claiming our preciousness, not being capable of imagining that we are worthy of that kind of connection and love, that God truly desires to be with us.
Small Alef is Part of the Call
But don’t forget that the alef is also part of the word vayikra, also part of the call itself. That feeling of smallness is in a way also a summons, an invitation into connection with something larger. The smallness in us asks for God, or, in a way, is God asking for us inside us, a little angel messenger reminding us through our need of what is possible.
God Joins Us There
Or understood another way, we can imagine God’s call of love as entering the tiny alef of our pain, not abandoning us, but crouching down to join us, to accompany us in those close quarters. In a way, God, too, goes into hiding together with us. For God’s name is absent from that phrase, vaykira el Moshe. The Torah says He, an anonymous He, called to Moshe, as if God let go of God’s own great name to enter that little alef space with us, to crawl in alongside us in the cramped intimacy of our little shell, of that secret hiding place in the attic or the corner of the room, the cave like place we escape into in our shame. God quietly and inconspicuously enters into those hidden places together with us. Imo anokhi betzarah. I am with him, God says, in distress (Psalm 91:15), in that narrow place, crawling in alongside us, with gentleness and patience, no demand to come out, no agenda of change, just the quiet accompaniment of a loving presence exactly where we are.
El – Towards Our Larger Self
I sit beside you in your misery and offer you my hibah, my affection, God says, letting you slowly see through My eyes how precious, how yakar, you are. In your own time, I know you will come out of this corner, moving from the small alef back into the capital mem Moshe, vayikra el Moshe, moving from the little alef of vayikra el, towards Moshe, towards the big Moshe, back into your full being, walking along with God from one to the other, together. back into your own fullness.
An Experience of Receiving
So sitting where you are right now, even if you are in your small alef place, not going out the door to search for God somewhere else, as if God is only next door where others seem to be larger and better. No, just where you are right now, opening the door for the waiting knocking lover to come in, letting in that gentle divine call like a breeze blowing in through the window, receiving it and letting it enter your whole soul and body and heart, letting it warm you and cool you and melt you and soften you and relax you, every nerve and fiber of your being drinking it up. There is no action here, no effort, no striving, no reaching out, just the motion of surrender, allowing yourself to be loved that profoundly, to receive that graciously. Surrendering to God’s loving call to you, trusting it, letting go of being in charge for a moment, letting yourself be loved, be found
It’s like that little child in her hiding place, she was crying there all alone and despondent, and now she feels this warm presence beside her, calling her into connection and love and relationship, calling her back into her own preciousness, into her own delightful light. God cries with her and then laughs with her.
But the World Is a Mess!
Maybe you’re thinking – ok, but how does that help. The world is such a mess. I am such a mess. How does it help for me to feel God’s loving call? I submit that it helps a great deal, that it makes all the difference. The definition of trauma is not something terrible that happens to you but something terrible that happens to you alone, without a supportive someone to hold you in it and process it, without a loving presence to accompany you through it. We can’t control what happens, but we can open ourselves to the divine call of affection and connection, to the sense of a God who is knocking at our door even when we are in the little alef place, ever calling to us, always wanting to be with us. So that whatever else happens, we are not alone.
But I Don’t Feel That!
And maybe sometimes it feels really hard, almost impossible to hear this call. You might have skeptics that doubt it is real, that say – but God doesn’t call to me. There is no sign of that in my life. Ah, but the signs are so subtle. Remembering again that the vayikra call is anonymous. God doesn’t leave a calling card. Isn’t that how it is for us when we get an inkling of the divine in our lives? It doesn’t beat us over the head and announce itself as God. It’s a gentle nudge, a quiet whisper, a breeze touching your sleeve, the sudden appearance of a butterfly on your stony path, a tiny fragment of rainbow, a sturdy tree, a kind voice calling you back to love, back to yourself. That is vayikra el Moshe, no God name, just this gentle camouflaged call. You do have it in your life; you just haven’t named it as God. And that’s ok. God, too, hasn’t named it as God.
The important thing is – let it in. Let yourself feel the affection, the freely offered grace, the call to preciousness and relationship, the call to kirvah, to closeness, a theme word in this new book of Vayikra. Let yourself enter the sanctuary and receive and be filled and overflow.
