Letting God In (Portion Tetzaveh)

The Kotzker Rebbe asked his students: “Where does God live?”

Immediately, they all responded: “Everywhere!”

“No,” said the Kotzker, “God only lives wherever we let God in.”

In this week’s portion, Tetzaveh, God tells Moses:  “I will dwell among the Israelites, and I will be their God. And they shall know that I the Lord am their God, who brought them out from the land of Egypt to dwell in their midst, I the Lord their God" (Exodus 29: 45-46). As Rabbi Shai Held notes, this is a startling revelation; these verses, at least, suggest that God's goal in liberating the slaves was not to bring them to the land so much as to dwell in their midst along the way. On this account, intimacy with God, not inheritance of the land, is the goal of Exodus.

This is both helpful and hopeful, especially for those of us who do not live in the land of Israel.  Our challenge is to open ourselves to the possibility of intimacy with the Divine, wherever and whenever we are—to let God dwell among us by letting God in. 

How do we do this?  We might start with mindfulness and gratitude.  When we live consciously, with our eyes and our hearts open, we begin to notice things—sacred things—all around us.  We experience daily kindnesses as little miracles and, in giving thanks for them, create an opening for joy.  This is especially important this month of Adar, when we are commanded to rejoice.

In that spirit, here is a poem by Baron Wormser, “A Quiet Life”:

What a person desires in life

            is a properly boiled egg.

This isn’t as easy as it seems.

There must be gas and a stove,

            the gas requires pipelines, mastodon drills,

            banks that dispense the lozenge of capital.

There must be a pot, the product of mines

            and furnaces and factories,

            of dim early mornings and night-owl shifts,

            of women in kerchiefs and men with

            sweat-soaked hair.

Then water, the stuff of clouds and skies

            and God knows what causes it to happen.

There seems always too much or too little

            of it and more pipelines, meters, pumping

            stations, towers, tanks.

And salt—a miracle of the first order,

the ace in any argument for God.

Only God could have imagined from

            nothingness the pang of salt.

Political peace too.  It should be quiet

            when one eats an egg.  No political hoodlums

            knocking down doors, no lieutenants who are

            ticked off at their scheming girlfriends and

            take it out on you, no dictators

            posing as tribunes.

It should be quiet, so quiet  you can hear

            the chicken, a creature usually mocked as a type

            of fool, a cluck chained to the chore of her body.

Listen, she is there, pecking at a bit of grain

            that came from nowhere.