Where are You?
If he perseveres and has the courage to take at least the first step, he commences a dialogue with God. The path of return will be shown to him.
If he perseveres and has the courage to take at least the first step, he commences a dialogue with God. The path of return will be shown to him.
“With ten sayings, the world was created” (Avot, 5).
These ten sayings are the channels of Divine Energy; they correspond to what the Kabbalists call sefirot or spiritual functions. We find them at the beginning of Bereishit: “And God said, let there be light! And God said, let the waters be divided!“
Just as human speech conveys and contains the thoughts of the speaker, the Divine sayings, namely the creation, convey and contain the Creator’s thought, and, even more so, the Creator’s presence. We can thus affirm that His presence fills the universe; everything, from the smallest cell to the most imposing galaxy, is a garment, a word that expresses His thought. Nothing exists without meaning; nothing subsists independently. Everything is guided, meticulously orchestrated and controlled: God is One!
And man’s purpose on earth is to decipher the great message of the world. To understand what God intended by the mountains and seas, flowers and birds, fire and clouds. To understand and then to act accordingly, as did Avraham, our first Patriarch, who traced for mankind the route of faith. Faith leads us to knowledge; it allows us to make the connection between the appearance of the world and its innermost meaning. Through our understanding of what surrounds us, we are able to enter into harmony with our environment. This takes us to the foot of Mount Sinai, where the Ten Sayings emerge from their mystery to become the Ten Commandments (clear indications).
Knowing this, we can no longer say of a transgressor who has strayed from the state of harmony and lost himself in the paths of revolt, that he has distanced himself from God. There is no place far from Him, without Him. As King David said, “If I sink into the abyss, You are here!”
Despair does not exist! Nonetheless, in this abyss where he has been led by misguided choices, the transgressor seems isolated, because in that place, the Divine presence is very much concealed. Near, yet far at the same time, as the thoughts of a man who speaks in a language we no longer understand. We hear the words, but we do not understand what they mean.
God is constantly calling out to the transgressor, but he does not understand the message… He only needs to take a hold of himself, to at least feel his innermost turmoil. Let him break his silence and call out, “God, where are You? I know that You are nearby, but I have lost my way; I no longer understand. Show Yourself to me! Help me!”
However deep the abyss into which he has sunk by his wrong-doings, as soon as he begins to search, to pray and to ask, as soon as he cries out, “Where are You?” the transgressor begins to feel in his heart an echo of the Divine presence, a note of comfort. If he perseveres and has the courage to take at least the first step, he commences a dialogue with God. The path of return will be shown to him.
***
Know that God’s glory fills the universe. There is no place that is not permeated by His presence. Even if we find ourselves far from the Torah, we will not say that we cannot serve God because the secular environment constantly assails us. For in every material object, even in all the languages of the world, God can be found! Without divine energy, words and objects would have absolutely no existence.
The further one recedes from holiness, however, the greater is the veiling of the divine light.
Even if you have sunk into the abyss of evil and even if you place yourself at a very low level and feel that from this level you can never draw close to God, know that even from there, He can be found. From down there, too, you can attach yourself to Him and make perfect repentance. It is not beyond your reach, it is within everyone’s grasp at every moment of one’s life.
The word “chet” “a sin” in Hebrew is, in fact made up of three letters, but only two are pronounced. The last letter (the aleph) is silent. It is this letter, aleph, which symbolizes “Unity” and “Eternity.” This teaches us, says the Baal Shem Tov, that there is an element of good hidden in every sin. In the wrongdoing, the good has been captured and mixed with the bad.
When we are sorry that we transgressed, by the power of repentance we cancel out retroactively the bad inherent in the transgression and only the good remains.
This is expressed by our sages in the following way: “Whoever repents transforms his transgressions into merit.” This is so because the negative aspect has been removed from the act, and only the positive aspect remains – the good, the aleph.
So, heartbroken by their sin and out of a true will to reconciled with God, Adam and Chava (Eve) acknowledged their failure and humbly recognized their exclusion from Paradise, the previous order. But they did not lose heart, and with their yearnings searched and found the supernal light.
Due to their perseverance, they discovered an even greater fulfillment than paradise. The upper consciousness from where flows down repentance that ties the lowest to the highest and produces an eternal delight.
Since earnest penitents outshine even the truly righteous, the lowest is designed to reach the highest.
To be continued…
(Used with permission from COURAGE by Israel Isaac Besancon. Published by Shir Chadash Publishers).
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