As this week’s Torah portion begins, Jacob is traveling alone from Beersheva toward Haran. He stops for the night and dreams of a ladder planted in the earth, rising to the heavens, with angels of God ascending and descending upon it. When Jacob wakes from his dream he declares, “God is in this place, and I did not know.” (Genesis 28:16)
It’s easy to marvel at God’s presence in the immediate aftermath of a peak experience, whether a prophetic dream like Jacob’s or a modern-day adventure: a holiday, a beautiful meal, kayaking with dolphins, sunset over the water — whatever a peak experience might be for you, real or imagined. When it happens, it’s easy to feel the presence of the holy.
It’s harder when life isn’t going smoothly. Where was God when my parents were dying? Or when depression clung to my heels and rooted me in one spot — or worse, convinced me that the place where I stood was one where holiness couldn’t possibly be? When life hurts, even the idea of the presence of God can feel like a daydream.
The real work is finding the presence of God with/in us even when the peak experiences are a million miles away. Not just in the sweetness of Shabbat, but also in the grind of the regular week. Not just when the world feels shiny, but also when justice and hope feel impossibly out of reach.
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I’ve come to see this as the most important spiritual move I can make — not using spiritual life to paper over what hurts, but learning how to allow pain to coexist with the holy. Often this is purely aspirational. But when I can get there, I feel clearly that God is also in the shiva house and in the hospital hallway where right now someone is pacing back and forth after receiving the worst possible news. When the world turns upside down, God is in that place too. Are we?
When Jacob awakes in the morning, he takes the stone that served as his pillow for the night and builds an altar from it. He then promises to serve God if God in turn protects him and returns him home safely. Overnight, Jacob shifts from “God is in this place” to “God, if You will be with me and protect me, then I will be Your servant.” His relationship with the holy seems to have become transactional. I catch myself doing this too. In a moment of extremis, it feels so natural to silently beg, God, I’ll do anything if You just make this turn out okay. But the bargaining takes me out of the mental and emotional state in which I might have been able to feel God’s presence in the first place.
God is in this place is a statement of awareness, and I don’t understand it to be limited either by space or by time. Yes, Jacob was talking about the particular spot where he set up an altar. But everything in the Torah is simultaneously about “them back then” and about us here and now. My favorite understanding of the angels on Jacob’s ladder is that they are our prayers and God’s responses. Our prayers are here — wherever we are.
The best tool I know for cultivating a sense that God is in this place is a meditation labyrinth. (Thankfully, there is one behind my synagogue, which means I get to walk one often.) Ours is a seven-circuit labyrinth — seven like the days of the week, or like the seven qualities we cultivate during the Omer period. Like every labyrinth, it has only one path. You walk in toward the center, and then turn around and walk the same path to return to where you began.
Because the labyrinth twists and turns, sometimes it feels like you’re going the wrong way. Every time I walk it, I’m reminded to pay attention to each stone where I place my feet. I am here in this place. And now this one. And now this one. The labyrinth reminds me to be present where I am, instead of focusing on wherever it is I thought I wanted to be going. When I notice my own presence in this place, I become better able to notice God’s too.
Lately, I feel a lot of empathy for Moses once he learned he wasn’t going to make it to the land of promise. Maybe that’s because after my heart attack a couple of years ago, I’m increasingly aware that I don’t get to control how long my life will be. Or maybe it’s because I fear that the world is going in the wrong direction, and I’m not sure I will live long enough to see that reality change.
But then I remember that in our cycle of weekly Torah readings, we don’t make it into the land, either. We get to the end of Deuteronomy and return to the beginning, as though we’d gone into a labyrinth and back out to start over. Maybe we don’t have the vision we need to really see the long view of where we’re going. Maybe turning away from our destination is actually part of how we get to where we need to go.
God is in this place, even when this place feels painful or frightening, even when we feel disillusioned or alone. If we can find the holiness right here, right now, then every place where we stand becomes a house of God.
This article initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge on December 7, 2024. To sign up to receive Recharge each week in your inbox, click here.
