On Wednesday I had the privilege of officiating a wedding – an elopement actually – that we held on the bluff at the ocean just beyond Commonweal in Bolinas. It was a spectacular day, and that is a spectacular place. It had poured rain on Monday and was gray and foggy on Tuesday. But Wednesday was clear, with dazzling blue sky, neon green grass, and blue ocean to the horizon. A coyote watched the nuptials from the next slope over and kestrels hovered completely still overhead as if they were the bride and groom’s attendants.
It was impossible to be in that spot in that moment without feeling the Divine flowing through the Universe. Out there on the first few feet of the Pacific Plate, at the conjunction of sky and land and water, in unseasonably and unreasonably bright weather. And not just the phyiscal beauty: this is a spot where many people sit and dream, watch sunsets, and heal. It is where attendees of Commonweal’s Cancer Help Program go to reckon with the changes in their lives. This is a special spot not only because of the nature, but because of the spirit that has been vested in that spot. Nature and spirit together. It could easily have been a travel poster for Creation itself.
And the tiny wedding was like the place – filled with spirit. We called in the directions and named the elements and then all the magic unfolded effortlessly, with the beautiful bluff and impending sunset doing all the heavy lifting. The Divine was clearly in that place.
In this week’s Torah portion, Vayetzeei, we have a famous moment in which Jacob realizes with a jolt that the place he is in is also infused with something Divine. He is leaving his childhood home, fleeing his angry birthright-robbed brother, when night falls. He selects a rock as a pillow and goes to sleep. He dreams of a ladder ascending to heaven. Angels climbing up and down it. God at the top, in some recognizable form, maybe not physically recognizable, but in the way that we know who the people in our dreams are without their having to be an exact likeness. In the dream, God offers blessing and prophecy. Then the story says:
וַיִּיקַ֣ץ יַעֲקֹב֮ מִשְּׁנָתוֹ֒ וַיֹּ֕אמֶר אָכֵן֙ יֵ֣שׁ יְהֹוָ֔ה בַּמָּק֖וֹם הַזֶּ֑ה וְאָנֹכִ֖י לֹ֥א יָדָֽעְתִּי׃
Vayikatz Ya’akov mishnato vayomer akhen yesh YHWH bamakom hazeh v’anokhi lo yada’ti.
“Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, ‘There is YHWH – Adonai – in this place and I, I didn’t know.’”
A very famous verse. A verse that raises questions more than it answers them. What is hamakom – the place? Is it this specific magical site, like the bluff in Bolinas? Or is it broader? Not hamakom meaning “place” but something more akin to “space”? Jacob noticing not that God exists in that localized way, but that God exists in the dimension of physical space overall. Maybe Jacob grew up hearing the stories of God talking to his grandfather Abraham and assumed God to be discrete and formed, with edges and boundaries. Thinking that God exists in one place at a time and talks to you from there. But now he felt Adonai in the land and the rocks and the trees and the sky overhead. God was in this place – God is in the realm of space – and he hadn’t perceived it before.
Later in rabbinic and mystical literature, Hamakom – “the place” – becomes another way we refer to God. Barukh Hamakom, we say. “Blessed is God.” And some say that we choose that name of God as a means of expressing God’s ubiquity. God exists in and is all space; all the physical dimensions that we are used to moving in, and dimensions beyond those. Hamakom is the Divine that exists in dimensions. The Reconstructionist siddur regularly translates this name of God, Hamakom, as “Omnipresent One” which, admittedly, is not a God-name that is easy to snuggle up to with one’s most intimate prayer. But that translation is trying to point toward this spacial, immanent understanding of a God-soaked Universe.
Today I was at Kaiser all morning for an infusion that I get every 8 weeks to manage a condition of my gut, a condition I had managed – not too well – with pills for 30 years before turning to this new drug. My vein was pierced on only the second try, which is good for me, and I was hooked up to an IV. Since this medication is new to me, I am still in a state of excitement and gratitude and wonder about it – it has stopped all my difficult symptoms entirely. I know that this is, in its way, miracle. As much as I look with caution at the pharmaceutical industry, I hold the awareness that someone dreamt up treating my condition this way; someone with a sense of purpose and a gift for biological problem-solving. And beyond that person, who knows how many people were involved in the development of this drug; and how many more gave over their time and talents and bodies in the clinical trials and the licensing process? This is a huge success, a gift to me and to people like me, and I marvel at the human ability to be inspired and to create and to heal. Sitting there with this chemical dripping into my veins, I said over and over, yesh YHWH bamakom hazeh. God is in this place.
I said it. And I believed it in some intellectual, theological way. But I noticed that I didn’t feel it. There, in the hermetically sealed building, on an electric recliner, with plastic tubes and metal needles and lots of tape and alcohol wipes, nurses in uniform, masks on faces, rolling office chairs, and baskets of pre-packaged snacks, I was not feeling the immanent Divine like I felt the moment deserved. What is it that keeps me from feeling Hamakom, feeling God’s spirit and inspiration flowing through all space, when 2 days ago on the high bluff it was so obvious?
A piece of it might have to do with the second part of what Jacob said. He said, anokhi lo yadati. “I, I did not know.” We often translate the phrase this way – “I, I did not know,” with a repetition of the “I”, not because Jacob was hesitant and fumbling for words, but rather to reflect a quirk of the Hebrew. In Hebrew it’s enough to say lo yadati – “I didn’t know.” The “I”, the first person, is embedded right in the verb, the way it is in, say, the Spanish word hablo – “I speak.” But in this verse of Torah, a free-standing first-person pronoun – anokhi, – “I” – is added, bringing extra emphasis to the first person of it. As if Jacob was pointing out something distinctly personal – first-personal – about his experience. As if he were saying, “Others might have known that the Divine is here, but I for one did not.”
Or the wording might point to something else. That the “I” separates us somehow from the world around us. Severs our connectivity. In her book, My Stroke of Insight, scientist Jill Bolte Taylor describes her experience of a massive left-hemisphere stroke. She describes losing her sense of self, of personal particularity, and in losing it, losing the discrete boundaries of everything. She was part of an Ocean of Being, indistinguishable from it. Without the “I” we are fully in the soup of Creation and we are the soup of Creation.
But in our typical, “healthy-brained” existence, there is a distinct self, an I, an ego. And while that serves us as an evolutionary adaptation, it also fishes us out of the Ocean of Being. Jacob adds the extra anokhi, the extra “I”, because he understands that some primal part of him was always aware of the Divine infusing every place and every thing. But his anokhi, his ego-self, robbed him of the ability to perceive it.
The Torah portion continues:
וַיִּירָא֙ וַיֹּאמַ֔ר מַה־נּוֹרָ֖א הַמָּק֣וֹם הַזֶּ֑ה
Vayira vayomer mah nora hamakom hazeh.
“Jacob was awe-struck and said, mah nora, how wondrous is Hamakom hazeh – how wondrous is this place.” Or “how wondrous is Hamakom” – the Divine that takes form in the Universe, that takes the form of the Universe.
For us it often takes leaving human enterprise behind to feel the Divine in the Universe. We go to nature. Or meditate in some special protected place. The more we are surrounded by the products and inventions and flotsam and jetsam of human activity, the harder it is to feel all that shefa, all that Divine that pours through everything. How hard it was for me today to feel the Divine not just in the brilliant medicine, but in the sterile plastic tube, and the bin full of biohazardous waste that the needle gets tossed into.
Anokhi – I – lives in the world of pronouns. The world in which things can be pointed to and discussed as if they are separate from each other. But with regular practice, we can sometimes succeed in rearranging the letters of anokhi (אנכי) to be k’ayin (כאין) – “like nothingness, like infinity”. In those rare and precious moments we stand a chance of feeling the awe and beauty Jacob experiences. Mah nora Hamakom hazeh: how wondrous this place!
Meditation, nature, personal prayer are just some of our practices to turn anokhi – the separate, defined ego – into k’ayin – something more like infinity-consciousness. May we keep practicing. So that not only on beautiful rocky bluffs under sky and hawks with rising moon and setting sun, but also in our human lives, in the inventions we’re proud of and the inventions that have counter-served us, in our homes, in our cars, in the places that feel most removed and disconnected from the world of nature and the world of Spirit, we may sometimes notice yesh YHWH bamakom hazeh – God is in this place. Even this place.
Take a moment and look around at your surroundings right now. The walls. The windows. The doors. The tables. The computer you are staring at and the image of your own face on the screen. Take in the fullness of it all. Imagine everything outside your space as well, and let it all be united together. Feel the YHWH, the Adonai, the God, the Divine, that is in all of it, that is all of it. How beautiful, you might say, how beautiful you are, Beloved. Yesh YHWH bamakom hazeh. Mah nora Hamakom hazeh – God is in this place, how wondrous it all is.