How do I Know God is There?

Note: At Temple Micah, every b’nai mitzvah student gets to ask their rabbi a question of their own choosing to be answered by the rabbi as part of their sermon the morning of the b’nai mitzvah. This is one of those sermons.

Dear Aaron -

As is custom in this Temple Micah community, my remarks this morning are a response to your question.

Aaron, you asked me, “How do I know when God is there?” How is God present in someone’s life? What does it feel like to connect with God?”

One answer to this is are the words of the bible’s book of Ecclesiastes - “ein od milvado,” - that there is none else but God. Traditionally this was just understood to be good old monotheism: there is no other God. But the mystics put a creative spin on this, and understand “there is none else but God” to mean that there is literally nothing other than God - meaning God is everything.

In this understanding, God is everywhere, and God is everything.

It is how JD Salinger puts it in one of his novels, where a character watches his sister preparing her bowl of cereal is mystified by the idea that she is pouring God into God.

While poetic, the answer to your question is not - Aaron, God is everywhere and everything and you just need to learn how to see that God is in the bowl and in the milk and in the cereal.

For me - such an approach is exhausting, and frankly, feels too small.

Because I believe in a God that is beyond everything -

Beyond our understanding

And Beyond our comprehension

And yet- I also believe in a God like the one you ask about -

A God that is knowable - that I can know and feel God’s presence with me

Yes- that is a contradiction

But what better description of God as “The One shaped by contradictions”

So In search of contradictions and convictions, I return to our biblical ancestors, who so desired God’s presence - and to know when it was, in fact, God.

The Psalmist declares that they only have one request of God -

Just to see God’s house- and well, maybe to have a peak at God, too.

Jacob has a dream of angels -ascending and descending a ladder to the heavens

And wakes up in amazement - perhaps some frustration

יֵשׁ יְהֹוָה בַּמָּקוֹם הַזֶּה וְאָנֹכִי לֹא יָדָעְתִּי׃

God is in this place, and I didn’t even know it.

מַה־נּוֹרָא הַמָּקוֹם הַזֶּה - he says, how awesome is this place and this moment

And then creates a ritual marker -

A way for him to remember the experience of God’s presence

And of course, the very purpose of the Tabernacle, the Mishkan you taught us about this morning

Was to be a place where you could encounter God

The Mishkan Ohel Mo’ed - was its full name

The dwelling place of meeting

Where God could be invited in, and could be encountered

Yet- even those encounters came with limits -

Moses - even Moses desired to know God more -

Moses - who had conversations with God - but had never seen God -

Says, “ הַרְאֵנִי נָא אֶת־כְּבֹדֶךָ׃”

Just let me see you! Moses desires -

Let me peek behind the Divine curtain -

God’s reply - “you cannot see My face, for a human being may not see Me and live.”

But still, Moses yearns for closeness - he wants to KNOW God is there -

Even as he knows that God is too big, too unknowable, so much so that he would not survive a true face-to-face encounter

So God let’s him see a glimpse-

Through a crack in a broken rock

God passes by, and allows Moses to see God’s back

And this, Aaron, is where I draw inspiration for my first answer

Because the contradiction here is to know God’s unknowability

And to desire knowledge of it

So I think we, too, must search for glimpses of God

Einstein suggested we might find God in coincidences,

“Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous,” he wrote.

What we call coincidence - two strangers running into each other at the moment they most need each other

Meeting a person who has exactly what you need when you need it

Because when you consider the vastness of the universe and all of existence, it is much more likely that we shouldn’t exist than that we do

Just the very fact that the right combination of DNA came together to make you, me, all of us, Aaron

That, perhaps, is a glimpse of God

So we must name it - allow ourselves to be awed and amazed by the improbability of it all

The bigness of God should not cause us to miss the miracles of the minute

That we exist

That we can imagine

That we can love

That we can sing

And yet- I wonder how many of us are Jacob walking through the world, sleeping

Unaware or apathetic to the idea that we are living in impossibility

We are living in a beautiful contradiction -

And so we must do what he did -

Look around - and acknowledge the moments that feel beyond comprehension

To not brush them off- but instead, to name them

In the words of our prayer book -

When we “walk sightless among miracles.”

We have to see “wherever we gaze, that the bush burns unconsumed.”

And we, clay touched by God, will reach out for holiness, and exclaim in wonder: How filled with awe is this place, and we did not know it!”

So first, we must attune ourselves to the miracles that too often go unacknowledged,

And then from our place of amazement - name it, as Jacob does

Or else - the best moments of our lives

The moments of transcendent awe

The moments of phenomenal coincidence

Of connection and care and joy

Of moments like this one - a holy moment when a new generation of a people who against odds, and all logical assumptions have survived

A holy moment when he stands up and says the words those people have been saying for thousands of years

We must call it what it is -

Holy, holy, holy

We might even dare to suggest - God is in this place, can we know it?

For all the moments that feel indescribable - maybe that’s how we know God is there -

Because we are existing in a moment that is itself beyond comprehension

Which perhaps is exactly the moment where we are touching God

Or at least seeing a glimpse

T.M. Lehrman says we do this through “microprocesses of attention, ways of using the mind so that the invisible other can be grasped [which enable us] to hold on to the possibility of presence.”

And that possibility of presence is available to us beyond the big moments of awe - beyond those moments that already feel outside of space and time, where it might be easier to imagine that possibility of presence

And here, too, is where the ancients come to give us language,

קָרוֹב יְהֹוָה לְכׇל־קֹרְאָיו

God is near to all those that call out to God

And this is echoed in the words of Medieval Spanish poet Yehudah HaLevi

WHERE might I go to find You, Exalted, Hidden One?

Yet where would I not go to find You, Everpresent, Eternal One?

My heart cries out to You:

Please draw near to me.

The moment I reach out for You, I find You reaching in for me.

HaLevi knows that your very question is a contradiction -

How do I know when God is there?

You can’t.

How do I know when God is there?

You’ll know.

How do I know when God is there?

You called.

You reached out.

And God reached in.

Mazel tov, again, Aaron-

On reaching this day- this day of holiness - of the active invitation of God’s presence.

Your friend,

Rabbi Crawley