Stumbling on God

Vayetze
Genesis 28:10-32:3

by Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman,
an author and speaker on Jewish ritual, prayer, and spirituality, is a professor of liturgy at the Hebrew Union College in Manhattan.

Elementary, my dear Watson,” says fabled detective Sherlock Holmes, admonishing his benighted colleague that everything has a cause and that every cause leaves its mark in clues. Aristotle, actually, had said as much over two millennia earlier. Almost no one reads Aristotle today, but he was once as popular as Sherlock Holmes would eventually be, and one of his most devout students was Moses Maimonides.

What bothered both Aristotle and Maimonides was the potential for infinite regress, because if everything has a cause, then no matter how far back you go, there must be some prior cause even for that cause. So they posited a “first cause,” a single “something” that is not caused by anything but that is the primal cause behind everything else. Maimonides called that “God.” If all other causes disappear, he said, God — who depends on nothing — would still remain; but were God to disappear, everything else — which ultimately depends on God — would instantly perish.

Maimonides died in 1204, the beginning of a century that would culminate in the Zohar, the kabalistic masterpiece that popularized a new name for this origin of all existence: Ein Sof, “Endless.” Kabala interpreter Arthur Green calls it “the hidden reaches of infinity.” Like Maimonides’ divine First Cause, Ein Sof is the ever present bedrock beginning of everything — very much (says Green) like the Talmud’s name for God, Hamakom, “The Place,” — not this place rather than that one, but the infinite reach that puts God simultaneously in every place, always.

Not for nothing, then, does our sedra begin, Vayifga bamakom vayalen sham, which our standard Jewish Bible translates, “He [Jacob] came upon a certain place and stopped there for the night.” But vayifga here is better understood as “stumbled upon”; vayalen need not imply that Jacob dwelt there for only one night; and makom is widely interpreted as Hamakom, the spatial name for the endlessness of God. Putting it all together, we see Jacob’s story beginning, “He stumbled upon God’s endless and eternal presence [Hamakom], intent on “dwelling there” as long as he could, before renewing his journey back home.”

But if God as Hamakom is everywhere, always (like Maimonides’ indestructible “first cause” and the Zohar’s boundless ein sof ), we should wonder how Jacob could have “stumbled” upon it — he must already have been there! What Jacob stumbled upon, then, was not new geography but new insight: that his finite makom (“place”) was part of the infinite Hamakom (“The Place”). It dawned on him that wherever he might stop off in the journey of his life, God would be precisely there. As the Karliner hasidim put it, Jacob stumbled upon the understanding that whatever makom he inhabited must be “the right place at the right time.” So Jacob vowed to “truly dwell in it” and grasp its divine potential.

Our sedra ends as it began: with the notion of “stumbling upon.” Having resumed his journey, Jacob is on the move, in no place at all, because he is merely passing through. Now it is not Jacob who stumbles upon a place, but “angels of God” who stumble upon Jacob. Apparently, when we inhabit no makom in which to find God as Hamakom, God finds us.

From the first instance of “stumbling,” we learn that when we pause somewhere on life’s journey, truly making it our mental and spiritual home, we find that our temporary place is part of the eternal place of God. The second instance teaches that we are sometimes on the run between one place and another — between jobs, homes, or life-cycle stages, perhaps. These are the in-between times where, having no makom ourselves, we can hardly discover we are part of the infinite Hamakom. But precisely when God seems absent, God’s presence is announced by angelic signs: a kiss from someone we love, a surprise phone call from a friend, or an unexpected kindness from a stranger.

Sherlock Holmes would have called them clues to Maimonides’ First Cause, Kabala’s Ein Sof, the Talmud’s Hamakom — the God who knows no bounds.

Like Jacob, we too settle down in one makom or another, potentially stumbling on the presence of Hamakom in them all. Also, like Jacob, we are often on the move, in between places, as if in a desert where all we can do is travel blindly on, hoping to find our next makom eventually, somewhere. But in such times, when we cannot find God, we can at least cast about for clues of God’s presence. The mystery of God is the infinitude of Hamakom, God’s limitless capacity to be available to us whenever we happen to be anywhere, but also when we fear we are nowhere at all.