Finding God in the everyday
Rabbi Yaakov Shimshon of Kosov (Ukraine, 1814-1880) loved to share with his students the stories of the great Jewish mystics, the Hassidim.
It once happened after morning prayers that Rabbi Yaakov began to tell one story after another without stopping. He and his students were lifted to such a state of divine rapture that they stepped out of time. The day passed, and it wasn’t until late in the afternoon that the Rabbi told his final tale. Soon afterwards, ever so slowly, everyone returned to the reality of the physical world, realizing that they had eaten neither breakfast nor lunch.
One of the students stood up and honoured Rabbi Yaakov, saying: “Until this moment, Rabbi, I did not really understand Moshe Rabbeinu, Moses our sacred teacher, when he said that while on Mount Sinai he ate no bread and drank no water (Exodus 34:28). Now I know what it is like to be filled with the very presence of God and to feel no further need to eat or drink.”
Rabbi Yaakov nodded his appreciation to his student and said, “Your interpretation is a worthy one, my son, but perhaps Moses was not celebrating his transcendence of food and drink, but actually regretting it?”
Perhaps Moses realized, Rabbi Yaakov imagined, that in those 40 days on Mount Sinai when he neither ate nor drank, he had actually failed to uplift the divine sparks in his own bread and water. In the world to come, would these sparks complain to the Holy One that Moses did them a grave disservice by putting his own love of God before their liberation? (From Rabbi Rami Shapiro’s book, Hassidic Tales.)
Rabbi Yaakov was drawing upon a foundational Jewish principle that all the parts of creation, even food and drink, contain a spark of the divine, a Nitzotz in Hebrew. A human being’s deepest spiritual work is to release those sparks and return them to God by using the things of this world in a righteous and honourable manner.
Imagine that. Even Moses, the only human being to come face to face with HaShem, the divine, needed to focus on the ordinary.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972) famously taught that we tend to read the Bible looking for mighty acts from God. Meanwhile, the God of the Bible is actually waiting for us human beings to find life’s greatest mysteries in the beautiful simplicities of our every day lives.
Listen carefully to the words of the Prophet Elijah, “There was a great and mighty wind, splitting mountains and shattering rocks by the power of the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind, an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake, fire; but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire, a kol demamah dakkah, the sound of a delicate silence.” (1 Kings 19)
The divine, Rabbi Heschel was teaching us, as was Rabbi Yaakov in our story above, is found in the ordinariness. The everyday. The seemingly most mundane aspects of our lives. That is where God resides.