Jacob awoke from his sleep. “G-d is truly in this place,” he said, “but I did not know it.”
The Book of Esther runs ten chapters without once naming G-d. A queen conceals her people, a minister builds a gallows, and a king who cannot sleep has the royal chronicles read to him on the one night it matters. Every turn of the story depends on timing that no one in it arranged, and the text never says who arranged it. The rabbis heard that silence as a statement. In Chullin 139b, Rav Mattana is asked where Esther can be found in the Torah, and he answers with a single verse from Deuteronomy: haster astir, “I will utterly hide.” The rabbis hear the hiding in the heroine’s name. The book that never mentions G-d becomes the book of His presence, because a presence that works without announcing itself has not stopped working. That leaves the question the scroll never answers. If He is in every turn of the story, why does no one in the story see Him?
The Hidden Face
The verse Rav Mattana cites is not gentle.
I will hide My face from them and they will be [their enemies’] prey. … On that day I will utterly hide My face because of all the evil that they have done in turning to alien gods.
Read quickly, it sounds like departure. Read slowly, it says something narrower. The Hebrew panim, face, does more work than anatomy. Maimonides, in the Guide for the Perplexed, I:37, lists among its meanings “attention and regard.” It is the sense in which Leviticus forbids a judge to have regard for the poor or the great, and in which the priestly blessing’s turned face means providence going with the one who is blessed. To hide the face is to withdraw regard. It is not to withdraw. A man who turns his face away is still in the room, and his hands and his back are still there. The verse says G-d hides His face. It never says He leaves.
In Guide III:51, Maimonides takes the reading further and locates the cause of the hiding in Israel itself. “It is clear that we ourselves are the cause of this hiding of the face, and that the screen that separates us from G-d is of our own creation.” For Maimonides, the bond between a person and G-d runs through the mind’s attention, and the same chapter supplies the image. Those whose thoughts are wholly directed toward Him are “always in bright sunshine.” Those who know Him but are busy with other matters “have then as it were a cloudy day: the sun does not shine for them on account of the cloud that intervenes between them and G-d.” The sun has not moved. The cloud is low, and it is ours.
The Torah never leaves the hiding without its counterpart. “If you pursue Him with all your heart and soul, you will eventually find Him” (Deuteronomy 4:29). Jeremiah repeats the promise to the exiles in Babylon: “You will search for Me and find Me, if only you seek Me wholeheartedly” (Jeremiah 29:13). A face that can be found was never gone.
The Baal Shem Tov told the matter as a parable, and his grandson, Moshe Chaim Ephraim of Sudilkov, preserved it in Degel Machaneh Ephraim on the haftarah for Ki Tavo. A king surrounds himself with walls, one within another, with rivers and soldiers and wild beasts between them, and all of it, the parable says, is made of illusion: achizat einayim, literally a seizing of the eyes. “His glory fills the earth; only the walls and the windings hide the face of the king.” Those who come for the rewards the king has promised turn back at the first wall, or the fifth. The king’s son does not. He longs for his father, cries out, and throws himself at the walls. When the father sees the son’s longing, he removes the illusions, “and he saw: there was no wall there, and no separating screen” (masach mavdil), only level ground, gardens and orchards, and the king on his throne. The Degel’s reading of the parable is direct. Whoever knows that everything hiding the King’s face “is no hiding, for the whole earth is full of His glory” knows what the son learned at the last wall. For the Degel, the concealment was felt, but it was never real. The King who allowed it, the Degel adds, created the world in lovingkindness and “wants them to recognize His divinity.”
Attention for Use
Most of a week is spent looking at things for what they do. Coffee is for waking, the car is for getting there, the inbox is for clearing, and money is for spending or keeping. None of this is a failure. A life has to be run, and attention that tracks use is how it gets run. But attention of this kind sees each thing as a step toward something else, and a thing seen only as a step is never seen as itself.
The problem is not the objects. Chassidut describes the divine as memaleh kol almin, filling all worlds, and sovev kol almin, surrounding them: within and beyond at once. If that holds, the coffee, the car and the money are not outside it. Nothing has to be set aside for the presence to be there. What has to change is the angle of approach.
Martin Buber put it in the plainest possible terms. In I and Thou—Ich und Du, where Du is the intimate “you” of German—he considers a tree. He can look on it as a picture, or perceive it as movement. He can “classify it in a species and study it as a type,” recognize it “only as an expression of law,” or “perpetuate it in number, in pure numerical relation.” “In all this the tree remains my object.” Then something else can happen, “if I have both will and grace,” and the tree is met whole, as Thou. Buber is exact about what that meeting costs, which is nothing. “It is not necessary for me to give up any of the ways in which I consider the tree. There is nothing from which I would have to turn my eyes away in order to see, and no knowledge that I would have to forget.” Picture and movement, species and type, law and number all remain, “indivisibly united” in the encounter.
The Same Ladder
Psalm 46 puts one word before the knowing: harpu. “Desist! Realize that I am G-d!” (Psalm 46:11). The verb means to cease, to let be. The psalm’s setting is war, with bows broken and spears snapped, but the order of the command holds beyond it: the ceasing comes first, and the knowing follows. What is let go of is not the world. It is the grip, the hand closed around each thing for what it can do.
A physicist can look at a tree and go down through its layers. The tree is made of cells, the cells of molecules, and the molecules of forces described, at the bottom, in mathematics. She can reach the bottom and say: nothing but. The same physicist, on another morning, can go down through the same layers and say: more than. Nothing she knows has to be given up between the two mornings; Buber’s tree has already shown that. She has gone nowhere new. She stands in the same place. What differs is what she knows there, which is Jacob’s word, yadati, “I knew.” Between sleeping and waking he did not move. The place was the same, and only his knowing of it changed.
The traditions that train this attention converge less in doctrine than in a physical act. Psalm 1 describes the one who delights in Torah: “he studies that teaching day and night” (Psalm 1:2). The verb is yehgeh, from hagah, and the JPS note gives its literal sense: he utters it. Isaiah uses the same root for a lion growling over its prey (31:4) and for Hezekiah’s moaning like a dove (38:14). Hagah is study as sound, words carried under the breath until they are known by heart.
When the Psalms passed into Latin, yehgeh became meditabitur, and the monks who chanted them kept the older sense of the word. Jean Leclercq, in The Love of Learning and the Desire for G-d, traces it back. The Latin meditari “is used generally to translate the Hebrew haga, and like the latter, means, fundamentally, to learn the Torah and the words of the Sages, while pronouncing them usually in a low tone, in reciting them to oneself, in murmuring them with the mouth.” The ancients, he notes, would have called it not learning by heart but “learning by mouth.” The twelfth-century Carthusian Guigo II gave the practice its classic form as lectio divina, a ladder of four rungs: lectio, meditatio, oratio, contemplatio—reading, meditation, prayer, contemplation. He called it the Scala Claustralium, the ladder of the cloistered, and scala is the word the Latin Bible gives to the ladder Jacob saw. Guigo makes the allusion himself: its “lower end rests upon the earth, but its top pierces the clouds and touches heavenly secrets.” In The Ladder of Monks he also gave the practice an image: “Reading, as it were, puts food whole into the mouth, meditation chews it and breaks it up, prayer extracts its flavor, contemplation is the sweetness itself which gladdens and refreshes.”
Al-Ghazali, the Persian theologian who left a celebrated teaching post to follow the Sufi way, describes that path in Deliverance from Error and sets the same act at its threshold. The way requires “the total purification of the heart from everything other than G-d Most High. Its key … is the utter absorption of the heart in the remembrance of G-d.” That remembrance is dhikr: the divine names, repeated until the repetition carries the one repeating. Ghazali is careful about what lies at the far end. The state there is “a closeness to G-d which one group almost conceives of as ‘indwelling,’ and another as ‘union,’ and another as ‘reaching’: but all that is wrong.” In Ghazali’s Arabic the three are hulul, ittihad and wusul.
Patanjali, whose Yoga Sutra systematized classical yoga, names the syllable and the practice in two sutras: “The name designating him is the mystical syllable oṁ,” and “Its repetition and the contemplation of its meaning [should be performed]” (I.27–28, in Edwin Bryant’s translation). The repetition is japa, a term Bryant traces to the old Vedic ritual texts, “where it referred to the soft recitation of Vedic mantras by the priest.” Four lamps share one act: words murmured under the breath until they open.
None of these practices produces what it prepares for. Guigo is exact about this. Meditation shows the soul a sweetness that “belongs to purity of heart, but which it does not give. A man will not experience this sweetness while reading or meditating ‘unless it happened to be given him from above.’” What the practitioner brings is kavanah, intention, attention aimed. Without it the words are only sound, which is why prayer, rightly understood, is not a message sent somewhere else but a turning of the one who prays. The ladder can be prepared, but its last rung is received.
The Unnamed Lamp
Some people do this with no framework at all. They sit with the breath for twenty minutes before work. They walk without headphones. They notice the pattern in a day’s interruptions and stop fighting its current. They would not call what happens there prayer, and nothing obliges them to. The capacity for this attention is older than any tradition and does not wait for any tradition’s permission. It belongs to being human.
What the frameworks add is orientation: not the capacity, but the direction it faces. That is not a ranking. A lamp that does not name its flame is still burning, and it is still lit from somewhere. The secular practitioner who goes down through attention arrives where the contemplative arrives, because the ladder has only one bottom. What each one knows there is a separate matter, and vocabulary does not settle it.
Every Part a Whole
Maimonides describes what happens when the descent is made facing toward its source. In the Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Yesodei HaTorah 2:2, he asks what the path to love and awe of G-d is, and he answers with attention to the world: “When a person contemplates His wondrous and great deeds and creations and appreciates His infinite wisdom that surpasses all comparison, he will immediately love, praise, and glorify [Him].” As he keeps reflecting, “he will immediately recoil in awe and fear.” This is not attention to what things are for. It is attention to what they are, and then to what that is made of, and further still.
At each level of that descent, the part does not shrink into a component. It opens into a whole. The Kabbalists built this into their account of the divine itself. The sefirot, the ten attributes through which the divine is understood to act, are not ten sealed compartments. Each holds aspects of the others. Sanford Drob, in Symbols of the Kabbalah, traces the doctrine through the sixteenth-century Safed Kabbalist Moses Cordovero and his behinot, the numberless aspects contained within any single sefirah. Look closely at any one, and it holds the rest.
Buddhism reaches for the same structure in Indra’s Net: a lattice of jewels in which every jewel reflects every other, and each reflection reflects again, without center or edge. In the Huayan school, the image teaches interpenetration: nothing exists on its own, and each thing contains all things. The structure matches the sefirot, with every part holding the whole. The account of what that structure is does not. Huayan names no creator and no ground; the net is neither pantheism nor panentheism, a universe without a container. Two traditions go down to the same place and know it differently.
The command to Abram reads differently in this light. “Walk before Me and be perfect” (Genesis 17:1). The word is tamim: whole, complete, sound, the word the Torah uses for an offering without blemish. It describes a person of integrity, undivided. It does not mean a person who sees wholes. But the two belong together. Attention split among uses splits the one attending, and attention that meets each thing whole asks the same wholeness of the one who meets it. Abram is told to walk before the face and to be whole, in that order.
The Back
Moses asked for more. “Please let me have a vision of Your Glory” (Exodus 33:18). The answer came:
I have a special place where you can stand on the rocky mountain. When My glory passes by, I will place you in a crevice in the mountain, protecting you with My power until I pass by. I will then remove My protective power, and you will have a vision of what follows from My existence. My essence itself, however, will not be seen.
Kaplan’s translation has already done the interpreting, and his notes give the Hebrew plainly. “My power” is literally kapi, “My hand.” “What follows from My existence” is literally achorai, “My back.” “My essence” is literally panai, “My face.” The rendering follows the reading Maimonides gives achorai in Guide I:38: “thou shalt perceive that which follows me, is similar to me, and is the result of my will, i.e., all things created by me.” The face is withheld. The back is the world.
Everything in the scene is given. The place to stand is given, and so is the cleft. The covering hand is given, and so is its removal. Moses brings the asking and nothing more; the seeing is handed to him from the other side, as it was to the son at the last wall.
Before Jacob woke at Bethel, he saw a ladder. “A ladder was standing on the ground, and its top reached up toward heaven. G-d’s angels were going up and down on it” (Genesis 28:12). He had stopped there only because the sun had set, and he took some of the place’s stones and lay down among them. Moses asked for the face on a mountain and was shown the back, which by Maimonides’ reading is everything that follows from G-d: every made thing, every stone. Jacob woke and said G-d was in this place. He was right, and more right than he could have said. He had spent the whole night lying on what Moses climbed a mountain to see.
In the morning Jacob “took the stone that he had placed under his head. He stood it up as a pillar and poured oil on top of it” (Genesis 28:18). He did not go looking for a better stone or carry this one up a mountain. He stood up the one he had slept on, where it lay, and named the place for what it had been all night: Beth-El, the house of G-d.
Source note: Translations draw on Aryeh Kaplan’s The Living Torah, the JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh, M. Friedländer’s translation of The Guide for the Perplexed, Ronald Gregor Smith’s translation of I and Thou, Edmund Colledge and James Walsh’s translation of The Ladder of Monks, Richard J. McCarthy’s translation of Deliverance from Error, and Edwin F. Bryant’s translation of the Yoga Sutras; the passage from Degel Machaneh Ephraim is translated from the Hebrew. Online links are provided for reference; their translations may differ from those quoted here.
Discover more from Many Lamps, One Flame
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.