The Enigma: God's House or Gateway to Heaven

“And (he) lay down in that place. And he dreamt; a ladder was fixed to the ground and its top reached to heaven … And Yacov awoke from his sleep …and he [was overcome with awe] and in fear he said, ‘How awesome is this place. This is none other than the house of God, and it is the gateway to heaven.”

The place where Yacov slept, dreamt of the ladder, and suddenly awoke was makom ha’mikdash, the destined place of the Temple in Jerusalem. At the moment Yacov awoke, he expressed the essence of the place in two contradictory terms: “the house of God” and “the gateway to heaven.” Contradictory because house of God implies the imminence of God within our world, while gateway to heaven points to Gods remoteness, His far off presence that transcends the limitations of our world. Gateway to heaven, it seems, transforms the Beit Hamikdash from a place where God is to be found and encountered, to a passageway to a far higher, distant place of ultimate Godliness.

Where Actually Is God?

This contradictory description touches on a deep, critical, existential question: Where is God?

As it turns out, the resolution of this enigma was expressed by King Solomon at the inauguration of the First Temple.

“But will God actually dwell on earth? For even the highest heavens cannot contain You, how much less this House that I have built!” (Kings I 8:27)

King Solomon himself grappled with the seemingly impossible notion of the infinite nature of God somehow being contained within the confines of a man made structure. In a similar fashion, the medrash tells us that, “Rabbi Yehuda bar Simon said that, ‘Moshe heard three things from God that left him stunned and confused. When God said, ‘Make for Me a mikdash (sanctuary) and I will dwell among them,’ Moshe said, ‘Master of the World, how can that be, ‘even the highest heavens cannot contain You!’ To which God replied, ‘Moshe, it’s not what you are thinking, rather, ‘twenty beams in the north, twenty beams in the south, eight in the west and eight in the east, and I will constrict My Shechina and dwell amongst them.’ And so it says, (Exodus 25:22), ‘And I will meet you there, (and make Myself known) and I will speak with you …’” Herein lies the astonishingly difficult to grasp understanding that God, unfathomable in His transcendence of all limitations, nonetheless constricts His infinite light such that it is manifest within the small confines of our physical reality.

Mitzvot

This is the deep, beneath-the-surface (sōd) meaning of the Torah and all the mitzvot; the constricting of Gods infinite light into precisely defined actions and places. Every mitzvah is a folding of the infinite into the strictures of spacial reality and the resulting revelation of the utter beyondness of God within the confines of human experience. Think about it: A moment before sunset we are living in the everyday world of chol, and a minute later kodesh, sanctity, blankets reality. This is actually an awesome display of both God’s “strength,” (gevura) and His love for the Jewish nation. What God has done is to take that whose very nature defies all limitations and mold it in a way that it is consistent with, and accessible within, the confines of human experience. Whether it’s the beginning of a holy day or a new year; tefillin, shofar or matzah, each serves as a carefully crafted pathway that becomes a conduit for that which ultimately has no limitations and seemingly can’t be confined to this or that pathway.

Confounding Godliness

Humankind has grappled with the awesome loftiness of God, and, in the face of His overwhelming Being, has often concluded that our world must necessarily be devoid of Godliness. After all, to place God anywhere in this world, immediately diminishes Him and brings Him down, so to speak, to our level. This very confusion leads to the assertion that, “What difference does any of this make to God? Why would a big, grand, transcendent creator of the universe care about what I eat or don’t eat? Aren’t the minutiae of my life mere trivialities in the face of the boundlessness of God?” And so God is left in the heavens as befits His nature, and we are left down here, as befits ours. The truth, however, is that this too places limitations on God by forcing Him out of one realm and confining Him to another.

In grappling with this tension of comprehension, the Jewish understanding is that while absolutely infinite, God is able to constrict and filter his ohr aiyn sof, His infinite light, in a fashion that enables Gods’ Presence to be manifest not “just” far above everything, but, to some degree, within everything as well. To experience the Beit Hamikdash, or to fulfill any mitzvah, is to grasp the end of a remarkable cord that stretches from down here, up to the highest, deepest regions of existence. As we fulfill a mitzvah, we’re not just going through a motion, we’re actually setting off spiritual vibrations of sorts that travel through our mitzvah cords to every corner, dimension, and level of creation.

House and Gateway

And so yes, what Yacov perceived was both a house and a gateway. And this was the deep, beneath-thesurface (sōd) meaning of Yacovs vision of a “ladder that was fixed to the earth and whose top reached to heaven.” The “House of God,” is the bottom of the ladder—the revelation of Godliness within the limitations of our world—which then climbs, rung after rung, until the “gateway to heaven.” Mitzvot, therefore, are resonant actions initiated by our hands, in this world, that unleash reverberations of kedusha, and stir a shefa, a “flow,” of spiritual energy throughout existence.

Exile and Redemption

With the destruction of the Temple and exile, the legs of the ladder of spirituality were ripped away from this world. This created a condition in which we became desensitized to this-world spirituality and came to relate to God more as a dweller on high, than an immanent dweller amongst us. In the aftermath of destruction and exile, our intuitive response to “where is God?” became “everywhere.” Today, however, in our era—the era of unfolding redemption—the era in which the Shechina is again becoming gradually more manifest in our worldly reality; our personal, inner avoda is to once again grasp that which is expressed countless times in Tanach; that God is to be found in Yerushalayim! “For God has chosen Zion, He desired it for His habitation. This is My resting place for ever and ever, here I will dwell, because I have desired it.” (Tehillim 132: 13-14)

To the extent that each of us is able to bring back the Shechina from the otherworldliness of heaven, to the here-and-now of our hearts, this will stir a further thirst and yearning—a yearning that is actually imbedded and blossoming within the souls of the era of geula: The souls of our times. Our renewed discovery of the inner depth of every mitzvah, and our longing for a profound relationship with God, will trigger pangs of desire for the rebuilding of Yerushalayim and the Beit Hamikdash.

As David expressed, (Tehillim 42:3):

“My neshama thirsts for God, for the living God—”

And therefore,

“When will I come and appear before God?”

In Yerushalayim.

Soon. Soon. In our very days.

Translation by Shimon Apisdorf