Vayetze (Midrash)

What is the “Place”?

On the most basic level, the following midrash is an attempt to find a source for the widely-used Rabbinic metonym or sobriquet for God, ha-Makom (“the Omnipresent” or, more simply, “the Place”), in a biblical verse. But on a deeper level, as we shall see, this seemingly simple usage is rich with profound theological implications. Genesis Rabbah 68.9:

“And he came upon the place” [Gen 28:10]. R. Huna said in the name of R. Ami: For what reason is the Holy One blessed be He designated by the name “Place” (makom)? Because He is the place of the world, and the world is not His place.

The essential idea here is the omnipresence of God. There is a subtle balance in Jewish thought between transcendent and immanent imagery of God. He is inconceivably powerful, omniscient, distant, ensconced in the highest heavens, seated on a mighty throne surrounded by myriads of fiery angels. Yet He is at the same time present in every place, in the smallest and most insignificant if His creatures and within every fiber of our being, as close to us as our own soul, hearing the softest whisper of prayer or groan of pain.

This immanence, which makes for a great sense of intimacy with God, is conveyed in the imagery of “place.” But there is a certain danger in this image. “Place” can be read as “ground of being”: a totally immanent, this-worldly, ever present deity—who is no more than that. By the statement that “He is the place of the world, and the world is not His place,” the authors of this midrash are indicating that the relationship not reversible, and there is no simple identity between God and the World. Nor is there a simple equation here between God and Nature. The position articulated is what is known as Panentheism, rather than Pantheism. The world is God, in the sense that it is present within Him; He is the very stuff and substance of the world—but there is something beyond that as well. Hence, what we have is not simple nature mysticism, that affirms whatever is as God, and hence as good, but something far more complex.

Said R. Yossi bar Halafta: We don’t know whether the Holy One blessed be He is the place of His world, or if the world is His place? From that which is written, “Behold there is a place with me” [Exod 33:21] we may say: the Holy One blessed be He is the place of His world, and the world is not His place.

This idea—of immanence existing within transcendence, of a Divine presence that is not exhausted by the universe as such—is reinforced by the use of a verse taken from the epiphany to Moses in the Cleft of the Rock when, following the incident of the Golden Calf, he was shown the Thirteen Attributes of Divine Mercy. The use of a verse from this chapter here is particularly suggestive, as Moses, the “Father of the Prophets,” reached the highest level of religious awareness and knowledge of which a human being is capable. There was nevertheless a certain barrier to even him receiving complete, comprehensive knowledge of the Divine. Our midrash seems to allude to this, as well, in the statement that he was put in “a place with me”—i.e., within, inside God, suggesting partialness, fragmentary, incomplete vision. This imagery is further suggestive of ineffable, mysterious aspect of God, what Rudolph Otto called “the Wholly Other.”

R. Yitzhak said: It is written, “a dwelling place [or: refuge] is the God of old” [Deut 33.27]. Yet we still do not know if the Holy One blessed be He is the dwelling place of the world, or if the world is his dwelling place? From that which is written: “O Lord, you have been our dwelling place” [Ps 90:1], we know that the Holy One blessed be He is the dwelling place of the world, and the world is not His dwelling place.

R Abba bar Yudan said: [this may be compared] to a hero who was riding on a horse, and his gear was falling this way and that; the horse is secondary to the rider, and the rider is not secondary to the horse, as is said: “When You ride on your horse” [Hab 3:8].

These two passages provide further examples, by other rabbis, of this principle. Another aspect of this: by turning “the place” into a name for God himself, it is stating, by implication, that there are no holy places. There is an interesting paradox here: God is encountered at a specific place, Bethel, which is than treated as a sacred place. Yaakov builds an altar, after exclaiming: “Indeed, there is God in this place, and I did not know it… This is naught but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven!” [Gen 28:16-17].

A literal reading certainly suggests that this is in fact the sense: this specific place is one endowed with numinous properties, with inherent holiness; it is a place where one enjoys special access to God —a veritable gateway to heaven. And in fact, the very next midrash (the continuation of §9) suggests that this place was not in fact the Beth-el familiar to us today—i.e., the place somewhat north of Jerusalem, beyond Ramallah, in the ancient tribal territory of Benjamin—but is in fact is a kind of code name for Jerusalem, for the site of the future Temple (and cf. 1 Chr 22:1, where David uses language very similar to v. 17 here). And elsewhere we read that the ladder seen by Jacob had its feet in Beer-sheba and its head in the Supernal Temple. The name Beth-El, “the house of God,” is thus yet another metonym for the holiest of all places. (Interestingly, the Samaritans apply an analogous usage to their holy place of Shechem. During the course of my Army basic training, at the base known as Baha”d Arba located in Beit-El, we once visited the Samaritan encampment on Mount Gerizim, near Shechem, and conversed with one of the Samaritan elders. Upon asking us where we were from, we said “Beth’el,” to which he replied, “No! This [Mt. Gerizim] is Beth El!”)

But on a deeper level the equation of “Makom” with God, and its transformation by Hazal into a Divine name, makes all places equally “The Place” where one encounters meets God. For God, according to the Hasidic homily, is wherever you let Him into your heart.

Interestingly, Rav Soloveitchik, in his halakhic analyses of kedusha, of holiness as a formal juridic concept, made a similar point. On several occasions, he was adamant in insisting that, halakhically, there is no inherent holiness in objects or places. Rather, holiness is ultimately the outcome of a conscious and deliberate human act of sanctification, of establishing a certain thing as an instrument for worship of the infinite, ineffable, omnipresent God. This may be done by setting aside a certain animal or money as a sacrifice or as hekdesh, property of the Temple generally; by constructing mehitzot, partitions, setting apart the Temple precincts from mundane areas; in the case of a Torah scroll, tefillin, or mezuzah, by the act of writing with a certain intention;. etc. Even the Sabbath, albeit endowed with a certain inherent holiness as a result of the seven-day cycle preexistent since the days of Creation, requires the recitation of Kiddush on Friday night as a kind of affirmation or agreement to its holiness.

Theologically, this rejection of the notion of innate holiness seems integrally related to the concept of idolatry. We will remember that Maimonides saw the very essence of paganism in fetishism—in attaching innate sacredness to objects or things that were originally vehicles for worshipping God (see HY III: Lekh Lekha, where I discuss his comments in Hil. A. Z. 1).

Mountain, Field and House

In an “old” or “exact” Rashi to verse 28:17 (“this is naught but the house of God”), we are told that Bethel was in fact Jerusalem, and that “because it was the city of God Jacob called it Bethel [lit., House of God]”; this was the same Mount Moriah where Abraham worshipped, and the field where Isaac went out to meditate. It then cites a Talmudic passage from Pesahim 88a (erroneously cited from Sotah): “’Let us go up to the house of God…’ [Isa 2:3]. Not like Abraham, who called it a mountain; and not like Isaac, who called it a field; but like Jacob, who called it a house.”

According to another Talmudic passage, in Berakhot 26b, the three times of the day on which the three patriarchs are said to have characteristically prayed are also the source for our three daily prayers. Another view there sees the three prayers as corresponding to three time-periods in the daily schedule of sacrifices brought in the Temple. This midrash, placing the worship of all three of the patriarchs in Jerusalem, may be seen as harmonizing these two views.

But more importantly, “mountain,” “field” and “house” seem to be significant as appelations for the meeting place of Man and God. I would like to suggest a three-fold typology by way of interpretation. Mountain suggests transcendence: a high, lofty, mysterious place, midway between heaven and earth, where man ascends to encounter the “Wholly Other” God. Field suggests God’s omnipresence: Isaac, the meditative mystic, sees God everywhere, in very flower and every blade of grass, but especially in open, natural settings far from the noise of human society. One is reminded of the Baal Shem Tov, or of the Zohar’s “Melekh basadeh”—the “King in the Field”—as a symbol for the accessibility of the Divine during the Days of Awe. Jacob builds a house for God, which is both: it is both humble and, well, homely, but also has clear limits and boundaries: neither the awesome, numinous quality of the mountain, nor the total openness of the field, but something in between. It is also suggestive of the establishment of fixed religious institutions; a temple, a synagogue, or, for that matter, a church or mosque, are all basically houses: four walls, built to contain and define the holy. Unlike Abraham, the pioneer of a new God consciousness, or Isaac, the mystical contemplative, Jacob was first and foremost the father of the twelve tribes, and thus of the Jewish people. As such, we may see him as concerned with creating suitable vessels for spirituality for all people, and not only for extraordinary individuals.