What does it mean to make something holy? I think about this question often when doing Havdallah, where we invoke the separation between holy and mundane. What allows the shift to happen? What is it that transforms time, or space, from the ordinary into the sacred? Sometimes it is the outer trappings of life that help us do that, but sometimes, I realize, it’s actually what happens in us, internally, that creates that shift.
This week in parashat Vayeitzei, Ya’akov has just fled from his family after the drama with Esav, and he falls asleep. He is in the middle of nowhere. It is a completely ordinary place with nothing there but a rock as his pillow. He dreams that famous dream with the angels going up and down the ladder, and when he wakes up, he makes a powerful declaration:
How awesome is this place?! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate to the heavens.
What strikes me about this verse and Ya’akov’s response to his dream, is that there was, from an outsider’s perspective, nothing awesome about that place! It was completely boring. There was nothing around him and the very thing that made him feel it was awesome was his own dream - literally in his head! And yet, he awoke and was able to see that it was not his dream that was awesome, but the place where he was. The place was awesome, he was filled with awe, because he decided it to be. Because he transformed that space.
I wonder what it takes for us - internally, spiritually - to transform something into being filled with awe. Truly awesome. What orientation must we have to the world to be able to be like Ya’akov, to take a place that is devoid of any traditional trappings of holiness, and see it as such?
The theologian Martin Buber teaches that while many of us may think of the world in two categories, holy and not holy, we should actually conceive of spaces and places and time as holy and not yet holy. Everything has the potential to be holy. Yaakov models that for us in this week’s parashah. In the most mundane of places, he declared that it was awesome. He declared that it was a house of God.
And the beautiful, powerful element of that realization comes from the end of the verse. Once Ya’akov was able to transform his own orientation to seeing that place as something awesome, it became a gateway to the heavens. Our relationship with holy spaces is not just about transforming our relationship with that place, it also creates pathways to creating a relationship with the Divine. It becomes a gateway to the heavens.
This Shabbat, as we carve out time that is holy, I hope we are inspired to see how other arenas of our life can also be filled with awe. And I hope that in the process, in shifting our own orientation, we build the most beautiful gateway.
