This week’s parsha, Behar, outlines the need for collective rest. With the instructions for the Sabbatical and Jubilee years, the Torah teaches that for one year, everyone and everything scales back. In the Jubilee year, we are taught that everything returns back to its original Owner; the earth belongs to God, and we are all residents in God’s world. As the Torah writes, “you are all resident-strangers with Me.”
Usually we understand this phrase to mean that we have a sort of insider/outsider status, that we live on this land and should connect to it, but that ultimately we are also not the owners, that we reside on God’s land. The Hasidic teacher Degel Machaneh Ephraim offers a different way of reading this phrase that has huge theological implications. He brings in a verse from Psalms to further describe our experience as a resident-stranger: “I am a stranger in the land; do not hide Your mitzvot from me” (Psalm 119:19). The Degel imagines a person who is lonely; they have no one close to them to connect to, and when they find someone, they can truly pour out everything that has been on their heart, with joy. The stranger wants mitzvot in order to connect with God.
And then the Degel Macheneh Ephraim turns the phrase around to say that this mirrors the experience of God. He says that God is a lonely stranger in the world, because God doesn’t have anyone to connect to wholly. We have all, as human beings, felt alone in this world. We have all had moments of feeling disconnected, and I am so moved by the idea that perhaps God feels this way too, that perhaps in being made in God’s image, our loneliness is a reflection of Divine loneliness.
The Degel imagines the Psalmist saying, “God, I am like you! I am also a stranger! Don’t hide your mitzvot, those things that help us connect to each other. I’ll act on them, those tools for alleviating loneliness, and it will help me, and maybe You, too.” This could change how we as humans relate to our own feelings of loneliness. When the Psalmist says, “don’t hide Your mitzvot from me,” he’s suggesting that engaging in mitzvot is a connective device to God that can act as a salve to our loneliness, and to Gods.
In describing God as a lonely stranger in this world, the Degel completely inverts what it means for us to engage ritually and theologically. I wonder what it means for each of us to think of our engagement with Judaism in this way. That our embrace of mitzvot affects our sense of connection and embrace to the Divine. That our desire to be a part of this vast sacred tradition keeps God company. I’ve never thought of God in this way, and I’ve never engaged Jewishly with this intention, but I wonder what it might mean for me to start. To imagine that I have the power to be a companion to God, and that in return, perhaps I’ll find one, too.
