Out of the Corner of Your Eye

By Rabbi Elyse Winick
KOACH Assistant Director
United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism

Back when my brother was in college, word got ‘round that he was an existentialist. This was not exactly said kindly and all I knew was that he read a lot of Nietzsche and Alan Watts. We never discussed it then, but years later, when I had gotten my own taste of modern philosophy, I thought I should ask him if it was really true. I found, to my astonishment, that despite a life that on the surface seemed altogether yuppie and mundane, he was still in the throes of existential angst. He said that he had come to believe that God is something which can only be seen out of the corner of your eye.

This image continues to fascinate me. The idea of seeing-but-not-seeing makes some sense. We have no empirical test for the existence of God. Yet we often (sometimes? if we’re lucky?) feel that we have brushed up against something we can’t quite identify, leaving us with a breathless sense we can’t quite describe. And, like the image in the corner of the eye, when we turn to confront it head on, it has suddenly changed, leaving us to question if and what we really saw.

What do I mean by God? Would it be begging the question to say I can only describe God’s presence? God is beyond our comprehension. The anthropomorphic terms we often use to help us understand become the shackles which prevent us from realizing how little we understand about God. But at the same time, they are powerful signposts, pointing us in God’s direction, helping us strive to know the unknowable. If we head in the directions they suggest, there will be much to be seen from the corners of our eyes.

God is a constant player in our lives, sometimes audience, sometimes director, but ever-present. To truly think about God yields a tremendous and frightening void. We are overcome by a sense of wonder in which we are terribly alone. And it is in these moments of being so utterly alone that we may really be experiencing God, in a pure, raw way. It is that which is indefinable and unanswerable that is God. If I could see God, God would no longer be God.

God’s presence, though, is easier to consider. God is present for me in the existence of all things. The complexity of the human mind, the molecules of a chair, the blue-gray of the sky, people working together to achieve a common goal. I don’t always sense God in these things, but often. When I do, it is extremely powerful. If I look too closely, the images burn with intensity and I stop. I’m venturing too close to the source.

If God is such an utterly personal experience, there can be no monopoly on truth. Truth becomes an equally powerful, equally personal experience. This, however, is not cause for chaos. It is cause for taking others’ views of God with immense seriousness. Instead of watering God down, this diversity makes God even more powerful. God can be all things to all people. And when two or more people share a common experience of God’s presence, it is as if the heavens open. For if you and I independently discover the same truth, what can be closer to perfection? Why is it that prayer requires a quorum -- the collective aloneness of experiencing God is the way we come closest to God. Sometimes, particularly during Kabbalat Shabbat (the Friday evening service) I realize that thousands of communities are singing the same words of praise and delight, many at precisely the same time. Then the words take wing for me, soaring ever higher.

Moses first meets God in the desert, at the site of the Burning Bush. He sees the bush burning and marvels at the fact that it burns without being consumed by flame. He says: "I must turn aside to look at this marvelous sight…" (Exodus 3:3). He does not see God’s presence right before him. He must turn aside, to something not directly in his field of vision. The easy thing to do would have been to just keep walking. But he turned off his path to something he had caught a glimpse of, perhaps from the corner of his eye.

Now that the academic year is near or at its close, let Sivan be the month in which you drift after that which you see from the corner of your eye. As we celebrate receiving the Torah and the ongoing gifts of Jewish tradition, may you find yourself searching, questing, yearning for a close encounter with the Divine.

[Posted 5/19/04]