The Challenge of Finding – and Talking With – G-d

Prayer is not meant to be a one-way conversation: when we get inside our own heads, we are trying to condense our own thoughts, and listen very intently. In this way, prayer (along with its cousin, meditation), has been compared to very slowly and carefully twiddling the knobs on a shortwave radio, trying to detect, and then hone in on, a specific signal.

There is actually a series of subtle hints in the Torah that tell us how conversations can be had with G-d. The first is that the voice of G-d comes to Moses from between the two gold keruvim, angels, on top of the holy ark. Those angels are reaching for each other, telling us that G-d’s voice is found where two entities seek to have a connection, a relationship. G-d can be found in the yearning that we each have for connection.

The second is a little more abstract, but bear with me: the place where Moses talks to G-d throughout the time in the wilderness is called, in the common English translation, “The Tent of Meeting.” In Hebrew, it is the Ohel Moed.

The interesting piece is that this is an obvious mistranslation. An ohel is indeed a tent – but a moed does not mean “meeting,” or anything like it. Here is how the word is introduced:

And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons (moed), and for days, and years:

The word does not mean “meeting” – it means “seasons” or “ordained time.” The word appears in the text many times (mostly as ohel moed), but of the 21 other incidences of this word in the text, none (except perhaps one) mean “meeting”! They instead refer to a time of year or declared festival. And here is the kicker: none of these examples refer to a moed set by mankind. Instead, every moed in the text, just like the lights of the day and the lights of the night, is either created or instituted by G-d.

Why does this matter? Because ohel refers to a tent, a structure that moves around, always able to go into motion. And moed refers to a season or a time. Neither space nor time are fixed. Moses talks to G-d on an opportunistic and unpredictable basis, suggesting that we, too, are to seek to connect with G-d in the same way.

Both the location of the ohel and the time of the moed were determined by G-d. Man cannot command G-d to communicate, but what we can do is to be ready and receptive, to seek to twiddle that dial and receive the signal when it comes our way.

So the ohel moed is really the ever-shifting juncture of opportunity in space and time. The Torah is telling us that G-d is not found in static permanence, but in dynamic growth. Such is the nature of every holy and beautiful relationship.

P.S. This connects to our understanding that relationships (including and especially with G-d) are always meant to be processes, not products. When and where things are static, they are stagnant. And stagnation leads to rot, and then to death. Good marriages are alive and vibrant and changing: dynamic. Bad marriages are where there is no longer any hope of growth. So, too, with the living connections between people and between ourselves and our Creator.