Isaiah Knew God Was Closer Than Five Hundred Years of Walking

The distance from here to heaven is five hundred years of walking. Rabbi Yehuda ben Rabbi Simon stated this as a fact in the midrashic tradition preserved in Midrash Rabbah, and it functions less as a geographical claim than as a philosophical one. Five hundred years is not an addressable distance. It is not a journey anyone is going to undertake. It is a way of saying: the gap between the human world and the divine realm is so vast that it cannot be bridged by any ordinary means of movement. And yet -- and this is the point the rabbi immediately turned to -- God is near. "As a person stands and prays and contemplates within his heart, and the Holy One blessed be He is near, such that He hears his prayer, as it is stated: 'You, who hear prayer, all flesh comes to You'" (Psalms 65:3). The idols, by contrast, stand in their owner's houses, apparently close. You can touch them. You can see them. But when you call to them, they do not answer. They are near in appearance and infinitely distant in fact. God is distant in measurement and immediate in response.

This paradox was what Rabbi Yehuda ben Rabbi Simon identified as the defining characteristic of the relationship between Israel and God, and what distinguished it from the relationship between the nations and their idols. The nations had made their gods close -- portable, visible, domestic, set up in houses. And the result was gods who could not answer. Israel had a God who dwelt beyond five hundred years of walking, whose throne Isaiah described as the heights of heaven, and who answered prayers before they were finished being spoken. "Before they call, I will answer" (Isaiah 65:24). The problem is not proximity but responsiveness, and proximity and responsiveness move in inverse directions in this theology. The closer the idol, the less it answers. The farther the God, the more immediately He responds.

The tradition about Isaiah and the firmament drew on this principle in a specific halakhic context: what is the reward for reciting the Shema and immediately proceeding to prayer without a pause? Rabba bar Abbahu taught that such a person could be certain his prayer would be heard. The principle was about adjacency -- not spatial adjacency, but temporal adjacency, the adjacency of one sacred act performed immediately after another. Placing hands on a sacrifice and slaughtering it immediately: the offering is accepted. Washing hands and reciting the blessing over bread immediately: the Accuser cannot find an opening to denounce you during the meal. Reciting the Shema -- which ends with the blessing of redemption, the acknowledgment that God redeemed Israel from Egypt -- and then immediately praying: the prayer is heard. The redemption that was recalled in the final blessing becomes the platform from which the prayer launches, and God, who is five hundred years away and simultaneously present to every prayer, hears it.

David understood this too, and the midrash preserves a conversation between David and God that has the quality of a negotiation. David said: Master of the universe, when the nations come to pray before You, do not answer them -- because they do not come wholeheartedly. They go to their idols first, and when the idols fail them and their suffering becomes severe, they turn to You. You should not answer them in those moments of desperation. "They cried out, but there was no savior; to the Lord, who did not answer them" (Psalms 18:42). The rabbis read that verse as containing a hidden directive: do not answer them. But when Israel calls, said David, answer immediately. The proof text he brought was from his own Psalms: "When I call, answer me, God of my righteousness" (Psalms 4:2). And God's response was: as you live, I will answer you before you call, as it is stated: "Before they call, I will answer" (Isaiah 65:24). "I do not have another nation other than you."

The connection between holiness and seeing God ran through a teaching about Isaiah 33:15 and 33:17. The verse says: "one who shuts his eyes from perceiving evil" -- and the very next verse promises: "Your eyes will behold a king in his beauty, they will see a distant land." Rabbi Menashya, son of the grandson of Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi, drew the connection explicitly: anyone who sees a matter of licentiousness but does not feast his eyes on it will be privileged to greet the Divine Presence. The capacity to see God is trained by the discipline of what you refuse to see. The eyes that decline the invitation to dwell on what degrades them become the eyes that can bear the vision of holiness. Isaiah, who had called heaven and earth as witnesses, who had spoken of the God who answers before the call is made, who had described the seraphim crying "holy, holy, holy," was in this tradition the prophet of nearness -- not nearness measured in distance, but nearness measured in the responsiveness of a God who is five hundred years away and never unreachable.