God Asked the High Priest for a Blessing in the Holy of Holies

On Yom Kippur, there was one man and one door and one room that no one else in the world was permitted to enter. The High Priest, once a year, on the Day of Atonement, passed through the curtain of the Holy of Holies to offer the incense offering and make atonement for the entire people of Israel. He tied a rope around his ankle before entering. If he died inside from unworthiness or error, someone would need to pull the body out, because no other human being could go in to retrieve it.

This was the room where heaven and earth most nearly touched. The Ark of the Covenant had once stood there, with the two cherubim facing each other across the kapporet, the cover, where God had said the divine presence would speak. By the time of the Second Temple, the Ark was gone, but the tradition of the High Priest's entry continued. The room was empty of furniture and full of something else.

What the Talmud records in Berakhot 7a about Rabbi Ishmael ben Elisha's entry into the Holy of Holies is the kind of story the tradition tells only once, because once is enough. Rabbi Ishmael went in to offer the incense. He looked up. He saw Akatriel Yah (אקתריאל יה), the Lord of Hosts, seated on a high and exalted throne.

And God said to him: Ishmael, my son. Bless Me.

The Blessing He Gave

Rabbi Ishmael was not struck speechless. He was not overwhelmed into silence. He stood before God in the empty room and said: May it be Your will that Your mercy should overcome Your anger, and that Your mercy should prevail over Your strict attributes, and that You should deal with Your children according to the attribute of mercy, and that for their sake You should go beyond the strict letter of the law.

God nodded.

The Talmud records that God inclined His head in acknowledgment of the blessing. A human being had blessed God, in the Holy of Holies, on Yom Kippur, and God accepted it. The relationship this implies is not what most theology expects. The tradition does not flatten it or explain it away. God, who created the world and sustains it and judges it, received a blessing from a man and found it appropriate, even necessary.

The prayer that Rabbi Ishmael gave has been repeated in Jewish liturgy ever since. The Yehi Ratzon, the "may it be Your will," at the end of the morning Amidah in many communities draws on this tradition: asking God to allow mercy to override strict justice when dealing with human beings. Every person who says it is repeating what the High Priest said in the Holy of Holies, which is to say they are standing, briefly, in the room where the earth and heaven were the same room.

What Creation Has to Do With Prayer

The rabbis who preserved this story were making a claim about the structure of existence. Prayer is not a petition sent from below to above, from the powerless to the powerful. Prayer is a conversation between parties who need each other, in which direction matters less than the transmission. Mekhilta DeRabbi Yishmael, the tannaitic commentary on Exodus compiled in the school of Rabbi Ishmael in the second century, records an earlier teaching from the same tradition: when Israel declares "Who is like the Lord our God" in prayer, the divine voice responds with its own praise of Israel. The exchange is mutual. The liturgy is a dialogue.

Creation made this possible. The world was not built as a stage for an audience of one, with God watching from above and human beings performing below. The world was built as a place where the divine and the human could be in genuine relationship, where a High Priest could walk into the innermost room and receive a question, and where the answer he gave could move through heaven and remain in liturgy for two thousand years.

The Day God Asked for Help

Rabbi Ishmael's encounter happened against the backdrop of enormous catastrophe. He lived in the era when the Temple's days were numbered, when Rome was tightening its grip on Judea, when the rabbis who would be executed as martyrs were already known to each other, already aware of what was coming. Heikhalot Rabbati, the mystical text that preserves many traditions from Rabbi Ishmael's circle, begins with the seizure of four great sages by Rome, a moment of communal catastrophe that required someone to ascend to heaven and ask directly what was happening and why.

Rabbi Ishmael was the one who went. He knew how to enter sacred space and stand in it without being destroyed. He had done it before, on the holiest day of the year, in the room that no one else could enter, and he had not only survived but been greeted by name. "Ishmael, my son." The God who calls you by name in the Holy of Holies is not a God who has given up on the world. The request for a blessing is not weakness. It is the most intimate form of the relationship creation was built to sustain: two parties, across every asymmetry, asking each other to continue.

Rabbi Ishmael said yes. He gave the blessing. He walked out of the Holy of Holies, untied the rope from his ankle, and reported to the waiting priests that the incense had been accepted.

God had said yes too.