Shekhinah Comes Wherever Two Speak of God

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The Angels Looked Down and Asked

God set the heavens out where the angels could see the work, moon and stars fixed where fingers had put them, and said that the righteous among men would be worth looking at as well. The angels were not persuaded. They had the whole of it in front of them, and underneath it a creature made out of dust that had to be fed twice a day.

"What is man, that You should remember him?"

They were not asking for information. They were asking why the attention was going downward at all, since God fills heaven and earth and had no shortage of company up where the question was being put.

The Man Who Would Not Let Go

The answer came back as bodies. Jacob was left alone at the ford at night with his wives and his children already across the water, and something took hold of him in the dark, and he took hold of it back. He was outmatched from the first minute. He did not let go until the sky went grey, and he came away limping, and he came away with a new name.

A little less than the angels, the psalm says of man. Here was the little that was less, hanging on with a wrenched hip.

Daniel walked out of the lions' den in the morning without a mark on him. The angels had asked what man was, and the answer kept arriving in the form of somebody who should not have survived the night and did.

If You Come to My House

Rabbi Eliezer ben Yaakov heard God make a neighbor's offer, in a neighbor's words: if you come to My house, I will come to your house. The place my heart goes, my feet take me. The place my heart loves, my feet take me.

From that the rungs come down. Ten men walk into a synagogue and the Presence is with them, because God stands in the divine assembly (Psalms 82:1). Three sit down to judge a case and He is in the middle of them, since the same verse puts Him among the judges. Two who fear the Lord speak to one another, and Malachi says He listened and heard it (Malachi 3:16). Even one man who mentions the Name is met where he stands.

Two is not a crowd. Two is a bench against a wall after the market has shut, one man saying a verse he half remembers and the other correcting him, both of them careful with the Name because they were raised careful. Nothing announces anything. The Shekhinah (the indwelling presence of God) comes wherever the Name is handled that way, and the rung holds all the same.

Rabbi Yoshiyah Turned the Verse Around

Not everyone would let "in every place" stand loose. "Could it really mean every place?" Rabbi Yoshiyah said, and he read the words of Exodus as transposed on purpose: in every place where I come to you and bless you, there I will cause My name to be mentioned. And where is that? In the chosen house. That is why the Explicit Name was forbidden out in the provinces, guarded, kept for one address.

So the Temple kept the Name, and the bench in the alley kept the visits, and neither reading was made to give way.

State Your Requests

Higher up, the men who climbed into the palaces stood in front of the storehouses and heard an offer with no ceiling on it. "My storehouses and My treasuries, nothing in them is lacking. State your requests and they shall be given you, and the desire of your hearts shall be done forthwith, for there is no time like this time, for the love of you clings to My heart."

They could have asked for anything at all. What they asked for was more Torah: a multitude of Talmud, halakhic traditions in quantity, questions to put on points of law, secrets by the pile, testimony in mountains upon mountains and wisdom in hills upon hills, learning thick in the streets and subtleties in the roads, laws as the sand of the sea and rabbis as the dust of the world.

"I know what you request," came the answer, "and My heart perceives what you desire."

The angels who had asked what man was worth were still above all of it, watching the request come up from the dust with nothing modest in it. When they had seen the whole of it they said, "O Lord our God, how majestic is Your name in all the earth."