One of my favorite images is this: God carries everything beneath His arms.
Think about that for a moment. Not just a gentle embrace, but a sustaining act of holding. According to some mystical traditions, God's right arm carries the heavens, while His left arm cradles the earth. It’s a powerful image, isn’t it?
But what, exactly, does “everything” mean? Well, the tradition gets wonderfully specific. The left arm, we're told, carries the 18,000 worlds that surround our own. And the right? It bears the staggering weight of 120,000 worlds of the Olam Ha-Ba, the World to Come. (B. Hagigah 12b).
Can you even begin to picture that?
And what are the dimensions of these arms, these cosmic supports? The length of God's arms, we learn, is like the length of this world from one end to the other, and the width, like the width of this world. Just…enormous.
It's a mind-bending concept, one that reminds us that God is, by definition, bigger than anything we can truly grasp. And the radiance of God's arm, it says, is like the splendor of the sun in the season of Tammuz. (Sefer Hekhalot in Beit ha-Midrash 5:189-190). Imagine that light, that warmth, that overwhelming power.
This image isn’t just plucked from thin air. It’s rooted in scripture. Remember Deuteronomy 33:27? "The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms." That verse is often interpreted as a promise of divine protection, but it also hints at this very idea: that the world itself is nestled beneath God's arms. As Rabbi Schwartz discusses in Tree of Souls, everything is completely dependent on a God who is larger than the universe.
The idea of God's arms crops up in other myths, too. Some describe the world as hanging like an amulet from God's arm. Others talk about God using His arms to destroy prior worlds. (See "Prior Worlds," p. 71 in Tree of Souls, referencing Midrash Konen in Beit ha-Midrash 2:34 and Seder Rabbah di-Bereshit 467, 743, 784, 840). And even more strikingly, some traditions assert that the Torah itself is inscribed on God's arm! (See "The Torah Written on the Arm of God," p. 252 in Tree of Souls, referencing Merkavah Rabbah and Midrash Aleph Bet 3:1, 3:5). Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews retells these stories with incredible detail.
What does it all mean?
Perhaps it's a way of understanding our place in the cosmos, of acknowledging the profound and humbling truth that we are, in some sense, held, protected, and cherished by a force far greater than ourselves. Perhaps it’s a reminder of the constant, unwavering support that is always available to us.
It’s a powerful image, isn’t it? One that invites us to contemplate the infinite and to find comfort in the idea of being held in the arms of the Divine.