Every day a question echoes through the universe, though it rarely makes a sound. It is a question that serves as its own answer, and it may be the most important question a human being will ever face.
Where are you?
To understand the weight of that question, we have to turn our usual understanding of faith on its head. Every morning we open our eyes and say Modeh Ani, closing with the phrase רַבָּה אֱמוּנָתֶךָ, "Great is Your faithfulness." We tend to hear that as a statement about our faith in the Almighty. In the context of waking up to a new day, it means close to the opposite. Great is G-d's faith in us.
By returning our souls to us each morning, G-d is saying, "I still believe in you. You have a purpose today." But that belief arrives with a cosmic roll call.
The Two Faces of the Same Word
In the Torah this question appears in two radically different eras, spelled with the very same four Hebrew letters, א־י־כ־ה. Only the vowels change.
אַיֶּכָּה (Ayekah, "Where are you?") is spoken by G-d to Adam in the Garden of Eden, immediately after the first sin.
אֵיכָה (Eikhah, "How alone she sits...") is the opening cry of the Book of Lamentations, wept over the destruction of Jerusalem.
In the Garden, Ayekah is G-d looking at a hiding Adam and asking, "Look at yourself. What have you done? Why are you hiding?" Fast forward to the destruction of the Temple and Eikhah becomes the consequence: where are you now that you have stopped hiding, but the connection is broken?
The Alter Rebbe, the founder of Chabad, was famously asked by his interrogator in prison: if G-d is all knowing, why did He need to ask Adam and Eve where they were? Did He not already know?
The Rebbe looked at the jailer and reframed the question for all of eternity. "G-d knows where they are physically. The question is personal. You have been allotted a precise number of days and years to manifest your unique soul in this world. Look at where you are right now. Look at what you have done with your time. Ayekah? Where are you holding?"
When the Almighty asks where you are, He is not asking for your GPS coordinates. He is asking about your soul.
From the Core to the Outer Borders
Why do we hide? Because we trade our אני (Ani, "I", the true and essential self) for איכה (Eikhah, displacement).
Look at the anatomy of the word אני:
א (Aleph): our connection to G-d.
נ (Nun): the doorway to the infinite, the fiftieth Gate of Understanding.
י (Yud): our personal self.
When we lose our way, the Nun, our infinite core, is replaced by כה (Caf Heh), which means "here" or "thus." It is a reference to physical boundaries and to the outside world. We stop living from the core, we become entirely ego driven, and we start to imagine that we can hide from the Infinite behind a metaphorical fig leaf.
The ultimate pivot is turning the ego, אני, back into אין (Ayin, "nothingness"), so that the Infinite can come in. Ayin is not self erasure. It is stepping out of the rigid shell of the ego so that the Divine Image inside you can finally shine.
The Gemara (Sotah 5a) hints at this with a spiritual standoff worthy of John Wayne: this town isn't big enough for the two of us. G-d says of the arrogant, "This body is not big enough for both of us. If you are entirely full of yourself, you can have it, and good luck."
The Ultimate Hiding Place
The Gemara (Niddah 30b) teaches that a baby learns the entire Torah while still in the womb. There is no ego there, only pure love and pure truth. It is written into your soul and into your bones. Then we forget it the moment we enter the world. How do we get it back?
We get it back on Yom Kippur, the day we strip away the physical ego, live like angels, and finally understand ourselves. When we find our true selves, we find the Torah.
The depth of this human power is staggering. The Gemara (Berachot 32a) notes that after the sin of the Golden Calf, G-d tells Moshe, "Leave Me alone, so that I may destroy them." Moshe hears this and realizes something wild. Wait, I am in G-d's way? He understands that the Torah is now in this world, לא בשמים היא, and that G-d actually delights when His children "defeat" Him inside the framework of the Torah.
Thirty Six
When we fail to use that power, we land in אֵיכָה (Eikhah), a word whose numerical value is thirty six.
Thirty six is also the number of instances of כרת (Karet, spiritual cutting off) in the Torah. Karet is a distorted form of good news. G-d does not cut us off. We disconnect ourselves. It is a boundary we create, which means it is a boundary we can remove.
Thirty six is also the number of hours that the original, primordial Light of Creation shone before it was hidden: twelve hours on Friday day, twelve on Friday night, and twelve on Shabbat day.
Where did G-d hide that primordial light? The Zohar tells us that it was hidden inside the Oral Torah itself. The Bnei Yissachar points out that the Talmud contains thirty six tractates, and that we light thirty six candles over the eight days of Chanukah, the holiday that celebrates the victory of the Oral Torah.
The Sword and the Way Home
What is the best way to hide something? In plain, wide open sight.
When Moshe asks G-d to reveal His face, G-d shows him that He wraps Himself in a tallis of light. This seems paradoxical. How do you hide your face with light? Because the physical light of this world acts as a garment, בגד (beged), a word that shares a root with betrayal. It is a superficial light designed to conceal the ultimate Truth. It is light hiding Light.
When G-d expelled Adam and Eve from Eden, He placed Cherubim and an ever turning sword of fire to guard the path to the Tree of Life. Why not simply erase the Garden from the map entirely?
Because He wants us to come back. He wants us to figure out how to get past the sword and the angels. G-d hid the light. He did not destroy it. He wants the joy of watching us find it.
The Three Weeks are a time to realize what we have lost, and to look directly at what has been hidden from us: that breathtaking, unfiltered connection to G-d in the Temple. And these three weeks mirror exactly the three weeks of light that run from Rosh Hashanah through the end of Simchat Torah.
The journey is identical. We look into the dark, past the turning sword of our own egos, and we answer the call.
We shift our Ani back to Ayin,
we clear out the static,
and we find the hidden light waiting exactly where it always was.
Right inside us.
Have a great week, Rav Gedaliah