Musings from Students of the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem
Posted on November 8, 2011 by Heligman
Too often the shades of our life are drawn and God’s magnificent colors are missed. I am taking on this project as a means to stop and enjoy God’s brilliance. For the month of November, each day I will document the evening sunset from the Pardes Beit Midrash. I hope you will stop and notice with me. And I hope we can all share a moment of gratitude.
Today I am feeling gratitude for those moment’s were text comes alive and is felt. The Pisetzner Rebbe writes that like the sun, which is impossible to look directly at, so too, God is impossible to look directly at. And he goes on to say, that it is only in God’s hiddeness that man can encounter God. As the sun set today, I eagerly peaked out the window for dusk to emerge, but it was too early and the sun still strong painfully burned my eyes making me momentarily blind. A little while later all of us in the Beit Midrash stared out the window with our jaws dropped, the sun had dropped to it’s lowest point behind a cloud and was now clear as anything, huge and bright, like a full moon, but dripping red and coloring the sky with it’s majesty. I think this is what the Pisetzner felt when he wrote that only in God’s hiddeness can man encounter God. If we are courageous enough, it is exactly in those cloudy moments of our life that we can look up and stare directly at God.
Sunset from Pardes Beit Midrash – 11/8/2011, 4:55pm
