The Invisible Presence
Photo by Thaï Ch Hamelin
The Psalms assure us that:
God is our refuge and strength.
a very present help in trouble.¹
Notice this Psalm doesn’t just say “help” or “present help,” but “very present help!” This is because there’s an invisible presence right where our visible world appears to be. As we will see, this invisible presence is found to be the one divine power, the one divine presence, and the one divine science.
There was a little five-year-old boy who tossed his pillow up on his dresser. And then he managed to climb up on top himself. He had a plan! Can you imagine what it was?
He was going to call his older brother into their bedroom, and when he came through the door, he planned to whop him with the pillow!
As he positioned himself on top of the dresser, he began to lose balance and fall backward. In that instant, he remembered his mother telling him that if ever he were in trouble, he could depend on God for help. Well, he realized he was in trouble, and said, "God, you’ve got to help me!”
In an instangyhe idea came to interlock his fingers and put his hands behind his head. As he fell backward, his cupped hands caught on the doorknob. His little feet came easily down to the floor, and all was well.
I understand he never told his mother!²
We’re going to talk this morning about the invisible presence that is always with us, wherever we go, wherever we are. Now, this isn’t just a presence in the world or even the best presence in the world. It is the only presence. It is Omnipresence. It is divinity.
Moses Cordovero was a central figure in the development of Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition which reveals that our eternal unity with God is inescapable. He says, in ripened words,
The essence of divinity [appears as]
every single thing—
nothing but it [infinite consciousness] exists;
since it causes every thing to be,
no thing can live by anything else.
it enlivens them.
Ein Sof [divine consciousness, the infinite nature of God]
exists [as] each existent.
Do not say,`This is a stone and not [an expression of] God.'
God forbid!
Rather, all existence is God,
and the stone is
a thing pervaded by divinity.³
Photo by Giorgio Trovato
To illustrate, imagine a glass of water with ice cubes floating in it. The ice cubes move when the water moves—but only when the water moves. Notice, too, that the constituents of the water and ice are identical. They’re both H-2-O. The ice cubes, regardless of their shapes, always remain H-2-O.
In this analogy, infinite consciousness is the water, and each of us is an individual ice cube. While we each eternally have our own individuality maintained by God, our essence remains the same. ‘Things’ are comprised of this same essence. In fact,
Every material belief
hints the existence
of spiritual reality.⁴
Your home, for example, can be seen as a manifestation of spiritual qualities such as Beauty, Comfort, Protection, Peace, and Silence.
Maybe you have a diamond ring you love. It can be viewed as a manifestation of Radiance, Beauty, Flawlessness, Brilliance, and Eternality—not to mention the enduring Love it reflects!
With this exercise, we can begin to see concretely that there is an invisible, tangible presence appearing as the visible world. Daniel Matt is a leading authority on Jewish mysticism and the translator of The Zohar: Pritzker Edition. He paraphrases Cordovero when he says,
There is nothing but Ein Sof.
Even a stone in a field,
Even a slab of concrete in a downtown parking lot
Is an expression of divine energy.
The entire world is God in myriad forms and disguises.⁵
Professor Matt explains it this way in one of his lectures:
A mathematician would tell you that
a fraction of infinity is, itself, infinite.
If a fraction of infinity were finite,
you’d be able to figure out
how big infinity is.
Because infinity is boundless,
even a fraction of infinity is boundless.
So each of us is one fraction of Ein Sof.
Each of us is one fraction of the infinite divinity.…
Each of us is a part of infinity.
Each of us is a part of that Oneness.⁶
David Aaron says,
The Kabbalah inspires
a complete paradigm shift.
It teaches that Hashem [God]
does not exist in reality—
Hashem is reality.
And we do not exist alongside Hashem,
we exist within Hashem,
within the reality that is Hashem .…⁷
The pagan Greek poet and philosopher Aratus glimpsed our inseverable unity with God some 300 years before the Common Era when he wrote:,
In [Divinity], we live and move
and have our being.
For we are also [divine] offspring.⁸
Aaron uses the spiritual attribute of logic when he says:
So there can't be you and God
standing side by side in reality.⁹
Abraham Isaac Kook further reminds us of our eternal Oneness with divinity when he says in his writings:
The Messiah's greatness, glory, and might
are that [divinity] does not exist outside of us.
[The Messiah] is our breath.
We seek Adonai, our G-d, and David, our king.
We revere G-d, and His goodness.
We seek our I,
we seek our Selves.
And we find.¹⁰
Ted Falcon explains it like this:
Each of us is an individual expression of
universal Awareness,
universal Consciousness,
universal Presence,
universal Being.¹¹
He says:
[God is] Absolute Oneness, Absolute Isness.¹²
This is the invisible presence right where the visible world appears. The perfection of divinity is always present, whether it looks like it or not! In Zechariah, God declares,
Not by might, nor by power,
but by My Spirit!¹³
The prophet Habakkuk says:
God is of eyes
too pure
to behold evil.¹⁴
It’s on the basis of such teachings that Bradley Shavit Artson reminds us that:
The Torah is very clear:
God’s goodness is absolute.¹⁵
If God is absolute Good, sees only good, and is the only presence, the only power, and the only spirit or consciousness, what is evil?
Rami Shapiro says,
[We wrestle] with our personal demons;
those aspects of our life history
and personality
that appear to defile the purity of our soul.
Notice I said ‘appear to defile’
for in truth nothing can defile the soul
which is a manifestation of God.
We imagine defilements and act as if they were true,
but there is a way to uplift all this to the Light
and find healing in a greater truth.
It is the healing in the Light
that is the spiritual perspective...
the power of light at work in our lives.¹⁶
Even so, we have attempted for millennia to account for apparent evil, even teaching that God creates it.
No! Divinity is the only presence, power, and consciousness. Our apparent delusion comes because every divine, right, true, good, and perfect idea in infinite pure consciousness has a conceptual or suppositional opposite. But there is no more power in a concept than what we give it with our belief!
The theoretical opposite of good gives rise to an apparent world that includes sin, suffering, disease, and death.
Consequently from one perspective—that in which thought bows to apparent opposites— evil appears real.
On the other hand, Omnipresence is an infinite field of divine law, absolute Love. It includes, for example, absolute Perfection, Peace, Harmony, and Wholeness. This is reality! Reality as found in Genesis, chapter 1 where there is no mention of evil in divine revelation, the divine perception commonly known as creation:
And God saw everything
that [divine consciousness] had [revealed],
and behold, it was very good.
— Genesis 1:31
When we view the world from this enlightened, highest perspective, evil is impossible. This is achieved when our experience of consciousness is as expanded as possible. So take heart!
Our perspective on reality is just that,
our perspective!¹⁷
— Dr. Tony Nader
Sometimes in our writings we find reference to yetzer hara which translates as the evil inclination. The teaching is that, apparently, we all have one!
But Shelomo asks,
What is the worst thing
the evil inclination [yetzer hara] can achieve?
It is to make one forget
that one is the child of a king.¹⁸
Kabbalah talks about the sitra achra, which means ‘the other side.’ Kabbalah Scholar David Aaron says,
[The] basic message
of the sitra achra is that
we are on one side
and Hashem, God, is on the other.
But once we come to recognize
this powerful illusion as false,
we quickly see that Hashem
is always and only on our side.
There are no two sides,
only oneness and wholeness.¹⁹
This is, perhaps, a departure from the expected answer, but let’s not discard it outright. Some of the most brilliant insights propel us higher in our view. This may be one reason why 13th century Kabbalist Jacob ben Sheshet teaches,
It’s a mitzvah for every wise person
to innovate in Torah
according to his [or her!] capacity.²⁰
Our own spiritual leader David Matt has explained that,
Hebrew is very malleable.
Things can be understood
in many different ways.
My brother Danny [Daniel] talks about the ‘ripening of Torah.’
In each generation
there are new interpretations of Torah.
The Kabbalists say that
originally Torah was ‘unripe’ in a way, and it is thru each generation’s
new interpretations
that it becomes ripe.²¹
On this topic, Amy Eisenberg Sasso says,
One text is not intended
to have a single interpretation
but is meant to yield different meanings,
depending on the readers—
their generation and their life experiences.²²
It is, after all, our knowledge and experience that define our perspective.
With regard to knowledge and experience, what about our thousands and thousands of hours of transcending, our experiences of bliss consciousness, of healing, and of witnessing Being being Itself?
And what about the revelations of modern quantum physics, where we discover that there is nothing solid, that everything is an unbounded ocean of consciousness in motion, as described by Maharishi Vedic Science?
To summarize in light of the Science of Consciousness, we can now understand that a concept or term for a supposed presence or activity apart from God has no presence, power or consciousness. It has only the presence and power that a limited perception gives it.
Einstein glimpsed this illusory nature of evil when he wrote,
The striving to free oneself
from this delusion
is the one issue of true religion.²³
Our mission is to inwardly, knowingly, and spontaneously exchange the fable of separation—the stand-alone concept—for the fact of eternal At-ONE-ment.
Divinity is the invisible ever-presence right where even a problem appears to be. To illustrate, here’s the account of a 10-year-old boy who was eagerly anticipating the start of summer camp. His trip, however, was threatened because water blisters as large as your thumb suddenly appeared on the back of his neck and across his shoulders. It looked as if he had been laboring under the weight of a heavy yoke.
He and his parents prayed for several days. There was neither pain nor progress. One evening after bedtime prayers, the boy confided to his mother. He said simply, “When I was little, I think Peggy took advantage of me.” Peggy (her name has been changed) had been his 12-year-old babysitter at times when he was in preschool.
As he uttered these words, instantly Truth welled up in the mother’s thought! She immediately declared to her son that purity and innocence are qualities of consciousness and cannot ever be lost or defiled. She reminded him of his divinity and that he could never be separated from God’s presence and loving care! In her prayerful thought, she also silently acknowledged the Truth about the girl’s true divine nature, purity, and purpose.
The subject was dropped, and the boy fell fast asleep. The mother continued in prayer and contacted a friend for support who was, in addition, a professional prayer practitioner.
The next morning, where there had been many large, mysterious blisters, only faint pink spots remained. By the next day, even the light pink spots had completely vanished. It was as if they had never been there. From God’s point of view, they had not been!
We can say confidently that right where a problem seems to be, Spirit—the invisible presence—exists. It’s important to note that this revealing of purity and harmony did not come from the mother’s words. Rather, it was revealed by the clarity and conviction of consciousness knowing Its own Nature, singing Its own Song.
Michael Berg, a present-day scholar of Kabbalah, says,
Certainty is the power
that draws the Light into your life,
Certainty is the vessel
into which the Light flows.
…the Light of the Creator
becomes present in our lives
to the degree
that we have certainty of its presence.²⁴
Wholeness reveals—in the awareness of our true nature—the image and likeness, the very emanation, of infinite pure consciousness. Remember, it’s Ein Sof that both emanates and animates all of existence.
Each year the High Holy Days—especially this holiest day of Yom Kippur—give us an upgraded opportunity to get more familiar with the invisible presence. It’s really a pathless path! The Lubavitcher Rebbe says,
There is no Truth about God.
Truth is G-d.
There is no one who learns Truth;
You become Truth.
There is no need to search for Truth.
You have inherited it and it is within you.
You need only learn quietness
To listen to that inheritance.²⁵
Rick Jacobs nails it when he says simply,
Silence is the ultimate connection.²⁶
‘Connection,’ of course, is possible because, in reality, there could never be separation or distortion between Ein Sof, pure consciousness, and the emanation of Ein Sof—anymore than the ice cube can be separated from H-2-O, or it’s nature distorted.
God and Man[-ifestation] always has been, and always will be eternally one. There is no duality! Except in belief. Or in what Jonah C. Steinberg calls “the delusion of separateness.”
Admit it! We all have our delusions, attachments and habits of thought that need to go. Number one on the list must be our belief in a presence, power, or consciousness apart from God.
As we explored last year, God doesn’t change, but our concept of God must change.
In Exodus, God says to Moses:
‘Put off thy shoes from off thy feet’—
for the place whereon thou standest
is holy ground.²⁷
We can interpret this to mean that we need to abandon the viewpoint that binds us and prevents our progress forward, that our vision must be of a new paradigm based on the Oneness of consciousness.
Martin Buber says it this way:
Put off the habitual
which encloses your foot
and you will recognize that the place
in which you happen to be standing
at this moment
is holy ground.²⁸
He concludes—as we must today—
There is no rung of Being
on which we cannot find
the holiness of God
everywhere and at all times.²⁹
There is, indeed, an invisible presence right where our visible world appears to be.
Waves of the Ocean
[1] Psalms 46:2 JPS
[2] Time is not a factor in your life—Dave Hohle, Speaker, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMtCKH1MCoc • 10.09.2019
[3] Danya Ruttenberg, Surprised by God: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Religion, Beacon Press, 2008, p. 116 · [appears as] replaces “is found in,” [as] replaces “in.”
[4] Mary Baker Eddy, Miscellaneous Writings, (First Church Christ Scientist, 1925), p. 60
[5] Daniel C. Matt, The God Beyond God, (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2007), p. 47 https://www.google.com/books/edition/Tikkun_Reader/adHalcHogUgC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=There+is+nothing+but+Ein+Sof.+Even+a+stone+in+a+field,+Even+a+slab+of+concrete+in+a+downtown+parking+lot+Is+an+expression+of+divine+energy.+The+entire+world+is+God+in+myriad+forms+and+disguises.&pg=PA47&printsec=frontcover • 01.16.2022
[6] Daniel C. Matt, Exploring the Kabbalah, video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRX7OEcj1MY • 02.01.2016 see video at 5:15
[7] Rabbi David Aaron, Seeing God, (Tarcher/Putnam, 2001), p. 14
[8] https://www.britannica.com/biography/Aratus-Greek-poet • 10.08.2019 see also Acts 17:28 KJV • [God] replaces ‘him’ and [God’s] replaces “his.” See also: https://www.redlandsdailyfacts.com/2009/12/01/pagan-poets-words-make-christian-point/ • 02.15.2022
[9] Rabbi David Aaron, Seeing God, (Tarcher/Putnam, 2001), p. 14
[10] Lawrence Fine, Eitan P. Fishbane, Or N. Rose, editors, Jewish Mysticism and the Spiritual Life: Classical Texts, Contemporary Reflections, (Jewish Lights Publishing, 2011), p. 16 • see also: Orot Ha-Kodesh—Holy Lights http://israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/17748 • 10.08.2019 • One translation: Orot HaKodesh 3, p.140-141 See also: https://web.archive.org/web/20151028011525/ • 10.08.2019 •
[Divinity] and [The Messiah] replace “he” and “He.“
[11] Spiritual Saturday, A Focus on Prayer, with Rabbi Ted Falcon 01.12.19 • https://youtube.com/watch?v=6m2JdTq-R3Ihttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6m2JdTq-R3I&t=5059s • video at 1:23:10
[12] When Jews Pray-Rabbi Ted Falcon, • https://youtube.com/watch?v=dyF3SJbFzBQ • 01.14.2019
[13] Zechariah 4:6 JPS
[14] Habakkuk 1:13 JPS [God is] replaces “Thou art.”
[15] College of Jewish Studies, November 28, 2018 https://youtube.com/watch?v=6xlHV-3IC18 1:26:42 • 02.25.2021
[16] Rabbi Rami Shapiro, @One daily message, email 12.07.2001
[16] Miriam Ashkenazi, The Moment of Truth, The Kabbalah Centre, https://kabbalah.com/en/concepts/the-moment-of-truth • 06.23.2016
[17] Dr. Tony Nader, Consciousness: A New Paradigm: Making Life Work for Everyone, a Master Class first presented December 7-13, 2021 (ce@miu.edu)
Please note this quotation and the five paragraphs preceding it were subsequently added to the text in December, 2021 to further clarify.
[18] Martin Buber, The Way of Man and Ten Rungs, Citadel Press, 2006, p. 108 • [one] replaces “man,” and “he,” [child] replaces “son.”
[19] Rabbi David Aaron, Seeing God: The Life-changing Lessons of the Kabbalah, (Tarcher/Putnam, 2001), p. 26 • Hashem is a Hebrew title for God.
[20] Symposium The Origins of Jewish Creativity, https://momentmag.com/symposium-the-origins-of-jewish-creativity/ • 05.21. 2013
[21] Email correspondence from David Matt 9.21.2019
[22] Sandy Eisenberg Sasso, Midrash: Reading the Bible with Question Marks, (Paraclete Press, 2013), p. 28
[23] Jonah Steinberg, Beyond the Delusion of Separateness, Huffington Post
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/beyond-the-delusion-of-se_b_13219428 •12.6.2017
[24] Miriam Ashkenazi, The Moment of Truth, The Kabbalah Centre, https://kabbalah.com/en/concepts/the-moment-of-truth • 06.23.2016 AX 7053
[25] Bringing Heaven Down to Earth, Book I: Meditations on the Wisdom of the Rebbe Rabbi M.M. Schneerson, #284, Tzvi Freeman, 1997, 2012, p. 236
[26] Rabbi Rick Jacobs quoted in The Eternal Conversation by Rabbi Alfredo Borodowski, The NY Jewish Week, March 12, 2013, • https://www.jta.org/2013/03/12/ny/the-eternal-conversation
[27] Exodus 3:5 JPS
[28] Martin Buber, Ten Rungs, Citadel Press, 1947, 1995, p. 15
[29] Ibid.
This includes edited excerpts and subsequent additions
from d’var Torah, Yom Kippur 5780
October 9, 2019 Congregation Beth Shalom,
Fairfield, Iowa
Copyright © 2019 Joy Hirshberg All rights reserved.
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