It is very near you

Reworking of 03/09/14 post.

Too many times over the last twelve years, I have failed to heed my intuition. Each time, I followed the path of “good” sense to a bad end.

The Torah reminds us to pay attention to what our souls tell us and to value our own experiences of life and of divine guidance. Often we are afraid to do so.

And Moses called unto all Israel, and said unto them… The LORD our God made a covenant with us in Horeb. The LORD made not this covenant with our fathers, but with us, even us, who are all of us here alive this day. The LORD spoke with you face to face in the mount out of the midst of the fire… And it came to pass, when ye heard the voice out of the midst of the darkness, while the mountain did burn with fire, that ye came near unto me, even all the heads of your tribes, and your elders; and ye said: 'Behold, the LORD our God hath shown us His glory and His greatness, and we have heard His voice out of the midst of the fire; we have seen this day that God doth speak with man, and he liveth. Now therefore why should we die? for this great fire will consume us; if we hear the voice of the LORD our God any more, then we shall die. For who is there of all flesh, that hath heard the voice of the living God speaking out of the midst of the fire, as we have, and lived? Go thou near, and hear all that the LORD our God may say; and thou shalt speak unto us all that the LORD our God may speak unto thee; and we will hear it and do it.' (Devarim 5:1-23)

Tradition teaches that each of us, even those who were not yet born and those who would convert millennia later, experienced theophany at Sinai. We heard god’s voice and we lived. Yet we begged not to hear god’s voice again! We asked Moses to be our intermediary. We relinquished our relationship with the divine and our own power.

We should not rely on someone else’s interpretation of his or her experience of life or of the divine. We should embrace our own experience, our own intuition.



Eve relied on Adam’s interpretation of god’s instructions. What if she had sought to hear god’s voice? What if she had listened to her own intuition? How different would her response to the serpent have been?

Adam also drew back from god. By failing to tell god honestly what he had done, he failed to embrace his relationship with god.

We’re not going to get it right when we listen to someone else as Eve did, or when we fail to treat our god as real, as a partner who is in relationship with us, as Adam did. 

We must not flee; we must embrace our experience of the divine.

Torah shows us that each of us should listen to god’s words, to our soul's speech. Moses wasn’t always a reliable intermediary. When god instructed Moses to talk to the people, he ran down the mountain and spoke to only the men, so an essential part of god’s instruction was lost in “translation.”

And the LORD said unto Moses: 'Go unto the people, and sanctify them today and tomorrow, and let them wash their garments, and be ready against the third day; for the third day the LORD will come down in the sight of all the people upon mount Sinai… And Moses said: 'Be ready against the third day; come not near a woman.' (Sh’mot 19:10-15) 


God wanted all of us to purify ourselves. Moses heard instructions directed at the males. (If god had been speaking of cooties, it was the women who should have been addressed since, according to the ritual purity laws, men were a source of ritual impurity far more often than women.) Someone else’s interpretation can be wrong. We must try to listen for ourselves. We may misunderstand (as Moses did), but we may get it right. If we do misunderstand it may, at least, be in a way that helps us gain understanding in the long run.

The god of Torah does not expect us to believe without evidence; we are expected to believe only what we have experienced. (Yirimyahu 7:9, Dvarim 11:28) And we should respond by inviting and embracing the experience—even if it means changing our minds, throwing out the rules of conventional reality, or modifying our understanding of a promise we have made. If the promise was to god… she will already understand. 


Pay attention, because your intuition can guide you to do what is correct for you at this particular moment. Rational thought is a poor guide and so are rules. 
You must “act for the soul regardless of what this world demands.” (Mallika Sarabhai) 


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It is not in heaven, that thou shouldest say: 'Who shall go up for us to heaven, and bring it unto us, and make us to hear it, that we may do it?' Neither is it beyond the sea, that thou shouldest say: 'Who shall go over the sea for us, and bring it unto us, and make us to hear it, that we may do it?' It is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it. Dvarim 30:14