Timeless Torah

When did you last experience the presence of G-d? Of course, He is everywhere and therefore we are technically always in His presence. But knowledge and awareness is one thing; experience is quite another. So while He may be everywhere, His power is cloaked in a variety of guises. Consequently, instead of G-d, we are conscious of nature, history, society, the economy and an assortment of other forces.
Rare is the individual who perceives the divine presence with the tactility of a personal encounter. The most spiritual of men labor for a lifetime to experience a single moment of true intimacy with G-d. But there will come a time, we are told, when “your Master will no longer be cloaked.” This, the prophets tell us is the age of Moshiach.
Every G-dly act we do today uncovers another fold in the curtain of creation. When the curtain will part entirely we shall behold the face of G-d. What will life be like in such a world? We have several precedents to draw upon.
First there was the revelation at Sinai when “G-d descended upon Mount Sinai,” and “Face to face, G-d spoke to you.” The result, says the Talmud, was that “with each divine utterance, their souls left their bodies.” Indeed, after hearing but two of the Ten Commandments directly from the Almighty, the Jewish people begged Moses to serve as their intermediary for “if we continue to hear the voice of G-d, we shall die.”
The revelation at Sinai was a point in time that portended the messianic reality. By the same token, there was also a point in space that for many centuries was an island of divine immanence in a spiritually reticent world. This was the Holy of Holies, the innermost chamber of the Sanctuary.
Even though, all of the Temple was a place of heightened divine reality, no part of it was as holy as the Kodesh HaKodashim, the Holy of Holies. Here G-d was felt in the most unequivocal and absolute manner; here one came face to face with the very being of G-d.
Only one man could enter the Holy of Holies: the High Priest. And even he was warned “not to enter at any time ... lest he die.” Only once a year on Yom Kippur, and only after intense preparation was the holiest human being on earth able to enter the Holy of Holies. Even then, if he failed to perform the rituals exactly as prescribed, or if he was unworthy of his station, he would not survive so intense an encounter. In fact, his lifeless body would have to be dragged out of the chamber by means of a long cord attached to his leg.
If we are to look to the precedents of Sinai and the Holy of Holies as our models for an unadulterated convergence of man and the Divine, this would imply that the era of Moshiach will spell the end of life as we know it. It would mean that we will exist in the transcendent state of those who experienced the revelation at Sinai and that our lives must be conducted as a perpetual Yom Kippur.
However, there is also another model for living in the presence of G-d. This is the case of Yehoash, the ninth king of the Davidic dynasty. Upon the death of Yehoash’s father, Achazayahu, the wicked Ataliah massacred the entire royal family and seized the throne. Yehoash, a year-old infant at the time, was saved by his aunt. In an act of desperation, she and her husband, the High Priest Yehoyada, hid him and his nursemaid in the Holy of Holies. When the child was seven years old, Yehoyada took him from his hiding place, crowned him king, and restored the sovereignty of Judah to its rightful heir.
For six years, a child and his nurse lived in the Holy of Holies: there she fed him, there they slept, there she changed his diapers. There they lived, twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, in the unveiled presence of G-d. This incident can be explained on the most basic level. To save the life of even one human being, the entire Torah is set aside.
On a deeper level, however, the story of the woman and child who lived for six years in the Holy of Holies reflects a deeper truth: that each and every one of us is in essence is a High Priest. Furthermore, if the High Priest was to reveal His pure and G-dly essence, than one can enter into the Holy of Holies at all times. Then the experience of the divine presence would not be limited to a once-a-year “ritual,” but that it would embrace the totality of life. It is only in this pre-messianic era that the ultimate experience of G-d is confined to a particular person on a particular day requiring particular actions.
Moshiach however will herald an age in which the natural, the everyday and the mundane are no longer antitheses to G-dliness and spirituality. A world in which G-d is revealed as the essence of life, and life’s every surge and ebb can be an encounter with the essence of G-d.