Makom Crisis
On a Saturday morning in January of 2022, I was in my room with the door closed, sitting on the made bed, typing on my laptop while the rest of my family roamed the house at our typical Saturday morning pace. On just about every other Saturday morning, I would have been flipping pancakes and checking on bacon since my family knows that Saturday breakfasts belong to dad. This morning, however, Christa was doing all the cooking alone, and I was alone in my bedroom because it made my family feel safer, and I didn’t have to wear a mask.
I was on day seven of a quarantine imposed by my family and me due to my contracting the Covid-19 virus. Miraculously our family had been Covid-free for the first two years of the pandemic, but with the Omicron variant sweeping the country, the infection had become almost inevitable. I had not left the 25 x16 bedroom for six days, except for my drive-up PCR tests. Because we happen to be among the fortunate Americans with more than two bathrooms in our house, one of which is connected to my bedroom, I ate, slept, and shat in the same space.
Unlike those enlightened souls who can stay mindful and centered in their cells for days on end, I obsessed about my “space.” I suppose more than “space,” I obsessed about “time,”… or both… I obsessed about how I move in space and time. You could even say that I was having a bit of a space-time crisis. The crisis is my limitations and my perceived limitlessness.
I know I’m not alone in the experience. Anyone who has ever come in contact with illness understands the anxiety of feeling limited. This is to say, limited compared to a previous condition. Limitation is woven into the very definition of being human. We are not endless. Materially, we take up a minuscule amount of space in our world. In little more than 200 years, no trace of our existence on Earth may be left. Once we pass the age of 27, we begin to slow down and become more prone to injury. There is a fixed number of miles I will never run in my life or weight I will ever be able to lift or yoga poses I can master.
While infected with the virus, the limits of my social interaction with others and my mobility were temporarily lessened because another life form had invaded my system, and my body was working overtime to respond to the threat. Thankfully, due to the rapid evolution of technology, what may have killed me or severely disabled me one hundred years ago can now only inconvenience my life for about ten days. This disruption in my life isn’t even as difficult as it would have been when I was a teenager because I still attended video meetings for work, prayed with my 12-year-old before bed on a video call, and watched The Matrix on different devices with my sixteen-year-old while discussing the plot over the phone. The limits of time and space that were concrete and universal at the beginning of my life are now dissolving more rapidly than we can keep up with.
The advent of our current technology has caused many people to reconsider what it means to be “here” and “there.” Much of the technology was designed to give us back time. The earliest washing machines promised to have all the washing done before 10 am , but instead of experiencing the rest the extra time would bring, people just bought more to wash! A crisis of presence and anxiety that accompanied the ever-growing comfort and convenience of the post-war era became a popular subject of theologians and psychologists.
The concept of “presence” was not the hot topic it is today. There was no such thing as virtual reality and no cyberspace to occupy. You might even remember a time before you created an “online profile.” How many profiles of you are there now online? Whether you made one or not, if you have any connection to any government or economic entity, there is an outline of your likeness active in a universe of “1’s” and “0’s.”
According to the website Datareporta in 2021, 62% of the world’s population use the internet voluntarily. 89% of the U.S. population is online. In particular, there are over 300 million smartphone users, of which I am one. I use the devices I own to extend the reach of my impact in the world. In many ways, it has allowed me more time to be present with the people closest to me with the experiences I value. On the flip side, it’s also lured me into the nothingness of being in multiple places at once. The struggle to stay present to my life has increased exponentially.
This crisis of space comes down to my spiritual definitions of “here” and “there” as it applies to God and me. Although my knowledge of quantum physics is cursory at best, it makes what I thought was solid rather squishy. Is there any difference between here and there in the first place? If not, what is my self? (the most basic “here”) What is God's self? (the ultimate “there”) Does God even have a self? Where is God in existence?
A Place in the Universe
Within the mystical teachings of Judaism, known as Kabbalah, is the concept of “tzimtzum,” developed by the Jewish rabbi Isaac Luria at roughly the same time as the tectonic shifts happening in Christianity’s Protestant Reformation (1534–1572). The Lurianic doctrine of tzimtzum refers to God restricting God’s divine light to create a void from which the Universe can exist. In Tzimtzum, God is paradoxically and simultaneously withdrawing and filling the cosmos with light. Both present and absent. Something and nothing.
There might be some comfort in this doctrine as an explanation of the beginning of creation if it had only happened once and never again. Yet, the reality of tzimtzum is an eternal reality, which means it is a permanent characteristic of God. Could there be anything more profoundly de-centering? How do you have any certainty in a God who actively resists any static form? Wasn’t God supposed to be the unmovable, never-changing “rock?”
How could you trust someone with such little regard for the rules of space and time, yet who is so connected to space that it's even one of his names?!
Among the seventy-seven names for God in Judaism, one lesser-known name is “Makom.” Ha-Makom literally means “The Place.” Not only is this word used frequently to refer to geographic and objective places, but it is also used to refer to God's mystical relationship to space.
A traditional Jewish farewell used for those who are grieving is “Ha’makom yenahem etkhem betokh she’ar avelei Tziyonvi'Yerushalayim" (“May God console you among the other mourners of Zion and Jerusalem”). Using the name “Ha’Makom” for God here emphasizes God’s imminence over God’s transcendence as a way to invite the mourners to inhabit the space of grief, knowing they are safe with the God, who is tangible and intimate.
Within the name “Makom” is a crisis of space. We are mortals restricted by the confines of time and space. When our consciousness intersects with the Makom, the crisis produces a disruption. The temporal and the eternal collide, and in the collision, life is made. God’s “something” fills the void of our nothings.
HaMakom is where/who any meaningful change takes place. For example, If someone were using technology to produce a weekly church service, would not the goal of that event be to cultivate an environment for HaMakom? A space where a crisis of faith is possible? Too often, church services are events designed to protect us from crisis; they are rituals to reinforce our certainties and invented selves. What if the goal of a liturgy was holy curiosity and surrender to HaMakom to un-make and make us? Perhaps the purpose of the worship service should not be to build a temple safe from the world, a place where God is hidden behind a heavy curtain, but space for “The Place” to help us see, in the words of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, that “every common bush is afire with God.” When we have a crisis of space caused by an idea that disrupts our objective reality, some part of our soul begins to wiggle loose from the straitjacket of our post-modern age. Our behaviors change because we get a vision of ourselves in this new reality, and our imagination comes alive where HaMakom is remaking the world.