“Mah nora hamakom hazeh!” – “How awesome is this place!” Jacob exclaims this after realizing he has had a divine encounter while sleeping on the side of the road, using a rock for a pillow. He didn’t realize he was roughing it in the house of G-d, but lo!
The phrase from this week’s portion, Vayetzei, first popped out at me a few years ago in Toba Spitzer’s “God is Here: Reimagining the Divine”. At the time I was new to the prison system, struggling to adjust to the environment, and trying to fill the ample amount of downtime I had as a government employee with some Jewish thought.
The context Spitzer used it in, at the time, didn’t particularly speak to me, as reading the phrase a dozen times in the Torah portion apparently hadn’t, but this time the phrase stuck. What did it mean to really be here, in this place? Is any place holy if you’re present with it, or are there other conditions to this awesomeness? I personally spend a lot of time in very unpleasant spaces – until I went on leave, at least one hundred and sixty hours of my month were spent in a facility that is at times violently punitive, deeply biased, and regularly smells like an oppressive blend of hot peppers, sweaty bodies, and overflowing grease traps. The air conditioning and circulation went out every time an inmate broke a sprinkler head in their cell, and that happened at least twice every day when someone got upset. My co-workers and some patrons regularly spoke disrespectfully to me, if not downright abusively. My physical appearance was frequently scrutinized and openly criticized or commented on by both inmates and coworkers, and on more than one occasion inmates have tried to physically touch or seize me through the cuffport in their cell door while I was delivering reading materials. Once, my life was threatened by a patron because I could not provide a James Patterson novel. As much as I love my work, it is at times terrifying. Most nights I came home smelling like capsaicin and wanting to shrink away from and forget all the awful human behavior I witnessed on the daily. It was hard to imagine where G-d could be hanging out in this hellscape.
Where you find G-d probably depends on how you understand the concept, whether you believe it as an external or internal divine force or a non-force, or whatever have you. Personally, I think of G-d as more of a state of peace and wholeness. When you act out of loving kindness, out of community, out of forgiveness, any time you choose to practice a mitzvah or to be kind rather than give in to your (totally natural and understandable) baser habits, you’re in touch with the holy. I think the Hebrew people wandered into the desert and at Mt. Sinai experienced something that we have spent 3000 years trying to articulate and make sense of. But regardless of how you conceptualize G-d, once you start looking for something, you tend to find it. So it was with my new mission to find G-d in such a miserable pit.
Mutual aid between inmates is complicated and vulnerable to abuse by bad actors, but for the most part they are generous with one another. Nobody has anything, and so they share it all. Tablets to make phone calls home, sharing extra commissary when someone was short on money, and even inmates with paralegal experience preparing legal work free of charge for fellow inmates. Is G-d in the person who appears with the help you need, just when you need it?
Because my facility largely houses men with heavy sentences, we don’t release many people back home, but we do release one or two a month. They walk out the front door wearing street clothes for perhaps the first time in more than a decade, and get to hug and kiss the loved ones waiting to pick them up. They look so proud of themselves, so joyful to be free to make their own choices again. Is G-d in the reuniting of a family, the repair of a community ravaged by racist practices and policies, or the ability to pick what you get to eat for lunch?
Does G-d exist in the adult learners who finally, finally graduate with their GED or Diploma, or even a college degree – is G-d in their beaming faces? Is G-d dwelling in the inmate who tells me the library is the only place he feels like a person? Is G-d in the library, or maybe the collection of knowledge that might help these guys build the tools they need to turn their lives around? And if G-d is in these places, isn’t it my duty that I pursue them and continue to create the best conditions for them to occur? Is the pursuit of these conditions for others justice?
I see G-d where I see people connecting now, and for as dark and awful as a prison can be, moments in it can be equally as beautiful and human. There are always bright spots in the dark, and that is where G-d dwells. Those are the awesome places.
