Parshat Re’eh

In this week’s parashah, Re’eh, Moses teaches about the mitzvah of pilgrimage: “. . . You shall seek out [God’s] dwelling place and go there.” For as long as the Temple in Jerusalem stood, this mitzvah applied to each of the three major festivals of the Jewish year.

The words “and go there” seem to be redundant.Doesn’t seeking out God’s dwelling place, by definition, mean going there? To resolve that problem, Rabbi Moshe ben Hayim Alshekhinterpreted “and [you shall] go there” as a promise, not a command. He explained that Moses meant to teach that, if we truly seek God’s dwelling place, then we are sure to go there, because it is precisely in our longing to meet God that God’s reality is manifest. No matter how inaccessible we imagine God’s dwelling place to be, it is as near as our own yearning. Our longing for transcendence opens our hearts to what was there all along.

What separates us from God is not doubt but complacency, not our difficulty believing but our sense of self-sufficiency. As the Kotzker Rebbe taught, God is present wherever we make room for God to be. When we truly seek God’s dwelling place, we discover that we are already there.