Being One with God

20 Jun 2026 - Random

“If a person who cynically refused to believe in God could observe everything a congregation said and did whenever its members gathered for prayer, study, and communal meetings, by the end of a year or two he would know a lot about what God does, even if God never showed up. For while God does not have hands, we do. Our hands are God’s. And when people behave as if their hands were the hands of God, then God ‘acts’ in history.”

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“We don’t just want to read about what God wants. We don’t want someone telling us what God wants either. We don’t even want God telling us what God wants. We want our eyes to be God’s eyes so that we can see the world the way God sees it. We want our teaching to be God’s Torah. We want our hands to do God’s work. We want our prayers to be God’s prayers. We want what God wants. Devekut: being one with God.”

Quotes taken from pp. 124 and 155 of God Was in This Place & I, i Did Not Know (2016), by Rabbi Lawrence Kushner. Buy here