My Connection to Hashem

My Connection to Hashem

My connection to Hashem did not start when I converted Reform in 2011. It was alive and thriving long before that time. The story of my connection to Hashem started decades before I knew the word Hashem and what it means - The Name. My connection to Hashem is also my relationship with Hashem.

My spiritual history is long and obsolete. And yet, it formed me into a willing vessel for my Orthodox Jewish conversion now. The story of my relationship with Hashem as a Jew is current and vital. It is alive and thriving in Torah, which is what I was missing in the past, although I did not know it. 

But my soul knew something about Torah, for sure. Songs and poems poured out of me, accompanied by a ukelele as a grade-schooler and a guitar in high school. I wrote and sang folk songs about God long before I knew him as a Jew. Those scribbled lyrics on faded scraps of paper are not nothing. They are tangible proof for my intellectual mind. They are what my mind must have needed to recall my genuine soul connection to the Creator of the Universe, our Almighty God and King. 

Seventy years are condensed into the three paragraphs above. Only now, at the age of seventy, am I beginning to understand what my soul knew and revealed to me over the last sixty years. If I start to feel like a spiritual sluggard, a remedial problem in the school of life, I think of Moshe Rabbeinu, Moses Our Teacher, liberator of the Jewish nation, who began his famous prophetic career at the age of eighty. 

My connection to Hashem is ever fresh. It's not like a silk floral arrangement that looks lovely, but lacks life force. I am growing and flourishing with Jewish life, for real. L'Chaim - to life!

At long last I am beginning to understand that I am a mishkan, a portable tent housing holiness in the wilderness of the world. Yes, it's true! Torah contains more sections about the Mishkan than any other single topic.  That fact tells me more than the actual words tell me as I study the Torah portions again every year. 

Also called the Tabernacle and the Tent of Meeting, the Mishkan was the original sanctuary the Israelites were commanded to build for the presence of God to dwell among them. Eventually it was replaced with the first and then the second Holy Temple. Both Holy Temples were destroyed, and today the Jewish people understand that we are, each of us, to make ourselves a dwelling place for the presence of God in this world.

I read these words each day in my siddur, my Jewish prayer book, and I believe them -

"I will make myself a sanctuary for Him in this world..."

Although it may sound like a lofty endeavor, and impossible to achieve by flawed human beings, becoming a mishkan is simply a choice. Having a connection to Hashem is a growing, moment-to-moment awareness of Our Almighty God and King which can be ours for the asking, with tenacity and persistence.

I am sharing my own experience in this life. I asked and I received, though the process has been a long one, and it continues to this day. The process of my connection to Hashem involves speaking aloud to Him and having confident expectation of His reply, in prayer and contemplation. These two things work for me, a lively little mishkan in this world.

Jews men pray aloud in congregation, most often in Hebrew. That is what most people know about Jews. But many Jews, and specifically Jewish women, pray fervently in their native language when they are alone. They use a siddur to recite traditional prayers, or they speak directly to Hashem as if they are speaking to a close friend.

When I began speaking out loud to the God of my understanding I was not Jewish and I had no prayer book of any kind. That did not matter. What mattered was, and still is, my intense desire to form a connection, to have a relationship with my Creator, my Almighty God. Anyone with the desire can do it, anytime they choose.

Nobody is more surprised than I am to read the words, "I am a lively, little mishkan in this world." What a blessing to know it and to write it! May you be blessed in your connection to Hashem today, too.