During this pandemic when God was looking for me at my desk, I learned to cultivate my suppressed internal introvert. And we have to re-learn how to not be blurry to one another. Many of us are now “back in the office.” God knows where to look for us now (and still finds some of us in our living rooms). What a metaphor! We left our set places with one another and eventually our backgrounds – that is, all that makes us whole people and leaders – got blurry. In our new set places, God relearned where we were, but our backgrounds became a blur to one another. We were done with beaches and palm trees and other contrived backgrounds that made my big bald melon disappear at random times, and we just blurred out the background. Then we were wowed by our very cool fake backgrounds. For a while we saw what each other’s houses looked like. Many of us established new ones, in our homes, in front of a computer. I hope that when God saw that our desks were empty, God said, “Where are they?” And for Jewish leaders in particular who are blessed to serve the world through the Jewish people, maybe God got worried for us and said, “Is anybody taking care of this people?”įor two years we were not in our makom kavua. What was the Holy Oneness thinking when, in March 2020, we didn’t show up to our set places ? When one day we were at our desks, by the water coolers, in the conference rooms, in board rooms, and then… WHAMO!!!!! There was a worldwide pandemic, and no one was in their set places. I love the idea of a God who doesn’t automatically know where you are but needs a protocol to be caring. This image of a loving God who scans the room for every one of us makes me feel cared for. She said if you are in the same place each day, on the days you don’t show up, the Holy One will see you are missing and know to worry about you. Riffing on this, a teacher of mine once made a more emotional case for keeping a makom kavua. In the Babylonian Talmud (Brachot 6b) the rabbis state “Anyone who establishes a set place ( makom kavua) for their prayer, the God of Abraham will be a help to them.”
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