Hashem is Here, Hashem is There….

Hashem is here, Hashem is there, Hashem is truly everywhere.

Hashem is here, Hashem is there, Hashem is truly everywhere.

Up up, down down, right left and all around.

Here there and everywhere, that’s where he can be found.

Up up, down down, right left and all around.

Here there and everywhere, that’s where he can be found.

So sings Uncle Moishy in one of his signature songs.

The original Chabad version as rendered in the Official Jewish Songbook substitutes East side, west side, all around the town for Here there and everywhere, and given the advent of the GPS generation it appears that Uncle Moishy was on to something because who today would know in what direction to point when singing East side, west side?

Be that as it may, in the same way that many of us never quite shake the dumbed down understanding of Chumash that we acquire as children, we also tend to “hear” the concept rather than the reality of Hashem is here, Hashem is there… in the context of a children’s song.  Ironically, it’s only the childish genre that distracts us from the fundamental truth that’s being expressed therein because the words themselves are spot on in their simplistic profundity.  So much so, that one would be hard pressed to more clearly make the point.

And what have the children been singing all these years if not the Emunah national anthem?

Here there and everywhere, that’s where he can be found points us in the right direction but unless we look in that direction through the lens of Emunah we’ll see nothing but nature.

Where is G-d to be found, asked Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotsk?  And he answered, in the place where He is given entry.  But how does He enter if not by virtue of our Emunah?

In EmunahSpeak: The Call of the Hour we said that Rav Wolbe states in his sefer, Ali Shur, that Emunah is a reality, not a concept.  Our job is to take the juvenile abstraction of Hashem is here, Hashem is there that we melodically internalized way back when, and morph it into the mature reality of Emunah.

In EmunahSpeak: Living With Hashem Rabbi Moshe Hauer….tells us as per Rav Kook that the perspective of Emunah is the opposite of blind faith.  It’s a perspective of being able to see things with a perfect clarity because Emunah is not an intellectual conclusion.  It’s not even a regesh.  There is a live connection (Neshama) inside each of us that is part of Hashem that Hashem blew into us.  And that piece that is in us knows that there is Hashem out there (and over there and up there and down there).  It feels it and it knows it viscerally.  Navuah (Navi) means to be able to see Hashem, and Emunah is a piece of navuah.

It comes out that a ba’al Emunah is a person that knows with a certainty that Hashem is here, there, and everywhere which culminates in a palpable feeling of living with Hashem. 

Hashem is here, Hashem is there, Hashem is truly everywhere is all that stands between us and spiritual blindness because as the Kotsker Rebbe observed, the one who does not see the Omnipresent [literally, place] in every place, will not see Him in any place.