Encountering God in the Everyday

This week’s Torah portion is Chaye Sarah, which means the life of Sarah. Sarah has died at 127 years of age; and Abraham purchases a plot of land for her burial, large enough to be a burial estate for his family. It is a deed of sale embedded in the Torah. He then prepares to send his servant, Eliezer, to his family in Mesopotamia to find a wife for Isaac.

The servant asks if Isaac may come along on the journey, but Abraham will not permit it. Abraham says that God of Heaven and Earth will send an angel to make his errand successful. As he approaches his destination, the servant prays, “God, God of my master Abraham, may you so arrange it for me this day that you do kindness and Truth with my master Abraham. Behold, I am standing by the spring of water and the daughters of the townsmen come out to draw water. Let it be that the maiden to whom I shall say, Tip over your jug so I may drink and who replies drink and I will even water your camels, her will you have designated for your servant, for Isaac, and may I know through her that you have done kindness with my master. (Gen 24:13-14)”

The Torah reports that he had not yet finished his prayer, when Rebecca came out and offered to give him water, and to water the camels too. The text says, “The man was astonished at her. (24:21)” Eliezer finds out that she is Abraham’s relative and when he asks about lodging, she extends her family’s hospitality to him. Why should he be astonished? Perhaps it is because of the speed with which these events occurred. Also, perhaps it is because we are not used to having our prayers answered. The Talmud speaks about one reason the prayer was answered: because Eliezer was not praying on his own behalf.

There are several instances of this in the Torah. We read, “And Abraham prayed to God and God healed Abimelech and his wife and his maidservants” (Gen. 20:17), and immediately after it says: “And God remembered Sarah as God had said,” [i.e.] The Talmud remarks: “as Abraham had [prayed and] said regarding Abimelech.”(Baba Kama 92a); another instance is the prayer of Moses about Miriam, when he cries out to God, “Please God heal her now!” (Num. 12:13), and she was healed at that moment. For Eliezer, when his prayer was immediately answered, it must have been a kind of spontaneous conversion. It’s not often that we have a shattering, peak spiritual experience in our everyday lives; an experience which is such a meaningful coincidence that it convinces us that the Divine Presence reached across the divide which separates Heaven and Earth, into our very lives. We don’t expect to encounter God in the everyday. Perhaps this is what Abraham meant by, “God of Heaven and God of Earth” (Gen. 24:3): that the Divine Presence encounters us at unexpected moments.

We don’t often believe our own experiences. If we did, we would not have had to wander 40 years in the wilderness after having seen the 10 Plagues, the parting of the sea, the giving of the 10 Commandments, the manna, and the pillar of cloud leading us each day. We would have trusted in God’s care and protection. We often attribute God in the mundane to mere coincidence. When the Torah says that Eliezer prayed that God do kindness and truth with his master, this is to say that when things go our way, we experience kindness. When we recognize Divine help, this is truth. It’s real. Another person may not recognize it from the outside, but we know it inwardly.

Does God answer prayer? Sometimes, and not always in the form we have asked for. Does God hear prayer? I’m convinced that the answer is yes, always. We should remember that is up to us to make the contact, through prayer, intentionally keeping the awareness of the Divine Essence in our consciousness, and through developing our relationship to the Divine. Out of our closeness can come the reaching from the Divine realm into the mundane, into our human affairs. As King David witnessed and wrote, God is there to all who call, to all who call upon God in truth” (Psalm 145:18). May our prayers, our calling out to God, allow us to experience the reaching out from shamayim, from the heavenly realm, into our lives for goodness and for blessing.