“you’ll seek G-d from where you are, and you’ll find Him…”
One Saturday night Moe found Joe on all fours searching on the floor under the street-lamp, about half a block from the Synagogue. “Did you lose something?” Moe asks. “My watch,” Joe replies. “Where did you lose it?” “Over by the Synagogue”. Moe is astounded, “So why are you looking for it here!?” Joe looks up and says: “The light is better here”.
This verse included in the Selichot repeated in the Yom Kippur liturgy emphasizes that we look for G-d “where we are”. Don’t wait for holier and more opportune opportunities. The Baal Shem Tov taught that G-d can be found and ought to be sought wherever we are.
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We noticed that the old Machzor book we are using (because we have a lot of them, and its costly to replace in large numbers for a one-day-a-year service) has the Kedusha creep up and slip in with little warning. There’s no header, no line break, and all of a sudden it’s the Kedusha.
Perhaps a similar message. Kedusha is the name of that prayer, but literally it means holiness. We often look for holiness where it belongs, under a certain headline or bracket. But the message is that holy opportunities are not only on holy days or in holy places. Holiness isn’t locked away at the synagogue or only available in Jerusalem. Holy opportunities can appear anywhere, anytime, it can be in a dorm room, in between classes or riding the bus. It might not give much warning or heads-up, so we have to ready to properly take advantage of the holy opportunity when it strikes.