Parashat Bekhukotai: Walking with God, Not Hiding

Vehithalakhti betokhakhem. “And I, God, will walk amongst you (Lev. 26:12).” This is one of the blessings described in our parsha of a life of following God and His mitzvot. That God will walk amongst us.

Rashi says this means that God will wander about among you in the Garden of Eden. I think the reason Rashi points to the Garden of Eden here is that the verb vehithalakhti, the reflexive form of halakh, “walk,” is used in reference to God in one other place – in Breishit, in reference to God’s voice wandering the Garden just after the first humans eat the forbidden fruit. What happens there? The people hear God walking and hide from Him among the trees; He calls out: Ayeka? Where are you? And they respond that they are fearful and hiding because they are naked.

This is the normal state of humanity – one of hiding and shame. We act in ways that we judge wrong (and often are wrong), but that is not really what removes us from God’s presence. What removes us from God’s presence, and in many ways, from our own presence, is the secondary aftereffect of our own judgment of ourselves – the hiding and the shame, our own assessment of our shameful “nakedness,” our own sense of unworthiness before God and humanity, and the hiding from truth and God that immediately ensues.

The blessing promised here for walking in God’s ways, for walking with a sense of His presence at all times, is in a way its own reward. What is the reward for walking in God’s ways? It brings a return to a pre-sin state, a return to the moment in the Garden of Eden when we could sense palpably God’s Presence walking about amongst us. But this time, instead of hiding and feeling shame, if we are really walking with God, then we learn not to hide, even if we are at times unworthy, not to hide, but to trust in the relationship, to trust that we are still worthy of God’s presence.

Tara Brach, a meditation teacher, likens our human situation of self-judgment to two arrows. There is the initial arrow of hurt, pain, anger, wrongful action, whatever, and then there is the second arrow, which digs us in so much deeper, the second arrow of self-condemnation and shame. When this second arrow hits, we are no longer walking with God; we no longer feel worthy of God’s presence. We hide from God and from ourselves and punish ourselves for our sins by distancing ourselves from God.

But God is still walking about the Garden looking for us. The key is to be steadfast with ourselves and with our relationship with God, not to quit on ourselves and hide and decide it is over and we are unworthy. That would be to walk with God bekeri, with a certain happenstance quality, sometimes on and sometimes off, depending on whether we feel worthy. No, we need to know that at all times God walks with us. To know this is in and of itself to return to the Garden of Eden, to return to the sense of peace and trust of that relationship. It was not the sin that destroyed it – God still wants us after we sin, is still walking the garden; He knows we are imperfect – it was the hiding, the distancing of our own selves from Him. It is the shaming that turns us away from Presence, convinces us that we do not deserve God and therefore do not seek or sense Him.

To walk with God, not bekeri, not with a sense of randomness or unsureness, but with a sense of sure-footed steadfastness, is to trust that God is walking with us, too, at all times, no matter what; it means never to give up on ourselves or shut down and hide, but to have the courage to face Presence at all times.