I was leaving for the afternoon prayer at a consulting gig at MetroTech, in Brooklyn, and turned to my secular colleague Bob and quipped: “I’m going to connect to the Master of the Universe. Do you need anything?”
It was an accurate description of what I was about to do. It was also a joke, and the joke worked because we both knew the gap between the words and the reality.
That gap is not a personal failing. G-d is the ultimate abstraction. Nothing about Him registers in our senses. That is why the commandment to love G-d is puzzling, and why connecting to the infinite is genuinely hard.
Jewish tradition begins with an unexpected idea: we were created for pleasure. But not just the physical pleasures we usually associate with the word. It points toward a much deeper kind of pleasure.
Think about pleasure in its different forms. When you’re thirsty, a cold drink fills a deficiency. When you’re confused and suddenly understand something, scattered ideas come together. Music brings separate sounds together into something beautiful. Love brings two people closer together.
In each case, something that was lacking is filled, something separate becomes more connected, or something incomplete becomes more whole. Many of our deepest pleasures come from this movement toward connection and wholeness. As the connection becomes deeper, the pleasure can become deeper as well.
If deeper connection can bring deeper pleasure, then the ultimate possibility is connection to the source of our existence itself. That is the remarkable claim of Jewish tradition: the greatest pleasure available to us is closeness to G-d.
The problem is that knowing this doesn’t create the experience. A person has four dimensions: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. Connecting to G-d takes all four. When you say the words of a blessing, the physical act is there while the rest of you is often somewhere else.
A blessing gives us a simple place to begin changing that. It is an expression of gratitude, and we already know from human relationships that genuine gratitude creates connection. When we bring more of ourselves to a blessing, it becomes more than words we are required to say. It becomes a moment of connection to the infinite.
There is a method to doing that, and it is learnable.