Rabbi Manis Friedman on Getting to Know G - D

It’s really important that we get to know something about God that we didn’t know before. Our knowledge of God should always be increasing. That’s how you get to know someone, and to know him is to love him. What do we know about God? Just an interesting observation. We don’t see God and yet he is very much present. How is that? A human being can choose to be seen or not seen by choosing his location. If I don’t want to be seen, I stay in my room. I hide in my cave. If I want to be seen, I come out into the public. That’s my free choice. So, I am the master of my presence. I can be present, or I can be absent. But if I am present, then even if I want desperately not to be seen, I can’t stop people from seeing me. If I'm in my room and I want people to see me - I desperately want people to see me because I’ve fallen and I can’t get up - it doesn’t help. People won’t see me, which means that as far as my visibility is concerned, I have no freedom of choice. I am not the master of my visibility. I am only the master of my location. So, if I don’t want to be seen, I have to be absent. If I want to be seen, I have to be present. What that means is that my existence is not really my own. To some degree, my existence is affected, influenced, and vulnerable to other people, to other things. It’s a relative existence. So, if I am in your presence, then you become the master, because you can see what is in your presence. And if I’m there, you’re going to see me, whether I want to or not. Obviously, God doesn’t have that problem. God is a master not only of his presence, but also of his visibility. And therefore, it is very logical that God can be very much present and yet not at all visible. So, when he wants us to see him, we will see him. When he doesn’t, then we don’t. But it doesn’t mean that he is absent. He is never absent. God is everywhere at all times, very much present even though he chooses not to be seen.