Isn’t the ruach, or spirit, choked out in Judaism’s obsession with technical details? Does an infinite G‑d really concern Himself with hair-splitting Talmudic minutiae? Isn’t Divinity synonymous with transcendence—and not narrowly-defined protocol? In one iteration or another, critics of Judaism—and many of its practitioners—wonder at our faith’s preoccupation with finite rules and measurements, our emphasis on time and space, in ritual exercises aimed at touching a G‑d without shape or form.

In Volume 3 of his collected talks, Likkutei Sichot,1 the Lubavitcher Rebbe asks this question in yet another iteration—this time as it pertains to prayer, which the Sages refer to as “the service of the heart.” Of course, prayer entails requests for basic needs, but reciting this wish list takes only a few seconds. As Chassidic teachings emphasize, in its highest state, prayer constitutes a meditative moment when we divorce ourselves from worldly life, a supremely spiritual exercise when we solder ourselves to G‑d and climb the ladder back to the soul’s source. (Even if we don’t sense this journey happening, the mystics tell us the soul does). If so, the Rebbe asks, why does one engaged in prayer—one singing the soul’s song, one tethering oneself to a timeless, unseeable G‑d—need to face a particular latitude and longitude in this physical world? Why, according to Jewish law, does one need to turn his body to Jerusalem, and why must prayer travel, as the Sages tell us, through “the gate of Heaven” located above the Holy of Holies? We’re not talking about a freight train carting lumber to a station, or a truck porting breakfast cereals to a supermarket loading dock.

The Rebbe’s answer to this question involves a reframing of how we tend to define G‑d.

Certainly, G‑d transcends time and space. He’s not subject to proportions, dimensions, measurements, stopwatches or clocks. “A thousand years are to You like a passing yesterday,”2 King David famously wrote, hyperbolizing the way G‑d resides beyond time. Yet, as the Chassidic masters explain, because G‑d transcends all categorizations, He’s not locked in transcendence or otherworldliness either. He’s not pigeonholed in spiritual infinity, relegated to the great beyond, just as He’s not locked in finitude. That is to say, G‑d transcends the limitations of transcendence. In fact, it is in an act that balances opposites–physical and spiritual, Heaven and earth, soul and body, finite and infinite–that we truly encounter G‑d’s Essence, or Atzmut, to use the Chassidic terminology. For, the ability to balance opposites–to fuse two items at polar ends of a binary–indicates the presence of a Divine power not locked into any category, even the category of transcendence or infinity. In this sense, prayer directed at Jerusalem–a meeting of space and beyond space, Heaven and earth, soul and body–entails an extraordinary empowerment, one that does not negate mundane life but permeates it. (In fact, absent the mundane dimension of geographical location, of facing Jerusalem, we’d be left with only spirituality—an experience of Heavenly transcendence but not an experience of combining the physical and spiritual and, therefore, not an ultimate meeting with G‑d as He resides beyond and fuses all categories).

And maybe this is the kind of empowerment we need right now. The “prayer toward Jerusalem” paradox reminds us that we may inhabit physical bodies and navigate our ordinary lives, we may appear subject to earthly probabilities, but all the while we remain fused to infinite salvation, to an eternal destiny, precisely here in this physical life. We are of this world but, at the same time, connected to something beyond it. Or, to use another Jerusalem Temple allusion, each of us resembles the Ark in the Holy of Holies, which, like many items in Jewish ritual life, met Biblically prescribed length, width and height requirements, down to the millimeter. Yet, at the same time, miraculously, the Ark occupied no space in the Holy of Holies.3 The ordinary (earthy measurements) and the transcendent (taking no space) in the self-same moment. So too, we engage in a powerful and paradoxical act—a meeting with G‑d’s Essence, an encounter with G‑d as He resides beyond all categories and fuses opposites—each time we point our boots to Jerusalem and allow the soul to whisper a prayer.