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What does it mean to experience God?

The story of Rebekah provides a fascinating perspective on this experience. 

We are first introduced to her as she meets a stranger at a well. (Gen24) The stranger eventually asks her who she is, and she answers confidently: “I am the daughter of Bethuel” Gen 24:24

She is, in fact, the first biblical character to use the word “I” or “anokhi” in Hebrew to refer to her identity. 

The story develops, and we learn that the stranger is Abraham’s servant who came in search of a wife for Isaac. A debate develops between Rebekah’s family and the servant about Rebekah. Should she go with him? When should she go? In the midst of the confusion, she steps forward and boldly declares, “I will go.” (v. 58). Her sense of identity and boldness to know and express what she will do is evident.

A series of events unfold that I won’t expand on here, but the next time she uses the word “anokhi” – I – it is in a very different sense. We no longer see self-assurance and confidence. 

Why I? – Genesis 25:22 

She questions the reason for her very existence. What happened between the bold “I am” and “I will” and this existential question, “Why I?”

A few of the events leading up to this question are illuminating. She married Isaac but suffers barrenness. This barrenness introduces a new reality. Her self-assurance is shattered, and her sense of anokhi, of I, reaches a dead end.

We might have great confidence in our freedom to construct our own narratives, but somewhere along this journey, you will face situations that do not make sense. And so, the meaning of my existence becomes exhausted … barren. Our stories grow old and stale. We become overly protective of our beliefs and certain of what to expect. We settle for the security of the familiar and lose touch with the source of creativity and the capacity to invent. The unintended consequence is that life becomes boringly predictable. 

Rebekah is barren. The theme of barrenness often appears in the biblical drama. The battle to overcome it is often a long and hard struggle, but then the promised fruitfulness finds fulfillment, and the story reaches a kind of crescendo. In Rebekah’s case, the plot takes an unexpected turn. Her barrenness is overcome rather quickly. Isaac prays, and she conceives, but instead of this being the end of her struggle, it is only the beginning.

Rebekah’s pregnancy is a profound metaphor for discovering the other within the self. This is a shocking new experience for the stable, centered, and self-sufficient person. There is a part of me that is known and a part that is not as obvious; a part I am conscious of and a part I am not. Fruitfulness, new life, and new possibilities begin with recognizing that there is more to me than what I have come to know so far. The framework within which I create meaning needs to expand to allow the other, the unfamiliar and the unknown, to grow. One cannot conceive new meaning and remain the same shape. Rebekah’s pregnancy opens up a whole new complexity as she experiences turmoil within herself. What she thought she wanted most happened, but it did not satisfy her. A more profound yearning awakens: 

“Why I?” 

It is precisely in this place where all the confidence she had in herself is lost, this place of confusion where everything that was supposed to satisfy does not, that a new depth of experience is opened.

She earnestly questions God and experiences God in a surprising way.

God does not return her to a stable, centered, and simple state. Rather, God confirms her complexity and disunity! 

Two nations—in your womb, two peoples from your loins shall issue. People over people shall prevail, the elder, the younger’s slave – Genesis 25:23 RA 

Dr. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, in her book The Murmuring Deep, comments on this text: 

God’s words to her communicate an elusive, ambiguous mirroring of her own disunity. In a sense, God is confirming her experience of fragmentation, separation. (“Two nations shall split off from your bowels …”) Her children, her interiority, are to be both alien, separate, absent—from each other and from her—and eternally present to her. Her life is forever bound up with them, her “I-ness” constituted by the interplay of conscious and unconscious aspects of experience.

Much like Rebekah, each one of us is pregnant with otherness. There is more to me than the self I am certain of. Becoming aware of this internal complexity may be uncomfortable, even unbearable, but it is exactly this discomfort that opens me up to greater understanding and fruitfulness.

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