Why Your Mistakes Don't Have to Define You - Parshat Bereishit - Rabbi Yaakov Asher Sinclair

When God asked Adam, Adam, the first man, "Ayeka, where are you?" He knew exactly where Adam was. God knows everything. So, what was he asking Adam? Hashem was saying to Adam, "What happened to you?" "What happened to you? A few moments ago, you were the crown of creation. The entire universe had been waiting for you. The stars had been hung in their places. The oceans had been poured into their basins. Trees and flowers had sprung from the earth. The sun and the moon had taken up their stations. And all of it was waiting for you. And now, you're hiding behind a tree. Where are you?" Before we do something wrong, the yetzer hara, the negative drives, tells us that it's really nothing, a small thing, kleinakait, hardly worth worrying about at all. And after we've done that sin, the same yetzer hara changes his costume, and now he tells us, "Do you realize what you've done? How can you possibly stand before God?" First, he makes the sin microscopic, and then he makes it infinite, beyond hope and eternal. The purpose of both lies is the same, to separate us from our creator. Adam, Adam's tragedy was not that only he ate from the tree, but it was afterwards that he hid. He hid from God. A person can spend his entire life hiding. He can hide behind his work. He can hide behind his possessions, behind his cleverness. He can even hide behind his mitzvahs. We can become so busy with everything that we never actually stop and ask ourselves where we are. The Kotzker Rebbe once said, "Where is God?" And his answer was, "Wherever you let him in." And maybe that's the meaning of Ayeka. God's not asking us for our GPS coordinates. He's asking us whether there's still a place inside us where we'll let him in. Bereishit, Bereishit is not merely the story of the creation of the world, it's the story of the creation of our world. Every morning we begin another Bereishit. Every mistake can be followed by another beginning. As long as a person can hear that quiet question, where are you? He can stop hiding and begin again.