Once upon a time, when my son Nuriel was five years old, he asked me: “Where is God?” I told him that God is everywhere. He, however, insisted that I was wrong, and that God was up there in heaven.
So I then asked him, “Where are we?”
That was easy. “We’re down here on earth,” he announced.
“No, you and I are actually in God.”
He struggled with that deep idea and then, with a big grin, he began to giggle. “Wow!” he said, “God is so fat!”
When atheists say there is no God in existence, they are partially right. God is not in existence, God is existence and infinitely more.
Here’s a helpful metaphor:
We are to God as a thought is to a thinker. If I create a person in my mind, that person exists in my mind. From his perspective there’s him and me. But from my perspective there’s just me. Although this person is not me, because he exists within me and is an expression of me, there’s really just me. Similarly, although we are not God – because we exist within God and are expressions of God – there’s really nothing but God.
When we ask the question, “Where is God?” we are attempting to place God in space and that is inappropriate – in fact, it is downright wrong. God is the creator of all space and all time, and thereby transcends all the limitations of space and time.
The question we must ask is not, “Where is God?” but “Where are we?” And the answer to that question is: “We’re in God.”
Our sages refer to God as Makomo Shel Olam, “the Place of the Universe.” In other words, all exists within God, and we ourselves are facets of God. Everyone and everything is, in some way, like a fetus in the womb of its mother, conceived and living within her; a part of her.
When some so-called New Age people refer to God as “the Universe,” they are actually closer to the truth of Torah than people who think God is a particular being somewhere in heaven. They are intuiting that God is a reality the embraces and includes all there is. Torah, however, does not refer to God as “the Universe,” because God is infinitely greater than the universe – indeed, He is the place and primal space wherein the universe exists.
That is why God is referred to as the imperative reality – for anything to exist, He must exist. Like in the mother/fetus metaphor. The fetus cannot exist without the mother but the mother can exists without the fetus. If God forbid the fetus dies the mother is still alive, but if God forbid the mother dies the fetus cannot survive on it’s own (at least in the early stage of it’s development).
That is why the Psalmist declared [104:34], “I will rejoice in God.”