“I will give you treasures concealed in the dark and secret hoards—so that you may know that it is I the Lord.”—Isaiah 45:3 (JPS)

“What does it mean,” the visiting scholar asked us, “when this prayer says that ‘God is overflowing’ with blessings?” Our scholar in residence for the weekend had been taking us through some of the prayers we said in Hebrew in every service, often without thinking about them. 

Earlier in the class, he had helped us explore some different translations of the standard prayers, the original reasons some of them had been included in the prayer book, and how they had been used in historical contexts. Now we were going beyond what we were saying when we prayed those prayers, into what was behind the words. 

One of the other participants answered, “Maybe it means that God is so full of blessings for us that they just spill out.” Another said, “Maybe it’s saying that God’s blessings are endless,” and the scholar instantly responded, “But are you saying that the blessings are bigger than God can contain? That God has an end, but the blessings don’t?” For a couple of minutes, there was silence. 

Then I raised my hand. “We can’t know God’s essence,” I said hesitantly. “Maybe the only way we can come to know God at all is to encounter God in the overflow.” 

The scholar kept the discussion going, but I was stalled in the new insight that had come to me. God would, it seemed to me, understand that I was too limited to grasp anything near the entirety of who and what He is. And God wanted me to seek, so He provided the place where we could meet. The prayer simply called that place “the overflow.”