I grew up in an Italian family. When I moved to New York University from the Philadelphia area, my aunties lamented that I had moved so far away. “How could you live SO FAR from us!” they cried. NYU is about ninety minutes door-to-door from where I grew up.
That distinction between physical distance and relational presence lives at the heart of many of our most meaningful relationships.
This tension appears in one of the Torah’s most striking moments. In the aftermath of the Golden Calf, God says something startling to the Israelites: “Ki lo e’eleh bekirbecha”—I will not go in your midst. The people hear this and mourn. No, they had not lost protection, or success, or even the promise of the land ahead. However, God would no longer be with them in God’s full presence.
There is something profoundly emotional about that moment for me. It has the feeling of separation anxiety that sets in when you are 12 and at a sleepover at a friend’s house and realize your parents are far away. Or the moment you realize your best friend moved across the country and you can’t run into her the way you once did or experience the same weather on the same day. Relationships are rarely tested only by conflict. Sometimes they are tested by distance—by the feeling that someone who was once fully “in our midst” is now slightly further away.
Read this way, the Torah’s story begins to resemble a kind of map of attachment. According to a midrash, the Golden Calf emerges when the people believe Moses is not coming back and a vicious separation anxiety sets in. They then rush to create something (anything!!) that might restore the feeling of presence.
Anyone who has ever experienced separation recognizes the pattern. When a relationship feels unstable, we grasp for substitutes. We recreate closeness quickly, sometimes desperately.
But the Torah also describes what happens next: the introduction of distance and maturation of the relationship that is possible with this distance.
The Ramban suggests that God’s withdrawal is not abandonment but restraint. If divine presence remained fully among a “stiff-necked people,” the intensity of that closeness would make every mistake catastrophic. Distance protects the relationship. It lowers the stakes enough for the relationship to survive.
Many relationships mature in exactly this way. At the beginning, closeness can feel constant and overwhelming. Over time, healthy relationships develop space; the love has become strong enough to tolerate separation. Psychologist Mary Ainsworth described this dynamic in her research on secure attachment. A securely attached child does not panic when a caregiver briefly leaves the room. The child trusts that the caregiver will return. That trust allows the child to explore the world. Security makes distance survivable or even beneficial at its best moments.
Hasidic teachers go even further. The Sfat Emet writes that concealment sometimes awakens a deeper search for closeness. The Mei HaShiloach suggests that when a person feels distant from God, that very feeling may be an invitation to seek more deeply.
Perhaps that is what the Israelites began to learn after the Golden Calf. God may no longer walk constantly in their midst, but the relationship has not disappeared. It has changed shape.
In one remarkable Hasidic teaching, my favorite one, the Degel Machaneh Ephraim reframes the entire question: “I will dwell among them—within each and every one.” Divine presence relocates. It moves from the center of the camp into the interior of the people themselves.
When we exist with someone truly “in our midst,” it means that we are close enough to be challenged by them and also deeply impacted by them at our core. These types of relationships, should we be blessed to have them, when held carefully and healthily, require rhythm and movement between presence and distance. Perhaps this is part of the avodah—the work—of deep relationship: transforming what it means to be in each other’s midst throughout our lifetimes.
Perhaps this returns us to the question at the heart of this part of the Torah: What does it mean to have a relationship with a being or person “in our midst”? We learn from God’s actions that presence can transform—from closeness in space, to proximity, to a deeper knowing. May we all come to know deep relationships and transformed midsts.