My brother in law Chaim Aharon Chazan quotes a vort / saying from a Chossid: the level (i.e. in the essence of God) where holiness doesn’t reach, nor does lowliness.

 

 

 

This is very profound, for our basic assumption is that God must be reached through lofty mechanisms – after all, he is quite lofty, is he not.

 

But this is as foolish as saying that a rock can communicate with a human.

 

We live in two entirely separate realms.

 

Hence, even the loftiest holiness cannot reach an infinitely perfect God, as it states, even the holiest service of God is sinful relative to God’s essential holiness.

 

The corollary of this is, that even the greatest sin cannot hurt God in any way.

 

Once we get this, a new world opens up, for instead of thinking that accessing God is through holiness, asceticism, ratzu, heartfelt prayer, communion etc. we realize that if all our holiness is like a rock relative to a human, hence there is only a single solution and that is crossing through a bridge that not ineffective man lays, rather that the infinite God who can cross over an infinite chasm lays.

 

That bridge is what God requests of you.

 

The famous story / fable is told that if a great professor asks a small child to pass him say a candy as he is a diabetic and needs to regulate his blood sugar level, then despite the fact that these two people may have nothing in common, a bond, a union, is born, for one assists, benefits, the other.

 

Similarly, all of our holiness and likewise all of our anger, sins etc. cause absolutely no difference to God, it is only by us submitting ourselves to his will (which obviously does include refraining from lowliness and choosing holiness – not out of our understanding but out of submission to God’s bridge Mitzvos) hence a bridge uniting God and man on his terms, which is the only mechanism through which the union of the infinite and the finite can occur – takes place.