Devil In The Details
By Yochanan Gordon
A friend of mine—a shliach from overseas—messaged me Sunday that he was flying into New York for a quick visit: the Ohel, a dinner in the city later that night, and then back home.
We’re friends from afar. We met once, but mostly we exchange ideas, Torah, and voice notes while waiting for the elusive chance to farbreng in person. He mentioned he might make it to Central Avenue, so I held out some hope that this whirlwind trip would finally make that happen.
After davening and a couple of shiurim, we headed out for a midday walk. I sent him a message:
“I’ll be heading out onto the Ave. Are you around?”
He replied: “At the Rebbe.”
I wrote back: “Please send my regards.”
A moment later, he added something vulnerable: he was having a very hard time writing a pa’n—pidyon nefesh—the note traditionally written, read, and torn at the Rebbe’s tziyun. Someone reading this is already wondering why we tear the note. The answer, based on the Rebbe’s own instruction in Igros Kodesh, is that tearing symbolizes that the request has been received and addressed; the paper is no longer needed.
I wrote back, “That’s good. It would be a problem if it were easy.”
Sensing I might have sounded glib, I clarified, “Just realize—everything you want to say, and would say if you could, already exists inside your inability to express it.”
He sent a voice note saying, “That’s a little too mevakshei-Hashem’dik,” referencing the themes Reb Yussie Zakutinsky brings out in KMH.
But I reminded him: this isn’t a KMH idea. The Baal Shem Tov himself teaches in Kesser Shem Tov that a person can find himself in intellectual confusion and simultaneously experience deep deveikus. Ambivalence doesn’t block connection; it is the place where connection becomes raw and essential.
His frustration carried the subtle feeling that struggling to express himself at the Rebbe’s resting place somehow reflected poorly on his relationship with the Rebbe. I was trying to tell him the opposite: that the very inability to articulate is itself an opportunity—an invitation to find Hashem inside the quagmire instead of interpreting it as a concealment.
Many stories of the Baal Shem Tov revolve around katnus hamochin, constricted consciousness. Most famous is the story of his attempted journey to Eretz Yisrael when he forgot everything—even needing to relearn the aleph-beis—which was his only way to survive that ordeal. At the end of his life, he said that after all his levels of faith, he envied the simple faith of a child.
Later that week, I found myself in a small personal tumult, and I remembered our conversation. On a walk, I tried a bit of hisbodedus. I looked upward and spoke in half-sentences, feeling the same difficulty in expression.
It didn’t bother me. If anything, I smirked—how easy it is to direct someone else through their ambivalence, and how different it feels when the ambivalence is ours.
But then something struck me: the whole construct of katnus and gadlus belongs to the realm of revelation. And revelation, historically, didn’t quite cross the Atlantic. The Alter Rebbe wrote that the kol of Har Sinai never fully reached America. Meaning: in America, we don’t connect to Hashem through the clarity of revelation—we connect through His essence, which is accessible precisely when revelation is absent.
When the Frierdiker Rebbe arrived, he was told that America was spiritually barren. From the floorboards of the Greystone Hotel he thundered, “America iz nisht andersh!”
America is no different.
Reb Yussie Zakutinsky recently suggested at a farbrengen with Reb Yitzchak Refoel Abuchatzeira that perhaps the Rebbe meant something deeper: In America, our avodah is to connect to the aspect of Hashem that is nisht andersh—the One of Whom it is said, Ani Hashem lo shanisi. Before creation and after creation, He is unchanged. In a land where revelation is muted, the essence is more available, not less.
Before writing this piece, I looked up the origin of “The devil is in the details.” Ironically, it began in Germany as “G-d is in the details.” Over time, as people encountered life’s complications, the phrase soured. Cynicism replaced faith, and G-d was replaced with the devil.
But the shift itself reveals something important: that the way we meet the details shapes the way we meet the Divine.
And that leads to the point tying the entire piece together.
In truth, there is no contradiction. The seeming tension—between finding G-d in the details and cleaving to His essence beyond revelation—only exists as long as we imagine that G-d is encountered either in clarity or in concealment. But the Baal Shem Tov, the Alter Rebbe, and the Rebbe all teach the same thing: the details and the essence are not competing; the essence is discovered through the very details that appear to obscure it.
In Europe, you found G-d in the details because the light was strong.
In America, you find G-d in the details because the light is hidden—and only Essence can be found in the dark.
The struggle to write the pa’n, the half-sentences of hisbodedus, the inner confusion, the ambivalence—these aren’t obstacles. They are the exact cracks through which the atzmus we’re meant to connect to in America shines through.
When words fail, when clarity retreats, when revelation dims—you aren’t further from G-d. You’re standing in the one place where nothing can block Him.
And that is where the details stop being the devil’s domain and return to being what they always were: the subtle, sacred places where G-d waits to be found. n
Yochanan Gordon can be reached at [email protected]. Read more of Yochanan’s articles at 5TJT.com.
