The silences of the Torah have for centuries moved people to interpretation. This week, we have one of those great silences – God appears to Abraham. But what happened before? How did Abraham have any sense that there was a God in the world? Emerging from a background of idol worship, did he possess a special intuition?

The rabbis fill in this gap in several ways, telling stories of Abraham becoming disenchanted with his father’s idols, or realizing that neither the sun nor the moon was the eternal God. Even more poignant is the story that Abraham saw the world as a palace that was ‘doleket’. He asked – Does no one own this palace? Out of the sky came God and said – yes, I am the Lord of this palace. The key question is – what is ‘doleket?’

As pointed out by Abraham Joshua Heschel, doleket can mean either on fire or full of light. In other words, perhaps the first monotheist saw the world as a place of pain and destruction. But perhaps he saw the world as a pageant of wonder and miracle.

Like the gestalt image of the face and the goblet, we too can shift our sense of God’s world. Life is full of pain and loss and almost unfathomable tragedy. The past year has demonstrated anew how destructive human beings can be to one another.

Yet at the same time, the world is full of discovery, of beauty and of love. There are moments when we understand that Abraham might have seen a palace full of light, and — overwhelmed by the miraculousness of everything from a soul to a star — asked, “Doesn’t this place belong to someone?” God had long been waiting for someone to recognize the brokenness of the world and its possibilities for tikkun, for healing and hope. Abraham was the first to fully feel it. For all of us engaged in fighting for a better, kinder, world, the lesson is manifest: seeing both the anguish of the world and its enchantment enables us to move from a palace on fire to one filled with light.