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God is infinite, omnipresent, beyond time and space, but what about angels and heaven? Surely they have limitations with regard to time and space?

In the (Tehilas hashem) siddur, before Shema, it says: "and the ophanim and the holy chayot [angels] with mighty sound rise towards the seraphim and facing them offer praise: Blessed be the glory..."

Doesn't this demonstrate some sort of spatial placement?

So where is Beis Din Shel Maalo located?

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  • Why do you assume "surely"?
    – rosends
    Commented Mar 5, 2019 at 13:54
  • @rosends so are you suggesting that angels are Limitless and omnipresent like a god?
    – larry909
    Commented Mar 5, 2019 at 14:39
  • I'm only suggesting that you are making unsupported contentions and phrasing them as certainties.
    – rosends
    Commented Mar 5, 2019 at 15:10
  • @rosends "surely" is meant as an assumption based on my understanding
    – larry909
    Commented Mar 5, 2019 at 15:10
  • do you have a source for that understanding? I'm not even sure I understand what you mean by limitations in time and space, let alone why it is so clear to anyone.
    – rosends
    Commented Mar 5, 2019 at 15:12

2 Answers 2

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The gemara in Berachos 48a relates a story of Abaye and Rava in their youth, being asked about where Hashem is:

Abaye and Rava were sitting before Rabbah. Rabbah said to them, “To whom do we pray?”. They said to him, “To The Merciful One.” “And where does The Merciful One live?” Rava gestured toward the rafters. Abaye went outside and gestured toward the Heavens. Rabbah said to them, “You will both be Rabbis.”

For an interesting take on this story, see this blogpost.

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  • Interesting answer but there's a difference between God and Heaven
    – larry909
    Commented Mar 5, 2019 at 18:17
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    @larry909 I think his emphasis was on Abaye’s answer, pointing to the Heavens, implying that Heaven is upwards.
    – DonielF
    Commented Mar 5, 2019 at 18:21
  • Doesn't that prove their total misunderstanding of the concept of G-d as per Rambam's Yesodei Hatorah? :)
    – Al Berko
    Commented Mar 5, 2019 at 18:54
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:) (see "you can't trap justice it's an idea")

Angels and the whole "world of souls" all are immaterial, they are ideas, thoughts, just like math, or your money in the bank or computer programs. They are not "in this world", but "exist" in parallel to it.

Now, if we compare the "world of souls" to programming, I'd say angels are objects of a certain type, having certain qualities and properties. Like: "can fly" - true, "observes G-d's commands" - true, "has free will" - false. And G-d runs the program and everything's ticking.

In this analogy, heaven is just the workspace where the program runs, it is not an object on its own.

Once, in the times of the Bible, people believed [that the Earth was flat and] that the "firmament" mentioned (in the first line on Bereyshis) is actually a firmament, that divides the world into an upper and lower world. Turned out there's no firmament so we had to change our story.

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