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When God asked Adam, the first man, "Ayeka," where are you? He knew exactly where Adam was. God knows everything. So what was He asking Adam? Hashem was saying to Adam, "What happened to you? A few moments ago, you were the crown of creation. The entire universe had been waiting for you. The stars had been hung in their places. The oceans had been poured into their basins. Trees and flowers had sprung from the earth. The sun and the moon had taken up their stations and all of it was waiting for you. And now you are hiding behind a tree. Where are you?"
Before we do something wrong, the yetzer hara, the negative drive, tells us that it is really nothing—a small thing, k’la k’tah, hardly worth worrying about at all. And after we have done that sin, the same yetzer changes his costume and now he tells us, "Do you realize what you have done? How can you possibly stand before God?" First he makes the sin microscopic and then he makes it infinite, beyond hope and eternal. The purpose of both lies is the same: to separate us from our Creator.
Adam’s tragedy was not only that he ate from the tree, but that afterwards he hid. He hid from God. A person can spend his entire life hiding. He can hide behind his work. He can hide behind his possessions, behind his cleverness. He can even hide behind his mitzvot. We can become so busy with everything that we never actually stop and ask ourselves where we are.
The Kotzker Rebbe once said, "Where is God?" And his answer was, "Wherever you let Him in." And maybe that is the meaning of "Ayeka." God is not asking us for our GPS coordinates. He is asking us whether there is still a place inside us where we will let Him in. Parshat Bereishit is not merely the story of the creation of the world; it is the story of the creation of our world. Every morning we begin another Bereishit. Every mistake can be followed by another beginning. As long as a person can hear that quiet question, "Where are you?" he can stop hiding and begin again.