It is not, then, absolutely necessary to be in Jerusalem to know the presence of YHWH. We do not provide a dwelling place for him; he himself is our dwelling place. Psalm 141, another that speaks of YHWH as a “refuge” (141.8), sees personal and private prayer as the functional equivalent of being in the Temple—a necessity, of course, for the great majority of Jews even before the destruction of the Temple in AD 70, and for all of them thereafter:
