Down but not out

Our beginning was not simple.  Upon our creation, the angels immediately lobbied against this idea.  They claimed, correctly, that man would fail and forget about their Source. Was it really worth it to create such a fallible creature that would drag the world through the mud? Why not keep the world angelic?  

Then, at the vision of the ladder, one Midrash claims that the angels were hovering around Yaakov like flies until G-d sends them away. This tension then comes to a head with a wrestling match between Yaakov and angel, some say it is the same original angel that talked against man, and is then cemented into our current name- Israel- wrestling with the angelic. What is the nature of this tension of human and angel and what does this tell us about who we are?

                The world angel doesn’t capture the essence of what these beings represent in Torah. The word angel means ‘messenger’.  They are created for a particular mission and they carry it out perfectly but that is it.  After the mission is over, they disappear. They have no essence that remains outside of its mission. In contrast, man can wallow about doing nothing; yet, he maintains an identity. His identity doesn’t depend on his accomplishment.  He is defined by his struggle and even in the moments of deepest despair, he still has a spark that can reignite at any second.  Angel and man are two diametrically opposed creations. One is mission dependent and one exists despite mission failure. The greatness of a being that exists independently of mission accomplishment is that it can regenerate even after failures. An angel doesn’t understand failure while we realize that we are defined by them.

Planting our dead

In a sad and ironic twist of fate, the timing of the Pittsburgh shooting is similar to the synagogue massacre that took place in Jerusalem 4 years ago during the Torah portion that deals with burying one’s dead.  Although no less a tragedy, the Torah portion provides the blue print for comfort when it comes to death. There are strange themes and elements in the parsha that dictate to us how we should view death and burial.

                First, the people whose plot of land he buys is children of Chet- translated literally as the children of the letter ‘chet’.  Their name appears ten times in this small segment of text.  The person in charge of the cave is named Ephorn, whose name is ‘afar’- dirt.  He then buys a cave called the cave of doubling.   Not surprisingly, the letter Chet in Hebrew is the only one made of doubling two other letters- zayin.  What is the Torah trying to communicate?  Further, when it describes that Avaraham cries, the letter ‘caf’ of the word ‘to cry’ is made small. Why is that? And why that letter?

                The main idea is that we must realize that there are two worlds that exist, ours and the next. There is a doubling of worlds. Death is not the end but a transfer from one world to the next. Not only that, but we make sure to bury a dead body in dirt because we understand that this isn’t the end but a new beginning. The person is now beginning a new life but is still very much alive. Much like a seed planted decays only to give way to a green sprout.   As for the crying, Avaraham realizes his wife was righteous. She is in a great place. Excessive crying is not appropriate. The letter ‘chaf’ means palm and symbolizes that Sarah was satisfied with just a handful of material wealth to be satisfied.  That was part of her greatness and she was in a place now where this was rewarded.

                Obviously, death is a tragedy and difficult, but nonetheless, the Torah gives us the means to be comforted. It is not an end for the deceased but a new beginning albeit one that leaves us lonelier than we started.

Care for all

When we think about the calamity of the flood, we associate it with Noah’s ark. More than the events that precipitated the event, pun intended, it Is Noah and his family that we think about.   The Zohar elaborates on this feeling by stating that we call the flood Noah’s flood.  Why? Because when the decree came from G-d that the world would be destroyed there is no protestation on Noah’s end. And for good reason.  He spent 120 years exhorting his fellow human beings to clean up their act and instead they mocked him.  It is understandable that he would give up on them. Nonetheless, the Zohar finds fault in Noah’s attitude to the destruction of his fellow human beings via his lack of protestation.

                Contrast this behavior with Abraham.  When the angel notified Abraham about the intention to destroy Sodom, Abraham immediately sets into action in protestation.  How could it be that G-d would destroy a city when there are righteous people in it? This is not the way divine justice should work. This level of concern is a fantastic level.  But, the Zohar points out that even this is not enough.

                What lacks in Avraham is that he is not concerned for the evil people of Sodom. He is concerned only for the righteous among them.  He is concerned also for how this would make G-d look. That is not big enough.  The ideal, according to the Zohar, is to be like Moses.  When the Jewish people sank during the episode of the golden calf, Moses didn’t ask G-d to save only those who were not involved in the debacle.  He asked G-d to save everyone, righteous and evil alike.  This is the ideal we are looking for, to care for every human being, even those not currently in line with our way of thinking that they should develop to a more ethical path.  And this isn’t  considered going above and beyond for if one doesn’t do it, it could well be that the punishment will be attached to their name. 

Paradox of self-sacrifice

                Two of the main characters in the Torah, Noah and Moses, have the opposite life trajectory.  The midrash[1] highlights the difference as follows.  Moses is described initially as an Egyptian man.  This is not surprising, of course, given that he grew up in the house of Pharoh.  Nonetheless, it is not a compliment given Egyptian values at the time of both idolatry and enslavement. However, Moses sheds this description over time and by the end of the Torah he is described as a man of G-d[2].  This is a remarkable turnaround and gives us an inkling into what type of internal work Moses did throughout his life.  In contrast, Noah is not so lucky. He starts of as a ‘righteous man’ when we first greet him at the beginning of the parsha but he then becomes a man of the earth after he departs from the ark.  While the ground has some admirable qualities, generally an association with the earth is a sign of an existence overly identified with physicality.  What happened?  It is not entirely clear given that Noah seems to do G-d’s bidding throughout.  

                One commentary explains that the difference between Noah and Moses was in the way they approached their life’s work.[3]  There are people who approach their life as a lonely mission towards personal actualization.  The people around them are a distraction in their achieving personal excellence.  In contrast, there are people that decide to dedicate themselves’ to the well – being of the community.  This comes at a tremendous self-sacrifice as their personal time is cut by all the responsibilities.  This sacrifice is real and can result in diminished wisdom.  However, the purpose of life is the latter according to the midrash. 

                Moses ended his life at a higher level of completion than Noah.  Why? When the nation of Israel faced destruction in the episode of the golden calf, Moses went to bat for them and even told G-d to erase him from the book if Israel is not to be saved. In contrast, Noah didn’t inspire his generation to improve or inspire G-d to save his generation. He went into his own ark and saved himself and his immediate family.  That root of self-centeredness, even though it came with good intentions was his downfall later on in life. Moses, in contrast, had a root of otherness that blossomed throughout his life and led to his greatness. While it may come at a personal cost at times, we have to ask our-self, what are we here for in the end?  If the answer is for the well-being of the community we may find our self paradoxically more elevated.

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[1] Midrash Rabbah 36

[2] Devarim 33

[3] Meshech Chochma

Spying out the reality

Friday night Shabbat meals are defined by two important Jewish staples- Challah and wine. It is hard to call it a Shabbat meal without these two minimal requirements. What is interesting, though, is that these two items make entering Shabbat a unique challenge. What is the problem? Shabbat is a celebration of an important fact- G-d created the world.  One way our sources tell us to strengthen that fact is to meditate on all the sweet fruits, vegetables, animals, and vistas on this small, scenic planet.  This brings us to a slight conundrum.  What you won’t find walking around is wine trees or challah trees. Why? Because it takes quite a bit of human ingenuity to make wine and bread.  If so to celebrate Shabbat properly we should take a juicy peach and a thick steak as they seem to be more directly a product of G-d when compared to the wine and bread that required human interference to produce.  So what is the idea?

                Wine and bread represent the two different ways human beings express their creativity in the world. Let’s take wine. Wine is the process in which we unleash the potential inside of a grape. It is a process of taking what is already there and making it better.  Bread is a different type of human ingenuity.   It is a process of taking two different items, flour and water, mixing it with yeast, giving it time, and producing a whole new compound.  

                That is the reason why we start Shabbat with these two items. It is specifically with the two items where it is difficult to see G-d’s hand in it because ours is so prominent that we challenge our self to still thank G-d for it.  Why mention this now?  Because the idea of wine and challah directly follows the sin of the spies to teach us at the heart of the sin was this specific issue. While living in the spiritual richness of the desert, seeing a natural land felt devoid of the divine, almost like going back to Egypt, so they spoke ill of it. They didn’t realize that life is about seeing through nature to see the divine. In a similar vein, we are supposed to see the divine through human ingenuity as we enter into Shabbat, specifically because it is difficult. 

Magic number 613

          The number 613 always struck me as a bit clunky and random.  It didn’t have the beauty of a round number or even an even number, and it never came up during a math class as a quirky number with special qualities.  It seemed to be a strange number to anoint as the Jewish symbol of excellence and spirituality.  So how did the Jewish people end up with 613 special pathways of spiritual connection?[1] The Talmud (Makkos 24a) states, “Rabbi Simlai expounded that 613 mitzvahs were told to Moses at Sinai 365 (negative commandments) likes the days of the sun and 248 (positive commandments) against the number of man’s limbs.”[2] One may be tempted to say that the number is random; that is how many mitzvah’s G-d deemed necessary to put in the Torah. But the Rabbis came along and connected the number to the days of the sun and parts of the body.  The questions then become obvious.  Why are these two aspects of the world singled out and how do they manifest within the context of the mitzvahs?

            Man and the sun represent two disparate aspects of the universe, nature and that which transcends nature.  These in turn mirror both aspects of effective rulership.  The first job of a ruler is to maintain the natural order of a nation, or in other words, establish enforceable laws that will keep the laws of the jungle at bay and establish unity.  The other job of a ruler is to provide the resources necessary to grow the nation into its creative potential. The two groups of mitzvahs that G-d gave us are the means to fulfil these roles effectively as represented by the man and the sun, subsequently enabling man to rule the world properly.

            Let’s start with the sun, which correlates to the 365 negative commandments.  The function of a negative commandment is to ensure that we maintain an order to the world.  That means no killing, no stealing, and no adultery etc..   The sun functions in the same way.  It orders the orbits of our immediate solar system and it maintains a steady path across the sky without waxing and waning like its counterpart the moon. 

            Then there is the human body which correlates with the 248 positive commandments. These Mitzvahs are there to help us transcend the natural order of the world towards a cohesive completion.  Man is called אדם, from the language of אדמה, which means dirt.  The whole idea of dirt is that it gives energy to a seed and helps it develop its potential as a plant.  Man’s job in this world is to excel at this second aspect of rulership and provide a positive development beyond that of the natural order running its course. Man stands at the crossroads of what he can become, and the goal is to fulfil his G-dly potential. Therefore, it is no surprise that in the Torah, the numerical value for b’tzelem Elokim is 248 as found in the verse in Genesis 1:27 ‘So G-d created man in His Image…’.  It is through the 248 mitzvahs man can fulfil his potential tzelem Elokim and complete the world properly.  

            The mystery of 613 is now clear.  The mitzvahs are intended to help human beings establish a basic order in the world by channelling our free will in the proper direction, and then gives human beings the tools to transcend the boundaries of nature and complete the world spiritually.  

Holy dessert

Perhaps, this will be taken as a way of moralizing what is in a way a moral failing, but hear me out. After a long, belt stretching three-course meal, the host brings out dessert. During the last course, you complain about how full you are and that you can’t imagine eating even one more crumb. Then something remarkable happens, the smell of dessert hits your nose.  The melted chocolate looks delectable and you notice a small nook in the recesses of your stomach magically appear.  When the host asks who wants dessert, you respond in the affirmative.  The Talmud corroborates this story in Megillah 7a: ‘There is always room for sweets’.

                What has happened is that you’ve expanded your desires. In the previous course, your desires were finished, and hence, there was no more room.  After the dessert comes out, a new desire accompanies it and the human being has the ability to expand with that desire.  What this reveals to us is that a human being is on some level only limited by the amount of desire he has and desire technically has no limits. It is a divine feature of our humanity- a limitless sense of possibility. In that sense, we can justify what dessert teaches us, but as we’ll see, we should appreciate the desire and turn down dessert.

                When this ability is channelled towards spiritual things, there is no end to what we can become and achieve. If channelled towards physical things, we are taking a limitless aspect and putting boundaries on it- that is a tragedy. This is what the verse means when it says, ‘be Holy, for I am holy’! Be limitless for I am limitless. Holiness is something set apart from the person and in that sense, our relationship to it is aspirational. It is where we are meant to grow so long as we have a desire to.  

omer and dignity

There is little more dramatic then the life of Rabbi Akiva.  He is described as an unlearned shepherd until the age of 40 at which point he experienced a tremendous spiritual awakening.  He learned voraciously for 24 years straight and he became the leading sage of the Jewish people.  If that weren’t enough, he built a massive academy of 24,000 students, akin to a large state university in size.  Then, this incredible achievement all comes crashing down within a matter of months.  A massive plague hits his academy around this time of year and all the students die.  This is not taken to be a random stroke of ill fate, but a particular punishment for a spiritual malady. The cause was attributed to a lack of respect in the way the students treated each other.  The Talmud in Yebamot 62b explains: ‘They said 12 thousand pairs of students did Rabbi Akiva have from Gevet to Antripas and they all died in one period of time because they didn’t behave with honor, one to the other. And the world was desolate until Rabbi Akiva came by his Rabbis in the south and he taught them, and they reestablished Torah in that time’.

 I think most people would quit or have a mental breakdown after seeing one’s life work crumble, especially at that age.  But Rabbi Akiva, didn’t. Instead he travelled and found a new pair of students and began anew. Aside from the incredible perseverance on the side of Rabbi Akiva, we need to understand how it could be that a lack of respect among colleagues could prompt the severe response that ensued?

The answer lies in the following question- how do we express the value of holiness? Certainly, we can’t buy it monetarily so how do we know what its value is to us?  By the honor we bestow upon it- do we treat it honorably? It stands to reason, then, that if we believe that we are holy, then the honor with which we carry ourselves is a direct measure of how holy we think we are.  And we don’t mean holier than thou, but holy in the sense of important, dignified, and self-respecting.

                       What is the measure of such comportment? There are no set rules on the subject but one barometer we can use is sensitivity and refinement.  Do we watch the way we speak and what we speak about? How abrasive are we towards others? How quickly do we eat? Where do we eat? The Talmud in Kiddush 40b goes so far as to say that one who eats in the marketplace (constantly) is doglike (because he is unembarrassed to perform animal needs out in the open) and can't testify in court. The Torah is meant to enhance this sensitivity. And if the Torah scholars of the generation don’t respect each other, it is a sign that the Torah knowledge may be vast, but it is bereft of wisdom and sensitivity and that is something we can’t tolerate.

                

Personal redemption

             Each year that we go through the Haggadah we are asked to take it personally. We need to see it as if this year we are leaving Egypt. Furthermore, if it hadn’t been for the Divine hand, we’d still be exiled in Egypt. How are we supposed to take this line? Is this an exaggeration or is there some truth to it?  

To understand this line we need to understand what it means to be in exile and what it means to be redeemed.  Exile has three characteristics according to the midrash[1]: a loss of place, a loss of unified purpose, and a loss of control.  A loss of place is obvious as that is the simple definition of exile. What is less obvious is the full ramification of it.  In general, a place is where we set roots and create stability.  When we don’t have our own place it is hard to be consistent.  A loss of unified purpose happens because in exile everyone is scattered and starts doing ‘their own thing’. Finally, there is a loss of control given that the leadership is not our own.  If we look at these ideas of exile we will find that on a personal level they are poignant.

How many times in our life do we not live consistently? Have we truly found our place where we fit and can set roots? Do all of our actions reflect a unified purpose or do we live multiple lives at once with nary a thread that connects them? Do we have a social life, a school life, a family life where our personality comes out in different ways and for different reasons or do we live with a global meaning in mind? Finally, are we in control or our friends or our phones or our desires or our societal expectations running the show?  

Redemption is the answer to these questions and it is an answer that we seek on seder night. Let’s find our place, our purpose, and our feeling of control for those are the ingredients of true freedom. 

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[1] Bereishes Rabbah 44:18 as understood by Rabbi Moshe Shapiro