Rabbi Zeitlin

Admittedly, I’ve got “factory-defective” wiring, but I’ve never really understood jealousy. When I learn of someone’s good fortune it tends to make me happy because, if for no other reason, it reminds me that these potential successes and joys and milestones exist in this world and that they’re accessible to me as well.

On Shavuot we emphasize the phrase,  זמן מתן תורתנו (Z’man Matan Torateinu), the time of receiving our Torah. Why the exclusivity? Aren’t we tasked with being אור לגויים (Or L’Goyim), a light to the nations (based on Isaiah 49:6)? (Torah, תורה, contains two key letters, ור, of אור (Or), light–furthermore, in Aramaic it’s referred to as אורייתא (Oreita), further emphasizing the concept of light. Kabbalistically, in the Creation of the Universe, the primordial light is called אור כי טוב (Or Ki Tov), Light which is the essence of Goodness, another reference to Torah which was later publicly revealed by Moshe Rabbeinu (on Shavuot) as a Tikkun, repair, of the damage caused by Adam’s sin.)

Perhaps part of the answer, at least, is that while the Torah is, indeed, given to each of us individually (and not limited only to the festival of Shavuot, but every day (see previous article), we each need to interact with it individually, to “process” it in terms of our unique Neshama, soul configuration, as preparation to sharing it with the world, acting as Or L’Goyim, Light to the Nations.  Likewise, we need to process and develop the brachot, blessings, good fortune that comes to us, preparatory of transmitting them to the larger world, transforming our receiving into our giving and thus fulfilling our ultimate charge of imitating God.

God, in His Infinity, did not create a static, zero-sum world, but rather a win-win world. When we celebrate others’ blessings, we know that the benefit isn’t lost in a “black hole” of that person’s ego or narcissism.  Nor is it detracted from what is left available for us to enjoy. Rather, it adds to all of our lives. When we celebrate another’s success, we add our light to the light that they will add and that’s one very simple way, no years-of-preparation necessary, to dedicate our lives to being Or L’Goyim.

 וּבְטוּבוֹ מְחַדֵּשׁ בְּכָל יוֹם תָּמִיד מַעֲשֵׂה בְרֵאשִׁית

U’v’tuvo m’chadesh  b’chol yom tamid ma’aseh bereishit

And with His Goodness He renews each day, continuously, the act of creation.

A great light goes out each and every day. It’s identical to the great light that comes into the world with Matan Torah, the revelation of Torah, on Shavuot.

What’s different about Shavuot, that we re-enact and celebrate this particular charge of energy? Each day should lead us to the same, but ever-heightening experience of expanded consciousness, awareness of God’s presence. The pure, undifferentiated light of Ein Sof is the same today as it was yesterday as it will be tomorrow.

We mark Shavuot because it is the culmination of an intense period, from the rebirth and awakening of Yetziat Mitzraim (leaving Egypt) of Pesach through Shavuot, of self and national preparation. Each year we take a symbolic journey, but engage in a very real process, largely shedding our old illusions, our self-delusions, our complacency. We might use elaborate meditational techniques or we might simply count the days in anticipation, aware that only later will we begin to know anything at all.

Of course we can experience great insight and revelation each day.  The lesson from Shavuot is that we need to prepare ourselves, to make ourselves receptive, to find the courage and honesty to throw away our fossilized and self-satisfying view of “what is”. It’s inconvenient and gets in our way for narcissistic self-indulgence on every level, but when we fully open our eyes, rather than merely go through pious motions, אֵין עוֹד מִלְּבַדּוֹ, Ein Od Mil’vado,  there truly is nothing but God (Devarim 4:35).

Then, and only then, are we ready to receive the Torah.

Chag Sameach.

There’s a teaching (Rav Avraham, son of Rav Eliyahu (the Vilna Gaon), commenting on the Introduction to the Tikkunei Zohar) that when Adam sinned, he diminished the world just a little, מעט (me-aht). One primary step in repairing the damage occurred when Moshe Rabbeinu revealed the light of the 49 Gates of Understanding,מ”ט שערי בינה (Mem-Tet shaarei Binah), through receiving Torah, as we will re-experience and celebrate next week on Shavuot.  A little over a week ago, on Lag B’Omer, we celebrated both the birth and yahrzeit of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, who took the next step when he revealed the Seventy Faces of Energetic Torah (אורייתא, Oreita, Aramaic for Torah, but emphasizing the light/energy, אור, Or, contained with in it), ע’ אנפין רזי דאורייתא, Ayin (the letter stand-in for 70) Anpin Razei D’Oreita through his masterwork, the Zohar.

Combining מ”ט (the 49 Gates) with ע (the 70 Faces), we re-create the word מעט, that “just a little” which was lost. Through Torah we have the potential to take the third step, completing the journey, to restore the world, true Tikkun Olam in the Jewish sense of the term, to where it was when it was on the verge of transformation into the eternal perfection of עולם הבא (Olam Ha’Ba), the World To Come.

Yes, it’s very important, and in many cases the actions and goals of incrementally improving our physical world, עולם הזה (Olam HaZeh), coincide with mitzvot from the Torah which aim at justice, compassion and responsible living. But without the enabling mechanism of Torah and Mitzvot, the highest these actions can aim is improvement of the physical/superficial. As Jews, utilizing our highest tradition and striving to inspire all mankind to aim for the very best rather than settling for the good-enough, we’re not satisfied.  Not only do we want more, but we have true faith, אמונה (Emunah) (related to the word אמנות (Amanut), craft, which informs us that faith is a craft, i.e. a work-in-progress (in builds as we work on developing it)) that we human beings can achieve much more.

While Torah and Mitzvot are, whether one likes the fact or not, the gateway to this higher calling, that’s not to say that everyone must become (or strive to become) a Torah Scholar (although with no other human activity so self-validating and self-rewarding, I can’t imagine why one wouldn’t want to try) nor ultra-orthodox, seeking the most difficult path to fulfilling the commandments (it’s really not that hard nor inconvenient to at least begin to perform many of them). But the “inconvenient truth” is that for a Jew to truly engage in Tikkun Olam and not merely “social action” or “environmentalism”, admirable as those goals are, but rather to participate in preparing the world for its evolution to its highest possible state of perfection, we must constantly engage and re-engage with that “very little”, that מעט (me-aht), our holy Torah in all its depths and complexity, restoring that which needs to be restored as we prepare for the next step and humanity’s glorious destiny.

Of all the 39 categories of מלאכה, malacha, productive work, that define the prohibitions of Shabbat, I’ve always had the greatest trouble with מכים בפטיש, makim b’patish, which literally means “hitting with a hammer”, but is the label given to a variety of activities which are seen as applying the final touch (the imagery is of a craftsman tapping on his finished product to signal its completion, Ta-Daaaa!).  It’s often used as a catch-all for activities authorities want to prohibit but can’t find another, better category (I continue to strongly doubt that turning on an electric light on Shabbat is really a matter of “completing the circuit” by throwing the switch, but since another major force in halacha, Jewish law, is to not separate yourself from the community, I certainly do observe the prohibition anyhow). In any event, this category has always eluded my understanding.

Over the recent yahrzeit (death anniversary) of the Ramchal, Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzatto, the great Kabbalist and Torah scholar of the early 18th century (and my own most powerful teacher and influence), I came across a passage in אדיר במרום, Adir B’Marom, Precious On High, where he describes the Hebrew letters as, each of them, comprised of two primal energies which he calls the ניצוץ, netzutz, spark, and the רקיע, rakiah, firmament (see Bereishit (Genesis) 1:6). (By this his is referring to each Hebrew letter being built by combining either a point, י, yud, or a line, ו, vav–examine the letters for yourself to confirm this.)

One of the fundamental principles of the mystical underpinnings of Jewish tradition is that the universe was created by means of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew Aleph-Bet. This means that the primal energy which forms both all matter and energy in our universe enters existence as modulated by the energies contained/symbolized in each of the letters!

With this thought in mind, I returned to the idea of makim b’patish, striking with a hammer, and saw the correspondence between the spark that results when striking, say, an anvil with a hammer and formulating the basic building blocks of all reality, the Aleph-Bet, by “smashing” the netzutz, י, into the rakiah, ו.

Admittedly, I’m in even deeper perplexity understanding makim b’patish as adding the finishing touch since it seems I’ve just defined it as even before the first step of creating something. Nonetheless, it doesn’t always have to result in a pretty package with a ribbon on top, and the exploration brings great beauty to my mind as well as provoking further thought.

Although B’chukotei begins with a series of blessings if Yisrael lives in harmony with the the design of reality embodied in the mitzvot, the curses we suffer by rejecting them outnumber (in terms of verses) the blessings by almost three-to-one.

Although the principle deviates in both the astronomical and the quantum realm, for the most part the universe we experience is defined by what for long has been called the “laws of physics”.  One of the most well-known is that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

We’re cautioned in Avot (2:1 and 4:2) (which many communities read during this period between Pesach and Shavuot) not to try to calculate the relative values of mitzvot. We don’t have the wisdom or the knowledge for this and our instincts and emotions and “common sense” will likely prove inadequate.

However, perhaps physics does provide an insight into the relative weight between conformance and non-conformance. The benefits accrued, the “equal and opposite reaction” to the effort and kavvanah (inner intention) we expend in performing mitzvot appears to be significantly less than the damage we provoke by ignoring them. While progress in just about any worthwhile endeavor usually requires a tremendous amount of time, effort and patience, often seeming to be more than “value received”, things fall apart much more rapidly. Civilizations which grew and developed over centuries and even millennia crash and disappear in almost no time at all, often leaving barely a trace of their former glory and achievement.

But since Yisrael’s job in this world, illuminating the presence of God in the universe, is eternal, even when we fail, we don’t disappear. At the end of the curses we read, וְאַף גַּם־זֹאת בִּהְיוֹתָם בְּאֶרֶץ אֹיְבֵיהֶם לֹא־מְאַסְתִּים וְלֹא־גְעַלְתִּים לְכַלֹּתָם לְהָפֵר בְּרִיתִי אִתָּם כִּי אֲנִי יְהוָֹה אֱלֹהֵיהֶם: וְזָכַרְתִּי לָהֶם בְּרִית רִאשֹׁנִים אֲשֶׁר הוֹצֵאתִי־אֹתָם מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרַיִם לְעֵינֵי הַגּוֹיִם לִהְיוֹת לָהֶם לֵאלֹהִים אֲנִי יְהוָֹה, And yet for all that, when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not cast them away, nor will I loathe them, to destroy them utterly, and to break my covenant with them; for I am the Lord their God. But I will for their sakes remember the covenant of their ancestors, whom I brought forth out of the land of Egypt in the sight of the nations, that I might be their God; I am the Lord (Vayikra 26:44-45).

 וּבְטוּבוֹ מְחַדֵּשׁ בְּכָל יוֹם תָּמִיד מַעֲשֵׂה בְרֵאשִׁית

U’v’tuvo m’chadesh  b’chol yom tamid ma’aseh bereishit

And with His Goodness He renews each day, continuously, the act of creation.

We say these words every single day at the beginning of the introductory blessings for the Sh’ma. In other words, we remind ourselves daily that the universe is not a closed system, a zero-sum game, but rather one of expanding, beneficial potential.

Perhaps more than any other belief, this is what distinguishes Torah Judaism from other western belief systems which are, largely, grounded in Aristotelian logic and empiricism. While a basic law of physics, almost universally subscribed to in contemporary society, states that matter/energy is neither created nor destroyed, making for a “zero-sum game” where every winner requires a loser, we believe otherwise.  Our tradition teaches us that, indeed, win-win transactions are not only theoretically possible, but should, in fact, be the paradigm of all human interaction.

This week’s Torah portion, Behar, specifies the laws of Shmitta, resting the land every seven years, allowing it to go fallow and entitling everyone, not just the owners, to harvest whatever grew that year on its own. Although many people point out the wisdom of the Torah in light of modern knowledge of farming and soil science, I find that more in the realm of apologetics for our “strange customs” and not really to the Torah’s point at all. Remember, God equipped humanity with sense organs capable of perceiving the external world as well as the “software”, intelligence, to understand it–He gave us Torah to teach us that which we cannot discover for ourselves. In other words, the laws of Shmitta, rather than a discourse on ecology, is a spiritual exercise in faith and trust, אמונה וביטחון, emunah v’bitachon.

Imagine the first generation of Jewish farmers, with no experience at all (remember, they had all wandered the desert for 40 years, their food provided by Heaven in the form of manna). Thirty-five hundred years ago, there wasn’t a great storehouse of agricultural wisdom they could access.  After scratching out livings for six years, they’re told to completely withdraw from farming for a year and to trust that there would still be food to eat. They hadn’t experienced several cycles of this mitzva so they had no factual, empirical experience to reassure them. Rather, they had to rely on a mechanism which broke all the rules of reality as they understood them.  Nothing in should have yielded nothing out, and in a world of strict empiricism and logic our people would have perished before they’d really begun.

However, U’v’tuvo m’chadesh  b’chol yom tamid ma’aseh bereishit. We don’t live in a zero-sum world.  When one person succeeds, he doesn’t bring failure to another. Prosperity by some doesn’t guarantee poverty for everyone else. Rather, we live in a world where prosperity brings more prosperity and where success doesn’t necessarily create victims, but, rather, more winners.

The real message of our parsha, the message of the Shmitta laws, is that neither do the rich have to take from the poor nor the poor from the rich, but that we all can succeed. Jewish survival doesn’t come at the cost of another people’s success, but prosperity, created together can be shared together. At each moment the resources of the world increase infinitely. God pours His Goodness into the world, renewing and replenishing and increasing, each and every moment.

Like our first generations of farmers so many centuries ago, if only we rely……

As I sit here on Yom HaAtzmaut, I’m filled with anguish over my own inability to overcome שנאת חינם, sinat chinam, baseless hatred of fellow Jews.  There are prominent Jews whose life missions appear to be to attack and weaken the State of Israel, placing thousands, if not more, of my people at deadly risk. I despise what they are doing in governments and news media as well as in NGOs and lobbying groups and it’s difficult for me to not let my hatred for their actions spill over into hating them as well.

Sinat chinam is a more complex issue than first appears. Overcoming it does not, by any means, equate with liking, approving or even tolerating every thought, policy and action I see a Jew advocate.  I am free to hate, denounce, oppose and combat these ideas, just as any fellow Jew is free to do the same to mine. Nonetheless, I need to keep in mind that my rival’s neshama, Jewish soul, is equivalent with mine, is rooted to the same place of holiness and requires, just as does my own, to be unconditionally loved.

A cliché for this issue is “to love the sinner but not the sin”, and while that is fine as far as it goes, I don’t find it at all helpful in refining my own feelings.  It’s a nice idea, but so what?

One of our most powerful, and most over-simplified, tools is תשובה, tshuva, which is usually poorly defined as “repentance” or “return”, as in bringing ourselves “back in line”. However, it’s a much deeper concept and perhaps exploring it will help illuminate a way to retain love and respect for people who stray so far as to endanger us all.

An important insight from our mystical tradition, Kabbalah, informs us that on a deep level, regardless of what we think we’re up to, what we’re really doing is searching for those נצוצות קדשות, netzutzot kadashot, holy sparks (shattered fragments of imperfect reality) that are keyed exclusively to our unique souls, integrating and then, with our Torah, mitzvot and ma’asim tovim (good deeds) actions, returning (tshuva) them to their holy source. (This, by the way, is the Torah definition of תיקון עולם, tikkun olam, repairing the universe, of which social action and protecting the physical environment are at most metaphorically included).

At this point in history, we can assume that most of the “easy-to-access” sparks have long been located and rectified. Many of those that remain are, almost by definition, in distant and often unsavory places.  Nonetheless, they’re part of the required assignment we, as Jews, have as our portion of partnering with God to complete Creation. Also, remember that in the spiritual sense location is not necessarily geographical, but can also be conceptual.

This is pure speculation, but it seems possible to me that those fellow Jews who find themselves advocating for our enemies, unbeknownst to themselves and others, are in a more real sense immersing themselves in this hateful socio-politico environment because that’s where their sparks are. So while it appears on the surface that their efforts are hateful, and in the short term they do appear to expose our people and our nation to mortal danger, in an ultimately more profound way they, like us, are bringing our world closer to the completion we all desire.

Although I’m a smart person and try to act with deliberateness to make things better, I realize that the narrow bandwidth that I’m aware of is an infinitesimal slice of the greater reality of my life. By extending the same awareness to others, especially those whose words and deeds I despise and combat, perhaps I can imagine that even without their awareness they are retrieving and restoring their unique “puzzle pieces” and, thus, escape my own descent into sinat chinam.

I’m not saying it’s easy and I’m not even positive that I’m right, but it seems worth every effort to embrace the entire Jewish people in love.

I’m visiting Los Angeles, a city where I lived in the 1970s. The traffic is orders of magnitude worse than in those years and the delays are appalling. Of course, there were many exceptions and memory is often rosy about the past, but the general rule was that it took about twenty minutes to get from anywhere to anywhere, while now the same trip frequently requires more than an hour.

There’s no spiritual value in complaining about traffic or bemoaning how society has declined (whether it has or not). However, we can learn a lot when we consider the phenomenon of today’s traffic versus yesterday’s in terms of systems.

Within a relatively few years, local, state and federal authorities created a massive infrastructure of roads and highways to manage what at the time was a wholly new method of transportation, the private automobile.  While almost as soon as it was finished it started to become inadequate, it worked pretty well for many years.  As the years passed, however, for a variety of reasons, the demand greatly outraced capacity, leading to the daily mess that is so familiar here as well as in the urban centers of most developed (I’m always amazed at the contrast in Israel which, having little to do with it’s Jewishness, but rather with it being a rapidly-developing nation, has an infinitely better, albeit not perfect, road and transportation system than when I lived there) countries.

The lesson, of course, is that no matter how wonderful a system might be when it is first unveiled, in order to maintain a reasonable level of functionality, not even talking about improvement, it must be constantly monitored, maintained and, as necessary, enlarged and advanced. This single system-level component, just like all the other subsystems and subsystems  of subsystems, requires ongoing supervision.  Just to maintain even the slightest level of efficacy actually does depend on continual but controlled growth and expansion.

I don’t have a lot of patience with the atheist crowd who maintain that reality is merely the product of random and arbitrary events.  I have not an iota more for the “God as “absent/currently-retired watchmaker” Who somehow created the infinitely complex phenomenon we call reality and then walked away to another project or to no project at all.

Rather, our tradition teaches that not merely is God neither dead nor absent, but that He is, in a way totally beyond any of our comprehension, continually monitoring, maintaining and manipulating every aspect of our reality.  Perhaps the biggest “belief” challenge is not whether or not the universe was created by a “power” named “God”, but rather that God, in ways far transcending our imaginations, remains actively and eternally engaged with every element of our reality.

Things come and go in our world as we move from the age of one dominant species to another, from one dominant culture to another, but in terms of the overall system which contains all the subsystems, the entire creation, reality does persist, our world  does persevere and it continues to exist. That very fact requires that the initial “system” continues to receive the Divine Flow that animates all of existence.  Unlike our deteriorating street and highway system which are failing from years of neglect, demonstrating the absence of any further engagement, our world, even though it swings from side to side, triumphs, thus revealing God’s never-ending engagement, hashgachat pratit.

We’ve already asked four questions during Seder.  We marched out of Egypt, once again, on our way to something called חירות, cherut, freedom. We’re about to witness the most dramatic Divine intervention into the natural world, the splitting of the sea.

The question, renewed each year, is why did God bring us out of Egypt?  What are we, both individually and as the Jewish Nation, expected to do with the immense responsibility of our new freedom?

(Apologies to readers in Israel for whom this arrived too late for the final day of Pesach. Of course, we need to keep asking this question even after the festival is concluded.)

It’s counterintuitive, but many good solutions are.

Perhaps rather than obsessing on our own personal feelings, senses of entrapment, hopes and aspirations, we should focus our attention, exclusively, on the redemption of the Jewish People, both in Israel and in exile together as one.

If nothing else, we’ll have at least temporary relief from the oppression of the self.