Rabbi Zeitlin

The Parsha, weekly Torah portion, Ki Tissa, begins with a census/tax.  Every adult male is mandated to contribute a half-shekel for the maintenance of the Mishkan (the portable sanctuary of the desert, in service until the Beit Mikdash, the Temple build by King Solomon).  Not only is everyone assessed the same “flat” tax, but rather than counting ourselves by the head, like cattle, we elevate ourselves by determining our population by what we produce and contribute.

Of course, everyone complains about paying taxes, but the tax that free people give to fulfill their responsibility rather than out of coercion is actually a declaration of that freedom.  And, as a mitzva, it also binds us as a community, as a people, to our Creator.

The Jewish people had only recently been taken from Egyptian slavery. And our slavery had been bitter, indeed, as we recall each year at our Pesach Seder.  We were thrust suddenly from a privileged and protected position as the family of the man who had recently saved Egypt from destruction, in Egypt’s most fertile region, Goshen, into lives of forced labor, physical abuse and hopelessness.  The slavery never stopped biting into our flesh and our souls.

But we weren’t the first slaves of Pharaoh. Rather, the Egyptian people themselves suffered that fate. But it fell upon them much more gradually–so gradually, in fact, that they probably were never even aware of their decline and probably never realized that they had become slaves.  We read the continued story of Yosef in parshat Shemot where, in the successive years of famine, the Egyptians first sold their possessions and then their land and eventually themselves in exchange for food.  In just seven years, they went from a culture who created their own wealth and met their own needs, to one that had everything provided them by their leaders.  As is said about frogs in a pot of water that is gradually heated, they didn’t know what was happening until it was too late. And as they gradually grew accustomed to their ever-increasing dependence, they didn’t even realize that they were no longer free. And thus they went along with tormenting the Jewish people whom they, falsely, saw as the only slaves in the picture. We never hear of them even crying out.

It’s never good to be tormented and enslaved, but if you are, having it suddenly imposed on you, as has happened to the Jewish people time and time again, is the preferable horror. Yes, we grew so discouraged that at one point the men separated themselves from their wives, totally giving up on the future. But we remembered it wasn’t always thus and realized we were in pain. Not willing to accept ourselves as victims, we had the awareness to cry out to God, even as we lacked hope.

It was that awareness of our true situation, with no candy-wrapping or window-dressing trying to fool ourselves that it really was normal for us to be oppressed, that refusal to accept that perhaps we really did deserve victimhood, that led us to call out. And that cry began the process of our redemption. Then, as a free, albeit imperfect people, we went on to escape from Egypt, to stand at Sinai, to build our Mishkan and to take on each of ourselves, freely, the obligations to ourselves as a community.

This week’s parsha, Terumah, begins with God telling Moshe to collect the donations the people will make in order to build the Mishkan, the sanctuary. וְיִקְחוּ־לִי תְּרוּמָה מֵאֵת כָּל־אִישׁ אֲשֶׁר יִדְּבֶנּוּ לִבּוֹ, And take for me Terumah (donations raised to a higher use) from each man whose heart has pledged. If you note the Hebrew you’ll see that both “man” and “his heart” are written in the singular.

Each person will contribute their unique assets, not only to the project of building a sanctuary, but in building a ultimately-perfected world, a world finally worthy to have been created by God. Each contribution is necessary.  Each is uniquely different from every other one.  None, and no partial combination of these, is sufficient.

There are many teachings, for example comparing the 600,000 letters in a Torah scroll with the 600,000 souls who received the Torah at Sinai, which speak to the worth of each of us, mandating our understanding of and caring for even those “whose letter is distanced from our own” as well as our care for each other.  This is, indeed, a very important message.

But our pasukim/verses go even deeper, I think, all the way to the very reason for the Jewish people and what we really have to give, and have been giving for thousands of years, to the world. We  believe in  individual empowerment which only derives from individual responsibility. We’re individually important because we are truly important, not just as a maudlin gesture. If any one of us were to have a mission that wasn’t important, absolutely crucial, their job, and later themselves would not be held to much importance. As we lose importance we certainly lose whatever power we might have attained.

Moreover, if each of our contributions are uniquely necessary, they are equivalent. This means no individual or group of people can ever be an absolute authority over the rest of us. Only God is the ultimate authority, the omniscience that contains no doubt. This wisdom, if strongly held, immunizes against totalitarianism and slavery.

Yes, it’s hardwired into our system to help people when they’re not able to manage for themselves, let alone continue their efforts for us all. But that’s only an emergency action with the ultimate goal to restore that person to their ability to, once again, perform their own work.  Otherwise, the entire world will sorely lose what that one, unique, person had the potential to contribute.  We can’t afford to reduce someone’s opportunity to do their job, just as we can’t refuse to do our own.

While I do usually spend daily effort and attention to Talmud (oral Torah) and Tanach (written Torah), what really appeals to me at this point in my life is generally described as Kabbalah, our “mystical” tradition.

No, I have no dreams to become a KABBALIST, some sort of “sorcerer”.  I don’t want to make a golem, sell charms on the internet nor be ordained as an exorcist. (I don’t even know if there are living today, any of our people with those “powers”, although I’m sure that there have been eras when certain extremely-rare and special personalities have gone beyond our mundane world.)  Nonetheless, this area of our tradition makes up the bulk of my Torah learning.

I’m certainly not trying to understand the “mind of God” because, obviously, that’s an impossible, and impossibly arrogant, undertaking.

So, why do I spend so much of my time and intellect to study the unknowable and impractical? Does it benefit anyone or is it merely for my personal amusement?

First, let’s review some of the concepts I discussed in a previous article, Basic Spiritual Mechanics.  Every thought, action and even emotion we perform in our everyday lives affects spiritual realms beyond our own perception which, in turn, affects our experienced universe.  Thus, I have to assume that reading, contemplating and learning anything will create a sequence of neural activity in my own brain and, on the most basic level, this particular configuration of electrical energy will generate a related pattern of energy in these “upper realms” which will then cascade back into our world and, to some degree which is probably below any threshold of perception but real nonetheless, change our world.

I assume that Torah study, in general, generates patterns which ultimately benefit our world.  I also assume that each soul is uniquely rooted, and thus attracted to a unique area of Torah.  Years of honest searching as we study hopefully will lead each of us to exactly what we’re most connected to.  There are those whose hearts lead them to Tanach (roughly, the Old Testament), some to Halacha (legal study), others to Talmud, to theology, to philosophy, to social issues and more.  While a background in all areas of Torah are required to more-than-superficially understand any one area, and while this neural activity will occur in all of them as well (just as it will with secular study and all other mental activity), when we focus on our own unique ד’ אמות, dalet amot, four cubits (which describe one’s personal “space”), that neural activity, these lights, will be most intense, having the maximum effect we’re able to create.

Again, while realizing that our individual contributions to bettering the world, either through Torah study, additional mitzvot and other good deeds we undertake, will likely be too small to perceive, they’re are still significant.  They are, like everyone else’s, necessary-but-not-sufficient elements for our great Tikun Olam, partnering with God and each other in bringing Creation to perfection.

I certainly hope that my studies do go beyond merely filling my time with an enjoyable activity.

Although it flies in the face of orthodox empiricism, the mystical insights of our tradition suggest there really is no such thing as simple and direct cause-and-effect. Rather, we view everything that happens in the realm of our awareness to actually be the result of unseen forces originating in “higher” levels/dimensions of existence which resolve into events and other phenomena as they enter our “world”.  While this might sound like Judaism views us as mere puppets and the end of a cosmic string, we humans, in this conception, are also empowered to arrange and reconfigure these “upper energies”, partially, at least, “programming” them to yield the best effects in our world.  Thus, we are both the initiators and the actors.

We’re taught that everything we do, think or even feel in this world directly effects these energies we can’t comprehend which “exist” in a realm we cannot perceive.  On a trivial level, if we “move” a book across a table, what we really did was perform an intellectual/sensual/physical action which, as it were, instantaneously changed the “upper lights” (light be a form of, and thus a symbol of energy) which, again instantaneously energized the inner forces of our hand and the book, thus moving the book across the table surface.

While this model seems more intellectually and emotionally appealing when we consider “spiritual” activities such as prayer and meditation, we’ve been told through the generations that even purely physical acts have the same power.  Thus we’re taught that a Tzadik (holy, righteous, saintly person) considers these sort of consequences before moving his little finger (remember that our rabbis often employ hyperbole, so, no, ostentatiously taking time to contemplate every simple, ordinary day-to-day actions is not the acid-test for a true Tzadik, but should give us pause before we precipitously act.)

This explains the power we hope that prayer and Torah study and other mitzvot, commandments, contain.  We can’t ever know for sure, but rather if we want to accept these concepts we can only do so on faith and trust.  Faith that these mechanisms actually do exist and and trust that the techniques we’ve received, generation after generation, from those who have made the efforts to acquire that wisdom, are valid.

To review, since this is a very important concept that underlies much of our traditional practices, all of our thoughts, feelings and actions affect transcendental energies, also described as lights, in the “upper worlds” (realms beyond our perception and only very partially within our understanding).  These lights, also known as shefa, divine flow, return to our world, the realm of experience we’re familiar with, and reconfigure our reality.  The source and “director” of all this energy is, of course, God, but the totality of all human action, some weighing more than others, contributes.  Thus, we’re granted an enormous amount of influence to both better and, chas v’shalom, harm all reality, vastly magnified beyond the mere “direct” physical results of what we do.

The phrase Tikkun Olam has become perhaps the central Jewish observance of those who have left other observance and mitzvot behind.  To be sure, it’s a very important description of our work as humans, and more specifically as Jews, in this world.

It’s largely become defined as “social justice”, which itself is a very important, although difficult to define concept.  Our Torah indeed teaches us the value of every single human being (often defined as corresponding to a universe!) and we also have traditions and halachot that lead to living in balance with the physical world, including the ecology of our planet.

We need to remember that an essential step in repairing and rectifying this world is the return of the B’nei Yisrael, the people of Israel, to Eretz Yisrael, the land of Israel.  There is no Tikkun Olam without this.

In everyday experience, as explained by the simplest physics, heat is really wasted energy, lost in resistance or friction.  What we  perceive as great, even heroic, effort is often just wasted effort.

Despite certain appearances, in reality the rules and structures which organize our ritual and devotional practices is really quite flexible, allowing a wide range of styles and approaches which completely and properly fulfill our halachic obligations.  (Of course, and it should go without saying but, unfortunately, must be repeated, I’m not saying that “anything goes” and “if it feels good, do it”, but that there is fairly large set of acceptable halachic options in almost every case from which we can choose a valid action.) Unfortunately, we rarely avail ourselves of this reality and many maintain that we’re locked into the minhagim (customs) of our ancestors or our own first approaches to mitzvot. Some also construct, artificially I would argue, a hierarchy that equates the greater the difficulty the holier and more proper the observance.  (Yes, halachic literature does distinguish between לכתחילה, l’chat’chila, “starting from the beginning”, and בדיעבד, b’di’avad, “after the fact”, but that’s a different axis of analysis).  Maybe that isn’t so.

I’m not necessarily or categorically stating that “easier is better”, but after years of experiencing myself and witnessing others driving themselves and people close to them crazy by always insisting on the hardest, and often most unpleasant, way to fulfill our obligations, insisting on including every optional prayer, psalm and meditation in daily tefilla as if it were absolutely required, forcing a mad and mumbled rush to get through too many words in a reasonable amount of time, looking around a synagogue and seeing faces that, rather than filled with smiles of peace and happiness, are distorted by grimaces of torment, I start to think that maybe, all too often, we make the choices, and are rabbinically encouraged in these choices, that waste and fritter away our energy and intentions.

Each of us change daily, just as our situations also change daily.  Rather than being indoctrinated to only look at the next more difficult method, we should (and those who study Gemara and Halacha in a deep way already, even if not always consciously, do) learn a wide-ranging repertoire of acceptable ways to fulfill each mitzva.  Perhaps to more fully engage with the true essence of each mitzva we need to select our performance appropriately to each time it comes up in our lives, independent of how we or our fathers did it yesterday.  We need to, as it were, learn different swings for a fastball than for a curve, and also how to distinguish between the pitches that are thrown to us.

It often feels to me that we deny God’s omniscience when we reject the freedom of choice He grants us and the confidence He has in us that we will, eventually, learn to utilize His wonderful gifts of Torah and Mitzvot as fully as we are capable.  We often praise an athlete or a musician or a speaker who achieves results in what appears to be an almost effortless manner.  That doesn’t mean that he isn’t working and working hard, but that he’s working effectively, with the minimum of heat, of wasted effort.  I honestly believe that God wants each of us to grow to our fullest potentials.

Rather than discussing cosmology or theology, as one might think a commentary on the Creation of the Universe in Parshat Bereishit would start, Rashi begins his teachings on the entire Torah quoting an opinion that the Torah really should have begun with החודש הזה, HaChodesh Hazeh, “This month…” which appears in the middle of this week’s portion, Bo.  Beyond revealing the underlying structural relationship between the Torah and the Mitzvot (commandments), he is directing us to another creation, this time of the Jewish People.

As we read, we are commanded to count the month of Nissan, in the beginning of the spring, as the first month of each new year (and not Tishrei, six months later, when we celebrate Rosh HaShana, the Jewish New Year)  Next, we’re told to select a lamb for each household to sacrifice two weeks later as the Karban Pesach.  The Torah is very specific that this is to be eaten in a group, and if a single household isn’t large enough to consume the entire lamb, two or more households must combine.

Next we’re told to do something very curious.  When we slaughter the lamb, we’re supposed to smear the blood on our doorposts and lintels, presumably so God, appearing to the Egyptians as the Angel of Death, would recognize the Jewish homes and pass over them.

Why would the omniscient, omnipotent Master of the Universe need a visual sign to mark the Jewish homes?  It’s even more a stretch when you consider that all the Israelites had originally settled in Goshen, living separately from the Egyptian population, and, when enslaved, this had become the world’s first ghetto, the original concentration camp.  Presumably, every home was Jewish, so why mark any of them?

One image traditionally used to describe the Exodus is birth, as in the Birth of the Jewish Nation.  We will soon leave the “narrow place” (מצרים, Mitzraim) and pass through the waters of the sea into full-fledged nationhood.  But we can also see the transition as one of growing up.  The simple step of joining together, with our individual uniquenesses, to transcend our separatenesses becomes the beginning of coalescing into a people.  Not only do we partner with close neighbors to share a meal, but everywhere we look, at all the houses in our ‘hood, we see everyone else doing the same thing.  No longer out of oppression and coercion, but out of the excitement of collaboration, we can begin to see ourselves as one people.

This, indeed, is a beginning within the Torah.  Adulthood takes our childhood’s energy and youth’s preparation and training into the arena where we’ll have our turn to change the world.  It begins with the exercise of working together.  It extends in the future to our national project to bring light into the world.  But we need continuously to remind ourselves that it only works when we see ourselves, with all our unique peronalities, nonetheless, as one.

Until the lunar year re-synchs with the solar later this spring when we experience the “leap” month of Adar II, our Jewish calendar has appeared “very early” this year. Nonetheless, the upcoming parshiot (weekly Torah readings) which feature the Ten Plagues always occur in the dark days of the year.  Although we’re aware, and on Pesach we celebrate that these cataclysmic events struck our enslavers rather than ourselves, even just witnessing such catastrophic disasters must have been terrifying.

Although the tales of the Torah occur in a particular time context, the Torah is eternal and it yearly unfolds in whatever present we find ourselves.  As this winter, with its excess of darkness and often-extreme weather grips us, we witness the growing pressure, threat and isolation Israel is experiencing, along with the explosion of openly-expressed (and too often non-denounced) anti-semitism throughout the world.

I frequently write, teach and say that “Judaism is the art of unreasonable (often irrational) optimism”.  Although it makes a fine sound-bite, I never say it glibly.  Like every art, it takes years of practice, of crafting, of challenge, of small successes and great discouragements.  Of course, it’s much more than merely an art (and remember, I say this as someone with an ongoing forty-year art career).  It’s a way of life, it’s an obligation, it’s a multi-complex historical and social endeavor and it’s a spiritual journey.

The Jewish people in Eqypt remained silent while the physical world in their immediate vicinity was coming unstuck.  Left with a promise, they saw little if any progress, only terror.

We’re told that, as slaves, we had descended to the 49th of 50 gates of pure depredation. It’s taught that we escaped Egypt at the very final moment–had we lingered even one minute longer we never would have emerged.  Perhaps that final, fatal step we avoided, the 50th gate itself, was that of total despair.  As weakened and exhausted as it must have been, our “art of unreasonable optimism”, of maintaining a glimmer of hope, enabled us to begin the ascent so many years ago.  Generations later, it forces us to evaluate every situation we find ourselves in, not as good or bad, but as a staging ground to our next step, to believe that as dark as our immediate position is, as uncertain that little piece of the road ahead as is illuminated right now, our goal not only exists and is possible, but is destined.

Rashi makes a very cryptic statement in a comment on this parsha. The eighth verse begins, וַיָּקָם מֶלֶךְ־חָדָשׁ עַל־מִצְרָיִם, And a new king arose over Egypt, to which Rashi explains, (רַב וּשְׁמוּאֵל, חַד אָמַר חָדָשׁ מַמָּשׁ, וְחַד אָמַר שֶׁנִּתְחַדְּשׁוּ גְּזֵרוֹתָיו (ש”ר א:ח;סוטה יא ע”א, Rav and Shmuel–one says it was actually a new king and the other says the he (the former king) issued new decrees (Sh’mot Rabba 1:8, Sotah, 11a).

The deeply profound lesson in this is that it really doesn’t matter what the actual cause is, nor does casting blame even begin to fashion a solution (it doesn’t even matter who said what!).  No matter the justification, no one is able to move backwards in time and change what happened. Maybe had Yosef (or one of his brothers) been able to forge a miracle and keep the former, friendly Pharoah alive, or, in the other scenario, had Yosef or one of his brothers managed to negotiate with Pharoah and convince him to keep his Israelite-friendly policies in place, we never would have suffered slavery, but does it really matter? Whether or not that or similar propositions would have saved our ancestors the pain and suffering is moot since we can’t go back and change history.

Rather, our only exit from Egyptian slavery was to wait it out, embrace our redemption when it finally arrived and, as it were, get with the program.  And even that immeasurable improvement in our lives did not happen instantly. We were not returned to the former luxury of exalted guests in the world’s wealthiest nation, but rather we endured forty years of seemingly random and unproductive wandering in a desert (granted, we did experience some peak events such as Matan Torah, receiving the Torah, and building the Mishkan, the mobile, temporary Temple, but we were ready to enter The Land within the first two years.)  And even our eventual establishing ourselves in the Land of Israel did not finish the project and return everything to perfection–that process, millennia later, remains ongoing.

In many significant ways, the past is trivial.  True, we can and must learn much from it and we can also savor wonderful memories, but we actually live in only the single moment of the fleeting present.  And whatever that present happens to be, our best general strategy remains exactly the same: try to determine what course of action (or, occasionally, inaction) will move us and the world to a higher state.  And both whether we chose well and progressed or chose poorly and fell back, we can never go back and either “double up” on the good choice or have a “do over” for the bad one.  Rather, once again we can only evaluate our new “present” and seek the best path from it to the next moment.

It’s true that Torah and mitzvot can help train us for each new “decision node”, one by training us to better analyze the moment in its infinite complexity and the other to habituate us to the mode of productive and beneficial action (this is another vital reason why extremist halacha is, itself, a bad move), but ultimately, for each of us, it comes down to our own decisions and actions.  It’s never wise to drive a complex route completely in reverse, intently staring in the wrong direction.

This week’s parsha, Vayechi, features Yaakov’s final blessings to his twelve sons and, through them, to the future Jewish people. This is preceded, however, with Yaakov’s intention to reveal to his sons all the future in its entirety.  Rashi explains that when Yaakov began to speak, the Shechina, the Divine Presence, withdrew from him, taking with it this knowledge. Instead he gave them his blessings.

As much as those who maintain a religious allegiance to science and progress might protest, we’ll never know more than a tiny fraction of even the material world. Those of us who maintain a belief in and are granted at least an awareness of transcendental spiritual realms, realize that the slice of “total” reality that humanity will ever grasp is, indeed, infinitesimal.

On the one hand, this built-in uncertainty is terrifying and all the blessings in the world barely allow us enough courage to go on.  On the other hand, living in a non-deterministic universe is what provides us with the blessing of bechira, choice, which enables us to become fully human.

These thoughts are dedicated to the memory of Rabbi Daniel Goldberger, zt”l, a mentor and friend, who, many years ago, showed me the value of the sincere humility which both requires and generates uncertainty.