Rabbi Zeitlin

Rosh Chodesh Adar is certainly none too early to begin thinking about Purim.  Although it’s classified by some as a “minor Jewish holiday” and is often trivialized to an excuse to have a costume party, it’s power is huge.

It’s not by coincidence that Purim is almost exactly one month before Pesach, the holiday we renew our freedom.  Everything about Purim is designed to optimize our efforts.  This includes the injunction to get sufficiently drunk to no longer be able to distinguish between Praise Mordechai and Curse Haman!

Of course Jewish tradition does not encourage substance abuse ever.  However, there are times that intoxicants can, like everything else created by God, be employed in our spiritual journey–the four cups of wine at the Pesach seder comes first to mind.

One of our great traps is complacency.  When we become so sure that we know what’s what, we lose any motivation to explore and to continue learning.  The drunkenness of Purim is directly aimed at this danger that affects every one of us.  To come to a point where we’re no longer so sure of our knowledge is the first step towards growth, to freeing ourselves from our preconceptions.  We’re no longer so sure who is the Mordechai and who is the Haman we face within ourselves.  Now we can begin.

When we begin the Purim story, the Jews of Persia are not being threatened.  In fact, they’re so well-established that they’re invited to the King’s feast.  The Megillah goes out of its way to point out that they were even served kosher wine!  King Ahashueros represents one aspect of Malchut, kingship, which points to our physical “real” world.  Without even realizing it, we were, even before the enmity of Haman brought it to the surface, under the threat of annihilation, of complete complacency.  It was through our at-first-reluctant actions that we preserved ourselves and eventually changed a day destined for destruction to a day of celebration.  הפיכה, Hafecha, turning upside down, is a major theme of Purim.  Again, this is reflected in overturning our usual view to bless Mordechai and to curse Haman.

Ben Bag Bag in the Mishna of Avot (ch. 5) directs us to הפך בה והפך בה, hafech bah v’hafech bah, to turn it over and turn it over again, דכלא בה, d’kola bah, that everything is within it (referring to the Torah).  But the pot needs to be regularly stirred.

We call this process שבירת קליפות, shevirat klippot, the shattering of the shells.  We must break the obstacles between ourselves and our relationship with God.  Among the most serious and hardest to shatter of these klippot is the tendency to feel that we know something fully.  While it might be possible to fully grasp a finite subject, it is by definition impossible to fully grasp the infinite reality of God.  Our most brilliant insights at last year’s seder table which, at the time, opened our minds and hearts, have now become stale.  It’s not necessary that they’ve become untrue, but they no longer tell the entire story.  We are not merely ready for more, we are starved for more.

I often use the metaphor of a ladder.  The ladder which gets us from the ground to the first floor must be let go of if we want to further ascend to the second floor or else it will become our anchor.  We talk about the exile in Egypt as an exile of דעת, Da’at, knowledge.  As we’ve also learned, Da’at is also an intimate relationship which needs to always be refreshed to remain vital and to thrive.

Purim is the holiday which celebrates and mandates our leaving our past preconceptions behind.  Turning them on their heads, shattering the inflexibility we’ve developed over the past year in our certainty, at the time, that now we finally have it right.  Rabbi Daniel Lapin once described life as riding a down escalator.  Unless we continue to march forward, not only will we not progress, but we’ll doom ourselves to moving backwards.  Purim begins our journey to freedom.  To quote John Lennon, “better free your minds instead”.

This is true happiness–knowing that we’re making progress, that we’re continuing to learn and to grow.  משנכנס אדר מרבים בשמחה, when Adar arrives, we increase happiness.  Chodesh Tov.

I recently wrote about relationship.  Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo published, just this week, a very deep article about loneliness, https://www.facebook.com/notes/rabbi-dr-nathan-lopes-cardozo/israels-security-and-the-need-for-strangerhood/339688556063212.

Longing creates motivation.  It can also create despair, but despair itself, rather than immobilizing, has the potential to force one, each and every day, to overcome this despair, to find the beauty and value and love that is in the world if we only acknowledge it.

The relationship between Moshe and Yitro, his father-in-law as well as colleague in clergy, is the first successful interfaith encounter.  Avraham’s encounters with Pharoah and Avimelech are disastrous, each almost resulting in Sara being raped.  Yitzchak’s experience with Avimelech mirrors his father’s and Yaakov’s with his uncle, Lavan, are even worse.  It isn’t until Moshe meets Yitro that this pattern changes.

Part of the explanation, of course, is that Yitro was, in his own tradition, a high priest.  He is described as having a strong awareness of and relationship with The Creator.  But there was also something quite unique about Moshe that allowed him to participate in this interfaith encounter and actually benefit from it.

The parsha describes Moshe sitting to judge over every dispute and enquiry that arises.  Yitro observes this and realizes that Moshe is spreading himself too thinly and is overworking to such a degree that he can’t long survive.  He suggests a system where Moshe delegates much of his authority, all the while retaining ultimate responsibility.  He teaches Moshe how to be an effective administrator, how to successfully continue his mission of bringing Torah, God’s essence, into the world through his leadership of the Jewish People.  And this advice, from a non-Jewish priest, is validated by the Torah and adopted by Moshe.

While this says a lot about Yitro, a supportive friend and ally, it says even more about Moshe in his ability to accept this outside and unsolicited advice.  Only a very self-confident person is able to accept constructive criticism and only someone who truly knows himself feels safe and secure in delegating authority.  What is it about Moshe that enables him to do this?

One of the Divine Attributes, ספירות, Sephirot, most associated with Moshe is דעת, Da’at, wisdom/knowledge.  Although he was a political and military leader as well as judge, effectively serving the role of king, we never refer to him as King Moshe or as General Moshe, but always as משה רבינו, Moshe Rabenu, Moses, our teacher.

Da’at doesn’t mean mastering a collection of facts.  Rather, it is the resolution of חכמה, chochma, inspiration and בינה, bina, analysis.  It also requires having a deep, intimate and interactive relationship with the knowledge (this aspect of the word is behind the clichéd phrase “biblical knowing” as euphemism for an intimate sexual relationship).

Only Moshe, of all our prophets, is described as communicating with God פנים אל פנים, panim al panim, face to face.  This is the posture of true conversation, of an intimate encounter.  Likewise, when chochma, inspiration, is processed by bina, analysis, in other words,when these two intellectual faculties truly and fully commune with each other, panim al panim, as it were, da’at, knowledge/wisdom is born.

The Zohar emphasizes the importance of this face-to-face relationship.  It teaches that Adam, the primordial human, was first created with his feminine and masculine natures back-to-back.  At that point, the world is still in a state of potential–nothing has yet started to grow.  Only when this unproductive relationship is realigned, enabling a face-to-face relationship between man and woman, is life really created.  Only at this point do the rains fall and the plants begin to sprout and grow, and only in this balanced and equal relationship does human life proceed.

Thus, Moshe is the first in our heritage who achieves this balance and this self-knowledge.  Bringing the Torah to the Jewish People and thence to the world, he experiences, learns, knows and teaches what it means to be truly and fully human.  This knowledge empowers him to not only evaluate the advice his father-in-law gives him, but also to adopt it without feeling his own authority threatened or challenged.

It’s not an easy path to achieve this level of wisdom, of self-knowledge and confidence.  It’s all too easy to fall prey to arrogance along the way which makes these spiritual goals impossible to reach.  Moshe’s solution, as we see in his initial role judging the people, gives a hint that at least one key is selflessness.

When we see Moshe burning himself out as he is doing, the obvious question is why would this fount of wisdom and knowledge engage in something so self-destructive?  Another tradition informs us that Moshe came into the world to rectify the soul of Noah.  Noah, for all his dedication, was flawed (he was described as a צדיק בדורו, tzadik b’doro, a righteous man in his generation, and one opinion is that only relative to his contemporaries was he righteous).  When told of the impending flood and mass destruction, yes he obeys the divine command to build the ark to save a remnant of life, but we don’t see him praying, arguing with God, to save his fellow humans.  Ultimately, he focused his efforts on himself.  Moshe’s action to repair this flaw was to concern himself with every single member of his people, to act with such selflessness that would ultimately be unsustainable.  This openness, this ability to truly listen to others (how else can one resolve disputes if not by listening to what each side has to say?), allows him to see the wisdom Yitro offers him and to return to a healthy balance.

Moshe’s trait of דעת, wisdom/relationship is identical to his practice of real dialogue.  We need to both know who we truly are and to be open, face-to-face, to know the other and truly communicate.

We “religion professionals” talk a lot about Eternity and the Eternal.  It makes me stop to wonder what really is and what isn’t eternal.

To begin with, God, of course, is eternal.  Our tradition unequivocally teaches that this is an inseparable quality.  We also know that הרצון עליון, HaRatzon Elyon, the Divine Will for us, humanity, to achieve and experience an intimate bond with God on the soul level, is also eternal.  This, we’re taught, is the ultimate reason for Creation.  Both of these concepts, of course, are abstract and ethereal beyond our grasp and full understanding.

We also know that the Torah is eternal, but since the Torah exists in our physical world where nothing is eternal, this concept requires refinement.  If we approach the aspect of Torah in which it is defined as “a name of God”, as our mystical tradition informs us, eternal makes sense.  However, if we look at Torah, even merging both our written and oral traditions, as a definitive and objective history book or a science book, the claim of eternal becomes difficult.  Of course, this is what led as great a Torah authority as the Malbim, (Rabbi Meir Leibush ben Yechiel Michel zt”l) in the nineteenth century to teach that we’re not obligated to view the science of Chazal, the sages of the Talmud, as necessarily valid science (both because they were speaking in terms of empirical knowledge of their day and, more importantly, they weren’t trying to teach us either science or history, but rather using analogies from both in order to teach spiritual concepts–as the Rambam, basing himself of Rabbi Yishmael in the Talmud, teaches us, the Torah speaks in the language of man).

The Torah is very difficult to define because it has both a finite and an infinite nature.  The written Torah, for example, consists of exactly a finite number of words and a finite number of letters, so that the addition or subtraction of a single one invalidates it.  There will never be more or fewer words and letters in any future or past physical Torah scroll.  In fact, each individual Torah scroll can be said to contain x amount of ink on y amount of parchment, no more and no less.  On the other hand, when combined with the Oral Torah, which our tradition teaches is of equal authenticity and authority as the Written Torah, it begins to expand over time into something approaching the Infinite as more and more words and thoughts are added to it each moment.

The Torah has been defined as the interface between the Infinite and the Finite.  Perhaps a better image is the penetration of the Infinite into the Finite.  Rabbi Shabbtai Sheftel Horowitz zt”l wrote about four hundred years ago in his masterpiece, Shefa Tal, itself a commentary on the kabbalah of of the Ramak (Rabbi Moshe Cordovero zt”l, the sixteenth century mystic who was the primary teacher of the Ari (the sixteenth century leader of the Kabbalah flowering in Tzfat)) that the soul, which is exactly equivalent with what we call אין סוף, Ein Sof, sort of a nickname of God, except that it is a fragment and spark rather than the whole of it, is comprised of an array of six hundred and thirteen wholly abstract, non-material, spiritual “lights”.  These “lights”, of course, being number 613, are the spiritual basis for what will, when it coalesces and materials, eventually into our physical world, become the 613 mitzvot, badly translated as “commandments”.

Examining the word, מצוה, mitzva, we see it contains the root צו, tzav, which means to bind or join together.  Now the idea begins to come together and we can see the Torah as expressing, and providing a means to fulfill, the Ratzon Elyon, Divine Will, of joining together humanity, as we exist in the physical and temporal world, with God in the infinite, eternal realm.

How we fulfill the mitzvot has changed over time.  There was an era of bringing קרבנות, Karbonot, sacrifices (karbon is based on the root, קרב, karav, which means to come closer) which ended with the destruction of the Temple, nearly two thousand years ago.  In every era and in every place, as the Pele Yoetz, Rabbi Mordechai Dov Twerski zt”l of Hornisteipel, regularly reminds us, the Torah teaches us how to serve in order to unite with the Almighty.  His grandson, Rabbi Shloime Twerski, zt”l, of Denver, writing about Jacob’s dream of the ladder, teaches that each individual, as well as each generation, has unique paths through the mitzvot.

So what we now see is eternal about the Torah is not specific, historical/geographic modalities of fulfilling specific mitzvot, but rather that it expresses, and provides eternally unique paths for us to fulfill, the Eternal Divine Will that we engage, intimately and fully, with the loving Creator.  We say that each of God’s “names” reflect a quality of how He relates to us (we’re constantly reminded that God’s intrinsic nature is wholly outside our understanding or even imagining, but we are allowed glimpses of certain qualities through how He relates to us). יקוק, the Tetragrammaton, expresses love and pure energy, אלוקים, Elokim, structure, organization and discipline.  Perhaps the name made out of all 600,000 letters of the Torah, representing all 600,000 root souls of the Jewish people, expresses the Ratzon Elyon that we each fully connect to His Divine Essence.  This, indeed, is the eternal dream of the Jewish people, that we be fully integrated, each in our own way, into complete, whole and perfect harmony.

And perhaps this is what Zechariah (14:9) the prophet means in his eternal lesson to us, which we repeat three times daily at the end of the Alenu prayer, ביום ההוא יהיה ה” אחד ושמו אחד, “and on that day God will be One and His Name One”.

The world, including the Jewish world, seems full of people who are convinced that they know everything.  They presume to know not only what’s right, but what everyone else should do.  The fact is that there will always be infinitely more we don’t know than that which we ever will know.  Moshe, the human being who had the closest and most intimate experience of Divine Wisdom was also described as the most humble of men.  Of course, he realized his greatness, but also realized that, compared with the Infinite God, he was still merely human.

Rabbi Twerski zt”l, in Parashat Bereishit, explains the verse, “And God created man in His image” by saying, “The central point of צלם אלוקים, Tzelem Elokim, in the Image of God, is not that man should look at himself and from himself deduce what God is, but rather the point is that he should look towards God and know himself.  And what do we know about God?  That He is a Creator and that He creates not for His benefit, but for the benefit of someone else.  And from that we learn the nature of man, which is to create and to create for the benefit of someone else.” (Malchut Shlomo, Rabbi BCZ Twerski zt”l).

Notice that he doesn’t say to look at God and see that he’s omniscient and omnipotent and thus imagine that we’re also omniscient and omnipotent.  What he says is that we have the potential to become selfless.  And, like Moshe, we also have the potential to become humble, to reign in our ego and our arrogance.

Shabbat Shalom

What do “the orthodox”, “the reform”, “haredim (ultra-orthodox)”, “hilonim (secular)”, “settlers”, “Tel-Aviv elite”, “conservative Jews”, “reform Jews”, “reconstructionist Jews”, “renewal Jews”, “humanist Jews”, “democrats”, “republicans”, “leftists”, “rightists”, “academics”, “working slobs”, “likud-niks”, “laborites”, “kadima”, “arabs”, “Palestinians”, “Israelis”, “zionists”, “post-zionists”, “anti-zionists”, “rabbis”, “the IDF (Israel Defense Forces)”, “Obama”, “Netanyahu”, “Peres”, “Barak”, “leftists”, “rightists”, “the rich”, “occupyers” the 1%” and “the 99%” all have in common?  I have seen them, along with myriad other groups,  all in this past year, referred to as “moral cancers”.

I propose that STEREOTYPING, in all its nefarious forms, is the true moral cancer.

When our tradition teaches us דן כן אדם בכף זכות, dan kol adam b’kaf zechut, to judge everyone to be ok, to cut everyone some slack, it’s not only telling us a healthy, moral and loving way to act towards people, but it’s also describing reality.  Although there are those who are truly evil, most people, most times really are trying to do their best to do the right thing.  It’s not an easy task, and each of us fails to meet it once in a while, but usually, most people, most of the time, try.  We each have a unique neshama, soul, and we deserve to be treated, and are obligated to treat everyone, as a unique individual and not as a stereotype.

Ultimately, this is the lesson of our parsha, ויגש, VaYigash, where each of Ya’akov’s twelve sons finally develop as unique personalities, preparing the way for a diverse, but united nation.  Likewise, in the larger context, each human is a unique individual in what will, please God, eventually, become the united enterprise to bring our world to fulfillment.

This brief example from my experience with Rabbi Shloime Twerski zt”l, illustrates a vital and absolutely necessary component of traditional, you can call it orthodox, halacha.

Most synagogue weekday services that I’ve ever attended feature someone walking through the congregation with the tzedakah pushkas (charity receptacles), which can often be very convenient.  Rabbi Twerski zt”l, on the other hand, would never allow this.  He realized that doing so actually stole the mitzva of giving tzedakah by introducing even a tiny amount of coercion or social pressure to perform a mitzvah.  (It also deprived us of the opportunity of going out of our way–even just a few steps–to help others.)  This policy daily reinforced his important teaching that each of us has a unique halachic path, a unique ‘אבודת ה, Avodat Hashem, way of serving The Creator.  We significantly diminish our effectiveness when we act in order to meet others’ expectations or, even worse, demands.  As the Rabbi taught, and as his finest students have taught me, and as I try to pass on to my students, God doesn’t want our חומרות, chumrot, stringencies–He wants our love.  And love’s deepest and strongest and truest expression demands that it be freely and lovingly and energetically given.

I’ve been studying a great sefer lately, Shefa Tal by Shabbtai Sheftel Horowitz, a kabbalist living in Prague about four hundred years ago.  He begins explaining one of the Proverbs of King Solomon, נר אלקים נשמת אדם, Ner Elokim Nishmat Adam, literally the candle of God (displaying the facet of form/organization/nature) is the soul of man.  He expands the word נ”ר (ner, candle) into an acronym for נפש רוח, Nefesh-Ruach, two fundamental levels of the soul.  He demonstrates that our expanded soul, adding the level of Neshama to Nefesh and Ruach are of the very light of God.  He goes on to explain that, in fact, the only way our unique human souls differ from the ultimate, unknowable essence of God is that He is the whole while we are individual sparks, and differ only in that from our side of the arrangement we lack the completeness of the whole.  (In other words, we’re finite, as we should be, with boundaries to our understanding and knowledge.)

He further develops this thought that this Divine Soul, reflected in us, is comprised of 248 white lights (pure energies of Chesed, Love) and 365 red lights (pure energy of Din, organization and structure)–in other words, the 613 positive and negative commandments while they are still in a purely spiritual, completely non-material state.  These lights, these energies, stretch between God and each individual Jew, first in a purely spiritual, ethereal, form, later coalescing and materializing into the physical (which includes our actions).
A “modern” way to imagine this is as a bundle of 613 optic fibers, each pulsing with its unique light, first pure energy and eventually materializing into a form that can animate and power us, along with allowing us the ability to glance back up the relationship in order to have some intuition, at least, of the Divine.  Whenever, from our end of the relationship, we enhance the power of an individual “optic fiber”, we strengthen that “light” above so it flows more powerfully back to us and the entire physical world.

Curiously, on Chanukah, our specific mitzvah is to light a candle.  Not merely do we perform an arbitrary mitzvah whose effect will be to “light up” a stream of light, but we light up that stream of light which is all about lighting up light itself!  This is the beauty of a metaphor of a metaphor of a metaphor!  We are doing something so powerful and so abstract but in a manner that was initiated by a very concrete and directly-connected action.

Rabbi Twerski zt”l pointed out that there is almost no Talmud at all concerning Chanukah.  What little is said is tangential to a discussion about Shabbat.  He teaches from this that Chanukah is so removed from our understanding that we can’t really even talk about it effectively.  This is also pointed out by many of our sages in the idea that eight, the number of nights/candles of Chanukah transcends seven, the days of Creation, representing our physical world.

The most we say for Chanukah is the simple prayer, אשר קדשנו במצותיו וציונו להדלים נר חנוכה, asher kidshanu b’mitzvotav v’tzivanu l’hadlik ner chanukah, who made us holy with his mitzvot (commandments, but containing the deeper meaning of binding together) and commanded (bound us together with Him) us to light the Chanukah candle (נ”ר נפש רוח). Without any specific idea what we’re really doing, but with the אמונה and בטחון, emunah and bitachon, “belief” and “trust” that it will be good, it’s almost like we light a soul-fuse which energizes the connection of light, the spiritual soul connection between us and The Creator, illuminating the upper worlds and allowing that enhanced light to return to our material world, spreading its energy and healing and love and tikkun.

If I merely wanted to be a gadfly, I can think of many easier avenues for a lifelong vegetarian than supervising the slaughter and processing of kosher meat.  I’m very proud to work with a new company, EcoGlatt, which provides healthy meat, 100% grass fed and finished, and is strictly kosher.  I’m not criticizing or rebelling against any of the national kashrut supervision organizations.  I’m simply taking this opportunity to enable Jews who otherwise wouldn’t be eating meat that is kosher.

As I’ve written in my standard response to questions about my work in this area, “over the last several decades many Jews in American have decided that if forced to choose between kosher and natural/organic, they choose organic.  Terrible publicity in recent years has led other Jews to shun kosher meat because they feel that Kosher no longer necessarily follows the spirit of the halacha, to minimize tzar ba’alei chayim (unnecessary cruelty to animals).  EcoGlatt was founded to overcome those objections by provided healthy, beyond organic, grass-fed and finished meat, schechted in the most humane,upright and kosher manner and at a very competitive and attractive price.  Hopefully there will be many, but if even only one additional Jew chooses to eat kosher meat because of our efforts, we’ve “saved a world””.

With great respect to the study required to supervise kashrut, and I’ve done this myself, it just isn’t rocket-science.  The Torah gives us mitzvot, commandments, as a way to harmonize ourselves with the Divine Will and, thus, deepen our relationship with God.  It’s not supposed to be an obstacle course in which we drive ourselves and everyone else crazy, impoverish ourselves, just to prove how sincere we are.  As I was taught years ago, God doesn’t want our chumrot (over-strict interpretations), but rather our love.  The deck, as it were, is stacked in our favor to successfully observe mitzvot and it just isn’t, and isn’t supposed to be, that difficult or expensive or unpleasant.

The major kashrut supervisors, for the most part, do a wonderful and important job.  I don’t see myself as competing, but rather working together to bring more Jews under the “wings of the Shechina“.