Rabbi Zeitlin

There are at least two New Year lessons that are universal. One is the importance of letting go, especially of grudges and anger acquired over the last year, an emotional housecleaning called forgiveness. Be sure to include yourself among those you forgive. Another thing to let go off is all the baggage we’ve acquired over the previous year. Strangely, these can can even include last years insights and inspirations.

One lesson taught by my rebbe is the need for courage to truly free oneself from preconceptions and habits that rather than leading you forward as they had in the past, now only hold you back. Or, as I like to put it, the ladder that brought you from the ground to the first floor becomes an anchor that prevents you from ascending to the next floor. Don’t glorify stagnation; keep growing.

Shana Tova to all

A mantra, a meditation, a reminder of what’s behind this entire Jewish enterprise.

We exist to be loved because the dominant “flavor” of God is love and it must be dynamic and flow in order to flower.  And while there is almost nothing our finite minds can truly grasp of His infinite nature, we do know that he is perfectly complete, needing nothing from outside Himself to be complete, that, ultimately, He is unknowable, but that He is  the source of and definition of all Goodness.

A lover wants only the best for the beloved, and since the ultimate goodness is defined as God Himself, we’re given the seemingly impossible opportunity to, as finite beings, approach ever so closely to the Infinite Goodness.  And nearness, spiritually, rather than physically, speaking, is resemblance.

So we’re given the opportunity to imitate The Creator.  We can do this by becoming creators ourselves, generating our closeness rather than merely receiving it like some sort of cosmic welfare.  We are given free choice to, at each moment, consciously and actively, independently move ourselves ever closer.

So, the Universe is created incomplete and we’re placed in it with the opportunity to partner in the finishing touches, bringing the world to its own perfect completeness.  Tikkun Olam is not merely restricted to helping others, to protecting the physical environment or any other specific set of tasks which might seem urgent at the time, although it does include all of these and more.  But it really means each of us using our unique gifts and unique vision to facilitate the ultimate perfection.

This becomes clearer as we remember that “Olam”, world or universe, has several meanings.  What we usually call the world is, more specifically, “Olam Gadol”, the greater world.  But there is also “Olam Katan”, the small world, actually many of those–each individual human.  This is the teaching that whoever saves a life is like one who creates the world.  So, we work, simultaneously, healing and completing both the Olam Gadol and the Olam Katan.  When we learn “as above, so below”, we’re really talking about the power that is generated as we heal and integrate our own personalities, refine ourselves as lovers and creators.

Much is beyond our vision and understanding, but which, nonetheless, is part of Creation.  So, in addition to those actions whose effects we can seemingly observe and understand, the empirical, there is also a lot which we can, at best, intuit, and if not, only “take on faith”.

But there is no “blind faith” in Judaism.  “Emunah”, faith or belief, related to “Amen”, is based on the same root as “Amanut”, craft.  Our mandate is to slowly craft our own belief, each a work-in-progress.

So, we have to work to accept, understand and, finally, believe that even while most of Creation is beyond our conception, it remains within our influence.  And Tikun Olam extends to this realm as well.

There are both actions that make sense and those which defy or transcend “sense”, both the logical and the trans-rational, and each can and must further the project of bringing the world to its perfect completion.

Step back a moment.  Take ourselves out of the centers of our universes, admit our own finitude, and we begin to see more than when we relied only on our own senses.  “Reishet Chachmah, Yirat HaShem”, the beginning of wisdom is seeing that there is an Infinite and Transcendent.

And remember, this Infinite Transcendent God acts only for the Good, for our good.  “More than the calf wants milk, the cow wants to nurse.”  We’re meant to succeed.

We’re given the tools to operate in the empirical, “rational” world.  We have sense organs which are coupled with Sense, the ability to process information.  Much of what needs to be done in the world  can be learned through this channel.

But our work in the invisible, transcendent, world beyond our conception, requires a map, advice and guidance.  But in order to accept and trust these gifts, remember the source and the motivation of them, which is love.  This enables us to trust, to do things that evade everyday reasoning, Mitzvot, in a word.

So we can now view those perplexing Mitzvot as pathways towards the tikkunim we’re not able to directly understand.  They’re not arbitrary, nor intended to turn us into regimented, unthinking robots but, rather, to enhance our unique effectiveness, our sensitivity, our capacity to love.  We might not understand the exact mechanism.  We don’t have to.

Just as The Creator desires our perfect completion, we work to create that same perfection in the unfinished world.  Both in ways we can determine for ourselves and in ways we accept with loving trust.

Of course, we can analyze and examine this to the finest detail.  Like our individual “emunah”, faith, like our efforts in “tikkun”, like the world itself, it’s a work in progress.  They’re all works in progress, each of us, the world we share, the infinite realms of reality we can’t even directly perceive.

By saying that we’re the key, we’re not in any way saying the world is ours to exploit, to destroy, to use as we wish.  Although we do have the power to destroy much, our ultimate role, once again, is to bring it all, our individual unique selves included, to it’s finest state.

Then we’re truly the creative partners of The Creator.  We’re as close to that transcendent being as possible, connected and receiving the flow of great love which was the original goal.

A mantra, a meditation, a reminder.  We’re here to do our best, to be our finest, and to then ultimately enjoy just being, in the eternal moment, basking in that Source of all light, all good, all love.

To paraphrase Hillel, the rest is details, come and learn.

As the rhythm and theme of the Jewish year flows from past setbacks, failures and disasters typified by Tisha B’Av to looking forward to Rosh HaShana and the promise of the future, I personally find it a lot “easier” to accept that things have gone wrong than that they will go right. I suffer from a very widespread malaise within our people, Chisaron Bitachon, an imperfect trust.

Oh, I have no problems, intellectual, emotional or spiritual believing that God exists. That He (note–throughout this article I use the masculine merely as convention–it’s fundamental that God incorporates and transcends gender, without requiring tokenism in speech or writing) created all there is, that He fills all creation with His essential Beingness, that we are, in final analysis, individual expressions of that Unknowable Unity.

I can also buy, intellectually at least, that God directs all of existence, that His ultimate aim is only good: the expression and realization of Divine Love. I’ll also accept, perhaps a little grudgingly now, that everything really will work out, that there is a higher, better realm of existence toward which we’re all headed, that the lion will, indeed, eventually, lie down with the lamb, that we’ll return in ultimate peace to our Holy Land, to Jerusalem, to a new expression and reality of the Holy Temple. I’m even not uncomfortable not knowing the details–I willingly admit my own intellectual limitations as human.

But when I try to apply that faith a little closer to home, addressing my own doubts and insecurities, it starts to break down. Why should the Creator of the Universe take the time to look at, let alone care about this individual life I call my own?

There is a mirror to this question. Just as I doubt God’s responsibility to me, I question my abilities to rise to the seemingly insoluble responsibilities and challenges our world now faces. How could God bring the world so close to the chaos and annihilation of economic collapse, ecological disaster, nuclear holocaust and worse, then dump it in our hands to manage? How, then, can insignificant I hope to make a difference and to have any real effect on these problems?

As Jews we have a unique approach to life. We’re bound to the world and to its Creator through the mechanism of covenant. Our blessings and our responsibilities are directly and intimately tied with each other. But our unique relationship goes beyond “do this, do that” and even beyond “if you do this I’ll do that”.

Rather, we’re heirs to a process where our mode of being is duty, reward and learning all rolled into one. Our path is described in the Torah. Our maximum reward and our means of achieving it are one and the same, to harmonize ourselves as much as we can to The Creator, imitating in the human arena His Acts in the cosmic. We’re told to “Be holy because I am holy”, to be compassionate because He is compassionate, to be just because He is just, to be wise because He is wise and, as much as we can, to become whole because He is whole.

According to the Rambam, our first duty/mitzvah/clue/step is l’ha-amin, to believe. This very word, emunah, is very close to the word amanut, which means a craft. Just as an artist and craftsman works and reworks his media, trying to perfect it, belief and trust also require constant work and tweaking and touching up. Blind Faith is of no use to us as Jews.

To back up just a moment, we need to keep in mind that the Torah is richly minimalistic. By this I mean that it is the very interface of the infinite into the finite. Condensed and concentrated into a limited number of words and letters, a finite amount of ink on a finite amount of parchment, is a full description of all that there is. In order to pack all this, the Torah must also be extremely efficient and economic. Therefore, a fundamental postulate in our approach to understanding Torah is that it doesn’t “waste ink” telling us anything we can figure out for ourselves. A common theme in the Talmud is called hava aminah which means one could have thought–in other words, the Torah only intervenes to tell us something we wouldn’t otherwise have been able to know.

A byproduct of this, by the way, frees us from the rather stupid and unproductive chore of defending a fundamentalist/literal reading and all that implies. The Torah is not, thank God, a science book nor is it a history book so we don’t have to argue evolution or archeology. The Creator gave us the tools we need–intelligence, logic and observation skills–to discover the scientific and empirical on our own. The Torah is for what we can’t derive solely from fact-gathering and logic–that is for the spiritual and ethical wisdom we need to reach our human potential of partnering with God to add the final touches to perfect Creation, thus earning our highest reward of becoming our highest selves.

This, finally, is the lesson I’m trying to share. We can reinforce and refine our emunah, craft our belief by taking this lead from God Himself. Just as He gives us the tools and abilities we need and then steps back, saying, as it were, “I trust you to reach your highest and to perfect your job”, we can enter the New Year with the mutual trust that God will, indeed, in spite of our inability to discern the details and the complex reasoning, complete and perfect this Creation of which we are all a part. May it be soon, in this coming year.

We commonly say that there are seventy faces to the Torah, but it’s also been taught that there are six hundred thousand interpretations of every passage, perhaps of every one of the six hundred thousand letters of the Torah. We have learned that every blade of grass has its own star which means that every “thing” that has been created receives its own unique and fitting energy of existence and sustained being. This means everything from sub-atomic particles to molecules to things living and inanimate, animal, vegetable, mineral, microscopic or galactic, conscious and also every emotion and thought, all energy and also all that exists beyond our perception or understanding, what we call the realm of the Ein Sof, continuously and eternally receives exactly what it needs. Ultimately, the source of all this energy is God, Adonay Echad, but there are also chains of secondary sources as the Olam, the universe, is interconnected.

The Netivot Shalom, speaking about the Priestly Blessing and the unique bracha which invokes it, commanding it to be given “b’Ahava”, with love, emphasizes the twin roles of giver and receiver in the paradigm of every loving relationship. This means that every vessel, every receiver, every beloved, has a lover, a provider, a source of energy. There is a symmetry, but not one that requires that “one size fits all”.

We are blessed with many teachers of Torah. Not everyone will be able to engage with each and every teacher and that’s fine. A challenge that faces every teacher is to not take “rejection” personally. A challenge that faces every seeker is to not become discouraged when a potential teacher isn’t “the one”. Just as we won’t fall in love with everyone who desires us, and not everyone we fall in love with will reciprocate our feelings, we retain faith that somewhere out there is at least one beshert and there are also the teachers we need. Sometimes we find our match easily, sometimes it’s harder and in ways we’d never expect.

I don’t know what brought me to Seattle or what brought you to my living room or to my bet-midrash. Likewise in cyberspace. But reaching each other is still no guarantee that we’re right for each other. If we are, welcome. If not, let us know without anger or jealousy or disappointment that there is another student, another teacher out there for each of us. And let us celebrate that our Eternal Torah contains room for all six hundred thousand souls of Yisrael.

Here’s a simple idea to celebrate Channukah, at least one of the eight nights:

After you light your candle(s), sit quietly and let everything on your mind slip away. When they’re all gone, all that’s left is nothing. Into this nothing let the light slowly flow until that’s all there is, all you know…. Gently hold onto this holy moment for a bit.

We seem overwhelmed with disasters. Hurricanes, Famine, Genocide, Wars and Chaos. A surge in oligarchies, economic and social polarization. The problems seem insurmountable. What effect can my individual effort have?

With an albeit romanticized legacy of mass marches, protests and demonstrations, many of us who came of age in the 60s and 70s envision a return to collective action to somehow end the war in Iraq, to somehow salvage the US economy from the corporate rape that rapidly impoverishes more and more Americans, to somehow recreate the atmosphere of hope, where anything is possible, that we remember. Maybe we did bring about giant steps, not necessarily completed, towards equality for black Americans by marching with Dr King. Maybe we did end the war in Viet Nam by marching with Pete Seeger. And maybe we even brought down the presidency of Richard Nixon (ironically, perhaps the best president in my lifetime as I now look back). But we can’t forget that each march, each demonstration, each boycott was, in fact, a collection of individual decisions to join in.

It’s easy and natural to be frustrated with a sense of impotence. “If only we can make them……” is almost a mantra. Make “them” wake up, make “them” see what’s going on, make “them” take action, make “them” stop! But this frustration, in these terms, is just a call for compulsion, as if what we want to force “them” to do, because of the “pureness of our goals”, somehow makes it right. Nonetheless, it’s still tyranny and we should remember that no revolution that succeeded has ever not become “them” pretty soon, all idealism shortly secondary to remaining in power. It’s arrogant to think that, even if we could magically “fix” everything, we would be the first generation ever to be immune from the addiction of power.

Our tradition recognized the power of numbers. We hint at this most basically, as we understand the need for “masses” when requiring a minyan for many of our prayers and mitzvot. But even that reality depends on each individual filling their mitzvah of “tefillah b’tzibbur”, davening with a community. It’s always up to each of us in our isolation to act as if we were the tenth, completing the minyan. We each have to act as if our decision is the one that will determine the balance. It can’t be otherwise.

But “have to” needs to be an individual decision each and every time. Our tradition is based on the concept of “bechira”, free choice. This gives us our opportunity to live “in the image of God” by acting from our own decisions, not out of any compulsion, be it social, psychological, legal or religious. And each choice has to be a real choice, not just a false front with the foregone conclusion that we’ll make the “right choice”. Greed, power, possession are so attractive exactly for the reason of making our opportunity to choose more than a sham.

Many years ago, when I davened with Rabbi Shloime Twersky z”l of Denver, a great chassidic master with whom I had the incredible “zechut”, merit, to study under for a time, I remember that he forbade the common practice in most shuls of, during the week, having someone walk through the group after the Amida (central prayer of the service) with a “pushka”, a charity jar. He taught that what might be seen as a convenience was actually a form of compulsion, perhaps only slightly, but significantly, utilizing shame to motivate us to give. That “stole the mitzvah” of “tzedakah”, charity, because it was no longer given completely freely.

We also have the concept of “olam”, a world or a universe. There is “olam gadol”, what we normally call the world with everything in it. But there is also “olam katan”, and that is each and every one of us as separate creations. They’re tied together with a concept of “just as above, so below, just as below, so above”.

This means that to truly bring about true peace, brotherhood and a sustainable future for us all, we first have to repair ourselves, “tikkun olam katan”. Only then do we contribute to “tikkun olam gadol”. And we have to do it freely, Godly, out of our own inner resources, “one hamster at a time”.

Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzatto, the Ramchal, the seminal 18th century kaballist, writes in his book, “Derech Hashem, The Way of God”, “…all is overturned when we, as humanity, allow ourselves to be obsessed with greed, focused only on desire. Wisdom becomes disgusting to us and we choose to become stupid. We no longer are willing to devote ourselves, even a little, to creating the holiness of other-directed effort. We run from any truths and allow evil to grow and dominate. Fraud and deception and stupidity are all given free rein. Perversion becomes respectable and the very concept of “values” becomes laughable, just one more tool to manipulate.”

As a result of this, noise blares at us ceaselessly, there is never a moment of calm. Suffering spreads universally and the only Divine recourse seems to be abandonment, leaving our world to feel senseless, random and mechanical. It’s as if a senseless bureaucracy has taken over, as if our world has been reduced to the absurdity of a Rube Goldberg device.”

(Part 2, Chapter 8, section 2 (my translation and adaptation–This book is available with a definitive translation by Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, and I recommend it to everyone. The limitations of translating for publication are addressed by Rabbi Kaplan by his copious footnotes, but the richness of the text allows other editorial choices in choosing how to translate).

Does this sound frighteningly familiar? When I see the cynicism, the contempt for truth and honesty that categorize the war in Iraq, the recovery efforts Louisiana and the Gulf Coast, the exploitation and out-and-out swindling of the American middle class by our leaders, when I read the Alice-in-Wonderland revision of history making Israel the “big bad wolf” and the surrounding Arab nations the “victims”, I see that our world truly is sunk in this terrible blueprint the Ramchal describes three hundred years ago.

I left the US for Israel in 1982 and returned (I’m in the sixteenth year of my two-year sabbatical) in 1989. I didn’t recognize the country I had returned to. In those few short years characterized as the “Reagan Revolution”, greed was transformed from a venal sin to the highest virtue, the energy that “made America great”. The sixties and seventies dream, perhaps naive and idealistic, but the formative one for my generation of Americans, the dream of fairness and equality, of a progressive society which, while moving ahead at an ever-increasing (and perhaps this was the naive, unsustainable part) but keeping an eye and an open heart on those at the lower end of the economic scale, was shattered. The, again perhaps naive, dream of legalized pot and a mellow America had been replaced with the horrors of crack, mainly in the ghettos, gang and drug violence, and prisons filled with victims, those addicted to the harder drugs and even those “guilty” of smoking something more harmless than legal beer.

In short, I felt that I’d fallen through the rabbit hole and landed in my worst nightmare. Sure there were plenty of new toys, all sorts of consumer “goods” to buy, but it has devolved to mindless consuming equalized as patriotism. I can take a walk in the wilderness without an uzi-carrying chaperone, but, with my head covered with a kippah, I better not try it in certain parts of my adopted home, the northwest, as well as in many other parts of this country. The guys extorting the US as well as the rest of the world with their strangle-grip on the oil supply are the international victims and the US government, instead of searching for new sources of renewable energy, is the oil business. The middle class quickly becomes the lower class with pensions and medical benefits and all the safety nets we’d taken for granted now bankrupted with the money going to those with absolutely no use for it. Athletes and singers made yearly salaries that exceed those of entire families over a lifetime.

And, perhaps, the scariest is that somehow this is all sanctioned by “God”. Well, definitely not by the God of our Jewish tradition. Not the God Whose name and seal are “Emet”, Truth. Not the God who tells us to look out for the widow and orphan, for the poor in our midst. I don’t know much about Christianity, but I can’t imagine the Jesus I have read about saying anything to legitimize the rape of the American people that we are still in the midst of.

What can we, as Jews facing Rosh HaShana one more time do beyond despairing, complaining and pointing out the obvious? Perhaps one key comes from the Ramchal who introduces this section by telling us that this situation is the polar opposite of the ideal condition for which all creation is intended. The horror is triggered by placing greed at the center of our lives and values. Perhaps the solution really is as easy as dethroning greed and selfishness, returning, i.e. Tshuvah, to our higher, rather than our lowest values, “Godding” by trying to resemble our Creator who lacks nothing and, thus, is motivated by giving rather than by taking.

It seems a tiny step, but this tiny step taken by enough people can create the critical mass to transform our world. It is in each of our individual reaches to make this indeed a Shana Tova.

The Shulchan Aruch has recently been attacked in a Russia lawsuit as a racist book. Obviously, this is very disturbing for any number of reasons.

It’s a tough issue because the Shulchan Aruch often is anti-goyim, whether Christian or Moslem. If we want to be honest, we have to own up to this. One of my greatest challenges is reconciling those parts of it, as well as other texts, to my own derech. This invariably leads straight to Metaphor, do not pass go, do not collect $200, do not rest on pshat. These passages can be explained as appropriate to certain times and places, especially those where Jews were under attack both frontally as well as more subtlely in terms of proselytizing. Which, unfortunately, probably describes the conditions of many of Russia’s Jews right now, reflected by this issue itself.

More than this, much of Tanach can be labeled genocidal. Wipe out the seven nations, destroy Amalek…. How do we read, understand and teach these passages?

In many ways, the “paradigm shift” we take as a fundamental structure for Judaism in the 21st century might not be true for Jews in Russia. And “our” paradigm shift certainly doesn’t apply to Jews immediately following the destruction of the Temple, to our ancestors expelled from Spain, suffering from pogroms in Europe, slaughter in North Africa and the middle east, to those in the shtetl or the victims of the Holocaust. The sense of openness and exploration we currently enjoy requires a sense of safety and trust which, to some degree, does exist in much of the west and, perhaps in other non-Christian, non-Moslem countries. While we can today learn together with Moslem clerics in San Francisco or Seattle, even in Jerusalem, I doubt that would be possible in Syria today and certainly not in the times of the Talmud, the Zohar (written by R. Shimon Bar Yochai while hiding from Roman troops in a cave), Rashi, the Shulchan Aruch or other major times in our history.

Of course, from the very beginning of rabbinic times, we’ve been told to view even the Written Torah itself below the surface. We learn that “eyn milchama ele b’yetzer”, that when Scripture mentions “war”, it’s really talking about the war each of us wages with our own inner demons, weaknesses and flaws in our grand work of tikkun, of self-refinement. Canaanites, Emorites, even Amalakites are not actual living people we’re told to murder, but they signify parts of our personalities to work on.

Perhaps it’s easier to take this grand approach to these biblical verses than it is to understand why it’s ok to charge interest from goyim, why it’s ok to uncover a collapsed wall on Shabbat if a Jew might be trapped, but not if we’re certain the victim isn’t Jewish. It could be that all we can do is say these were different times, times where the struggle to survive was more immediate.

But is we start with the assumption that the Torah, both written and oral, both Scriptural and Rabbinic, are eternally true, we have the much greater challenge to uncover the meanings beneath the meanings. An image I have is an infinite onion whose layers can be removed when no longer fresh, revealing new and totally alive layers.

If you’ve studied with me, you know that I’ll often find the journey itself, trying to bond to the underlying structures and webs of relationships between the concepts and opinions, the very music and dance of the Talmud (or other text), to be the meditation, the process, the avenue to reach toward devekut. Perhaps the meaning isn’t in the meaning at all, but in the architecture as it reflects the Divine Mind.

These answers aren’t wholly satisfying, but they are a start.

July, 2005

We refer to the New Year as Rosh HaShana, the head of the year. There are a number of titles we could give this day, but the Rabbinic Tradition has chosed Rosh.

The Kabbalists (The Zohar, Ramchal and many others use this figure) describe time and other linear processes in a three-way analysis: Rosh, or beginning, Emtza, middle and Sof, end. Rosh is described as a period when the absolute good, the unity of the Creator, is completely present but in a state described as not-yet-revealed or in potential. Emtza is the period of our present reality, the period of good and evil and the free will to choose between them. Sof is the final resolution where the truth, beauty and inherent goodness of Creation is readily apparent, unified and real.

Rosh HaShana is, as it were, a yearly re-set to the world of total potential, total possibilities, an opportunity to charge into the Emtza and hopefully andwith the help of God, this year, to get a little closer to achieving the Sof of fulfillment, maturity, understanding and compassion.

A comment by Tosefot in the fourth chapter of Tractate Brachot, in order to prove that the Musaf prayer can usually be said as early as one wants (after finishing Shacharit), refers to a rule that on Rosh HaShana one may not say Musaf until after the third hour (implying that earlier is permitted the rest of the year). The stated reason is that B’nei M’Lachim, the sons of (secular) kings usually get up at that time.

Of course this is a very curious citation and reason until you recall the structure of the Rosh HaShana Musaf prayer which incorporates the special sections, Malchiot (kingship), Shofrot (references to the Shofar) and Zichronot (rememberences).

It’s said that on Rosh HaShana, we, the Jewish people, crown, as it were, our God and declare his Kingship (more curious still, an aspect of the Creator described as feminine). Keter, or crown, represents the beginning of the process of divine creation and revelation, Malchut, kingship, the culmination of the process. By trying to integrate the beginning with the end, as described in a previous article, ( rosh_hashana.htm), we try to contribute to the creation of the final goal where the pure, simple, Godly Goodness, fully realized and revealed, illuminates, warms and nourishes the world.

To try to avoid detours, distraction and short-circuiting ourselves, we emphasize the dedication of our Musaf to the Infinite and Transcendant Creator, the Invisible God, the Ein Sof and not to any lesser force or being. We make it impossible to confuse ourselves with any concrete, material and thus finite concept; any person, any leader no matter how inspiring; any ben Melech, no matter how powerful, how beloved; with any fixed idea, no matter how appealing. As we enter this intensive period of Tshuva, of return to our potentials, of growth, of self-examination, re-dedication to our goals and refinement of ourselves and our world, we run away from complacence and towards engagement.