TABLE OF CONTENTS
Who is Moses?
‘Now Moses was a shepherd…” (Ex. 3:1)
The Talmud describes Moses’ first encounter with God at the Burning Bush, saying, ‘He looked without looking’ (Berachoth 7a). What that means, says the Rebbe Reb Bunim of P’shischa[1], is that Moses looked at God with both eyes, leaving no eye to watch himself watching; he understood what he was seeing without taking note of it. In many ways Moses resembled Adam before eating of the Tree of Knowledge (Radical Bereishith).
The reason we are not all Moses-type geniuses, is that we have not cultivated the art of looking with both eyes. One half of our mind sees something, while the other half examines the seeing half and forms an opinion about the vision. The result is a mish-mash of images and impressions rarely having anything in common with the facts of what we are witnessing. We are so busy thinking about our response to it, that we are hardly present in our own life as it happens. Moses was always totally present. Even when noticing something supernatural, he’d didn’t say, ‘Wow! Isn’t this amazing?’ Instead he focused on the experience to the exclusion of all other thought. He didn’t ask, ‘Why am I seeing this?’ or any number of consciousness-questions you and I might ponder as we watch a burning bush that is not consumed.
Moses is discussed at some length in the final chapter of this work, (Radical Zot Habracha), in particular Reb Bunim’s reading of Moses’ unique spiritual genius. The first aspectof Moses’ uniqueness is Moses’ availability to us, the Jewish People, and the second is his availability to God. Moses is a shepherd and that is always how he sees himself. Even when walking with kings, he sees himself as a shepherd and nothing higher, nobler or more important. Even when acting with divine authority, charged by God with the mission to deliver the Israelites from Egypt, when performing miracles, splitting the Red Sea, bringing down the Torah from Heaven, or preparing the People for nationhood, Moses only sees himself as only a shepherd, temporarily delegated with other tasks. Therefore, his dialogue with God at their first meeting has to be examined with this in mind.
God told Moses: ‘Go and gather the elders of Israel together and say to them, “The LORD, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, has appeared to me, saying, ‘I am indeed concerned about you and what has been done to you in Egypt. So I said, I will bring you up out of the affliction of Egypt to the land of the Canaanite …’”
‘They will pay heed to what you say; and you with the elders of Israel will come to the king of Egypt and you will say to him, “The LORD, the God of the Hebrews, has met with us. So now, please, let us go a three days' journey into the wilderness, that we may sacrifice to the LORD our God.”
But I know that the king of Egypt will not permit you to go, except under compulsion. So I will stretch out My hand and strike Egypt with all My miracles which I shall do in the midst of it; and after that he will let you go…’
Then Moses said, ‘What if they will not believe me or listen to what I say? For they may say, “The LORD has not appeared to you.”’
The LORD said to him, ‘What is that in your hand?’ And he said, ‘A staff.’ Then He said, ‘Throw it on the ground.’ So he threw it on the ground, and it became a serpent; and Moses fled from it. (Ex. 3:16 – 4:2)
Reading this text we see clearly that God told Moses he would succeed; why then did Moses ask, ‘What if I don’t succeed?’
God subsequently gave Moses three signs with which to establish his authority and credentials in Egypt. First Moses was told to throw his staff to the ground. It turned into a serpent. He was told to grasp its tail and it turned back into a staff. Next, he was told to put his hand into his robe, when he took it out it was leprous. He was told to put his hand in his robe again and when he pulled it out it was healed. Next he was told to spill water on the ground which would turn into blood. This third sign did not have an undoing, and we are not told the blood ever turned back to water.
Here, says the Izbicy[2], we find a very subtle dialogue concerning the future of the Jewish People and the nature of free-will.
Moses’ initial objection is about style. ‘I’m a shepherd,’ he tells God. ‘When herding sheep I use a crook, a staff or long stick to turn the sheep in the direction I want them to go, or to prevent them running in the wrong direction. How can I be a shepherd to the Jews without a metaphorical staff? What will I use when they need direction and guidance? Will I persuade them using logic and argument? I’m a shepherd, God, not a politician, and not an orator. When I represent Your glory as Your messenger, God, it is not fitting to rely on my own persuasive powers. What will I do in those moments when they don’t believe me?’
God asked Moses, ‘What is that in your hand?’
‘A staff.’
‘Throw it to the ground.’
He threw it on the ground, and it became a serpent.
We alluded to the significance of the NACHASH – Serpent earlier, in the first Sidra of the Book of Genesis (Radical Bereishith. There we read how Adam’s attempt to blame the serpent for tricking him and his wife into eating of the Tree of Knowledge, was rejected. Since God had previously brought all creatures to Adam to be named, Adam knew precisely what the serpent was and what it could do. Adam tried to rationalize his own behavior by denial, by pretending to have been naïve and unaware of the serpent’s cunning and persuasive power. Adam had to lie about his own awareness to justify having eaten of the forbidden tree.
Here in the first Sidra of the Book of Exodus we are shown how the serpent has become part of all of us, even Moses.
Moses realizes what the concept of the staff turning into a serpent really represents. The coercive power Moses thought he lacked and needed in order to carry out his mission, was just another way of tripping himself up.
The serpent convinces me that I am no longer connected (if I ever was connected) to the source, to God, to Life. The thought process is utterly absurd when reduced to its logical conclusion. In effect, my own mind is trying to convince me that I am dead. It sounds completely stupid when laid out like this in black and white, but that is the essence of the serpent’s argument.
Moses suddenly realizes, ‘God has given me a mission, and has told me I will succeed. My feelings of inadequacy and my sense that I need more power are symptoms. The serpent whispering into my ear telling me I am not enough, convincing me that God has not equipped me sufficiently, that I am not totally connected to God who empowers me.’
Being connected to God means having all the tools necessary for one’s mission, whatever that might be. It is true of Moses, but it is also true of you and I. We come fully equipped and remain so throughout our entire lives. If I am charged with the mission of my life, if God animates me, how can I be cut off from the source? If am I alive, how can I be dead?
The answer to this question is crucial to our self-understanding. The Serpent who convinced Adam and Eve to eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, convinces us that were are dead.
You’d think such psychological tricks and schemes would be impossible, absurd or self-contradictory, wouldn’t you? But until we are shown the absurdity we don’t notice it; it’s one of the anomalies which make humans so special. We are capable of holding contradictory thoughts and mutually exclusive ideas simultaneously.
Exodus from Egypt requires us first to acknowledge our bondage in Egypt. As long as I remain unaware how my thinking has me trapped, I cannot free myself of the self-defeating thoughts. As soon as Moses realized his error and saw the staff for the serpent it was, he was taken aback and fled from the thought.
‘Of course, if God has given me the mission to deliver the Israelites from Egypt, He has also given me all the tools I need, even the coercive power to make people listen.’
‘Now,’ said God. ‘Grasp it by its tail.’ Moses did so and it turned back into a shepherd’s staff in his hand.
And here the Izbicy makes that remarkable leap of Biblical exegesis which distinguishes his work, the Mei Hashiloach, from every other Torah commentary.
God is showing Moses where his heretical, inadequate and self-defeating thought originated. ‘Grab hold of your serpent-thought by the tail, examine it back-to-front, reverse it and follow it back to its source and you will find it is the original thought which came from Me, from the source. It was I, God, who put into your head the thought that the Jews might not believe you and that you might lack the power you need to do the job.’
Because the serpent-thought is part of the God-Thought, God’s plan for us includes stupidity and self-defeating errors. Serpent-thoughts make us human and precious, innovative, inventive, creative and ultimately successful and triumphant.
Being in Egypt means not being aware when we are acting without awareness, not knowing that we don’t know what we’re doing, not realizing when we are lost. Humans are experts at it. Well, most humans are experts. Moses was an exception. Moses always knew what he was about, he was never lost. As was said at the outset, he was totally present and aware. He didn’t waste time thinking about himself thinking about himself, because he wasn’t an observer in his own life; he was the participant. But he did need to learn this lesson before being sent down to Egypt, in order to better understand how to handle the Jewish People. Moses had to learn how to recognize the error in his own thinking to be able to help people see it in theirs.
Why did God put thoughts of inadequacy and impotence, and not some other doubt, into Moses’ mind?
Because, answers the Izbicy, there will come moments when the Children of Israel do not listen to Moses, when he will indeed be inadequate and impotent, without enough power to coerce Israelite thinking, and Moses he will fail at his mission (Radical Korah). Outright failure and imperfection are also part of the divine plan; rebellion and rejection of God are also built into the plot of history, they are crucial to God’s narrative (Radical Vaetchanan).
The first sign God gives Moses - the staff turning into a serpent - has a resolution which hints at the events we read about in the twenty-first chapter of the Book of Numbers.
But the people grew impatient on the way; they spoke against God and against Moses, and said, ‘Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? There is no bread! There is no water! And we detest this miserable food!’ Then God sent venomous serpents among them; they bit the people and many Israelites died. The people came to Moses and said, ‘We sinned when we spoke against God and against you. Pray that God will take the serpents away from us.’ So Moses prayed for the people. God said to Moses, ‘Make a serpent and put it up on a pole; anyone who is bitten can look at it and live.’ So Moses made a bronze serpent and put it up on a pole. Then when anyone was bitten by a serpent and looked at the bronze serpent, they lived. (Num. 21:5-9)
The second sign God gave Moses was to put his hand into his robe; when he took it out it was leprous. He was told to put his hand in his robe again and when he pulled it out it was healed. This sign also has a resolution, which alludes to events surrounding Miriam and Aaron who speak badly of Moses. Miriam is stricken with leprosy and is later healed (Radical BeHaalothcha).
It is the third sign that has no resolution. We do not read of blood turning back to water. And it is at the water that Moses made his greatest error, as we read in the twentieth chapter of the Book of Numbers. Instead of talking to the rock he hit it and also referred to the Israelites as ‘rebels’, thus setting up a chain of events which is still unfolding today.
These three dramas are constantly playing out in our lives, constantly. First, the Serpent convinces us that we are inadequate, regardless of our averred faith in God, the breathtaking subtlety of His creation and the perfection of His plan. We still think poorly of ourselves and our personal potential. The second drama involves the need to judge others negatively, trying to increase our self-esteem by denigrating others; this is a chronic and systemic human failing and the cause of Leprosy in the Torah. These two shortcomings have their positive denouement – they work themselves through as we evolve and come to accept ourselves for who we are.
It is the third drama which remains unresolved. In rage we come to resemble those we hate, we take on the characteristics of those whom we fight, and eventually commit those very sins we accuse others of doing – this is a problem for which we have not found a solution. When desire and longing manifest as anger who can sort through the consequences? When water turns to blood who can still find the love in their pain?
CHAPTER 2 – VAERA
Who are our leaders?
‘I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as God Almighty [El Shadai], and did not reveal to them my name ‘LORD’ [YHV”H]. I also established my covenant with them to give them the land of Canaan, the land where they resided. Also, I’ve heard the groaning of the Children of Israel whom the Egyptians have forced to labor for them, and I’ve remembered My covenant. Therefore, tell the Children of Israel, ‘I am the LORD. I’ll bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I’ll deliver you from their bondage. I’ll redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great acts of judgment. I’ll take you for My own people, and I’ll be your God. Then you will know that I am the LORD your God, who brings you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians. I’ll bring you to the land that I swore to give to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. I’ll give it to you as a possession. I am the LORD.’
Then Moses conveyed all this to the Children of Israel, but they did not listen to Moses due to their lack of spirit and the hard work. (Ex. 6:3-9)
How does it come about that when God finally sends us His messenger with good news and the tidings we want most to hear – a herald like Moses, who has the special formulae and secret codes to prove his credentials – we cannot hear the message?
The answer the Izbicy gives is downright scary. He says the problem resides at the very top, with our leaders, the great men and women of the generation. They prevent the redemption because they are unable to move beyond their fears[3]. There are, the Izbicy suggests, not one but forty-five different sorts of fears preventing our leaders from hearing the message of redemption.
Readers of these pages know that after the Izbicy rebbe, the one I most esteem is his rebbe, the Rebbe Reb Simcha Bunim of P’shischa whose teachings were the precursor to the Izbicy’s Mei Hashiloach. Simcha Bunim is the last of the rebbes known as the ‘Rebbe Reb’, because a great number of his disciples became rebbes in their own right.
The following story took place sometime between 1813 and 1825, when the Rebbe Reb Bunim described the following:
‘At this moment I feel I have the ability to urge and press for a hastening of the End of Days, for King Messiah to arrive. But I have also allowed myself to imagine the sequence of events surrounding the Messiah’s arrival and the unfolding narrative.
‘He will find his way to the chief among all the leaders and saints of the generation, for that is surely where all the leaders will gather to welcome him; so naturally they will gather in Medzibuz at the home of the ‘Lover of Israel’[4], who is undoubtedly the senior and noblest leader of our generation. There, in his house, all the rabbis and leaders of the generation will assemble to be seated at a very long table. I may also find myself a seat somewhere on one of the ends of the table, while on the two sides will be seated all the great and holy ones. The place of honor will naturally go to King Messiah, while the holy rabbi of Opatów, as head of this entire generation, will have the chair next to the seat of honor. Before long, the holy Opatów rabbi will ask King Messiah, “Would your lordship be so gracious as to reveal who it was among us that so successfully brought about the End of Days, hastening your honor’s progress and arrival?”
‘The Messiah will answer truthfully, “It was Bunim the P’shischer, the one sitting at the very end of the table.”
‘I know that the rabbi of Opatów will have a horrible sense of failure and inadequacy as a result of the revelation, and that’s the only reason I hold myself back from having anything to do with bringing the Messiah, so as not to cause the old rabbi any bad feelings[5].’
I can understand someone being afraid of failure, but being afraid of success - where does that fear originate? To be afraid of hurting someone else’s feelings with my success? Where do fears like this originate, and how powerfully can they hold us back?
In this week’s Sidra, immediately after the Torah tells us that the Israelites would not listen to Moses, we are given a brief genealogy of the three elder tribes, Reuben, Simeon and Levi. Once Phineas the son of Elazar son of Aaron of the Tribe of Levi is named, the recitation of genealogy is interrupted and the Exodus narrative resumes.
Izbicy tells us that it was the forty-five Israelite leaders mentioned by name in the genealogy who were interfering with the Exodus. Their unresolved issues were preventing the Israelites from hearing the message of redemption, and both Moses and Aaron are among the leaders named. This, says the Izbicy, ought to inspire some serious existential dread in the hearts of all Jewish leaders to this day. Even Phineas, with whom God later makes a Covenant of Peace[6], is not without the need to resolve his fears. Moses had fear of failure instilled in him by God, as was discussed in the previous Sidra (Radical Shemot).
As we said in Radical Vayishlach, by withholding his blessing from the Tribes of Reuben, Simeon and Levi, Jacob prevented them from accessing their Yichus – Relationship with their roots. Our roots are in God, Yichus is the source of our Life-force, whence everything flows into and out of us. Being disconnected from it, not being able to feel it pulsing in us, sets up some very unhealthy resonances.
In last week’s Sidra (Radical Shemot) we learned how the serpent can delude me, a living breathing being, into believing I am dead - simply by messing with my thoughts! Here, in this text, we are looking at the fundamentals of Exile.
Human intimacy means having a close association with, and detailed knowledge of someone. This is why, in the Bible, sexual intimacy is referred to as ‘knowledge’.
Knowledge – Knowing is the essential ingredient of the Forbidden Tree, the eating of which resulted in our exile from the Garden of Eden. Judaism sees the Egyptian Exile as the natural consequence of our expulsion from Eden, and in the Kabbalah the Egyptian Exile is referred to as the Exile of Knowledge. The entire Book of Genesis can be read as a running commentary on the loss of intimacy in the lives and history of one family. The Book of Exodus is the Redemption of Knowledge and the healing of intimacy, as I have discussed at length elsewhere[7]. Another way of saying all this, is that by eating of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil we damaged our capacity for intimacy. The damage led to greater and greater consequences until we were completely reduced to slavery in Egypt. Moses came and redeemed us; our capacity for intimacy was restored, and we were healed.
Babies, infants and even small children are not afraid of intimacy because they are not afraid of being known. Something happens to us in the process of growth and development, in maturation from childhood to adulthood, causing us to absorb and internalize toxic levels of shame and mortification, humiliation and degradation. We become afraid of intimacy because we are afraid of being completely known.
The first thing we are told after Adam and Eve ate of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, is that their eyes were opened; they became aware of being naked and felt the need to cover themselves with fig-leaf belts. There had been a rupture of intimacy and suddenly Adam and Eve were afraid of being seen, known and understood.
Moses is the only person who never has to ask the question, ‘God, what am I to You, what is our relationship?’ because Moses has no fears of being known. He is not carrying shame, and cannot be humiliated because he never tries to protect his ego. Moses is the one Hebrew prophet whom God knows intimately, face to face, therefore Moses exists in a world where no one has eaten of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and there has been no loss of intimacy. This is why he has been chosen to deliver us from the Exile of Knowledge: because Moses is not a part of our exile. Moses lives in a state of Giluy Shechinah – Revelation of the Divine Presence.
The birth of Moses was brought about as the first act in the fixing of intimacy, as I have discussed at length elsewhere, and that is why he has no doubt as to his Yichus. Moses knows who he is to God.
We lost touch with who we are to God, the moment we lost touch with who God is to us. That happened (Radical Bereishith) when we realized we were naked and tried to hide from being seen by God. Adam and Eve had their eyes opened when they ate of the Tree of Knowledge. This does not mean they could suddenly see what they had previously been blind to, but rather that they could no longer look at anything with a child’s eyes, with wonder and appreciation. Instead they were stuck, as we are stuck, watching everything through clever eyes, eyes with a mind of their own, eyes that filter what they don’t want to see, but fasten and feast on glamour, artifice and allure.
Adam and Eve were suddenly terrified of being known, and thus no longer capable of intimacy. Intimacy requires taking the risk of being known by another person. Where Adam had previously looked at himself with wonderment and admiration, seeing himself and Eve as marvelous and sophisticated creatures of God’s making, with skills and capacities beyond anything in heaven and earth, he suddenly saw himself in all his failings and weaknesses, incapable of transcending his most basic and animal instincts. Adam now saw himself as a creature doomed to irrevocable spiritual ruin and perdition.
To flip from one end of the world to the other like this, from extreme to extreme, Adam had to go through a complete change of heart. From knowing himself as the handiwork of a benign and beneficent Creator, he had to start thinking of himself as a victim of a malign and vicious stalker. As was discussed in Radical Bereishith, God challenges Adam with the question, ‘Is it possible that from the Tree of which I commanded you not to eat, you have eaten?’ (Gen. 3:11) because for Adam to entertain the belief that God would allow him to ruin himself, he had to assume God’s motives in creating him were evil.
We are all being asked this same question all the time; do you believe that God who created you would allow you to completely mess yourself up? Do you believe that He sits back watching you ruin yourself - like a child running out into traffic - without intervening to protect His creation,, as a parent would try to snatch its child out of harm’s way? Do you believe that God brought you into this world for the sole purpose of punishing you for going against His will, like a sadist or demon setting snares and traps?
Adam answered Yes to these questions, and that was his first original sin. You and I are being challenged with the same query on a daily basis, and as long as we continue to respond as Adam did we remain in Exile of Knowledge; stuck in our own little Egypt.
Until we reclaim our Yichus – Relationship we struggle with our fears of intimacy, redemption and joy. Until I can sense the presence of my Creator everywhere in me - as integral a part of me and as accessible as my heartbeat and breathing – I am not experiencing the truth of my relationship to God. Until God is as true and tangible and real to me as my own consciousness of myself, there is something separating God from me - and that is me.
Moses spent three days arguing with God at the Burning Bush, trying to convince Him to send someone else. Nowhere in the Torah do we hear someone express so many fears in the presence of God. In last week’s Sidra we listened to Moses telling God of his misgivings and apprehensions that the Israelites would not believe him, not trust him, and not follow him, because he did not feel strong enough, eloquent enough or successful enough. But Moses was really arguing with himself, since God had already promised him he would succeed. As was explained last week, these very doubts were supposed to be a sign to Moses that God was so close and intimate he was even part of Moses’ thinking process, prompting Moses’ doubts about himself. Moses grasped this lesson the moment he grasped the serpent by its tail and it turned back into a staff.
In this week’s Sidra we listen to ourselves arguing the same specious and delusive fallacies, convincing ourselves we are cut off from the Source, disconnected from the Divine, sundered from God and all alone. I convince myself I’m all alone, but how can I seriously argue that I am alone if I also believe I am an event happening in the mind of God? Unless I also allege that God is thinking of me because He wants to write me a tortured, tragic and damnable ending?
Either I believe God is Good or else I don’t believe in God at all but instead fear and worship some demon. This is where Adam failed and committed his first sin, so starting the chain of events which led to our bondage in Egypt, the Exile of Knowledge. Knowledge of God is a moment of Oneness, connection, relationship and self-realization. The Exile of Knowledge is a feeling of isolation and alienation from others and from one’s self, and from God.
The redemption is the re-assumption of one’s Yichus – Relationship; it’s really simple but very hard. Exile is very complicated but really easy.
To be redeemed we must find the key to a gate which is locked from the inside - we have to bypass the gate and unlock it from the inside in order to let ourselves in – it is paradoxical.
The Tribes of Reuben, Simeon and Levi hold the keys to this the Fiftieth Gate that can only be opened from the inside. Reuben shows us how to see ourselves, how to look at ourselves without rejection in our eyes. Simeon shows us how to listen affirmatively to ourselves, how to hear what’s going on inside the inside of our heart, and Levi shows us how to stay ever-present in our own solitudinous company, never to abandon ourselves to the terror and isolation of the demon-serpent whispering.
CHAPTER 3 – BO
Who is Pharaoh?
Then the LORD said to Moses, ‘Come to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart and the hearts of his officials so that I may perform these, My miraculous signs among them.’ (Ex. 10:1)
R. Shimon said, ‘Now is the time to reveal secrets which are connected above and below. Why does the verse say, “Come to Pharaoh,” it should have said, “Go to Pharaoh.” Why did God say, “Come”? (Zohar Vol. II 34a)
There are two kinds of darkness: one is the sort we create with our actions, mistakes and misdeeds, that darkness which comes of wickedness and sin. And then, there is the sort over which we have no control; the darkness which lies at the heart of humankind where, from time to time, the beast stirs and stabs and ravages and feeds and sleeps again. This is the darkness which is on the face of the abyss.
The seven plagues mentioned in the previous Sidra parallel the first type of darkness, that which we create with our rage, jealousy and resentment - which we fabricate with our seditious speech and petty character assassinations, our venal selfishness and our pride[8].
The three plagues in this week’s Sidra represent the darkness over which we have no control, that from which we ourselves flee in fright and consternation. Those are parts of ourselves which horrify and disgust us as much as they terrify, whose source lies in the Unconscious, the Subconscious and mysterious workings of the hippocampus, the thalamus, the hypothalamus, the amygdale and the whole limbic system.
The Zohar on this week’s Torah portion is long and complex. A full explication would be beyond the scope of this work, but it does need to be referenced to provide context for the narrative. The Zohar begins by asking why does God say to Moses, ‘Come to Pharaoh’?
In fact, this is the fourth time in the Book of Exodus that God tells Moses to, ‘Come to Pharaoh,’ so why does the Zohar wait until now to reveal secrets not heretofore discussed?
The answer is simple. Each of the three previous times[9] God told Moses to ‘Come to Pharaoh,’ there was a specific thing Moses had to say or do to Pharaoh in God’s Name; either to command or warn Pharaoh about God’s word and the Jewish People. In this instance at the opening of this week’s Sidra no such thing is implied. God calls Moses to come to Pharaoh with no purpose in mind, as the verse states.
Then the LORD said to Moses, ‘Come to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart and the hearts of his officials so that I may perform these, My miraculous signs among them. That you may tell your children and grandchildren how I dealt harshly with the Egyptians and how I performed My signs among them, and that you may know that I am the LORD.’ So Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and said to him, “This is what the LORD, the God of the Hebrews, says...” (Ex. 10:1-3)
The Zohar astutely chooses this point in the narrative, when God seemingly avoids telling Moses what to do or say, to reveal the mysteries of the Great Serpent. And it is worth noting that the mysteries revealed in the Zohar at this juncture are in fact secrets, in the sense that long after we are told what they are, they remain impenetrable. According to R. Shimon there are sections of the Genesis-Creation Mystery which have never been properly taught or explained, even to initiates and students of the Merkava - Chariot.
On such occasions as I consider making a study of the holy Zohar, I skip directly to this section and remind myself both of how little of the text I understand, and how amazing are the depth of R. Shimon’s insights into the working of the human mind, because that is what this section of the Zohar is about. R. Shimon begins the revelation thus:
He raised Moses and led him into rooms inside rooms, whereupon he reached a great and powerful sea monster from which many steps evolve and descend. What was it?
It was the secret of the Great Dragon!
Moses was afraid of it, and approached only those rivers that were his steps. But he feared the monster itself, and did not approach because he saw that it stemmed from roots in high places.
When the Holy, blessed One saw how Moses was afraid, and that all other celestial messengers dared not approach it, the Holy, blessed One said, ‘Speak, and say: Thus says the Lord GOD: “Behold, I am against you Pharaoh, king of Egypt, the great dragon that lies in the midst of his streams, saying, ‘My Nile is my own; I made myself.’” (Ezek. 29:3).
The Holy, blessed One and no other, has to wage war with Pharaoh, as it is written, ‘And all inhabitants of Egypt will know that I am the LORD.’ (ibid. 6)
The mysterious wisdom of ‘the great dragon that lies in the midst of his streams’ was taught only to those masters of the Law who know the secrets of their Lord. (Zohar Vol. II 34a)
Obviously Moses is not afraid of any flesh and blood dragon, sea monster or crocodile. The Great Serpent is a metaphor, and even celestial messengers are afraid of a metaphor. What is this great mystery the Zohar hints at?
Imagine the Divine Light, if you can. Well, obviously you can’t, no one can; it’s the Infinite Ineffable. God designed the world in such a way that we humans can develop a method of comprehending the Divine Light by way of metaphor. Clearly the Divine Light is too big and strong and bright to even imagine looking at. Imagine instead a wall or barrier against the Light, so that all we know of the Light, is that it is hidden behind this wall, that were it to be uncovered we would go blind and be burned by it.
Now imagine a tiny pinprick of a hole in the wall. Without being able to discern everything about the light, we’d be able to see its color and intensity. And we would also become aware of the opacity and thickness of the wall.
Now imagine a human-shaped hole in the wall, with a stained glass window in the image of a human separating you from the light. The light passing through the wall is human-shaped and human colored, but it would have to be a very special piece of glass indeed, to fool you into not realizing it is there separating you from the light.
Now I need you to make a big leap of the imagination. Imagine that a human being; a flesh and blood person, the next man or woman you see in front of you is that very stained glass window onto the Divine Light, because that is what the entire thesis of the Torah is. We know what we know about God and the Divine Light by learning from other people about other people, that’s all we have to guide and enlighten us. Every human being is transparent to God, or should be so.
But what then is the dark wall separating us from, and preventing us being burned up by the Light? What is it composed of, if the hole showing through it is made of human being? Well, unfortunately (or fortunately, as the case may be) the darkness preventing us from seeing or knowing anything about the Divine Light is also the human being. The wall is also the window; the messenger is also the message. It is we ourselves who are so opaque and dense, so impervious to the Light and invested in darkness. Humans raised without other people are steeped in darkness, and people left to wallow in their own thoughts see no light, because they can only see themselves. What goes on in our mind when we look at another human being, what image the other person evokes in us when we see them, what light they become transparent to and what god they convey to us, these are the things which shape us and our light. These are the things that define how we look to others.
Nowhere was this understood with more precision and insight than in Ancient Egypt, where we were forged in the blast-furnace of adversity into a People who could see God. We saw God by looking through the prism of Egypt, through their Pharaoh and all his illusory magical imagery. In Egypt we learned how to ‘see’ and we learned how to imagine what cannot be seen. We took an important step there, evolving into a people who can imagine God, not as an image of a thing but as an unspoken, ineffable Name of dread and power which rests inside us, animating us.
Pharaoh’s genius was to manipulate the image in the minds of his subjects. The whole of Egyptian culture was built around a ‘Pharaoh’ who was not present in any tangible way except as an idea in the mind of subjects, citizens and slaves, who might live hundreds of miles away. Egypt invented the idea of Image in the sense that we have adopted it in modern culture, in magazines, billboards and the movies. The glamorization of the human image - turning a living individual into an idol - was an Egyptian invention and artifact[10].
We, Jewish People, have assimilated and perfected this skill, raising it to heights the Egyptians never dreamt of, for we have manipulated our own minds to have an image of God which is a non-image, a word, a sound of a word, a word that cannot even be pronounced, a pure intellectual meme.
It’s relatively easy for us, with the enormous lexicon of English Language words at our disposal, to analyze the Egyptian genius and trace its evolution. Your common Egyptian peasant or artisan had a vocabulary of around a 1000 words; what makes perfect sense to us seemed like purest magical mystery to the Egyptian peasant.
The blackness of the wall - the density and opacity of it - is us.
Reach back behind your head and feel the nape of your neck: that’s where the dragon Pharaoh of this Zoharic teaching crouches in his river[11]. Your spine is the Nile from which rivers of nerves stem and flow downwards and outwards. At its head crouches Pharaoh on his throne of images and words. Beneath him scurry the priests and magicians of your Self, burrowing through your cortex, mining it for information about your condition, carrying messages to and from the deeper sanctuaries of the Mind into what can only be called Brain; through forebrain, midbrain and hindbrain to the spinal cord and down. All these processes are part of the dark from before Creation. We will never know them, for they speak no language the person understands. It is sufficient that the body comprehends the signals it receives from its government.
There, Pharaoh claims his sanctuary, there he grunts in the swamp; oozing life-sustaining fluids. ‘Here,’ he announces, ‘no one is capable of acting on God or recognizing God. No God exists in this darkness because the dark separates and excludes God. That’s its function, stupid. I reign here, this is my river, I made it. You can’t kill me, Moses, because I am your life.’
God has led Moses onward, to the rooms inside rooms, into the rooms beyond rooms, into the inside of the workings of the human mind.
As Moses is led ever deeper into the workings of his own, mind he finds himself less and less capable of wrestling the monster lurking there, where a smell may trigger a fugue-state, the sound of a voice or even a silence can induce a fight-or-flight reaction, while a single visual image prompts all the lustfulness, wanton, lewd and lubricious trappings of lechery. Moses is afraid to engage with the Pharaoh crouching in his river, because he who thinks in words cannot access God inside the dark. Moses cannot articulate his consciousness that Pharaoh, the dragon, is just another function of God in the animal body of a human being. How can humans reach that far into themselves to be able to ‘know’ that God is coddling and coaxing every sex- growth- and stress-related hormone carried down axons to the pituitary gland, commanding its release from there into the bloodstream to activate and organize distant body systems?
Our parents teach us to cover our instinctual nature with a coating of words, to distinguish among the safe and the unsafe, the stranger and the familiar, the ‘us’ from the ‘them’. Mostly we are taught through stories what is acceptable and what is not, who is to be emulated and who is not, what is beautiful and what is not.
But we are not human by birth. We become human when we practice, over a lifetime of blundering and halting progress, copying those we admire and imitating their greatest achievements. A child brought up without stories and the education which comes from rubbing shoulders with other growing and evolving humans, will not be a human. Without language of any sort, we would not be us.
Egypt’s architects and engineers, her sculptors and artists all worked for the idea of Image, the industry and commerce of Image, the Image which is intended not just to frighten or subdue, but to imprint itself upon the viewer, forever in the mind of every Egyptian: PHARAOH!
The art and genius of the Pharaohs was distilled into the essence of mental noise, the pitch and loudness of which guaranteed them their dynasties and privileges. An overwhelming bombardment of Image burned onto the retina of every Egyptian subject to keep the noise of Pharaoh loudest in their minds.
When Moses is invited to ‘Come, grapple with Pharaoh,’ he draws close and is appalled and terrified to discover that Pharaoh is indistinguishable from Image itself. All our ‘human’ feelings and thoughts can be manipulated, because they can be triggered with the right stimuli. Feelings can be nothing more than complicated chemicals, hormones activated and released into in the bloodstream, triggered by events and even by thoughts as they pass over us and through us.
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When I look at another human being and I see through them to the Divine Light, when I realize that a person is nothing but a stained glass flesh-window on God, then the God I am looking at is inside me, not that other person.
Moses looking at Pharaoh realizes that the human mind is both angel and monster, dragon and cherub.
Words alone do not make a human being, because Pharaoh had all the words yet he was a monster. A person is also that part which is instinctual, reactive, dark and animal without becoming a Pharaoh.
Without Pharaoh’s trick of manipulating the Image to create the idea, we would never make the transition from hominid to human to Jew, and it was the Jewish adaptation of that skill of image-making which we applied to words, that made us ready for God.
Pharaoh knew just who he was and what kind of explosive information he was sitting on, noting less that a jump in human evolution. It was the secret of the Ancients which had already kept his dynasty in power for a thousand years or more. He laughed at Moses because he knew just how deep his roots sunk into the source of human development, how parallel his progress with ours, how necessary his secrets to Jewish People-hood[12].
Which brings us to the crucial moment in this week’s Sidra, at midnight on the night of Passover.
And Moses said, ‘Thus says the LORD: “About midnight I will go out into the midst of Egypt.”
‘And all the firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die, from the first born of Pharaoh that sits on his throne, even to the firstborn of the maidservant that is behind the mill; and all the firstborn of beasts. And there shall be a great cry throughout all the land of Egypt, such as there was none like it, nor shall be like it any more. But against any of the children of Israel shall not a dog move his tongue, against man or beast: that you may know that the LORD puts a difference between the Egyptians and Israel. And all these your servants shall come down to me, and bow down themselves to me, saying, Get you out, and all the people that follow you: and after that I will go out.’ And he went out from Pharaoh in a great anger. (Ex. 11:4-8)
According to our tradition, it is important to acknowledge that what happened at midnight in Egypt was a revelation of the Divine Light – Giluy Shechina, when we saw God’s Presence. It is an important part of our yearly celebration of Passover, as stated in the Passover Haggadah:
God brought us out of Egypt, not by an angel’s hand, not by a seraph’s hand, nor through a messenger.
The Holy, blessed One, did it in His glory, Himself!
Thus it is written, ‘On that night will I pass through the land of Egypt. I will smite every first-born in the land of Egypt, from man to beast, and I will carry out judgments against all the gods of Egypt; I am God.[13]’
I will pass through the land of Egypt – I, and not an angel. I will smite every first-born in the land of Egypt – I, and not a seraph. I will carry out judgments against all the gods of Egypt – I, and not a messenger. I, God - It is I and none other!
Elsewhere it is discussed how we are, individually and uniquely, animated by the Word of God that He puts in each of us; every man according to his need. The Divine Word shapes us as humans, each of us according to God’s design. The word is also called Torah, and there are infinite varieties of Torah to suit every kind of soul. God never repeats Himself, and the Torah is always fresh and novel. God hides Himself, so to speak, inside that individual Torah each person expresses (Radical Nitzavim)[14].
In Pharaoh, in Egypt, in the currents flowing up and down our spinal columns, through the dragon wallowing in its River Nile, crouching in its swamp, pulsating and grunting with Life and bursting out of the dark - the Divine Light is there, hidden in its purest, most pristine form. There are no complex word-forms, nothing but God.
According to our tradition, the commentators emphasize, had we stayed one moment longer in Egypt we would have passed through the Fiftieth Gate of Separation and would have become irredeemable[15].
There was something about the moment of Divine Revelation in Egypt that could have propelled us deeper into exile, through the last Gate of Separation toward a total loss of intimacy which could never be recovered. And yet, according to tradition it was at that very moment when God revealed Himself that we were redeemed, not because we had earned it or deserved it, but because it was imperative, it could not be delayed, for to have delayed would have meant there was nothing worthwhile and holy left of Israel to redeem. This seems like a heavy paradox, does it not? For what could have been more innocent and holy than the entire Jewish Nation sitting at a Passover Seder, singing God’s praises, eating the Paschal lamb as commanded by Moses and speaking of the Greatness of God? What was it about that moment that was so spiritually dangerous, and how could Giluy Shechina have jeopardized the future of the world?
The Egyptians know how to manipulate human beings through the use and application of the Image. They have learned how best to feed images into people’s minds, mainly through the eyes, to obtain their desired results which are fear and compliance, worship and loyalty. In the Zohar we read how Pharaoh’s existence is a challenge to God, because Moses is incapable of fighting the Egyptians, since the evolution of Pharaonic thinking is part of our own narrative, part of the evolution of our own thinking. We evolved in Egypt. God became our God in Egypt, as the prophet declaimed: ‘Yet I am the LORD your God from the land of Egypt, and you shall know no god but Me: for there is no savior beside Me’ (Hosea 13:4). Not God who brought us out of Egypt to make us into His People, as described in the Ten Commandments, but God from the Land of Egypt.
The Pharaohs understood only too well how belief, faith, worship and trust can all be manipulated and violated. They saw the way humans are almost hard-wired to relate to massive and overwhelming power, and they saw what we today would call an opportunity to ‘hack’ the system, to insert a piece of malware in the form of a meme into the human mind[16]. Some ideas are parasitical; the most powerful virus-like notion being Religion itself, the idea that God can be conceptualized by mentally combining all God’s characteristics and particulars to construct a definition of Him. The Egyptians did it first and they did it best. Religious feelings, i.e. religion with a lowercase r, is basic to all humans, it is a crucial part of our toolkit for handing life. Religiousness may manifest in any of a number of behaviors: reverence, fervent devotion, piety, faith and worship, but they are not Religion, they are simply religious.
Today, Religion comparable to the Religion of Egypt is produced in Hollywood, Bollywood and the entire global image-making industry, using Egyptian discoveries of how humans can be ‘hacked’. It is built on the premise that we are not entirely human all the time. Parts of us are much more primitive and responsive to sensory stimuli in predictable ways, triggering behaviors over which the human mind has little or no control.
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Abraham and his descendents fought the tides and waves of ancient fashion and culture, persisting in the awareness that to be fully human is at least to know when you are being manipulated by others using images and memes to ‘hack’ your BIOS[17]. Jews have persisted so long in our determination to remain aware, that we have succeeded in ‘hacking the hack’.
We did this by allowing ourselves to be infected with the original Egyptian malware, but only after rewriting its code, as though we’d taken the virus and inserted another virus into it. As a result we have a trip-switch, an emergency shut-off that short-circuits whenever it is violated or penetrated by a stealthy meme be it written in the Christian, Muslim, renaissance, enlightenment, socialist or liberal code.
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How did we achieve cultural, religious and spiritual prophylaxis and how do we continue to hack the hack? Think about this, that which we call God has a Hebrew word, a Name, written éäå"ä – YHV”H. Bible scholars have translated it LORD, which is similar to the Hebrew ADON - Lord.
What do we do when we look at the word - éäå"ä? Well, we scan it with our eyes the way it is written but we pronounce it ADONAI with our mouths. We say ADONAI out loud. Why would we do such a thing? Why would we lie to our own minds about what we’re reading with our own eyes? What’s the purpose of telling myself, ‘I am reading éäå"ä – I am talking to You, éäå"ä,’ while calling Him ADONAI?
Imagine you walk up to someone who has a name-badge on their lapel saying, ‘Hi! My name is Dick,’ you point to their name-badge and say, ‘Hi, Jane. Yes, I’m talking to you, Jane. It’s nice meeting you.’
Every time a Jew talks to God - hundreds of times a day - he does precisely that. Points to God’s Name written éäå"ä – YHV”H, scans with his eyes and says, ‘Blessed are You, ADONAI.’
What are we doing to our mind when we split it this way with linguistic and audio-visual trickery? What have we done to our collective minds with 3500 years of such neuro-linguistic splitting?
The most important achievement we have attained with this mental trick is to avoid all attempts to make us into a Religion, to conceptualize God or succumb to Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, Arabic, Russian or English malware[18].
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According to tradition, God did not want to manifest anywhere inside the Egyptian metropolis because it was disgusting, unclean and unfit, by way of being a place of idolatry[19]. Even Moses made the point when he told Pharaoh ‘As soon as I'm out of the city, I'll spread out my hands to the LORD in prayer…’[20], as though Moses were telling Pharaoh that his capital city was too disgusting a location for a Hebrew to pray to his God in.
Now what exactly do we mean when we say that a human habitation is disgusting, unclean and unfit for the presence of God? Isn’t it a trifle naïve to suggest that something we do could offend God? As though God had nostrils which our smells can cause to wrinkle in nausea, loathing, aversion or repugnance, the way toilet or mortuary smells affect us?
But the Torah is full of such expressions of God’s pleasure and displeasure, as we read, ‘And the LORD smelled the soothing aroma and said to himself, “I will never again curse the ground because of humankind.”’ (Gen 8:21)
It may best be understood thus: God wants to be known as God of Israel; that’s the plan and ultimate goal of Creation (Radical Haazinu). Every every event in history has to be interpreted in light of this thesis.
Every belief system and religion in the world gets its chance to project itself as God’s Truth. All gods and goddesses get an equal chance to become the Face of God, for God agrees to assume the mantle and persona of whichever deity most humans believe in most strongly.
Now, for example, were God to speak with a child prophet in Mecca, Rome, Delhi, Lhasa or Los Angeles, there would have to be a manifestation and revelation of Giluy Shechina – Divine Presence in that location, and its the ripple effects and echoes would continue to be felt by everyone in that place for some time afterwards. In effect God would be endorsing and boosting the honor and distinction of the local god, lending credence to its pretensions to represent the divine.
Which isn’t to say that only the Hebrew Prophets were true, and that there was no authentic prophecy in ancient times besides Jewish prophecy; the oracles at Delphi, the Sybils, the Celtic runes and Chinese I-Ching etc. were equally reliable and authentic prophecies. But they did not purport to speak in God’s name.
This explains why Ancient Egypt, as the most antithetical to Jewish values, was considered the most unholy and unclean place in the world, and why God did not desire to reveal Himself within its precincts.
At the moment of midnight when God revealed Himself in Egypt, we all experienced ourselves the way Adam and Eve experienced themselves in the Garden of Eden before eating of the Tree of Knowledge.
What did we know about God before we ate of the Tree of Knowledge? We knew the simplest truth, ‘God was first.’
The revelation of God in Egypt meant that everyone and every sentient thing, even horses and cattle became aware of this simple truth, ‘God is First – before me – God is First!’ And while every first thing was swept up in that revelation of Firstness, every firstborn thing was gathered unto God, and died[21]. Jews are also swept up into Firstness, to be the living Avatars of God Himself, as Moses (while still at the Burning Bush) was ordered to warn Pharaoh:
God said to Moses, ‘When you go to return into Egypt, see that you do all those wonders before Pharaoh, which I have put in your hand: but I will harden his heart, that he shall not let the people go. And you shall say to Pharaoh, ‘Thus said the LORD, “Israel is my son, my firstborn: And I say to you, Let my son go, that he may serve me: and if you refuse to let him go, behold, I will slay your son, even your firstborn.”’ (Ex 4:21-23)
We are God’s firstborn in that we are the Original Thought (Radical Balak) which existed before Creation, and we have always been swept up in God’s Firstness.
The danger in that midnight moment was this: that we might begin to think of ourselves as God’s First Thought objectively, instead of experiencing ourselves as such. Doing so would have recreated the original split which occurred in Adam and Eve when they went from a state of awareness to an awareness of their awareness. Had it happened to us at midnight in Egypt, we might have come full circle to recreate original sin, and intimacy might have been ruined forever.
Simple intimacy consists of the awareness that I am me and you are you.
Broken intimacy consists of the awareness that I am being me and you are being you, but another me and a different you exist.
CHAPTER 4 – BESHALACH
What is the Original Thought?
And it came to pass, when Pharaoh had let the people go, that God did not lead them by way of the Philistia Road, although that was closer; for God said, ‘Lest the people should have regrets when they see war, and return to Egypt.’ (Ex. 13:17)
The Hebrew word for the phrase ‘And it came to pass’ is VAYEHI, and, according to the sages, wherever a chapter begins with the word VAYEHI, it is an expression of woe[22]. In this case it is because, by implication, Pharaoh is still tied to us and we to him. While we may no longer be in Egypt physically, we are still carrying it around inside us spiritually; Pharaoh is accompanying us out of Egypt. As the narrative unfolds, we read how quickly we had changes of heart and demanded to be allowed to return to Egypt, and how quickly the Egyptians forgot why they had driven us from their country, and what catastrophes their holding onto us brought down upon them.
As was previously discussed, Pharaoh challenges God, ‘I dare You to remove me from people’s minds and still have the same people with the same minds! Get rid of me and human evolution is pushed back, for I am the movement of the future,’ (Radical Bo).
On the other hand, Pharaoh cannot imagine himself and Egypt without the Israelites. There’s something we give him, to which he has become addicted. Perhaps it’s the unique way we have of looking at things, or the special gifts we bring with us whenever we are a minority among a hostile nation? Regardless of the reason, Pharaoh chases us in a pitiful attempt to gather us back into the fold like lost sheep, so that he might own us once again. His ability to inspire or coerce all of Egypt to follow him and to invest what energy and treasure they could still muster to chase after the Jewish People, in the hope of undoing the historical catastrophe and reversing the tides of misfortune they had just suffered, is nothing short of insane genius.
In order for us to disconnect from Pharaoh, all Israel has to pass through the Red Sea. In the Exodus story, the sea split for us while the Egyptians who pursued us were drowned in it, thus ending our two hundred year symbiosis. The severing of our relationship with Egypt can only be compared to the cutting of an umbilical cord. For, while a baby may be born into fresh-air, it is only the severing of the umbilicus ends the process of gestation and the connection between womb and fetus.
Throughout the Talmud and rabbinic literature this event is known as KRIYAT YAM SUF – Tearing the Red Sea, rather than Splitting, Dividing or Cleaving[23]. This choice of words begs an explanation, since throughout Scripture KRIYA – Tearing is only used in the sense that we use it today: tearing at one’s clothing as a sign of grief and mourning, acknowledging the finality and irrevocability of death.
The Zohar, ever alert to the nuances of language, connects KRIYAT YAM SUF – Tearing the Red Sea to a strange and mythic Midrash.
Rabbi Shimon said, ‘There is a doe on earth for whom the Holy, Blessed One, does many things. Whenever she cries, the Holy, Blessed One, pays attention to her distress and listens to her voice. When the world requires Mercy in relation to water she gives voice, whereupon the Holy, Blessed One, paying attention to her voice, takes pity on the world, as it is written, “As the hart yearns for streams of water, so does my soul yearn for you.” (Ps. 42:2). When she tries to give birth, she finds herself closed in on all sides. She comes and places her head between her knees, cries and raises her voice, and the Holy, Blessed One takes pity on her. He sends a serpent to bite her genitals, opening and tearing that place for her, and so she gives birth immediately.’ Rabbi Shimon also said, ‘Do not test God in this matter for it is very precise.’ (Zohar Vol. II 52b)
The idea of the doe needing a serpent or dragon to tear her open is not unique to the Zohar, variants also appear in the Talmud and Midrashim[24]. However, it is the Zohar that makes the connection between the Tearing of the Red Sea and God vicariously tearing open the womb of His favorite doe to facilitate the birth, presumably of His favorite fawn.
It is significant that the Zohar refers to the doe ‘giving voice to the call for water’, because water is a metaphor for desire (Radical Nitzavim).
In the following verses the Torah describes our desperate situation:
As Pharaoh approached, the Israelites looked up, and there were the Egyptians, marching after them. They were terrified and cried out to the LORD. They said to Moses, ‘Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die? What have you done to us by bringing us out of Egypt? Didn’t we say to you in Egypt, “Leave us alone; let us serve the Egyptians”? It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert!’
Moses answered the people, ‘Do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will see the deliverance the LORD will bring you today. The Egyptians you see today you will never see again. The LORD will fight for you; you need only to be still.’
Then the LORD said to Moses, ‘Why are you crying out to me? Tell the Israelites to move on.’ (Ex. 14:10-14)
Any thinking person reading this text has to ask himself, what else were we supposed to do? If a Jew isn’t commanded to pray at a time of his distress, what on earth (or heaven) ought he to do instead? When God asks, ‘Why are you crying out to me?’ Isn’t it obvious that we’re praying to Him? The key to understanding the flow of the narrative, from the expression of woe at the beginning, through the Splitting of the Sea and the Song of Gratitude, to the collective decision to turn our backs on the past and walk into the Wilderness, is provided by the following Zohar.
Rabbi Isaac said, ‘When camped by the sea they saw a multitude of enemies. There were the [Egyptian soldiers and cavalry] massing to attack them, but also hosts of angels on high, all gathering against Israel. The danger they saw all around them was imminent. The sea with its towering waves was in front of them, all these hosts of soldiers and all the battalions of Egypt were behind them, while above there were many avenging angels against them. They were reduced to tears, when the Holy, Blessed One, said to Moses, “Why do you cry to Me?” We learned in the Book of Concealment that the word AYLY - to Me, is chosen precisely, because it all depends upon The Ancient One. At that moment the Holy, Ancient One was revealed; Desire spilled over into all the upper worlds above, and then the Infinite Light shone through.’
God says to Moses, ‘Don’t pray to Me, I am named YHV”H – LORD. As LORD and God of the Jews I am in competition with 70 other gods and especially with RAHAB, god of Egypt (Radical Haazinu). This is not the moment to invoke Me, this is a moment when the Original Thought demands to reveal itself – the Holy, Ancient One!’
When the Zohar mentions ATIKA KADISHA - the Holy, Ancient One, it is an oblique reference to the Original Thought, that idea which arose before God desired the Creation of the World (Radical Balak). It is the original thought of us, of you and me, of Israel: you, me, God and the Torah, all living together happily ever after, in unity and sublime harmony – a very peaceable and tranquil thought.
In last week’s Sidra we learned how Pharaoh who is called, ‘That great dragon which lies in the midst of his streams, saying, ‘My Nile is my own; I made myself.[25]’ represents the spinal cord and the lower autonomic brain and limbic system. We saw how afraid Moses was to fight Pharaoh, and we heard Pharaoh’s claims that even God could not get rid of him without getting rid of what makes humans human.
Elsewhere we have discussed how God hides Himself differently according to the exigencies of the location, that there is a greater level of hiddenness when God puts himself into the Word that animates the soul of someone destined to live in dangerous places. Such a soul needs a short set of instructions to survive, therefore his Torah may be a short phrase. And then there are the people who are in such jeopardy, their instruction consists of a single Divine Word, or even less than that; an urge, a command, an instinct wherein God Himself manifests, not trusting any Word to convey the message. Torahs of this kind are known as Sitrei Torah – Hidden Torahs; so holy and concise, containing God so immanent that even words are not sufficient to carry the message. God Himself is the teaching – the Word[26] (Radical Nitzavim).
The Word, Divinity or Sitrei Torah animating Pharaoh is the simplest and highest, purest and most naked Self of God, because Pharaoh’s soul is the most polluted in Creation. Conversely the Torah has to be highest, as is explained. Another way of stating this would be to say that our instincts are a much simpler and clearer manifestation of God than our humanly constructed thoughts and ethical behaviors. The parts of ourselves capable of holding an internal dialogue, discerning right from wrong and making moral choices are not animated by God-given instincts (Radical Vayeshev). The Pharaoh inside us, the dragon/serpent spinal cord does not have complicated Torah encoded into it, it has the simplest and most direct possible, as was explained in last week’s Sidra (Radical Bo)[27].
When God revealed Himself in Egypt at midnight on Passover, every firstborn thing was subsumed in the awareness of God’s Firstness and died - except for Pharaoh himself, who did not die. He was energized by the experience and his evil genius was spurred on to ever greater and riskier endeavors. This brings us to the crux of this Sidra’s narrative when Pharaoh and all his hosts have massed against the Israelites by the Red Sea.
Pharaoh has seen God inside himself and has not died, he is aware of the Divine Immanence animating him, and has felt the sublime frisson of the Life Force in his own spinal cord and brain.
Now as God prepares to Split the Red Sea to save His People, Rahab god of Egypt asks the Heavenly Court for a special emergency session. ‘Time-out, Time-out!’ he cries. ‘There’s some cheating going on!
‘We agreed back when we all chose sides,’ argues Rahab, ‘that whoever has the most and strongest believers gets to sit on the Throne of Sovereignty. Now I see You, God, are going to Split the Red Sea for Your Jews, but that is not allowed by the Rules of Play agreed on when we threw dice to decide who gets what nation and who ends up with whom. I ask for Justice on behalf of my People, Egypt. Let there be a weighing of merits and a judgment to decide who is more deserving, my People or Your People?’
This is what the Zohar is referring to when it says that not only was the Egyptian Army massing to attack them, but Avenging Angels were prosecuting them in Heaven. Israel was already under a bitter legal attack from on high - Lawfare. The Letter of the Law demanded strict judgment, ‘These have pagan hairstyles, and so do these have pagan hairstyles. These are uncircumcised, and so are these uncircumcised. These wear wool and linen, and so do these wear wool and linen admixtures! The Israelites are no more deserving of Salvation than their enemies.[28]’
For God to show favoritism at this point would be to reveal His hand, so to speak, to show His cards and reveal that He had been cheating from the very beginning - from before the beginning, in fact. It would mean the revelation of the Holy, Ancient One, allowing everyone with an eye to history and narrative to see that God doesn’t care how His People compare with other nations, how well their claims stand up in a court of law, what their merits or shortcomings might be. Everyone would be able to see that God is prepared to disregard His own rules when necessary, to protect His personally chosen and favorite People from harm. But the original lottery was not supposed to have been about favorites, we were supposed to have fallen to God’s portion by pure chance, not by prior design. Revealing that God had us in mind before Creation would mean that the cosmic lottery which took place around the time of the destruction of the Tower of Babel was a farce, a fraud and a scam (Radical Haazinu).
To understand what is happening here in the subtext of the Exodus narrative, at the moment of cosmic confrontation at the Red Sea, it is important to understand the Zoharic metaphor of the doe in travail.
There are few overtly sexual and erotic metaphors written into the Talmud, but this is one exception. The Talmud discusses why the Torah is compared to a Doe, as in this verse:
‘She is a loving deer, a graceful doe. Let her breasts satisfy you always. May you always be captivated by her love.’ (Prov. 5:19) R. Shmuel b. Nahmani says, ‘How does the Torah resemble a doe? Just as a doe has a very tight vagina and is therefore the favorite, since every time he penetrates her, her mate feels it is the first time, so the Torah, every time the scholar [penetrates her, it] feels like the first time.’ (Eruvin 54b)
For the director of music. To the tune of "The Doe of the Morning." A psalm of David. (Ps. 22:1) R. Zeira said, ‘Why is Queen Esther said to resemble the doe [in this psalm]? Just as a doe has a very tight vagina and is therefore the favorite, since every time he penetrates her, her mate feels it is the first time, so it was with Esther, for each time Ahasuerus penetrated her it felt like the first time.’ (Yoma 29a)
Do you know when the mountain goats give birth? Do you watch when the doe bears her fawn? (Job 39:1) This doe has a very tight vagina. When she crouches to give birth, I, God, have prepared a dragon which enters and bites her cervix, softening and loosening it so that she is relieved of her severe throes.’ (Bava Batra 16b)
These three Talmudic references are the source for the Zoharic metaphor mentioned at the outset: ‘…When the Doe tries to give birth […] the Holy, Blessed One takes pity on her. He sends a serpent to bite her genitals, opening and tearing…’
There is a famous parable attributed to the Ba’al Shem Tov.
A king hears a fiddler playing a tune. ‘Come play this tune in my palace,’ the king orders the fiddler. ‘Play it again,’ the king commands as often as he wishes, even several times a day. But the violinist could no longer perform the piece with the same original creativity or poignancy the king first heard; he was too used to playing it. So the king invited important guests to come and hear the piece being played; ambassadors, potentates, foreign dignitaries and such, all so that the king could hear the tune being played as though for the first time; with hitlahavut – fiery passion, for each time the violinist played it for someone new he found something new in the music, otherwise it had just become routine. Eventually the king tired of the arrangement, and decided to blind the fiddler. Subsequently, whenever he wanted to hear the music played with freshness the king only had to fool the fiddler into believing someone new was there to hear him play it[29].
Elsewhere I have discussed the fact that the only desire or craving the sages attribute to God, is the craving to hear the prayers of the righteous[30]. This is the favorite music of the king’s fiddler in the Ba’al Shem Tov’s parable. Eventually God tires of arranging fresh disasters to spur our prayers, so He makes us blind. Now we imagine our own disasters, and pray passionately and fervently in God’s favorite tune to be saved from disasters that are not even imminent.
We are the doe R. Shimon talked about when he said, ‘There is a doe on earth for whom the Holy, Blessed One, does many things […] takes pity on the world.’
We are the Talmudic doe with the very tight vagina, that’s one reason we are God’s favorite. We make the freshest music in God’s favorite tune. And now we are blind, every time feels like the first time, and our prayers are what God craves.
Yet as we were pressed ever more tightly from behind by Pharaoh’s army and cavalry, closed in by the desert on either side and the Red Sea in front, with the Avenging Angels looming above us, God had no appetite for our prayers, as the Torah tells us: Then God said to Moses, ‘Why are you crying out to me? Tell the Israelites to move on.’ Because this was not one of those moments God craves, where the prayers and the cries are music to His ears.
This was the second kind of moment, the kind the Talmud and Zohar describe as ‘when she tries to give birth, she finds herself closed in on all sides. She comes and places her head between her knees, cries and raises her voice.’
What we are trying to give birth to at this moment is God. God calls us His Mother, as we learn in the Midrash.
R. Shimon b. Yochai asked R. Elazar b. R. Yosi, saying, ‘Is it possible you heard something from your father concerning the phrase, “The crown with which his mother crowned him”?’ [The phrase is part of the verse, ‘Go out and look, O daughters of Zion, upon King Solomon and upon the crown with which his mother crowned him on the day of his wedding and his heart’s delight.’ (Song of Songs 3:11) Tr.]
‘Yes,’ he answered.
‘What was it?’
‘There was a king who loved his only daughter more than enough. He used to call her ‘my daughter’. But, he could not stop embracing her until he called her, ‘my sister’, and he still could not stop embracing her until he called her ‘mother’. So it was, God loved the Jewish People more than enough, calling them ‘My daughter’, as it is written, (Psalms 45) ‘Listen, daughter and look.’
But He did not stop loving them until He called them, ‘My sister’, as it is written, (Song of Songs 5:2) ‘Open for me, my sister, my lover.’
He did not stop loving them until He called them, ‘My mother’ as it is written, (Isaiah 51:4) ‘Listen to Me, My people, pay attention to Me, My nation.’ Don’t read the word, OOMI - ‘my nation’, but EEMI - ‘my mother’.
R. Shimon b. Yochai rose and kissed him on his head, saying, ‘Had I only come to this world to hear this explanation from your mouth, it would have sufficed.’ (Cant. Rabbah 3:2)
It was at this moment in history, with our backs up against the sea, that we had to birth a new concept of God into the world, a new persona that God would adopt as His. In order to facilitate the birth, God sends the dragon/serpent, Pharaoh to bite us in our most vulnerable and painfully private place. To tear and rip it open, so that the baby, the newborn can fall out into the world.
This is what is revealed. Just as a person has a serpent-shaped spine, a spinal cord and central nervous system, an unconscious and subconscious BIOS[31] equivalent or similar to the computer firmware that directs many basic functions of the operating system - so does humanity. Sometimes the serpent of humanity takes on the hierarchical Pharaonic form we discussed in last week’s Sidra (Radical Bo), while at other times it may be less easily identifiable. But that is not where it ends. What was revealed at the Red Sea, was that that universe itself also has a serpent-shaped spine, a spinal cord and central nervous system, an unconscious and subconscious BIOS called ATIKA KADISHA – The Holy, Ancient One.
Imagine the Tree of Life of the Sephirot as a single column with buds but no branches, there is only Keter - Crown leading down to where Malkhut ought to be (but isn’t), and no other Sephirot on the column; this is a schema of ATIKA KADISHA.
CHAPTER 5 – YITHRO
What was the Revelation at Sinai?
‘On the morning of the third day there was thunder and lightning, with a thick cloud over the mountain, and a very loud trumpet blast. Everyone in the camp trembled. Then Moses led the people out of the camp to meet with God, and they stood at the foot of the mountain. Mount Sinai was covered with smoke, because the LORD descended on it in fire. The smoke billowed up from it like smoke from a furnace, and the whole mountain trembled violently. As the sound of the trumpet grew louder and louder, Moses spoke and the voice of God answered him.’ (Ex. 19:16-19)
In ancient synagogues the cantor would read the Torah portion from the scroll, verse by verse, while a Turgeman – Interpreter would translate into the vernacular. Now, from the phrase, ‘Moses spoke and the voice of God answered him’ the Talmud deduces the law that the interpreter may not raise his voice louder than the cantor[32]. The mediaeval commentators were hard-pressed to understand the correlation here, for the opposite seems to be true. Surely, they argue, God speaks while Moses interprets? How can we even imagine Moses raising his voice above that of God?
For the Izbicy, this Talmudic teaching makes perfect sense, because it is God who is the interpreter while Moses speaks the Ten Commandments[33]. God, the interpreter of the Ten Commandments? How does that come about?
Elsewhere we have discussed the notion that each of us is animated by a divine command, word or impulse, and that we have God inside; every individual is, in fact, another aspect or Face of God. That’s why we are all unique, since God never repeats Himself; He is infinitely creative (Radical Vayigash). Every human is another and distinct iteration of God (Radical Re’eh), we are all windows in the black wall of ignorance, transparent to God who animates our flesh and blood (Radical Bo). To discover his purpose, every person has to access his or her own divine command, to discern what God means by creating and sustaining him (Radical Nitzavim).
We learn in the Talmud:
It is written, ‘And the LORD will be king over all the earth. On that day the LORD will be one and His name one.’ (Zach. 14:9) And now, is He not one? This is what the prophet means: In this world it is written YHV”H while being read ADONAI, but in the world to come it will be written YHV”H and read YHV”H (Pesachim 50a).
In Radical Bo we discussed at some length the benefits that accrue to us, Jews, who have mastered the art of reading God’s name, YHV”H with our eyes while pronouncing it ADONAI with our mouth, lips and tongues, and how it has protected us from many subtle forms of mind-control wielded by those who control the images we are bombarded with on a daily basis.
Why is it necessary to protect ourselves by this linguistic trick, bifurcating our brains this way? Why can we not stay ‘on-top-of’ our own minds, distinguishing what is real from the illusory and the truth from the propaganda by using the intelligence, clarity and discernment of the mind itself? The answer, as it was given in the two previous Sidras, is somewhat dispiriting: it is because we each carry around our own serpent inside us, the spine, spinal cord and central nervous system built upon the unconscious and subconscious BIOS[34] governed in the main part by the lower or limbic brain.
But imagine if this were not the case, imagine what it would feel like to inhabit a body if there were no dark and hungry portions of the mind operating on timetables and to specifications of which you were oblivious. Imagine there were no oblivion inside you at all, no impulse-to-act in which you were not an equal planner and decider. Imagine what it would be like to feel whole in every sense, to have access to your ‘lower’ the way you do to your ‘higher’ functions.
This, says the Izbicy, is what the above Talmud is referring to. In the world to come every person will be able to see how his or her grasp of things is one with the flow of Divine Light, that there are no dark or hidden impulses in the human being, no hungry, driven portions, just God, beside whom nothing exists. For what did Moses mean when he said, ‘It was shown to you to know that the LORD is God. There is no other besides Him.’? (Deut. 4:35) Most people think it means there are no gods besides Him, but we understand that Moses was stating something more fundamental. Nothing exists but God. The Hebrew phrase AIN OWD does not refer to gods, it simply means there is no-else.
If we really internalized the idea that there is no-else but God, we would not be able to read YHV”H with our eyes while pronouncing it ADONAI, it wouldn’t be true. We only do it because we ourselves are split. We cannot integrate our whole Self into our higher, speaking, verbalizing self, because too much of our functioning self remains trapped within an autonomous nervous system; the serpent/dragon wallows in its river, saying ‘This is my river, I made it!’.
The Izbicy says something even more radical: The fact that I see myself as flawed is because I cannot see how God is integrated throughout the universe, I don’t experience God-in-everything, since if I did so I would also experience myself as whole in every way. It is only when I feel my own wholeness that I can experience God’s immanence throughout the world and God becomes One[35].
If I experience myself as flawed, it is only because I cannot see God’s Oneness. And I will only be able to see God’s Oneness when I am no longer split between higher and lower Self, between intellectual goals and instinctual impulses, rational choices and primal urges, thoughts and emotions. According to the Izbicy this is the only way to understand the metaphor stated at the beginning of Genesis, ‘God made the firmament and so divided among the waters below the firmament and the waters above the firmament, and it was so.’ (Gen. 1:7) As long as this split prevails, it prevents us from accessing and integrating our Whole-Self, as I have discussed at length elsewhere[36] (Radical Emor). Frankly, asks the Izbicy, what is rational man and what could he possibly achieve through his own intellect and with his own thoughts? On the other hand, what a person does with his natural inclination, in the grip of his instincts, is being done with the power that God put in him[37].
As was discussed in the previous two Sidras, the serpent part of us carries the instinctual commands necessary to the maintenance and reproduction of life, and may occasionally reveal the Holy, Ancient One representing God’s desires before Creation (Radical Beshalach), something the rational mind is incapable of doing.
But the split is illusory, and this is essential rabbinic teaching. Our own hierarchical mindset (the fact that we think there is a higher and lower) prevents us seeing our wholeness. Rabbi Akiba tried teaching this lesson to his brightest students before leading them into Paradise. ‘When you reach that place of pure marble-stone do not say, “Water, Water!” for the liar cannot prevail in God’s presence.’ (Hagiga 14b) Only Akiba came out of Paradise in one piece. His students could not hold onto this essential teaching, so they died or went out of their minds. The split between higher and lower is an illusion interfering with our perception of God’s own Oneness.
Even Moses cannot hang onto this insight, as the sages inform us: ‘Things not revealed to Moses are yet revealed to R. Akiba and his friends.’ (Num. Rabba 19:6)
We all express a unique Face of God for He is infinitely creative. However, it is not easy to discern and become aware of the particular divine phrase, word, command or instinct which makes up our personal Torah.
So we are given the Torah at Sinai collectively, and charged with guarding, studying, obeying and celebrating it equally. I have to apply all its teachings to myself as though it had been written only for me, and so must you. This is our collective duty and the covenant we swore at Sinai to uphold forever.
But the goal of every individual has to be to find his own Torah, to discover what unique divine command animates him, to reveal his own specialness and explore his connection to God.
Moses was a shepherd, that’s all he was and ever aspired to be. Everything he became was simply the result of exploring his shepherd nature, searching and finding God, the Shepherd inside himself. Moses was merely developing and expanding upon the pioneering genius of Jacob (Radical Vayetze). Moses would have told you that in shepherding he was only following in the footsteps already trodden by his ancestor, a spiritual path he was drawn to follow (Radical Zot Habracha). The point Moses would have emphasized is that he wasn’t even being original, that others before him had already explored the spiritual dimensions of this connection to God.
And yet, look to what heights his personal exploration took Moses! Finding the divine within doesn’t have to be seen as a mystical quest, at all. It is more the search for authenticity and substance, than a mission in pursuit of holiness.
Another way of comprehending the difference between ‘this world’ and the ‘world-to-come’ has to do with the way we comprehend one another. As humans we depend on speech for the most part, to convey our feelings and thoughts, our intentions and needs. On a more ‘primitive’ level there are other means of communication such as ‘body-language’, stance, posture and attitude, etc. At an even deeper level such decisions are being made by our unconscious and subconscious, autonomous systems.
In the world-to-come when we are no longer split between our conscious, aware, human mind and our un/subconscious serpent mind, communication between people will operate at a much deeper and intuitive level.
Rebbe Reb Bunim of P’shischa describes the world-to-come as a state where no person will have to explain the Torah inside him to anyone else, because the other person will already resonate to it, because of the Torah that person has in him. As everyone becomes aware of the divine in himself, learning to recognize God in his own personality, in his drives and characteristics, so meeting and encountering another person becomes an exercise in resonance. As I look at you, the God in me informs me of the God in you without you having to explain anything to me[38].
At Sinai God decided to give the Torah through Moses, which meant that the Torah would have Moses’ imprint upon it forever. In fact, in fourteen different places throughout Scripture, it is referred to simply as the Moses’ Torah.
While Moses was speaking the Commandments, God was carving them into our hearts. This is what the Talmud means when referring to God as Moses’ interpreter. God carved the words and their meaning into us, every Jew received the Torah their own way, in their own light, in harmony with the original GodWord animating each of us and our unique God-given soul. And when we say God-given, what we mean is that God gives Himself. God is the given. God writes himself into the words of the Torah and asks to be received, taken, owned and cherished. It’s a God-given Torah.
At that moment when we all stood at Sinai receiving the Torah, it was in God’s power to open it infinitely large for each of us, a unique and individual Torah for every person who stood there, as for all generations; but He did not. That would not have been Moses’ Torah; it would have meant the interpreter raising his own voice over that of the cantor.
God could have given us such a Torah as would never, ever have left us; that we would never have been able to forget, forsake or falsify. But that would have meant there were versions of the Torah greater and more powerful than Moses’.
The Five Books of Moses end with the promise, ‘Since then, no prophet has risen in Israel like Moses, whom the LORD knew face to face,’ (Deut. 34:10) but had God lifted each of us up to our potential at that moment, who knows how many prophets equivalent or greater than Moses there would be?
As Malachi, the last of the Hebrew prophets, tells us in God’s final prophetic message, ‘Remember the Torah of Moses My servant, which I commanded him at Horeb for all Israel, the statutes and ordinances.” (Mal. 3:22) Referring to His Torah as Moses’ Torah, God humbles Himself before the most humble man ever to walk the earth, for this is how Torah is born, and this is its primary teaching.
CHAPTER 6 – MISHPATIM
Who Is the Hebrew Slave?
‘And these are the laws you must put before them. When you buy a Hebrew slave…’ (Ex. 21:1-2)
The dissociative switch from Sidra Yithro we studied last week to this week’s Sidra Mishpatim (i.e. from receiving the Ten Commandments at Sinai to dealing with the laws of Hebrew slavery) is like falling from the top of a skyscraper straight down into a hole half a mile deep… We plunge from one emotional and spiritual extreme another.
Although we are not told why this man was sold into slavery, a Hebrew slave is someone who has squandered his inheritance in the Land of Israel, has no remaining assets or friends to support him financially, and has no job. He has been arrested, tried and sentenced for theft, and has subsequently been sold into slavery by the court in order to pay the damages and fines the judge decided to award the plaintiff. That’s quite a lot of background information which the text fails to provide. Why begin at the end of the story? Why aren’t we told of the slave’s poor choices, the stupid things he did prior to his crimes? Why aren’t we given a narrative the way we were given a detailed description of the mistakes and blunders in the story of Joseph and his brothers in the Book of Genesis?
The Izbicy suggests we apply the notion of the Hebrew slave to ourselves, it is our personal narrative[39]. If you must know the background, read the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. We all begin life with a clean record, certain assets and potential. We all start out thinking we can acquire, get or grab a slice of whatever it is we fancy, and we all have to deal with the facts of life. The question, why am I here, has the same answer throughout time and space – Adam & Eve, Tree of Knowledge, Garden of Eden – expulsion and exile. Individually, our private narratives may seem very different and distinct, but the feelings we share are universal.
At virtually any point in our lives we can stop, examine ourselves and ask the only truly useful existential questions, ‘What am I doing here, where am I going and how do I find my Olam Hatikun – World of Fixing?’
The Izbicy references a Zoharic quote in which R. Shimon bar Yochai and his son, R. Elazar, are having a discussion concerning Thinking and Thought.
R. Elazar said, ‘Father, how many different kinds of thought there are! The lowest Dwelling-Presence of God is called Thought[40], but Supernal Chokhma is also called Thought. Above that is the Supernal Thought[41], while highest of all, above which there is nothing, there is the Hidden, Secret and Highest Thought[42]? And are you telling me that Adam’s thoughts were able to reach that high? That cannot be, for as Adam himself admitted, ‘I became afraid for I am naked,’ which is to say, Adam was well aware that he was stripped of his clothing, i.e. the Supernal Thought in which the simple thought is wrapped? […]
R. Shimon replied. ‘I am having a revelation; things I had no idea I knew until now are suddenly becoming clear; matters that will not become fully clear until the day King Messiah arrives.’
R. Elazar said, ‘If what you’re saying is correct, then we are being told that there exists Adam Kadmon – a Primordial Man who comes before anything else, and that there also exists another sort of Man.’
R. Shimon replied, ‘Son, of course, those are the facts. Adam, whom [God] the Prime Cause created in His image, was hidden and secret, and this is what caused the Prime Cause to withdraw. It was the Second Man who sinned in Thought, while the Third Man sinned in Action, for there are three versions of Adam: Adam in [the World of] Creation, Adam in [the World of] Formation and Adam in [the World of] Action, and not all sins are equal.’ (Tikunei Zohar 19, p.p. 42b)
One phrase in the above dialogue begs some sort of explanation. What did R. Shimon bar Yochai mean when he said, ‘Adam, whom God created in His image, was hidden and secret, and this is what caused the Prime Cause to withdraw’?
When we say God withdraws from somewhere or someone we don’t mean that He disappears from that place or person. If God withdrew from you, obviously you would cease to exist; for you are but another facet of God, as is discussed throughout this work in many places. What we actually mean when saying God withdraws is that He turns His back, so to speak, and is no longer visible face-to-face. When I am face-to-face with the divine inside me, when I am aware of my own soul and its standing in the presence of God, I am standing in the Light, caught up in rapture and exultation –a state of pure joy. Sin is a meaningless concept within such a moment.
You and I don’t have the wherewithal to stand face-to-face with God while remaining who we are as individuals. We don’t have the mental, emotional and spiritual resources; we aren’t equipped to be in that state of rapture and still be human beings with personalities and lives, capable of making mistakes and learning, capable of falling in love and out of love. Adam, who is created in the Image of God, is so high that for God’s plan to evolve and devolve, for man to become human and to lose God only to find Him again, to fumble with ideas until he becomes capable of telling God who to be, for the Original Thought to become reality, God has to turn His Face away, so to speak, to make room for history to unfold.
Another way of saying this, one that makes Adam culpable, so to speak, is that when God brought this Supernal Man into being, Adam’s first thought was, ‘I am!’ His second thought was, ‘To what purpose?’ These two thoughts are the equivalent of Man turning his back on God. By putting himself at the center of the question, Adam puts himself at the center of his universe; he is looking at himself and not at God. And so, it may be said, God has been forced to withdraw from that world.
This is why our Sidra begins in the lowest of four Worlds, in Olam Assiyah – the World of Fixing, because it reflects the moment when Adam reaches consciousness in the narrative of his own Life on Earth. Adam’s arrival in this world is thus described using the metaphor of a Hebrew slave who is ‘sold for his theft[43],’ equating Adam with a thief who takes what God has given him, and instead of remaining face-to-face with God, turns and puts the focus onto himself. Adam the Second, sins in thought with pride and desire. Adam the Third eats of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and so becomes Adam the Fourth, you and I, in exile and slavery.
‘He should work for six years and then, in the seventh, he must be released to go free.’ (Ex. 21:2)
According to Izbicy, SHMITA - the Sabbatical Year is a metaphorical leap from ‘working the field’, representing a person’s self-absorbed preoccupation, to ‘leaving fallow the field’, representing a person’s desire to worship and engage with God. When God sees that someone has the desire to step away from his self-absorbed toil, to allow his field to fall fallow and to concentrate on Him, then no bars can keep his soul imprisoned nor stone walls cage him. No earthly power can prevent his becoming free. The Hebrew slave goes free with SHMITA, unless he is determined to remain a slave, in which case the slave’s owner pierces his earlobe with an awl, and the slave is then allowed to continue his slavery until the advent of the Jubilee – 50th year.
YOVEL – the Jubilee Year represents the revelation of the Simple Desire. In my book Sefer Yetzira: Chronicles of Desire, I devote large sections to an exploration of the concept of God’s Simple Desire.
In his kabalistic description of Creation, the ARIZAL (R. Isaac Luria Ashkenazi 1534-1572) said ‘God constricted His infinite Self into the innermost point within Him, literally into the center of His Light.’ What he actually meant was this: God, as it were, felt a want, a desire for something which is similar to that desire we experience as an emptiness in the gut. God made room, like a hole inside Him for the sensation of emptiness, resembling a void, a nothingness or darkness in His actual Light. (Sefer Yetzira: Chronicles of Desire p.p. 8)
…All of existence is the product of God’s Simple Desire. When we can get past our plethora of desires and get in touch with the Primal Desire - the God-shaped Hole inside every one of us, then we are in touch with the substance of the universe. Desire is the substance of which the universe is made. When we go beyond the infinity of nameable desires that is Chaos, we can experience the unnamable desire - which feels like the absence of anything - that is Void. […]
Chaos is the sensation of desire inside a person for things; as the hunger to eat or thirst for water, but the sensation of Void is different. Void is the sensation of emptiness and a vacated space inside the self, a feeling of lack and want; a sense of the No-thing. Chaos more closely resembles a mixture and blend of all the desires flowing from the Breath flowing from the Holy Spirit, which is the seat of the Simple Desire, source of all desire. From there God formed substance, which is not an undifferentiated desire for something, but rather a sensation of lack and emptiness. (Ibid. p.p. 170)
When the Simple Desire manifests in the world, says the Izbicy, the Jubilee manifests inside every individual whether they are ready or not, whether they long for God, or not. Since we are each a facet of God, when God allows His experience of the Simple Desire to manifest in the world, each of us resonates and our deepest desires are aroused and wakened. The divine in us sings out in harmony with the Song of God as it narrates the tone-poem of Creation. When God sings Simple Desire, nothing holds us back from experiencing it within our soul, so no slavery exists anywhere at all. Thus even slaves who want to remain slaves and who went back to serve their masters after the Sabbatical Year, have to go free in the Jubilee Year.
This Sidra of Mishpatim – Laws has to be read personally. The Torah is never merely talking to someone else at another time and place; everything has to apply to me and you, equally. This explains why the Sidra does not begin, as other chapters almost invariably do, with the phrase, ‘God spoke to Moses, saying.’
Because you and I are equal to Moses when we stand before God in the World of Fixing, wondering what our purpose is, why we are here and how we are to connect with the Simple Desire, therefore The Chapter of Laws is not given to Moses to give to us. Rather, we each have to identify what concerns us, what applies to us, and when we find what concerns us, when we explore our connection to the divine, to discover what is authentic in ourselves, what is holy and good, the benefits accrue equally to our possessions. That’s why this Sidra also deals with damages and torts; when my belongings, possessions or property cause damage, I am liable, because ‘who I am’ does not just mean as some abstract psychological Gestalt. ‘Who I am’ includes everything I own. My soul not only permeates my body, my home or my clothing, but even my car and my computer. My pets and animals express me, they are iterations of me, as I am an iteration of God. If something belonging to me causes damage or hurts someone, then something in me needs fixing. We take responsibility for the consequences of our acts. Whether the things that occurred were reasoned or impassioned, we blame no gods or accidents for our impact on others, we never attribute our mistakes to some outside or supernatural agency. I am responsible! There are no ‘outs’, no excuses or rationalizations for treading on others, and no matter how high I climb the social ladder, I can never aspire to have rights that others do not also have.
CHAPTER 7 - TERUMAH
The Gift of God
‘Speak to the children of Israel, that they take Me an offering: of every man whose heart gives him willingly, you shall take My offering.’ (Ex. 25:2)
Without a close familiarity with Biblical Hebrew it is difficult to fully convey the complexities of this verse, but there are three syntactical elements calling for exegesis.
The first is the phrase ‘take me an offering’. Why does the text not say, ‘bring me an offering’?
The second is the apparently the redundant ‘Me/My’ in the verse.
The third is the problematic ‘heart gives… willingly’; the verse does not clarify whether the donor is giving his heart or the heart is giving him.
There is a sweet and tender Midrash on this verse:
...and then there are transactions wherein the seller is acquired along with the purchase. God said to Israel, ‘I sold you my Torah, and I was sold along with it, as it were,’ as we read in the verse, ‘take Me an offering.’
A parable of a king: The king had a daughter, an only daughter. A marriage was arranged with a prince from a foreign country. When the prince wanted to return to his land and take his wife with him, the king said, ‘My daughter, the princess that I gave as your wife is an only child, and I cannot be parted from her. Nor can I reasonably forbid you to take her away with you, for she’s your wife. I beg of you, do me but this one favor; wherever you may end up going together, please make me a single bedroom where I can dwell with you, for I cannot bear to let her go.’
This is what the Holy, Blessed One said to Israel: ‘I gave you My Torah. I cannot be parted from her, nor can I tell you not to take her with you. Rather, everywhere you go together, make me a home where I may dwell,’ as it is written, ‘Let them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them.[44]’ (Ex. Rabba 33:1)
The Midrash explores two bold ideas. The first is that with the act of receiving the Torah, we also acquire God. ‘Take me’ says God. It is a God-given Torah, and what is given to us is God.
The second idea is more subtle. It is the proposition that it’s possible to take the Torah without God unless we pay special care and attention. Torah and God do not automatically go together, we have the power to carry her off, so to speak, and deny God any connection to her. The king to the prince, ‘Make me a sanctuary so that I may continue to dwell close to my daughter, even while she is married to you.’
The Midrash could have phrased it such a way, that the king was offering to do the prince a favor, to act as peacemaker among the young couple in the future, should they have trouble in their marriage. Instead, the Midrash describes the king begging a favor; God begs us to make Him a place where He might dwell so He might remain close to the Torah, which, as we read elsewhere, has been His delight since before the Creation of the world, as it is written, ‘I was the nursling at His side. I was His constant delight, rejoicing always in His presence[45].’ (Prov. 8:30)
The key to understanding the verse and the Midrash is the third element, the heart. How do you take God? How do we make a sanctuary where God longs to dwell? ‘Of every man whose heart gives him willingly.’ It’s not the person who donates his treasure in a heartfelt manner, it’s the heart donating the person which is crucial. The message is that my heart has to donate me to God for anything Jewish to happen, whether it’s fully receiving the Torah or creating a sacred space.
As is discussed at length elsewhere (Radical Korah), God did not invite us to donate our hearts and build Him a sanctuary where He might dwell among us until we sinned with the Golden Calf. Prior to that, although we had officially received the Ten Commandments at Sinai, it was Moses went up the mountain to bring down the Torah for us. In theory at least, before the sin of the Golden Calf, prophecy and revelation could occur anywhere on earth, without requiring a special place or sanctuary. In practice, however, it was one man acting as intermediary for us, who went up a mountain to experience prophecy and then carry down the Word. The system we had in place at that time involved a chief-prophet who went up to God to bring down not the Divine Presence, but the Law - the Word of God. We may have needed a teacher, but what we really wanted was a priest, someone who could invoke and access the divine without needing to go anywhere else, showing us how to worship God while walking among us. We wanted to feel God’s presence and see Providence, rather than be taught His word.
The sweet Midrash quoted above does not really give the whole picture. The prince didn’t just marry the princess and then attempt to carry her off back to his country. The Midrash glosses over the scandals, the drama, the kicking and screaming recriminations, the cover-ups and the interventions. The prince turned out to be promiscuous, conducting himself without the least decency or propriety. Only weeks after the wedding he flagrantly abandoned the princess, sickeningly and drunkenly acting in the most debauched and depraved way with one of the palace slaves, an ill-bred woman who cleaned the windows in his chambers.
The Midrash somehow fails to mention that detail.
Why did the redactor of the Midrash narrate the parable here, as a commentary on the verse, ‘Take Me an offering,’ rather than wait five verses and connect it to the final quote, ‘Let them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them’?
What does it mean to ‘take’ God?
The Book of Kings contains an incident in which Joram, king of Israel needed the services of a prophet. He called upon Elisha to act as his prophet to bring a message from God concerning his kingdom. Elisha, who was not in the mood to prophesy, told King Joram, ‘But now take me a musician,’ and the story goes on to describe how ‘when the musician played, the hand of the LORD came upon him.’ (II Kings 3:15)
Elisha did not say ‘bring me a musician’, he said ‘take me’, because just any musician would not do. It had to be the sort of musician and the kind of music that would move Elisha emotionally, so preparing him to receive the Divine Presence. In order to achieve the proper mood for prophecy Elisha needed to be moved; he said ‘Take me.’
‘Take Me,’ God says. ‘If you want Me to dwell among you, you will have to move Me; but you will only move Me when your heart moves you.’
The sanctuary we build for God is what takes God and moves Him to dwell in it, but it only does so when it is manufactured from materials that sing out to God with our love and devotion. Our hearts donated us to build a sanctuary and so the sanctuary constantly calls to God and moves Him, takes Him.
So the Midrash ties the parable of the king and his married daughter, not to the verse, ‘Make Me a sanctuary,’ but to the plea, ‘take Me.’
How do we create a sacred space, a sanctuary for the dwelling presence of God? How does a person’s heart donate them to God? It’s easy to say the words, but there doesn’t seem to be any guidance in the text itself, any practical suggestions of how to sway one’s heart.
The secret lies in the title of this week’s Sidra, the Hebrew word TERUMAH which we have hitherto incorrectly translated as Offering. More correctly, TERUMAH is something raised or elevated, and thus the English Hebraists translated it as a heave-offering[46]. TERUMAH does not mean a voluntary offering or donation as the text implies, or as may be inferred from rabbinical exegesis. To the contrary, TERUMAH is most often used to describe the agrarian tax given to Cohen - Priests. Consisting mainly of food, TERUMAH consumption is restricted by numerous laws and could be eaten only by priests, their families, and their servants under very strict conditions of TAHARA (Radical Chukath).
In this context, TERUMAH is the key to understanding how to take God through the process of you being given by your heart.
The Izbicy says:
‘Take me TERUMAH’ means that every Jew needs to take God and put Him on top, i.e, to make Him first on the list of everything, the way all important things are placed at the top. (Mei Hashiloach Vol.I - Terumah)
The Izbicy goes on to explain how this is achieved. It’s an exercise anyone can become adept at. The Talmud tells of an incident:
In the Yeshiva of R. Ashi one day, the lecture terminated at the subject of the ‘Three Kings’ [Jeroboam, Ahab and Manasseh who, the rabbis declared, have no place in the world-to-come].
‘To-morrow,’ said R. Ashi, ‘we will commence with our colleagues,’ [a reference to the fact that these three kings were known to be scholars of the law]. That night Manasseh appeared to him in a dream.
‘You called us your colleagues and your father’s colleagues, so tell me; from what part of the bread do we begin saying the blessing Hamotzi?’
‘I don’t know,’ replied R. Ashi.
‘Ha! You haven’t learned this, yet you consider yourself my colleague?’
‘Teach me,’ begged R. Ashi, ‘and to-morrow I will give it over in your name during the class.’
He answered, ‘From the part of the bread which is most crusty.[47]’
What the pagan Jewish king, Manasseh, was trying to teach R. Ashi is that even a piece of bread is transparent to God. When making a blessing over the bread, before I say, ‘Blessed are You, Adonai, God, King of the world who brings bread out of the earth,’ I need to see God in the bread. And it’s not that actually difficult to see God in the bread according to King Manasseh. All I need to do is look for the crustiest part of the loaf. The reason, explains the Izbicy is this: there are so many processes that go into baking bread, from kneading the dough, stoking the oven, shaping the loaf, and then placing the loaf where it will bake evenly in the heat of the oven. Why then should it be impossible to predict which part of the loaf will bake first and most? Why isn’t the surface of bread 100% evenly baked when the entire loaf receives equal ingredients and equal amounts of oven heat? The answer is that we are not in charge of all the processes, even with regard to an artifact as utterly and intensively manufactured as a loaf of bread. I hold it in my hand, turn it to look for the brownest, crispiest crust, see the hand of God right there and begin, ‘Blessed are You, Adonai…’
The same is true when I look at a person. If I put God on top of everything in my life, I will see God in other people. And when I learn to look properly I will also see God in myself, in my relationships, my work, my money, my home and my belongings, because the hand of God is in everything, in every event and every place.
My heart donates me to God when I put God first and foremost, and I become the sanctuary when I find God in all things.
CHAPTER 8 – TETZAVEH
Tabernacle, Priesthood and Vestments
This week’s Sidra reveals the design and specifications for the priestly vestments, and then in the final verses describes the small incense-altar. Although the architecture, dimensions and design of the sanctuary and all its accoutrements - the curtains and coverings, the ark and cherubs, the menorah, the table and show-bread, the great sacrificial altar - are all comprehensively described in last week’s Sidra, there is a reason, says the Izbicy, why the small, golden incense-altar and its details are only given here, after the vestments have been dealt with[48].
To begin with, the Torah is eternal and so applies to each of us, all the time. Therefore, the tabernacle is not a unique, once-in-history fabrication that Jews were commanded to make thousands of years ago while traveling in the wilderness; it is something everyone has to make for themselves today.
The incense-altar represents the synthesis of all the complications and contradictions we hold within ourselves, the notion that God’s Will is implicit, explicit and complicit throughout everything we do and that in the final analysis, nothing happens in the world that is not God’s Desire. The sacred incense was almost twenty percent Galbanum, a resin with a very bitter, acrid, and peculiar scent. Perfumers understand that combining attractive smells with ugly smells like galbanum is crucial to creating a full and satisfying fragrance. According to the Zohar, the Incense is what ties everything together[49], the good and the bad. This idea can be used to excuse any sort of behavior, however outrageous. For if everything is in the ‘hands-of-heaven’, why take responsibility for our actions, why not just do as we please and blame God? After all, God needs the ugliness to complete the whole panoply of Creation, doesn’t He?
That is why the incense-altar is only mentioned after the priestly vestments, for the clothing worn by the High Priest is yet another metaphor.
The breastplate of the High-Priest was set with twelve gemstones in four rows of three, representing the twelve tribes of Israel. Much has already been written (Radical Vayechi) about the character of each tribe, positive and negative[50]. The High Priest’s breastplate also contained the Oracle of Urim and Thummim which had the answer to every question. For the answer to every question is contained within the collected and unified Community of Israel, and the breastplate exemplifies that concept, which is to say that we contain the answers to our own questions, if only we knew how to consult our own oracular self.
First was the ruby or other red-colored stone, possibly a carnelian, associated with Reuben. The color is important because red is the color of joy, life, blood, meat and wine! Reuben as Jacob’s firstborn is endowed with special qualities, primarily that of being able to see God in all things, as the translation of his name suggests: REU BEN – See the Child. Being able to see God first in everything is crucial to one’s soul and spirit (Radical Terumah), and is the first source of joy. Being able to connect to the joy is the very first key to all answers.
Second is a green stone, most probably an emerald, associated with Simeon. Simeon has the deepest Torah of all, but it is never finished or completely mature. It is green in the sense that it always needs another stage of growth before it is properly understood. R. Shimon bar Yochai (who was of the Tribe of Simeon) and his book The Zohar are examples of Torah requiring ever greater qualification and clarification, for bar Yochai’s Torah is as deep as that of Moses. The Hebrew name for the stone is PITDAH written Peh Dalet Tet Heh. The Peh on the front and Heh on the end spell the word PEH - Mouth. Inside the mouth are Tet and Dalet, the letters prior to Yod Heh – YAH. What this hints, at is that there is in us something so deep it cannot even be spoken by the mouth, something which comes before YAH.
Third is the yellow quartz or citrine, associated with the tribe of Levi. Its Hebrew name BAREKET is derived from BARAK – Lightning that flashes with brilliant suddenness and can be frightening. Levi is the tribe capable of suddenly manifesting Fear of God, a primal and reflexive reaction to the divine presence within.
Fourth is a black stone, perhaps jet, anthrax or basalt, associated with Judah. Black absorbs (whereas white reflects all colors) all the colors of the spectrum. This hints at Judah’s talent for taking on as many different roles as necessary. He is flexible and willing to adjust to the exigencies of time and location. As the Izbicy states it, when Judah stands among the Righteous he is perfectly righteous, but when he stands among Ba’alei Teshuva – Penitents he is the most penitent. King David of Judah sometimes refers to himself as the impoverished and destitute[51], while at same time he sees himself as the Hasid – Saint who lacks nothing.
Fifth is the sapphire, or possibly lapis-lazuli, a blue stone associated with Issachar, hinting at his access to Supernal Wisdom and clarity of vision. When the Israelites gazed upon the Divine it is written, ‘They beheld the God of Israel, and beneath His feet was as a brick fashioned of sapphire, like the essence of the heavens in purity.’ (Ex. 24:10) The Sephirot have their origins in this vision, as I have described elsewhere at length[52]. Issachar is the source of our mathematical and scientific genius.
Sixth is the transparent diamond, associated with Zebulun. The Hebrew word for diamond – YAH-HALOM translates as ‘God is right here’. Zebulun sees the divine in everything, from the most mundane to the ephemeral and evanescent.
Seventh is the bright orange of jacinth or amber, associated with Dan. There are moments when the passionate will to triumph, and the vehemence of conflict (even when that conflict is within the self) may appear like rage to the outsider. Dan is such a person, as I have discussed elsewhere[53]. Sometimes even the intensity of one’s certainty in God, appears to others like anger. We can learn to trust this part of ourselves more.
Eighth is the striped and variegated agate associated with Naphtali. In contrast to Zebulun who had the gift of seeing the divine in everything and everyone, Naphtali has the gift of seeing the divine in himself, regardless of his mood and situation. The Hebrew word for agate – SH’VO means ‘it is inside it’.
Ninth is the violet or purple amethyst, associated with Gad. Like the color violet, Gad has the highest energy potential of all the tribes. He is the source of our potency and the one who energizes us when we are lethargic. It is the Tribe of Gad who will act as harbinger of the redemption, waking us up to the possibilities locked inside us.
Tenth is the yellowish chrysolite or peridot, the color of olive-oil, associated with Asher. The Hebrew name for this stone is TARSHISH, and the Talmud uses Tarshish as a measure of expanse, equivalent to 8000 miles, or one third of the world[54]. Of all the tribes, it was Asher who enjoyed the most luxurious life. His territory produced the highest quality olive-oil, always a symbol of light and luxury. Asher didn’t merely look expansive, it was his nature. We too have the ability to expand to fill a third of the world if we only put our mind to it. It is a positive trait, not a defect of character, to want to expand and take up more space physically, emotionally and spiritually.
Eleventh is the pale or white onyx associated with Joseph. It first appears in Scripture in the story of Genesis and the rivers which flow out of Eden, together with gold and bdellium, both hinting at impermeable love[55]. Joseph forgoes sinning with Potiphar’s wife, not out of fear of the sin or of being punished, but out of love for God. Inside each of us is a powerful and altruistic love trying to make itself felt.
Twelfth is the multi-colored opal, associated with Benjamin, who has the gift of being able to assimilate every imaginable cultural artifact or civilized moré into the Jewish tradition. The Hebrew for opal is YESH PEH[56], which means there is a mouth with which to swallow and absorb things. We have within us the talent to recognize what we need to learn and acquire from outside our familiar circle, for the glory and worship of God.
The Ephod – Waistcoat or Cape reminds us that we are always wrapped in God. We are never alone. We humans have so many moments of doubt, self doubt, self questioning and sometimes also self-recrimination, that we cannot live without support. The Ephod had arm-like straps coming from behind around the waist and over the shoulders, to remind the wearer that he is always in the arms of God. For I was there, in the first handful of dust with which God fashioned Adam, in the handful of dust shed by the galaxy that exploded aeons ago when God first fashioned the universe. And I will be in that last handful of dust when God gathers it all together to be returned to rest beneath the Throne of Glory.
The M’il – Mantle had a fringed hem from which hung seventy tiny gold bells alternating with tiny purple pomegranates. Their constant tinkling is a reminder that we need to pay attention to whatever it is we’re listening to. Not merely to pay attention to what is being said, but rather to watch what we listen to. As we become aware of what we’re listening to, we become aware of who we are, because, just as we can hear what is below the surface of things, our hearing is done from the deepest depths inside us. The way I listen to people says everything there is to be said about me.
The Mitznefet – Turban reminds us of the need to remain teachable, humble and open to learning new ways of doing things, never to feel our learning process is finished. We can never stop learning, we mustn’t stop, we daren’t stop; for to cease learning is to stagnate and be destroyed by corruption and decay.
The Tzitz – gold forehead-plate or diadem worn by the High Priest displays his goodwill for his fellow Jews. An open display of the forehead has little significance in the modern world, but in the iconography of Ancient Judaism it represents the revelation of the King’s Desire[57]. In modern idiom you might call it ‘letting down your guard’ or ‘wearing your heart on your sleeve’, allowing others to see the softer, gentler and more vulnerable side of yourself.
The Avnet – Sash was worn over the heart. It was 32 cubits long, thirty-two being a number equivalent to LEV – heart[58]. For the heart sits between the upper intellectual (mind) and the lower instinctual (viscera) not just separating but also connecting the two, to synthesize a human personality. There are times though, when we have to turn our hearts inside out so that we can take a good look at what goes on there. A heart needs to be understood; in other words, ‘The unexamined life is not worth living[59].’
CHAPTER 9 – KI THISA
The Mystery of the Golden Calf
While Moses was on Mount Sinai and God was inscribing the Fourth Commandment[60] onto the Tablets of Stone, we Israelites were at the foot of the mountain sinning with the Golden Calf, demanding of Aaron that he make us ‘gods who will walk before us’ (Ex. 32:1).
In Radical Korah we explore Aaron’s role in the fabrication of the Golden Calf, while in Radical Masey we discuss its connection to Moses and the Sabbath. Here we look at ourselves and what impelled us to want it as an object of worship.
We knew God, it’s not as though we were in any doubt about God’s existence. It had been but a few weeks since the magnificent Revelation at Sinai, and only a few months since the Exodus from Egypt. We were adults whose lives had been radically altered by God, for after enduring long lifetimes of slavery we were all suddenly shown His power and truth. We had witnessed and experienced divine intervention, miraculous deliverance and supernatural, eye-popping revelations.
Reading through the Jewish commentators on the Golden Calf episode, from the early medieval to the late classic exegetes, is a tedious and repetitive exercise. Their various unimaginative theses boil down to this: ‘It was not our fault. It was them, the multitude of foreigners who escaped from Egypt during the Exodus and who attached themselves to our camp, who wanted to worship idols - not us. We just wanted someone to step into Moses’ shoes, because we thought he had died.’
Nowhere in the commentaries did I find anything more creative than an attempt to assign or reassign blame. So, while the commentator may distinguish among Israelite and non-Israelite, describing eloquently the holiness of the Jews compared to the pagan tendencies of the gentile camp-followers who instigated the Golden Calf, the writer as an individual does not identify with the Jews any more than he identifies with the gentiles. While there is an implicit ‘them vs us’ gloss to the narrative, there is no sense of ‘and this is how I personally felt at the time’ about it.
In other words, the Golden Calf episode was something which happened to my ancestors a long time ago, for which I must pay and continue to pay, but in which I played no part then and play no part now. It’s nothing to do with me.
This is a dissociative response to the narrative of our People, and goes violently against the grain of the eternal Torah, all of which must either apply to me personally, or else has no relevance and is merely a fable.
Izbicy always sees the Torah as a current-events document. Everything is happening in the present, every word speaks to me, and was written for me.
It has been said that revolutions happen not when conditions are most terrible and unbearable, but as conditions slowly improve – when the revolutionary asks, ‘Why wait?’ Looked at from that perspective then, events around the Golden Calf describe a failed revolution.
Why is that when I commit a sin I feel cut-off from God? Throughout this work we have emphasized again and again the notion that we are each an iteration of God, another face of the divine, a unique creative facet of the Infinite Creator. If you look at me with your eyes open properly you will see God (Radical Bo), so how does it come about that I cannot feel the presence of God in me all the time?
I can take myself through the logical progression of thought, imagining myself animated by the divine Life-Force, imagining my soul starting out in the beginning when it was with God, before I was conceived. I can imagine my subconscious and unconscious thoughts, the deeper processes within me, and my very instincts humming to God’s tune, resonating with His melody. There are times of joy when I sense the InDwelling Presence of God as well as His glorious and breath-taking encompassment of it all; imminent and transcendent. There are moments when I can talk to God as with myself and my heart, holding conversation as with a friend or confidant.
But when I sin, I am suddenly on my own. When I do something bad I feel utterly bereft and isolated – there is no divine presence in me, no creative genius, neither celestial harmony nor music - no magical poesy nor gifted word. When I sin I am depressed, crushed, despondent and disheartened. But how can someone who believes that God is with them and in them be despondent? Surely I must have lost my faith, but why should sinning cause me to lose faith and be disabled, and suddenly without access to the divine and joyous within me?
This problem, the accessibility of God when we most need to feel His presence, is at the heart of events and dialogue recorded in this week’s Sidra.
If I woke up this morning knowing what God wanted of me today, not in the generalized and unspecific way we are used to, but as a “to-do today” list, surely my life would have a different shape. Instead, I wake up to a vague sense of duties unfulfilled, jobs that need doing, responsibilities to take care of as dictated by the Torah and the Books of Law. Wash my hands, say the appropriate blessing, put on my clothes in a certain order, make my way to the synagogue to put on the same Tefillin and recite the identical prayers in service to God as I did yesterday. All instructions have already been given, all was laid out in a book of rules hundreds if not thousands of years ago, everything was final, and if today will be different from yesterday, it is because the world outside me has changed, not because my instructions have changed. The same laws guiding me yesterday apply this morning. I walk around in a sort of fog, guided almost exclusively by a fence made of the rules surrounding me and impelled by the needs my body makes me aware of. I do not have a vision of the end God has in store for me or of the trajectory of my life, beyond an apprehension that I have made a mess of it and that pain awaits me.
How about you? Did you receive notification this morning that God has other plans for your day - a list of special contingencies, perhaps? Did your soul speak to you, beyond waking you up from your sleep, to tell you what it heard from God in the night? Have you been vouchsafed a predictive dream?
When we were camped at Sinai, life was fairly uncomplicated. Finding food was not a major problem. All we had to do was walk outside every morning and pick up the manna which had settled like dew on the ground, take it back to our tents and cook it - fry it, bake it or drink it neat. There were no farms to go to, no traffic to negotiate, no paperwork or bills. But that did not make things simple, because we ourselves are complicated, and so we complicate even simple things.
We sat around waiting for Moses to come down the mountain with the Torah as he had promised. But we were idle, prone to thinking and pondering the important things in life. We were a huge flock of sheep-like people suddenly waking up to the realization we had been acting like sheep.
The trigger that woke us up was an act of God, for as God carved the Fourth Commandment into the block of stone we suddenly became aware of the all possibilities and permutations of the future. The true meaning of Sabbath is the World-to-Come, when we will see the big picture, and not merely fragmentary sections of our lives. Then our soul’s journeys from the beginning to the end will make sense and we will be endowed with clarity. The world to come is that place in time when we rest at ease and are at peace. Rest and peace only exist in the absence of fog and uncertainty.
Imagine you had that sort of clarity now, what if you woke this morning with the narrative of your life made clear?
Well, the first thing you’d know is what to pray for and how. You’d know how to speak to God to tell Him of your worries and concerns. You’d know what to ask for, not simply because your body tells you what it needs, but because you’d be working towards finishing and fulfilling the story of your soul.
As soon as God carved the words ‘remember the Sabbath to sanctify it’ into the stone tablet, we all awoke to the Meaning of Life, more specifically to the meaning of our own lives as individuals, and suddenly the old way of living was no longer enough. We had a sense of the possibilities our lives might have if only we saw the big picture. We demanded the ability to see the big picture.
Jacob had turned God into a shepherd by living his life as a sheep (Radical Vayetze), acting as though he had no idea what to do next, always waiting on God to move him. Suddenly we wanted to be led and not driven, to see the future and not just the past[61], that is to say, for every individual to be able to see where he and his soul were journeying, instead of living in fog and uncertainty. We thought, if each of us could be aware of his or her destiny, our entire lives could be lived at a whole other level of intensity. ‘Make us gods who will walk before us’, we demanded of Aaron when Moses failed to return on time, ‘to lead us from in front, not driving us from behind.’
Some of us wanted to go beyond that paradigm altogether. No longer would we be restricted to animal-like attitudes, wherein humans like sheep or cattle require the oversight of a herder. Instead we could move toward a true relationship of partners with God. For when a person bears witness to the fact that God is Creator, he becomes a partner in Creation[62], for everything has to be observed (in order to collapse the alternative possibilities which may coexist) before reality is solidified and determined. The Sabbath, as we observe it, is our testimony to God’s creativity and sovereignty, it makes us partners with God, yet there is nothing sheep-like in that observation. We witness it as adults with vision and insight.
At the event of the Golden Calf we were trying to act like mature adults without first going through all the trials and errors of childhood, adolescence and early adulthood, and we made a predictable mess of things. It made us very ill until Moses came down the mountain and, after grinding the idol to dust, fed it to us as a purgative or emetic medicine[63].
The Torah describes Moses’ pleadings with God on behalf of the Jewish People, but then interrupts the narrative to record a private discussion between Moses and God in which Moses dares ask to be shown God’s glory.
The LORD told Moses, ‘I will do the very thing that you have said, because you have found favor in My sight and I know you by name.’
Then Moses said, ‘Please show me Your glory.’
The LORD replied, ‘I will make all My goodness pass before you, and I will call out My name, YHV”H, before you. For I will show mercy to anyone I choose, and I will show compassion to anyone I choose. But,’ He said, ‘you cannot see My face, for man shall not see Me and live.’ Then the LORD said, ‘Behold, there is a place by Me, and you shall stand there on the rock; and it will come about, while My glory is passing by, that I will put you in the cleft of the rock and cover you with My hand until I have passed by. Then I'll remove My hand so you may see My back, but My face must not be seen.’ (Ex. 32:17-23)
The way most commentators read this narrative, Moses saw it was a propitious time to ask for favors, that he was ‘on-a-roll’ so to speak, with God, so he asked also to be shown God’s glory. The Izbicy sees it differently. Moses was strongly affected by our making the Golden Calf, he expressed his anger and disgust, but he understood very well the implications of it all. He saw how the Commandment to observe the Sabbath had triggered us into wanting more, more vision and more insight. In a word, Moses appreciated how the Golden Calf was an expression of our desire to live in the moment of Sabbath, in the epoch of the World to Come while still in this world of the here and now.
What is God’s glory?
From the verses quoted above it may be deduced that God’s glory is His face. For God tells Moses, ‘You can see My back but not My face.’
The Talmud throws in a little hint at what the metaphors of God’s face and back mean.
‘I will put you in the cleft of the rock and cover you with My hand until I have passed by. Then I'll remove My hand so you may see My back.’ R. Chana b. Bizna said in the name of R. Shimon Hasida, ‘This teaches us that God showed Moses the knot of His Tefillin.’ (Berachoth 7a)
Tefillin are a metaphor or symbol of ties, bonds and affiliation. The word Tefillin is cognate with the word Naphtali, which means to be spun and twisted into a single thread[64]. Our Tefillin contain parchment scrolls with the Sh’ma and other sections of Torah describing our eternal ties to God.
What words are written into God’s Tefillin?
After a discussion in the Talmud about God wearing Tefillin, Rabbi Nachman b. Yitzchak asks R. Chiya b. Abin, ‘These Tefillin which the Master of the Universe wears, what is written inside them?’ R. Chiya answered, ‘They contain the following verse, “And who is like Your people, one nation on earth?[65]”’ (Berachoth 6a)
Essentially, God is telling Moses that he will be shown the knot of the divine Tefillin, at the nape of the divine neck, so to speak, but not the full frontal vision of the Tefillin containing the verses displaying God’s ties to the Jewish People.
What’s the difference between the knot at the back of the head and the words in the box at the front of the head? Surely they mean the same thing; that God ties Himself to us, no matter what?
The Izbicy explains it thus[66]. Moses asks to be shown precisely what the Israelites wanted to be shown: to be given vision and insight into the present moment – the big picture, to be able to see the narrative of our lives from the past into the future.
But the Glory of God, as King Solomon stated, is to hide things[67]. So God told Moses that while he would be permitted to see the knot at the back of God’s neck, which is to say he could see every detail of the narrative from its earliest beginnings up to the present moment, that he could perceives the present in the context of the past. He would not be allowed to see the present moment in the context of the future. To see God’s Glory would be to see how God is tied and bound to us in the present moment that looks both backward and forward. But to see this would negate the concepts of free will, choice, reward & punishment and all the responsibilities and consequences implied in the Ten Commandments. If you could see how God is tied to you in the present moment, even in the worst sin, even in the most disgusting and loathsome act, everything would be turned upside down. You would never feel alone, nor ever despair.
Moses was not pleading for himself when he asked to be shown God’s Glory; he was still arguing with God about the rights and wrongs of the Israelites’ worship of the idol – all they had wanted was clarity, vision and understanding.
The Torah in all its complexity remains firmly cemented to the simply stated foundations of Individual Responsibility. Its thesis is that we all have inescapable choices we have to make in our lives, and we will pay the consequences of those choices whether we want to or not. Moses is the prime Lawgiver and therefore not even he is allowed to transcend the paradigm to see the Glory of God, to understand how the fog obscures reality, to appreciate how God is with us in the moment.
But He is with us in the moment, and that’s the most important essential to carry with us from this Sidra.
CHAPTER 9 – VAYAKHEL
The Secret of the Gathering
Moses assembled all the congregation of the Children of Israel and said to them, ‘These are the things that the LORD has commanded you to do. For six days work is to be done, but the seventh day shall be your holy day, a day of Sabbath rest to the LORD. Whoever does any work on it is to be put to death. Do not light a fire in any of your homes on the Sabbath day.’ Then Moses said to the whole community of Israel, ‘This is what the LORD has commanded: Take from among yourselves an offering for the LORD. Everyone whose heart is willing is to bring as an offering for the LORD: gold, silver, and bronze…’ (Ex. 35:1-5)
The Torah inserts a reminder to about Sabbath observance into the plans for the building of the Sanctuary, for various reasons. Technically, by establishing a connection between the fabrication and functions of the Tabernacle and the need for Sabbath observance, the definitions of forbidden work can be deduced from the labor, skills and rituals involved in the Temple’s construction and its sacrifices.
The Izbicy Rebbe gives us another way of looking at this text. The Zohar provides a cryptic key.
What is Sabbath? It is the Name of the Holy, Blessed One. (Zohar Vol. II 88b)
In the previous Sidra (Radical Ki Thisa) we discussed the notion that Sabbath is a foreshadowing of the World-to-Come, a taste in this world of what it will be like to see the big picture of your life and its narrative from beginning to end, to experience your connection and Godly essence as a physical and emotional sensation. To be in Sabbath is to be aware of your essential divinity. Acting, doing, worshiping and connecting with God inside you, fulfilling your destiny in the awareness of your Godly soul, praying and obeying and celebrating the Torah in partnership with God in you and the world is Sabbath. Whenever I do something L’Shem Shomayim – in Heaven’s Name, the center-point, the focus and heart of the act is my relationship with God (Radical BeHaalotcha), and that is Sabbath.
What does that mean, really, in practice?
Last week we asked, why is it that when I commit a sin I feel cut-off from God? The answer is because when I do something bad I am cutting myself off from myself. How does it come about that I cannot feel the presence of God in me all the time? For the same reason that I cannot always experience my inner self, my true, core being, my soul and Life.
When I do a Mitzvah with mindfulness, with the Kavvana – Intention to do it L’Shem Shomayim – In God’s Name, I am acting as if I am aware of the divine in me. Kabbalists, and those who try living as though every act has cosmic and universal significance, are accustomed to saying the following before performing any Mitzvah:
In the name of unification - of the Holy, Blessed One, and His Shechinah – Dwelling Presence, in fear and love, in the Name of All Israel - Behold I am ready and prepared to fulfill my obligation…
What this short meditation attempts to do is to bring to the forefront one’s awareness that God’s Dwelling Presence is, in fact, you and your intention. When you act as a whole person, when you do something for God with your whole body, with your intellectual awareness and your emotions, with your willingness and your devotion, then your action involves your entire consciousness; you are affirming your choice to be human in relationship with God – that is how you become the Shechina – Divine Dwelling Presence. Another name for the Shechina is All Israel, for that is where God dwells: in the perfect, eternal and unblemished collective soul of the Jewish People[68].
When I do something for God with my whole body and soul, with my consciousness, awareness and desires, then God (who is in me) performs the act together with me. I unify God and me, and I am thus unifying God and His Shechina. Doing it together with all other Jewish People elevates and empowers the act significantly, enough to create a place on Earth where God chooses to install His presence – a Sanctuary.
So Moses assembled all the congregation of the Children of Israel, for he meant to show us how we might successfully create the Tabernacle. First we needed to be mindful that Sabbath is the essential ingredient of any holy endeavor by acting with Kavvana L’Shem Shomayim. As God had told us through Moses, ‘take Me an offering of every man whose heart gives him willingly’, as we learned in a previous Sidra (Radical Terumah).
The Izbicy compares Moses’ assembly of the nation to King Ptolemy’s gathering of scholars described in the Talmud:
King Ptolemy[69] once gathered seventy-two elders. Without informing them why they had been summoned he isolated them in separate chambers. Entering each scribe’s room, he said: ‘Write the Torah of Moshe, your teacher, for me.’ God put shrewdness into the heart of each of the scribes to emend the text, and they all made identical changes, e.g. instead of translating the Torah literally they all began it with the verse, ‘In the beginning God created’[70], etc. (Megillah 9a)
Imagine, says the Izbicy, how pleased each scholar/scribe felt with his work on completion of the project - how clever he’d been to translate the text to avoid over-complicating things, to provide a finished text that would be harmonious and readable while also being subtle, erudite and clever. Imagine his astonishment on discovering his neighbors had all worked in the identical linguistic and grammatical style! Now imagine his outright disbelief on finding that the shrewd and subtle emendations he’d made were mirrored down to the smallest detail in the work of all the other scribes. He could be left in no doubt that God had been guiding his hand and the hands of all his seventy-one colleagues, to emend the text in particular places.
The same miracle was seen in the construction of the Tabernacle. Every individual who worked on the project worked freely and unencumbered on his or her own section, creating it with their particular artistic interpretations and skills. Tapestries and curtains, clothing and accessories, furniture, fixtures and fittings, all were created by individual artisans and craftsmen, donating their time and skills, putting their heart and soul into the creative process. As you would imagine, working at this level of artistry and craftsmanship, each artisan would produce something having a distinct artistic feel. And that is how each of them felt on completing his or her project. How clever they’d been, how harmonious, subtle and gorgeous the final product was to look at. Imagine their astonishment on discovering they had all worked in the identical artistic style. Now imagine their outright disbelief on finding that every shrewd and subtle embellishment had been mirrored down to the smallest detail, in the work of all the other craftsmen.
The divine presence manifested at the Tabernacle as a stationary cloud hovering above the Sanctuary. This cloud only came to rest on the finished project, not during its building or assembly. Until the final peg securing the last guy-rope had been driven into the ground, the Tabernacle was incomplete and the Shechina did not come to rest upon it. The message was clear for all to see, no matter what status the workman may have had, when the humble blacksmith compared his efforts to that of finest and most celebrated artisan, to the likes Betzalel who cast the Menorah - Candelabrum of a single piece of pure gold, there was no difference in importance. Every part was crucial to the whole, no piece more significant than another.
This is why we cannot stand to prayer if we need the toilet. Every part of us has to be involved in the relationship, in the worship and service. We cannot excuse bits of our body, or ignore segments of consciousness involved in other business while we address ourselves to God. It has to be all of us for it to really be us.
And Moses said to the Children of Israel, ‘See, God has called by name Betzalel the son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah. And has filled him with the Spirit of God, in wisdom, in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship; to make artistic designs, to work in gold, silver, and bronze, to cut stones for setting, to carve wood, and to engage in all kinds of artistic work.’ (Ex 35:30-33)
When all is said and done, Moses invites us to look with fresh eyes at the work of Betzalel. Even though we had just learned an important lesson about the divine inspiration with which we all toiled at the fabrication of the Tabernacle, and were shown that we were equals when it came to the importance of our individual tasks, there was yet another lesson to absorb.
Betzalel was an artistic genius. Works of art cannot be measured on any scale devised by humanity, for there can be no objective gradation of its values. Great works of art, works of great art or artwork of greatness - we cannot even be sure of the proper descriptive term, for we cannot quantify or qualify it, we don’t quite know what it is.
But after telling us that we were all inspired in our work by God, whether spinning or weaving, carving or casting, engraving or hammering, that it was God animating us and guiding us that made the finished work so great, why does Moses single out Betzalel?
If we were all equals and our finished products were of equal importance to the whole enterprise, why is it necessary to look at Betzalel’s artistic contributions on their own?
Moses was hoping to forestall the grim insurrection that his cousin, Korah, would instigate a short time after the Tabernacle’s dedication, as narrated in the Book of Numbers (Radical Korah). Korah argued, ‘You’ve gone too far! Everyone in the whole community is holy, and the LORD is among them. Why do you set yourselves above the LORD’s assembly?’ (Num. 18:3)
God calls some people and endows them with gifts. It’s a fact of life.
While it is true that we are all equally divinely inspired, divinely animated and empowered, and every one of us has a God-given soul, we are still not all equal or the same. While a hundred thousand people could have made the same artifact for the Sanctuary, when Betzalel put his hand to any fabrication there was magic and glory, perfection and brilliance in very single item he made. Anyone with eyes to see should have found it easy to admit the truth.
But you know how it is, not everyone did admit the truth. Some people refuse to look and refuse to see. They deny what’s in front of them because it is inconvenient and does not fit their scheme of how the world ought to be. Some people are so jealous of talent and art they don’t have, they simply deny its existence. But that is to deny God and His Creation.
Moses invited us to look at Betzalel’s work and see God. For just as people who are genuinely themselves are transparent to God, so too, authentic works of art are transparent to God. The reason is obvious: God is the Creator. Any work of creativity imitates God. And just as God is always fresh and new, never repeating Himself, so, too creativity is always fresh and new. It is we who grow jaded and bored, cynical and derisive and too lazy to invest the effort to perceive God in our encounter with Creativity.
There is a word missing from the English language and most other languages, too. It is an important Yiddish concept called Farginen. It means a feeling or sense of entitlement and right on behalf of others, for when I experience satisfaction at someone else’s success and enrichment, and feel pleasure at someone else’s advancement I Fargin them.
Some people don’t Fargin, they just refuse. Moses begs us to open our eyes all the time, to see how gifted others are and to learn Farginen skills. Very often it is only through the Farginen of other people’s success that we are given to unlock our own potential and see our own specialness.
CHAPTER 11 – PIKUDEI
The Mystery of the Tabernacle
In this week’s Sidra Moses provides a scrupulous reckoning of the precious metals donated by the Israelites for the Tabernacle, accounting for every ounce of gold, silver and copper. Then we are given a report on the completion and assembly of the finished project, the priestly vestments, the Tabernacle and its furnishings. The priestly vestments were discussed in Radical Tetzaveh. Here we will look at the furniture of the Tabernacle.
Most prominent was the Ark of Testimony, it was the first item placed inside the newly erected Sanctuary.
The Ark was comprised of three boxes, two of gold and one of wood. First the inner gold box was inserted into the wooden box, which was then inserted into the outer gold box. The innermost gold box had a rim or lip extending outward from its upper edge to cover the upper edge of the wooden box, so the Ark appeared to be made entirely of gold.
These three boxes, says the Izbicy, represent King, High Priest and Saint – Tzadik Yesod Olam[71].
Tzadik Yesod Olam – literally: the saint who is the foundation of the world, represents the channel or conduit through which divine abundance flows into the world[72]. In the Book of Genesis we encountered Joseph, the original Tzadik – Saint who resisted sexual temptation. Sexuality, embodying the flow of Life of God[73] into this world, has become the most powerful symbol conveying our understanding of sainthood, because the saint is master and controller of his sexuality.
Having mastery and control makes someone a perfect conduit for God’s Shefa – Gushing Plenty, because Mastery means knowing where to direct the flow and to whom, while Control means being able to give or withhold the flow according to the need and capacity of the recipient. The Tzadik – Saint is therefore also given the title Yesod Olam – Foundation of the World, because sexuality is the foundation upon which the edifice of life is built. LifeForce flows, gushing through the body of the Tzadik, using it to channel God: procreating, healing and nourishing all Creation.
The high-priest lives in a state of worship, detached from the world of commerce and politics, not much below the level of an angel. The Prophet Malachi describes him thus, ‘For the lips of the priest preserve knowledge, so they seek Torah from his mouth, for he is an angel of the Lord of Hosts’ (Mal. 2:7). The high-priest needs the saint to keep him grounded in his body, or else his tendency to forget his mundane surroundings may leave him stranded without a feather to fly with. The saint channels God’s LifeForce into the high-priest whether he asks for it or not, for without it the high-priest would waste away and die for lack of support and nourishment.
The king lives in a state of need; he owns nothing and has no power of his own. The king is but a titular head, the leader and designer of his nation’s program, of its goals and strategy, but he has nothing of his own, for all his power is given him by his subjects. He expresses their longings; their secrets and desires. All his desires reflect the needs of his kingdom, comprising the entire realm and each of its citizens. He needs the saint to help him receive the Divine Gifts in the proper amount, for the king is likely to be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of desires he has to experience on an ongoing basis. Only the saint has the ability to turn the flow on and off in keeping with the king’s capacity to receive and process, thus protecting the king from his own desires.
We all have these three aspects to our soul: high-priest, king and saint. The high-priest is that part of us which cannot be bothered with the mundane, it takes no pleasure in work or finance, and cares nothing for contracts and bills, and wishes to be left alone without distractions to focus on its objective. It needs that part of us which is selfless, caring and dedicated to helping and protecting itself, which is the saint.
There is also a part of us which is overwhelmed by needs and desires, the heart which cannot govern without the support of all our other limbs and organs, each of which clamors for all its love and attention. The heart is king over the body and soul, the emotions and corporal sensations, but it has nothing to give and no power to make decisions unless it is fed with energy and given space and freedom to operate. It requires the services of the saint who provides a balance of giving and withholding, or else the heart is quickly overwhelmed with details and processes, crushed under the burden of its responsibilities and unable to function safely.
High-priest and king are the gold boxes, while the saint is the simple wooden box which provides life and structure to them. The king is the innermost box, for he represents the heart, while the high-priest is the outermost box representing an individual’s public face and appearance; their persona. The saint, symbolized by the plain life-saving wooden skeleton box, is that part of us which communicates and connects our body to others and to the outside world, keeping us alive and well.
The Ark is not empty. It contains the Stone Tablets carved on Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments. In other words it contains the Torah. The first of the Ten Commandments begins with the word ANOCHI which means I. According to the Talmud the word is an abbreviation of the phrase “I MYSELF WRITE AND GIVE”[74], the Torah is God writing and giving Himself to us.
If life can be said to have meaning, this is it: God writes himself in your DNA, in your peculiar and particular uniqueness, in your strengths and weaknesses, and your role is to express it in a way that allows other people to read God when they read you.
God in you is the Torah in you (Radical Bo, B’Shalach, Nitzavim), you are the Ark of Testimony, everything that can be learned about God can be discerned just by looking at you who mirror Him and are transparent to Him.
The lid of the Ark was a covering made of gold out of which two winged golden cherubs protruded. The cherubs had the bodies of a man and a woman with children’s faces, and though their bodies were angled toward the same direction, their faces looked to one another.
In us this represents the need to embody both masculine and feminine sexual aspects in order to be a healthy human being. We are not one-dimensional single-sexed people inside, for as we read in the Zohar:
Job said, ‘He is in one, and who can oppose Him.’ (Job 23:13) He meant to say that God only dwells and can only be found inside one.
Question: Ought not the text to have said, He is One? Why does it say, He is in one? [...] It means God only dwells in someone who is so comfortable in holiness that they have become one. [...] And when is someone called one? Only when they are a balance of male and female and are comfortable in supernal holiness and have the intention to achieve a state of holiness.
Come and see, when a person is the perfect union of male and female and has the proper intention to sanctify himself as he should, he is in a state of perfection and is called one without blemish[75]. (Zohar Vol. III 81a)
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Where the Ark represents the mind, the Menorah represents the eyes, the Incense Altar represents the nose, and the Table with its Showbread represents the ears.
The Menorah has a central column, like a spine, from which three pairs of branches extend, resembling ribs or arms. The column and branches have three distinctive ornaments - cups, knobs and flowers - corresponding to three the ways we use our eyes, of which we have to remain aware.
Cups hint at the hunger with which we use our eyes. We have the ability to look at the world in a certain way that takes and takes and takes. Whether it is in a worshipful way or a lustful way, we drink the world as though trying to suck the entire universe in through our eyes. It’s important to be in awareness of the ‘look’ in our eyes, and turn it around to have giving eyes, to look out at the world in a way that makes the things we look at vessels for the divine and not mere stuff for us to get.
Knobs hint at the way we use our eyes to make us stick out in the crowd and among people. To catch other people’s eye, to meet one another eye to eye, staring at someone to get their attention. We need to be aware of what we’re doing when we use our eyes to project fear or rage, to bombard others with heavy or violent emotions, or to disturb and move them.
Flowers are delicate, hand they hint at the subtler ways in which we use our eyes. There are times we use our eyes to avoid making contact with people, to blend in and remain unnoticed, or to confuse and misdirect others.
The Menorah had to be tended every day, cleaned and prepared in the morning for the lighting ceremony at night. A description of Aaron lighting the Menorah is given in the Book of Numbers, where we discuss what it really means to do something L’shem Shomayim - for Heaven’s Sake (Radical Behaalotcha).
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The Incense Altar hints at the deepest level of consciousness (Radical Tetzaveh). Your nose connects you directly to the olfactory bulb which sits almost underneath the brain. It is very primitive in evolutionary terms, but very sensitive to nuance. Unlike the optic nerve which filters and processes signals into patterns before they even enter the brain proper, the nose has no filters. The way in which we perceive smells can be influenced by learning and memory, but we cannot avoid their power. They influence our moods, our heart-rate and other autonomic responses. Our sense of smell has not altered since we were part of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, we can still use it to access that most ancient, archetypal and secret part of ourselves.
Unlike the eyes that have so many Mitzvahs – Commands and Prohibitions attached to them, the nose does not deal with rights and wrongs, the permissible or forbidden, and cannot be faulted along those lines. There are no either-or, kosher or non-kosher, good or bad, sinful or virtuous smells. All smells, pleasant or disagreeable combine to form the background against which we conduct our lives. It is up to us to become aware of them and their effects on us.
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The Table with Showbread represents the ears. The verse beginning SH’MA ISRAEL – Hear O Israel,[76] is probably the best known verse in the Torah. It means Listen!
It is a challenge to wrap one’s head around the concept that we provide for and sustain God, or in the words of the Zohar, ‘Jews maintain their Father in heaven,’ (Zohar Vol.III 7a).
This is quite separate from the notion that we tell God who to be (Radical Vayera, Radical Haazinu) through our faith in Him. The Zoharic idea that we sustain God is found throughout classic rabbinic literature, as in the following quote from the Talmud, where God asks Moses to empower Him.
R. Joshua b. Levi also said: When Moses ascended on high, he found the Holy, Blessed One tying crowns to the letters [of the Torah]. God said, ‘Moses, don’t people greet each other with Shalom in your town?’
‘Should the slave extend Shalom to the master?’ replied Moses.
‘Nevertheless, you should have wished Me success in My endeavors.’
The next time Moses went up the mountain, immediately on his arrival he cried out, ‘And now, I pray, let the power of God be great just as You have spoken.[77]’ (Sabbath 89a)
God does not need us to feed him or provide sustenance to maintain Him; that is not the underlying message of these concepts, for that would be pagan. When we talk of sustaining or providing for our Father in Heaven, we mean that we have the capability and potential to give Him pleasure.
Our ears can hear things from below the surface, while our sight is more restricted and we can only see what’s showing on the surface. In terms of pleasure and pain, the ears are far more versatile than the eyes.
What we are talking about is the nature of hearing as opposed to touching, seeing, smelling or tasting. Sound is different because sounds can convey information by their absence. Elsewhere we have discussed that the highest form of Torah is the TA'AM - the Musical Note[78], but why is music higher than actual words of Torah?
In speech it is only the sound of the words that conveys information. The silences between words are not speech. They allow the listener to distinguish between words and the speaker to breathe, but of themselves carry no information. Music is different. In music the silence always has as much weight and value as the sound. What is the difference between the walk and the dance? If I’m walking, then standing motionless means I have ceased walking. If I’m dancing however, then the stillness is as important to the dance as any movement.
I pray to be granted access to the mysteries of the Table and Showbread, to uncover the secrets hidden in the shapes and functions of the arrangement, for the Table was the most complicated and mysterious of all the Tabernacle furniture. It is the only article in the Sanctuary concerning which Maimonides said, ‘I cannot think of a good reason for it, and to this day I have not been able to find any purpose to attribute to it,[79]’ although he found meaning and allegorical reasons for every other facet of the Sanctuary and its functions without any problem. R. Isaac Luria the ARIZAL, also prays, ‘May He reveal to us the reasons for the twelve breads, for they are a letter of His Name, folded and thin…’
Ultimately, becoming a Jew means learning to listen. More will be revealed.