Table of Contents
The Desire for Longing
Leviticus is the classic Greek name for this, the third of the Five Books of Moses, and is close to the Hebrew equivalent used in the Mishna and Talmud, TORAT COHANIM – Priestly Torah. In the middle-ages it came to be known as VAYIKRA, which is the book’s first word, and that is how it is known today. I find it significant that not a single English translation does justice to that first word. They all have this reading of Leviticus 1:1 – ‘And THE LORD called to Moses, and spoke to him out of the Tabernacle, saying...’
But the verse properly reads: He called to Moses, and the LORD spoke to him out of the Tabernacle, saying... (Lev. 1:1) The word VAYIKRA – He Called, does not merely indicate that God called Moses, but is, according to the classic commentators, an expression of tenderness and affection; whenever He spoke to Moses, God always called fondly to him first, ‘Moses, Moses![1]’ Stated this way, it’s a sweet and romantic notion, but it hides much more profound and complex ideas, for when God calls ‘Moses, Moses!’ it suggests He needs something from Moses, but how can God need anything?
What does it actually mean to be called by God? Why does calling need to be emphasized in the opening to the Book of Leviticus, which deals in the main with animal sacrifices and ritual Law?
The Izbicy Rebbe sees each of these two questions providing an answer to the other: atonement and forgiveness happen when we hear God calling. Animal sacrifices performed in the absence of Calling are meaningless rituals[2].
When I call you, or call out to you, it implies I want something. When God calls you, the implication is that God wants something from you, but what could God want? As the prophet says, ‘If you sin, how does that affect God? Even if you sin again and again, what effect will it have on Him? If you are righteous, what do you give to Him; or what does He receive from your hand?’ (Job 35:6-7)
The answer begins with an understanding of the following verse. ‘And it shall come to pass, that before they call, I will answer; while they are yet speaking, I will hear.’ (Isa. 65:24) Now, if God has already answered, asks the Izbicy, why are they still speaking (assuming that ‘speaking’ refers to prayer)? If God answered me before I began speaking, what remained to be said?
Crucial to our comprehension of this verse is an appreciation of ‘Calling’ and what it really means. Calling in the Biblical sense means Longing and Anticipation. The literal meaning of the word Anticipation, that we understand as feeling an emotional response in advance, is actually ‘taking into possession beforehand’. To catch something before it is thrown, to receive it before it was given.
Elsewhere I have written at length describing how God’s Simple Desire creates and sustains the Universe[3]. Our existence is an expression of God’s need and desire, because in God, Will, Need and Desire are synonyms.
Moses was by nature a man of little desire, and fewer needs. His name, MOSHE, means ‘drawn from the water[4]’, and water is the ultimate metaphor of desire, the most universally and elementally desired thing (Radical Eikev). By delivering the Israelites from Egypt, Moses had completed the task with which God had first entrusted him at the Burning Bush. Next, he had ascended unto God to receive the Ten Commandments on behalf of us all, at Mount Sinai. When Moses came down the mountain with the second set of Stone Tablets (to replace the original Ten Commandments that were broken) he guided us through the fabrication and construction of the Tabernacle as described in the second half of the Book of Exodus. At every stage in Moses’ career, once he had fulfilled his instructions to the letter, he expected to be relegated to being a shepherd again (Radical Zot Habracha). Now that the Tabernacle was complete and Aaron was to assume the high-priesthood, Moses expected to be sent back into obscurity, to being who he thought he was. In fact, Moses assumed that with the completion of the Tabernacle, not only was his role as Lawgiver over, but the role of the Torah itself was going to change. He assumed God was opening a new chapter in His dealings with the Israelites, giving primacy Aaron, the priesthood and the sacrificial rituals of the Tabernacle.
Moses was very happy for his brother and did not grudge him his ascendancy in the least, Moses was a Farginner (Radical Pikudei), and had no desire to become a priest or High Priest. But that does not mean Moses did not live in anticipation of hearing God again, for once you have heard God’s Word, the rest of your life can only be spent wanting to hear more. Moses was a man who did not allow himself desires, which is to say he did not live in expectation of bringing down more Torah from Heaven, yet his desire for God’s Word never waned. What we are told at the beginning of Leviticus is that Moses’ longing continued to grow because had God imbued him with Desire.
This is the true meaning of the verse with which Leviticus opens, He called to Moses: God filled Moses with desire, by filling him with ‘Calling’.
And this is precisely what Isaiah means with his prophecy, ‘before they call, I will answer,’ for in order to become prayerful we first have to be filled with God’s Desire; it is a gift. Whenever we are filled with the desire to call upon God, it is because we have already been answered. Our desire for God is God’s answer to the prayers we have not yet conceived.
Desire is the material of which the Universe is woven and chiseled. Having a desire for something assumes a sensation of lack or deficiency; God’s Simple Desire represents God’s reduction of Himself through this sensation[5]. The sensation of the Simple Desire and its accompanying awareness of deficiency together comprise the level known as Ain - No-thing, it is as close as we can come to imagining God saying, ‘I’.
When the Prophet Jeremiah quotes God saying, ‘My insides roil for him[6]’ the metaphor of visceral sensation is being used precisely because it is something everyone can relate to. We experience it as a savage and voracious emptiness in the gut. God makes room, like a hole inside Him for the sensation of want, resembling a void, a nothingness or darkness in His actual Light.
When we experience longing like that, we are mirroring the Simple Desire. It is as close as we can come to imagining God saying, ‘I am’.
When we all camped in front of Mount Sinai after coming out of Egypt, the Torah tells us, ‘They entered the Sinai Desert, and Israel camped there in the desert in front of the mountain,[7]’ to which the sages add, ‘as one man with one heart.[8]’ Even Moses, who had up to that point been in charge, did not feel outstanding or special in any way. He was merely another Jew waiting to see what happened next.
But Moses was a worthy vessel for desire and longing, and so when the need arose for a representative, someone who could hear the Torah spoken and channel God’s Word, Moses was elevated, as we read, ‘Then Moses went up to God, and the LORD called to him from the mountain.’
Here at the beginning of Leviticus, after the construction of the Tabernacle, just like there at Mount Sinai when we were ready to receive the Ten Commandments, Moses settled back into the assumption that his time of specialness was over, yet he remained a worthy vessel. So while it was true that Aaron would become High Priest, Moses was still the vessel and channel for God’s Word, so the Book of Leviticus, TORAT COHANIM – Priestly Law was revealed through him.
Leviticus opens with this emphasize on Moses and his capacity for longing, to give us each a key to the mysteries of all the Sacrificial Atonements outlined in this book.
To sin is to have forgotten who we are. It means we have lost our Yichus – Relation to God (Radical Vayishlach), and it also means we have lost sight of our own integrity and wholeness (Radical Yithro). Forgetfulness is at the root of all sin, for were we still in a state of awareness and collection we could not bear to feel cut off from God, we would not be able to bring ourselves to do something that would give us even a momentary sensation of disconnection from God.
But how can slaughtering an animal, burning or eating its parts and sprinkling its blood on the altar fix the original forgetfulness or the sin which came of forgetting? If it is the feeling of penitence, regret and remorse which brings down forgiveness, why are the physical rituals of sacrifice, of killing, burning and eating, even necessary? And while it’s easy to say that nowadays we repent without the Temple Sacrifices, the Torah is still eternal - either every word of it applies to me personally, or else it is all fable.
The prophet quotes God, saying, ‘For I did not speak with your fathers, nor did I command them on the day I brought them out of the land of Egypt, concerning the matters of burnt-offering and sacrifice.’ (Jer 7:22) What he means is that on the day of the Exodus there was a revelation of ATIKA KADISHA – Holy, Ancient One (Radical Beshalach), and whenever that occurs it becomes crystal clear to each and every one of us that we are connected at the Source. While we exist in that moment of the revelation of the Holy, Ancient One, it would be meaningless to make Offerings and Sacrifices, for what would be the point in taking something from the palace of the king to offer as a gift to the king[9]?
But we tend to live most of our lives in an illusory sense of isolation, inside a bubble of self-consciousness, unable to remember the revelation of the Holy, Ancient One; we no longer recall the sensation of belonging with and to God. Tabernacle rituals have significance to us, their purpose is to open up a window through which the penitent can see the Light of ATIKA KADISHA – Holy, Ancient One and can examine his actions in that Light. When we are able to do so, we become aware how the sin never happened[10].
How can a sin not have happened?
The answer may seem thorny and problematic but it is still the truth. God’s Will is implicit, explicit and complicit throughout everything we do, and in the final analysis, nothing happens in the world that is not God’s Desire (Radical Tetzaveh). We live stuck in our world, within the small picture we draw with our minds, unable to access the Big Picture that is God’s vision. But there in that Big Picture within the Simple Desire, paradoxes resolve themselves.
Here we come to the significance of the Great Altar which was made of stone and filled with earth. It was the first feature of the Temple or Tabernacle mentioned in the Torah, as we read in the text immediately after the giving of the Ten Commandments, in Sidra Yithro:
An altar of earth shall you make for Me and sacrifice on it your burnt offerings and your peace offerings, your sheep and your cattle. In every place where I cause my Name to be remembered, I will come to you and bless you. (Ex. 20:21)
The reference to memory in the second part of the verse appears to be an explanation of the first part; wherever God causes His name to be remembered - at this earthen altar - the blessing follows naturally, because the forgetting which lay at the root of all sin disappears. God causing remembrance of His Name hearkens back to what was said at the beginning of this Sidra, that whenever we are filled with the desire to call God’s Name it is because God is answering the prayers we have not yet conceived, because He sees us as worthy vessels for the Gift of Desire - the Calling.
I feel I have to be careful lest what I say be misunderstood and misinterpreted, and I am not qualified either by virtue of scholarship or authority to speak on this subject.
No one really understands Torah until they have stumbled over its words[11], and some of us don’t ‘get it’ until we’ve basically ruined it and ourselves. None of us arrives at where we need to be until we make mistakes, because we only ever learn from our failures. Some of us even have difficulty learning from our failures because we keep repeating sin until a deep groove of habit is worn into the very fabric of our body and soul, so that changing direction and altering our behavior requires more energy and determination than we can muster.
Suddenly God calls. We experience it as the need to repent, to reconnect, to call upon God, to pray or fix the sin, and instantaneously we become vessels to be filled with a longing for change, a desire for connection with God; a revelation of Yichus – Relation and God’s Oneness and our own wholeness (Radical Yithro).
We come to the Cohen – Priest, we bring ourselves to him and share the troubles in our heart. He listens as we recount the sin, for he is that part of us which has never sinned, that higher or deeper function forever oblivious to the stench or wretchedness of the act, for there is always part of us which remains whole, unblemished and untouched no matter what we may be doing. He is our core Self whose job it is to help us explore the longing for God, because this is God’s Desire.
I bring the animal and stand with it before the priest. He shows me how to press down with my strength on its head while I confess out loud the nature of my wrongs. Deeper and deeper we dig, for the motive, for the sensation and the intention of the sin. He takes the knife and slaughters the animal, kills it by slitting its throat and spilling its blood into the bowl he holds in his hands. Dipping his fingers into the blood he sprinkles it on the wall of the altar. The smell of blood is in the air, on the ground, on the stone and in my nostrils; it is me.
The fat, the kidneys and the tail burn on the pyre upon the altar, their smoke roils and whirls while the smell of roasting flesh fills me. And suddenly I see a lion crouching in the smoke on the altar, and I know that my offering has been accepted[12].
I want to suggest that there is something primal in the act described. Killing an animal by cutting its throat with a tool, collecting and sprinkling its blood on the wall, and then roasting the fat and flesh on a fire are the most basic of human acts. The revelation of ATIKA KADISHA – the Holy, Ancient One does not come about through intellectual endeavor (Radical Beshalach), but through the most powerful and basic of human instincts. As the Izbicy points out; 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[13].
The combination of longing to reconnect with God, and the desire for atonement, the smells and sounds of death, blood and roasting flesh together with the presence of the Cohen – Priests and the Levite – Musicians, the rituals and sacraments all came together in that place where God descends to Earth upon the altar, and man ascends to Heaven upon that very same altar[14]. In the acts of killing and sacrifice we became aware; we saw visions of just who we are to God, what our purpose is and how our every sin is part of the Big Picture and the Simple Desire.
The essential ingredient is our desire for closeness and reconnection with God, our need to feel whole and unbroken again, to feel ‘Called’ - imbued with the savage and ferocious emptiness that cannot be filled with anything but God - for that’s what it really means to be ‘Called’.
Chapter 2 - Tzav
Nighttime in the Sanctuary
There were no services in the Tabernacle or Temple at night; neither midnight, full-moon nor solstice ceremonies or the like – all services were conducted by the light of day, in full view of the public. There were no secret rituals conducted out of sight, by groups or by individual priests with information no one else had access to. Everything is laid out for the layperson to read about in the Torah. This attitude of openness prevails to this day; in conducting their normal business, Jewish Courts of Law do not convene during the nighttime. Bills of divorce may not be written, witnesses are not examined or deposed, conversions are not performed and decisions are not reached after daylight hours.
But while there were no nighttime sacrificial rituals of worship in the Sanctuary, certain business had to be conducted. Chief among these concerned attention to the pyres which burned on the Great Sacrificial Altar in the courtyard. The fats and limbs of animals offered as sacrifices had to be turned over and completely burned before morning, so priests assiduously tended these fires through the night to ensure that the various daily offerings were properly reduced to ashes.
The dominant theme of Temple Sacrifices, underlying all this busy activity, remained the worshiper’s desire for communion with God. Whether they were offered on behalf of the nation from public funds, or by individuals on their own behalf, the sacrifices burning on the altar all night represented the desire to express desire for God, however that might be done.
From the very outset of the Book of Leviticus, one word repeats like a motif: RATZON – Desire. In the context of the sacrifices, the common English translation of RATZON is free-will, as we read in last week’s Sidra,
If the sacrifice is a burnt offering taken from the cattle, let him offer a male without blemish: he must offer it of his own voluntary will at the door of the Communion Tent before the LORD. (Lev 1:3)
Others read the word RATZON to mean ‘at his pleasure[15]’, or ‘to make the Lord favorable to him[16]’.
In Radical Vayikra we discussed how the essential ingredient of all sacrificial rituals was the desire to meet God, to ascend unto Him who descends unto us at that very place. The Great Altar is the locus-in-quo, the very place where Desire burns.
My favorite reading comes from R. Shabbatai HaKohen, the Shach (1621–1662), who suggests that it is Desire itself which has to be offered as a sacrifice and burned on the altar[17], before goodwill can flow.
So you come to God burning with desire and say, ‘God, take all this Desire you have given me, and be pleased with me.’ You offer everything at that moment, your life, possessions, your emotions and thoughts, your dreams and hopes; everything that is you yearns to leap forth, to be slaughtered and consumed, if only to become one with God.
And then what happens? When everything is burned down to its most basic components, when it is all reduced to ashes and clinker, what then?
It becomes patently obvious that not all physical matter can be elevated. Fire will not raise everything aloft. The stuff of which we are made will not rise from the earth and reach heavenward, for ‘the dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.’ (Eccl. 12:7) When all the sacrificial passion is spent and we who are stuck in the material world go back to the mundane routines of everyday life, what should become of those flesh and bones now charred to black embers and coals, which the altar has not consumed and cannot convert to anything more spiritual than ash?
The opening of this week’s Sidra deals with that very issue, as we read:
God spoke to Moses, saying, ‘Command Aaron and his sons, saying, “These are the regulations for the burnt offering: The burnt offering is to remain on the altar hearth throughout the night, till morning, and the fire must be kept burning on the altar. The priest shall don his linen tunic and his linen breeches upon his body; and remove the ashes from where the fire has consumed the burnt offering on the altar, and he should put them beside the altar. He should take off his garments, and put on other garments, and carry the [remainder of the] ashes out of the camp to a clean place.
The fire on the altar shall be kept burning on it, it shall not go out; and the priest shall burn wood on it every morning: and he shall lay the burnt offering in order upon it, and shall burn on it the fat of the peace offerings. Fire shall be kept burning on the altar continually; it must not go out.” (Lev 6:1-6)
The first and earliest morning ritual in the Tabernacle was this, the TERUMAH of Ashes. Terumah, as has been discussed in Radical Terumah, means elevating something by putting it on top and making it most important. Here we are commanded that the priest take a shovel and climb the ramp to the altar, select a handful ashes from the middle of the glowing pyre and carry it back down to the floor of the courtyard.
At the bottom of the ramp he turns to his right, walks around the east wall of the altar and carefully places the ashes on the ground about thirty centimeters from the altar where they are absorbed miraculously into the foundations of the structure of the altar. This ritual was carried out daily for more than four hundred years in each of the Temples respectively, and never was there any residue of ashes blowing around in the wind or scattered by the feet of priests. It disappeared into the very fabric of the altar.
This ritual is the metaphorical solution to the despair we feel on discovering that there are parts of us which simply will not be elevated, no matter how dedicatedly and intensely we worship God. There are parts of us, most base and intractable, instinctual and impulsive, which remain stuck in place and cannot even be raised aloft by fire.
Though we burn with joy and fiery zeal all night, in the morning it will be seen that some things about us don’t change, remaining unmoved and immovable, and we are back to being who we are. Water, heat and air, the volatiles and gases are gone, and we are left to deal, as we are always left to deal, with the basest mud, clay and dirt (Radical Kedoshim).
This is the moment, says the Izbicy, when a certain longing wakens us, a cry to heaven, ‘I raise my eyes to the mountains, where will my salvation come from[18]?’
The mountains represent the heights of my soul, the heavens unto which the offerings and sacrifices of my body have been elevated. I lift up my eyes and cry, why must I be left behind, why can I not also be transformed from base matter to become a fragrance in the nostrils of God?
It was Jacob who first asked this question. He left Be’er-Sheba destitute, and walked to Mesopotamia where he was forced to earn a living by the sweat of his brow and the work of his hands. ‘My father, Isaac, and grandfather, Abraham were wealthy men, free to spend their days and nights in worship and contemplation of God, while the manual work and business was done by others. I am reduced to the life of a common laborer, a shepherd sleeping outdoors, unable to follow my heart and soul in the service of God. Where will I ever find salvation?[19]’
This is the cry of my ashes condemned to remain forever earthbound, having watched the rest of my body consumed, caught up in the rapturous exaltation of worship and sacrifice, elevated into God’s pleasure and desire. This is the cry with which Ben Zoma shook the world, ‘[God] divided between the waters above the heavens and the water below the heavens.[20]’
‘Where is the fixing? Why is there such a huge divide between the holy and mundane? A parable: Two slave-girls were acquired at the same auction, in the same lot. One was designated a house-slave, the other a field-slave. ‘My sister lives in a real house with a roof, with decency and respect, while I live in the direst straits without the least common convenience, forced to forage for my food like an animal in the fields. Why was I singled out for such low status?’ she complained. ‘Were not my sister and I auctioned together, as one lot, equals and identical? What have I done to deserve demotion and degradation?’
Who has not asked this question of themselves? Why is one part of me caught, stuck in the mud like a rutting animal, while other parts of the same me sing in worship, ablaze with devotion, completely free of selfish desire?
The Torah answers us in the language of metaphor, in the TERUMAH of Ashes which took precedence over every other ritual in the Tabernacle. Nothing could happen before a small shovel-full of ashes had been raised, elevated and lofted from the cinders on the altar, from those very complaining embers doomed to remain earthbound. They were removed and placed next to the altar where they were absorbed into that very altar.
The sacrificial altar itself is made of those bits of us which are not and never can be consumed on the altar – that’s the clear message. And as long as I have not internalized that message from my life, from my yesterday, I cannot begin a life of worship today. Today I serve God on the altar of my yesterday, on those very parts of me that refused to be elevated.
The priest reaches into the heart of the pyre, to the reddest glowing embers. Pushing aside the blackened ash he roots about for the still living coals and chooses from among them a measure to place beside the foundations of the altar. We watch them die, lose their heat and revert to black and dark. Because it was never the heat in them which made them special or worthy, it was not the fire or passion which made them deserving - it was the longing.
One word is conspicuously absent from the Book of Leviticus, it is the word ‘Please’. It appears more than a hundred times in the other four Books of Moses, and another three hundred times in the rest of Scripture, but not here in the very heart of our hearts.
Shlomo used to say, ‘The mind has many thoughts, and no two thoughts are exactly alike. In a person’s lifetime they may have innumerable thoughts, but the heart lives a lifetime and only ever has a single thought, just one word, ‘Please![21]’
The word ‘Please’ is a prayer, and God uses it, too[22]. Here in Leviticus the Torah does not use the word ‘Please’ because we are living in the prayer. We are it, there’s nothing else to say but, Please!
And here, when we reach the Terumah of Ashes, we are in the ultimate stage of prayer, in the Please-of-Pleases, or Desire of Desire (Radical Tetzaveh).
The verse in Psalms reads: Why do the nations say, ‘Where, pray, is their God?[23]’ But the verse may be read otherwise: Why do the nations say, ‘Where is “Please,” their God?’
One of the reasons the gentiles so loathe and revile us Jews, is because we have a God who says ‘Please!’ What sort of God expresses weakness, desire, longing and need? But need and the expression of need is so integral to how we see ourselves, that we can’t even imagine a universe in which they are not essential building blocks. We don’t even see Weakness as a weakness. The Prophet Isaiah has God referring to us as the worm, ‘Do not be afraid, you worm Jacob, little Israel, do not fear.[24]’ To which the Midrash adds, ‘It takes a worm to bring down a mighty cedar.[25]’
Fire will not elevate the earth, but as this Sidra shows us, there is such powerful longing in the earth it doesn’t require elevation. It’s already there.
Chapter 3 - Shemini
The Middle of the Middle of the Torah
This week’s Sidra begins by recounting the events surrounding the deaths of Nadab and Abihu, Aaron’s two elder sons. For seven days Moses, wearing simple white linen vestments, assembled and disassembled the Tabernacle by himself and celebrated its dedicatory offerings. It was on the eighth day that Aaron and his sons were consecrated to High-Priesthood and Priesthood respectively, and tasked with all its functions by Moses, who then stepped back into his role as Lawgiver. Aaron donned the four vestments of the High Priesthood: breastplate, waistcoat, mantle and forehead-plate described in Sidra Tetzaveh, as well as the four vestments - breeches, tunic, sash and turban - common to all Priests.
After the day’s services were completed, but before Aaron and his sons sat to partake of those portions of the offerings they were commanded to eat, Nadab and Abihu, eldest of Aaron’s four sons, took a pan of incense and attempted to make an offering inside the innermost sanctuary, the holy of holies. They died at God’s hand where they stood, and their brothers had to drag their corpses out of the sanctuary for burial.
When order was restored in the Tabernacle and its ritual functioning had recommenced, Moses inquired of Aaron whether the remaining priests had eaten properly of the offerings as commanded. In particular, Moses was anxious to discover whether or not the goat of the sin-offering of the New-Moon had been eaten by the priests. Moses’ inquiry is the central point of the entire Torah, because if you divide the Torah into two halves by counting the total number of words, you will find the dividing line falls between two words in this verse which happen to be identical. These words are DRASH, DRASH – Inquiry. The Torah will often repeat a word for emphasis. Since ‘inquiringly inquired’ is not English, the verse is usually translated ‘And Moses diligently inquired’.
Moses discovered to his consternation that Aaron and his sons had refused to eat the meat of the New-Moon sin-offering. Aaron told him, ‘There was no technical reason for not eating it. But on a day like this, a day on which my two sons died, I simply couldn’t bring myself to swallow it.’
When Moses heard this, he was satisfied.
To understand some of the subtext in the narrative, let us examine what the Talmudic sages had to say about the sacrifice in question – the goat of the sin-offering of the New Moon.
R. Shimon b. Pazi asked; The verse says, ‘God made the two great luminaries,’ but then contradicts itself saying, ‘The greater luminary to rule the daytime and the smaller luminary to rule the night.[26]’
The moon said to God, ‘Master of the World, can two kings wear one crown?’
God told her, ‘Go, diminish yourself.’
She spoke up to Him, saying, ‘Just because I spoke the truth, must I be the one to diminish myself?’
God replied, ‘You can shine both day and night.’
But the moon said, ‘What use am I at noon?’
God told her, ‘Israel will always celebrate its Festivals in lunar months, they will depend on you.’
She argued, ‘The sun is still the one on which they depend to count equinoxes and fix their annual calendar.’
‘Go,’ replied God. ‘The righteous will identify with you, calling themselves by your name - Jacob the Small, Samuel the Small, David the Small.’ However, when God saw that the moon was not satisfied with this amends, He said [to the Jews], ‘Atone for Me, for I diminished the moon.’
This is what R. Shimon b. Lakish meant when he said, ‘See how different is the goat [sin offering] of the New Moon from other sin offerings, it is accompanied by the instruction ‘a sin offering for God.[27]’ God said, ‘Let this [monthly] offering be an atonement for My diminishing the moon.’ (Chulin 60b)
Every weekday, festival and holy day had its own particular sacrificial offering. They are specified in the Torah in the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth chapters of the Book of Numbers. Here, for example, is the Rosh Hashana service as it is laid out in the text:
On the first day of the seventh month hold a sacred assembly and do no regular work. It is a day for you to sound the Shofar. As an aroma pleasing to God, offer a burnt offering of one young bull, one ram and seven male lambs a year old, all without defect. With the bull, offer a grain offering of three-tenths of an epha of the finest flour mixed with olive oil; with the ram, two-tenths; and with each of the seven lambs, one-tenth. Include one male goat as a sin offering to make atonement for you. These are in addition to the monthly and daily burnt offerings with their grain offerings and drink offerings as specified. They are food offerings presented to God, a pleasing aroma. (Num. 29:1-6)
As the text makes plain, the Rosh Hashana ritual included burnt-offerings, a sin-offering, grain-offerings and libations of wine translated as drink-offerings. The text specifies a male goat as a sin-offering ‘to make atonement for you’. Almost identical language is used to describe the various permutations of offerings for the different festivals and occasions. It is only once that the Torah uses a slightly different clause – regarding the New Moon sin-offering – where the text says ‘a sin-offering to/for God.’
Why does God tell us to bring this male goat, sin-offering to atone for Him? According to R. Shimon b. Lakish it is for His having diminished the moon, reducing it to a mere reflection of the sun’s light and relegating it to the lesser role.
Here the Izbicy steps in and explains the metaphor. The diminution of the moon is actually a reference to the blemish which God built into the core of every creature. We are all born with character defects, imperfections and weaknesses, as the Prophet Isaiah put it: ‘I called you a sinner from the womb.’ (Isa. 48:8) Everyone carries a basic flaw, but God expects us to fix the flaw He put into us. We are all justified in complaining: ‘Why did You create me flawed?’
This explains God saying, ‘Atone for Me; I sinned by diminishing the moon.’ God is the owner of the sin-offering, the penitent, so to speak, who needs the sacrificial atonement at each New Moon.
But if I sin and bring its offering to the Tabernacle how does it atone for me? Well, the Talmud states categorically, ‘When the Cohen eats of the sacrifice, the owner receives his atonement.[28]’ The Cohen is God’s proxy in this matter, and by eating the sacrifice on behalf of God, implies that God accepts responsibility for my sin; that I no longer have to carry it.
Conversely, when God is the penitent, and the sin was that of God making us flawed, the Cohen acts as our proxy in the matter. When he eats of God’s sin-offering he is stating that we human beings accept responsibility for God’s sin, and that He no longer has to carry it[29].
This is what makes Jews unique among nations and distinct from the gentile; we accept responsibility for every part of our behavior, even where we know it is God’s fault. We do not blame God for making us who we are, nor do we hold Him accountable for our sins (Radical Mishpatim). We acknowledge the fact of it intellectually, but then practically ignore it and act as though we alone are responsible for who we are and what we do. We do not criticize God for making us bad, even while praying to Him to make us better.
God treats us measure-for-measure, providing us with the same courtesy we give Him (Radical Emor).. Instead of blaming us for the stupid, mean and nasty things we do of our own free will, He takes the responsibility for it on Himself, so we are atoned for when the Cohen eats our sin-offering. This explains the most basic paradox in Judaism On the one hand I believe with perfect faith that God is, to quote Maimonides, Creator and Manager of all creation, and that He alone did, does and will do everything[30], while on the other hand I blame myself for everything I ever did, do and will do in the future. How can I both believe that God alone exists, while simultaneously attributing all my deeds to my own free will, as though I alone exist?
God had waited 2450 years - from Creation and Adam’s sin until the dedication of the Tabernacle - on that fateful Rosh Chodesh – New Moon day. Everything was ready and prepared; the male goat sin-offering was going to be eaten for the first time in history and God would finally have atoned for diminishing the moon and creating humankind so flawed and imperfect. Events transpired, Nadab and Abihu died tragically and Aaron found he couldn’t swallow his food, though he tried his hardest.
It may never have occurred again in a thousand years of Temple sacrifices that the priest, for one reason or another, could not partake of the male goat sin-offering of the New Moon. It didn’t matter. The one that counted, the first one, the first time, did not get eaten, God did not receive atonement, the ritual was ruined and the debt remains unpaid.
When we ask ourselves why this came about, we are forced to examine the reasoning behind Nadab and Abihu’s attempt to offer incense without receiving proper authority. What were they trying to achieve?
They wanted to fix the sin of Adam and Eve. Since it was to be the day on which God receives absolution for His original sin, so to speak, Nadab and Abihu assumed it was the ultimate propitious moment and time to bring down absolution for the entire world. They were a part of us which never left the Garden of Eden.
The Talmud describes the soul having five characteristics of God. Just as God fills the world, so the soul fills the body. Just as God sees everything but remains invisible, the soul sees without being perceivable. Just as God animates and sustains the world, the soul animates and sustains the body. Just as God is holy and pure, so is the soul holy and pure. Just as God sits in the innermost chambers, so does the soul sit in the innermost chambers[31].
I have a question. Having stated that the soul, like God, fills the whole entire body, what purpose is there in adding that like God it sits in the innermost chambers? Either it is everywhere or it is in chambers, which is true?
To sit is to lower yourself from a standing position. When we talk about God sitting, we mean that God has descended from a higher place, and has brought His presence closer to us (Radical Kedoshim). Closeness with God can contradict the second characteristic, that of God remaining invisible. So God’s approaching closeness is always accompanied by God’s deepening hiddenness. The closer God comes to you, the more profoundly He hides Himself inside you. That explains why God’s closeness most often feels like distance, because we have forgotten how to plumb our own depths, and no longer have access to our own innermost chambers. It’s a skill that can be relearned, but there are individuals who never lost that skill, and Nadab and Abihu were such a pair. In modern times, the Piacezna Rebbe[32] was such an individual. He dedicated his life to teaching the techniques for accessing the divine within[33].
God’s innermost chambers are the Torah, and our innermost chambers are our personal Torah (Radical Noah, Masey, Vayelech). We meet God there and nowhere else. Nadab and Abihu lived inside their own personal Torahs all the time, and wanted to open the whole world, every individual, each to his or her personal Torah, to God inside. The Piacezna Rebbe gives us two pieces of invaluable information about the process. First, when God’s presence is hidden, there’s only one place He hides: within the innermost chambers of Torah. Second, the only way to access the innermost chambers of your own Torah is to explore newness, by being creative, to discover something fresh in the familiar intimacy. You will only find God when you innovate, explore and take risks. Even in the Torah of your pain you can find newness and originality. Writing in the terrible wasteland of the Warsaw Ghetto in the middle of the Holocaust, the Rebbe says:
Thus we learn, that while in the outer chambers of heaven there is always ‘strength and rejoicing’ before God, within the inner chambers God weeps in His distress, as it were, over the pain of the Jews.
So, it is possible that at a time of Hester Panim - Concealment of the Divine Face, which is to say, when God hides Himself within the inner chambers, a Jew may also enter and be alone with God there, each Jew at his own level. There within the inner chambers, Torah and worship are revealed to each person who enters. We have already spoken about how the Oral Torah was revealed primarily in exile, in Babylon, and how the holy Zohar was only revealed to R. Shimon b. Yochai and his son R. Elazar when they were living in a cave, fleeing the Roman government, afraid for their lives.
There are times when a person wonders about himself, thinking; ‘I am broken, I am ready to burst into tears at any moment, and in fact I break down in tears from time to time. How can I possibly learn Torah? What can I do to find the strength not just to learn Torah, but to discover new Torah and Hasidut - Piety?’
And then there are times when a person beats his heart saying, ‘Is it not simply my supercilious heart allowing me to be so stubborn, to learn Torah in the midst of my pain, and in the midst of the pain of the Jews, whose suffering is so great?’ And then he answers himself; ‘But I am so broken. I have cried so much, my whole life is fraught with grief and dejection.’ He is lost inside his introspective, self-analytical confusion. But as we have said above, it is the Holy blessed One who is crying within the inner chambers, and whoever presses himself close to God through Torah, is able to weep there together with God, and also to learn Torah with Him.
This then is the difference. The pain and grief he suffers over his own situation, alone, in isolation can break a person. He may even fall so far that he becomes immobilized by it. But the crying that a person does together with God makes him strong. He cries and takes strength. He is shattered, and is then emboldened to study and to worship.
It is only the first or second time that a person finds it so difficult to pick himself up, because of the pain. But if he is bold, if he stretches out with his head to touch the Torah and worship, he then gains access to those innermost chambers where God is. And there he laments and ululates with God, as it were, alone with Him. And then, even in the midst of pain, he can learn Torah and worship God’s blessed devotions. (Sacred Fire – Parshat HaChodesh 1942)
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When a child learns the shapes of the Hebrew letters for the first time, there is fresh revelation in heaven concerning these letters. And this fresh revelation, occurring in heaven through the child’s learning of the letters, is drawn downwards, so the child draws down upon himself a fresh revelation as to the meaning of the shapes of the letters.
This is not the case with adults who are too familiar with the shapes of the letters. When we look at them we are not learning anything new, so we do not have God teaching us anything directly. The only revelation we can inspire in the upper worlds, is in the meaning of the Text of the Torah, in the P’Shat. But when the Talmud described ‘children’ who explained the mystical meanings in the shapes of the letters, it was actually referring to holy people who could approach the text as children. They brought about revelation even in the shape of the letters, and not just in the meaning of the text. They could still learn like children, and so were able to look at the Aleph and Beth and Gimmel and ask; ‘Why is the leg of the Gimmel stretched out towards the Daleth, etc.?’
Therefore, every time a person revises Torah that he has already learned, he must learn something new from it, delving deeper into it so that God is given the chance to be the teacher again. Only when something new is learned - when one learns with God and directly from Him - can a fresh revelation occur in heaven, bringing down a new revelation upon the student who is learning in this world. (Ibid. Shevi’i Shel Pesach 1941)
Just as Eve did not ask permission before eating of the Tree of Knowledge, Nadab did not ask permission. Just as Adam followed Eve and took her advice, Abihu followed Nadab. Just as Eve’s act was one of purest willing self-sacrifice[34], so was Nadab’s, and just as Adam’s act was one of purest faith, so was Abihu’s (Radical Bereishith). Adam had faith that God was speaking to him through Eve, that she was carrying the Torah he needed to survive (Radical Bereishith).
Nadab and Abihu were going to demonstrate for the whole world to see that Adam had never eaten of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil; that he had only eaten of the Tree of Knowledge of Good. They were going to show us how while Adam and Eve may have been mistaken in the conclusions they reached, they were entitled to be mistaken. Mistakes are only sins if God says they are. When it is God’s desire, our mistakes are glorious successes, messianic revolutions and revelations (Radical Emor).
Unfortunately, God is not ready to let go the thread of narrative, there remain souls within the Divine Body who need to be born. It is not time for the loose ends of time to be wrapped up. There are discoveries still to be made, Torah still to be experienced and written, and, I suspect, some pain still to be endured.
The ultimate mistake, the sin which undoes all sins, cannot be planned or premeditated. It has to come from God, and that belongs to the Messiah and no one else.
Chapter 4 - Tazria
I Am a Woman Giving Birth
Speak to the Children of Israel, saying, ‘A woman when she gives seed, and bears a male, shall be TUMA seven days.’ (Lev. 12:2)
Most translators render the verse, ‘a woman when she conceives’, but that is incorrect. The true and proper translation is actually ‘a woman when she orgasms’, as the Talmud makes clear[35]. Since every word in the Torah has to apply to me, how am I to interpret this chapter?
In Radical Pikudei as we were examining the various furnishings of the Sanctuary, specifically the cherubs on the lid of the Ark, we discussed how in order to be a healthy and whole individual a person has to contain a balance of both male and female. Here we learn what that means in practice.
Whether or not we find it politically correct or convenient, the classical view of sex, and most especially the kabbalistic stance, is that the man provides the Shefa - Gushing Plenty, while the woman provides the Keli – Vessel to receive and incubate the Shefa. When we understand this to mean that every individual has within him or herself both Shefa and Keli, giver and taker, and that being healthy means being balanced, it should be less politically incorrect and less gender oppressive. But it probably won’t feel that way. We tend to remain stuck in our prejudices.
The way the Izbicy interprets this chapter, we can view all our relationships as metaphors describing the spiritual nature of our desires. Desire is the chief ingredient of all our interactions with the mundane or spiritual world. Desire, as has been stated frequently in this work, is the stuff of which the entire universe is made. God’s Desire and our desires, the Simple Desire and our multiplicities of desires.
When Abraham expresses his desire to God, ‘Oh that Ishmael might live before You!’ God answers, ‘Indeed, Sarah your wife shall bear you a son whom you will name Isaac, and I will establish my covenant with him, a perpetual covenant, with him and with his seed after him.[36]’
What it means is that for something everlasting to last forever to be born into this world, the desire which begets it has to be that of ‘Sarah your wife’, the purest and most single-minded possible[37].
The great mathematician, Archimedes, once said, ‘Give me a long enough lever and a fulcrum on which to pivot, and I will move the whole world.’
Abraham is the lever God uses to move the world, and Sarah the fulcrum on which everything pivots[38]. The single and most indispensible property of the fulcrum is that it be immovable, for should the fulcrum shift the lever will not work.
God calls us His mother (Radical Beshalach). As the Midrash describes; first, God loves us so much He calls us His daughter, and then He loves us so much more that, He even calls us His sister. But then on top of all that He loves us so, so much, He calls us His mother. The Jewish People are capable of such Desire, the purest desire - at the level of ‘Sarah your wife’ – the only sort which can give birth to God and to Eternity.
There are many types of desire, all stemming from the original, Primal Desire. We have differing, and sometimes contradictory, emotional, intellectual and physical desires, in our heart, mind and stomach. Where in the body does that desire known as ‘Sarah your wife’ reside?
Desires as pure as ‘Sarah your wife’ only exist when mind, heart and viscera are in complete agreement about what they want. When Abraham asked God whether Ishmael might not be the chosen one, God told him No, for Ishmael is not the son born of ‘Sarah your wife’; he does not come from your highest or purest level of desire.
We only have to look around us at the world today, to see clearly why Ishmael is not chosen to walk before God. It’s not a surprise to us. But it was a surprise to Abraham, until God explained what and who Isaac was going to be, to Him and to us.
When Abraham achieves the level of desire of ‘Sarah your wife’, he becomes the ‘woman when she gives seed and bears a male’ who is Isaac, born of a Godlike desire because it is unified and uncluttered. That’s why it has Godlike potential and gives birth to Salvation.
The first love mentioned in the Torah is the love God recognizes between Abraham and Isaac[39]. Jews spoke Aramaic from Abraham’s time until the middle-ages when Judeo-Arabic, Ladino and Yiddish began to supplant Aramaic as the lingua-franca[40]. The Targumim are written in Aramaic and remain our most authoritative source of knowledge about how our ancestors understood the Hebrew text of the Torah. Targum is the Torah in the vernacular, and in the Targum we invariably find the Hebrew word AHAVA - Love translated as RACHIM, derived from the word RECHEM – Womb (Radical Eikev).
The desire in Abraham which gives birth to Isaac is called ‘Sarah your wife’ because it is a desire indistinguishable from love, which is a love indistinguishable from RACHAMANUT- Compassion, which is defined as a feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for another who is stricken by misfortune, accompanied by a strong desire to alleviate the suffering.
In order to give birth to the Shechina – Dwelling Presence of God on Earth, that which the Torah here calls ‘a son’, I have to be able to Love with Fear, Desire with Sympathy and Rejoice with Terror[41]. And to do all these simultaneously I must be able to splurt all that Shefa - Gushing Plenty, into the Keli – Vessel with sufficient gusto to trigger an orgasm of Gushing Plenty inside the Vessel. Neither my masculine nor my feminine desires on their own express the kind of Love and Fear of God necessary to trigger Salvation.
I was a small child, two or three years old, my mother tells me, when my father took me with him in the car. The car, an old Ford V-8 Pilot, had a tricky passenger door with an unfortunate tendency to fling itself wide open without the least provocation. This was before cars had seat-belts built into them, and long before child passenger safety seats were invented. I have no memory of this incident, by the way. At some point my father made a U-turn on a busy main-road. Out of the corner of his eye he saw me propelled from the suddenly wide-open passenger doorway by the centrifugal force of the U-turn. All he had time to do in that split second was to fling himself over and reach out, managing only to snatch me by my ankle as my body was flung out of the car. That night his nightmares began. My father had lived through the 1930s as a young boy in Germany. After losing his parents to the Nazis in WWII he went through the Blitz in England, as an orphan. But that night in 1958, after my close encounter with a near-fatal accident, he began to have nightmares. Certain kinds of fear are transformative, they can cause traumatic stress disorders and other physical manifestations of the body and mind. When trying to imagine what it feels like to experience Love, Fear, Desire, Sympathy, Rejoicing and Terror all at the same time, my father comes to mind, and that moment which lasted a lifetime, when he watched me catapulting headfirst into the busy traffic.
Shlomo used to tell a story about Rabbi Israel ha-Levi Horovitz (d. 1819), known as Eisenkopf (Ironhead), so called because he had an Iron Head for studying the Talmud, and was one of the most noted Jewish scholars in Lublin, a city of Jewish scholarship. He came into the Yeshiva looking for a suitable young man to marry his daughter. He gave a public lecture from the pulpit comprising a very sophisticated Pilpul. He asked a question on the Talmud and challenged any student in the Yeshiva to answer the question, proposing that any student was capable of answering the question would be suitable as a son-in-law.
All the best and brightest young scholars attempted to solve the problem and answer the question, but to no avail. As soon as they finished speaking he demolished their arguments with a few pointed words. After it was over and no-one was able to answer the Eisenkopf's question, he left the Yeshiva and made his way home.
One young student caught up with him and said, ‘Rabbi, I’m not here to answer the question and get your daughter as a prize. I’m not one even of those who tried answering the question. To be frank I’m not that great a scholar. But I could not just sit there and watch you walk out without asking you for the answer to the question you posed. Could you just enlighten me, please?’
The Eisenkopf smiled at him, saying, ‘Ahh, you’re just the young man I have been looking for to marry my daughter. Not a scholar, but interested in scholarship. Not a know-it-all, but interested in finding out. Not afraid to admit his ignorance, or ask for help. You’ll do.’
Sometimes when I wonder about the nature of Pure Desire or the Simple Desire, I think of this story and ponder what sort of husband the Eisenkopf wanted for his daughter. I think Shlomo told this story to keep it simple. Mind, heart and soul can desire the same thing. The young man following the sage on the streets of Lublin, catching up with him and finding the nerve to stop and question him was the woman giving seed, and bearing a male.
The Izbicy points out that the choice of the word ‘woman’ (who gives birth to the boy in the verse quoted above) was deliberate. When the angels wanted to denigrate Moses they referred to him as ‘born of woman’. “What is this born of woman doing among us[42]?” they complained, when Moses went up Mount Sinai to receive the Torah. That’s why the text chooses ‘woman’, specifically to make clear that it is precisely what the angels most denigrate - flesh and blood with desires most fleshy and bloody - that is capable of giving birth to salvation and nothing else. Angels don’t have desires, they have commands to fulfill, words to carry and orders to obey at God’s desire. They don’t give birth to salvation; they don’t give birth at all.
This chapter in the Torah comes immediately after an extensive catalogue of animals, birds and fish, kosher and non-kosher. Each has its particular characteristics. Those forbidden to us exemplify greed, impatience, cruelty and rage. Among the forbidden birds are those which eat their prey while it still lives, perhaps they fear some other creature will snatch their prey from them. They have no faith. Kosher birds have a crop in which they store food. Kosher insects have articulated legs with knees at the same height as their heads. The Izbicy reads this as a hint of the need to keep in mind the possibility of changing direction.
Chewing the cud is one of the vital signs of a kosher animal, it ruminates. Its cloven hoof hints at a certain stance, it never grabs anything. Each sign is a pointer from which a person can learn a lesson, because every characteristic represents another desire, and each desire has the potential to give birth to salvation. It is not just the purest unified desire of ‘Sarah your wife’ which gives birth to salvation, every desire has that ability.
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The verse we quoted at the outset spoke of TUMA, a concept discussed in Radical Chukath. Why should giving birth be accompanied by any sort of TUMA? The Izbicy explains, using a parable.
The king announced that he would welcome petitions from each of his subjects. One man wrote a beautiful petition, perfectly worded and couched in such sweet terms that the king was moved to grant the request. But the man had written his appeal on toilet paper, so the king commanded his officers to fulfill the man’s request, but also to fine him for presenting it in such a disrespectful manner. So it is, with us when we approach God with our desires. Even our prayers are never far divorced from the grossest physical expressions of need. Though we find our true desire - which is for connection to God - in the center of our meditations, they are usually only awakened in the hotbed of our physical neediness.
God is not looking for false love or false fear, He invites us to approach Him as we are. It is written:
Make with Me no gods of silver, and do not make yourselves gods of gold. Make Me an altar of earth. (Ex. 20:20)
When we worship gods of silver it means we are pretending a love of God, displaying passion we don’t really feel. Don’t pretend to be God’s best friend, He doesn’t want it, and you have no right to assume a familiarity you were not granted. And God will not fill you with love unless your love was true to begin with.
When we worship gods of gold it means we are pretending to fear God, displaying awe we don’t really feel. God says, ‘Make Me an altar of earth,’ which is to say, God wants only your true feelings. Earth stands for simplicity, as it really exists in your heart[43].
While it is true that our desires may give birth to Salvation, many of those desires, even our feelings for God, start out in very ugly forms. They make us TUMA.
Chapter 5 - Metzora
Human Rites
For the most part the previous Sidra, Tazria, spoke of Leprosy in its various forms. Not to be confused with Hansen’s-Disease, a chronic infection caused by the bacteria Mycobacterium leprae and M. lepromatosis, leprosy in the Torah more closely resembles Vitiligo. The METZORA – Leper has the same TUMA status as a corpse (Radical Chukath), and cannot live at home as normal people do. This week’s Sidra deals with the TAHARA - Cleansing and Purification rituals of the leper after his or her leprosy disappears.
The Talmud blames leprosy on the sin of gossip and slander, in a clear case of measure-for-measure: ‘He caused a separation between a man and his wife, between a man and his neighbor, let him live alone outside the camp[44].’ We see this happening in Sidra BeHaalotcha where Moses’ sister Miriam is stricken with leprosy after talking improperly about him.
This week’s Sidra opens thus: ‘This shall be the Torah of the leper, on the day of his TAHARA: he shall be brought to the priest.’ (Lev. 14:2)
The Hebrew word for ‘This’ is ZOT, and ZOT always hints at the Shechina – Dwelling Presence of God[45].
The word ZOT first appears in Genesis, when it is also the first spoken word in the Torah. ‘ZOT - This time,’ said Adam, ‘it is bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.’ (Gen. 2:23)
Human beings speak because God breathed His breath into Adam’s nostrils, and so into all of us. The way to read that metaphor is that God bestowed the power of speech on us by breathing into us, by kissing us. When you kiss someone and breathe into them, some essence of you enters them; there is ‘a connection of spirit and spirit’. When people kiss, their two breaths - which carry something essential of them - also intermingle and become a single breath comprised of both their essences. As we read in the Zohar:
O, would he kiss me kisses of his mouth! (Cant. 1:2) The Assembly of Israel (Shechina) calls out, ‘O, would he kiss me kisses of his mouth!’ But why ask for kisses instead of asking for love, why doesn’t she say ‘O, would he love me!’? Why ‘kiss me’?
This is what we were taught: What are kisses? They are the cleaving of breath unto breath (spirit to spirit). This is why kissing is done with the mouth, because Mouth is the source and channel for Breath (spirit). So kissing on the mouth is an act of profound devotion, attaching breath to breath so they become inseparable. This is why when someone’s soul expires with ‘The Kiss’ and they connect to that other Breath, to the breath from which they will never be separated, it is called ‘The Kiss’. This is why the Assembly of Israel cries, ‘O, would he kiss me kisses of his mouth!’, that they become inseparable from one another. (Zohar Vol.II 124b)
It’s important to internalize the message of this teaching. The Creation of Man is not a mechanical process. The Heimlich Maneuver is a purely mechanical process. Someone cannot breathe, so you embrace them from behind and pull them towards you with your fists pushing up under their diaphragm. After it is over you may have saved their life, but there is nothing of you inside them. When you give someone mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, however, something of you is inside them and remains with them. Genesis narrates how God breathed life into Adam’s nostrils in order to convey to us that God has bestowed something special on us, something which was previously inside God, so to speak: God’s spirit.
The first time Adam spoke a word, he expressed the breath that God had breathed into him, so the very first word contained that divine breath. ZOT was that very first word, so ZOT will always be associated with the Shechina – Divine Presence, which is that part of God that is, so to speak, outside Himself.
The phrasing of the verse teaches us that ZOT shall always be the rite of the leper. Everywhere else in the Torah the text says, ‘This is the rite of such and such’. Here we are told ‘This shall be the rite.’ By emphasizing the phrase ‘shall be’, the Torah tells us that this will always remain the cleansing rite of the leper[46], we will never be done with it. It was not a law pertaining to people living thousands of years ago. It remains in force today.
Speaking or listening to gossip comes is thrilling and satisfying because it reinforces distinctions and differences. It says: You and I are not the same as the person we are gossiping about. He/she doesn’t belong to our group, we are on the inside and they are out. The purpose and dynamic of gossip is a very ancient and primal one; it’s not a modern invention. Genesis narrates the Serpent’s most lethal and seditious gossip in the following exchange:
The Serpent was the most cunning of all the wild animals that God had made - saying to the woman – ‘Did God really say you may not eat from the any of the trees of the garden?’
The woman replied to the Serpent, ‘We may eat from the fruit of the trees in the garden, but the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, God said, “Do not eat of it and do not touch it, or else you will die.”’
‘You will certainly not die,’ replied the Serpent to the woman. ‘Really, God knows that on the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil.’ (Gen. 3:1-4)
The Serpent’s tactic is to persuade Eve to believe that God only forbade eating of the Tree of Knowledge because He wanted to keep all the godding to Himself. Knowing that eating of the Tree would confer godly powers on Adam and Eve, God naturally decreed it forbidden for jealous and petty reasons, and the threat of death was no more than a lie designed to frighten them off. The Serpent was cunning, but Eve was complicit in the Lashon Hara – Slander; she listened to it, considered it and then acted on it. Listening, considering and acting on a slander you hear - even when you don’t accept its veracity - resonates and echoes with the contemptible lies of the Serpent in the Garden of Eden. It is a primal evil to this day.
If God breathed Himself into me in an act of most intimate Oneness, how dare I pervert that gift to destroy Oneness and foment discord?
The Mei Hashiloach opens this week’s commentary by referencing a quote from Jeremiah. The prophet, as was commonly the case, was having a bad day. He laments being born to become a prophet whose prophecies are so bleak and pitiless, laments being a cursed man for bringing such bad news to the people and the city. ‘Why is my pain never-ending, and my wounds incurable, that will not heal? Why are You a mirage, a lie, a promise of water that will always fail?’ (Jer. 15:18)
It is a classic slander to call God a lie, a tease and a disappointment, even if Jeremiah was in dire emotional straits, for a man of Jeremiah’s stature to speak so was a sin.
At the outset of his career as a prophet, he had been promised: ‘I, the LORD, hereby promise to make you as strong as a fortified city, an iron pillar, and a bronze wall. You will be able to stand up against all who live in the land, including the kings of Judah, its officials, its priests and all the people of the land.’ (Ibid. 1:18) But things had not turned out well for Jeremiah, he became a prophet of doom. People did not repent as he imagined they would, though enemies were at the gate and the nation on a fast track to disaster. When the Jerusalem fell and barbarians overran the country, when kings died at the hands of friends and prophets were stoned on the streets Jeremiah grew so sad he lost his prophecy altogether. Not even his prophecy was reliable. He went into crisis, blaming God for disappointing him, for making him an unsuccessful, unhappy prophet, and an unheeded cry.
The Izbicy quotes the following verse from Jeremiah as an introduction to Sidra Metzora: ‘Therefore, so says God, “If you return, then will I bring you back, and you will stand before Me: and if you separate the precious from the vile, then you will be as My mouth.”’ (Ibid. 15:19) Because it suggests the only true fixing for Lashon Hara.
We are all the Breath of God, but imagine what it is to be the Mouth of God, to have the energy and power to breathe spirit and life into the whole world!
If we view gossip as a purely mechanistic and evolutionary tool, whose purpose is to keep people in line and reinforce some important societal norms, then we’re trapped because gossip is a primal behavior. How do we heal from such an ancient habit? It seems impossible to change without radically altering the way we talk and interact with others.
In the above verse God gives Jeremiah the formula for change without necessitating radical excision or intervention. God doesn’t advise Jeremiah to simply shut his mouth in order to avoid Lashon Hara, but tells him to ‘separate the precious from the vile’, and it will be enough to overturn a lifetime of bad speech habits.
Instead of tackling his problem speech from the standpoint of its causes and effects, God invites Jeremiah to get in touch with his Torah. As we have discussed elsewhere, each of us expresses a completely different Torah (Radical Bo, Yithro, Nitzavim). But we all trapped in the Evolutionary Paradigm[47] wherein gossip is merely ‘unsanctioned evaluative talk about people who aren’t present’ until we get in touch with our Torah, at which moment our speech completely changes.
To begin learning my own Torah is to discover the Divine in me. There is one sentence, thought or word or perhaps just a single urge that God put into me - when He breathed His spirit into Adam’s nostrils - that made me this essentially divine creature capable of addressing Him face to Face. And when I elevate what is precious from the dross, when I start expressing the essential Torah animating me, my speech breaks out of that evolutionary paradigm. I am separated from the mundane entirely and become the Mouth of God. The words I speak will all be Torah no matter what I talk about and whom I address, because I will be incapable of saying anything that splits people from one another or destroys them. I will be living in the true awareness of my Godliness, and the Shechina – Divine Presence will be talking out of my mouth.
This, says the Izbicy, is the meaning of the opening verse, ZOT-This shall be the Torah of the leper, on the day of his TAHARA: he shall be brought to the priest. When I start living my ZOT Torah, i.e. the words God originally breathed into me, I will begin the cleansing healing process. And the best, the only way of doing it, is not by going silent and avoiding speech, but by being brought to the priest. The priest is always and only God Himself[48].
I need to be brought to the priest.
Chapter 6 – Acharei Mot
Yom Kippur
God said to Moses, ‘Speak to your brother Aaron, and let him not enter - at anytime – into the sanctuary beyond the curtain to the Face of Mercy covering the Ark, so that he not die, for I appear over the Ark in a cloud.’ (Lev. 16:2)
This verse opens a chapter filled with detailed instructions for the Yom Kippur service in the Tabernacle/Temple.
As has been emphasized throughout this work, the Torah is eternal; it applies to everyone, everywhere. So these detailed instructions concerning Yom Kippur don’t just apply on Yom Kippur, or refer to some dead High Priest from ages past.
It’s easy enough to say that every moment is Yom Kippur, and every place we are in is the Holy of Holies and that we are, each of us, the High Priest. It certainly sounds very good. But what does it mean?
The Izbicy[49] takes his cue from the following verse: ‘And there shall be no man in the Tent of Meeting when he [the High Priest] comes to make atonement in the sanctuary until he goes out; he shall make atonement for himself, for his household, and for the whole congregation of Israel.’ (Ibid. 17)
‘What!’ asks the Midrash, ‘is the High Priest himself not a man then?[50]’ Obviously the High Priest has to be inside the Sanctuary when the rituals are being performed, it’s him doing the service. The suggestion then is that some essential part of the man has to be left outside when he enters to do the Yom Kippur service in the Holy of Holies. The Torah chooses the Hebrew word ADAM here to denote the man (rather than the more common ISH) in order to emphasize the primal nature of the ritual. It would appear that even that part of us which is Adam has to be kept out of the proceedings for the Yom Kippur atonement to happen.
Elsewhere we have discussed how the High Priest represents that part of us which lives in a perpetual state of worship, far removed from the body and the needs of its flesh and blood (Radical Pikudei). Only that part of us which is the High Priest may enter into the sanctuary on Yom Kippur. Which part of us is the High Priest? Well, the Torah gives us a very broad clue. The very first verse describing the ritual begins with the word ZOT: ‘B’ZOT - With this, shall Aaron enter the sanctuary…’ (Ibid. 3) ZOT refers to the original breath God breathes into us, which makes us a unique individual (Radical Metzora). The High Priest lives in a rarified atmosphere, breathing a purer, more intoxicating air. As the Izbicy Rebbe notes, referencing a quote from the Zohar, ‘we have two nostrils, one inhales life, the other Life of life[51]’. What it means is that while we breathe air mixed of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide and other gases into our lungs in order to survive, our High Priest is breathing Air from the source of Life, as described in the Sefer Yetzira[52]. Creation is an ongoing process, an act which never ends. God breathing His breath into Adam’s nostrils is happening all the time in you. So while one of your nostrils breathes regular air, the other is receiving Life of life.
Throughout this work we have discussed the fact that there is an individual Torah animating each and every person (Radical Bo, Yithro, Nitzavim). Here we discover that this Torah has a name. It is called ZOT, and it is only with ZOT that you, as your own High Priest, can begin to conduct your Yom Kippur service.
Generally when we set out to pray, we think about it and about what we need and want to ask for. As the prophet says, ‘Preparations of the heart belong to man, but the answer of the tongue, is from God.’ (Prov. 16:1) Which, stated another way, means you do the planning, but the end result is from God, the actual prayers coming out of your mouth are a gift from God. In this verse the operative noun is again ADAM rather than ISH, because usually we reach into ourselves to find our connection to God so that we can pray with the right Kavvana – Intention. In the Sidra, however, the Torah warns us, ‘Let there be no ADAM in the Tent of Meeting when he comes to make atonement in the sanctuary until he goes out,’ emphasizing that the normal routine will not work on Yom Kippur.
I once watched Andrés Segovia, regarded as one of the greatest guitarists of all time, teaching a master class. After listening carefully to a student playing the guitar, he said, ‘You’re playing the music but you’re not allowing the guitar to sing. Let the guitar sing its song.’ To access my High Priest I have to allow my Torah to speak itself, not some interpretation or preferred personalized version, but the original Torah God breathes into me. It has to express itself for the Yom Kippur service to take place at all.
There are Hasidic stories: one of a coachman who rides his coach into the forest on Yom Kippur to crack his whip in worship of God, another about an unlettered ignoramus in the synagogue who can do nothing but read the Hebrew Alef-Bet over and over – some people read these stories as failures, but the Tzadikim understood as true expressions of authentic Torah that did the work of the High Priest there and then. Not that whip-cracking was the essential Torah, but that the essential Torah may express itself in ways we don’t recognize because we are unused to allowing our guitar to sing its own song while we play ours.
The Book of Judges tells us that the Spirit of God moved Samson[53], which means Samson was also a prophet, even though all his prophecy amounted to astonishing feats of physical prowess, nothing you or I would recognize as Torah or prophecy. I’m not suggesting everyone abandon their Torah studies and go find some physical skill to excel at. What I’m saying is that your Torah may be hidden in the last place you look, because wherever God puts His unique and divine imprint upon us, He covers us with shadow[54] (Radical Re’eh). There’s an astonishing anecdote in the Talmud:
R. Kahana went in and hid under Rav’s nuptial couch where he heard him playing and laughing [with his wife] and doing his business.
He [R. Kahana] said out loud, ‘One would think my father’s mouth had never tasted this dish before!’
Rav answered, ‘Kahana, is that you under the bed? Get out, it’s indecent.’
To which he replied, ‘It’s Torah and I have to learn it.’ (Berachoth 62a)
Rav and R. Kahana were not father and son. It remains unclear from the narrative whether it was Rav or R. Kahana’s Torah that was calling out to be learned, but one of the two was divinely inspired in the act of sexual intimacy. Kahana certainly did not hide under the bed in order to observe his rebbe during sex to learn the Halacha – Laws of Tzniut - Modesty or Derech Eretz – Etiquette; the room was dark and he was hiding under the bed so he could have seen nothing. We can only speculate what precisely he meant with the comment about his rebbe’s mouth never having tasted this dish before, but to me it sounds as though he was talking about TAAM - Geschmack – Taste (Radical Chukath). Taste does not simply mean the flavor or savor of something taken by mouth, does it? There’s a world of taste in your perception and enjoyment of what you consider excellent in Torah, service, worship, music, speech, design, clothing, or in a given social situation. Taste could mean almost anything. His response, ‘It’s Torah and I have to learn it,’ will therefore remain emphatic but obscure. He was clear, however, that it was not Halacha – Law or Minhag – Custom he came to learn, but Torah.
The purpose of Yom Kippur is Atonement, a word much misunderstood. Most Jews associate Yom Kippur with the process of Teshuva – Repentance, a process around which an entire culture has evolved within the Jewish Community that now has a Wikipedia entry of its own. It is described as the return of secular Jews to religious Judaism, and by extension, the return of any sinner to a non-sinning state. Maimonides, in his magnum opus, has a separate section comprising ten chapters on the Laws governing and defining Teshuva – Repentance.
Yom Kippur translates as Day of Atonement. Teshuva – Repentance is not included within the parameters of the word kippur which means cleaning. Clearly, Kippur and Teshuva are different processes. Atonement happens when ZOT enters into the sanctuary and takes over, which is to say, when the Torah inside you is allowed to conduct the proceedings.
The Hasidic masters really understood the core differences between repentance and atonement. Doctor Bernhard, though a young man, was personal physician to King Wilhelm II of Prussia at the end of the 18th century. He was not in any way a religious or practicing Jew, but upon witnessing a medical miracle wrought by Reb Dovidl Lelover[55] in clear defiance of the laws of nature and medicine, he traveled to Lelów to meet the Tzadik. After talking privately with the rebbe for a number of hours, the doctor came out a changed man. He was not a Baal Teshuva – Penitent, he was already a rebbe, the famed Tazdik, Reb Chaim Dovid Doktor of Pietrokov. His process had been atonement; the revelation of ZOT, the divine Torah animating his soul. That’s all it took. It was a matter of a few hours’ work on the part of the rebbe of Lelów to help the secular, medical doctor discover and manifest his real self, his High Priest. Doctor Bernhard did not stop practicing medicine, but he was also one of the famous Polish Rebbes until his passing in 1850.
However, there are other sorts of High Priests than those who perform miracles and teach Torah, and as the following anecdote demonstrates, Reb Dovidl Lelover had a talent for helping them find themselves.
It happened that the Lelover and the Holy Yid[56] were together when the Lelover invited the Yid to take a haircut at the hands of his own personal barber. As soon as the barber began cutting his hair, the Yid was moved beyond words.
‘Let me take him home with me,’ the Yid begged his friend the Lelover. ‘I’ve never experienced anything like it in my life. Can’t you help another barber find his true self and let me have this one?’
‘Unfortunately,’ responded Reb Dovidl, ‘It doesn’t always work.’
Now, while I have no idea of the workings and dynamics of rebbes who help people find and manifest their divinity, and the Lelover Rebbe was unquestionably a genius of that type, I find the second story even more astonishing than the first, because the barber was allowing his personal Torah to sing in the cutting of another man’s hair! The barber had found his atonement, obviously.
There are three elements to the Yom Kippur referred to in the Torah. The day, Yom Kippur, the place inside the Holy of Holies, and the person of the High Priest who was the only one permitted to conduct the service.
We have explained the High Priest to mean the part of us that lives in the ZOT Torah, the life of Life which God breathes into us every moment, but where inside us is the sanctuary located?
Chapter 6 - Kedoshim
Holiness
The LORD spoke to Moses, saying, ‘Speak to the entire assembly of Israel and say to them: “You shall be holy because I, the LORD your God, am holy. Every man shall fear his mother and father, and keep My sabbaths: I am the LORD your God.”’ (Lev. 19:1-3)
Holiness is a concept most religious people seem to grasp intuitively without being able to define it in simple terms[57]. Sanctity is the Latin equivalent of holiness, and is understood to mean something hallowed, which simply brings us back to the word holy. In Jewish literature KODESH – Holy is usually assumed to be a person, thing or time set apart and separated from the ordinary, for the purpose of serving God. Most often sexual boundaries are assumed to be an essential component of holiness.
The Izbicy Rebbe, on the other hand, emphasizes the ‘preparedness’ implicit in the concept of holiness. God commands us to be prepared to drop what we are doing at any time in order to be face to Face with Him. We must be ready, so profoundly and psychologically prepared, that we could be facing God all the time even when we seem to be going about our personal business; and why? Because, as God tells us, I, the LORD your God, am holy, ready to drop whatever I’m doing to be Face to face, in communion with you.
And because this chapter is spoken pointedly to the entire assembly of Israel, and as we have been taught, ‘wherever ten Jews assemble, the Shechina – Divine Presence automatically resides[58]’, we may be compared to ordinary people who have the power to compel our Sovereign to visit us. The command to be holy can therefore be seen as God’s request, ‘Since you have power to compel Me to be with you, be very careful and make sure you do not bring Me to dwell in disgusting places.’
It is significant, according to Izbicy, that the phrase ‘you shall be holy’ is used rather than the simple command form ‘Be holy’[59], because it sounds more like a promise than a command, just as the prophet says:
For as the rain comes down and the snow from the sky, and doesn’t return there until it has watered the earth and made it give birth, bud, and produce seed for the planter and bread for the eater; so it is with My word - that comes from My mouth - it will not return to Me empty, until it has accomplished My desire and has prospered in what I sent it to do. (Isa. 55:10-11)
God has had a plan since before the beginning and we, Israel, are the main idea in that plan: as the Midrash discusses:
Six things preceded Creation; two had actual existence while four remained as creative ideas. Torah and the Throne of Glory actually existed, while the Patriarchs, Israel, the Temple and the identity of the Messiah remained in-potentia, in the Thought. (Genesis Rabba 1:4)
Maimonides in his Guide for the Perplexed examines the concept of God’s Throne of Glory and poses a fascinating question.
I have seen a Midrash attributed to R. Eliezer the Great, chapters known popularly as Pirkei D’Rabbi Eliezer. I have never seen anything quite as bizarre in any of the writings of those who claim to be followers of the Torah of Moses our Teacher. And this - that he could say such a thing. Listen to what he says:
[...] From what is Earth created? From the snow beneath the Throne of Glory, God took some and threw it, as it is written, ‘To the snow He said, ‘Become Earth.’ (Job 27:6)
That was a quote from the Midrash Pirkei D’Rabbi Eliezer, and I have to wonder about this sage; what did he actually believe? Did he believe that creatio-ex-nihilo is a lie; that it is impossible for something utterly new to come into existence without it being preceded by some primordial matter? Is that why he sought to question the origins of Earth? Then what has he achieved with his answer? It begs the simple question, where was the snow beneath the Throne of Glory created from? And the very Throne of Glory itself, where was it created from? [...] What’s more, he seems to be subscribing to the Platonic notion of the Eternity of Matter.
The sages have also written - most peculiarly - saying that the Throne of Glory was created before Creation. Now, if R. Eliezer believes that the Throne is eternal, then he is positing it as a god, not a created, corporeal thing. How then could it be made to turn into something corporeal like the heavens? [...] In summation, we are left with bewildering ideas which can confuse a religious man’s faith very, very thoroughly. I cannot see my way through this Midrash to explain it properly or sufficiently. I’ve only mentioned it here in order to prevent you stumbling over it. (Guide: Vol. II Ch. 26).
I find it very interesting that Maimonides describes the Midrash concerning six things created before Creation as merely peculiar, while calling R. Eliezer’s Midrash unacceptable, heretical and bizarre.
Obviously, Maimonides sees the rabbinic notion that God created things before Creation as a challenge, because it doesn’t fit with his rational approach to Creation and the Laws of Physics. But he doesn’t need to argue or dismiss that idea out of hand since the Throne of Glory can be excused as some sort of metaphor, which Maimonides does not have to explain or probe. It’s an Aggadic Midrash, homiletics, a rabbinic parable or something. R. Eliezer, on the other hand, is saying that physical matter, the Earth, is created out of the snow beneath the Throne, and that hypothesis crosses the all theological boundaries as far as Maimonides is concerned, because he considers this to be the first and most crucial aspect of the Jewish creed: that everything in the Universe, in our physical world, was created out of nothing by God Almighty. Therefore R. Eliezer has to be challenged.
In Radical Shemini we discussed how when we talk about God sitting, we mean that God has descended from a higher place, and has brought His presence down closer to us. In light of this we may understand the Midrash about the Throne of Glory before Creation to mean that God had already lowered Himself before Creation, and that God’s decision to create amounted to a lowering of the Divine, because it suggests that God has Desire. For God to want something is already an act of lowering Himself[60].
R. Eliezer who assumes there was snow beneath the Throne, is merely extending the metaphor. Snow is nothing but water without heat, a metaphor perfectly describing Desire devoid of Passion[61]. R. Eliezer is suggesting that Earth, the dust and clay of which we are made, is derived from the desire God had for us which necessitated the creation of base matter. But clay and dust are themselves a source of depression because they exist to serve life without passion (Radical Tzav), and so must have been created from that part of the Throne devoid of God’s passion – the snow underneath it. The parts devoid of God’s passion are those aspects of Creation God has no taste for, and has certain regrets for having created. Chief among these is Exile, especially internal exile and self-alienation[62] (Radical Vaera), which is responsible for feelings such as despair, despondence, inertia, cynicism, indifference and those characteristics that function by chilling the passions of the soul. Hence R. Eliezer finds snow beneath the Throne which can be cast out as dust and earth.
If the Throne of Glory is a metaphor, then beneath the Throne of Glory is yet another metaphor. According to tradition our souls are also taken from beneath the Throne of Glory[63]. With what we have just said about snow and passionless desire, it may be understood thus. A man and woman begin procreating with passion, desire and heat. They come together and do what they do. But the child is not conceived of that moment of passionate desire; conception happens much later, after the sperm have made a long and arduous journey which may have taken days, through the woman’s body, in search of her ovum. Conception happens long after the coupling pair walked away from their passion. The soul is taken from beneath the Throne of Glory just as the snow was taken from there. It is not a place of light and warmth. It is dark; the darkness from before Creation.
What is the Darkness before Creation? In Radical Bo we discussed the fact that each of us is transparent to God. You are a window in the wall through which I can catch a glimpse of the divine, the way a stained-glass window allows light to shine through it. Here God is referred to as You. Looking at God this way I catch a glimpse of the Infinite[64], and His name is YHV”H.
In Radical Chaye Sarah we discussed what it feels like for a person to feel God inside his or her body, how terrifying that can be and how thrilling. Here God is referred to as I, because here I am in touch with my own prophecy and can feel God speaking through me. Looking at God this way does not allow me to experience His infinite greatness, however intimate and close the feeling may be, for I am looking through the prism of my Self and I am so limited. This is ADONAI, the constricted God[65].
There is a third form of address, when we refer to God in the third person as He. This is EHYEH – I Will Be, and it is associated with the future to come[66]. Here there is no light at all, only Darkness, for nothing exists but Desire for the Light. This is the Darkness preceding Creation, and it roils thick and palpable beneath the Throne of Glory, for it is the corollary of God’s decision to have a desire, the Desire for desire. Desire is for something in the future which does not currently exist, it is a sense of absence and lack.
Very often, perhaps most often, this is our experience of God; the absence of light and the absence of presence; we cannot feel Him and receive no answer when we call. Desires surface in our consciousness devoid of divinity or grace, we feel urges and demands serving the lowest parts of our humanity, drowning us in our own preoccupation with the selfish anodyne and obsessive greed, in pursuit of instant gratification. At such moments who can call up the light or presence of God? Who wants to or even wants to want to feel God at such a time? But it is at those very moments that God promises, EHYEH ASHER EHYEH – I Will Be Who I Will Be, and that is where Israel exists, as was stated in the first Midrash quoted above. The Patriarchs, Israel, the Temple and the Messiah are created before they exist, which is to say they arise in the Divine Thought, in the dark. In the plan since before the beginning God had already made us holy, and holy we will be. And the two commandments following this prediction are: Every man shall fear his mother and father, and keep My Sabbaths, because they represent beginnings and endings, past and future, cause and effect; for parents are our source and the Sabbath is our conclusion. Our parents represent the small picture, while Sabbath represents the big picture (Radical Vayakhel, Emor).
Ultimately, says the Izbicy, God says, ‘You shall be holy because I, the LORD your God, am holy. I breathed Myself into you, therefore you can be nothing else but holy!’
Chapter 7 - Emor
Priesthood
The LORD said to Moses, ‘Say to the priests - the sons of Aaron - saying to them that he shall not make himself TUMA for the dead among his people.’ (Lev. 21:1)
Three times in this one verse the Torah uses ‘saying’ rather than ‘speaking’ or ‘telling’ to convey its message. That in itself is a message. In the biblical tradition, ‘saying’ is the softest form of speech, the quietest and gentlest way of addressing someone. Something is being said very softly here.
As has been discussed previously (Radical Pikudei), we each have as a part of our intellectual, psychological and spiritual personality, a Priest, that aspect of us which is essentially worshipful, standing in perpetual readiness to serve and receive from God. The priest in us elevates all our deeds, even our sins and blunders (Radical Shemini). This Sidra addresses itself directly to that part of us, to the priest who can only listen to the gentlest chiding from God, because it is so vulnerable and unprotected, so raw and unguarded, living as it does in a state of breathless adoration.
It is to this priest, this worshiper that God’s command is directed, says the Izbicy, because it is the part of us in most pain over the state of things in the world[67]. It is the one who observes everything going on in the world in full awareness that it is the good, nurturing and loving God who is the cause of everything; yet who must deal with reality as it exists. God speaks most gently to he or she who lives in the belief that God’s relationship with Creation is one hundred percent benign, and who has to deal with the inexplicable existence of overwhelming evil side-by-side with Divine Providence.
Whereas if people are convinced that things happen by accident, that no One is ultimately in charge of the Universe, they don’t have complaints at God. When they watch events that contradict God’s stated purpose, they shrug it off as the consequence of random or chaotic interactions that are simply obeying the Laws of Nature; unfortunate accidents. But when you believe that everything is Divine Providence, then you may have a struggle to find congruence between your view of the world and actual events.
It is to the believer, the priest that the Torah directs this imperative, ‘that he shall not make himself TUMA for the dead among his people,’ meaning not to develop a sense of grievance, injustice or feeling of ill-treatment in objection to God. The directive is a challenge to the believer to have faith that God’s intention remains entirely benign regardless of the evidence of our eyes. To carry on trusting that God has no bad, no darkness, no malign intentions, no vindictiveness or evil intent in spite of the events unfolding in our lives and everywhere around us.
This can only be said in a whisper, and if ‘saying’ is the softest form of address, then something ‘three-times-said’ is being whispered. God is whispering to us to trust Him that nothing bad has ever happened and that He will not allow it to happen, no matter what we think is happening in the moment. To what may it be compared, asks the Midrash, but to a chef who came and went before the king. The king told him, ‘I decree that henceforth you never again look upon a corpse, for you come and go and see my face. I do not want you defiling my palace.’ So it was that God decreed the priests who enter the holy temple should never make themselves TUMA to the dead[68].
The chef is the person appointed to organize and prepare the king’s feasting and rejoicing, it is his job to add joy to the king’s life and not to be the cause of sadness and depression. Gazing upon the face of death is the opposite of joy. The purpose of the priesthood is twofold; both to open the channels of joy flowing into this world and to give pleasure to God with their service.
Death represents that which can never be fixed, rectified or undone as is discussed in Radical Chukath; anything for which we no longer carry any hope in our heart, is considered dead to us. When we touch or are touched by death we become TUMA because we have internalized the lie that things are what they seem, that history cannot be undone and that what has happened is unalterable. This sort of thinking is stupid; it means we are in a stupor, unconscious and out of touch with God. TUMA means we have forgotten that what passes for reality is an illusion.
Priests are not closer to God than the rest of us, priesthood doesn’t function that way. The priest merely acts as the bridge, the connector or waking consciousness in the mind.
Sleep is defined as a state of unconsciousness from which a person can be aroused. This does not mean their brain or body is not working during sleep, a man remains the same man; there’s lots going on in his mind, but something significant is missing – he is incapable of higher thought when asleep and cannot hold a conversation, concentrate, or perform any sort of task while asleep. You cannot be awake to your consciousness when asleep, and it is the priest who represents your waking consciousness or wakefulness.
We think of wakefulness as being situated in the head somewhere, perhaps in the ‘mind’. This much is clear, without it we are completely disabled. When awake your mind has access to your spirit and soul, because you can think lucidly and direct your thoughts, make conscious choices and take a stand, while in sleep your spirit and soul are disconnected from your mind by the absence of the interlocutor; the priest.
The message this Sidra is whispering to us is the crucial importance of not disengaging the priest, not disabling spiritual wakefulness, not interfering with the connection between mind and spirit – not to defile our thoughts with death – with regrets, resentments and rage. The free and fluid journey we take, that experience we think of as our Lifetime, depends on the health of our inner priest. If wakefulness gets bogged down, the journey stops and we become mired and stuck, because our ability to think clearly, actively and constructively is compromised; we go into negative territory.
As has been said previously, the entire Torah is a code. Everyone can and must apply it all the time, to every situation and occasion. Sidra Emor is a code, and this, the first verse in Emor is an urgent, whispered code. Just as there are things our physical bodies need to survive - we have to eat and drink for example, to sleep and rest - so it is with our minds and our thoughts. We can speak our body’s needs out loud in public, but there are needs which can only be whispered. So listen.
Last week in Radical Kedoshim it was said that Sabbath represents the future, the world–to-come; here we are given to understand why.
King David wrote, ‘When God restores the fortunes of Zion, we will have been dreamers.’ (Ps. 126:1) Our entire narrative will be seen as having been a kind of dream. What sort of dream? The sort that needs interpreting. All our self-knowledge, the whole vast modern field of psychology, psychiatry, analysis, talk-therapy and their branches reveal that the interpretation of our lives is what makes everything real to us; events are merely the dream material, the narrative of our life is not the primary factor – it is how we interpret the narrative which counts. My dream is merely the string on which the pearls of meaning and importance are being strung together. The ancients understood the importance of and knew the secret of dreams: that dreams are not over when you wake up, and dreams are not just stories that happen in your sleep, they contain prophecy (Radical Miketz). The following is one of many stories about dream interpretation told in the Talmud:
Bar Kapara told his dreams to Rebi. ‘I dreamt my arms were chopped off.’
‘You won’t need to work anymore at your manual labor because you’re about to become rich,’ Rebi answered.
‘I dreamt my legs were chopped off.’
‘So rich you won’t need to walk anywhere, you’ll be carried on horseback.’ (Berachoth 56b)
The Izbicy sees Rebi’s dream interpretation as a key to understanding the Torah’s prohibitions. Sabbath Observance and its severe strictures can be interpreted as a hint to the World-to-Come and its abundance, the way the Bar Kapara’s dismemberment nightmare was interpreted as a hint to the coming of wealth and abundance[69].
On the Sabbath virtually every act of creativity and enterprise is forbidden: cooking, making clothes, writing and agriculture; you name it, it’s forbidden!
Ahhhh, but what does the World-to-Come hold? Rabban Gamliel sat and taught, ‘The Land of Israel is destined to bring forth loaves of artisan-bread and soft velvet clothing.’ (Talmud Shabbat 30b)
Thus the prohibitions against manual work on the Sabbath are a foreshadowing of the World-to-Come when manual work will be unnecessary and obsolete. What seems in our dream to be an ever expanding set of restrictions and limitations is not what it seems. We may not bake on the Sabbath, nor are we allowed to make clothing of any sort, because when we wake up from this Sabbath and find ourselves in the world-to-come we will have been dreaming of not needing to work rather than the prohibition against it. This, says the Izbicy, is the Secret of Life.
Because everything that happens in this life is but a dream requiring interpretation. And as it is interpreted, so it actualizes as the person’s reality.
A person who comprehends that everything happening to him is a word from God - that everything lives at the Mouth of God - understands the reason for everything (and can taste the divine in each event) and realizes true Life.
As with bread which provides us with life, the chief life force which comes through the bread is the Word of God in the bread. Whoever eats without understanding this eats as an animal and therefore only takes from the bread the most rudimentary and temporary Life Force. But one who comprehends that it is the Word of God coming through the bread as nourishment, also receives the divine and eternal Life coming through the bread. For Bread - LECHEM (ìçí) has the same letters as the word (çìí) CHALOM - Dream.
Like dreams, bread also requires interpretation. And similarly, so do all the pleasures, for bread is a metaphor describing all the pleasures and good things of this world[70]. (Mei Hashiloach Vol.I – Miketz)
The priest is that part of me which justifies me both in my own eyes and in God’s eyes, always capable and willing to interpret my actions in the best possible light. This does not mean that venal part of me making excuses for my blunders, rather the genius inside me capable of finding that thread of my narrative which when pulled demonstrates that what you complained was a poorly made, ill-sized, too-wide sock, is in fact the perfectly sized and snug fitting sleeve of a fabulous knitted designer jacket.
My priest and confessor is also my champion and counselor. I have to protect him from having to deal with death or else he will not be able to do his job, for when he stops doing his job I become stuck inside a nightmare inside a dream from which I cannot wake.
My ability to think is not responsible for either my thoughts or the actions I take on the basis of my decisions after thinking. My ability to think, my wakefulness is too precious for me to allow it to be touched by death.
When my ability to think is hampered by TUMA, which is to say when the pain of loss, fear of death, grief of tragedy, conflict and unresolved paradoxes overwhelm my waking moments making me incapable of objectivity and unable to reach a fair and balanced assessment of myself in the present moment, my connection to God will also be damaged. The inability to feel faith, optimism and confidence is a mental illness and disability brought on by the crippling of my own priesthood.
Just as we are born with reflexes that keep us breathing and that fight off attempts to suffocate us when something blocks our nose or mouth, we are also born with mental and spiritual reflexes that must keep our connection to God open. And just as certain drugs or medical conditions jeopardize those anti-suffocation reflexes, so do certain thought patterns stifle the flow of energy between us and God blocking the conduits of the spirit.
Should such a blockage occur and should a state of TUMA be acquired, then Sidra Chukath and the Red Heifer provide the solution and cure. But the preparation of the Red Heifer itself requires the ministrations of a Cohen – Priest, so it is absolutely crucial to protect that priest from TUMA.
There is one part of us which must not be shamed, shouted at, abused or threatened. It is arguably the most vulnerable part of our psyche, that part of us which can convince us of our own worthiness. As long as the priest is empowered to do his job, we are capable of living in the vortex of the paradox unscathed. We can at once suffer the pangs of exile while simultaneously believing in God’s benignity, graciousness and compassion. We are still in that very moment when God announced, ‘In one short moment, I abandoned you,’ (Isa. 54:7) because that one short moment hasn’t even passed yet[71].
In return, God announces, ‘You haven’t even sinned yet.’ God always treats us with perfect measure-for-measure. And just as we sit and wait upon His Salvation in the immediate present moment, so God sits and waits a thousand generations for our first sin to forgive. This, the awareness of our mutual waiting is an open conduit, the stream through which pleasure flows from God to us and from us to Him. A thousand generations may have passed but God is still waiting for the first Jew to sin so that He may forgive him or her. While we are still dancing in that very first instant when God whispered, ‘Shhh, wait here, it won’t be but a moment and I’ll be right back…’
Chapter 8 - Behar
Self – versus - Other
‘You shall not oppress one another; but you shall fear your God, for I am the LORD your God.’ (Lev. 25:17)
In a number of places in the Mei Hashiloach the Izbcy rebbe directs his words at those he calls the ‘Great Jews’, men like Moses and other prophets. He suggests they examine their weaknesses and faults for the causes of the Exile, rather than simply blame the plebeians among us for what’s wrong with the Jewish People. In Radical Bo we learned how the unresolved issues among forty-five Israelite leaders mentioned by name (including Moses and Aaron) were interfering with the Exodus, preventing the Israelites from hearing the message of redemption. Here in this Sidra, the Izbicy suggests that the recipient of the command in this verse is not merely the common man, but those he refers to as ‘great and precious souls.’
In the Talmud we read:
Our Rabbis taught: ‘You shall not oppress one another’. Scripture refers to the tyranny of words, for example: If a man is a penitent, one must not say to him, ‘Remember your former deeds.’ If he is the son of converts to Judaism one must not taunt him with, ‘Remember the deeds of your ancestors.’ If he is a proselyte and comes to study the Torah, one must not say to him, ‘Shall the mouth that ate carrion and forbidden food, disgusting crawling things, come to study the Torah from the mouth of God?’ If someone is suffering pain, stricken with illness, or has buried his children, one must not speak to him as the companions spoke to Job, blaming him with lack of faith. (Bava Metzia 58b)
In this prohibition against oppression the Talmud sees the Torah’s urgent command to us to guard our tongues against making others the butt of our jokes or the foil of our wit, to avoid bullying, spiteful talk, or words that wound, shame or defame.
Izbicy disagrees with the Talmud[72]. The Izbicy prefers to read this commandment as a prohibition against seeing another Jew as ‘the other’ (for if you cannot overcome the me–versus–other in your relationships with other Jews, you won’t be able to overcome your tendency to see God as ‘the other’, either - Radical Shoftim). When you see a person do something obviously against the will of God and are overcome with the desire to denounce and call down judgment upon them, God commands, ‘You shall not oppress’, for having being commanded to ‘love your neighbor as yourself,[73]’ how could you delude yourself into thinking God actually wants you to denounce them? God wants us to treat each other with compassion, to pray for someone else in their need; how could you think God wants you to stand accusing them? In fact, by doing so, you’re saying that God wants you to denounce yourself, but if that were true you’d already have been denounced, because you have surely done enough to deserve it. If God wanted to look at your life with a judgmental or even a perfectionist eye, how well do you think it would stand up to close scrutiny? God never told a single soul about any of your sins, isn’t it obvious He wants them kept hidden?
The Izbicy says, when we criticize and condemn someone’s actions we are making two false assumptions. First, we are assuming that we are free of the blemish we see in the other person and that we are therefore more desirable in God’s eyes. Second is our assumption that it is now God’s desire to expose and denounce the other person.
But it is the accuser who stands rebuked, not the accused. God will show you that it is decidedly not His desire to have you reveal or inflate other people’s secret sins. It is God’s desire that you hide other people’s sins the way you would your own, with as much guile, deceit and cunning as you invest in maintaining your own image. He wants you to advocate on behalf of someone you may have seen sinning, to speak up for them and justify their actions to others. And here the Izbicy adds one sentence, ever reminding us why he is considered such an extraordinary voice in Torah: ‘For you can never properly judge another man guilty, for perhaps his desires are that much stronger than yours? Or perhaps this thing he did was permitted to him, for there are many things that are forbidden to you that are permitted to him.’
This Sidra has three main components, Shmitta – Sabbatical Year, Yoivel – Jubilee and Ribbit – Usury. The Izbicy associates them with the three basic components of the universe discussed in the third chapter of Sefer Yetzira, i.e. Space, Time and Soul[74], because these are the three things we feel we own and can rely upon.
The commandment to observe the Sabbatical year forces us to relinquish possession of any land we hold in title. Fields must be left fallow and orchards unattended. Everything growing from the earth is legally ownerless. Even cattle and wild animals have access to my property if they come to feed on its produce; I have no special rights to it. It is a salutary lesson that everything belongs to God. This corresponds to the element of OLAM - World.
The commandment to free all Hebrew slaves in the fiftieth, Jubilee year forces us to relinquish possession of another soul. Even if a slave wants to continue in bondage to his owner, he is freed against his will. Only God, the Creator, has the right to own someone in perpetuity. This corresponds to the element of NEFESH – Soul.
The prohibition against usury, charging interest on loans whether of money or goods, has a single fundamental principle, as we read in the Talmud: R. Nachman said: The general principle of usury is this: ‘Any payment for waiting is forbidden’[75]. What makes usury forbidden is the assumption that the borrower should pay for the lender’s waiting period. But the Torah says that when a lender is paid for the period of time during which the borrower uses the money any interest accrued is forbidden gain, because God is the master of time, we cannot own it; even our own time is not ours. This corresponds to the element of SHANA – Year.
In another sense, says the Izbicy, the three commandments in the Sidra also speak to the landless, the poor and the slave, reminding us that even when we are in the direst straits, whether we are imprisoned, hungry and homeless, or unable to find someone who will lend us enough to help us get back onto our feet, God is still in charge of the world. All property is a legal fiction. God never lets go. All wealth is on loan from God and all people belong solely to Him, no matter whose collar or yoke they are forced to wear.
A large section of this Sidra is devoted to the sale and subsequent ‘redemption’ of property. Houses or fields, in and outside urban areas, might be sold to buyers belonging to other tribes, but under certain conditions a member of the original tribe, or the original owner, might force the buyer to sell it back. Most property automatically reverted to its original owners in the Jubilee year, and so contracts and bills of sale took this into account.
As was discussed in Sidra Mishpatim, after the conquest the Land of Canaan was divided among the Twelve Tribes, which meant that for a Jew to be sold into slavery, he had to have previously wasted his inheritance, broken the law by stealing and accrued debts he could not pay. Here the Izbicy extends and plays with the metaphor, as follows.
It is written: If a man sells a dwelling house in a walled city, he may redeem it within a year of its sale. For a full year he shall have the right of redemption. If it is not redeemed within a full year, then the house in the walled city shall belong in perpetuity to the buyer, throughout his generations; it shall not revert in the Jubilee. (Lev. 25:29-30)
The ‘dwelling in a walled city’ referred to in the verse above is a person’s tongue, guarded by walls of teeth and lips[76]. The tongue can cause its owner to lose everything. In almost all cases after selling a house or a field the seller can force its redemption by buying it back. But even when he fails to do so, the Jubilee year eventually trumps the sale and the property automatically reverts – except a house in a walled city.
There are many different sins for which the punishment may be the temporary loss or forfeiture of a person’s property. Perhaps his sin was so severe that he was sold in slavery to repay the damages he caused. Yet in both cases the assumption is that with time, when Jubilee comes around as it always eventually does, the property will revert to him, or he will be emancipated from slavery. ‘Doing Time’ means that eventually the time is done, and the full sentence, having been carried out, is finished.
But when the sin was committed with his tongue, says the Izbicy, which is to say, if it was not a sin against God or a trespass against the law or society but rather a personal insult or shaming act, then the victim may acquire all the sinner’s rights and privileges, leaving the sinner nothing with which to redeem himself.
This is a repeated theme in Izbicy Torah, as we read in Sidra Ki Tetze:
If two men are fighting and the wife of one of them comes to rescue her husband from his assailant, and she reaches out and seizes him by his privates, you shall cut off her hand. Show her no pity. (Deut. 25:11-12) This is a metaphor. When a person (during an argument, and even when acting unthinkingly out of fear or rage) mortifies his neighbor by exposing his secret weakness, revealing some fault of which he is ashamed, this is the meaning of the phrase ‘and she grabs his privates’ i.e. something of which he is ashamed[77]. You should cut off her hand, meaning deprive him of all his merits. ‘The hand’ always means the right hand, the one which holds the merits. (Mei Hashiloach Vol.I – Ki Tetze)
The Izbicy explores similar ideas in discussing the role of the Serpent in the Creation narrative. Humans have two basic characteristics which the Serpent attempted to exploit and highlight: our capacity for boredom and our inquisitiveness. Angels have neither. The Serpent meant to expose our propensities as systemic weaknesses to be ashamed of, and it succeeded. As soon as we ate of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil we experienced shame at having done so. The Serpent’s punishment, therefore, was to have its hands and legs cut off[78]. Similarly we read:
If you make Me an altar of stones, do not make them hewn. For once you wave your sword over them they are defiled. Do not ascend on steps to My altar, that you not expose your nakedness on it. (Ex. 20:23) All Jewish hearts are referred to by God as ‘My altar’. This explains the prohibition against using steps to ascend to it. It is forbidden to anyone to consider himself better or higher than another Jewish soul. This is why the Torah warns, ‘that you not expose your nakedness upon it,’ meaning that you not end up embarrassing yourself. For if you are haughty over another person the result is always that you descend to a level lower than the one you were haughty over. And the other person is given your higher levels. (Mei Hashiloach Vol.I. - Yithro)
This is why the Torah in our Sidra says: If it is not redeemed within a full year, because it is crucial that a man make amends within the year to someone he has embarrassed and shamed. We Jews are taught to believe that everything good we’ve ever done is stored somewhere to our credit. All the Mitzvoth – Commandments we have obeyed and all the Aveiroth – Sins we have avoided are recorded in some book of merits, piled high on a scale to balance our accounts, readied against the Day of Judgment, when we have to stand before the One True Judge.
Now imagine, says the Izbicy, you shame someone during a public dispute. In the heat of arguing and fighting you expose his private disgrace or reveal his shameful secrets. In an instant, all your merits and debits change hands. Whatever lay in the balance in your favor is transferred to his account; your credit is reduced to zero. Whatever sins and debts he owed, those very sins you may have exposed, are now yours to own. Where previously you had no dishonor, wickedness or blame showing in your balance, your account is now deeply overdrawn.
You have a year to appease him and make things right. This does not necessarily mean you have twelve calendar months, it means one complete cycle in the event-life of your relationship. It means making restitution and amends to your victim.
Where may one find such Rebbes today?
Chapter 9 - Bechukothai
Before The Beginning – After The End
All tithes of herd or flock, whatever passes under the staff, the tenth shall be holy to God.’ (Lev. 27:32)
In times past, after the performance of all burial rites had it was customary to provide mourners with a drink of wine referred to as the Cup of Condolence. There is no precise translation for the Hebrew TANCHUMIM, and though the words Consolation, Comfort, Cheer and Condolence are most commonly used, none quite reflects the Hebrew, for TANCHUMIM implies a change of heart and a change of mind; a complete reversal of mood. In the following Midrash, God asks the Jewish People to accept the Cup of Condolence from His hand, to drink it as a symbol that the Exile is finally over and done with; that we are consoled for all the grief, pain and loss suffered during the Exile; that the moment of crisis has passed.
Afterwards the Holy, Blessed One will say to Israel, ‘Children, the time has come for you to accept this Cup of Cheer from Me.’
Israel will reply, ‘Master of the Universe, it began with You becoming enraged at us, expelling us from Your home and exiling us among the gentiles. Now You wish to appease us?’
God will respond, ‘Let me explain. This is what it’s like. A man married his sister’s daughter. Once he grew angry at her and threw her out of the house. After a number of days passed he approached her in order to appease her, but she said, ‘Previously you got angry at me and threw me out of your house, now you’re coming to make up with me?’ The man responded to his niece, saying, ‘In case you’re thinking that after you left my home I’ve been there without you, the truth is that I haven’t entered my own house since.’
So God says to Israel, ‘Children, since the day I destroyed My house in the world below, I have not entered into My house in the world above. I’ve been sitting idle, doing nothing. And what’s more,’ God says to the Jewish People. ‘If you don’t believe Me when I say I haven’t entered My own home, just pass your hand over My head and you’ll see it’s completely drenched with dew.’
Is it not written, ‘For my head is drenched with dew, my locks with shards of night.’ (Cant. 5:2) (Tana D’Bei Eliyahu - Zuta Cap. 21)
By implication, the Midrash is hinting, we are not merely God’s closest kin acquired through marriage, we are a-priori family. He can no more have divorced us than a man could have thrown his sister’s daughter out of the house and onto the street. We are more than ‘just His wife’, we’re also His niece, and any attempt at divorcing us would be considered irredeemably offensive and taboo. Still, God doesn’t ask us to believe Him when He says He was only pretending to have done with us, God challenges us to touch His head and feel the dampness, to see for ourselves that since exiling us He has not been home, has not slept in His bed nor eaten at His own table. He has been in Exile, too.
What could it possibly mean, to touch God’s head, to feel His hair? It means that our sages, of blessed memory, were not afraid to push a metaphor as far as it would go, and nor should we be.
What is it like when God is at home, dwelling where He wants to, with His sister[79] and her daughter? The brief period in Jewish History when God was ‘at home’, so to speak, was during the reign of King Solomon in the tenth century before the common-era, approximately 3000 years ago.
When God dwells in His Place there is a sumptuous Revelation of Canticles (Song of Songs), we are allowed license; being invited to touch God’s head and feel the dew in His hair. We live in a divine embrace which means we can sense the presence of God in our own bodies. But when He is exiled there is the withering Revelation of Ecclesiastes, all is Vanity of Vanities and we dwell bereft, like God, in David’s Ever-Toppling Booth[80], trembling and frightened at the future that may befall, aware more than anything of God’s absence, when there isn’t a single day which isn’t more cursed than its previous[81].
Almost every Jew, no matter how little he or she knows of Judaism’s sacred liturgy, has heard of the Kaddish prayer. Astonishingly, hardly anyone pays attention to the words. It’s a great shame so few people can even translate it into comprehensible language; they are missing something important, for the Kaddish contains some radical ideas.
The first part, talking of the greatness of God, ends with the following: ‘Above and beyond all blessings, hymns, praises and consolations that are uttered in the world! And say, Amen.’
Now what do we mean when we say that God is above and beyond all the consolations that are uttered in the world?
Rashi, in the eleventh century[82], suggested two readings of the Kaddish[83]; both pivot upon the Midrash quoted above. In the future God is going to comfort and console each of us individually for the exile. Not with a single consolidated Cup of Condolence that some virtual or representative ‘Israel’ is invited to drink on our behalf, but as a personal gesture of empathy, the way we do when we are present in a house of mourning, when we sit with the mourner and listen. We sit and remain present, waiting quietly and sharing our presence with the person experiencing unspeakable grief, silently expressing our willingness to listen or speak, as the mourner may indicate. We offer food or whatever else the mourner might need or desire. The proffered Cup of Condolence symbolizes our desire to ease the mourner’s burden however we might.
So, in the future, God will put His arm around your shoulder, allow you to sob your feelings of grief and loss into His bosom, hold you until the tears have passed and whisper into your ears the words you so desperately need to hear; those very whispered words of healing which only He can utter. And so it will be with every single Jew who ever lived, whatever he or she may have suffered, God will comfort and cheer them. And this is the meaning of the Midrash, God saying, ‘Now is the time to accept the Cup of Condolence from My hand.’
The second reading is this. When God says, ‘Touch My hand and feel My hair,’ it will suddenly occur to us that God is, and always was, the world’s chief mourner. And once we internalize that we were not the real victims of history, that in the cosmic charade we called history it was God who suffered most, we will be moved to offer God the Cup of Consolation, each of us on our own. Can you imagine! Every Jew who ever walked this earth will say, ‘God I am here for You. Say what You need to say, feel what You need to feel, I am listening.’ And God will receive the Cup of Consolation at our hand, and drink, and be comforted after all the losses and grief He endured, and the cosmic mood will change. The Kaddish extols God’s endurance as much as His greatness, for on that Day of TANCHUMIM it will become clear to the whole world how far beyond our comprehension was the extent of God’s suffering and how far beyond our ken His compassion and empathy.
In Radical Shemini we discussed how the diminution of the moon on the fourth Day of Creation is actually a reference to the blemish which God built into the core of every creature. We are all born with character defects, imperfections and weaknesses, as the Prophet Isaiah put it: ‘I called you a sinner from the womb.’ (Isa. 48:8) Everyone carries a basic flaw which God expects us to fix, even though we are all justified in complaining: ‘Why did You create me flawed?’
This explains God saying, ‘Atone for Me; I have sinned by diminishing the moon.’ God is the owner of the sin-offering, He is the penitent, so to speak, who needs the sacrificial atonement at each New Moon.
What we did not discuss in Radical Shemini is how the flaw built into every creature is but a reflection of the Tzimtzum – Diminution of the Divine Self: God constricting Himself in order to create the world by making room for Desire, Need, Want and Emptiness. One cannot conceive any greater Tzimtzum of the Divine, than that willing creation of a void within Himself to experience emptiness and desire, resembling nothingness, nullification and darkness in the center of Light[84].
Why did God diminish Himself with the sensation of desire for us? Because we called to Him, we lonely, wretched, passionate Jews, we precious, lucky, creative few who pant after God, longing to worship and exult in His Kingdom, in the Land of Life - we beckoned and seduced with our promise to make Him glorious and transcendent; we persuaded God with our craving for intimacy and closeness. We arose thus in the Thought of God, convincing Him that we would make it worth His while to go through this narrative-rich, blood-sodden epigram called The World, if only we are given the opportunity to prove it. Because we are absolutely certain we can Sanctify His Name in Public, affirming God’s holiness in the heart of all human beings.
Abraham is not the first to throw himself into the abyss in order to sanctify the Name of God, God does it first, risking everything by throwing Himself into Creation.
In Radical Vayechi in reference to the Tribe of Simeon it was discussed how you can’t win any spiritual dividends unless you are prepared to risk something precious upon the result of a venture with an uncertain outcome. In this life, no one can amass any profit or advantage if they insist on keeping their capital and spiritual kernel intact. Being committed to God does not mean always trying to protect my place in the World-to-Come. If my relationship with God revolves around me ensuring myself a good and comfortable place in the World-to-Come, it is not God I hold in greatest esteem - it’s me.
What is true of us Jews is doubly true of God, for it is God who is the greatest Risk-Taker of all. He staked His reputation, His very Godhead and Godness on the Jews and our faith in Him, as is discussed in Radical Haazinu (also Radical Bo, Beshalach, Zot Habracha).
In essence spiritual risk-taking is only sinful if you lose the bet, forfeiting whatever it was you used as a stake in the game of chance. As long as the outcome is not decided, nothing is lost. The Tribe of Simeon has gambled the most, is the most sorely tested by time and circumstance, and stands to gain the most in the end if it wins. For that is the nature of risk-taking, as Jacob our patriarch taught us (Radical Toldot, Naso), when the moment comes to gamble everything on one throw of the bones, a single toss of the dice or flip of the cards, a Jew has to be ready to jump in and take that risk. So Jacob bests his brother Esau again and again, and perhaps because he seems so timid and risk-averse, Esau does not take him for a gambler. Isaac certainly does not, until Jacob walks away from the table holding all the winnings, the firstborn privileges, the land and its inheritance, and of course, the blessing of Blessings and the power to bless others.
All this we learn from God, for all these risks were originally taken by God in creating the world.
We still convince God that the world is worth creating every day; that you and I will make it worth God’s patience and goodwill to have embarked on this endeavor.
But the creation of the world was a very risky business; in fact it was a sin, for to risk your safety, even in order to sanctify the Name of God, is a sin - unless the Torah specifically commands you to do so[85].
Abraham was the first to throw himself into a furnace in order to sanctify the Name of the Holy Blessed One. It is therefore very troubling to learn that his self-sacrifice was not even considered meritorious, as we read in the Midrash: Abraham was only saved from the fiery furnace in the merit of Jacob, as it written, ‘Therefore, thus says God to the House of Jacob who redeemed Abraham.’ (Isa. 29:22) Jacob redeemed Abraham.’ (Gen. Rabba 63:2) Once it becomes clear that Abraham was not commanded to martyr himself for the Sanctification of the Name of God, but that by offering himself to be cast into the blast furnace he is regarded as one who inflicts wounds upon himself, all of Jewish history becomes incomprehensible - until I see Abraham mirroring God. There is a price for taking a risk, especially one such as Abraham took. It has to undergo a process of Birrurin – Clarification; was it truly done in Heaven’s Name, or not?
When you attempt to mirror God you’re letting yourself in for a lot of Birrurin – Clarification - an infinite amount, if truth be told. So Abraham is allowed to survive for the time being, but the process of Birrurin – Clarification goes on and on. Martyrdom after martyrdom, cruel destruction-testing after cruel destruction-testing down the generations, as we Jews testify with our blood and pain to the Oneness and Unity of God.
This week’s Sidra is almost wholly taken up with blessings and curses, especially the threatening and blood-curdling curses. The direst threats and promises of Jewish martyrdom are written starkly in thirty-three verses of disastrous predictions: ‘You will perish among the nations; the land of your enemies will devour you.’ (Lev. 26:33) But the final chapter deals with the matter of Erechin – Valuations and Endowments that a person might offer to the Temple. The Izbicy explains the connection between the chapter of punishments and the chapter of valuations. Their juxtaposition tells us that no matter what doom may hang over us, we can redeem ourselves with acts of charity. Belief in a predetermined and inescapable evil fate is alien to Judaism. Money can indeed solve most crises[86], provided the money is not used to bribe one’s way out of taking responsibility for a crime. But we are allowed to interfere with the processes of Fate, especially our own fates, by tilting balances in our own favor through redemptive acts.
And then the Book of Leviticus ends on the following note: All tithes of herd or flock, whatever passes under the staff, the tenth shall be holy to God. He [the tither] is not to be concerned whether it is good or bad, nor shall he exchange it; for if he does exchange it, then both it and its substitute shall become holy. It shall not be redeemed. These are the commandments that the LORD commanded Moses for the people of Israel on Mount Sinai. (Ibid. 27:32-4)
When a farmer comes to tithe his flock or herd, the tenth animal is chosen at random. He cannot then say, ‘Oh, that’s a poor specimen, I’d prefer the holy one to be of a much higher quality. Here, I’ll put that one back into the flock and substitute a better one for the tithe.’ God chooses, and so what may appear to have been a random act - for the sheep and cattle did not decide among them which would be the tenth to pass beneath the herder’s rod – was an act of God. This, suggests the Izbicy, applies across the board. Whenever we see someone apparently unworthy elevated to prominence, it is not incumbent upon us to speak badly of them, to inform or enlighten people to their true worth. Surely God has a reason for choosing whom He chooses[87], which brings us back to the theme of this Sidra.
Abraham was merely the first in a chain of martyrs culminating in and epitomized by the martyrdom of Rabbi Akiba.
Rabbi Akiba is discussed in a teaching by Rabbi Shimshon of Ostropoli who was himself a Jewish Martyr. Shimshon was murdered in 1648 at Polonnoye, Volhynia, during the Chmielnicki uprising which was touted as a Ukrainian revolt against Polish dominion, but was just another excuse to butcher Jews. To this day the ‘heroic’ Bogdan Chmielnicki’s savage and wanton extirpation of Jews is considered to be one of the most traumatic events in our history. Within eighteen months over three hundred Jewish shtetls, villages and townships were destroyed and about a fifth of Polish Jewry perished. It was the greatest calamity the Jews of Lithuania, Poland and the Ukraine were to experience until the rise of Hitler. Persecutions were characterized by ‘hitherto-unknown atrocities’. Children were dismembered or thrown into the fire before the eyes of their mothers, women were burned alive, men were skinned and mutilated.
Hitherto-unknown atrocities are generally considered a requirement which must be demonstrated by all applicants being considered for entry into the historical records of Jew Hatred under the Jobs-Description Act.
Apparently the Romans were good at that kind of thing, too. In this story, the Roman emperor Hadrian condemns ten rabbis to death for the sin of the Biblical Ten Tribes who sold their brother Joseph into Egypt, as narrated in Genesis (Cap. 37), some fifteen or so hundred years previously.
R. Haninah b. Tradyon was wrapped in his Torah scroll and burned alive. Cool wet sponges were placed artfully around his heart to ensure he not die too quickly. As he was being burnt, he told his students he could see the letters of the Torah scroll flying back up to heaven.
Rabban Shimon b. Gamliel and Rabbi Ishmael the High Priest were murdered together in public, at one of those amphitheater spectacles the Romans specialized in staging. R. Ishmael said, ‘I am a priest, son of the High Priest, kill me first that I not have to watch the death of my friend.’
R. Shimon b. Gamliel begged, ‘I am a prince, son of the Prince of Israel, kill me first that I not have to watch the death of my friend.’
‘Draw lots,’ said the Roman Speculator - the man charged with organizing public executions in a tasteful manner. They cast lots and it fell upon R. Shimon. The executioner immediately took an axe and hacked off his head. R. Ishmael, crying and moaning, picked it up and held it to his bosom, ‘O holy mouth, trusted mouth, holy mouth, trusted mouth, pearls dropped from these your lips. Who buried them in dust? Who filled your tongue with dust and ashes…?’ He was not allowed to finish his speech before they prepared to chop off his head too, but his voice had carried, he’d caught the eye of Hadrian’s daughter and so the sword was stilled. ‘Spare him,’ she beseeched her father. ‘He is so beautiful I cannot bear to see him perish. Oh, my god, will you just look at him?’
Her father said, “No problem, you can have his face.”
“Ooo, yes, Daddy,’ she said eagerly, and sat watching while the men with the flensing knives began painstakingly removing R. Ishmael’s face. As they moved up beyond his brow, to his forehead and the soft, sweet spot where he was used to place the Tefillin, he began bellowing. ‘NO, NO!’
Heaven and earth trembled at the cry.
The knife slid deeper under the skin and again R. Ishmael screamed, ‘NO, NO!’ The Throne of Glory first shook and rattled, then vibrated moving and sliding across the floor of Pure Marble as wave after wave of shuddering horror bent the very fabric of time and space.
Angels began shouting at God, ‘How can You let this happen? This man to whom You entrusted all Your secrets, this holy sage is being butchered by that wicked monster; is such the reward for Torah?’
A Heavenly Voice was heard all over the world. An echo of the Primordial Shriek of Tzimtzum was felt around the skies and stars, and a command came out of the Nowhere: ‘If I hear even one single sound of protest, one more complaint, but a murmur of dissent, I will turn this whole sorry mess back to Chaos and Void. Do you hear, DO YOU HEAR?[88]’
R. Akiba was special. You can tell he was special, because he had a unique and special death; his skin and then the flesh underneath was flayed and shredded with iron combs until it hung off his bones, another of those good old ‘hitherto-unknown atrocities’ we read about so often. Akiba is the top line entry in the field of Jewish scholarship called Martyrology which, as with Holocaust Studies, only developed because it would be a pity to waste so rich an opportunity for the advancement of Jewish Studies, Departments, Chairs and an Endowments.
As was discussed at the end of Radical Lech L’cha, Rabbi Akiba is God’s guilty pleasure. And no wonder. All Akiba wanted, all he ever dreamt of, was to die in pain for the sanctification of God’s Name.
And here is what Shimson of Ostropli had to say about Rabbi Akiba. The teaching contains a few too many ‘it is well-knowns’ for modern tastes, because Shimshon was speaking and writing for scholars who were already familiar with the sources in the literature. One must assume there was indeed a time when everyone was familiar with these details. Translating Ostropoli’s work into readable English is a particular challenge because almost every paragraph involves a play upon the Hebrew letters of a verse, a technique scholars prefer to call ‘hermeneutical-numerology’. Conveying the essence of his ideas into English also means having to explain kabbalistic matters which he takes for granted, vast fields of study have therefore to be compressed into a few readable sentences.
The first idea in Ostropoli teaching is this: As was discussed in Radical Shemini, God asks us to atone for His sin in diminishing the moon, a sin that may be understood as a reference to the blemish which God built into the core of every creature. We are all born with character defects, imperfections and weaknesses which God, nevertheless demands that we do our very utmost to fix. And yet, as was discussed, through the deaths of Nadab and Abihu and the unfolding of that tragic narrative, the Sin-Offering ritual was never properly performed and God did not receive the atonement He asked for.
But that weakness which exists in all creatures, and bleeds like an unfast color through the flawed fabric of our lives, has cosmic repercussions. As a result of it Joseph ended up alone with Potiphar’s wife, after having been sold into slavery by his brothers who felt he was driving a wedge between them and their father on earth as He is in heaven. Joseph, who was seventeen years old at the time and maddened with lust and power, did not have sex with Potiphera but he did orgasm. He grabbed hold of himself while trying to contain his lust but ten drops of sperm leaked out from between his fingers, mingling with the dust and earth of Egypt, two hundred and fifty million spermatozoa, each fully capable of engendering a new life were wasted and absorbed into the soil of a foreign land and as a result millions, perhaps billions of souls were doomed to die before being born.
When Joseph’s father, Jacob, was married to Leah at the age of eighty-four he had not yet had an orgasm in his life. Reuben, the first-born, was literally the first-fruit of Jacob’s loins. Now here in Egypt was Joseph, a mere seventeen years of age, stripped of his nobility and potency because of his brother’s treachery. Jacob’s secret name was The Sun, and Joseph’s secret name should have been The Moon, but it was ruined; everything was spoiled, diminished and dimmed. After Joseph’s loss of sacred-soul-sperm, the Moon was but a pale and insignificant reflection of the Sun, incapable of redeeming itself or shedding light, it no longer had any light of its own, and was only capable of reflecting the Sun. Joseph would never become Twelve Tribes. All that remained to him were two drops of sperm, that, when Joseph eventually married and begat two sons, would become the Tribes of Menasseh and Ephraim.
God says, ‘Bring an atonement for Me, since I diminished the Moon,’ referring not only to the Moon in the sky and the Fourth Day of Creation, but to the fact that God is implicated in the sale of Joseph into Egypt and his subsequent diminution. Joseph and his descendents would never recover their status. Every attempt at national leadership would end in disaster, from the fall of the House of Joseph when we all became slaves in the Egyptian Exile after the death of Jacob, to the divisive rendering of the whole Jewish national identity under Jeroboam ben Nabat of the Tribe of Ephraim, which occurred after the death of King Solomon when the united Israelite commonwealth was split into two never-to-be-reconciled kingdoms. And in the future, when Joseph attempts to produce the Messiah, he will fail again. Messiah ben Joseph will be killed, only the Messiah ben David from the Tribe of Judah can succeed.
After the brothers sold Joseph into slavery they had to make sure no one would tell their father, Jacob, what had happened, so they swore an oath of secrecy. For the sacred oath to accumulate sufficient power to prevent Jacob discovering the truth, such a cabal requires ten members, and there were only nine brothers present at the sale. What they did was to implicate God, binding Him by their oath not to reveal to Jacob what had happened. God allowed Himself to become the tenth conspirator, and for the next twenty-two years Jacob was denied any prophecy. God did not speak with Jacob again until news of Joseph’s survival was brought to him from Egypt during the years of famine. Had Jacob received prophecy during those twenty-two years he would instantly have known that Joseph was alive. How could he not - Joseph’s light was shining brightly from one end of the world to the other - Jacob could not have missed seeing him.
Gods asks, ‘Atone for Me, since I diminished the Moon,’ expressing a desire to expiate His guilt for acceding to the brother’s wicked plot, which resulted in the permanent diminution of Joseph. The sin-offering brought when the Tabernacle was dedicated was never properly consumed, it was not eaten and God did not receive forgiveness. The sin remained un-expiated until Hadrian came along and decided to do the job for God.
Why did God not settle for that first sin-offering? Why were events so arranged to prevent it being properly consumed? Well, as was said previously, we called to God, beckoning and seducing Him into the act of Creation with our craving for intimacy and closeness with Him. We convinced God to take the risk, but everything has to come Measure-for-Measure and our longing for God is not by itself sufficient to balance the Divine Constriction or Tzimtzum necessary for Creation to happen. There’s no nice or appropriate way of saying what I am about to say, no words to cover up the shocking and improper anthropomorphism, but I have no choice. It must be stated. God creating the world required God to want to die a little, to reduce Himself a little, tear away some of His Light. Tzimtzum runs counter to the Biblical narrative and childlike acceptance of God’s perfection. But that is the only way we have of understanding the shape of the World we experience. So, please, read on.
God’s Tzimtzum meant there was already someone who wanted to die for God, to be reduced and torn to bits for God. It meant there would be someone on earth whose only real ambition was to suffer in agony for God. That person was Rabbi Akiba, whose greatest fear was that he might die a natural and painless death. Before Creation there was one soul screaming to be tortured in worship of God, dying to be born so that it might die again and again in agony for God; and that soul was Akiba.
The beckoning and seduction came from Akiba whose soul offered itself Measure-for-Measure, convincing God to explore and endure the pain and agony of Tzimtzum, to make room for the world to happen. That requirement of Measure-for-Measure was what made Akiba so crucial to the whole enterprise of Creation.
But why did it have to be in that particular generation and not say, during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar at the time of the destruction of the First Temple, or in Egypt during the Exile there? Why does this expiation only begin in the generation of the Mishnaic sages in the first and second centuries C.E.? Might not ten of the prophets who were exiled to Babylon in 586 B.C.E. have substituted for Joseph’s ten brothers, just as well? Were not Ezekiel, Daniel, Ezra and Nehemiah, Obadiah, Joel, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi, Mordechai and many others equally worthy? Why did God have to wait so long?
The answer first begs the question: who says that a human may stand in for God, as atonement? And, should it even be possible, who could be holy or great enough to stand in for God?
At the time of the fall of the Second Temple and for the next two hundred years conditions were ripe for Divine Atonement. What had not existed around the time of the fall of the First Temple had now evolved: Rabbinic Judaism and the great academies of Jerusalem, Yavne, Lod, Bnei-Brak, Usha, Shefaram, Beit Shearim, Sepphoris and Tiberias. It was in these great Yeshivas that the Oral Law was studied and developed, where the rules of exegesis evolved and were codified. Competing rabbinic schools arose, advocating different rules and regulations for the development of the Law. Sages taught their students to read sacred texts and uncover the codes hidden therein. Once such sage was Nachum Ish Gamzu, a Tanna of the first century C.E. who was the teacher of Rabbi Akiba, and who taught him the exegetical principles of Inclusion and Exclusion (Ribbui u-Mi'ut). These principles of Inclusion and Exclusion were later taught in the School of R. Akiba. What this meant was that the student could look for a superfluous word such as the definite article ‘the’ or the conjunction ‘also’ in a biblical verse, and deduce that something besides the plain meaning of the verse is being taught; the principle of Inclusion – something else is being included - besides the plain text. The Exclusion principle works the other way round: a superfluous conjunction such as ‘but’, ‘yet’ or ‘still’ in the verse hints at restrictions beyond those stated in the text.
The Talmud describes one student in the academy of R. Akiba whose thesis was an attempt to ascribe added meaning to every single use of the word ‘the’ in the Torah[89]; a massive undertaking when you consider that the first verse in Genesis reads, ‘In the beginning God created ‘the’ Heavens and ‘the’ Earth.’
‘The’ Heavens would mean God created something in addition to the Heavens. ‘The’ Earth would mean something in addition to the Earth, and so on. The hopeful exegete would then have to deduce what, in addition to Heaven and Earth, were also created in that first verse.
Shimon H’Amsuni the doctoral student whose ambitious thesis this was, certainly had his work cut out for him. And he got amazingly far with it. He was deep into the last of the Five Books of Moses, the Book of Deuteronomy, before encountering an insurmountable obstacle in the verse: ‘Fear the LORD your God.[90]’ The verse contains the word ET – ‘The’ and is therefore Inclusive. But what or who could possibly be included in the fear of God?
Shimon H’Amsuni had to abandon his thesis after having worked on it for many, some say twenty-two, years[91]. But when R. Akiba was apprised of the problem he provided a simple solution. What could possibly be added to the fear of God? Why, fear of the Torah scholar, naturally. A person has to show as much respect, awe and fear of offending a scholar as he might for God Himself; that’s the inclusivity of the word ET in that verse.
At the very instant these words came out of Akiba’s mouth, a great ringing and clanging was heard in Heaven, doors slammed shut and wheels began to grind, and the Emperor Hadrian awoke with a new worm crawling inside his head, the sin of the Ten Tribes. The Oral Torah had provided the perfect mechanism for expiation of God’s guilt: Akiba, as the world’s greatest Torah scholar, would stand in for God under the rubric of Inclusivity derived from the verse itself.
None of the late, great prophets or the earliest of the Rabbis had learned or taught the exegetical principles of Inclusion and Exclusion (Ribbui u-Mi'ut) on the verse in question, so the substitution of R. Akiba for God could not have happened a thousand or even a hundred years earlier.
But isn’t it a bit of a coincidence that the very rabbi who first taught the breakthrough reading of the ‘Fear the LORD your God’ verse should also be its protagonist and executor?
This is where R. Shimshon Ostropoli explains that Akiba was from a family of converts and thus a representative of an altogether different spiritual plane than his contemporaries. Everyone knows, says R. Shimshon, converts are products of the tenth Sephira; of Malkhut – Sovereignty.
The mention of a Sephira (or the plural Sephiroth) invokes an area of the Kabbalah least amenable to simple English translation. Without a massive digression into the esoteric doctrines of Jewish mysticism it isn’t really practical to undertake an explanation of the Sephiroth. For the purposes of this teaching, the following may be said.
The world is God’s chariot, and God governs the world the way a driver drives his car. God is in charge all the time, as a driver must necessarily be, but driving a car doesn’t just mean telling it where you want to go and going there, though that may seem to be the impression a non-driver gets from watching the process of driving. The car is not a box with wheels in which to be conveyed from place to place. It has an engine which drives it forward or in reverse.
So the engine drives the car? Well, no, the driver controls the engine which drives the car.
So the driver drives the engine? Well, no, the driver controls the fuel which feeds the engine.
The fuel drives the engine? Well, no, combustion drives the engine, the fuel merely feeds combustion.
So the driver controls combustion? Well, no, combustion is automatic when the right ingredients are present, the driver does not have anything to do with the combustion that occurs in the engine.
So is the car propelled by combustion fed by fuel controlled by the driver who is in charge of the engine? Well, no, there are various gears, clutches, shafts and differentials which relay the kinetic energy from the engine to the wheels after the driver selects his preference, while maintaining control of the direction of the wheels.
The driver controls the wheels, don’t they simply revolve? Yes they simply revolve, but no, they cannot be allowed take the car anywhere without constant supervision, they must be steered and braked.
One way of looking at the Sephirot is to see the world as a mechanism which has to be driven, with each Sephira representing another element of the machine. However, as soon as you try to adopt this scheme and correlate it with the way you as an individual operate as a mechanism, the system collapses and the analogies fail. The brain, the mind, the self, the soul and the various levels of consciousness are not amenable to being labeled the way the parts of a car can be labeled. But a human is nothing if not a microcosm of the world, and if the Sephirot apply to the macrocosmic world, as God’s chariot, they must equally apply to the individual human as God’s chariot, too.
A compromise system has to be agreed on, or else nothing can be said. So, teachers of Kabbalah use various parts of a male human body as labels for the Sephirot, with the understanding that are meant as very rough guides, and do not bear too close a scrutiny. The final two Sephirot, the ninth and tenth are Yesod and Malkhut respectively. In Man they are analogized by the Penis and its Crown, respectively.
Joseph represents the ninth Sephira – Yesod – Fundament because he is fundamentally Jewish, fundamentally holy and fundamentally endowed with Yichus – Relationship with God (Radical Vayishlach). Joseph is a projection of Jacob, the next stage in the process of discovery and exploration that began with Abraham.
Being a convert, Akiba has nothing to do with that process and has no fundamental Yichus – Relations with God. Akiba is not connected to the ninth Sephira of Yesod – Fundament, it is absent from his past, so he has nothing to build on, no Jewish foundations to develop or Jewish connections to evolve beyond.
Joseph had been sure he was the chosen one because he saw himself as the main link in the chain of spiritual development he saw as the Jewish mission. He saw himself as a vital, perhaps final link in that chain, and was certain that without him the chain would break, which was all very true and nice, but missed the point entirely. Chains have a purpose they are not ends unto themselves. A chain is designed to carry something on its end that is not simply another link, that which is attached to the end of a chain is its purpose; and that’s the meaning of Malkhut – Sovereignty. Foundations are very important, we can all agree, but the flimsiest cabin or the most rickety cabana is of more practical use and purpose than the sturdiest, well-built foundation.
Joseph thought he was quite literally the end of the line, the apotheosis of a Jew - but he wasn’t.
Some things come from outside Judaism, from somewhere beyond the chain of tradition and endowment, from a place devoid of light or holiness. Some people, the most important, come from a completely different direction after having taken an unpredictable path. Look at Jethro who had worshiped every single possible pagan god. He was as far outside chain of the tradition someone of that period could be. So it is with all converts, the urge to move towards God is not encoded into their genes in any Jewish sense of Yichus – Relation and they are not guided from within. They are moved, urged and impelled from elsewhere beyond the chain.
Joseph and Rabbi Akiba are juxtaposed against one another; Joseph representing the ninth Sephira of Yesod, and Akiba the tenth Sephira of Malkhut. Rabbi Akiba is going to be punished and martyred for his/God’s part in diminishing Joseph; by turning Joseph into a mere link in the chain of Jewish history, and not (as Joseph thought) the end and purpose of it.
Joseph is pained by pleasure and has to fight it off, while Akiba is pleased by pain and welcomes it. Joseph is a ruler by force of will, a Tzadik – Saint who denies himself pleasure even when it is permitted him, even in the service of God. Akiba is a Torah Scholar and therefore a king who exerts no force of his own, at all, and he is masochistic because pain whether self-imposed or imposed by others, gives him pleasure, so long as he feels it in the service of God.
Malkhut has no power of its own, while Yesod only exists to exert power and control. If Malkhut is the machine which can move mountains, Yesod is the motor powering that machine.
Rabbi Akiba comes to Judaism the way God comes to Creation, by being called from beyond; by receiving the gift of sacrifice being offered by the ‘other’. Judaism, God and the Torah come to the gentile like the dew which condenses on the cold body, warming it with its breath, for condensation is a warming process. God offers Himself, beckoning and beguiling to the pagan, ‘Come and make Me in your image, too,’ for that is what it means to be a Jew; we tell God who to be (Radical Lech L’cha, Vayishlach, Mishpatim, Pikudei, Haazinu, Zot Habracha).
Jethro was the first convert to Judaism, and before he arrived Moses ruled Israel as an autocrat without checks or balances to his power. Once Jethro arrived the power structure was altered radically and hierarchies of successive ranks were established, because Jethro’s conversion provided somewhere for the power to flow. Jethro was to Israel what Akiba is to Joseph, what Malkhut is to Yesod, what the vagina is to the penis. Once Jethro arrived and converted to Judaism, every Jew no matter how humble, base, unimportant, inferior or insignificant became a conduit for the flow of energy from a higher to a lower level[92].
Rabbi Akiba receives the Divine Dew seemingly from nowhere, warming and quickening him to adopt life as a Jew. But it does not stop there, for Akiba goes on receiving the Divine Dew, now in the form of the Oral Torah which also seemingly comes from nowhere, condensing and collecting in the Chokhma – Wisdom of the scholar. Akiba becomes a Talmud Chacham - Jewish Scholar worthy of being feared as a god, and thus able to stand in for God.
Finally, Akiba is a shepherd. Jacob was a shepherd, too, and made God his shepherd as was discussed in Radical Vayishlach. If God is my shepherd, then anything untoward happening to me is His responsibility. Any damages I cause are my shepherd’s responsibility, even when I do something stupid and hurt myself, that’s the shepherd’s responsibility too. The adoption of total powerlessness in one’s relation to God was pioneered by Jacob and acted out by R. Akiba who was utterly convinced that everything God does is done for the good. It was Akiba’s constantly repeated affirmation, his one article of faith, even as the iron combs ripped him to death.
And of course, Akiba has done us all a huge favor, by articulating the refrain, ‘Everything God does is done for the good,’ he offers God the perfect opportunity to reciprocate, Measure-for-Measure, ‘Everything the Jewish People do is done for the Good.’ We are His shepherd and that is the direction we would have Him go.
I am including the English text of Rabbi Shimshon Ostropoli’s teaching below, for those who want to read the original in a literal English translation.
It is written: ‘All tithes of herd or flock, whatever passes under the staff, the tenth shall be holy to God.’
The Torah is hinting at a vast and profound mystery hidden in this verse. It is well known that the ten martyred rabbis killed by the Romans were substitutes for the Ten Tribes who sinned in kidnapping and selling their brother Joseph into Egypt, and it is also well known that R. Akiba was the substitution for God[93].
R. Akiba stands in for God for a number of reasons:
He was from a family of converts to Judaism, and converts are products of the tenth Sephira, the quality of Malkhut - Sovereignty, as is well known.
Akiba is known to have adduced a particular and special exegesis for every time the Hebrew word ET - The, appears in Scripture. It was R. Akiba who taught that the apparently superfluous word ET in the verse, ‘You must fear ET - The LORD your God,’ - is there to include the scholar, and that one must fear the scholar the way one fears God[94].
It was R. Akiba who first taught the equivalence between honoring the scholar and honoring God, that’s why he was the one who was chosen to represent God in the denouement in the story of Joseph and his brothers.
R. Akiba was a shepherd, as the Talmud describes[95], a detail crucial to the story.
And now, this is the explication of the mystery of the Torah: The Hebrew phrase, V’CHOL MAASAR - All tithes, in the verse ‘All tithes of herd or flock etc’ is a Notariqon - Abbreviation. The seven Hebrew letters comprising the two words V’CHOL MAASAR become seven words, which when translated read as follows: ‘All of them will know why Akiba died, who was a shepherd[96]’ of herd or flock.
So that everyone will know exactly why Akiba died the way he did, the verse continues, ‘whatever passes TACHAT HASHAVET - beneath the staff’. The Hebrew word SHAVET translates both as a Rod/Staff or a Tribe. ‘Whatever passes’ is not just referring to sheep and cattle, but to the ten martyred rabbis. Each rabbi was martyred TACHAT HASHAVET – In Place of a Tribe. Each of the rabbis was a substitute for one of Joseph’s brothers. Thus ten righteous men perished to atone for the sin of the sale of Joseph. But there were only nine brothers implicated in Joseph’s sale into slavery. Why then was a tenth man; R. Akiba, required to atone for their sin?
R. Akiba, as was noted previously, is connected to the tenth Sephira. He is, as the verse continues, ‘the tenth shall be holy to God.’ because he was the substitute for the Shechina who was implicated, so to speak, in the sale of Joseph - understand this.
This is hinted at in the Talmud where it is written that R. Akiba’s soul left his body as he was completing the verse from the Sh’ma, ‘Hear O Israel, the LORD, our God, the LORD is One.’ As he said the word ‘One’ his soul departed, and a voice rang out from heaven saying, ‘Lucky are you Rabbi Akiba, for your soul departed with the One.[97]’, meaning, of course, on behalf of the One, the only One. Understand this.’ (Pithgamin Kadishin - Bechukothai)
Unfortunately for Lurianic Kabbalah in general and Rabbi Shimshon Ostropoli in particular, the thesis taught above cannot be defended. The Bible text itself counters the argument that Rabbi Akiba atones for God’s sin. After everything is said and done, the sin remains as it always was, awaiting expiation, as we read in the next verse: He is not to be concerned whether it is good or bad, nor shall he exchange it; for if he does exchange it, then both it and its substitute shall become holy. It shall not be redeemed.
Substitution for the tenth is simply not allowed, and even when a substitution is attempted the original remains as it was, the tenth, while the substitute also becomes holy. They are both tithes now.
Nothing R. Akiba did was sufficient to change the balance of guilt in the Universe and God is still awaiting the opportunity to make things right.
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The Work Was Completed - By Grace of God Almighty who has not abandoned His Lovingkindness with His servant to this day - the Ninth of Shevat in the year 5775 (January 29th 2015) at Tzfat, Israel.