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Home / Weekly Parashah / Vayeishev / Daily Insight #2 |
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Vayeishev: Daily Insight #2
Yesterday, we saw that Rebbe Hillel of Paritch explains that
Jacob, having inter-included love and fear of God, was able
to dwell, i.e., sustain the state of fearing God and not flee
from it to a state of complete and absolute nullification of
self. Yet, we still have to understand, what makes Jacob’s
ability notable? Is it not better when experiencing awe of
God to simply flee upwards, amid laughter like his father Isaac,
to the bosom of his Father in heaven?
To understand this we have to pay careful attention to the two verses that Rebbe
Hillel brought in support of the definition of “dwelling” as a fear of God, and
see them in context. The first was:
All the people perceived the thunder and the lightning flashes and the sound
of the horn and the mountain smoking; when the people saw it, they trembled and
stood at a distance.
Then they said to Moshe: “Speak to us yourself and we will listen; but let not
God speak to us, lest we die.”
Moshe said to the people: “Do not be afraid, for God has come in order to test
you, and in order that His fear may remain on your faces, so that you do not
sin.1
And the second was:
Men will enter cavernous cliffs and earthy tunnels from fear of God, and from
the splendor of His majesty, as He rises to make the earth tremble.
On that day men will cast away to the moles and the bats, their idols of silver
and their idols of gold, which they made for themselves to worship.
To enter clefts in the cliffs and caverns in the rocks from fear of God and the
splendor of His majesty, when He rises to make the earth tremble.2
The first verse, as mentioned, describes the effect of the initial revelation
of God at Mt. Sinai, as He came to give the Torah. When the people saw the sounds
(sound waves were picked up by the eyes), they received an experience of higher
fear3—the fear of shame. Moshe
Rabbeinu tried to persuade them to move closer, explaining that the reason that
God revealed Himself in such a fearsome manner (that it caused them to pull back)
was in order “that His fear will be on your face, so that you do not sin.”
But, where the first verse brought by Rebbe Hillel describes the experience of
only the Jewish people at the Mt. Sinai, the second verse is spoken by the prophet
Isaiah about all the peoples of the earth. Isaiah tells us that in the future,
“When man casts away his silver (money) and gold (riches) idols,”4 all
of humanity will experience this state of awe of God and thus ascend to a state
of nullification of being, as did the Jewish people at Mt. Sinai.
How are fear of God and embarrassment related? The sages explain that the experience
of the fear of God at Mt. Sinai indeed left a lasting impression of embarrassment
on the face of every Jew. The simple explanation is that the embarrassment is
both before God and before other people and is caused by one’s self-consciousness
of one’s own sins. However, Rebbe Hillel states that this embarrassment causes
absolute and total nullification of self. This suggests that the embarrassment
is considerably deeper and more existential than embarrassment from past sins.
Instead, in Chassidut it is explained that the full revelation of God causes
a person to be embarrassed that his very being contradicts the omnipresence of
the Almighty. The fear that arises in the heart is how is it possible that God
is indeed everything and He alone is, and yet, that I perceive myself to have
being of my own; how is it that I continue to experience myself as separate and
distinct?! It is true that the embarrassment is most strongly experienced when
one sins, because at that time not only does my experience of self contradict
God’s omnipresence, but, to quote the Tanya’s very graphic image, when a person
sins “it is like taking the head of the king and pushing it into a latrine full
of excrement.“ Nonetheless, when God’s singular totality is understood, even
without sins, it leads to a need to be sucked into the body of the King; to be
completely and absolutely nullified.
But, we still have to ask: where in the two verses selected by Rebbe Hillel is
there a description of complete and absolute nullification? Physical embarrassment
and fear is evident: the Jewish people stood far away, embarrassed to come any
closer and all people will ultimately flee from the presence of God into metaphoric
caves, to hide from fear. The answer is that every person comprises a body and
a soul. These verses describe the reaction of the body to the experience of higher
fear. But, the soul reacts differently. While the body runs away from God (down),
the soul runs towards God (up)!
Now we are closer to understanding the importance of Jacob’s ability. A regular
person, when experiencing fear of God, experiences a rift between body and soul.
The soul runs, as it were upwards, towards its source in God, while the body
flees as it were downwards, to hide in embarrassment and fear. This is the deep
meaning of the verse: “Who knows, the spirit of men, does it rise; the spirit
of the brute, does it descend to the earth?”5 But
Jacob, who is likened to the crossbeam that connects the upper and lower extremes
of the middle axis, both at the same time, does not move at all. He is like the
axis around which everything revolves, or in the language of philosophy, the
unmoved mover! Jacob is able to sustain both extremes, running up and fleeing
down as a single experience, freeing him from the experience of the shattering
of the body-soul bond. Jacob, as the archetypal soul of beauty, corresponds to
the torso (the main part of the body’s physique) and to the Torah. Thus, it follows
that the unity of experience is dependent on one’s complete observance of the
Torah’s body, the 613 mitzvot. Indeed, the gematria of “one
beam” קרש אחד is
613!6 The beam is able to sustain
Jacob’s unified experience when a person is wholly committed to the observance
of all the commandments.7
Submission, separation, sweetening
Now, let us return to the second verse that Rebbe Hillel brings.
The first thing we would like to note is that it almost repeats
word for word 2 verses later, with a verse in the middle describing
when all human beings will experience the higher fear of God.
We now have three verses that describe the fear of God:
1) All the people perceived the thunder and the lightning flashes
and the sound of the horn and the mountain smoking; when the
people saw it, they trembled and stood at a distance.
2) Men will enter cavernous cliffs and earthy tunnels from
fear of God, and from the splendor of His majesty, as He rises
to make the earth tremble.
3) To enter clefts in the cliffs and caverns in the rocks from
fear of God and the splendor of His majesty, when He rises
to make the earth tremble.
These three verses lend themselves to analysis using the Ba’al
Shem Tov’s three stage model called chash-mal-mal,
or submission-separation-sweetening.8 The
two examples that the Ba’al Shem Tov gave for understanding
this model were circumcision and speech.9
Circumcision is required in order to sanctify the procreative
organ so that a man’s sexual energy is not wasted. But circumcision
is a three stage process. First the foreskin is cut away. Then
a thin transparent membrane is removed. Only then is the crown
of the organ completely formed. Circumcision cuts away the
foreskin in order to reveal the aspect of holiness in procreation.10
The same is true for rectified speech. For our speech to be
sweet, i.e., an instrument of holiness, we must go through
two earlier stages of submission and separation. The “foreskin”
of the mouth is cut away by refraining from speaking ill of
another person or improperly. The “thin membrane” of the mouth
is cut away by annulling any feeling of self that accompanies
our words. Only when these two have been removed can the spoken
words come from the heart and have the proper effect on the
listener.
Thus, we have the following correspondence:
Ba’al Shem Tov’s terminology |
in circumcision |
in speech |
Verse |
submission |
removal of foreskin |
refrain from forbidden
speech |
All the people perceived
the thunder and the lightning flashes and the sound of
the horn and the mountain smoking; when the people saw
it, they trembled and stood at a distance. |
separation |
removal of membrane |
removal of feelings of
self |
Men will enter cavernous
cliffs and earthy tunnels from fear of God, and from
the splendor of His majesty, as He rises to make the
earth tremble. |
sweetening |
revelation of the crown |
revelation of rectified
speech |
To enter clefts in the cliffs
and caverns in the rocks from fear of God and the splendor
of His majesty, when He rises to make the earth tremble. |
In the first verse, the fear of God caused the people to be
embarrassed to enter into a conversation with God. Instead
they appointed Moshe to speak with Him and they themselves
remained silent, viewing things from afar. Thus, there fear
of God brought them to a state of submission. In Chassidut,
this is likened to the state of the bride under the wedding
canopy. Because of her natural modesty, the bride is embarrassed
to speak out loud and submits to letting the groom speak the
words of sanctification to her without verbally expressing
her consent.11
In the two verses from Isaiah, the word that we have translated
as “cliffs,” צרים ,
arouses a strong association with circumcision, as it also denotes
a very sharp flint rock which throughout the Bible is the instrument
of choice for performing the circumcision. But, in the first
verse from Isaiah, צרים appears
in reference to “caverns,” מערות ,
while in the second verse it appears in reference to “cleft,” נקרות .
In Hebrew, “caverns,” מערות ,
is related to the word “immodest” (in the sexual sense), ערוה ,
thus the first verse from Isaiah is clearly related to the removal
of the transparent membrane from the male procreative organ.
The word “clefts,” נקרות ,
is found in relation to Moshe Rabbeinu when God reveals Himself
to him in “the cleft of the rock,” נקרת הצור .
It was at that moment that Moshe experienced the greatest revelation
of the Almighty (he saw God as much as a human being can) and
heard the Thirteen Principles of God’s Mercy recited. The revelation
to Moshe in the cleft of the rock was the high-point of the entire
revelation at Mt. Sinai, and arguably would have been experienced
by every Jew had they been able to enter into a dialogue with
God after shrinking back in fear. What this means is that the
entire Jewish people did not complete the three stages of submission-separation-sweetening
at Mt. Sinai—only Moshe did. The highest state of union with
God was attained only by Moshe, 120 days after the giving of
the Ten Commandments.
3. Lower
or minor fear of God is fear of God’s kingship, His power
to reward and punish.
6. We may
say that an electrical wire is the best metaphor for understanding
how something can connect two things at a distance, transfer
messages between them, and yet never move itself. Electrical
wiring, which runs within the walls of a building is also
a splendid physical metaphor for the actual, original middle
crossbeam (בריח התיכון ,
see Exodus 26:28) that ran within the walls of the Tabernacle.
Although electrical wiring is the medium for electricity,
we might think that as it connects two extremes, it itself
(or at least, its inner composition) must be moving. But,
in reality, neither the wire itself, nor anything that
it is made up, actually moves when electricity is transferred.
This is one of the applications of the relationship called
enclothement (התלשבות ),
which we have talked about in length in the past. Indeed,
the Hebrew for “live electrical current” זרם
חשמלי חי is
653, the same value as that of the phrase from the Shabbat
morning prayers “…[all innermost parts of the body (alluding
to Jacob, the archetypal soul of beauty)] shall sing to
Your Name…” יזמרו לשמך (note
that the word for “current“ is a permutation of the word
for “sing“), quoted by Rebbe Hillel above, indicating that
turning the body on in this way also translates into the
ability to praise God with one’s body.
7. This
is hinted to in Jacob’s own words: “With Laban I dwelt”
(Genesis 32:5). The word “dwelt” here is written גרתי and
its numerical value is 613. The sages say that literally
this implies that even though he dwelt with Laban he did
not fall from his spiritual level, but allegorically, following
Rebbe Hillel this means that after having experienced the
fear of God of his father Isaac, his performance of all
613 commandments allowed him to balance the experience
with his corporeality.
8. See Keter
Shem Tov, 28.
9. “Circumcision”
in Hebrew is מילה ,
which has the same numerical value as “mouth,” פה .
The analogy between the two is found originally in Sefer
Yetzirah 1:3. See more in Body, Mind, and Soul,
pp. 41ff.
10. In
Chassidut, the power of procreation is considered the infinite
power, the exemplar of the similarity (image and likeness)
of man to God, who is infinite in all His powers. In the
Talmud, procreation is called the great mitzvah,
where the word for great is רבה whose gematria is
the same as that of “light” אור .
The circumcision itself is called an אות ,
which means “sign” or “letter.” Thus, just as the letters
of the Torah are like lenses focusing the infinite light
of God to form words that have physical holiness, so the
circumcision focuses the infinite power of procreation
in man to form the body of a child that will have physical
holiness (the body of a Jew is considered holy, a quality
that will be fully revealed to all people in the future).
With the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s encouragement, it has become
a common practice for parents to purchase a letter in merit
of their newborn child in a special Torah scroll written
in honor of Jewish children around the world. How appropriate
it is that when the newborn infant is a boy, the letter
be inscribed in the Torah scroll on the same day that the
circumcision is inscribed in the flesh.
11. In
the future, both the sound of the groom’s voice and the
bride’s voice will be heard; see Jeremiah 33:11.
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