Nothingness
Thoughts on VaYishlah 2018
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Standing on the bare ground – my head bathed by the
blithe air and uplifted into infinite space – all mean egotism vanishes. I
become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the
Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)[1]
Yaakov felt
helpless as he cried to God in preparation for his encounter with Esav:
God
who has said to me, “Return to your land and your birthplace, and I will deal
well with you.” I am unworthy of all the kindness that you have steadfastly
done for your servant. For with my staff I crossed this Jordan and now I have
become two camps…
(Bereshit 32:10-11)
Painfully describing
his state of instability, wedged between the homes of Lavan and his parents, Yaakov
understood that this was the time for prayer. He shouted out to God: “Save me
from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esav!” (12)
The Hakhamim
pointed to a most unusual context for the first biblical reference to prayer:
On the day Hashem Elokim made
earth and heavens, no shrub of the field being yet on the earth and no plant of
the field yet sprouted, for Hashem Elokim had not caused rain to fall on the
earth and there was no human [“ve-adam ayin”] to fill the soil…
(2:4-5)
Although God had
already commanded the ground to bring forth vegetation on the third day of
creation, he didn’t send rain for its growth until the sixth. Why not? Rashi
answered:
Because “There was no man” [adam ayin] to
till the soil, and so there was no one to realize the goodness of the rains.
But when man arrived and realized that they are a necessity for the world, he
prayed for them, and they fell, and the trees and vegetation grew.[2]
Vegetation wouldn’t
grow without man’s recognition of its absence and subsequent prayer. In the
kabbalists’ transformative reading of these verses, it is man’s ability to
recognize the “nothingness” – the ayin – that fuels the prayer which
steers existence.[3]
Describing this
Kabbalistic concept of ayin, Arthur Green wrote: “There is an
ungraspable instant in the midst of all transformation when that which is about
to be transformed is no longer what it had been until that moment, but has not
yet emerged as its transformed self.” That fleeting period of transition is the
moment of ayin. And in a world of constant change and transformation, we
are in contact with ayin at all times.[4]
Indeed, the great medieval kabbalist R. Azriel of Gerona long ago noted the
paradoxical belief that the source of all “being” is “nothingness,” when he
stated: “Being is in nothingness in the mode of nothingness, and nothingness is
in being in the mode of being.”[5]
By separating the
“upper” and “lower” waters on the second day of creation, God concurrently
brought forth the space in between – the ayin. Man’s paradigmatic prayers
fill that space of “nothingness” by bringing forth water from the “upper”
realms and merging it with those below. Genuine prayer emerges from
understanding our role within the ayin of existence.
Considering his
past journey from Lavan’s home (“with my staff I crossed this Jordan”), Yaakov
longed for return to his parents’ home (his “land and birthplace”), and was
overwhelmed by the unstable realm between the two – the ayin – which he
was then experiencing. “I am unworthy of all the kindness that you have
steadfastly done for your servant,” Yaakov then declared. He pondered the
deeper meaning of ayin, and realized that his own self (אני) was merely a vexing reconfiguration of nothingness (אין).[6]
And just as he was engulfed by the
vulnerable and self-effacing state of ayin, Yaakov tapped into its essence
– prayer. He cried out in prayer to God and demanded: “Save me from the
hand of my brother, from the hand of Esav!”
[1] “Nature,” in Selected
Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York, NY, 1965), pg. 184.
[2] Commentary of Rashi to Bereshit
2:5, s.v. ki.
[3] See, e.g., Avivah Gottlieb
Zornberg’s The Beginning of Desire (New York, NY, 1995), pg. 312.
[4] Arthur Green and Barry W.
Holtz, Your Word is Fire: The Hasidic Masters on Contemplative Prayer
(Nashville, TE, 2017), pg. 8.
[5] R. Azriel of Gerona, Derekh
HaEmunah VeDerekh HaKefirah. Cited by Daniel C. Matt, in The Essential
Kabbalah: The Heart of Jewish Mysticism (New York, NY, 1983), pg. 68.
[6] See, e.g., R. Aryeh Kaplan’s Jewish
Meditation (New York, NY, 1985), pg. 87, and Moshe Hallamish’s An
Introduction to the Kabbalah (New York, NY, 1999), pg. 255.