Listen to this morning's class on Nefesh HaHayim 1.9-10 here.
Follow along with the sources that we used in addition to the text here.
Sunday, December 29, 2019
Nefesh HaHayim 1.9-10
Listen to this morning's class on Nefesh HaHayim 1.9-10 here.
Follow along with the sources that we used in addition to the text here.
Saturday, December 28, 2019
Tuesday, December 24, 2019
Sunday, December 22, 2019
Saturday, December 21, 2019
Thursday, December 19, 2019
Tuesday, December 17, 2019
Monday, December 16, 2019
Sunday, December 15, 2019
Saturday, December 14, 2019
Sunday, December 8, 2019
Friday, December 6, 2019
Parashat VaYesse: Intution
Intuition
Thoughts on Parashat VaYesse 2019
Click here to view as PDF
And
Yaakov left Be’er Sheva and set out for Haran. And he came upon a certain place
and stopped there for the night…and he lay down in that place, and dreamed…And
Yaakov awoke from his sleep and said, “Indeed, God is in this place, and I did
not know.”
(Bereshit 28:10-16)
Rashi commented upon the apparent uniqueness of
Yaakov’s sleep at that time, writing: “In that place (Be El) he lay down, but
during the (prior) fourteen years that he served in the House of Ever he did
not lay down at night, because he was occupied with the study of Torah.”[1]
Indeed, it is reasonable to imagine Yaakov as an individual who abhorred sleep.
He would, in fact, remark twenty years later to Lavan that “Scorching heat
ravaged me by day and frost by night; and sleep fled from my eyes”
(31:40). The mission-driven Yaakov employed a cunning mind and deceptive spirit
to control his destiny. We all know people like that. They never have time for sleep!
But God had another plan for Yaakov. Rashi cited the Hakhamim’s
reading of the text: “The sun set for him suddenly, not in its normal time, so
that he should spend the night there.”[2]
Seeking a prophetic dialogue with Yaakov as He had with Avraham and Yisshak,
God laid Yaakov to sleep. This must have felt unnatural for Yaakov. He was
unaccustomed to the diminished state of consciousness and loss of cognitive
control inherent to sleep. Yaakov’s reaction upon waking best reveal his
feelings of vulnerability at that time – “Indeed, God is in this place, and
I did not know.” Yaakov was uncomfortable with “not knowing.”
Whereas in the past it was he who
“knew” what Esav and Yisshak did not, Yaakov now experienced himself
what it meant to “not know.”
I believe that Yaakov’s dream on the mountaintop at Bet El instilled
him with more than just a feeling of humility. It exposed him to a dimension of
thought that he had until then left unexplored. “There is a profound intimation
here about the dynamics of sleep,” Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg wrote, “about the
loss of consciousness and the possible gifts of unconsciousness, about knowing
and dreaming.”[3] What is the difference
between wakeful “knowing” and restful “dreaming”? Oliver Sacks explained that
the electrophysiological properties of the brain in waking and dreaming are
quite similar. There is a single mechanism for both – the constant
inner-talking between the cerebral cortex and the thalamus, a continuous
interplay of image and
feeling.
Waking and dreaming, then, are fundamentally the same, distinguished only by
the sensory input of wakefulness. Whereas a “waking consciousness” derives from
sensory input, dreams are the product of their absence. Dr. Sacks summarized:
“Waking consciousness is dreaming – but dreaming constrained by external
reality.”[4]
Yaakov’s state of dreaming, then, opened him to the mental world of
“unconstrained thought.”
The Kabbalists distinguish between two distinct modes of thought – hokhmah
and binah. Hokhmah
derives from the words “koah mah,”
or “the potential of what.” It refers to the question of what something really
is – its essence. Binah, on
the other hand, relates to the word “bein,”
or “between.” It implies separation, as you look at something logically and put
yourself at distance from it. While
deciding to build a home, for example, hokhmah is
the initial flash that enters into the mind about what the house will look like
(its essence as a home), while binah is
the deliberate blueprint of structure and rooms (its intricate details).[5]
Arriving at the top of the mountain at Bet El, Yaakov must have taken
in the landscape and its environs. Employing his cognitive faculty of binah,
which he was adept at doing, he immediately noticed the mountain’s many
externalities – the grass, the rocks, the trees, etc. Laying him to sleep,
however, God encouraged Yaakov’s entrance into the realm of hokhmah.
He urged him to see beyond the “logical” and “apparent,” and into the
“essence” of that mountain. And so, he did:
And Yaakov awoke from his sleep…And he was afraid
and he said, “How fearsome is this place! This can be but the house of God, and
this is the gate of the heavens.” (28:16-17)
As the trappings of wakefulness faded away, Yaakov’s mind now extended
beyond the sensory input of consciousness. He tapped into the pristine
perception of hokhmah,
and beheld the unfathomable reality that lay before his eyes.
But it is possible to experience hokhmah
even while awake. Albert Einstein remarked: “At times I feel certain that I am
right without knowing the reason.”[6] And
R. Moshe Sofer z”l,
the great 19th Century Hungarian authority and author of Hatam
Sofer, more than once told his students that his method to
answering halakhic questions was based upon intuition, immediately stating
answer that first came to his mind. Upon making that initial determination, R.
Sofer would search “backwards” grounding the answer in its appropriate sources.[7]
“The major decisions of man’s life are made spontaneously and
suddenly,” R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik z"l once said, “in response to an aboriginal
command from within.” He pointed to decisions of faith, marriage, solutions to
financial problems, acts of military genius and a variety of other pivotal
resolutions in life that are often reached intuitively.[8]
The chaotic nature of life, however, has a way of distracting us. We
are often led astray from our intuition in directions that we ourselves choose,
based on a variety of logical factors and determinations. Awakened to a similar
reality of “self-blindness,” Yaakov expressed surprise that he had failed to
intuit the sanctity of his sleeping place. Although it took a dream to “open Yaakov’s
inner eyes,” we can “open our
eyes” even while awake – by following our intuition.
[1] Commentary of Rashi to
Bereshit 28:12 s.v va-yishkav.
[2] Commentary of Rashi to
Bereshit 28:12 s.v. ki ba.
[3] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The
Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis (New York, NY, 1995), pg. 190.
[4] Oliver Sacks, An
Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales (New York, NY, 1995), pg.
57.
[5] See, e.g., R. Aryeh Kaplan, Inner
Space (Jerusalem, IS, 1991), pg. 57-8 and R. Yechiel Bar-Lev, Song of
the Soul: Introduction to Kaballa (Petah Tikvah, IS, 1994), pg. 83-4.
[6] Albert Einstein, Einstein
on Cosmic Religion and Other Opinions and Aphorisms (Mineola, NY, 2009),
pg. 97.
[7] See Maoz Kahana’s “Yesh
lanu av zaken,” in Hagedolim: Leaders Who Shaped the Israeli Haredi
Jewry (Jerusalem, IS, 2017), pg. 99-100.
[8] R. Abraham R. Besdin, Reflections
of the Rav vol. 1: Lessons in Jewish Thought Adapted from Lectures of Rabbi
Joseph B. Soloveitchik (Hoboken, NJ, 1993), pg. 91.
Tuesday, December 3, 2019
Sunday, December 1, 2019
Saturday, November 30, 2019
Tuesday, November 26, 2019
Sunday, November 24, 2019
Saturday, November 23, 2019
Tuesday, November 19, 2019
Monday, November 18, 2019
Sunday, November 17, 2019
Parashat VaYera: Making Space
Making Space
Thoughts on Parashat VaYera 2019
Click here to view as PDF
[1] Emma Hornby, “Preliminary Thoughts About Silence in Early Western Chant,” in Silence, Music, Silent Music, (Aldershot, UK, 2007). Pg. 142-3. Cited by Jane Brox, Silence: A Social History of One of the Least Understood Elements of Our Lives (New York, NY, 2019), pg. 68.
God’s one-sentence
command of Avraham was strict and straightforward:
…And
He said, “Take, pray, your son, your only one, whom you love, Yisshak, and Go
forth to the land of Moriah and offer him up as a burnt offering on one of the
mountains which I shall say to you.”
(22:2)
It appeared to
leave Avraham with no room for self-expression or interpretation. His options
seemed simple: to listen or not to listen to God’s word.
And yet, as Avraham
began his journey to “the land of Moriah,” something unexpected took place:
On
the third day Avraham raised his eyes and saw the place from afar. (22:4)
Instead of lowering
his eyes in an obedient march to “one of the mountains which God would say,”
Avraham “raised his eyes,” and recognized the mountain – on his own – from
afar. Indeed, after Avraham had climbed
the mountain and God warned him not to harm Yisshak, Avraham again
“raised his eyes.” He again expressed himself independently, noticing a
ram that was caught in the thicket by its horns, and deeming it the right
replacement for Yisshak on the mizbeah (22:14).
Ironically, then,
the episode of the Akedah – forever remembered as Avraham’s display of
absolute deference to God and His word – lays hint to an integral element of space
in the man-God relationship. It teaches that even in the most “constricting”
circumstances of our relationship with Him, there remains a hollow void within
which each individual may carve out their own personal niche. Even as Avraham
followed the absolute order of God to sacrifice his son, the opportunity to
“raise his eyes” remained.
I first appreciated
the significance of a literal and figurative space to our lives during a
meeting with a personal mentor, David “Hurdle” Tawil. Hurdle was critiquing the
speed of my speech in a sermon on one particular Shabbat morning. He told me
that by failing to sufficiently breathe in between sentences and paragraphs, I
stole the opportunity from my listeners to reflect upon the message and find its
relevance to their own lives.
“I’ll tell you a
story to get across the point,” Hurdle then told me, with the twinkle of his
eye. He told me that over sixty years ago, a friend of his was struggling in
the retail business of clothing. Distinguished today as a standout
philanthropist of our community, this individual was struggling to make ends
meet at the beginning years of his career. And so, he called Hurdle into his
store, and asked him for advice. He showed off his high-quality merchandise and
questioned why nobody seemed interested in buying it. “And I noticed the issue
immediately,” Hurdle told me, “there was not enough space from one rack to the
next.” Entering into the store, consumers were “overwhelmed” by the vast array
of merchandise laid out in front of them, and unable to appropriately “take in”
and appreciate the value of each individual garment and parcel. “When you leave
the right amount of space,” Hurdle then taught me, “you allow for the people
around you to appreciate what you have to offer.”
The British
historian Emma Hornby pointed out that both in Hebrew and Greek words for
“spirit” also mean “breath” (nefesh and neshamah) or “wind” (ruah).
The silence of the “space in between,” a breath or the wind, allows the spirit
in.[1]
Indeed, the very creation of man entailed God “blowing into his nostrils the
breath of life – nefesh hayah,” creating a “living spirit – nishmat
hayim” (2:7). And Onkelos, the classic translator to the Torah, famously
explained that the “living spirit” of man is best defined by his ability to
speak (ruah me-malela). How ironic! Our self-identity, which is best
expressed through our speech with one another, was born out of the silent
space of a breath.
Consider the
similarity of relationships with our children to the “Akedah experience”
between God and Avraham. No, I don’t mean that we too ask our children to
slaughter others! But just as God expected Avraham to obediently follow his
word, so too do we of our children in many interactions with them. Learning
from that somewhat unexpected “space” which God carved out for Avraham, the
message to us is clear. Allow your children to “raise their eyes” and notice on
their own. Even as you intend to impart advice from years of life-experience,
the words are often understood best through a medium of appropriate space. It
is ironic yet true that guided-growth flourishes most in a context that invites
self-reflection and expression.
[1] Emma Hornby, “Preliminary Thoughts About Silence in Early Western Chant,” in Silence, Music, Silent Music, (Aldershot, UK, 2007). Pg. 142-3. Cited by Jane Brox, Silence: A Social History of One of the Least Understood Elements of Our Lives (New York, NY, 2019), pg. 68.
Monday, November 11, 2019
Sunday, November 10, 2019
Saturday, November 9, 2019
Tuesday, November 5, 2019
Monday, November 4, 2019
Sunday, November 3, 2019
Parashat Noah: Separation & Unity
Separation & Unity
Thoughts on Parashat Noah 2019
Click here to view as PDF
The Torah described Noah’s
actions upon descending from the ark:
And Noah
built an altar to God and he took from every clean cattle and every clean fowl
and offered burnt offerings on the altar. (Bereshit 8:20)
And God’s response:
And God
smelled the fragrant odor (re’ah
ha-nihoah) and God said in His heart: “I will not again damn the soil on
humankinds score…And I will not again strike down all living things as I did. (8:21)
God’s determination appears
to be inspired by Noah’s korbanot. His decision to spare the future of
humankind and all living things wasn’t decided by the sheer devastation of the
flood, but by Noah’s sacrifices. What was the significance of those korbanot?
“Creation is the making of
separated things,” stated the political philosopher Leo Strauss, upon counting
five explicit and ten implicit mentions of havdalah – “separation” – in
the first chapter of Bereshit.[1]
Indeed, Ramban interpreted the Torah’s first pasuk, “At the beginning
God created the heavens and the earth,” as a reference to God’s initial
creation of a single entity of formless matter.[2] God’s subsequent actions during the six days
of creation, then, gave form to that matter through a series of deliberate acts
of separation.
Consider God’s initial
actions in Creation: Light was separated from darkness (1:3-4), the “upper and
lower waters” were separated from one another (6-7), land and water were
separated (9-10), and the heavenly bodies were purposed to separate between day
and night (14-18). Leon Kass thus summarized: “Creation is the bringing of
order out of chaos largely through acts of separation, division, distinction.”[3]
Why did God bring
forth all of these separations? To create a habitable space for humankind.
After all, a world of absolute darkness and water leaves no place for man. It
is through the space that was created “in between” – the rays of light, air
space and land – that we find our place in this world.
But what is the
role of humankind in this “separated space”? I believe, perhaps paradoxically,
that it is to seek a reunification.
Consider the fact that our very creation began in a state of unity
between “upper” and “lower” realms of existence – crafted from “the dust of the
earth,” God breathed into Adam the “breath of life” (2:7).[4]
The Hakhamim similarly suggested that the “mist” which “ascended from
the earth” (2:6) immediately prior to his creation was from the clouds and was
purposed to “saturate the soil” from which he was created.[5] It
was the water of the “upper worlds,” then, that mixed with the “lower world”
soil to create a human being.[6]
Indeed, immediately after
Hava’s separation from Adam – “And God built the rib He had taken from
Adam into a woman” (2:22), she was led to a natural unity with him –
“Therefore does man leave his father and his mother and cling to his wife and
they become one flesh” (2:24). The Hakhamim furthermore pointed to
humankind’s task to seek unity in existence in their explanation of a
rather cryptic pasuk, “For God had not sent rain upon the earth and
there was no man to work the soil.” Rashi explained:
And what is the reason that “He had not sent rain?” Because “there
was no man to work the soil”…When Adam came and realized that they are a
necessity for the world, he prayed for them and they came down, and the trees
and types of vegetation sprouted.[7]
God withheld the downpouring
of the “upper world” rains until the creation of a human being. It was the
human’s destiny to establish a unity between his “lower” world and that of above.
But the flood of Parashat
Noah effectively “turned back the clock” of creation, rendering the world
uninhabitable by collapsing the natural separation onto itself. The “upper” and
“lower” waters crashed again into one another – “The springs of the great deep
were split open and the storehouses of the heavens opened up” (6:11), and the
waters covered the mountains (7:19), as an effective “un-creation” took place
in a world of “chaotic unity.”[8]
Noah’s subsequent emergence from the ark into a “recreated” world of
separation, then, renewed humanity’s mission of unity.
And Noah
built an altar to God and he took from every clean cattle and every clean fowl
and offered burnt offerings on the altar. (8:20)
R. Ezra Bick commented, in a
different context: “If sacrificing an animal is characterized as turning the
flesh into smoke, the inner meaning of this action is turning the physical into
the spiritual…the korban creates an actual metaphysical link by bridging
the gap, by turning the physical into the spiritual.”[9]
Noah’s decision to bring forth a korban at that time touched on the very
core of his existential mission. The divinely “fragrant odor” produced by his
sacrifice represented the necessary bridge between the material flesh of this
world with the spiritual essence of the world above. It was his immediate step
in the appropriate direction of unity – his ultimate destiny – that
inspired God’s will to secure the future of humankind and all living beings.
The call to unify
cries out to us on a constant basis in our own lives of compartmentalization. And
it is only realized when we successfully overlap the ideals of the various
realms of our lives. We are commanded, for example, to extend the time of kedushah
at the synagogue to our everyday activities. The commitment to truth and
honesty in our households must likewise be matched in our dealings at the
workplace. And a strict adherence to halakhah may not be reserved for
specific times or places, but rather exist as a part of our very identity. Unity
is found when we infuse the seemingly disparate domains of our lives with the
common essence of sanctity and truth.
[1] Leo Strauss, On the Interpretation of Genesis, L’Homme 1981 (21:1), pg. 9.
[2] Commentary of Ramban to
Bereshit 1:1 (s.v. bereshit).
[3] Leon Kass, The Beginning of
Wisdom: Reading Genesis (Chicago, IL, 2006), pg. 32.
[4] See Bereshit Rabah
12.8. See, as well, R. Hayim of Volozhin’s Nefesh HaHayim 1.5 (s.v.
hagah).
[5] Commentary of Rashi ad.
loc., s.v. ve-ed.
[6] As noted by R. Moshe Shapira, Afikei
Mayim: Sukkot ed. R. Reuven M. Shmeltzer (Jerusalem, IS, 2012), pg. 243.
[7] Commentary of Rashi to
Bereshit 2:5 s.v. ki.
[8] The Hakhamim likewise
deduced that over the course of the flood there was no distinction between day
and night (Commentary of Rashi to Bereshit 8:22, s.v. ve-yom).
[9] R. Ezra Bick, “The
Significance of Haktarah,” Torah MiEtzion: VaYikra (New Milford,
CT, 2014), pg. 32-33.
Tuesday, October 29, 2019
Monday, October 28, 2019
Sunday, October 27, 2019
Parashat Bereshit: Hearing His Voice
Hearing His Voice
Thoughts on Parashat Bereshit 2019
Click here to view as PDF
Following the story of Adam and
Hava’s banishment from Gan Eden, the Torah stated:
And Adam knew Hava his wife and
she conceived and bore Kayin…And she bore as well his brother Hevel… (Bereshit 4:1-2)
Although Rashi
understood this to have taken place prior to their exit from Eden, a
simple reading of the text suggests that Adam and Hava procreated only after
leaving the Garden. Indeed, Ibn Ezra explained why this response would make
sense. Undisturbed by thoughts of mortality during their lives in Gan Eden,
Adam and Hava understood their own lives of productivity as all that mattered.
Realizing now that they would one day die, however, inspired them to seek
children who would continue their legacy even after their deaths.[1]
Reading the
reaction of Adam and Hava from this perspective, though, is reminiscent to me
of the philosophical perspective of French existentialists such as Camus and
Sartre. Accepting that life is, objectively speaking, “meaningless,”
existentialism admits only to the subjective search for meaning in life.
In other words, their philosophy suggests that there is no real meaning to
living, but once alive, we may as well “invent” a purpose and reason for our
individual lives. The great psychotherapist Viktor Frankl compared this
approach to looking at the world through a kaleidoscope. Peering into a
kaleidoscope, we can only see what other human beings have put in, and the
pattern depends on how we turn the kaleidoscope. Understood in this fashion, we
might then suggest that Adam and Hava’s decision to have children was self-conceived
at the time that they realized the bleak future that lay ahead.
In truth, however,
Adam and Hava’s mission to procreate had already been determined in the very
moment that followed their creation:
And God blessed them, and God
said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and conquer it’. (1:28)
But although He had
thus spoken to them back then, they apparently only heard it now.
While the call of mankind to pursue meaningful-based activity was clearly
stated upon their appearance in this world, it took this moment of crisis for
Adam and Hava to finally understand it.
Viktor Frankl
compared this approach to searching for meaning to staring into a telescope.
Although we might each look through the telescope from a different subjective
viewpoint, what we see is the same – the objective reality. Presenting this
idea at Harvard University almost sixty years ago, Frankl pointed through the
window at the Harvard Chapel outside and told his students: “That chapel out
there presents itself from a different perspective to each of you, depending on
where you sit. If two of you were to claim that you see the chapel in exactly
the same way, I would have to tell you that one of you is imagining things. But
despite this different and highly subjective perspective, no one will deny that
the Harvard Chapel out there is one and the same objective reality.”[2]
I believe that each of our
own journeys towards meaning in life are similarly guided. Based in the
objective existence of God’s words, our authentic experiences and genuine study
of Torah hold the keys to uncovering their veiled meaning. The Hakhamim
thus demanded that we “reenact Ma’amad Har Sinai” every time we study
Torah – “Just as there it was in awe, fear, trembling and quaking,
so in this case too it must be in awe, fear, trembling and quaking.”[3]
The Zohar furthermore stated, “He who endeavors in [study of] Torah
is as if he stands every day at Mount Sinai and receives the Torah.”[4] We
are commanded, then, to reposition ourselves in dialogue with the Almighty,
urged to crane our necks out ever further to hear His words as He speaks to us in
the present.
“Somehow, when I open up the gemara,
either alone or when I am in company,” R. Soloveitchik once remarked, “I have
the impression, do not call it a hallucination, as if I hear, so to say, the
soft footsteps of somebody invisible. He comes in and sits down with me,
sometimes looking over my shoulders…The study of Torah is basically, for me, an
ecstatic experience in which one meets God.”[5]
Gershom Scholem likened this phenomenon to a musical symphony. He explained
that when genuinely engaging in Torah we play the role of a musician playing
the symphony. And although we have not composed it, we nonetheless participate
in significant measure to its production. God’s dialogue with Am Yisrael,
which began at Har Sinai, continues to take form through us – as we listen for
His voice in the present.[6]
God’s initial blessing of “Be
fruitful and multiply” fell upon the deaf ears of Adam and Hava. The ease and
relative certainty of their early stages of life made it difficult for Adam and
Hava to properly comprehend His words at that time. Banishment from Gan Eden
and realizing their finitude raised the volume of His message and forced its
meaning upon them. It was then that they “discovered” the objective words that
God had spoken to them long before.
Adam and Hava’s experiences
back then ring true to us today. Seeking God’s presence and searching for
meaning in our own lives is sometimes misperceived as a futile attempt at
self-invention (as in: “You don’t actually believe that?!”). In truth,
however, endeavoring upon that journey taps into the sounds of His eternal voice
which seek dialogue with us.
Genuinely studying His words while
engaging life with open eyes reveals a particular truth that continues to shine
from afar.
[1] See Commentary of Rashi to Bereshit 4:1, s.v.
ve-ha-adam and Commentary of Ibn Ezra ad. loc. See, as well, Ossar
Mefarshei HaTorah: Bereshit vol. 1 (Jerusalem, IS, 2016), pg. 153 and R.
Meir Mazouz’s related discussion of this topic in Bayit Ne’eman: Bereshit vol.
1 (Bnei Brak, IS, 2019), pg. 117-119.
[2] As cited by Joseph B. Fabry in The Pursuit of Meaning: Viktor
Frankl, Logotherapy, and Life (Charlottesville, VG, 2013), pg. 46-47.
[3] Berakhot 22a.
[4] Zohar vol. 3, pg. 179. Cited by R. Hayim of Volozhin in Nefesh
HaHayim 4:14.
[5] Related in an address on June 19, 1975. Transcribed by R.Aaron
Rakeffet-Rothkoff, in The Rav: The World of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik
vol. 2 (Jersey City, NJ, 1999), pg. 200-4.
[6] Gershom G. Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other
Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York, NY, 1971), pg. 296-303.
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