Parshat B’Chukotai, The Practice of Dying and the Bedtime Shema

If we examine our lives, we find that the greatest cause of sorrow is that we take up something and put our whole energy into it. Perhaps it is a failure, and yet we cannot give it up. We know that it is hurting us, and any further clinging to it is simply bringing misery on us, still we cannot tear ourselves away from it. The bee came to sip the honey, but its beak stuck to the honey pot and it could not get away…

…We want to enjoy the pleasures of life, as they eat into our vitals.

We want to get everything from nature, but we find in the long run that nature takes everything from us, depletes us and casts us aside…

…This is the one cause of mystery – we are attached, we are being caught.

Work constantly, but be not attached.

Reserve unto yourself the power of detaching yourself from everything, however beloved, however much the soul might yearn for it.

However great the pains of misery you feel if you are going to leave it, still reserve the power of leaving it whenever you want.

The weak have no place here in this life, or in any other life.

Weakness leads to slavery, weakness leads to all kinds of misery, physical and mental.

There are hundreds of thousands of microbes surrounding us, but they cannot harm us unless we become weak, until the body is ready and predisposed to receive them…

…The difficulty is that there must be as much power of attachment as there is of detachment.

There are men who are never attracted by anything. They can never love. They are hard-hearted and apathetic.

They escape most of the miseries of life, but the wall never feels misery.

The wall never loves, it never hurts, but it is the wall after all.

Surely it is better to be attached and caught than to be a wall.

Therefore the man who never loves and is hard and stony escapes most of the miseries of life, and escapes also its joys.

We do not want that. That is weakness, that is death. That soul has not been awakened. That never feels weakness, never feels misery. That is the coward’s fate. We do not want that.

At the same time we not only want this mighty power of love – the mighty power of attachment, the power of throwing our whole soul upon a single object, losing ourselves and letting ourselves be annihilated as it were for other souls, which is the power of the gods – but we want to be higher even than the gods.

A perfect man can put his whole soul upon that one point of love, yet he is unattached.

Swami Vivekananda

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The Zohar tells us that Psalm 25 is recited during Tachanun, because in the alphabetical acrostic of this Psalm, the letter vav (symbolizing the Tree of Life) is missing. The Tree of Life must be omitted, because reciting the Tachanun prayer involves embracing the Tree of Death – it is about knowing how to let go and surrender.

And yet, in our Siddur, Psalm 25 does not appear in Tachanun. Instead we read Psalm Six. In Hebrew numerology the number six is the letter vav.

In his commentary on Mishna Brura – Tachanun, the Be’er Hetev, quoting the Magen Avraham, says that the Zohar is correct in citing Psalm 25. This means that at some point in history this prayer was changed, despite the fact that the sages of the Great Assembly were responsible for setting the liturgy for the entire Siddur.

If Psalm 25 glaringly omits the letter vav, why, of all the possible substitutes, was Psalm 6/vav chosen to be recited in its stead?

The Be’er Hetev says the change was made because Psalm 25 is a dangerous prayer, in that it can shorten a person’s life if it is recited without sufficient sincerity. Therefore, it was considered too risky to be included as part of the set liturgy, even though the sages had cited it. It is through recitation of Psalm 25 that Ima Shalom said her husband R. Eliezer caused the death of her brother Rabban Gamaliel. The Gemara, (Baba Metzia 59b) says that from the time of a disagreement between her husband R. Eliezer and her brother R. Gamliel “she did not permit R. Eliezer to fall on his face.” “Fall on his face” means to recite the Tachanun prayer. When her husband does manage to recite the prayer, R. Gamliel dies, and Ima Shalom cries, “You have killed my brother!” When asked how she knows this, she replies, “I have this tradition from my father’s house: All gates are locked, excepting the gates of wounded feelings.”

And so the Tree of Death, symbolized by Psalm 25, was replaced (by all except Lubavitch Hassidim) by the Tree of Life, symbolized by Psalm 6, because the dangers of including and embracing the Tree of Death were considered too great. (The song Ein K’Elokeinu is omitted from the Ashenazi Siddur for a similar reason).

In Parshat B’Chukotai, the word Chok-Law is derived from Hakuk, meaning “deep excavation”. Chok is connected to death, because the primary Chok is the Chok of Para Aduma – the Red Heifer, whose ashes counter the tuma of death. In these connections we find profound teachings about what it means and what it feels like to embrace the Tree of Death.

Chok is usually defined as a law that is not understandable by rational means. The re-definition of Chok as “deep excavation”, cited above, aims to turn every Mishpat (“rational” law) into a Chok, by excavating to a deeper level.

This excavation is the core Avoda/work of the Piacezna Rebbe – it is what he had to do in order to stay calm and focused in the Warsaw Ghetto.

We can all undertake this Avoda/work when we practice dying every night, by going to sleep, and through this work both death and tuma are developed as positives – and part of a positive process - rather than as negative and undesirable.

In this positive perspective, death and tuma are associated with Shabbes. All three represent the empty space on which we need to focus, if we are not to succumb to the driven-ness and frantic pace of the working week. Practicing dying by consciously letting go and entering sleep is related to the meditative concept of taking deep breaths for the mind. Scientific analysis has shown that in a deep meditative state, the brain gives off alpha waves, which are like the deep breaths of deep sleep.

The Jewish way of achieving this state of deep alpha rest is through the bedtime Shema, which embodies the paradox of raising sleep – an unconscious state – to consciousness.

According to this Torah, instead of teaching people how to be effectively active, we need to teach them how to be effectively inactive. The whole focus of tertiary education is on teaching people how to be more effectively active. What we don’t teach people is how to be effectively inactive.

Central to learning how to be effectively inactive is the idea that the Jews don’t keep Shabbes; Shabbes keeps the Jews. Unless our inactivity is deep rest, it cannot go anywhere. This “active sleep”, or “conscious unconsciousness” is the still, small voice that we develop within ourselves.

Teaching people how to go to sleep, and how to wake up in the morning, is a critical piece of Torah. We need to learn this before we can really enter Shabbes or the Tachanun prayer, both of which involve more advanced meditative practice, because all nourishment, all spiritual and intellectual success, emanates from Shabbes.

In order to deal existentially with our lives, we have to practice dying.

As Carlos Castenada says; if I look quickly over my left shoulder, I will see my death stalking me. Castenada writes that being able to look at our hands in the midst of a dream, and realize we are dreaming, is one aspect of the practice of dying.

In a similar vein, the Rebbe of Ishbitz, (Mei Hashiloach Part 1, Parshat Miqets) in making the connection between lechem/bread and chalom/dream, asserts that waking life is a dream, because our regular waking existence is the state of greatest unconsciousness. Eating becomes the model for unconscious activity when a person eats “like an animal”, without awareness of the divine life force in the bread. When we understand that the letters for lechem/bread and chalom/dream are identical, we realize that bread, representing all the material pleasures of this world, needs to be understood and interpreted – excavated at depth - if these pleasures are to be raised to the level of consciousness.

The same letters that form the words “bread” and “dream” also form the word melach, “salt”. While bread represents life’s goodness and pleasures, salt represents its constrictions – the tears and the crying. When Amalek is in charge, we experience life as a constant roller coaster ride between the good and the bad, in which constriction dominates. To avoid this outcome, we need to be able to solve the dream of life in accordance with Joseph’s interpretation, in which the seven emaciated cows are nourished by swallowing the seven fat cows. For many people, the emaciated cows swallow the healthy cows, but remain emaciated. In this scenario, the constriction dominates, and leads to a manic-depressive roller coaster ride through life. When things are going well, people feel good, and when things are not going well, they feel bad. There is no possibility for digging deeper, and finding the good inside the bad.

One strong image of the Melach/salt dominated world-view is that of Lot’s wife, who symbolizes someone who just looks back at the losses and is frozen in her tears.

Both Lot and his wife represent Everyman. Both are stuck in the unconscious.

Lot is at first afraid to go into the cave with his daughters, because the cave represents his fears, just as Lot’s wife becomes frozen by looking back.

Torah, however, offers a different perspective in which joy is found inside sorrow through a process of dream-interpretation and solving. When we excavate and find the pitaron/solution to the dream, we have achieved a state of “conscious unconscious”.

This invitation to interpretation is the trick the Torah plays – it is one of the key features of the elem/hiddenness of God in olam/world. The basic premise of this world-view is the more active a person is, the more mindless he is. This directly counters Western culture, whose basic premise is the more active a person is, the more conscious he is.

In this Torah, dreams are the highest form of consciousness, while active waking life is considered to be less conscious, because it is instinctive. The human being is instinctively active, like an ant. Regular human activity – the daily routine - is habitual, and habit drives out awareness. Mindfulness is excluded because nothing is weighed up or contemplated – it is just done – so that the person becomes a human doing instead of a human being.

Many people in Western society need to learn how to actively waste time.

In the Sabbath Eve song Kol Mekadesh, we sing, “Help those who stop on the seventh, the ones who plow and harvest universes, who take small steps.”

In Yiddish, this kind of “small step” walking is called shpatzierin, meaning “a stroll that has no goal”, but although there is no set destination, energy comes from each step.

This is the experience of Avraham, whom God commanded to go “to the place that I will show you”. (Genesis 12:1).

During the week, we need to know where we are going, because we are driven by fear of not earning a living. Our activity becomes mindless and compulsive.

The unconscious experience of life is a roller coaster of ups and downs.

The Peleh Yoetz (an 18th Century work by Rabbi Eliezer Papo) teaches that Amalek effectuates the split that creates this roller coaster, because Amalek is the force of competition, and the force of randomness – in Hebrew “Keri” – which is the most repeated word in Parshat B’Chukotai. The Torah says (Deuteronomy 25:18) “Amalek….karcha b’derech”. This can mean either “Amalek cooled you on the road” or “Amalek happened to meet you on the road”.

In Parshat B’Chukotai Hashem is saying, “If you are casual (keri) with Me, I will be casual with you – if you “happen” to meet Me, I will “happen” to meet you. This is connected to the idea of Shmitta – which states that unless we abandon and surrender not only ourselves but also our activity and our belongings, they will surrender us and abandon us.

Ironically, one of the main products of “the rudderless voyage called Progress” is the multitude of elderly people sitting in old people’s homes, feeling utterly abandoned – a state described by Swami Vivekananda as being sabotaged by nature.

In modern Western society, the whole aging process leads to lonely, abandoned depression, and so practicing the art of dying is the most productive retirement fund of all. And yet, the world encourages us to practice the exact opposite. Jewish immigrants to the United States were told as soon as they arrived that if they continued to observe Shabbat, they would not be able to earn a living. Western society prizes activity above all, and is morbidly afraid that inactivity will swallow a person and prevent him from ever becoming active.

The Jewish people are considered a mystery and an enigma because they fly in the face of these Western values.

The Rebbe of Ishbitz identifies one of the most basic fears behind anti-Semitism as fear of the Jewish people’s connection with inactivity and with death. Death is feared above all else, and so the Jews’ connection with death becomes a source of fear. People generally identify with the world of action, and with strategies for more dominance and better, more effective action, and yet the Jewish people represent something totally different. Through our survival in the face of massive persecution, we are perceived as an ally of death, and our inordinate achievements are said to stem from our having access to some kind of secret to which the rest of the world is not privy.

The Esh Kodesh, in his commentary on Parshat Bo (January 24, 1942) explains how the Jew, through his alliance with the Tree of Death, keeps his composure in the face of death. This contains the whole secret of the phoenix rising from the ashes. The Esh Kodesh quotes the Zohar (vol.1, 103a) on the verse from Eshet Chayil (Proverbs 31:14); “Her husband is well known in the gates…” The Zohar understands the Husband as Hashem, “Husband of the human soul”, and sh’ar/gate in its alternate meaning of “estimation” or “valuation”. The Esh Kodesh goes on to explain that revelation is always at the heart of mystery and of darkness, and so Hashem “is known by each person inasmuch as that person in his heart esteems and values Him.”

We can turn this around, to get the same picture from an external perspective, in which the husband is understood as the Jew. In the final analysis, Jews are well known for what they don’t do. Although the world usually views the successes of the Jews as the result of drivenness or conspiracy, the greatest accomplishment of the Jews is actually in not accomplishing. Knowing how to embrace inactivity by keeping Shabbes is the generating force for all the accomplishments of the Jews throughout the ages. The mysterious engine that drives the Jewish people, that which gives them their tremendous vitality and energy, is Shabbes. Shabbes is the inner life of all the accomplishments of Eshet Chayil, the Woman of Valor. The heart of the mystery of Eshet Chayil is the paradox of ultimate inaction as the source of all activity.

The “Bedtime Shema” is the key to the mystery. The Shema provides inner illumination, which acts as an antidote to “burn-out”. The experience of “burn out” corresponds to the death penalty that entails pouring molten lead down the throat – which turns a person into an empty husk.

The main teaching of the Bedtime Shema is that in order to get up effectively in the morning, and not suffer from burn out, we have to go to bed effectively at night.

While Western culture teaches “the early bird catches the worm”, Jews are unique in that we begin our days at night.

For the Jew, the main avoda is at night, after the end of the working day. Night is the Shabbes time, the time of review, and so night is the source of all our morning energy. We derive power and force from inactivity, from wasting time, from simulated death.

Ultimately, Shabbes is a training course for being present, with each of the laws of Shabbes making a precise contribution. We can only attain the deep breath of rest if we are able to be truly present on Shabbes, and the training ground for Shabbes is in how we practice going to sleep.

The Zohar describes night as a time when all the superficial klipot/husks and external forces – the forces of tuma - combine to block out the sun.

This seemingly totally negative description of night and death and tuma as blocking physical illumination is nonetheless the basic principle of our personal spiritual illumination, as we learn in the second paragraph of the Bedtime Shema, where we say: “Blessed are You, Hashem our God, King of the universe, who casts the bonds of sleep upon my eyes and slumber upon my eyelids, and who illuminates the pupil of the eye.”

Our main experience of illumination is at night. Hence, in a philosophical tour de force, the first fourteen pages of Gemara Pessachim are taken up with explaining why or/light is really night. Under the rubric of the “conscious unconscious” principle, this makes perfect sense. The Gemara here explains that the night, by precluding physical sight, teaches us to turn on our inner light and fine tune the sight of our souls.

The Gemara tells us, “the candles of God are the souls of human beings”, and so the search for chametz before Pessach involves going with a candle and a feather into the darkest places inside ourselves, and looking in the nooks and crannies for the fermenting grudges.

Similarly, in the Bedtime Shema, we review all the fermenting places in our day. We first (in the first paragraph) let go of our grudges, then (in the second paragraph) we experience the illumination.

Next we connect the illumination associated with going to bed with Shabbes, by reciting Psalm 91, which is also recited at Havdalla. Shabbes is bracketed by parentheses of illumination. We begin Shabbes by shielding the Kiddush cup in order to see our reflection in the wine. The sparkle in the wine returns the sparkle to our eyes, and cancels the burn-out and exhaustion caused by the labors of the week. At the end of Shabbes, at Havdalla, we place a drop of wine, which contains the torch of the Havdalla candle, into our eyes to guard the illumination in our eyes.

The last thing we say before going to sleep is; “Into His hand I shall entrust my spirit when I go to sleep – and I shall awaken! With my spirit shall my body remain, Hashem is with me, I shall not fear.”

Going to sleep in this way is a deliberate attempt to surrender, and with the Bedtime Shema, we practice this moment of surrender. Although it is much easier to put our energy into new strategies and new ways to be effective, we choose to put our energy into the conscious act of surrender.

This is similar to the practice of meditation, in which we surrender any foreign thought that comes to us, and gently turn our minds back to the mantra. This is what creates the meditative state, described by Swami Vivekananda as the moment of detachment. It doesn’t involve rejection or cessation of desire or of care or of love. The object of detachment is not to become a wall. It does involve detaching from the fruits of our action, detaching from expectation.

Upon arising, the first thing we say is, “I am thankful before You, O living and eternal King, because you have returned my soul to me with kindness – great is Your trust.”

The only way we can experience this return of that which we have entrusted to God, is if we consciously surrender it the night before. The whole act of surrendering, in creating the empty space, transforms sleep into the empty space of Malchut. To the extent to which we can effect this surrender, we experience a resurgence of gratitude, energy and renewal in the morning upon awakening.

After this waking moment, we can appreciate each one of the morning blessings as one of the worlds of consciousness, and one more movement towards getting up.

In davening, the movement through the four worlds is an act of perfecting the Tree of Life.

But when we say the Tachanun prayer, we move from the Tree of Life to the Tree of Death.

The first line of learning is sleeping. The second line of learning is Shabbes. And the third line of learning is Tachanun.

The extent to which we are able to simulate death in the first two determines the ultimate act of “conscious unconsciousness”, which is Tachanun, through which we can experience deep forgiveness for our sins. Through the simulation of death in the Tachanun prayer, we arrive at the point of brokenness through which we gain relief.

The deepest sense of Tshuvah and forgiveness comes through our embrace of the Tree of Death. Ironically, this is Tshuvah b’simcha/with joy, because it accesses the still small voice within that can stand up, even in the Warsaw Ghetto.

With all its failures and successes, with all its joys and sorrows, life can be one succession of sunshine, if we are not caught…

…Attachment is the source of all our pleasures now. We are attached to our friends, to our relatives. We are attached to our intellectual and spiritual work.

We are attached to external objects because we think they will give pleasure.

What again brings misery, but this very attachment?

We have to detach ourselves to earn joy.

If only we had power to detach ourselves at will, there would not be any misery.

Man alone would be able to get the best of nature. Having the power to attach himself to things with all his energy, he has also the power to detach himself.

Swami Vivekananda

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