Parshat B’Har : The Process of Hod, the Whirling Dervish and The Still Small Point

A Hassidic Tale:

There was to be a wedding in the town of Annapol. The rabbi of the town was devastated to see that he was only third on the list of invited guests. On top of this, because the rabbi arrived late at the wedding, he was seated on the outskirts, served cold food, and he left early, angry and disgruntled.

Rebbe Zusia, whose name was last on the list, arrived early, knowing that the most important Mitzvah of a wedding is to rejoice with the bride and groom. Because he was so early, he was seated right next to the groom, he was served an excellent meal, and he was the first to dance with the bride.

Zusia became so excited by all this joy and celebration, he entered into an ecstatic state, calling to God, “Hashem, You are the Groom and we are the bride!” In this state of ecstasy, he danced out of the hall and into the forest, and continued dancing there day and night for three days, until finally he look up to heaven and said, “Master of the Universe, Zusia is hungry!”

When Zusia finally returned to town, the rabbi asked him how he could have had such an ecstatic experience at the same wedding which he, the rabbi, had not enjoyed at all.

Zusia responded: “Rabbi, you came expecting everything, and you got nothing. I came expecting nothing, and I got everything.”

Rebbe Zusia was not a slave to reactivity, because no matter what was going on around him, he was able to carry the stillness of Shabbes inside himself.

As long as Shabbes is in the center, the Jewish people, like Sufi dancers, can stay centered in the midst of turbulence and chaos.

In Sufi dancing, the dancer holds up his hands and whirls around for hours without getting dizzy.

In the same way, Parhat B’Har is structured around the number “7” and the idea of Shabbes – Shabbat, Shmittah (Sabbatical Year), Yovel (Jubilee) and Ribit (Interest). The world is a totally overwhelmingly dizzy place, unless we have Shabbes as the core.

The Rebbe of Ishbitz, in Mei Hashiloach, points out that the Jews are the only group in the world who get their Shefa/abundance from inaction rather than from action. While most of the world sees action as the source of money and food and sustenance, the Jewish people understand that abundance comes from the emptiness and inaction of Shabbes.

Shabbes is the center of consciousness – it is a space we carry around inside ourselves. Although the Succah is concretized on Succoth, the immaterial Succah actually exists all year round – as a Mitzvah of thought forming a cubicle of space in every individual. Each of the six sides of the cube corresponds to one of the Mitzvot of thought. Above is the first commandment, “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt…” The ground below is the second commandment, “Do not have any other gods before Me…” In front is belief in Shema Yisrael – belief in the unity of all reality, and that there is no place empty of God. To the right (Chessed) is the Mitzvah to love God. To the left (Gevurah) is the Mitzvah to be in awe and fear of God. The sixth side of the Succah of thought is behind – which is the West – Ma’arav, because we always pray facing the East. Ma’arav is also confusion, and this comes from the back, so this Mitzvah is shielding the mind from destructive passion, which is the Tenth Commandment – not to be envious.

The seventh space in the cube is the empty space inside, and this is Shabbes, which is the source of everything.

On the issue of unification of thought/direction – exemplified by the manner in which the Cohen/Priest goes around the altar – the Zohar (120b) says: “Whoever accomplishes unification in the proper way…happy is his portion in this world and in the world to come, and, moreover, in such a one the Holy One, blessed be He, glorified Himself.”

The key to achieving this unification is in trust and surrender, which manifests as a yielding of hope. The Zohar goes on to provide a concrete example, explaining that sleep, which is a sixtieth part of death, involves giving over our soul in trust to Hashem.

This yielding of hope is the core of being a Jew/Yehudi, and it is rewarded when, upon arising, the sleeper feels refreshed and full of life. Only by separating himself from the Tree of Life can he come to feel part of it. This, says the Zohar, is what happens during the Tachanun (Vidui/confession) prayer. We must actually die in order to be forgiven sins that are punishable by death.

On the basis of this, the Rebbe of Ishbitz teaches that shomer Shabbes (Sabbath guardianship) is the key to becoming a Shomer/guardian in the world. The point of Parshat B’Har and its focus on the seventh day is that we are not owners of the world, in any of the five dimensions.

We arrive at the fifth dimension, the spiritual, moral dimension, by adding the first three dimension of space to the fourth dimension of time. The first step is to yield the land. The feeling of ownership is a key part of a person’s security mechanism and defenses, and so the Mitzvah of Shmittah/Sabbatical year teaches us that we cannot own space. The Jewish people’s first year in Eretz Yisrael was the Shmittah year in which everything had to lie fallow, because everything else had to rise out of that.

The next step is to yield time. Although this is very difficult, non-ownership of time is equally critical. People try to own time by giving time a price tag in the practice of charging Ribit/interest on loans. And so the Torah tells us to become a shomer/guardian of time by not charging interest – by giving free loans. The free loan is the highest form of charity – higher even than anonymous charity, because it preserves the dignity of the borrower.

Finally, in the fifth, the spiritual dimension, we are commanded to yield souls. The attempt to own souls is slavery. The Torah calls the Yovel/Jubilee Year Dror (Leviticus 25:10). A Tsippur Dror – “liberty bird” - is a bird that is still free, even when it is in a cage.

The Dror is the Piacezna Rebbe in the Warsaw Ghetto, and it is Aaron facing the angry mob. The secret is in not getting dizzy. The core of this is Shabbes. When we put Shabbes in the center, we give up on the idea that strategies will give us what we want, and we attain the ability to do things l’shma – without hope for a reward.

All of this pertains to the Sephirah of Hod – because Hod is about opening up your heart with trust, and yielding to Hashem.

Hod – the Sephirah generally translated as “glory” – has three meanings; Gratitude (todah), Yielding (mod’ei) and Confession (Vidui)

The direction of Hod (in the shaking of the Lulav) is downwards, yielding to Mother Earth.

Lag b’Omer, the center of the Omer, is Hod she b’Hod she b’Hod.

In the counting of the Omer, the week of Hod is the fifth week, five being the letter Heh, which is the picture of the open heart.

At the very center of the Omer is the effort to pry open the closed hearts of the slaves.

This is a very difficult process, because trauma stops people from opening their hearts. People who have been abused and intimidated lack the trust they need in order to open their hearts. Intimidation and abuse creates a shell/klipa that is the blocked perception of self (tuma) that alienates and distances a person. The blocked perception/tuma creates the illusion that the shell/klipa that closes up the heart is actually a necessary defense in a threatening world.

The Jew is the abused child of the world family, and so the process of Hod is the essence of the Jew (Yehudi). The pinnacle of this process is the revelation at Sinai – the chuppah/bridal canopy in which Hashem is the groom and the Jewish people is the bride. To get to this place where we can see our Beshert/soul-mate, we must first be able to see our own souls. To be Hashem’s Beshert, a person must first see that his soul is worthy of being a Beshert.

Because it documents the passage from slavery to freedom, the whole Omer counting features the concept of Hod, and the origin of Hod is in Leah, whose breakthrough moment of Gratitude and Yielding was in the birth of her fourth son Yehuda. Yehuda’s name means “this time I will praise God.” (Genesis 29:35) Hod is the root of the word Yehudi/Jew (one who confesses to God, gives thanks to God, and yields to God).

Leah introduces Hod to the world through Yehuda, the progenitor of the Messiah, whose birth represents the pinnacle of a redemptive process of movement and transformation from grudge (slavery) to gratitude (freedom). This process is centered around Hod, because Yehuda is able to say of Tamar, “She is more innocent than I am” (Genesis 38:26). Yehuda is grateful and he confesses and yields to Tamar, and it is in this redemptive moment that Yehuda becomes the first Jew/Yehudi.

A key step in this process of coming to gratitude (the process of Hod) is found in the animosity of one person toward the other. In the stories of both Leah and Hannah, the ‘outer antagonist’, or nemesis, (Rachel in the case of Leah, and Peninnah in the case of Hannah) is a vital part of the process of transformation.

On the Sephirotic tree, the embodiment of Hod is Aaron, the left leg of Adam Kadmon.

The Midrash says, when Aaron died, the main cortege at his funeral comprised eighty thousand children – the offspring of the forty thousand marriages Aaron had saved by lying to men and women in order to reconcile them with their spouses. The Midrash says the children attended Aaron’s funeral out of gratitude to him for saving them from becoming the children of broken homes.

In his ability to risk his own place in this world and in the world to come by yielding to others, Aaron stands opposite Moshe, who never gives up his truth. In one sense, the authority of Moshe replaced the authority of Paro in the national psyche and in this sense, Moshe was feeding the addiction and the slave mentality of the Jewish people with his charisma.

The Golden Calf was never intended to replace Hashem. It was intended to replace Moshe. And in this sense, the Golden Calf was Aaron’s greatest accomplishment, just as it was also brought about by Moshe’s aloofness. During the plague of Darkness, when the Jewish people were out collecting gold as compensation from the Egyptians, Moshe remained aloof, with a rigidity that in many ways keeps people apart and alienated. He could not relate to their desire for gold, and judged it harshly, and so went instead to raise the bones of Yosef. He did this by quoting from Yaakov’s blessing of Yosef. Thinking him a great magician, the Egyptian magicians stole the parchment he read from. Later, as heads of the mixed multitude at Mt. Sinai, these same Egyptians threw the parchment into the fire, creating the Golden Calf.

It was Aaron’s Hod that stepped into the void and softened Moshe’s Netzach. Because Moshe created this indispensability, Aaron had to step into the void. In contrast to Moshe, Aaron was able to relate to the people, so that when they demanded a replacement for Moshe, he was able to tell them to bring him their gold jewelry (Exodus 32:2), thereby preventing an even greater debacle (see 32:25). Aaron wanted the people to stop killing each other. In order to achieve this he was willing to yield, to compromise, to make the golden calf, if they would agree to stop the killing. This is Aaron’s greatness. He knew that by making the golden calf he was sacrificing his place in the world to come, and still he was willing to do it. He was willing to do something without hope for a reward.

This is why Hod is the center of the Omer. Hod is the core of moving past the slave mentality, which is the consequence of abuse.

From this moment on, Moshe realized he must make himself dispensable, and he spent the rest of his life trying to achieve this. He learned from Aaron how to work hard while being free of attachments. Doing something for its own sake, without any hope of a reward, is the key for any collaboration, and this is the hope for the redemption of the world.

The greatest achievement of Moshe and Aaron – and the greatest achievement in the history of the world - was their collaboration, the collaboration between Netzach and Hod.

Avoda Zara literally means “strange work”. It takes a huge amount of work to maintain one’s center in the midst of incredible pain. This work is the core of the process of Hod.

It is this Avoda/work – the process of Hod - that keeps a person alive in the face of embitterment, bad feelings and grudges towards those who seem to be depriving him of what he wants. It is the ability to stay centered even in the face of dizzying chaos, as Aaron stayed centered when facing the mob at the time of the golden calf and the Rebbe of Piacezna stayed centered in the Warsaw Ghetto. It is this Avoda that sustained and transformed the Biblical heroines Leah and Hannah.

The process of Hod involves traversing the space between Lechem Oni/the bread of my pain, and Lechem she onim alav devarim harbe/the bread that answers many questions, which is the act of learning from pain.

The Piacezna Rebbe worked on traversing this space in the Warsaw Ghetto, as did Aaron when he heard of the deaths of his sons, Nadav and Avihu. The Torah says (Leviticus 10:3) v’yidom Aaron – “and Aaron remained silent” when he heard of his son’s deaths. As well as meaning silent, dom refers to mute, inanimate reality. From this we learn that Aaron was silent like the earth. He was able to stay still and centered in the midst of dizzying chaotic turbulence.

This process requires a great deal of Avoda/work.

Leah’s sister Rachel is the key transition figure in the process of Hod – the transition from grudge to gratitude. The key grudge we all hold onto is the grudge against our parents. If we get stuck in a grudge, so that the grudge becomes an idol, we can die, even while we are still alive.

It was Rachel’s grudge against her father Laban for switching her with Leah on her beloved Jacob’s wedding night that caused her to steal Laban’s idols when she left Padan Aram (Genesis 20:32). And Rachel died because of these idols, which represent the rigidity of grudges and resentments.

Rachel named her second son Ben Oni (Benjamin) – “the son of my pain” – and she is still crying for her children, to this day. The object of the entire process of Hod is to make all pain birth pain. Rachel died in her birth pain, just as Mashiach ben Yosef/Josephic Messiah will die in the birth pain of Mashiach ben David/Davidic Messiah.

In her grief, Rachel is a vital part of the dialectic between crying and learning from pain. Just as Nidah tuma is needed to create the proper empty space in which the egg can be fertilized, Rachel’s unending tears are necessary. They are a central element in the process, because, even as the Piacezna Rebbe achieves stillness, someone has to be crying for the Warsaw Ghetto and for the pain of the Jewish people. This is the dialectic of Job’s friends, from whom we learn that we cannot command a person to learn from his pain, even though this learning produces the Messianic process, which is the salvation that we are always working towards. Salvation emanates not from activity and agendas, but from the inactivity and emptiness of the center, which is Shabbes.

And to say, ‘Bless et Hashem, the blessed One.’ The word et implies something additional – this is the evening that ushers in the Sabbath. Blessed is Hashem the blessed One – He withdraws the blessings from the source of life, and the place which all streams emanate to water all things [the source of understanding, which makes possible spiritual and intellectual success]. Because it is the source [from which blessing issues], like the secret of the ‘sign of the covenant’, it is called ‘the Blessed One’, since it is the spring that nourishes the well. Since [the blessings] extend to it [the Godly source of blessing], they will all remain for all eternity. This is why we say, ‘Blessed is Hashem for all eternity’.

Zohar, Terumah – from Sabbath Eve liturgy.

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