Ekev : The Greatest Light
It is the paradox of the dialectic
that creates the perception of God.
The whole idea of Kabbalah is that
reality can be portrayed mathematically, in colors, and in geometry. Taken to
its logical conclusion, this leads to a vision of life as a geodesic dome.
The cross is the symbol of linear
dialectic – where reality must be either one way, or else it is the other way.
The Magen David, however, is a portrayal of the Sephirot, and hence its sides
are spherical. The Magen David symbolizes the reality in which space is curved
and opposites eventually meet in the same place, just as Kabbalah teaches that
the extremes of Chessed and Gevurah eventually meet in the same place. The
curved-sided triangle of the Magen David is the basic form of the universe.
In therapy, I try to create some
amazement through cognitive dissonance.
When a person zeroes in on
incongruity, like that between good and evil, he can arrive at a connective
reality instead of a dissociative reality.
This same process is at work in
Torah. Regarding the paradox of the connection between the Pilegesh
b'Giv'ah (Shoftim 19) and the
festival of Tu b’Av, it is important to recognize that the Torah of Moshiach
comes out of the startling contrast between these two.
Going back to the beginning of the
circle, we can see that the whole birth of the Jewish people is traced to
Yehuda standing as collateral for Benjamin. This moment was the moment of
conception –like the moment when the sperm meets the egg. It could be called the
‘orgasm of Tshuva’. If Yehuda had not stood up before Joseph and declared
himself collateral, everything would have been lost. The brothers would have
become alienated, and the family would have perished in its own pain.
There is more than one way to perish
through sterility and alienation. Just as there are two alternative empty wombs
– the fruitful womb and the sterile womb – so are there two alternative
versions of satiation and satisfaction.
Moshe refers to these two versions
of satisfaction in Parshat Ekev. The first time he uses the word savata/satisfied
(Deuteronomy 8:10), Moshe says “When you eat and are satisfied, you must
therefore bless God your Lord for the good land that He has given you.” This
refers to Birkat haMazon – the blessing after meals.
The second reference to savata
is in the context of complacency – “You may then eat and be satisfied, building
fine houses and living in them. Your herds and flocks may increase, and you may
amass much silver and gold – everything you own may increase. But your heart
may then grow haughty, and you may forget God your Lord, the One who brought
you out of the slave house that was Egypt.” (Ibid 12-14).
The first version of satisfaction is
the same as the fruitful version of emptiness. Here the emptiness of the womb
precedes fertilization and birth. This is the emptiness of compassion, where
death and pain bring forth birth. The Esh Kodesh articulates this fruitful
emptiness very powerfully in a note he added to his commentary on Parshat Ekev.
(The commentary was written in August 1941 and the note was added at the end of
1942). In the commentary, which focuses on the hithadshut - constant renewal of Judaism, he insists
that even though they are suffering, people can still “learn things that do not
require too much concentration, or at least recite Psalms.” In the note added
in 1942, however, he retracts this, saying that by now “the holy congregations
have been annihilated in a radical excision” and that it is now impossible to
carry on, or even plan reconstruction. Although this seems to negate the notion
of hithadshut - newness and
renewal, the Esh Kodesh finished this addition on a note of great hope: “Only
God, He will have mercy and save us in the blink of an eye. As for the
rebuilding of all that has been destroyed, that will only happen with the final
redemption and the resurrection of the dead. God, alone, can build and heal.
Please, O God, have mercy; please do not delay in rescuing us.”
The Esh Kodesh believed in the
process. Even when he personally could do no more, when there was no womb left
from which anything could emerge, he believed that God would do it for him.
From this darkest of all times rose the greatest of hopes, like a phoenix from
the ashes. The encapsulation of this process is in the phrase “in the blink of
an eye”, which the Esh Kodesh uses often in his writings. The deeper meaning of
this phrase is that when a person changes his perception, everything is
suddenly new. Although external, objective ‘reality’ may remain unaltered, the
world becomes a place of hithadshut – where everything is constantly
new.
All the things the Esh Kodesh did to
serve Torah – to keep davening, keep learning, to keep the soup kitchen
going in his house – were also a deepening of the revelation he experienced. As
the darkness around him deepened, so too did the revelation, which brings with
it the experience of everything constantly becoming new, in the blink of an
eye.
This is the same process as the one
by which Tu b’Av and Messiah rise from the ashes of Tisha b’Av and the rape of
the Pilegesh b'Giv'ah.
A major question arising from the festival of Tu b’Av as it is
described in Taanith 31a, is why Jewish women scholars have not picked up on Tu
b’Av as the most radical expression of women’s values in the entire Torah? In
Tu b’Av the affirmation of the intrinsic value of women is explicit. The women
say to the men, “Raise your eyes and see the value of women”. This is more radical, more adamantly
concerned with affirming the value of women than anything else in Judaism.
Nothing needs to be inferred from this text, it is all there in black and
white, and yet it has been largely ignored.
One reason for this might be because of the association of Tu b’Av
with the Pilegesh b'Giv'ah. There is in the Jewish world a prevalent belief that Judaism is
filled with negativity, that we bring our suffering on ourselves by focusing on
episodes such as the Pilegesh b'Giv'ah and Tisha b’Av, and the
Holocaust. This reasoning states that if we stop being so negative, and become
more positive, we will be more liked, and our suffering will end.
Economics, however, teaches us just the opposite. It teaches that
‘investor psychology’ – buying high and selling low – is guaranteed to lose
money every time. In the world-view of ‘investor psychology’, the world is a
roller-coaster in which up is up, and down is down. When we are drawn into this
perception, by investing money or emotions, we will lose every time. What we
need to do is knock ourselves out of this perception, even though the knocking
out process does not feel good. We need to have the same attitude as smart
investors, who know that up is really down, and down is really up. They buy
when prices are low and sell when they are high.
The Esh Kodesh understood this. He was able to keep his composure
in the Warsaw Ghetto because of his understanding of darkness such as that of
the Pilegesh b'Giv'ah. The Pilegesh
b'Giv'ah is the darkest place in the Torah, and it is also the most
well-written. An outstanding feature of the writing is in how the woman’s
silence is echoed. As the concubine lies at the entrance of the house, her
hands “grasping the threshold,” her husband says (Shoftim 19:28) “Get up. Let
us go”. The text does not tell us that the woman is dead. It simply goes on to
state, “there was no reply”. These four words resound as if through an
amplifier.
Juxtaposed to the absence voice in the Concubine of Giv’ah is the
fact that the Esh Kodesh was able to keep his voice, and the question of how he
did this, and how his voice actually grew louder and louder as the war
progressed. The Esh Kodesh, in the Warsaw Ghetto, understands that this darkest
place contains the brightest hope. He is the hope, and as the war
progresses, his Torahs continue to shine brighter and brighter. When the sky is
dark, the Jewish people know that the moon is there, and so the darkest place
becomes the lightest. Even though it seemed as if there was nothing in the
darkness but more darkness, the Esh Kodesh knew the difference between the question
that is Amalek and the question that is Hashem. Amalek’s is the sterile cynical
question that sees nothing at all inside darkness, whereas the Esh Kodesh could
say, as he did in his footnote to Parshat Ekev, it looks as if nothing is
there, and yet I know that in the blink of an eye, it can all change. The
sliver of the moon will appear, and everything will turn around. This is
radical amazement, and this sense of mystery is the fruitful question that the
Esh Kodesh calls a handle on the Torah. Through this question, through this
sense of mystery, everything is illuminated.
Because he was able to grasp this process, the Torahs of the Esh
Kodesh became more brighter and brighter, and he was able to experience the
greatest light while still inside the Warsaw Ghetto.
The secret of hithadshut – newness is in the process that
takes us from the Pilegesh b’Givah to Tu b’Av. First, there is the total
silence of the woman’s voice in the story of the Pilegesh b’Givah, and
then the woman’s voice looms forward in the chorus of women’s voices in Tu
b’Av. This is a most dramatic contrast.
The aftermath of the Pilegesh b’Givah leads to a situation in
which the Tribe of Benjamin is almost wiped out, but eventually, the Torah
tells us (Shoftim 21:15) the tribes “relented toward Benjamin”. The word for
“relented” is machol, the same word we use on Yom Kippur when asking for
forgiveness. The key word of Tu b’Av is Machol, because Machol
means ‘forgive’, ‘relent’ and also ‘dancing circle’. It is this last definition
that links Tu b’Av with the closing vision of Ta’anith – the circle around
Hashem, which is the main image of Mashiach. The dancing women of Tu b’Av link
the Pilegesh b’Givah with Mashiach.
After the war between the tribes, mainly women were left, because
so many men were killed, and it was through the dancing women of Tu b’Av that
the tribe of Benjamin was resuscitated.
This takes us back to the larger circle of Torah, for the Jewish people
were redeemed when Benjamin was not attacked by the brothers.
Here we return to the two experiences of savata/satisfaction
that correspond to the two ways of experiencing emptiness. The first is the
satisfaction that comes from real spiritual nourishment. Moshe Rabeinu connects
this true spiritual satisfaction with the eating of the mann/manna.
Manna is the food of the imagination. To experience the true satisfaction that
is described in Birkhat Hamazon/Grace after Meals, we must nourish
ourselves from the Essence, and this is done through the eating of Manna. Manna
– the food of the imagination – banishes the cynicism of Amalek by helping us
imagine that the Eye that sees and the Ear that hears is right there at the
table with us while we eat. Before we
eat the meals of Shabbat, we literally invite the Shechinah to sit down with
us, by reciting Askinu Seudasa, a short invocation, based on the
teachings of the Zohar. This literal invitation can be called ‘eating manna’.
The main way we eat is through our imagination, so the recitation of these
lines totally transforms the moment of pleasure from an ejaculatory experience
into a birthing experience. This is called ‘nursing from the Essence’. Once the
Shechina is present, we are able to express our gratitude, and the gratitude is
for the life-source in the food, not for the pleasure of the taste. By creating
this imaginary structure of the Shechina at the table, we can proceed to
perceive the life in the food.
In reviewing the Torah in the Book of Deuteronomy, Moshe shows us
that this transformation is the whole focus of food and of eating. In Parshat
Ekev, Moshe recalls the tests and challenges faced by the Jewish people in the
wilderness. “Remember the entire path along which God your Lord led you these
forty years in the desert. He sent hardships to you, to test what you know in
your heart, whether you would keep His commandments or not. He made life
difficult for you, letting you go hungry, and then He fed you the Manna, which
neither you nor your ancestors had ever known. This was to teach you that it is
not by bread alone that man lives, but by all that comes out of God’s mouth.”
(Deuteronomy 8:2-3).
In this wonderfully poetic expression,
the mann is tied, through the key word yadah/know to the Tree of
the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Our tradition also connects these two, when it
specifies that Haman (which can also be read as ‘the mann’) is hamin
ha etz ha ze , referring to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in
Parshat Bereshit. Here, the snake is Amalek seducing Hava by saying ‘there is
nothing there, you are empty. You will only be full if you eat this fruit and
become as wise as God.’
In this passage from Parshat Ekev the void is portrayed as both
the empty stomach and the empty womb. Amalek came because when the people ran
out of water, they said, ‘there is nothing here – there is no compassionate
God.’ The positive, fruitful alternative to this is to have an imaginary
conversation with Hashem at the table, to eat in the presence of ‘the Eye that
sees and the Ear that hears’. We need to have the same positive relationship
with satisfaction as with emptiness. The focus is the same – we can become
stuck in sterility through stuffing ourselves, like the men in the Pilegesh
b’Givah, just as we become stuck through a cynical response to emptiness,
like the Jews when they ran out of water.
The alternative is the machol – the empty circle described
at the end of Ta’anith, which, says the Ishbitzer in Mei Hashiloach, is filled
with Hashem. The greatness of this Torah of Mashiach is in the fact that
although everyone in the circle is unequal relative to each other – each person
has her own distinct qualities – each is also equidistant from Hashem. This is
the positive response to emptiness - the positive fantasy expressed by the Esh
Kodesh as ‘in the blink of an eye’. This is the positive question – the mystery
that leads to birth of our handle on the Torah. The negative fantasy is the
cynical question of Amalek – the fantasy that leaves a person stuck in the mud,
like Adam and Hava when they retreated from each other to masturbate with their
private fantasies.
In contemplating these two options – sterility and stuckness or
fruitfulness and hope, we can see the purpose of the Jewish people’s forty
years of wandering in the desert. For forty years they went round and round, in
an empty place. They kept going around in this empty place until it became a
place from which they could draw fullness.
Unlike the Esh Kodesh, the concubine of Giv’ah was stuck in the
desert. She did not have a voice because she accepted the reality that was
imposed upon her. This is called a ‘victim mentality’, or ‘slave mentality’.
The alternative response of the Esh Kodesh to darkness and
suffering contains within it the secret of the Jewish people. The first time
that Moshe left the Jewish people in the void, when he ascended the mountain to
receive the tablets of the Law and returned to find the Golden Calf, he broke
the tablets because he realized that he had not empowered the people, he had
simply replaced Pharaoh, and then the Golden Calf had replaced him. The
mentality of the Jewish people, at this point, had not changed at all. They
were still stuck in their victim mentality, which is the slave state. Moshe
realized that he would have to leave in a way that would empower the Jewish
people.
This is the significance of the forty years in the desert. As
Moshe says in Parshat Ekev, God sent ‘tests and afflictions’. As the Talmud in
Gittin says, ‘a person cannot stand in a place of Torah unless he has failed
there’. The tests and afflictions and failures of the Jewish people during
their forty years in the desert were the process through which they shed their
victim mentality, and arrived in Eretz Yisrael.
Most people tell their stories with themselves as the victim. This
guarantees loss of voice. This is the story of the Pilegesh b’Giva,
where the darkness becomes a void in which one becomes stuck in the mud. In
this frame of mind, the void is a place of terrible losses, and a person looks
into the heart of darkness and sees nothing. This is the void of She’ol
– the Hebrew word for ‘hell’ which also means ‘question’ – the cynical question
of Amalek which doubts the presence of the compassionate God.
Eretz Yisrael is a frame of mind, in which we are not subject to
victim mentality. Therefore Moshe says (Deuteronomy 8:10) ‘When you eat and are
satisfied, you must therefore bless God your Lord for the good land that He has
given you.’
Eretz Yisrael is the state of mind through which we eat from the
Manna and nourish from the Essence, with gratitude.
Moshe continues (Ibid 11) ‘Be a guardian of yourself’. We must see
ourselves as guardians of this gift. We need to learn to be guardians of the
energy we derive from food. Guardianship does not end with producing,
harvesting and eating the food. It continues through to the energy derived from
the food. From this we can understand that the real, positive satisfaction
derived from eating is that through eating we become slaves of God.
Then Moshe warns us that even if we attain this conception of
Hashem and this relationship to food, we can still lose it, because we live in
a world of sleeping and forgetting. “You may then eat and be satisfied,
building fine houses and living in them. Your herds and flocks may increase,
and you may amass much silver and gold – everything you own may increase. But
your heart may then grow haughty, and you may forget God your Lord, the One who
brought you out of the slave house that was Egypt.”
This is the second version of satisfaction, the satisfaction that
comes from stuffing oneself, the way the men in the story of the concubine of
Giv’ah stuff themselves with food and alcohol.
Moshe reminds the Jewish people (Ibid 15) “It was He who led you
through the great, terrifying desert, where these were snakes, vipers,
scorpions and thirst. When there was no water, it was He who provided you with
water from a solid flint.”
Flint is the hardest rock. This represents the transformation of
the heart of stone into the heart of flesh.
Moshe tells us that even in the pain, Hashem was only doing good
for us. “He may have been sending hardships to test you, but it was so He would
eventually do [all the more] good for you.”
The following verse contains the key line, “You will say in your
hearts, ‘my strength and the strength of my arms made this good for me.’”
This is the quintessential description of being satisfied in the
sense of being stuffed. It is this type of satisfaction that brought about the
objectification of the concubine of Giv’ah, through which she was viewed as a
commodity. This is turned around in the festival of Tu b’Av, whose dancing
circle of women provides us with a picture of the ‘full void’. It is only the
experience of the full void that allows us to relent, because the other void is
full of grudges relating to how we have been victimized.
In this way, the sterile, stuck experience comes full circle, in
that the victim mentality is tied to the emptiness. The bitterness of this
experience of emptiness creates grudges against anyone who has wronged us in
our lives.
The story of the war against the Tribe of Benjamin in the Book of
Judges is a retrograde story, in which the tshuva of the brothers in the Book
of Genesis is actually undone. While in the Book of Genesis Yehuda stands
collateral for Benjamin, in the Book of Judges, the tribe of Yehuda comes to
kill the tribe of Benjamin.
This is tshuva undone, when we forget the mann, and we
forget that everything comes from Hashem, and we go to sleep.
The message, however, is that this is not the end of the process,
for from the midst of the total negativity of the story of the rape of the
concubine of Giv’ah comes the total positivity of Tu b’Av and the vision of
Mashiach.
The Esh Kodesh in the Warsaw Ghetto models this process for us. We
need to look at what he does with his Torah as much as we look at what he is
actually saying. The Torah of Tu b’Av teaches us that we have to start by
looking at depravity, gazing into the heart of darkness to see the most
depraved acts that human beings have ever committed.
In Parshat Ekev, Moshe Rabeinu is able to distill this process and
describe it. He shows us that the process is the same, no matter where we are.
We can be in the lap of luxury or in the horror of Aushwitz, and we can be
asleep and see nothing, or we can connect to the Source, and see Hashem.
The Esh Kodesh speaks of the idea of allowing oneself to be
comforted by God, that when we touch God’s pain, all the clouds dissipate.
This, for the Esh Kodesh, was a source of radical amazement.
In his commentary on Parshat Ekev (Part B), on the verse
(Deuteronomy 8:15) ‘It was He who provided you water from a solid cliff’, the
Mei Hashiloach says that with this, Hashem shows the Jewish people that they
should never give up or become exhausted from hoping for salvation.
Look at the
rock from which you were fashioned, which is Abraham our father. A key part of
Abraham was to give birth while he was sterile.
According to
the Midrash both Abraham and Sarah were born sterile. Sarah was actually born
without a womb, and for them to give birth is the definition of drawing water
from flint. According to nature, these two people were not able to give birth.
From their side, they had no power of prayer. And yet, says God, I blessed
Abraham that this lesson should be learned through him, that from this a person
should learn to believe.
Here is the connection with the Esh Kodesh in the Warsaw Ghetto.
The Ishbitzer is saying that there is no womb left, and yet, we can see what
emerged nonetheless, for we have hindsight. We can see what emerged from the
Esh Kodesh, how there are more people studying in Yeshiva today than ever
before in Jewish history. If this Esh Kodesh could see this, he would be in a
state of radical amazement.
The Ishbitzer goes on to say that God’s comfort and blessing comes
from absolutely nothing, where not even nature could provide a womb in which to
give birth. This, he says, is our constant comfort – that although the void
looks totally dark, we can constantly see the macholot – the circles –
dancing out of the gas chambers, and the circles of women dancing out of the
rape of the concubine of Giv’ah.
Thus, Paradise
emerges from destruction, to teach us that when things look hard like flint,
there will be birth from this emptiness. This is the meaning of water from flint
– our primary image of consolation. Flint is the driest, hardest rock, utterly
devoid of softness, and it is from this that Hashem takes water.
This is the radical belief of the Esh Kodesh in the Warsaw Ghetto.
Even though it runs counter to all human reasoning and understanding, he was
able to hold onto it, and because of this, his work serves as the greatest
guidepost for hope for all people.