Lech Lecha : Out of the Matrix
God and man both emerge from the primordial slime.
The world is the place of sleep. In the movie, The Matrix, everyone exists inside an elaborate,
controlled system, but no one knows that they are in it. This is a world of total
projection, in which people have the illusion of autonomy. The enemies of the
Matrix, those who retain their autonomy, live on the “Zion Ship”. To get there
from the Matrix, they must pass through a series of portals. The majority, who
remain in the Matrix, are kept there by the constant soothing of superficial
comforts. In this scenario, idols are the guardians of the gates of
unconsciousness.
In the world of Torah, every Mitzvah is a portal through to the world
of awareness. The Beit Hamikdash/Holy
Temple is the ultimate portal, and so the Pilgrimage to Jerusalem is literally
to break through our unconscious to see God and be seen by God.
This process of waking up sounds wonderful, until we read in the Brit be’en Hab’tarim (Covenant of Between the Pieces – Genesis 15) that there is a high
price to pay. Here, God speaks of furnaces, vultures, slavery and oppression.
This is not a comfortable scenario. The higher the consciousness, the higher
the risk, as we learn from the three rabbis who entered the Pardes and could
not leave in peace (Hagigah 14b). In order to wake up, you have to do battle
with the Matrix. The Matrix depends on keeping things predictable and
controlled, and in the movie, the hero, Neo (“New”) chooses to do battle with
this control, even though it is painful and difficult, and there are
casualties.
The Esh Kodesh is acutely aware of this, as he pursues the depths of
Torah in the midst of war and chaos. The freedom and independence of mind that
enables him to do this is absolutely unbelievable.
God is our projection. God can be seen as compassionate, or jealous, or
angry, or crying, or depressed. And then there is the ultimate reality.
According to the Esh Kodesh, in his commentary on Parshat Noah (November,
1940), the aspect of God that is immutable (the Ein Sof) connects with what we can identify as tenacious, flexible autonomy.
In our pilgrimage, which is our work towards perceiving the Ein Sof, the key factor is the power of the
imagination - our ability to grind out a lens, and to distinguish how the lens
is blocked by our projection. But the more we strive for a clearer and clearer
lens, the risk of projection becomes higher and higher, so, in the story of the
four who entered the Pardes, in the irony of ironies, Ben Zoma actually sees
God, and goes mad. He sees himself as duality, and then he projects this onto
God. Acher dichotomizes, seeing God as all-Power, and so when he experiences
God as all-Nothing, he loses his faith.
Ben Azzai sees God as consuming and as fusion, and so he fused, by
committing suicide, because he was unable to go back. Rabbi Akiva - the only
one of the four who was married – had in his marriage a model of dialectic
intimacy based on autonomy and non-fusion. Only Rabbi Akiva was able to enter b’shalom and leave b’shalom. As well as “peace”, shalom means
“payment” and “completion”. In the context of reciprocal exchange, Rabbi Akiva
was able to see God and come out the better for it.
The Rambam creates a hierarchy of lenses through which God is viewed,
from Adam, Noach and Abraham, to Moses, who sees through the clearest lens of
all.
Projection and bias make the lens opaque, and this is what creates the
darkness.
Man is born in the darkest place of Hashem’s imagination, and God is
born in the darkest place in our imagination. The fall from the Garden of Eden
represents the birth of God as well as the birth of man. Through the Tree of
Knowledge, we plunge into an unconscious world of blame, shame and denial. In
this unconscious world, we don’t know that we are projecting. The first step
out is to know this.
It follows, then, that just as a child needs a ‘dependency stage’ in
its steps towards autonomy, we need the ‘stubborn dependency’ that can create a
dark place from which God can emerge.
Tantrums are very important developmentally.
Darkness is a defined part of creation, and according to the Ishbitzer,
it is part of the creation of every human being. Our task is to find our
darkness.
In his commentary on Parshat Noach (November, 1940), the Esh Kodesh
writes of the power of the imagination to be independent of even the most
harassing surroundings as an attribute of Jewish “stiff-neckedness”:
To be stiff-necked and continue functioning
as worshipping Jews, to endure and to perform the duties incumbent upon us, involves
the high level of stubbornness described above. In addition to this, to
actually engage fully in study of the Torah, entering deeply into the knowing
of it, is an even greater challenge – for regardless of the troubles besetting
us, there is no great difficulty in putting on phylacteries (t’fillin) or fulfilling other practical Commandments.
But to study Torah, and especially to enter into the depths of Torah, is
extremely difficult.
The Esh Kodesh here is describing a way of getting past reactivity, into
the autonomy of mind and spirit. Even if someone is totally harassing me, I
don’t have to dance their tango.
This journey into autonomy of mind and spirit is the journey of
Avraham’s ten tests. First, he must escape from the Matrix. This corresponds to
Avraham’s first test (according to Rambam’s commentary) – to leave his land,
his birthplace and his fathers house.
You have to leave all the powerful influences of every person’s
consciousness: Your mother’s influence, your father’s influence, and go to
yourself.
In Western literature, we are used to seeing heroes as people who
accomplish through their achievements. The Torah idea of accomplishing through
marking a dead end is an anomaly, and an incredible idea.
Noach’s greatest achievement is that he marked a dead end, and each of
Avraham’s tests is a dead end marking where he failed.
At the very beginning of his story, Avraham lies about his wife, and he
encourages her to lie, in order to save his skin. This is not a very flattering
start for our greatest hero.
The sensation of moving out of the Matrix is one of moving into
darkness. Interestingly, the word for Matrix in Hebrew is meitzar which is literally the word for “Egypt”.
Abraham defines for us and teaches us what it means to step into the
darkness in order to find the light. And so, Abraham’s first great
accomplishment was to study the stories of Adam and Hava and Noach in the
yeshiva of Shem and Eber. To be able to go on to the next step, he had to stand
on the backs of Adam and Noach, by finding the markers they had left on their
dead ends.
The whole idea of progress and accomplishment in Torah is cumulative.
This is the concept of the ethical will. An ethical will, in which one lists
all one’s mistakes, is very hard to write. It is a difficult way to think, but
it is based on the idea that there is a cumulative learning from mistakes, and
that we can benefit from cumulative judgment.
Abraham couldn’t go anywhere without Noach and Adam and Hava. And he,
in turn, leaves as his ethical will, the stories of the mistakes he made.
This dimension is totally missing from the histories of most cultures. One
of the key ingredients is the ability to tell the story truthfully, without
cover-ups. In this sense, Hashem is the editor of the Book of Genesis. The
Editor here uses his editorial power to only allow honest stories into the
Book.
One skill is in telling a story honestly. Another skill is the ability
to listen carefully.
Avraham was skilled in listening to the stories of those who had come
before, and learning from them.
It’s one thing to have a good memory of collective judgments of dead
ends. It’s another thing to make use of them.
The pilgrimage towards objective, clear vision is a fascinating
process, throughout which is the constant seduction of Noach/comfort. Mitzrayim
is constantly luring us back, because no matter how dysfunctional it is, it is
also familiar and comforting.
Parshat Lech Lecha opens with an incredibly sweet moment (Genesis
12:1-3). Hashem (the God of compassion) ‘whispers’ (omer)
to Abraham: “Go to yourself, from your land, from your mother’s influence (artzecha comes from the word leida/ birth), from your father’s house, to a land
that I will show you.”
The key part of this journey is to be able to leave expectations. People
often become bound to a perfectionist dream, and are unable to embrace reality
and move forward because of this. We adopt a perfect illusion, and then proceed
to beat up ourselves and everyone else who doesn’t conform to this illusion.
The way to move beyond this is to learn from Abraham’s process of
taking small steps. This is the meaning of ‘the land I will show you’. You
don’t know where you’re going. All you can do is take one small step towards
problem solving, and then another, so that they build on each other, even
though you can’t know what you will end up with. This building up the fruit of
your actions, without being attached to the end result, is vital in effective
solution building.
This is Abraham’s invention – the idea of walking in front of God. What
does this mean, as an instructional tool? It means that with each small step
forward, we always return to step one, which is to accept the situation the way
it is. Without the initial acceptance, we become more and more intolerant, in
the manner of Noach. We become hypercritical, and we turn everyone off,
including ourselves.
Accepting the situation as it is means accepting myself as I am. This
is walking in front of God, into darkness. I say to myself, “This is where I am at. It’s not where I want to
be, or where I think I should be. Where do I find God here?” The process is
one of letting go of expectations, of illusions of perfection, of ‘Promised
Land, utopian thinking’. This is the role of Shabbat in our lives. The amount
of acceptance and the amount of motivation to press on must exist in equal
amounts, because it’s the acceptance that creates the small steps forward.
At the end of the Torah, Moshe achieves his goal by not going into the
Promised Land. For Moshe, the ‘Promised Land’ was the rejection of Promised
Land thinking.
The great parallel between Abraham and Moshe is in their teaching of
how we gain our dreams by sacrificing our dreams.
The whole problem with longing is that it creates attachment. The
secret is to long for the Promised Land without being attached to the result.
Achievements and talents are tangential. They are merely tools. The key thing is
the journey into the darkness, and the greatest thing a person can do is put a
marker on the dead end of his or her failure.
In Parshat Lech Lecha
(Genesis 12:9) the Torah says “Abram then continued on his way moving steadily
towards the negba”.
Although negba here is often translated as “south”, it
actually means naguv
mi’mayim/dry from water. This is
referring to a place in the human imagination.
Abraham is moving towards a
dry place – which in the Book of Exodus is identified as a safe place (Yam Suf)
and the place of ultimate test (without drinking water). It is a place of
longing, fear and desire.
The three origins of civilization
were all places of tremendous fear and desire. The deltas of the Nile, the
Tigris and Euphrates, and the Yellow River in China were all places of incredible
of opulence, and yet they were also places of tremendous tyranny and oppression.
Abraham is moving towards a
dry place in the mind. In terms of the desert, this represents closeness to
Hashem. Although the dry place is the place of test, where we meet Hashem, we
experience a tremendous snake-like seduction to come instead to the river. We
want to avoid the negba – the dry
place.
So Abraham is not really
physically moving anywhere. He is moving to a place in his mind. His experience of this is described in the
Torah as v’iyi
ra’av b’aretz / ‘there was
a famine in the land’ (Ibid 10). His immediate response is to go down to Egypt,
even though, as the Midrash makes clear, he knows that Egypt is a very
oppressive place. He doesn’t know how to live in a dry place, so he goes to
where there is a river.
Abraham arrives in the Promised
Land, and the first thing he does is leave! Abraham is reconnoitre-ing the
territory of the Jewish people’s descent into Egypt, into oppression, into
slavery, into the Matrix.
This is where you have to
start. We can’t short-circuit the Matrix, because we’re not born with a
cumulative awareness of error. We aren’t born with an inherent awareness of our
particular hisaron/deficiency. We must go on a journey through
the Matrix to find our hisaron.
This is not equivalent to
Noach’s idea of building an ark and floating away in utopian seduction towards
the light. Abraham had to keep moving
south to Egypt. He had to find his own darkness. He couldn’t find it in Haran
because the darkness of Haran was the darkness of his father and of Nimrod.
Abraham had to find his own darkness. When he goes down to Egypt, he knows he
is looking at himself.
The journey to the Promised
Land cannot be a straight journey. It has to be a spiral, and Abraham’s journey
down to Egypt is what makes it a spiral.
In Egypt, Abraham asks
Sarah to say she is his sister, ‘so it will be good for me on your behalf’
(Ibid 13). Through this deceit, Abraham is spared, and Sarah is taken to
Pharaoh’s palace. This classic
objectification of Sarah is, for me, is one of the most awesome moments in the
whole Torah.
After Sarah has been
returned to Abraham, the Torah says (Genesis 13:1) ‘Abram headed northward, to
the Negev (hanegba) along with his wife and all that was his,
including Lot.’ The same word, hanegba, is used
for his descent into Egypt, and for his return to the Promised Land.
The lens has cleared, and
now Abraham sees the Negev desert not as a dry place. He now realizes that this
is the Promised Land. It is where he wants to be.
Hanegba
in each instance is the
same place – a place in Abraham’s mind. Now that he has seen the Matrix, with
all its silver and gold and other bribes, he chooses to live in the desert,
which he no longer experiences as famine and drought.
In Egypt, the place of
water, there is also fear and oppression. After seeing this, Abraham chooses to
go where there are no people. Now, Abraham experiences negba as a place wiped dry of the moisture of
desire and fear – as a place where he can see God through a clear lens. What
began as a drought and a longing for the Nile, ended up becoming the Promised
Land.
Finding the Promised Land
involves the process of Tshuva/return – of
coming back to square one and seeing it through a different lens.
Lot, however, has a
different experience. When he and Abram agree to go their separate ways, the
Torah says (Ibid 10) ‘Lot looked up and saw that the entire Jordan Plain, all
the way to Tzoar had plenty of water. (This was before God destroyed Sodom and
Gomorrah.) It was like God’s own garden, like the land of Egypt.’
Lot is yearning to go back
into the Matrix, into his Gan Eden – the Garden of Eden – ‘the land between the
rivers’.
The Midrash says the
argument between Abraham and Lot was over whether to muzzle the sheep. Abraham
wanted to muzzle the sheep to prevent them from eating other people’s grass.
This echoes all the way back to the antagonism between Cain and Abel. According
to the Midrash, Cain accused Abel of allowing his sheep to eat his grass, and
in the Book of Exodus, Moshe takes his sheep out to Mt. Sinai to avoid the
possibility of their eating other people’s grass.
Lot accuses Abraham of
being impractical – that it is ridiculous for a shepherd to muzzle his sheep.
This is all part of the state of mind called naguv/dry.
The Mei Hashiloach provides
a powerful illustration of this process. When God commands Abraham regarding
the covenant of circumcision (Genesis 17:9), the question arises, why did
Abraham have to wait to be commanded to perform this Mitzvah, when according to
the Gemara (Yoma 28) Abraham, through observation and deduction, kept the whole
Torah? The Ishbitzer explains that observance of the Mitzvot help keep a person
balanced, preventing him from becoming extreme in one way or another.
Circumcision was the only Mitzvah not kept by Abraham prior to his being
commanded, because circumcision involves repair of God’s creation. God created
the world with inherent imperfections, and to perform the Mitzvah of
circumcision before being commanded by God was be tantamount to calling God’s
work ugly and flawed. Abraham did not want to do this. This is why God gave
Ishmael to Abraham. When Abraham saw that his son Ishmael’s behaviour was not
good, he understood that God also deliberately presents us with imperfections
and deficits, and that it was his task to repair them. Through this, Abraham
learned that the title ‘Adam/man’ is
earned through the performance of tikkun/repair.
This is the fundamental
call to man, to become Adam - a mensch. Abraham was able to intuit all the other
Mitzvot, but he wasn’t able to realize the Mitzvah of circumcision until
Ishmael became a teenager, and showed him what was needed. There had to be a
place in Abraham’s mind – a void, an empty space for this Mitzvah to enter.
Each Mitzvah is like a
certain medication. Unless there is a receptor, able to receive it, it can’t do
any good. Until Abraham experienced his son as a teenager, acting out, he
wasn’t able to comprehend the Mitzvah of circumcision, which commands us to
repair nature. Before Abraham can move forwards, he must accept things as they
are. He must accept Ishmael, the darkness from which God is born.