BeHa’alothekha: A reflection on the process of going out and coming back home

Of all the many yeshivot that flourished in Europe before the war, only one survived the Holocaust. In 1940, there was only one yeshiva in the United States. At this time, no one in America believed that Torah and observant Judaism would survive. It was an absolutely accepted myth that Torah and Judaism were gone from the world. The one yeshiva that survived was the Mir Yeshiva, and out of this one yeshiva, there are more people studying Gemara today than at any time in Jewish history, including the time in Babylonia. During the war, hundreds of yeshivot were liquidated by the Nazis, so the head of the Mir Yeshiva had each of his students memorize a tractate of the Talmud. Before the Nazis invaded Lilthuania, the head of the yeshiva was able to obtain 30-day visas from the Japanese consul in Vilna, and so together they embarked upon the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Vladivostok. From Vladivostok they took a boat to Kobi, Japan, where they were befriended by a member of the Japanese royal family. This man, a relative of the Emperor, obtained visas enabling the entire group to travel on to Shanghai. After the war, this man converted to Judaism, grew a beard and payot, and went with the Mir Yeshiva students to Israel, where he remained a member of the yeshivah until his death in 1963. Out of this journey grew the whole rejuvenation of orthodox Judaism in the world.

Mir Yeshiva, 1930
Thanks to Reeva Kimble for the photo.
Her website has history, genealogies, and many more photos of Mir, Belarus.

 

"When the Ark went forth, Moshe said, ‘Arise O God, and scatter Your enemies! Let Your foes flee before You!’ When it came to rest, he said, "Return, O God [to] the myriads of Israel’s thousands." (Numbers 10:35-36)

In the "sun culture," this process is dichotomized -- there is a tremendous tension between the odyssey and the hearth, and life is viewed as a choice between the two.

Western tradition bases its approach to this issue on the model of Homer’s Odyssey, contrasting journeying forth with returning to the hearth -- presenting them as irreconcilable dichotomies. In this model, those engaged in journeying place no value at all in returning home. They base their entire lives on the next expedition, and are unwilling to establish homes and permanent relationships. In the Odyssey, Ulysses always had to tell Penelope of his next expedition before they could make love, because it was the expedition that was central and important. If the Greeks had written the Torah, Moses would have ridden triumphant into Eretz Yisrael on a white horse, instead of dying in the wilderness before reaching the Promised Land. Western Greek culture is death-defying and death-daring, yet it is premised on victory over death, and provides no tools for dealing with death when it happens.

Our hero, however, dies in the desert. Jewish tradition sees journeying and settling as dialectic, as crucial components of a single process, which is modeled by the process encapsulated in Parshat BeHa’alothekha. While Greek culture promotes the concept of conquest - "to serve, to strive and not to yield", in Torah we learn to strive, but also to yield when appropriate. While they were in the wilderness, the Jewish people would all dig their own graves. Death was a very real part of the journey.

Judaism provides a dialectic model of machane/camp and nessiya/journey. In this model, both are equally important, and each presents a different sort of challenge.

With nessiya/journey, we go outside our own turf, and we take a risk. This is very liberating, as it frees up a lot of energy. The return to machane/camp is also valuable, as we are able to see old problems in a new way. If the two are dichotomized, however, the return is almost impossible, because we don’t want to face the problems of the camp.

In his commentary on Parshat BeHa’alothekha in 1940, the Rebbe of Piasezna quotes the verse (Numbers 10:35-36) When the ark went forth (b’nesso’a), Moses said, "Arise O God, and scatter Your enemies! Let Your foes flee (y’anussu) before You!" When it came to rest, he said "Return O God, [to] the myriad of Israel’s thousands."

In the Torah, these two verses are preceded and followed by inverted letters Nun. The Piasezna Rebbe, quoting the Gemara (Shabbat 104a) describes the Nun as representing the person of faith, and then goes on to say that the inverted Nuns are the people of faith of the Warsaw Ghetto, who were turned mamash upside down by their broken hearts.

The Ishbitze Rebbe, in his commentary on BeHa’alothekha, emphasizes the metaphor of movement into a place of demons, characterized by burning snakes, scorpions, and desolate wilderness. (See translation below.)

Extrapolating from these two Torahs, we can perceive the word Nes, comprising the letters Nun and Samech, as the person of faith, when faced with darkness, meditating upon the support of the Samech -- which is the invisible support of Hashem in the world.

 

The four meanings of the word Nes -- Flee, Miracle, Test and Flag -- are manifest in the four worlds of consciousness. In the world of Assiya, Nes means "Flee"; in Yetzirah it means "Miracle"; in Beriya it means "Test"; and in Atzilut it means "Flag." The correspondences on the map to the right are learned from Rabbi Hoffman and Areyeh Kaplan's Sefer Yetzira.

For those experiencing this ascent through the worlds, each stage, as it is experienced, seems like the absolute highest. In the world of Assiya, the act of running away -- leaving old patterns and going out into the desert -- seems like the ultimate act, and the experience of the miraculous emerges from it. The level of "Test," however, is even higher. The quintessential test in the Torah is the Akeida/Binding of Isaac, and in a sense, this is also the high point of the Torah. It is this test that creates the Beit Hamikdash. The Akeida took place on Mt. Moriah, the future site of the Temple, because the Akeida, the test, became the flag for the future.

We are constantly looking for flags, but knowing how to recognize them is a major challenge. And, as we learn from the example of the Akeida, even knowing what the tests are is a major challenge, but in the final analysis, the test that produces Tshuva is much higher than the miracle.

A miracle is God bailing us out of a problem, and so, in the Torah, prophetic revelation is deemed to be very weak. Being bailed out does not produce Tshuva, whereas the sense of being abandoned does. When Joseph was left to rot in prison for two years because the wine steward forgot all about him (Genesis 40:23), he realized that this time he would not be saved by a miracle. The last two years he spent in prison are called in the Torah "two years of days" (Genesis 41:1). Time became much slower for Joseph when he realized that his charm and his good looks were not going to bail him out this time. When he realized this, he let go of all expectations, and was able to fall back on the ‘zero point’ - Samech -- the invisible support of Hashem in the world. With this realization, Joseph screamed, and within sixty seconds of this agonized scream, Pharaoh had the dream that prompted the wine steward to remember Joseph and mention him to Pharaoh.

This is the level of Nes-Test. Hashem was not going to let Joseph out of prison until he had this realization and hit this ‘zero point.’ Salvation does not happen until we pass through this level.

It was this understanding that caused the "revolution of Pshiske" in the Hassidic Movement. The School of Pshiske was formed as a tremendous reaction against the ideal of the miracle. While all the other Hassidic Rebbes were famous for there wonder-working, the School of Pshiske rebelled, because the experience of the miracle precluded the experience of Yeshu’a/Salvation.

This understanding, that the Test is on a higher spiritual level than the Miracle, is the main teaching of Avraham Avinu. It is called the teaching of the "small steps", as described in the Sabbath Eve song Kol Mekadesh: "Help those who stop on the seventh, the ones who plow and harvest universes, who take small steps."

In any given situation, a miracle will short-cut the Tshuva lesson that may otherwise have been learned, and so Avraham organizes his own life around ten major tests, each of which corresponds to one of the Ten Sephirot. Because of this, Avraham (and later Moshe) stands in contrast to Noah, who experienced his life through the lens of "utopian seduction."

One way of encapsulating the process embraced by Avraham and rejected by Noah is in the Talmudic dictum, "Do not force the [Messianic] end."

If we force the end too quickly, we may obtain relief, but we are going to miss the next small step, which may contain the key lesson that we need to learn to do Tshuvah and effectuate salvation.

A miracle is ‘spiritual Prozac’; it brings relief. A depressed person needs the Prozac in order to be able to make the journey. Paradise, Shabbes, Gan Eden, and the Mashiach are all essential ingredients. They keep hope alive; they make it possible for us to keep stretching ourselves, so that we can go on our journeys. Without them, using the metaphor of the Tzimtzum (divine self-contraction), the world would be too dark a place, and we would not have the hope needed to light our way.

In Avraham’s case, the fact that he could give Sarah to Pharaoh, while trusting that everything would be for the best, and his ability to go through the mess with Hagar and know that everything was as it should bear witness to his level of confidence in Hashem.

The events themselves are Avraham’s dialogue with Hashem. He does not betray his process by praying for miracles, even though he knows he can effectuate them, as he did when he escaped death in Nimrod’s fiery furnace through his prayers. The fact that Avraham knows that he can effectuate miracles makes his withholding and his organizing his life around tests much more powerful.

Avraham’s life, as he presents it in the Torah, is a lens -- a whole metaphor for perceiving Hashem - in and of itself. In this way, each person grinds his or her own lens.

Noah prayed, "Save me, and kill them". Avraham’s radical departure from Noah takes him from the world of Yetzirah into the world of Beriya. And Moshe, by recognizing the flag that Noah left, was able to develop the idea of pe al pe/mouth to mouth -- intimacy with God, which is the world of Atzilut. When God says to Moshe (Exodus 32:10) "I will destroy them and make you into a great nation", Moshe knows he has been there before, because there is a flag there.

In the Hebrew word Noseah/to travel, the letter Ayin represents complexity. The numerical equivalent of the letter Ayin is the number 70. Ayin also means "eye." It represents the complexity of the world, and the complexity of what the eye takes in.

The person of faith, after meditating upon the Samech -- the invisible support of God in the world, can go on with this on the journey into the world of Ayin/Eye. The Samech is essentially an Alef reality, and yet the person of faith can take this with him into the superficiality of everyday life.

The concrete metaphor for this is the journey, past one’s boundaries and one’s borders, into the desert. Another way to describe it is over al midot’av -- surpassing one’s own personality. Thus, the name Ivrim/Hebrews, from over, means "the ones who surpass themselves," although, ironically, over also signifies avera/sin.

When the Ark travels in this way, then all of our enemies -- all the negative forces -- the scorpions, the snakes and the demons are put to rest. This is the experience of Joseph in the pit. His greatest enemies dissolve, because with his piercing cry, Joseph realizes that he has met the enemy, and the enemy is himself.

The journey is made up of small steps, which combine to form a process that slowly unfolds. An important part of this is the dialogue and dialectic between the machane/camp and the nessiah/journey.

Part of the experience of machane/camp is the process of sitting and clarifying, which requires the separation of Mechitza. In the desert, the Jewish people needed the Mishkan, and all the curtains around it, so that everybody would know where they stood in relation to the Mishkan, and what work they needed to accomplish to get back inside it. The purpose of the Mechitzah is to create tension between opposites, thereby connecting them. Miriam criticized Moshe for abandoning the Torah, which was the truth, but she became metame because she told Aaron. In this sense, tuma is the ‘blockage of passion’, in that the Mishkan is the place of passion, because it is where the chaos is converted into kedusha.

According to this understanding, Miriam, through her banishment from the camp becomes the main model for the Esh Kodesh. When Miriam was quarantined outside the camp, all the people waited and listed to her silence. The Torah says (Numbers 12:13) "For seven days, Miriam remained quarantined outside the camp, and the people did not move until Miriam was able to return home." The Hebrew for this is ha’asaf Miriam, which echoes back to the birth of Joseph. Asaf is the name "Joseph", and Miriam comes from the word Mar, which means "bitter". The critical part of the process is asaf mar. Rachel called her son "Joseph", because she said (Genesis 30:22) "Hashem has collected my bitterness.

The Jews waited a week to collect Miriam, and during this time they were all listening to her silence. Miriam was not the only leper. She was not the only one to be banished from the camp, but she was the only one to agree to have the story of her banishment included in the Torah. It was Miriam who, through the waters from her well, brought cohesion to the camp. According to the Midrash, the women from the various tribes rowed boats along the canals formed by the water from Miriam’s well, in order to visit and talk with each other. If this had not happened, the competition between the tribes would have dominated.

In the following commentary the Rebbe of Ishbitz (Mei Hashiloach Part 2, Parshat BeHa’alothekha second Torah), explains how the meaning of nesiya/journey is to travel into the wilderness, to go outside the borders of our orderly lives, to find the chaotic forces within ourselves, and to derive kedusha/holiness from those very forces. Both the nesiya/journey and the machane/camp are tests, one of expansion and one of contraction.

On the day that the Tabernacle was erected, the cloud covered the Mishkan, the Tent of Testimony. Then, in the evening, there was something that appeared to be like fire on the Mishkan [remaining there] until morning. (Numbers 9:15).

Thus, a human being, in his soul, has wayward, chaotic forces that want to cause him to sin. These come from the destroyed universes, and the person needs to bring them in to Kedusha/holiness. This is what is called a nessiya/journey. Machane/camp is so-called because there are times when it is the will of God that the people of Israel should not extend themselves outside their borders, but should only contract, in all types of contractions, as in the serious, weighty mode of sitting in one’s house.

From this aspect of machane/camp, comes all the savlanut (patience/suffering) that the people of Israel have suffered. Therefore, it is written, "the cloud covered the Mishkan", because the Mishkan is the deep point in the heart of Israel.

The phrase "the cloud covered the Mishkan" indicates that a person cannot extend himself to introduce kedusha from outside the camp. Therefore, the people must endure the challenge of the camp for one day, or two days, or a month or a year--..according to the will of God. It is written that there was a cloud from evening until morning, and it was directed by God, just as He created day and night. Knowing this, a person can rest, as it is written, (Numbers 9:21) "when the cloud then rose in the morning, they would travel on."

A human being is "at rest" when he knows that the hidden-ness of God will not be lengthened, and that there will only be a limited amount of hester/hidden-ness -- just enough for a revelation of divine light, for in this is God’s direction of the level. At times there is a greater amount of hidden-ness, until it comes to God’s will that there should be permission to travel, to obtain new things. As it is written in the Midrash, all the fences and the sanctity of the camp were only there in the time of camping. As soon as they rolled up the camp to resume their travels, then all the distinctions collapse. And so it is written, (Ibid 19) "the cloud remained over the Mishkan for many days." The Midrash explains, wherever the Torah says "many days," it means these are drawn out and painful, and so the verse goes on to say "the Israelites guarded the guarding of Hashem." They had to guard with strength, that they should not ‘push the end and the hour,’ and for this Hashem will save us.

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