Tag Archives: Iyunim

Erotic Poem, Intra-Divine Allegory – or Both?

18 Friday Apr 2014

Posted by in Beauty in Nature, Divrei Torah, Holidays, Inuyim - Prayer reflections and ruminations, Musings about God/Faith/Religious life, Poetry

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“The world is not as worthy as the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel, for all the writings are holy, but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies.”

So said Rabbi Akiva (2nd century Palestine), who believed that The Song of Songs, traditionally attributed to King Solomon as a young man, is an allegory between two lovers, God and Israel.

According to Moshe Idel, Professor of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Kabbalah – New Perspectives, 1990), the 12th century Spanish mystic, Rabbi Ezra ben Solomon of Gerona, the 13th century Castilian mystic, Rabbi Isaac ibn Avi Sahula, and others focus on what are called the theosophical processes taking place between the two lower Sefirot of Tiferet (symbolized by the bridegroom) and Malchut (symbolized by the bride). According to these Kabbalists, both the biblical description and human love itself reflect or symbolize higher events within the metaphysical structure of God. (p. 206)

In other accounts, such as that of the 13th century Spanish Kabbalist, Avraham ben Shmuel Abulafia, The Song of Songs is an allegory of the intellect and its union with God.

These allegorical interpretations of The Song of Songs, beginning with Rabbi Akiva, are the basis upon which The Song of Songs is read each year on the Shabbat during Pesach, for it is then that we celebrate our people’s redemption on the one hand and the hoped-for-redemption of God within God’s Divine Self on the other.

All that being said, this extraordinarily enriched poetry seems at first glance to be a purely secular poem (God’s Name is never mentioned) celebrating young, sensuous and erotic love, the passionate draw of two lovers yearning for relief from their existential loneliness:

“For Love is strong as death / Harsh as the grave. / Its tongues are flames, a fierce / And holy blaze” (8:6 – Translation by Marcia Falk)

Taking the Songs as a secular poem, an allegory, or both, the emotional and spiritual longing can be sated only by one’s human and/or Divine lover.

The great Rav Avraham Isaac Kook wrote of the higher love this way (Translation by Ben Zion Bokser):

“Expanses divine my soul craves. / Confine me not in cages, / of substance or of spirit.

I am love-sick / I thirst, / I thirst for God, / as a deer for water brooks.

Alas, who can describe my pain? / Who will be a violin / to express the songs of my grief?

I am bound to the world, / all creatures, / all people are my friends.

Many parts of my soul / are intertwined with them, / But how can I share with them my light.”

          Shabbat shalom and Moadim L’simchah!

 

 

 

 

Turning and Returning: A Journey Outside Time and Space

08 Sunday Sep 2013

Posted by in Divrei Torah, Ethics, Health and Well-Being, Holidays, Inuyim - Prayer reflections and ruminations, Jewish Identity, Musings about God/Faith/Religious life, Poetry, Quote of the Day, Uncategorized

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These ten days from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur is the time of turning and returning, as the psalmist says, “O God, bring us back, and light up Your face that we may be rescued.” (Ps 80:4)

Rebbe Nachman of Bratzlav used to say that “Everywhere I go, I am going to Jerusalem. “ He probably meant that his every thought, prayer and deed brought him closer to his true spiritual home, to that time when the Jewish people was one with the land of Israel, the holy city, and with Torah.

Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev, however, differed and said, “Everywhere I go, I am going to myself” as if peeling away the skins of an union to rediscover his core spiritual essence.

We too are called by tradition to ask in these days of turning and returning, ‘What is our spiritual essence, the core within that we cannot abandon without walking away from ourselves?”

The psalmist said, “Torat Elohav b’libo – His God’s teaching is in his heart” (Ps 37:31), meaning that we can be truest to ourselves as Jews when we learn and embrace and become living Torah scrolls ourselves.

This High Holiday season is our annual corrective to everything in the past that has fragmented, shattered, distracted, frustrated, disappointed, hurt, offended, humiliated, angered, and taken us away from our truest selves.

Rabbi Eliezer taught that the time to do t’shuvah is brief. He told his students, “Turn one day prior to your death.”

They asked, “Master, how can anyone know what day is one day prior to their death?”

He said, “Therefore, repent today, because tomorrow you may die.” (Talmud, Shabbat 153a)

Central to Yom Kippur is that we use every opportunity to break from the inertia to which we’ve become accustomed and take the first step to turn ourselves around and return to the right path that represents a new beginning. God promises a great reward saying, “You are as if newly created. What happened in the past has already been forgotten.” (Sifre Devarim, Piska 30)

At my weekly Men’s Torah study recently I had a difficult time moving the discussion away from one point we were discussing on the theme of t’shuvah that seemed to take over the hearts and minds of many participants. I had an agenda for our hour long session, and we were not getting quickly enough to what I considered the main and conclusive issue. One of the participants said, “Don’t worry Rabbi – if we don’t get there today, we always have next year!”

He was right, of course. We read Torah every year, and over time fulfill Yochanan ben Bag Bag’s instruction, “Hafoch ba, v’hafoch ba, d’clua ba – Turn it over and turn it over again, for all is contained in it.” (Tanna De-Vei Eliahu Zuta 17:8).”  

The special kind of t’shuvah that comes as a result of Torah learning transports us beyond past and present as we know it, because Torah has no time. It occupies Eternal time, and as such is always current.

Torah stands also outside of space as we understand it. When we learn Torah we are on a spiritual journey towards our essence, as Levi Yitzhak taught, and towards Jerusalem, as Rebbe Nachman taught.

Rabbi Brad Shavit-Artson reflects movingly on the nature of religious turning in these words:

“I think about turning and turning without end… just another word for a dance. It may be that the turning we are called to do before God is one of rapture and joy, of dancing in the presence of the Holy One, as did King David when he returned to Jerusalem with the Ark. Maybe the turning that we should focus on is not one of sorrow and mourning, but of exultation – that we are in the presence of something so magnificent, so unpredictable, so unanticipated and unearned that all we can do is click our heels and spin and dance.”

The 13th century German mystic, Matilda of Magdenberg, expressed it this way:

“I cannot dance, O Lord, /  Unless you lead me. / If you wish me to leap joyfully, / Let me see You dance and sing. / Then I will leap into love – / And from love into knowledge, / And from knowledge into the harvest, / That sweetest fruit beyond human sense / And there I will stay with you, turning.”

May this time of turning be restorative for us all.

G’mar chatimah tovah. May you be sealed in the Book of Life.

Note: I am grateful to Rabbi Brad Shavit-Artson, who assembled some of the above text material and the last poem in an article on T’shuvah in 2003. Translations of the Psalms are taken from The Book of Psalms, by Robert Alter, 2007.

Coin of Fire – Parashat Ki Tisa

01 Friday Mar 2013

Posted by in Divrei Torah, Health and Well-Being, Inuyim - Prayer reflections and ruminations, Musings about God/Faith/Religious life, Uncategorized

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“This is what everyone who is entered in the records shall pay: a half-shekel by the sanctuary weight to “atone for your souls.” (Exodus 30:13)

The Tosafot surmises that

“Moses was perplexed, thinking to himself, ‘What can a person possibly give that will serve as atonement for his soul?’ Thereupon, God showed him a ‘coin of fire.'”

Question – How can a “coin of fire” grant atonement for one’s soul?

Rabbi Menachem Schneerson answered with a parable:

A person once served as an apprentice to a silver and goldsmith. The artisan taught his apprentice all the necessary details except for one, which he omitted because of its utter simplicity: in order to melt gold and silver and change its shape, a fire must be lit under the metals.

Setting out on his own, the apprentice faithfully followed all the particulars his master taught him, leaving out that one “minor” detail that his teacher had omitted, the need for a fire. Because of this omission, of course, nothing happened. The silver and gold remained as they were, and the apprentice could fashion nothing at all.

God similarly responded to Moses by showing him a ‘coin of fire,’ (the half-shekel). (Likkuti Sichos, Vol. III, pages 923-28; from Parashat Shekalim “An Undivided Half-Shekel“)

The parable explains that merely offering a half-shekel coin doesn’t bring about atonement. But, when the coin is offered with  fire, referring to soul-fire, then the half-shekel atones even for a sin as grievous as the sin of the Golden Calf.

Another question – Why does Torah ask for only a half-shekel and not a whole shekel?

Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev explains in a complex Kabbalistic discussion (Kedushat Levi, vol. 2, p 494, Lambda Press) that what we’re dealing with here are purely spiritual matters, that when an Israelite gives a half-shekel of twenty gerah weight, it isn’t about the monetary value we earthly beings require to physically sustain a community. Rather, it’s about how we may enter into God’s presence.

The first letter in the word Keter (Crown – the highest emanation of God on the Kabbalist chart of emanations) is chaf, and chaf equals twenty according to Hebrew letter-number equivalents, the same as the weight of the half-shekel, thereby indicating that the 20 gerah (chaf-Keter) weight half-shekel is a spiritual metaphor of ascent towards yihud (unity) with God at the highest level.

Rabbi Levi Yitzhak explains that without the spiritual fire no offering, no gift, no presentation from the heart will succeed in linking heaven and earth. Soul-fire is the critical element that enables yihud, union, between us and God.

It is part of the human condition that we are broken, flawed, distracted, seduced, unfocused, fragmented, disloyal, weak, and imperfect. The golden calf incident is the most spectacular example in the Biblical period of betrayal perpetrated by the people against God. Only 39 days before the making of the golden calf (recalled in this week’s Torah reading) they heard the commandment against worshiping false gods, and they made the object and celebrated it as a god in spite of what they had only recently experienced at the foot of Mount Sinai.

Those who had turned away from God badly needed a means to return to holiness. Restoration, thankfully, is always possible. Rabbi Simon Jacobson writes that Moses “offers us a rare – once in history – glimpse into the intimate secret of communicating with the Divine, as he beseeches God to forgive and reconcile with the people…. Moses implores God, ‘Show me Your face.’ [And in response] God forgives.”

Mending our relationship with God (and with those we love and community) is a fundamentally restorative and healing process, and it begins with the offering of the half-shekel.

Judaism teaches that we are most whole when we enter into authentic, trusting, loyal, loving, and passionately committed relationships with family and friends, with a sacred community and with God. That is the lesson of the half-shekel “coin of fire.”

For those of us who do not believe there is a God or, at the very least are skeptical about ever experiencing a relationship with the Divine, then I suggest that you let authentic relationships with loved ones and with community suffice. Perhaps the Divine-human experience will follow.

Our Torah portion and the Midrashic literature teach that the ‘coin of fire,’ the half-shekel, facilitates atonement (read instead “at-one-ment“). When that occurs, when we offer a coin of fire we become, in effect, God’s light, as it says in Proverbs (20:27) – Nishmat adam ner Adonai – “The human soul is the lamp of God.”

Shabbat shalom.