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Parashat Bo
Essays and Articles:
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Three Relationships to the Instrument
Translated from Hebrew by S. NAthan l'ilui nishmat Esther bat mordechai
The Torah warns against an “instrumental” tendency, though it recognizes the vital need for using instruments. One cannot manage without them.
Western society, enslaved to the God of Instruments, while trying to retreat from their use, while praising the use of primitive, non-machine-like tools, is forgetting that the life-expectancy of a Bedouin, for example, is slightly over forty years, if he does not die in his childhood from infection and disease.
No one minimizes the use of instruments like the Bedouin. Even houses they do not have, nor shoes, nor electricity, nor telephone. Yet in spite of this, they are not healty. Most of their time is wasted acquiring food.
The gravest use of the instrument is the one that transforms man into an instrument. In couples for example: He is her instrument, and she is his instrument. They are friends in a relationship of “a love that is dependent on some external thing”, which means an instrumental love.
The Torah brings an extreme example – the relationship to a slave: “And God spoke to Moshe and to Aharon, and He commanded them to B’nei Yisrael.” Yerushalmi, Rosh Hashana 83: “Rabi Shmuel son of Rabi Yitzchak said: ‘What did He command them about? About the chapter of setting the slaves free.” Yirmiyahu 34:33: “Thus says God: ‘I sealed this covenant with your forefathers on the day I took you out of the land of Egypt, out of the slave house: At the end of seven years, each of you must set his brother Hebrew free.’”
Regarding the mitsva of setting the Hebrew slave free – what was the Torah’s hurry? Immediately upon taking them out of Egypt they must be commanded regarding a mitsva that does not apply until the Jubilee year? Could they even have had slaves when they were leaving Egypt? And even before the Giving of the Torah?
It is further written in the Yerushalmi (ibid) that “Yisrael were not punished for anything except the issue of setting the slaves free.” Exile was decreed upon the Jewish people as well as the result of their invalidating this commandment.
It would appear that relating to man as to an instrument is the mother of all sin. Such relating reached its peak in Egypt. (Parallel to what was taking place at the turn of the twentieth century.) Just as the Holocaust came to show us the futility, the hopelessness, the final stop that belief in technology causes, so the ten plagues came to Egypt for a similar purpose.
Thus it was too in the nineteenth century, in which the birth of technological sophistication brought Technological Man to repeat the mistake of the generation of the Tower of Babel. Just as its faith in socialism, which too was tainted with human instrumentalism, saw man as the instrument of society, and society as a structural phenomenon that stood on its own right, as a goal justifying itself, so did the turn of the twentieth century see technology as its idolatrous redemption.
One should here divide the plagues – following in the footsteps of the Maharal and of the Alshich HaKadosh – into four groups. Each group contains three plagues. The first plague of each group represents the instrument in service of man. The second represents the instrument that man has come to identify with, and which has become an expression for him. The third represents the stage of the golem who turns on his creator. Man is enslaved to the instrument.
One’s relationship to instruments constitutes the track that characterizes and that expresses one’s relationship not only to the environment, but also to oneself – because the relationship to instruments expresses the feeling of ability, both for good and for evil.
The use of instruments expresses one’s tendency to seek after certainty. This means defining (reducing) one’s goal, and limiting the means required to achieve the goal, out of an expectation of achieving a predictable result.
This is called the reductionist tendency. As inter-dependency between man and the instrument intensifies, so man’s vision becomes increasingly limited in scope.
At the first stage, it causes no real harm, as long as the instrument is vital for preserving the balance between “being” and “doing”, meaning that “doing” requires an instrument in order to express “being”. At the second stage, use causes dependency, out of the habit of identifying with an instrument that “one cannot possibly do without.”
At this stage, the instrument has deviated from the framework of tashmishei kedusha, accessories in service of sanctity, to become purely secular. At this stage, arrogance raises its head, and continues to seduce one, to drag one toward the third stage, which is the stage of dependency upon and enslavement to the instrument.
Arrogance celebrates here, in order to hide the nakedness of enslavement. Man deludes himself at this stage into believing that with the aid of the instrument he is all-powerful, and within reach of the coveted mountaintop: certainty.
The stupider the man is, the more he will put his faith in instrumentalization: More quotations, more formulas, less critical thinking, and less creative thinking. The wise one delights more in having his theory overturned, than in having his theory supported. Ipcha mistabra is more interesting than tana demisayaia.
Along comes the Torah, and sees to it that man is protected against falling into the trap of instrumental certainty. This is done through – para aduma, the red heifer, which serves as two opposites within one instrument, and through – the mitsva of Shabat, which clears reality of any instrument of any kind, and through the main part of the mitsvot – the dinim, the moral-ethical system, in which interpersonal behavior, and interaction with the other, attain to the level of reciprocity: That man should not see the world as a goal to be conquered, but should rather see man as a goal to be identified with.
At this level, the shutting off and limiting goal of certainty gets pushed aside in favor of the moral goal. By distinguishing good from evil – which opens up and widens one’s connection with the outside, and which liberates one from dependency upon the object, and which directs one’s interests toward inward, qualitative sensation, and toward a value-based dimension of height – one is spared the reductive focus upon the object.
Here we see that the use of instruments is effective and beneficial as long as it connects man to the dimension of height, by serving as a tangible, mitsva expression, representing the infinity of height’s vastness. “Let all your actions be for the sake of heaven”, and “I continually place God opposite me”.
Korban Pesah, the Passover offering, as an instrument, comes to free man from his tendency to enslave himself to an idol. Hence the commandment prohibiting notar, forbidding the remains to be left over, in order that no trace of the mitsva might be left to serve for idolatrous ritual.
The eating of the offering – the eating of any korban shlamim, not only the korban Pesah – is meant to serve the same purpose. The korban olah, burnt up entirely, gives this message as well. Macat bechorot, too, the slaying of the first-born, came to destroy man’s tendency to enslave himself to someone greater than himself.
The mitsva of eating matsa is attached to a prohibition against eating hamets, as with other positive commandments: Lav hanitak li’asai. It is a negative prohibition attached to a positive commandment, to teach you that the object – the physical item – that serves for mitsva does not stand on its own merit, but rather on the merit of the commandment.
Similarly with lel shimurim, the Night of Keepings, as the first night of Pesah is called. There is a debate between Even Ezra and Ramban: According to Even Ezra, it is called Keepings because the Creator kept watch over b’nei Yisrael. According to the Ramban, it is the night that God keeps and watches and waits for. Both of these interpretations are meant to break one away from any sanctifying of the night itself, in order not to turn it into an instrument of avoda zara.
The prohibition against involving a non-Jew in the korban Pesah, as also the prohibition against involving a slave, and the prohibition against involving an uncircumcised Jew, etc. are intended to warn against all these who are limited and not at the level of freedom. This is because causing someone to belong when he is not yet free can bring about his enslavement to the object.
“The Torah spoke of four sons: One wise, one wicked…” On the surface it would appear that the opposite of wise is stupid, not wicked. Yet this is to teach you that the stupid one is not granted any status at all by the Torah. He does not deserve to be related to. The simple one is a different matter; he is not to blame, it is a character trait, he was born thus. “The one who does not know how to ask” is not to be blamed either, for he falls into the category of the captive child.
This is to teach you that a normal human being emerging out of normal living conditions – if he does not grow up wise, then he is wicked, and there is no excuse for him.
To summarize: Behavior is comprised of three urges. The most basic and lowest urge belongs to the animal mechanism of self-preservation, and this is the brute force drive: Dominion and conquest.
At the level of quality, there are two urges. At the cerebral level, is the striving for certainty: Certainty creates instrumentality, whose father and begetter is fear of the unknown, and therefore this urge too belongs to the self-preservation mechanism.
The third urge, too, is inborn, and it belongs to a natural element of the personality, on the plane of values. It is a sensitivity to incessant distinction between good from evil.
Guilt feelings, which too are the progeny of ego and self-preservation, torment man. At a superficial glance, they too seem to belong to the survival mechanism.
However, a more cautious and deeper look shows a tendency toward good existing already in young children.
(There is the parable of the bear: Should one choose someone good and slightly stupid or should one prefer someone clever and slightly evil? This is the voice of instrumentality speaking.)
Instrumentality attempts to take over distinctions between good and evil. Psychology, in Neitsche’s wake, tries unsuccessfully to attribute the distinction between good and evil to education, and not to human nature.
However, only distinctions between good and evil can broaden and exalt the human spirit.
The Absurd: Certainty strives for precision, which requires reduction, which yields up the broad span of control. Searching for a dime under a flashlight, they lose control over the entire territory of values (good and evil).
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