Love’s Suffering

 “For in this matter, you do not believe in God.”  (Deuteronomy 1:32)

“In which He promises you that He will bring you to the land: In this, you do not believe in Him.” (Rashi)

“But it does not appear that way.  Rather, [explain it] like the simple meaning of the text: That it was about the miracles in the desert, that He carried them as a man carries his own child, yet you do not even believe in that.” (Ohr HaHaim)

“Delay [of redemption] comes from nothing other than lack of belief.” (Ramban)

What exactly the prophet is lamenting, in his rebuke to the Jewish people over their lack of belief?  After all, even Abraham our forefather questioned: “By what shall I know that I will inherit it [the Land]?”

In Tractate Nedarim (32) we find: “Because Abraham questioned: ‘By what shall I know’, he was punished with: ‘You shall surely know that your seed will be strangers in a strange land, etc.’”

Is faith defined as an absence of emotional involvement in events (“the one for whom the miracle is performed does not even recognize his own miracle”) or as an excess of emotional involvement?

Could it really be an absence of emotional involvement?  Is such a thing possible?  Are we meant to be emotionally blocked against everything taking place outside of us?  Can it be that this is a desired condition?  What then is lack of belief?

Rather, lack of belief means a lack of one’s own self’s involvement, that self which possesses Godly quality.  Lack of faith is a lack of value-driven appreciation, a lack of the appreciation that connects one to the Cause of all causes – and which brings one to experience the gratitude that obligates.

Lack of belief means also an excess of ego involvement, an excess of the self-preservation mechanism, which responds to events with short-sightedness and small-mindedness; its reaction is the simple wish to escape the entire affair: “Let’s get us a [new] leader, and go back to Egypt.”  Nostalgia for the garlic, onions, and watermelons of Egypt – “and we feel sick of this lightweight / stale bread.”  Another ego option is – denial: The sin of the Calf.  The sin of the spies. 

This latter sin – the inability to accept the promise of the Land – whence its source?  Out of which perception does it derive?

Three Approaches to Reality.

During childhood, or in the case of a very simple person whose inner experience is very meager, it is mainly external stimulation – the environment, loaded with stimulants, with the mechanics of stimulation – that pulls the reins that lead him.  In this he is close to and closely resembles the animals.  This is why, in animals, long-term pleasure or experience is absent.  Neither imagination nor emotion participate in their experience of contact with the external environment.

If someone works or operates within a framework of unchanging routine, and goes to work in order to function as a cog in the system without ambition or emotion, he is essentially an activated entity.  Even when he is active, he occupies the category of an active machine, because none of his energies draw their powers from will, conscious awareness, choice, or personal taste.

As people approach maturity, their unique personality begins to consolidate itself.  This increasingly consolidated personality possesses unique qualities that include personal taste, ambitions and choice.  The qualities are what create the ambitions and the goals.  As this process of consolidation moves  forward, increasingly, one’s experience of existence passes from the outside environment to the inner self. 

This inner self then becomes increasingly decisive in determining which goals from the outside are to be pursued.  It is the inner self that sorts through and selectively adopts materials from the environment, to do with them as it wishes.  Emotion plays a starring role in this inner dynamic, and gives fuel to the capacity for doing, for carrying out intention.

The mind’s role is to create equilibrium within, and to inspect, and to test the process of doing.  It constitutes a moderating factor, contributing balanced judgment.  Without mind’s involvement, man is ruled by emotions and by passing excitements, thus losing his capacity for objective judgment.

A non-regulated flow of emotion causes one to waste energy and to lose control, to respond to events out of proportion, and to become a helpless plaything in the hands of one’s psychological processes.  Mainly, one begins to be controlled by the inner and outer forces, such as lust, pride, vengefulness, and all the rest of negative traits and human weakness.

Lack of gratitude, Ba’al Pe’or, Croesus and his mob, the spies: The more unpredictable one's situation becomes, the less effective one's defense mechanisms grow, and the less immune one becomes to the errors that might trap him.  Mainly, one becomes less open to one’s own (now weakened) ability to accept and to express values, and to take them into consideration as part of the decision-making process. 

  At this point, new defense mechanisms make their appearance, which push rationality aside, and give priority to the external environment - to the law, to the formal rules of the game, to manners, rituals, conventions, and fashions.

Exaggeration makes its appearance sooner or later in this process and turns into compulsive neurosis, which strangles every personal expression - be it emotional or rational.

Strange as it might appear, the mechanism of repression that paralyzes emotion, simultaneously paralyzes the thinking mind and the decision-weighing process; at one blow - the entire inner, qualitative apparatus come to a halt.

Compulsive neurosis, with its rigid, paralyzing filtering criteria, takes nothing into account except systems of external rules, rules written and fixed, devoid of flexibility or practical insight, and never attuned to the changing needs of changing reality.

Both approaches, that of unregulated emotion and that of compulsively rigid mental control, belong to ego’s survival mechanism.  These differ from the survival mechanisms of the other animals only in the intensity of confusion, entanglement, and suffering that they bring upon their owners.  These sufferings are of a frustrating and paralyzing nature, strangling all creative self-expression.

The third approach is the ideal one, “for which every devoted follower might pray”.  It is the expression of the self, a focusing of the quality of the creative self.  This approach, too, is occasionally marred by suffering.  Yet as opposed to the suffering of the previous approaches, these are sufferings of love.  These are sufferings that derive from the problems of seeking, from the process of self-consolidation that often encounters complex and conflicting conditions, and from a lack of the conditions necessary to enable the expression that creates. 

It should be noted that emotional, rational, and meaningful-content-type processes undergo change, and lose their negative, distressing aspect, the moment they are controlled by the creating self.  The stimulants of the external environment then cooperate with the inner will, and actually create a sense of challenge by the difficulties they place before one.  The more one is blessed with talents, the more one’s motivation prevails when one encounters unpredicted difficulties.  The opposite is true of the survival-oriented person, who is held captive by the stereotypical behaviors of routine.

The promise of the Land contains and encompasses all of these problems and difficulties.  It conceals within it all of the dangers that lurk for every personality type.  For those held captive in the hands of the survival urge, the promise constitutes the threat of the unknown, which is difficult to reconcile with the known and familiar and routine.  The other, far graver difficulty: “And Jeshurun grew fat, and kicked away [the Torah].”  “My own strength and the power of my hand have done all this…”

Read this as the brute force element that exists in material wealth.  External wealth that plays by the rules of the game of brute force can put a stop to the process of discovering the potential hidden in the self, that potential that is concealed in the innermost space where qualitative goals, and spiritual and moral meanings are contained.

See to it that sanctity's needs are addressed.  Find “men of the sacred”.  People who fear heaven, who are wise and insightful.  Moses replies: “ ‘Wise and well known, [yes].’  But I did not find any insightful ones.”

“This is one of the seven character traits that Jethro told Moses to look for, but Moses only found three: Righteous, wise, and well-known people.  But men of prowess, fearers of God, men of truth, and haters of ill-gotten gain he did not find.” (Rashi)

What he did not find was the self’s ability to withstand the temptations of the environment. 

This is apparently why the forefathers of our nation were so concerned about the challenges and dangers entailed in the promise of the Land, why they were endlessly warning and re-warning the Jewish people against these perils.  This is why the sin of the spies is considered to be the archetype of sin; it is the stumbling block in the test of trust in God.

Both parties suffer for this; it is a mutual affair.  Shechinta begaluta suffers.  The shechina, God’s Presence as It dwells among human beings, is languishing in exile.  If it were possible to say this, kivyachol, it is as if the Creator suffers from a lack of Godly Presence being expressed by human beings in the Holy Land specifically.  Divine suffering then encounters human suffering, the suffering of man, who has discovered, but then lost, the opportunity to express his own Godly quality in perfect creativity.

A vacuum is created out of this separation: Out of the Godly Presence that is missing in the creation, and that is missing to the same extent in the man who is preoccupied with his own egotistical survival.

This absence of ideals creates “a corrective longing”, “a yearning for redemption”, a mourning over the vacuum that exists: “All who mourn the destruction Jerusalem will merit the celebration of her rebirth.”

This means that love’s suffering holds the potential for repair.  This is the pining of the one who loves and the pining of the beloved: Ani ledodi, vedodi li, “I am for my beloeved, and my beloved is for me.”

The difference between the twenty one days ben hamitsarim, “between the narrow straits of grief” (between the seventeenth of Tamuz and the ninth of Av) and the twenty one days between Rosh Hashana and Hoshana Raba is that while both of them bring about repair, the days of ben hamitsarim bring repair through suffering, through midat hadin, the measure of judgment.

Suffering brings about an awareness of the lack of Godly Presence in the creation, and this awareness brings one to awe of God.

On the other hand, “the days of forgiveness and compassion”, in which the Beloved appears and knocks on the doors of His people – “call to Him when He is close by” – are days of love and compassion, and are controlled by midat harahamim veha’ahava, the measure of compassion and love. 

Both of these are periods of mutual yearning.

What is the role of suffering?

Are the five afflictions of Tisha B’Av exactly identical to the five afflictions on the sacred day of forgiveness, or is there a substantive difference between them?  Some say: “On Tisha B’Av, who wants to eat?  And on Yom Kippur, who can eat?”  Others say just the opposite.

It seems that one who experiences suffering out of profound regret over a path gone bad, seeks to punish himself.  It is as though he were saying: I recognize, with a profound awareness, that I am not deserving of forgiveness until I purge myself of my sin, and I am willing to accept suffering and castigation upon myself over the forbidden pleasures that caused my deterioration.

According to this approach, the one who distresses himself has no will to eat, because his will is preoccupied with castigating his body.

Self-torment on Tisha B’Av, in contrast, is a sensation of deep pain over the vacuum created by mutual exile.  Both the Shechina and the People of Israel are exiled, a result of Jerusalem destroyed, and the Sanctuary.

To tell the truth, it is difficult to convince oneself – one’s own existential experience – by using historical logic.  Jerusalem was destroyed in the wake of the evil deeds of its inhabitants.  The distress of existence in exile is not necessarily connected to any specific material distress, but rather to a value-driven, spiritual distress.  One mourns over the public sorrow, over the national sorrow. 

One who mourns over Jerusalem does not undergo a process of purification and a refinement of the physical senses as does the sinner standing trial on Yom Kippur.  Therefore as far as he is concerned there seems to be no justification for the five bodily “torments”.  Yet he suffers in order to identify with the suffering of shechinta begaluta, the exiled Presence of God, in the sense of sorrow over the hilul Hashem, the desecration of the Name of God entailed in the destruction of Jerusalem.

From this perspective, it seems there would be substantial differences between individuals, between the different character types, in terms of the way they create connections between their inner and outer experience.  The type for whom routine guides all activity is obligated to be severely stringent – ahd kutso shel yud – in his fulfillment of all five of the “torments”, and even to add further stringencies of all sorts, in order to surround himself with stimulants that limit day-to-day routine activity, in order to bring himself into the experience of spiritual mourning.  For after all, pure and utter spirituality is not his portion in life, in that this derives from the innermost qualitative self, and the less of a self there is, the more a person is dependent on control by external stimulants.

On the other hand, a subjective type, controlled by an intensive, excitable inner experience, who is capable of straying on the slippery path he has chosen – which runs along a mystical track, in the sense of “in secret, my life force weeps,” – might find himself suddenly drowning his sorrows in…drink, God forbid, or succumbing to a state of profound depression, as in “who can eat?”

This excitable type, dissolving in the puddle of his own emotions, is required to follow the written and accepted traditions of halacha, the legal conventions of Jewish practice - in precise detail.  He has no need to bind himself with extra stringencies, nor to add any bundles of supplementary afflictions and castigations borrowed from the library of Christianity or from the latest fashion in mysticism.

The third type, who possesses balanced judgment, sets his sights on a support structure of three-fold balance, which he attains through the dimension of height.  This spiritual dimension shelters him, and imposes peace and tranquility among the warring elements: Emotion on the one hand and rationality on the other, unite through awe of God, identifying themselves with the Divine will.  Through this balance, this third type is privileged to enjoy an even further increase of perfect equilibrium: He finds that his egoistic being fades away while his value-driven self finds its true expression. 

Only such a person is capable of choosing – without the distraction of egoistic-interest-based interferences – his own sufferings of love (within the framework of halacha, obviously) according to his own situation, which embraces both the spiritual and the material.  He may choose what he wishes of the kulot, the leniencies and what he wishes of the humrot, the stringencies, according to what his own existential situation requires.  He need not feel qualms of conscience, or fear that perhaps his prejudice in his own favor is tempting him and distorting his judgment.  Both kulot and humrot are equal in halachic terms.  The profound distinction between the two, which determines their substantive differentness, lies only in the character and the personality of the one mourning over Jerusalem. 

Until  what point does love’s suffering extend?  And at what point do we suspect that it is the suffering of one who has chosen a love of suffering because he has a self-flagellation complex, and craves suffering for pleasure. 

The former, through love’s suffering, is a tsadik who rules his urges, his yetser, and the latter, through suffering for pleasure, is ruled by his yetser.

It should be mentioned that one of the most critical afflictions, in addition to the five afflictions of Tisha B’Av, is the severe distress of being prohibited from learning Torah.  It seems in my humble opinion that this distress is the most serious of all the afflictions, for a talmid hacham, for a Torah scholar whose Torah learning is his primary occupation.  For him, this distress weighs as much as all the other distresses, and lulei demistafina, “were it not for the fact that I dare not say such a thing”, I would say in the most clear-cut terms that a talmid hacham should be exempted from the five afflictions, which are superfluous as far as he is concerned in contrast to the anguish he experiences over the prohibition against studying and preoccupying himself with Torah. 

Being that he has chosen “the life of eternity”, and that he has never traded it in for “the life of the moment”, the world of Torah then becomes his whole world.  Everything else is degraded in his eyes.  Were it not for the dispensation that permits studying the laws of the destruction of the Temple, in depth, and reading the narratives that tell of the destruction, it might be argued  that a dispensation to study Torah is obligatory in the case of a talmid hacham, on the grounds of pikuah nefesh, as a life-saving necessity.