Does one relate to them simultaneously,

or one after another,

or one instead of the other?

Man’s attitude to matter and to spirit becomes a

problem that preoccupies God’s servant, and robs the better part of his physical and emotional resources, being that man is carved of matter in his body, yet is an image of God on high in his quality.  Among the other religions that understood that one must cope with human duality, Judaism uniquely excels.

The other religions chose the easy way, and by a simplistic division into good guys and bad guys, viewed any preference for the physical as evil, and the spirit’s victory through rejection of physical matter as the ultimate good.  These religions do not trouble to investigate the qualities of the spirit.  Instead, they choose the mere fact of rejecting matter, of making war on the physical, as being a spiritual act.

This means that a righteous man and a saint is one who is a masochist who chooses the destruction of his body’s tendencies.  Thus William James, in his Types of Religious Experience, counts the stages of holiness, which contain no trace or hint of holiness whatsoever and are nothing more than the seven stages of masochism.  The worst masochist – is the holiest of all.

Islam sees obedience and the acceptance of the yoke of ritualistic acts – which have no connection whatever with the effort to cope with physical matter – as describing a good man, with no substantive reduction of his physical tendencies.  Other than certain marginal issues such as prohibiting the use of alcohol or eating the flesh of pigs, Islam does not delegitimize the pleasures of this world entirely.  In order to satisfy the subject of martyrdom and self-sacrifice – for there is no self-respecting religion that does not give this subject a place of honor – Islam pushes it outside of life’s framework.  The “shahid” who commits suicide for the sake of murdering “heretics” is the martyr.  We are not dealing here with a way of life but with a form of death.  Thus does violence and murder win the eternal title of sacred martyrdom in the religion of brute force.  And what does this religion promise the martyr, if not an overflowing abundance of fleshly pleasures in the next world?

Just so, and without having any complexes about it, Islam openly declares the adoption of coarse, brute-force physical matter as a goal to which every believer should aspire.

Torah does not make its own work easy, entering into the very thick of the relations between matter and spirit.  Being that the Torah accepts the dual essence of man, and sees the merging of spirit and matter as a given that one must accept and treat AS IT IS, with the first premise being that both of these were created by God, one is required to delve deeply into the dynamics that prevail between these two opposites, and one must investigate the profundities of the mystery of potential completeness concealed in the complex structure called man. 

A classification of the various philosophical approaches within Judaism according to their different emphases upon spirit and matter, or according to their suggestions regarding the relationship to and the treatment of these two fundamental components would be a faithful reflection and an accurate definer of these schools of thought, including their numerous and various and subtly differentiated characteristics that differentiate them from one another.

It should be pointed out that what all these approaches have in common is the assumption that one must accept dualism as a natural feature that may never be touched or harmed.  The difference between the approaches derives, in my opinion, not from differing philosophical perceptions but from a uniquely original principle that illustrates the differentness between human beings: “Just as their faces are different, thus too are their views different.”  Add to this, thus too are the needs of every single individual different, and one must build upon these and direct them toward the coveted goal – that is – nearness to God, and actualization of the Godly Presence by man, “including his innards and legs and thighs” with no ignoring of any one of his components – according to Ibn Ezra’s comprehensive formula, found in a number of places.  We will quote his formulation in the parasha of “mei meriva”. 

“Know that when the part will know the whole, it will attach to the whole, and it will innovate signs and wonders within the whole.”

The sacred Ohr HaHaim describes the dynamic processes of God’s servant relating to the components of matter and spirit with a thoroughness of profundity that has no equal.  We adopt his description of this process as the guiding line in our own approach: “And this specific category – none are aware of its quality, and it is inaccessible to awareness, neither from the mouth of man, nor from a scripture, nor can it be attained by the imagination of one whose intelligence is based in the material.  And when anyone attains a part of this attainment, it will separate itself from him, for he prevents it from being received, and it will enter his awareness only through its signs, for he is its opposite, its opposer and its enemy, and it will effect an act of ruin within him, neutralizing within him the force that makes him move and exist, and sometimes his life force will despise him, and will quarrel violently with him, and this accounts for the mystery of the prophets’ wildness!  And when this specific category increases its influence upon his innermost being, the life force will despise the flesh, and leave it, and go back to its father’s house.”

“And I will inform anyone investigating the inner acquisition of knowledge of the object of knowing, שהשכלת ההשכל תשכיל ההשכלות. ובהשכל, בהשכלתו ישכיל, שמושכל מושלל ההשכל, {I give up.  Please accept my apology.  I am at A COMPLETE AND TOTAL LOSS as to how to translate this section of the Ohr HaHaim…I can only offer you the Hebrew text and wish you luck…}

 וכשיכשיל, בהערת עצמו, ולא עצמו ישכיל. שהמושכל מושכל ממושכל, בלתי מושכל מהשכל, והשכילו למשכילים בייחוד השכלתו בסוד נשמה לנשמתו, ואז מותריו יהיו עטרי מלכים וכיסאם

for life can have life, of which Moshe says: ‘And you shall choose the life’ [i.e. the known life that has been specifically referred to] and it negates the life of the mundane sameness of general feeling, and he who is blessed of the living God will bless Him who uniquely bestowed this uniqueness upon his own uniqueness.”

Thus the Or HaHaim –an inscrutable riddle of a text in every direction.

The tendency to classify every expression of the sacred as nistar, as relegated to the “secret writings” department, to entrust it to the hands of the kabbalists, seems to be an evasion of confrontation with nigleh, with the need to access that portion of the Torah whose meaning is “revealed”, i.e. meant to be understood.  Nigleh is not a synonym for simplicity, just as nistar is not a synonym for profundity and sophistication. 

In the following paragraphs we suggest an interpretation according to the Ohr HaHaim’s own conceptual approach, which will be found to provide a guiding line of interpretation and comprehension for anyone willing to make the mental effort, and for any investigator attempting to discover the guiding line that runs through the biblical narrative like a crimson thread.

To Be Continued…

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