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Teiten Emet LeYaakov “Give Truth to Jacob”
Attachment to Truth Versus Brute Force
Dreams
Kfitzat Haderech –
the Road’s Jumping:
Place as the Realization of the Dream.
Translated from Hebrew by dR.
S. NAthan
l'ilui
nishmat Esther bat mordechai
L'ILUI NISHMAT MAYER
HIRSH BEN LAIBEL
A
dream wrinkles the dimension of events into a pod-like
experience, in which the innermost self feels at home
and does as it pleases, being liberated from reality.
Truth
in love – connecting between inner and outer – the
authentically original…
“A tsadik’s
leaving a city makes an impression.” Impression
– an imprint embedded in physical matter, after the
stamp has been removed. Thus the tsadik:
His presence makes no impression, due to his humility,
and “no one is a prophet in his own town”, etc., etc.,
etc. – all the miscellaneous futilities of the
existential environment. It is only after his
departure that the void is discovered, the impression
that he has left behind him, in that this emptiness is
not merely meaningless, but rather it is empty in his
image and in his likeness, of value and of good works,
and of his wisdom that is lacking. Thus the want
is revealed to be not merely the lack of his
personality. Rather, it is the difference
between the essential and the non-essential elements
of existence that has been exposed.
Prior
to the tsadik’s departure, everything had
appeared on the surface to be entirely related to
pragmatic survival, without scales of values and
priorities. Yet suddenly we find, after the
departure of the tsadik, that as it turns out
nothing is left in the city. It is all an empty
rattletrap of nothingness. What is essential has
been left empty and bare.
Thus
it is with every conflict or quarrel connected with a
tsadik; when the tsadik departs,
everything is discovered retroactively to have been so
much ado about nothing, and a distortion of that
vision that can discern what is truly important from
what is irrelevant.
Here
we find an explanation for the saying, aharei mot
kedoshim emor, “after [his]death speak [of his]
sanctities.” This is not a negative indicator,
or an indicator of compassion. Rather, it is an
indicator of the revelation and exposure of truth.
“If
the Lord will be with me” is not a request for help
through a miracle, but rather “with me” literally,
through the new free choice by which Jacob confronts
brute force (Esav).
Up to
this point, it had been God Himself in all His glory,
Who had dealt with reality’s brute-force aspect.
It is only from Jacob, onward, that man must deal with
brute-force through free choice. Through the
quality that man has created for himself, he will
emerge victorious over quantity, over brute force.
Jacob
does not pray for a miracle. The meaning of
miracle is that God reduces the sphere of operations
of man’s creative choice, and instead He Himself, in
His magnificence, deals with the brute forces of
existence. Jacob is requesting siyata
dishmaya, Heaven’s assistance, to be able to
deal with brute force on his own qualitative
abilities.
Here
for the first time, the Creator bestows upon
man-who-has-attained-quality, the ability to control
and to sanctify physical matter. This is the
rebuttal to the various “greens”, who accept
axiomatically, as obvious and self-evident, that
whatever is natural is good. In the Torah
approach, the natural is bound to brute force, as the
flame is bound to the coal.
One
who chooses quality requires qualitative and
sophisticated solutions to the problem of existence,
rather than to subjugate himself to the naturalness of
brute force.
The
trouble is that the sophistication that created clever
systems, mechanisms, and devices has, like
Frankenstein, turned on its creator. Man has
gone from bad to worse, from one extreme – enslavement
to “natural” physical matter – to the other extreme –
enslavement to mechanization.
Judaism
finds a solution only through attachment to and
dependency upon the Creator of the universe.
One’s relationship to nature is no different than
one’s relationship to wisdom: They are necessary only
relative to the extent of the existential need, in
order to worship God thereby.
Isaac
understood that it would suffice to attach brute force
to the Godly ideal in order to sanctify physical
matter. Rivka knew that in order to sanctify
physical matter, there must first come a prior stage,
in which the ground is laid by using brute force
matter’s rules, such as shrewdness and cunning – rules
that are compatible with the rules of the game of
physical matter.
This
is the purpose of the confrontation with Esav.
It is only at a later stage that Jacob becomes capable
of confronting Lavan the Liar – “I am his brother in
deceit” – in order to learn a further lesson.
With Lavan, Jacob learns to penetrate to the inner
core of the “natural” material system, down to its
minutest and most exacting details.
Actualization – place
“Place”
is mentioned three times: Jacob instituted arvit,
the evening prayer. Avraham is symbolized by a
mountain: Avraham instituted shaharit, the
dawn prayer. Isaac is symbolized by a field:
Yitzchak instituted minha, the afternoon
prayer. Jacob is symbolized by a house.
A mountain evokes the reality that is found in the
object. Man stands opposite the mountain:
Reality appears in his eyes to be a problem of brute
force, as difficult to conquer as a mountain; the
climb to the top is hard.
Avraham
is the man of lovingkindness, yet he knows well
the meaning of war, the meaning of conquest.
This is the prayer of shaharit, of the dawn,
at the first moment that man faces the war of
existence.
Isaac
is a field. Minha the afternoon prayer
comes when man is sunk deep into existence, involved
with his own existential affairs. He is immersed
in himself and in existence, both of which are merged
and immersed within one another.
At the
minha prayer, a man finds himself, as he deals
with self-expression. The problem of existence
then becomes a problem of the expression of the self,
and ceases to be a mountain that one must face.
Rather,
it becomes one’s own existence. One’s own
confrontation with oneself. The mountain
disappears into the human being, who finds himself
standing in an open field. A field is a place of
hidden potential. The potential seems to lie
dormant beneath the earth, but it is actually within
man himself rather than within the earth. It is
man who determines how dormant potential shall
germinate and grow, and become actualized in the
field.
At arvit,
the evening prayer, man is finding the potential
hidden within him, while he himself is being
transformed into Godly potential, and facing his own
self’s Godly expression. Thus when Jacob lay
down in that specific place, he had to transform it
into an expression of the kedusha, the
sanctity within him.
Place
as actualization: To actualize values is to practice
alchemy. It is to transform the crude substance
of brute force into a superior substance, into the
value itself, made real and tangible.
“It is
not the place that makes the man, but rather the man
who makes the place.” Were it not for man, the
place – Mount Moriah – would have remained orphaned,
despite its illustrious lineage in the founding of the
universe, and as the place of the akeida, the
Binding of Isaac.
Here
is the continuation of the free choice that is in man:
Man must transfer the kedusha that is within
him from its state of dormant potential to a state of
actualized, tangible reality. From inside of
him, it comes out, to be applied to the environment.
Vayifga
bamakom at
the first stage: “And he encountered the place.”
And he
used it:
“And
he took from the stones of the place” that had turned
into something used by man, at the second stage.
“And
he lay down in the place” that had accepted him.
At this third stage, kedusha is applied to the
place, in merit of the tsadik who has laid
his head there, and then Godly realness is tangibly
realized, and then applied back to Jacob, in
reciprocal relationship, as two allies who toil
together until they have attained their goal.
Place
as the key to spirituality, as sha’ar hashamayim
– “Heaven’s gate”.
It is
man who creates the tangible realization of kedusha,
not only for himself, but for all the kingdom of
heaven, and he becomes transformed, to become the
partner kivyachol, if such were possible, of
the All-Powerful, ruling the angels, and controlling
them, rather than merely receiving missives and
messages from them.
Thus
God says to Jacob, "I am the God of Avraham your
father” for you are his most direct actualization,
even more than Isaac, whose eyes have dimmed.
“And
the God of Isaac”, for it is you who connects and
completes them both, as the third side of the
triangle, as indicated above in our discussion of
“place”.
Here
the child asks: If God promised that He would guard
him wherever he went, and He promised to bring him
back home in peace – “for I will not leave you until…”
– how could Jacob doubt it – that is how it looks –
and vow a vow that looks like he’s making a condition
with God?
It
might be a continuation of the idea of independent
free choice through personal responsibility: Man must
create the Godly reality anew, and not rely in a
passive manner on promises and gifts that he has not
toiled to acquire. The condition was not towards
the Creator Who makes the promise, but towards
himself:
If I
succeed in guarding the Godly Presence within myself
along my difficult and temptation-filled path, then
and only then will I know that I have fulfilled my
mission as bearer – within myself and within my own
existence – of the Godly Presence.
Here
we see that man is the source of the mitsva, rather
than the mitsva itself. Just as man is the
source of the sin: Azivat hahet,
“abandoning the sin” means that right now a man has
detached himself from his personal inner attachment to
the sin, and has removed it from the position occupied
by his own existence.
Kefitsat
Haderech,
“The Jumping of the Road” – in the sense of a
shrinking of the road. A second meaning – a
shrinking of time. Neither are correct.
“It
teaches that the earth folded underneath him” meaning
that only in human reality can time and place
meet. Without man, there is place but no
time. Time is the human expression of
place. Kefitsat haderech is man relating
to time according to his value. Kefitsat
haderech is the reduction and shrinking of place
that happens for a man whose kedusha raises
him above place and above time.
The
love borne in the heart of the universe, must reach
the fountain that flows at the top of the
mountain. (Consider the fox and the little
prince.) Jacob’s love does not resemble Isaac’s
love of Rivka, a love born after all conditions have
been fulfilled. Jacob is required to toil and
struggle in order to create love, yesh mayayin, out
of itself: Love through identifying with his
own self-expression, for a woman for whom he must toil
and labor and suffer, until she has been
internalized in his heart.
He
must close and complete a similar cycle of hishtadlut
to win his wages.
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