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PART II  of  “The Other; The Stranger; He”

“…He” 
The Relationship to “Him”

 

 Translated from Hebrew by S. NAthan

l'ilui nishmat Esther bat mordechai

See PART I   The Other; The Stranger

 The difference between the “other” and “him” is profound, touching the very roots of interpersonal relations.  “He” is inside the circle of personal relatedness, only “his” essential substance and character is unknown.  This lack of knowledge about “him” arouses interest, and stimulates the desire to make contact, to draw nearer.  “The Holy One, Blessed be He.”  This appelation for the Master of the universe was coined during the period in which prophecy was eliminated, and the era of “[God’s] Hidden Face” commenced.  Hiddenness arouses longing, the craving to shelter beneath the wings of the Shechina, to deepen one’s acquaintance with Him to the point of identifying with Him.

Emotion and Character Traits

Emotions transform into positive character traits, when they are properly placed between head and hand, between mind and action.  Detaching emotions from either one of these, turns them into bad character traits.  In Bilam’s case, his emotions were detached from the dimension of height.

Ethics of the Fathers 5:23: “Whoever has these three things, is of the students of Abraham, our forefather.  Whoever has these three other things, is from the students of the wicked Bilam:  A good eye, a lowly spirit, and a humble life-force – then he is of the students of Avraham our father.  An evil eye, a haughty spirity, and a greedy life-force – then he is of the students of the wicked Bilam.” 

Bilam “won” the title “the wicked” from our Talmudic Sages, who attached it to his name.  When he is mentioned, he is Bilam HaRasha.  He was wicked, he remained steadfast in his wickedness, and he never retreated from it to the day he died.  That happened when he went to seek out Balak in order to demand his reward for having succeeded in harming the Jewish people.  Twenty four thousand Jewish lives were lost thanks to the Bilam’s advice which he counseled to Balak – to attack Israel in a vulnerable area, the trait of lustfulness - directing Balak to send the daughters of Moab to seduce the Israelite men.  In Bilam the saying is fulfilled: “Whoever condemns another, is actually condemning his own flaw.”

For this reason, this wicked one became the eternal “other”.  Wickedness can exist within the human cycle for a limited time only.  A cycle that revolves round a human being-God axis does not tolerate the wicked one for any length of time.  Wickedness is an illness, a pathology.  A pathological condition is not a static one. 

From illness, one either recovers or dies.  Such is the path of wickedness.  It moves towards destruction or towards repentance and return.  It must choose one of the two.  The mouth that uttered: “Let my life-force die the death of the righteous, and let my end be as [Israel’s]” – a prayer that indicates a recognition of the truth – and yet still did not guard itself against attempting to curse Israel, testifies to the fact that sin here is no outcome of “a spirit of foolishness” or momentary weakness, but rather of the pure wickedness of the owner of that mouth, setting Bilam as an eternal symbol of wickedness.

It behooves us to examine the process by which the phenomenon of wickedness develops.  No human being is born wicked.  Wickedness has no roots in human nature.  The claim that some are born wicked impairs the principle of free choice, and lays the blame at the Creator’s door.

The wicked one is the product of the deeds of the crown of creation, and testifies to his ability to control himself, and to generate ruin or repair, by his own decision, independent of his environmental conditions.

The “to and fro” of emotion travels the path of a trajectory created by a pendulum swing, from “the world of creation” to “the world of doing” and back again.

As mentioned in previous essays, emotions have no specific qualitative features of their own.  They serve as a source of energy, sending currents of vitality and power to the components of quality that originate in “the world of creation”, source of values, for the purpose of connecting and transmitting these components of meaninful content and value to the “world of doing”, to the raw materials of tangible reality, in order to create Godly.

The “world of doing” is subject to defined laws that create an impression of brute force and of the strong’s ability to dominate the weak.  The danger that lurks in wait for anyone immersed too thoroughly in “the world of doing” is surrender to the law of brute force, a law that enslaves whoever surrenders.

Surrender goes through a process of temptation, of believing in the illusion: I will find a way to the top, by agile maneuvering, by walking between the raindrops without getting wet.   A little slyness, a little shrewd speculation, “fight cunning with cunning,” after all.  To triumph over brute force, you must speak its language.  Be even more brutal, and mainly, more cunning.

This indeed was the path taken by the wicked Bilam, for he enslaved his Godly quality to natural, material forces, to his survival mechanism.  He turned “envy among scholars” into envy of others, he turned love into lust, and the human tendency to cling to good, he turned into a covetous longing for money and imaginary honor.

The power of emotions, this wicked one severed from the source of values originating in “the world of creation”, and enslaved them to the brute force world of physical matter, thus transforming emotions from noble character traits into evil character traits.  From the power that flows from values, it became a coarse, destructive brute force power.

Severing the axis of emotions – which brings values toward actualization – is the cause of the phenomenon of bad midot.  “A spirit of foolishness mislead him.”  In his abundant, coarsely materialistic stupidity, Bilam was certain that Israel, who are dependent upon the world of values, are detached from the world of action, and completely oblivious to the seventy worlves encircling them with intent to kill.  Easy prey, thought the wicked one to himself, and belittled their ability to contend with evil.

Like the lazy pupil who dreams of great achievements in Torah overnight, yet hopes he will not to have to give up even one moment of sleep: “Let my end be like [Israel]” for indeed that rasha discerned that emotions cannot tolerate a severing from both worlds.

Detachment from “the world of doing” drags in its wake a loss of ability to control and to actualize. 

That much, Bilam understood, but he missed the mark with regard to the opposite direction: Ignoring the world of ideas, source of spirituality and values, means jumping into the abyss, and falling directly to the arms of the forces of she’ol.  It is a fall into the arms of the bad midot, rioting in turbulent chaos, into the whirlpool of  wantonness, disguised as freedom, into a sea of lusts, there to drown, into a thirst never quenched.

It is a fall into a world of chaos, disguised as a track of time, properly organized, zoned into past, present, and future, while in truth, the chain of time is unlinked the moment it loses the spiritual/value-based dimension of height.  This dimension gives the perspective that unifies time, and that determines the direction the track must travel: From the past, “remember the days of the universe, peruse the years of each generation”, to the present as the arena of occurring events: “If today you will obey Me,”  “What I command you today,” and toward the future, toward a redemption that is conditional upon the continuous present.

Yet the present turns into a vision of apocalypse now when the link to the future is detached from its source in the past or from its actualization in the present.    “Was” without “is” encounters “there” without “here”.  The means for achieving the ends roll about, “stones that no one picks up”, of interest to no one, for really there are no ends to achieve; there is no actual goal.

These superflous means, turn the “good eye” that looks down from the dimension of height, toward an aimless present.  They turn the “humble spirit” toward a track of time that begins and ends, toward a hopeless present.  They turn the humility of the “humble spirit” who knows its Creator, into the “greedy life-force” of arrogance: “I and nothing else.”  “Who can resemble and who can compare to – me?”  To belittling the ability of others.

It should be noted that the detachment from the tangible world, which that rasha discerned in the Jewish people, can create the risk of ignoring the danger of temptation by physical matter.  Such ignoring, classifies the forces of evil in the category of the “other”, who does not deserve to be related to.

Revenge.  Ignoring the “other” testifies to a lack of vigilance in one’s protection of the sacred.  Just as the generation of scholars who did not eulogize their deceased as they should have, were punished, because ignoring the need for eulogy testifies to ignoring a Godly presence whose parting has left a vacuum, so does an evil deed that is allowed to pass with no response, testify to the lack of an appreciation of the harm that has been perpetrated.

The Jewish act of revenge was not the result of an overflow of hurt feelings, suffered by ego, but rather from concern, for the sorrow of the Shechina, for the desecration of the Name of God, for His sake.  Thus Israel’s revenge is called “God’s revenge against Midian,” pointing to the track of a vertical axis, from the human soul, to Him.  That it is both “Israel’s revenge” and “God’s revenge against Midian” demonstrates this vertical axis, from the human soul to the dimension of height.  Revenge intended as repair of a distortion of the Godly, is carried out entirely along this vertical axis, that runs from God’s servant to the Creator of the universe.  Revenge is thus an expression of emotions that tie the pillar of the heavenly teaching together with the pillar of the halacha, which determines earthly reality. 

Detaching emotions from their dependency on these two pillars, which support them from both sides, unleashes them onto the bestial track of destructive hatred.  This is the revenge of wickedness.

 

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