Translated from Hebrew by S. NAthan

l'ilui nishmat Esther bat mordechai

     “But during a moment of solitude, delight in what exists, for we stand in the intermediate space between universe and plaything, in the place originally intended for a pure event.” (Rilke, Elegy 4) Cetonet Pasim: Pas – Yam.

    A Striped Coat

    In Hebrew etymology it may also be read as: Stripe – Sea. “ ‘The sea saw, and fled.’ What did the sea see? It saw Yosef’s coffin. Measure for measure: In the merit of ‘and he fled, and he went outside,’ the sea fled from his presence.” (The Splitting of the Red Sea)

    “The wicked one awaits the righteous one:” “You have not one day that a man’s yetser does not overpower him, and were it not for the Holy One helping him, he would never overcome him.” (Kidushin 30)

     “Seven times, a righteous man will fall, yet he will rise up.” “Whoever is greater than his friend – his yetser is greater than him as well.” “He guards the feet of His devoted ones.” “Whoever preoccupies himself with Torah for its own sake, etc…it distances him from sin.” (Avot Ch. 6)

    Where exactly does “sin crouch at the opening”? A friend clarified this for me. As an expert at cracking codes in the hi-tech industry, he explained the problem facing computer engineers: They’ve already developed a code that will respond only to the owner’s eye structure. They’ve already developed a code that will answer only to the owner’s voice. The problem is that these codes can be cracked in a very short time, because they are specific and defined: One code responds to the eye, another to the voice, and another to fingerprints.

    He himself had found a formula for a much better code, which he compared to a room that has no door. If you know where the door is, you already hold fifty percent of the solution in your hand. If the door has a keyhole, and you are only missing the key, you already hold most of the solution in your hand. The code he had discovered was a lock on a room whose door could not be found. This code would change according to every situation, according to every changing condition, and even according to the changing situation of the code owner. This exactly describes “the sin crouching at the door” to man. The secret of this code is cracked in Parashat VaYeshev, which somehow always meets up with the celebration of Chanuka, and its miracle of the jar of oil that had been sealed, concealed and encoded, and was discovered only after the devotion and self-sacrifice shown by the righteous Maccabees.

    Despite the fact that “impurity is permitted when it applies to an entire public,” it is nevertheless a barrier to spirituality. The miracle of the code being cracked to reveal the location of the key – to heaven – is like our parasha, which reveals the doorway through which sin enters.

    For this reason the parasha does not refrain from exposing the sins of God’s tribes, those twelve roots of sanctity that nourished the tree of Jewish genealogy – which was nourished by them and which then continued building the foundations of the spirit that they had bequeathed. Yet behold an amazing thing: According to the plain meaning of the text, the tribes, and Yosef “the righteous” among them, were beset with sin and with human weakness – just like any other human being. Nor were they even found clean of lust’s weakness.

    However, as with every description of what was supposedly a sin, Hazal open our eyes to another dimension of the sin, which is a root and branch of the purest self-sacrifice for the sake of heaven, to teach you that there is no sin without mitsva, and without a spiritual parallel.

    Two seductive women: Tamar, and the wife of Potiphar, the latter of which Hazal label a mirsha’at, utterly wicked: Both intended their actions for the sake of heaven, for they had seen, through the sacred spirit of prophecy! that they were destined to bear splendid fruit from these righteous men. However, Potiphar’s wife could not tell if this was meant to be from her or from her daughter.

    On the external plane, they were seductive, and on the internal plane, they were saintly women, self-sacrificing and self-risking for the sake of the privilege of attaching to the root of the tsadik.

    And what of the intentions of that tsadik himself? His actions too are bound and interwoven with pure and sacred intentions on the one hand, and less sacred on the other hand. “ ‘And he came…to do his work.’ Hazal differ on this: One view says, to do his actual work, as he did every day, and another view says that he intended to sin. Such are the people of Israel, for even the wicked among them are as full of mitsvot as a pomegranate.”

    Is this possible? Yet it proves that even their wickedness is bound up with the self-sacrifice of mitsvah, even in the very sin itself: The outer sin sometimes covers a pure inner intention.

    After all, one should not view a mitsva or an aveira from a black or white perspective. Good guys and bad guys is a childish division, incapable of reflecting real experience. Most people are intermediate, in the sense that there is no wicked person whose evil intention is so encompassing as to have penetrated through all the dimensions of his personality, and permeated all of his intentions. There may be a person whose intention was for the sake of mitsva, specifically, but he was halted at one of the many stops along the way to the mitsva, and tempted by one of the many temptations of the yetser, which weakened him, and then he stumbled into sin.

    There may be another person who intended “to do his work”, meaning to pursue an ordinary routine action, and then he stumbled through distraction. Another may actually intend to sin, and then stumble over what is actually another person’s sin. Another may have intended to sin, but then departed from it because of circumstances against his will, and actually turned to the path of mitsva. There is the accidental sinner who comes very close to being a deliberate sinner, and there is the accidental sinner who comes very close to being a sinner under duress, and thus absolved of blame, and there is the deliberate sinner who comes very close to being an accidental sinner, and even a doer of mitsva.

    There is also the transgression for the sake of heaven, which is greater than the mitsva performed not for the sake of heaven, and having said all this – go try to find the code and the formula for a life free of sin. For this reason Hazal have taught us: “The wicked one awaits the righteous one.” Meaning that “there is not one day that a man’s yetser does not overpower him, and were it not for the Holy One helping him, he could never overcome him.” (Kidushin 30) Meaning that there is no clear-cut code for sin, nor for mitsva. Rather, the Holy One performed a doubled and redoubled kindness for the people of Israel, and gave us His Torah, which contains the wherewithal to guide and to show “the straight path a man must carve for himself” and He established within His Torah halachot, practical rules of behavior dealing with what is forbidden and what is permitted, and laws of finance and damages and sanctity and purity, and there is an additional and doubly redoubled hesed that He has lavished upon the people of Israel, which is the study of Torah for its own sake, for “during the time he is preoccupied with it, it shelters him, and even during the time he is not preoccupied with it, the Torah he has learned stands him in good stead, and saves him from sin.”

    Yet in spite of all, “do not believe in yourself until the day of your death.” To teach you how very many and multiple are the stumbling blocks, and the hurts and the harms that pass over a human being, righteous and wicked as well, before they arrive at the end of their path, whether of wickedness or of righteousness. Now you, go ahead and figure who is the tsadik and who is the rasha in the final analysis. “A man sees to the eyes, but the Lord sees to the heart.” For every good action that a man does, how many miracles have first had to occur for him, and how much heavenly assistance has had to accompany him, and how many trials has he been forced to overcome before the action could be called on his name. Thus with Reuven, who intended to save Yosef from his brothers’ hands, despite the fact that he himself was the initiator of the idea of casting him to the pit. Thus with Yehudah, in his advice to sell Yosef to the Yishmaelites. Thus with Yosef, when he gave his brothers a bad and libellous name, and thus with his dreams: “And his father kept the matter in mind,” knowing the other dimensions and perspectives contained in Yosef’s dreams.

    Nevertheless, despite the great variety, and all the many differences, the Torah comes and determines halacha, the laws of what is prohibited and what is permitted, of what is a mitsva and what is a sin, and each one entails its own reward and punishment. Then let a man not judge his fellow, whether for better or for worse, unless he is obligated to do so in some legal capacity. “Whoever says, David sinned, only errs.” Cetonet Pasim, A Striped Coat: To teach you that there is a multiplicity of layers and dimensions comprising any cross-section of mitsva or of sin. Layers and stripes, stripes and layers, with each stripe showing another layer of the quality of the action, in human behavior, and showing also that “there is but a pesa separating the righteous man from the wicked man.”

    In the prayer of ahl hanisim, “for the miracles” which we add on Chanuka, we say: “You gave the powerful into the hands of the weak, and the many into the hands of the few, and the defiled into the hands of the pure, and the wicked into the hands of the righteous, and the malevolent into the hands of those who preoccupy themselves with Your Torah We are witness here to the different qualities and levels of behavior: The weak, who deserve heavenly assistance because of their weakness, for the Holy One assists them for the sake of balance in justice – defending the weak. The few, means that quality is victorious over quantity, for this principle has reflected the Torah perception since time immemorial. The pure require no explanation, for after all, their place is within the camp of the Shechina. The righteous, who attained their high degree by their own powers, who have merited actualization of the goal cherished by every servant of God – they have the right to a miracle, a right to be rescued.

     “Those who preoccupy themselves with Your Torah” occupy a completely different level, for “at the time that he is preoccupied with it, it shelters him.” Those who preoccupy themselves with Torah apparently do not need kosher certification. Rather, “whoever preoccupies himself with Torah, merits many things,” and this merit of Torah stands him in good stead in the present as well as in the future, and for continuing generations.

    Torah study creates a new reality, in which “no tool raised against you will succeed.” This is not a case of giving preference to the more qualitative. Rather, quite simply, this new reality exists in the merit of Torah and nothing else.

     “Yosef the righteous” was privileged to attain “both tables,” in merit of his avodat hamidot, his toil to perfect his own traits of character, which he did by beginning at the beginning, from the very foundation, for he was required to overcome trial and tribulation at every single stage. The Torah does not conceal any of the stages of temptation, any of the stumbling blocks that Yosef had to overcome. “From the dungeon of the prison, he came out to rule,” which encompasses every temptation that ever lurked for mortal man. Yosef is the symbol of righteousness because he himself was meritorious and because he saw to it that his brothers would also come out meritorious, through the trials he made them undergo, which atoned for their spiritual failure in having sold him.

    The “twin fawns” of every mitsva: At the entry to each mitsva, a sin is in pursuit, and for every sin, a mitsva is bound in its wake. A metaphor for this would be: “Mitsvas that a man grinds with his heels.”