Translated from Hebrew by DR. S. NAthan

l'ilui nishmat Esther bat mordechai
L'ILUI NISHMAT MAYER HIRSH BEN LAIBEL

    “And unite our hearts to love and fear Your Name…for we put our faith in Your sacred Name; we will exult and delight in Your deliverance.”

      Many have paused over the absurdity inherent in the mida of bitachon - the character trait of confidence in God.  For after all, the Holy One does not tend to diverge from the laws and fixed processes of Creation. These are laws that He Himself has determined, from the time that He created the universe. These are laws based on foundations and reasons known only to the Creator. What does not appear good in the eyes of man – in truth this is not the case. Therefore man must aspire and pray for the privilege of being able to see and to identify with even what is bad, and to be able to discover that in truth there is no bad at all, that gahm zu litova, “even this is for the good.”

      Furthermore, the Rambam, in our weekly Torah reading, presents the rules by which God manages the universe. He makes a distinction between the public as a whole and the private individual. Still, these rules are permanent and clearly-ordered, and they are anchored in causes that are absolute.

      “ ‘With all your hearts and with all your souls:’ (11:13) But has it not already mentioned ‘with all your heart and with all your soul?’ However, one is a warning to the individual while the other is a warning to the group.” (Rashi quoting Sifri: Ekev)

      “The explanation of this issue is that God does not work miracles on a regular basis except in connection with the majority of the nation’s actions. A single individual, however, lives by his own merit. And by his own sin, he dies. So it is saying here that if they were all to do all of the commandments out of perfect love, He would work all of these miracles for them, for their good. And it says that if they were to worship idolatry, He would work a sign for their bad.

      “Know also that miracles are never worked, whether for good or for bad except with those people who are utterly righteous or utterly wicked. But for the ordinary ones – as is the way of the world – He does good or bad to them according to their own way and according to their own deeds.”

      The Ba’al HaTanya discusses the concept of beinonim, the ordinary people. He determines that in our day, all are judged to be beinonim. It seems to me that the beinoni is not a person who stands at the midpoint between utterly righteous and utterly wicked. He is not half righteous and half wicked. Rather, his is a new status in man’s relationship to his God.

      Among the utterly righteous and the utterly wicked, there is an absence of the human element. Therefore such people are not really counted among mortals at all. They are messengers (angels) of good or of evil, in human incarnation. But the beinoni is a human being. He incarnates the human being within the heavenly systems.

      The beinoni is thus a human being who has created his own level of avodas Hashem - his own service and worship of God, and his own uniquely original relationship with his Creator.

      A human being cannot relate to heaven or to heavenly law per se` because he is not of darei maala, those who dwell on high. Similarly, he cannot relate to the physical creants per se` because he himself is not of physical matter in his essential substance, and therefore “the human being cannot live on bread alone.”

      We see from this that the heavenly laws designed to regulate physical matter have no application to him at all. This means that the mida of bitachon - confidence in God as a personality trait - is not drawn from a belief in God’s constant management of the universe. Therefore a human being who is immersed in a difficult and threatening reality cannot have faith that Heaven’s management, which heaves physical reality to and fro, will somehow pass over him. Such an attitude might even be considered chutzpah towards Him.

      However, he is required to have faith that he will merit hashgacha pratis, a personalized Providence fitted to his own size and measure, to his own measure and level of bitachon, if and when he creates, out of his own existence, a reality that reflects – not the laws of physical matter and not the laws of the spirit, but rather – his own personal being an expression of Godly reality.

      This reality that he creates out of his own existence reflects a process he is undergoing in which the cause of his existence transforms into the goal of his existence: To actualize a Godly reality in the world, which means to sanctify God by the sheer fact of his existence.

      For every action that he takes to express this goal of his existence, he merits a hashgacha pratis that fits itself to the quality of actualization of Godly presence that is unfolding within him, within his person and within his behavior.

      Knowing, working towards, and having unshakeable faith in this principle is the real mida of bitachon, and it is a mida beinonis. That is - it applies to the beinoni definition: It is an expression of Godly presence within human experience. This is what is meant by “to love God…to walk in His ways ulidovka bo, and to cling to Him.”

      Ramban: “Rabbi Abraham said: … ‘And this is a great mystery. …If so, it is one of the warnings against idolatry: That one’s thought must not separate from God towards other gods….Rather, all else must be nothing and naught…it is possible that this includes also dvaikus, the requirement to ‘cling,’ meaning that one must be constantly remembering God and His love. Your thought must not separate from Him, when you walk on the road and when you lie down and when you rise up – to the point that his affairs with his fellow human beings would be only through his mouth and through his tongue, but his heart is not with them. Rather, he is before God.

      “And it is possible among people of this great stature that their life force is already treasured in the eternal treasury even while they are still alive, because they have become in themselves a lodging for the Shechina…for behold their thought and their deeds are with God constantly.

      “This is why Joshua warns them that even now, in the Land, when miraculous acts have been removed from them, let their thought be constantly of them, in order to cling to the glorious and awesome Name, so that their cavana, their focused awareness will never part from God.”

      We see from this that bitachon is a sensation of awareness that derives from dvaikus.

      Like the Jew, the Holy Land contains a certain intrinsic qualitative element that is not patterned after or subject to the laws of nature that have been fixed into the creation by God. Instead it is patterned after and subject to the behavior of its inhabitants.

      Comparing the Holy Land with the land of Egypt, the Torah cites Egypt as an example of God’s fixed management of the universe.  Consider: “All of the disease I laid on Egypt, I shall not lay on you, for I am God, your Healer.” This is because the one whose faith is in God, whose entire reality constitutes an expression of dvaikus baHashem, clinging/attached permanently to God - would never fall prey to medicine’s laws of nature. Rather the Holy One in all His glory would heal him.

      The Holy Land is “unlike the land of Egypt.” “Rather she is better than her,” Rashi interprets. “Both for better and for worse,” the Ramban interprets, because she follows the principle of every private individual’s behavior. It can therefore indeed be less good in the Holy Land than in the countries ruled by nature’s fixed laws.

      The Ramban adds a parable about a healthy person versus a sick person:

      “For you see that this parasha is warning about the way of the universe, and we must learn from this. Because although everything is in His jurisdiction, and it would be the simplest thing in the sight of God, yisborach, to destroy the inhabitants of the land of Egypt and to dry up their rivers and wells, nevertheless the Land of Canaan would be destroyed more quickly if He did not give her His mighty rains. A sick person (Eretz Yisrael) is more in need of merit and prayer to be healed by God than a healthy person (Egypt) on whom no ailment has come. A like attitude applies to poor and rich, and God enlightens the eyes of both.”

      “ ‘A land on which the Eyes of God…rest; a land that God…seeks out.’ Yet does God not seek out all the lands? He seeks only her, as it were, yet through that seeking…he seeks out all the other lands. Here lies a profound secret, because this land is sought after in everything, and she is everything. And all the lands make their living from her in truth. (Ramban)

      We see here that the law-governed system established at the six days of Creation - is dependent upon a dynamic avodas Hashem, a service and worship of God that is constantly unfolding and emerging bechol yom tamid, “every day, incessantly,” renewing the maiseh bereishis, the act of Creation, through the oved Hashem, God’s servant who becomes a partner to his Creator in the management of the universe. So it is with the Holy Land when an oved Hashem dwells within her, and so it is with the oved Hashem himself. It is the mida of bitachon objectified.

      Awe and Faith

      “What else does God…ask of you…except to feel awe?”

      Awe: A sensation of belonging to the Creator.

      Faith: A feeling of being capable of applying this (belonging to the Creator) to reality.

      The Jewish approach: Apply method to the madness. Take control of the madness of absurdity by applying order and method, but not through reduction, separation, or superficiality.

      The Jewish approach to religion is characterized by an attempt at integration, at confrontation. It makes the effort to encompass all of reality, to include all its disparate components and dichotomies, contradictory as they may be, and to gather them all into a framework that can endow them with qualitative meaning (even the evil and the ugly of them) and that can enable them to be related to in a assertively human, value-driven manner. This is an effort to impose order and method, yet it takes place in a spirit of midas harachamim, of compassion, of teshuva, the return to God, and of  reconciliation.

      Every effort to superficialize or reduce the Jewish approach through rationalistic method or religioustic reductiveness, anything that divides or minimizes the scope of religion or that distances it from life would be rejected by the Jewish perception. This explains the Jewish rejection of Protestant Judaism, because of its reductiveness, and the Jewish rejection of Catholic (fanatic) Judaism for the opposite reason, because of its separating from life.

      More on the Mida of Bitachon:

      I imagine human existence in the material world to be like a bread store. A brightly lettered sign hangs over it, gaily announcing: “Not on bread alone shall a human being live!”

      We could delve more deeply into this, and investigate which is the greater absurdity: Entering the store hungry and finding it empty, or entering the store and finding it filled with all different kinds of breads emitting fragrant aromas fresh from the oven. There is rye bread covered with baked sunflower seeds or poppy seeds or sesame, there are pretzels, there are crusty onion rolls, but lo, one’s pockets are empty, one has not a single penny.

      The ticket required to enter such a store would call for a good deal of chutzpah, or a great deal of masochism, perhaps even bordering on insanity. A somewhat more appropriate ticket for entering such a store, the ticket that would contain a little bit of all the indicators put together, in a size dose that would allow them all to live together – might be a sense of humor.

                                    ***********************

      Voyeurism is a contemptible character trait – immoral and bordering on the criminal. It is the invasion of an individual’s private space without his knowledge. This is only if someone possesses a private space obviously. From the voyeur’s point of view there is no wickedness here, but only an illogical absurdity bordering on the insane. One cannot after all penetrate a space, for the purpose of exposing its dark corners and inaccessible places, by using a key intended to open another entirely different space that is utterly strange to it.

      Peering through distorted eyeglasses that are not fitted right, that fit neither the eyes of the voyeur nor what he believes he is seeing – is an optical illusion. Its distorted failure is a foregone conclusion and its entire purpose is to provide a dubious – to the point of insane – pleasure to the confused voyeur.

      A similar or even worse load of baggage weighs on the back of the psychological profession, which presumes to create eyeglasses for the purpose of penetrating the secret spaces of another person’s life force. This attempt to penetrate the private space, whose complexity and compoundedness become doubled and redoubled the moment a spouse has penetrated into it, borders on the criminal as well as the insane.

      In the office of humor one might acquire a ticket to enter the orchard of mystery. Consider the four who entered the pardes. We must remember and never forget that of the four who dared to penetrate within it and to expose its secret places - only one emerged unharmed. Of the other three, one became a heretic, the second lost his sanity, and the third lost his life.

      Though we cannot possibly compare the persons involved, we may glean a lesson from this midrash [Tractate Hagiga 14: "There were four who entered the orchard (of secret knowledge).  The son of Azai, the son of Zoma, the "Other," and Rabbi Akiva.  The son of Azai took one glimple and died.  The son of Zoma took one glimple and went mad.  The "Other" became a heretic.  Rabbi Akiva entered in peace and came out in peace.") -    that there is a punishment for those insolently curious who presume to treat another’s private space as though it were their own.

      If we speak of humor, we must admit its limitations; there is wrongly used humor and there is vicious humor. There is no greater cruelty than la’ag larash, the humor based on mockery of a person whose situation is pathetic.

      For the people who live in that house, the situation is tragic, while in the eyes of the voyeur, it is the funniest thing he has ever seen, like the motions and gesticulations of someone engaged in a telephone conversation within a glass-enclosed telephone booth seem to the people on the outside.

      Therefore we wish you, dear and bold reader, a pleasant adventure, but at your own expense entirely.
P. S. Sorry about this, we are making a dangerous mistake here. The courageous reader who believes in his own sense of humor that he imagines he is blessed with – should recall that humor is a gift from heaven; the price for its use can be terribly high. All the insurance coverage in the world will not and cannot guarantee that he will ever be able to cover the heavy debt he will incur.

      The mida of bitachon is the only guarantee that he will go in and yet come out unharmed from an unpredictable, peril-fraught adventure of this kind. The boteyach baHashem - whose attachment to God is central to his personality, enters the pardes, the "orchard," not by way of his ego. He is not equipped with sensors from the survival mechanism.

      A courageous person is someone who stares in the face of death without fear. But someone whose inner self has grown out of the study halls of Godly quality, who has attained a mature level in the mida of dvaikus, who is galvanized by devotion, by self-sacrifice, by the sincere wish to sanctify God through the mere fact of his presence – he has the highest chances of entering and coming out unharmed, acquiring a wealth of wisdom and inheriting the broad and boundless estates of ruchnius in the process.

      The ba’al bitachon is the one who walks into a bakery in order to buy ruchnius, to acquire spirituality. The minuval – that degenerate that is the yetser hara, the inclination to evil – he pulls with him into the study hall, as the Talmud recommends. In the bais medrash specifically, he deals with it, as it were. In the marketplace he is preoccupied with Torah, and while in the bais medrash, specifically, he deals with the temptations of physical matter.

      He lives simultaneously in both opposite worlds, and he deals with a confrontation with absurdity that has only dubious chances for success: Can the circle be squared? Can the spirit be made tangible? Can the physical be granted meaning?

      One may certainly view this attempt as being a symptom of the madness with which the Chosen People has been blessed. This explains the danger that lies in wait for the Jew who dwells in lands that have engraved rationality upon their banner. It explains the failure, the superficiality of Judaism in Anglo-Saxon lands specifically, and the flourishing of Judaism in those lands where rationality and mysticism run riot in the form of superstitions and existential distress.

      The Jew flourishes in lands where dichotomy, contradiction and double meaning run riot. But he loses his absurd character, which knows how to turn wound into healing, aivel liyom tov, mourning into holiday, and physical matter into spirit, he loses his powerful validity in lands of the detached mystical character of the Far East, and in lands of a purely rational character that eschews ascending to the heights.

      Now we may understand why in the Holy Land,  such great hope for the Jew lies hidden. It is a land that is not subject to the laws of nature at all. “It is a land on which God’s eyes rest, from the year’s beginning to year’s end.” All this is true with regard to the birthland of the Jewish people as a whole. But for the individual, his birthland, the place where he is tended and cultivated is the Jewish home. This place excels in all those same symptoms, but here they are sharper and more piercing, penetrating directly to the individual’s pain of heart and mind and body.