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Parashat VaYeshev
Rav Haim Lifshitz
Essays and Articles:
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Space and Time
Loss of Connectednes / Non-Belonging And Its Remedy – Freedom: Leaving Egypt “Every day a man is required to see himself as if he had come out of Egypt:” The Holocaust
l'ilui nishmat Esther bat mordechai Plague of darkness, Korban Pesah, "this month to you is the head of months." Jewish time expression. The Ramban's approach, which views hashgaha as permanently merged with a free choice initiative, disallows a perception of two parallel tracks that never meet. This is Ibn Ezra's perception: Free choice for people of high quality, and hashgaha for the simple masses who tend to enslave themselves to the natural systems. The Ramban grants all rights to the individual. He pins his hopes on the individual's supreme ability to influence the external system from within himself. This is quality's victory over quantity, and mainly, moral choice's victory over systemization. It is moral judgment's superiority over the law of the system, and the conscience's superiority - when conscience is creatively active as a result of human quality's involvement, an achievement at the level of yesh may'ayin - over accepting reality at its face value. Face value is the tendency of the systemized view, which invites man to accept reality as a given that is not subject to his free choice, and therefore it has no room for the intervention of his morality and conscience; there is no room for the individual human being to intervene in the great all-encompassing system. The Torah comes toward the individual, viewing him as the ultimate balancing factor, who will resolve - through his use of the third scripture, through his values drawn from the dimension of height - contradiction born of inevitable deviation from systemized orders. Science, that deals in systemization, holds no solution to the problem of human existence, neither in the political sphere nor in the economic sphere, nor even in the medical sphere, not to mention the behavioral "sciences," where loss outweighs gain because the essential has been ignored: Human quality, which must and which alone can protect the equilibrium of human ecology, by activating midot tovot - goodness of character - and morality in human relations. The hidush the Torah brings to the world is the transfer of human responsibility from the realm of nature to the realm of human relations and interpersonal responsibility. From the man/ nature conflict, the Torah moves the focus to the conflict of man and his fellow. The makot were a double-edged sword, transmitting their message to Egypt and to Israel alike. To the Egyptians, the plagues uprooted their illusions regarding man's dominion over nature, and to Israel they were a lesson that man bears responsibility toward his God and toward his fellow: Maintaining the balance of relations between himself and nature he can safely leave in the faithful hands of hashgah. (But only when he does not attempt to nail human relations into systemized law - only when he relates to his fellow through personally creative moral judgment.) We see that there are two goals; l'ma'an is said twice: "In order that I shall place these, My signs, in his midst," and "in order that you shall tell it in the ears of your son and your son's son - of how I abused Egypt…" "'B'choshrot' - b'chi l'Mitsrayim v'sherut l'Yisrael." "What was weeping to Egypt was a service to Yisrael." What service was performed by hoshech? What lesson did it teach Yisrael? Free choice as completing the hashgaha is expressed in human terms as a freedom that is not limited to the technical framework of the Torah. It is a freedom that more precisely expands the values and principles of the Torah to include the entire human / existential cycle. For this reason, the question of time occupies a central position in our parasha: Time constitutes the major channel of non-freedom. It is man's connectedness and belonging to his environment. A sense of belonging is comprised of a sense of space and a sense of time. "Know - where you come from, and to where you are going," instructs the Torah. These are the instructions of existence. You must consider them as well, in addition to the instruction of "know before Whom you stand." The first of existence's instructions is an instruction of time, and the second is an instruction of space. Time is divided into three parts: The existential present, the past and the future. When present is severed from past and future it becomes a fleeting unit of time that leaves no real impression, no point of realness that can be grasped. It is nothing more than a point of time that passes before it can manage to turn into realness. Whereas when it is supported by another of time's parts, the past, and when it moves toward the future, then time's three parts unite to form a continuous unity that holds a meaning, a beginning, and a final purpose. In this entity, cause and goal unite to form a perfect union. Time's parts have no substance in and of themselves. Time itself has no substance at all. It is no more than a human relating to an event in the human existential cycle. It does not exist outside of this cycle. Physical time is the duration of physical units. This duration is measurable. The only meaning of this measurement is as a yardstick of continuity, of an order of events - what is before and what is after - which means space! The dimension of time is added to physical continuity only when it enters the cycle of human existence. It is only the human being relating to the event who grants it a dynamic, emotional, and subjective meaning. We see than that time has subjective meaning only. Time turns into the existential experience that man grants it. A place/event that unfolds where there is no human being has no dimension of time. Therefore, the time that is severed from its past and its future simply passes without leaving any impression upon the human being who is in it - as in "the one for whom the miracle is performed does not recognize his own miracle." In contrast, the more one deepens and enriches one's own relationship to time, transforming it into continuous experience, the higher its level, even unto eternity - as in "every day a man must see himself as though he has come out of Egypt." By continuing the historical event beyond its chronological moment, through the continuity of time, to reach until his very own experience of existence, man raises the event from an occurrence of segmented time to a meaning that is beyond history, a meaning that holds the supreme values that are at the basis of man's existence - every man's, and his own especially. Through the path of time, man finds the meaning that is closest to his heart, the meaning that can express the distresses of his own existence - his fears, his yearnings, and all the other murmurings of his heart. The Torah's goal in its vivid descriptions, and mainly in the imperatives that accompany them, is to eternalize the unfolding of events, and to bring them nearer to the Jew through an act of mitsva that accompanies the event. Thus Korban Pesah, thus the mitsva of leaving Egypt, and thus the commandment that "this month for you is the chief of months." A stake is driven through the cycle of time, to fix it with meaning through an act of mitsva. It is the Rosh Hashana, the New Year of mitsvot - of "doing", as opposed to Tishrei's New Year, which is the beginning of "being". One for heftsa and one for gavra - here the object and there the subject. Here, in Nissan, through responsibility toward the Creator, while in Tishrei, through responsibility toward one's own existence. Yetsiat Mitsrayim expresses man's responsibility for his actions, through his relating to his environment by way of the dimension of height. The Torah disallows the direct relating of man-to-environment. Man must first pass through the stage of relating to the dimension of height, from which he will take values and content that are capable of granting meaning to the existential surround. …which otherwise means mere response patterns, reactions and reflexes, enslavement to any stimulus from the outside, and neglect of the initiative of free choice. Such neglect points to a lack of quality, to a world based on principles of brute mechanical force, and ruled by a blind technocratic system empty of content or quality. In that world man loses his uniqueness to become a lifeless, non-unique cog in the mighty machine. The Torah's goal is to be understood as granting man's time/space existence a higher dimension of quality. It wishes to give man the third katuv that resolves the deviations of the system, that resolves the conflicts between the different parts of a complex existence that is necessarily comprised of mutually exclusive opposites. The Torah offers us the third Godly dimension, that intervenes between conflicting adversaries, to unite toward a goal that will grant them teleological continuity. **************************************************************************************** Makat hoshech, the plague of darkness: "A darkness of dense gloom, where they did not see one another for those three days, and then for another three days a darkness that was doubled on this, where no man stood up from where he sat. One sitting could not stand, and one standing could not sit." (Rashi) The first three days of darkness blurred their dimension of time: Sunsets and sunrises were confused to the point where they lost all connection to time. The second three days came to uproot their connection to the dimension of space. The lack of a sense of space undid their sense of belonging to such an extent that they feared even to move or change position. Being uprooted from the feeling of connectedness and belonging is more than "one sixtieth of death." In contrast to the Mitsrim, "all of b'nei Yisrael had light in their dwellings," meaning they experienced the ability to relate to space and time as a preparation for their redemption from Egypt, in order to sharpen the contrast between their positive existence and the emptied-of-meaning existence of the Egyptians - who could now find nothing at all of meaning. Not even the meaning of their hatred for the Jews was left to them. Their sense of belonging was the appropriate victim of the last plague. It was the end in a series of plagues that HaKadosh Baruch Hu brought upon those evil ones, prior to the very last one, makat b'chorot, which was the only maka that held personal meaning. Darkness, the severing from belonging, is worse even than severing from the self, for one loses the image of man, including the self image which is its basis. Coshrut - The plague to the Egyptians contained a blessing for Yisrael: During this plague, a new qualitative meaning was granted to space and to time, with the mitsva of korban Pesah and the markings of space, of the threshold and the two doorposts, in the time of the tenth day of the first month, etc. The content of these mitsvot grant meanings of height to dimensions of space and time. "Every day a man is required to see himself as if he had come out of Egypt." So it is in our own era, the era of the Holocaust, which bears much resemblance to the Holocaust of Egypt. Then as now, the Jewish people passed through a furnace of fathomless pain that had no equal for severity and depth. Millions were exterminated following an odyssey of persecutions and humiliations that had the effect of undermining their basic sense of existence. The testimony of an innocent youth who had passed through the furnace of pain in the death camps reads as follows: "So these people had to somehow pass all those four, six, or twelve years, or in the latter case for example, twelve times three hundred and sixty five days, which means, twelve times three hundred and sixty five times twenty four, and also: Twelve times three hundred and sixty five times twenty four…and all these all over again, second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day: That means that they had to somehow fill all that time all the way to the end." (Imre' Cartes in Without A Fate, p. 186.) The author notes that his listeners have not fully understood him. A description of this view of the horror is not to be found anywhere in all of the extensive literature extracted from the survivors who were saved from hell. In the mouth of a fifteen-year-old youth, who is not yet able to categorize horror according to life experiences, description acquires a fundamental meaning. The Germans excelled in a talent for evil that bordered on the artistic. They had as their goal the uprooting of their victims' actual belonging to space and time. To this end, they were incessantly changing the location of the prisoners, through laws that were changed every day without explanation. They deprived their victims of the attempt to guess or predict the hidden intentions behind the changes. For the very existence of the survival instinct requires an understanding of what is taking place, what the intention of the foe is: There is a seeking after logic, after any kind of rule-governed process. This need too was eliminated by the wicked ones. All that remained was a sense of time that was impossible: Time with no continuity. Minimal units of time. Transition without continuity, without anticipation from second to second, from moment to moment, leaves the victim with an experience of annihilation at every second. Meaning - this second which he occupies has no continuation, and it is the last second of his life. The terror of death, the pain that is unbearable yet not continuous, but rather born anew in every minimal unit of time. As different to continuous pain, which hurts only at the first blow, the victims were struck by a pain that renewed itself at every second. The absolute uprooting of a sense of existence in space and time is a torture that destroys the very foundation of existence. The loss of anticipation, the despair of hope - "better than it is death." Utter end: Even redeeming death was denied them as long as it was possible to postpone it. They were to extract the very last drop of anguish. So it was in the Holocaust that paralleled the plague of darkness. Then came the plague of darkness, "and all Yisrael had light," and Holocaust time was transformed for ahm Yisrael, to become Torah time: Time that is rich with the dimension of height, with an eternal stability that is the crushing answer to all those discontinuous units of time. From here the way is cleared for the giving of the Torah, as an eternal existence that will displace two-dimensional time/space existence devoid of the dimension of height which, alone, can grant time eternal continuity. From this point on, b'nei Yisrael are given their own niche and their own task, by which to express the initiative of free choice in all its power, for the service of God - in which the hashgaha from on high and the free choice from below meet to form a perfect unit - man-and-his-God unified. This union has the power to transform technical order to become true justice, to become a law steeped in moral content and values, to become a space that is time and a time that is space: The time of our Torah in the land of the sacred. Such is the lesson that a Jew takes with him, in his heart and in his knapsack, to travel the long torment-filled journey of the galuyot. It is baggage that can turn yisurim into yisurim shel ahava, and living for the moment into eternal life. It makes mockery of his enemies and survives them all. It is the meaning that accompanies the doing of mitsvot zecher li'y'tsiat Mitsrayim, "in memory of leaving Egypt." Go To Top
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