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The Sanctity of the Cohen
Time’s Sanctity (Shabat and Festival)
The Sanctity of the Land.
Translated from Hebrew by S.
NAthan
l'ilui nishmat Esther bat mordechai
“Round and round
goes the wind,” round the axis of encounter between hashgaha and
behira. Out of this encounter, a delicate matrix is formed
that regulates the sensitive balance between the two allies, The Creator
Himself in His glory, and – man.
We attempted to
elaborate on the issue of man’s holiness in Parashat Kedoshim, for man is
commanded regarding kedusha in that parsha: Kedushat ha’adam
– the sanctity of man. A question seems to present itself
regarding the difference in substance between man’s holiness and the
supreme holiness: “Sacred shall you be to God – against your
will...And you shall sanctify him – against his will.” (Rashi)
Here it seems that the holiness of the Cohen does not derive from a
human source but is rather imposed on him from above: “For I am God Who
sanctifies him.” “And his sons I will sanctify, to cohen for
me.”
“My
Shabatot shall you keep, because it is a sign between Me and you
for your generations, to know that I am God Who sanctifies you.”
“Therefore God blessed the day of Shabat, and sanctified it.”
“These are God’s appointed times, callings of sanctity that you shall call
them.” “What does Shabat have to do with the appointed times of
festival? To teach you that whoever desecrates the festivals, they
consider him as having desecated the Shabatot.”
What is the
nature of Shabat’s sanctity as opposed to the sanctity of the
tsadik? As opposed to the cohen? Is there
autonomous kedusha – an autonomous force of kedusha, or is
all kedusha only an expression of God’s kedusha, given to
man as a gift, to God’s servant when he reaches the height of his own
wholeness? Or is the height of completeness called kedusha,
simply as a borrowed name, to teach you how important shlaimut is,
to the extent that it resembles the Supreme One?
Or perhaps there
are two kedushot – one human and the other Godly. For this
possibility, we would need to investigate the difference – in terms of
power and influence – between supreme kedusha and human
kedusha. Does human kedusha turn man into supreme
man? Does man acquire supernatural powers?
The inquiry into
kedusha can get caught in its own tangled webs until it borders on
the absurd. The universe, on the one hand, and physical matter with
all its mechanical systems, are built and function according to obvious
rules, so it seems. For the purpose of investigating these systems,
man has created and developed ways and means that in principle prove
themselves sound. For some reason that is not entirely clear,
science has not managed – despite the enormous resources at its disposal
in terms of brain power and all the other human powers invested in it – to
find the missing link between the forces of nature and individual man’s
existential condition. “The One sitting in heaven laughs, at the
utter failure.”
Colossal
achievements that reach so high as to touch the forces of heaven are
inadequate to attain even a slight understanding of what is in one’s
neighbor’s heart, or to improve people’s standard of human quality.
One of the keys that God has kept for Himself, and has not given over to
man, is this missing link between the universe’s existence and man’s
existence.
Strange as it
may seem, the mechanisms of religion are afflicted with this same
dichotomy. “There is such a thing as a degenerate by permission of
the Torah,” declares the Ramaban. A man can occupy himself with the
pursuit of Torah and mitsvot all the day long, and never find the key that
opens the gates of heaven. Though he knock at every tsadik’s
door, or gravestone, though he grab every shred of amulet or other
wonder-working item, though he is obsessed with the goal of attaining
perfection, which fills his heart with longing, yet “the life-force will
not be filled” and he knows no peace.
Suddenly one
discovers kedusha. One stands stunned before its limitless
power, faced with the implications of a kadosh such as Rabi Hanina
ben Dosa who remarks: “Not the serpent causes death – sin causes
death.” One wonders, what is the mystery called
kedusha?
How can a human
attain the privilege of supreme kedusha when after all, “he is
immersing for purity while holding an insect in his hand”?
Enter the Torah,
to grant man – to force upon man – the kedusha of the
mikdash and of the korbanot, the kedusha of Shabat
and festival, and the kedusha of the Land.
Such
kedusha contains no abstinence, and is in fact its exact opposite:
“Eat fattened delicacies, and drink sweetened beverages,” and “take
pleasure...over God.”
How so?
Here the Torah
reveals the secret of opposites: If you wish to attain kedusha,
oversimplifying – as is recommended by all the other religions, being
man-made – will not do. Prushim tih’yu. Prishut
is not nezirut. Renunciation is not kedusha. Any
prishut that gnaws at the vital needs of existence is not
kedusha.
The Jewish
kedusha imperative demands the impossible, it would seem.
“Human beings of the sacred shall you be to me.” A “sacred” that not
at the expense of “human”, of human needs. First be a human being
and only afterwards be sacred. One who detracts from his own
existence’s vital needs detracts from his own kedusha.
Hence Shabat and
festival, and hence the kedusha of the Land. “A gift have I
in my treasure house, and I wish to give it to Yisrael,” the Creator
shares the good news. This gift is uniquely qualified to sanctify
physical matter.
The One Who
sanctifies Shabat on high, breathes His sacred spirit into the one who
sanctifies Shabat below, granting the one below an ability to take
pleasure in physical matter and sanctify it with the highest form of
sanctity.
The same applies
to the festival, through heightened awareness, through maintaining the
delicate balance of “half of it for the Name of God and half of it for
you.”
The same applies
to the sanctity of the Land, which is capable of counteracting “and
Yeshurun grew fat, and kicked...” and all the other temptations to which
“each person [who] sits under his grape vine and under his fig tree” is
subject, when he fails to notice how the sense of “my own power and the
strength of my own hand” is worming its way into his heart and emptying it
of the sensation of kedusha. All this is available for the
low price of observing mitsvot hatluyot ba’arets, “the commandments
that are conditional upon the Land”, chief among which are shmita
and yovel, which ensure that the sanctity
of the Land will
rest upon its inhabitants.
The same applies
to the sanctity of the cohen, who rules over the sanctity of the
Land, who leads its comings and goings, on whose word the sanctity of the
Land rests, while he himself has no portion or inheritance in the land
itself. He is the address for all the priestly gifts, he is the
human link enabling human beings to identify with sanctity, to allow
sanctity to settle into their insides and to take over their souls.
This identifying with kedusha, the people on the one hand initiate
by their own free choice to reach out toward the mida of
kedusha, yet their initiative then encounters the supreme
kedusha, in the form of hilchot Shabat, cohen,
and mitsvot hatluyot ba’arets.
Yet all this is
inadequate, as long as man is still short of acceptance of authority, of
absolute surrender to the supreme kedusha and its
imperatives. This surrender to authority does not cancel man’s own
autonomy or free will. Such a dialectic produces an opposite
phenomenon. When sanctity rests upon a human being who has accepted
authority, this frees the human being from the fetters of the survival
mechanism. The original “I” is then revealed in its full immensity
of human power. Kedusha gives birth to “I”.
This
kedusha paves the path of dvaikut, which identifies with its
Creator’s quality, with the supreme kedusha which begets the
kedusha of man, who then turns into a kadosh without losing even a
hair’s breadth of his own humanness. The kadosh is human
being-God. He is a human being who does not surrender to physical
matter, yet nor does he despise it. He makes of physical matter an
element and a container of supreme sanctity that is free of physical
limitations, of temptations, and of the danger of surrender to the
survival instincts. His is the ability to control physical matter
and raise it out of the dung heaps.
The Heroism
of the Kadosh
It is difficult
to view the manifestation of kedusha, in a human being wrought of
physical matter, as an organic process of natural growth. It appears
rather to require a leap – a daring leap over the fathomless deeps of
existence. It is the jump off the cliff that turns the sa’ir
la’Azazel into a heap of bones on the mountain of God, the hero who
lands on God’s mountain, over the fathomless depths of
Azazel. Such a leap requires heroism. “Heroes of
strength, doing His will.”
This is the leap
of Rabi Shimon ben Lakish over the rushing river in order to feast his
wondering eyes on the rare beauty of Rav Yohanan. This leap taught
Rav Yohanan – who himself knew a thing or two on the subject of
kedusha – how much spiritual heroism was contained in that leap,
concealed in the personality of Resh Lakish yet revealed by the leap, for
it revealed more than a set of well-developed muscles. Such a leap
holds the promise of kedusha, and Rav Yohanan reveals its secret to
Resh Lakish: Helcha l’orieta. “Your prowess, for
Torah.”
Yet such heroism
can be controlled, by the power of free choice that the Creator has
granted man. It is an indicator of “man’s advantage over the
beast. It is the power of will, of controlling one’s material
conditions, of making wise use of one’s vital and spiritual energies, of
which heroism is an expression – for its power to create “sweet out of
fierce,” and lemonade out of a lemon. In short, for using one’s
abilities to redirect that which appears bad in the direction of
good.
There have been
criminals blessed with heroic qualities who, in their great foolishness,
used their heroism to sow destruction. There have been gedolei
Yisrael versed in the art of facial and emotional expression, who
discerned the precious quality hidden in the vulgar, and made ba’alei
teshuva of such people, who eventually became as famous for their
righteousness as they had once been infamous.
This is the
power of the ba’al teshuva, of which it is said: “In the place that
ba’alei tshuva stand, even utter tsadikim cannot stand.” For
heroism is not one of the forces of nature, rather it is to be found in
human quality, which only those “created in the image” possess. “Be
heroic as a lion” is only an external model that nature provides, of what
a human being can truly create – yesh mai’ayin. Indeed the
essence of avodat hamidot is creating yesh
mai’ayin.
On the surface
of things, but really only on the surface, one might wonder why a place of
honor was never set aside for heroism on the path of the just
leading to kedusha, in the mishna of Rabi Pinhas ben Ya’ir, to
which the Ramhal built his great monument wrapped in mystery, splendor,
and kedusha.
Perhaps because,
quite simply, if one does not have the basic ability to create good midot,
to mold and to develop the Godly element in man according to behavioral
models that are applicable to his existential conditions, then one would
be unable to step beyond and above the mechanical system of matter.
Heroism is the name of this Godly ability. Using it for the heavenly
purpose, drafting the qualities of “I” into its service.
Here it appears
that avodat hamidot has as its basis a heroism that accompanies
every stage of the process, from the beginning – the gateway of
zehirut, and then moving on to zerizut, and so on, at every
single rung of the ladder, until kedusha. Heroism is linked
to each stage, and injects vital energies into the one wrought of mere
physical matter, into his process of being born anew as a Godly
personality while he is involved in the creation of a yesh mai’ayin
that works an alchemical effect, turning the dynamics of physical matter
into spiritual power that soars to the highest peaks.
It is no longer
difficult to understand why heroism is not an act of restraint and
repression of material tendencies, of renunciation and self-flagellation,
of cutting oneself off from the sources of existential vitality.
Rather it is as the Rambam perceives it in Shmoneh Prakim, which speaks of
the koah hamitorair, the “rousing energy,” the source of vital
energies that are the key to a hero’s mental and spiritual strength,
accelerating his physical and mental powers and determining a new
direction for them, which he channels and restrains, without needing to
break them or to cut them off from their vital source: “A ladder set
firmly on the ground and its head reaching to heaven.”
“By breaking
your midot you double them,” warns the razor-sharp elder of
Kotsk.
Thus is
equilibrium created between heaven and earth, between the hero’s creative
initiative, and his acceptance of the supreme yoke and the supreme
authority, between the initiative of kedushat ha’adam, which grants
a human being supernatural powers that free him from the limitations of
time and space, and his acceptance of the authority of kedusha
represented by the cohen. When this perfect equilibrium is
reached, we find Rabi Hanina ben Dosa.
This creates the
miracle wrought by human hands: A hero that does not feel his own
heroism but only gratitude to the one who created all things. The
miracle is born out of an encounter and a merger between the hero’s
initiative of free choice and the generous response by the
hashgaha, which bestows Its own power upon its faithful earthly
ally.
Human
kedusha merges with Godly kedusha, at the center of which is
the Shabat, the gift from the treasury of the Creator of the universe,
meant to serve as a model for union between the One Who sanctifies Shabat
on high and the one who sanctifies Shabat below, since Shabat creates
spirituality out of physical matter, and gives man a sensation of
spirituality from within the material: “To take pleasure among
pleasures, swans and quail and fish,” and to experience a sensation that
is “a hint of the world to come.”
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