Parshat Hukat

Essays and Articles:

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The Innermost Point:

Beyond Limits - Beyond Time and Space

 Translated from hebrew

Essay: Week of Parashat Hukat.


“They shall take a perfect red cow that has no flaw in it and that has had no yoke laid on it ...and slaughter it...and burn it – its hide and its flesh and its blood with its wastes...and a pure man shall gather the ash of the cow and place it outside the camp in a pure place... And whoever ...becomes impure, shall cleanse himself in this [water mixed with red-cow ash].”  (Parashat Hukat 19:1-14)

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“And there was no water for the crowd to drink, and they gathered on Moshe and Aharon, and they quarreled with Moshe, saying: ‘If only we had perished when our brothers perished...why did you bring us to this desert? To die there – we and our cattle? Why did you raise us out of Egypt to bring us to this evil place...?’ And God said to Moshe... ‘Take the rod and gather the crowd, you and your brother, Aharon, and speak to the rock before their eyes, and it will give its waters, and you will take water out of the rock for them and give the crowd and their cattle to drink.’ And Moshe took the rod from before God as He had commanded him. And Moshe and Aharon gathered all the gathering toward the face of the rock, and said to them: ‘Hear, then, rebels. From this rock, can we take water out for you?’ And Moshe raised his hand and hit the rock twice, and abundant water came out and the crowd and their cattle drank. And God said to Moshe and Aharon: ‘Because you did not believe in Me, to sanctify me in the eyes of the children of Israel, therefore you will not bring this gathering to the land that I have given them.’ These are the mei meriva, the waters of quarrel, over which the children of Israel quarreled with God, and by which He was sanctified.” (Parashat Hukat 20:1-14)


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Human existence can be defined as traveling along two opposite tracks, because a human being contains two opposite tendencies.  One tendency follows his survival instincts, and this track moves outward.  The other tendency follows creativity, and this track moves inward, seeking the never ending treasures to be mined from man's Godly center, quarrying them out, struggling to transform them from a state of dormant potential - into a state of  realized, actualized, tangible Godliness. The outer-directed tendency travels along time's track, while the inner-directed tendency eludes time, and faces toward God's creation, traveling along its endless vistas.

"The light of my eyes has gone out, in every sense of the word", mourned the elderly man who had lost his eyesight. "Perhaps you have already seen enough," replied the rabbi.

The man was a highly creative and exceptionally talented individual, but he had spent his whole life collecting data. The curiosity that characterizes talented people had increased his appetite for information, and turned it into a gluttonous craving for any and every scrap of knowledge. His was a heedless and undiscriminating obsession.  He established no categories and set no boundaries, but swallowed everything whole. The time had come for him to turn away from his futile, externalized pursuits, and to look inward.

(See how critical it is to set boundaries, and to discriminate, and to respect halachic categories: The need to make fine distinctions between forbidden and permissible, between pure and impure, is a basic premise.)

Looking inward, one discovers the innermost point.  Often referred to by the poetic and mistaken phrase, "a small piece of God," it is in fact not small at all. Experienced even once, it is unforgettable: "...At a moment of serene quiet, [free] from voracious hungers," (Chazon Ish, Emuna uBitachon) at a moment of liberation from the cobbles and chains of the survival instinct, a man turns away from all that, and towards the inner center that embraces the Godly kernel, which contains all that is original and unique in him. It is unforgettable. Even the lightest brush against this point of inner quality creates a sensation that is such as to make him recoil from all the non-quality, soul-suffocating contingencies of existential reality.

It does not require any effort, nor will-power nor greatness of spirit. No courageous battle need be waged against the forces of the klipot (the "shells" - the distracting exterior wrappings of reality). They just melt away, in the heat generated by the creative fire - that is ignited when contact occurs between the spark of soul and the conscious awareness of the rational mind.

The explosion that follows is the result of a contradiction that is built into existence itself. The contradiction is between the survival system (that toils along the tracks of time and space) and creativity - that hovers like the spirit of God over the face of the water. "Water" is the power that would restrict and overwhelm man. It is the power of the physical flow of time and space that would drag a man down and under, that would not allow him self-control, that would not allow him to explore the deeper meanings of existence, that would deny him creativity's endless wealth, which has been waiting for him since the moment of creation. Man's capacity for utterly missing his opportunity is the effect of het ha'egel, "the sin of the Golden Calf".  Its destructive repercussions were far-reaching, almost ruining the healing and restorative effects of matan Torah, the gift of Torah at Sinai.

If water can defile, it can also purify, as the water of parah adumah, the red cow, demonstrates. But it can only purify when man dominates it, and bends it to his will. It can only purify when man penetrates the mystery of purity.

The mystery of purity is the mystery of quality that does not use force. It is the mystery of the absurd: It is about quantity turning into quality. It is about a red cow's ashes - the ultimate symbol of everything material - being turned into an indicator of purity, purifying - by the sheer power of quality - every body of water with which it comes into contact.

Mei Meriva - Waters of Quarrel: "Through water, were Moshe and Aharon smitten."
Water holds the secret of endless flow, of purity. It purifies a man from the limitations caused him by physical matter. It washes over him, cleansing him of his incautious contact with matter.

However, it can be turned into “waters of quarrel”: It can be mistakenly perceived as a power in and of itself, as a quality in and of itself. Then it becomes a power that enslaves, and a deity of idol worship.

This accounts for the extreme response, and for what seems to be the excessively severe punishment that is immediately meted out to Moshe and Aharon - a lesson to all generations, to all great spiritual leaders who have not refrained from hitting the rock, who have not resisted the temptation to use force in order to dominate water. The message is broadcast to future generations of all time: Force against force does not beget ruchniut. It does not liberate the spirit from the confining tracks of time and space.

Only speech can do that, for speech is the touch of spirit against matter. Speech – persuasiveness – is an indicator that the spirit reigns supreme over matter. (The spirit of God within man, not the Platonic idea of spirit.)

For man is a Godly presence. He has no need to detach from his own inner reality, in order to attain power. He is not required to distance himself from the reality-based-on-spiritual-quality that he has created in his own private olam hayetsira, in his personal creative world. On the contrary, the reverse is true. The more he strengthens his inward involvement, and the deeper he penetrates to the core of his own infinite quality, the more powerful he becomes.

Man's only hope of breaking out of the vicious cycle of physical matter lies in increasing his qualitative, Godly center. Only through inner quality is man liberated from his impossible situation, his miserable existence as an insignificant particle in a huge quantity of uncontrollable mass.

Let man not be seduced into trying to kick aside the material wrappings, as the Platonic religions (such as Christianity) urge him to do. Let him not erase his own uniqueness to disappear into the great universal vastness, as the Far Eastern religions advise. “Not in heaven is it...and not across the sea...but rather it is very near to you, in your own mouth and in your own heart”. Truth is very close at hand – inside you. If you seek it far and wide, you only distance yourself from it.
 

Consider Ibn Ezra’s cryptic comment: “The interpretation that is correct in my eyes I can only reveal in clues: Know, that when the part will know the whole, it will cling to the whole, and it will bring forth within the whole new signs and wonders...but here the part is [still] a part when he hit the rock, and water did not come out until he hit it a second time, and so they did not sanctify God’s name.”
 

The secret of existence is transforming the part into the whole. It is freeing oneself once and for all from the mechanical survival systems, to become instead – Him: To become whole by virtue of contact with the Godly kernel that is the root of one's own soul.
 

When they used a rod, and hit the rock, they were making use of force, which divides the whole, and truncates it into segments, and separates the parts from the whole. Had they spoken to the rock, it would have merged the parts with the whole, supporting thus the wholeness of the entire universe.

To use Ibn Ezra’s words: When the part (a human being) knows the whole (God), and is able to recognize Godly truth, the part becomes aware that God’s presence is to be found in all things, and that there is no space free of Him. This awareness is what gives the part its place within the whole. It grants wholeness (and power) to the isolated part: “When the part will know the whole, it will cling to the whole, and it will bring forth within the whole new signs and wonders”.


The "hologram", a new conception of physical reality suggested by British physicist David Boehm, was a response to difficulties that arose with the old assumptions about time and space.  These difficulties resulted from Allen Aspect's (University of Paris, 1982) discovery that sub-atomic particles such as electrons can transmit information among themselves simultaneously, regardless of their distance from one another.  In some incredible way, each particle "knew" what the other was doing, and affected - and its behavior was affected by - the behavior of the other.

This renders null and void Einstein's principle,  that information cannot travel faster than the speed of light because that would break the time barrier.  Indeed, Boehm claims the simultaneous transfer of information discovered by Aspect does not happen through any process known to physics: It does not travel the track of space and time. 

Instead, the information has already pre-existed in every particle. This tells us that existence does not occur in a space/time system within objects, but rather in the qualitative essence of every particle. 

It is popular to say that information is stored in the brain.  Yet this is not correct.  There is no collected accumulation of mass located in a certain place, in the brain.  Rather, knowledge exists within every particle of the human spirit.  No information, or comprehension, or illuminating insight, or any awareness that arises out of the human spirit, can be determined at a particular place.

The human spirit cannot be imprisoned within the limited and reduced framework of space and time.   The very concept of reality as a territory defined by space and time makes it much more difficult to conceive of the phenomenon of the unlimited, such as the human spirit.

How are we to explain the "hologram" principle?  How are we to explain that the whole is reflected in every one of its particles?  These critical questions create a vacuum.  The comprehension gap begins to yawn.

Ibn Ezra comes to save us, divulging that the secret lies in the particle's ability to connect with and belong to the whole, the ability to recognize and to consciously agree to connect and attach to the whole.  "When the part will know the whole, it will cling to the whole."

Identifying with the whole to the extent of "clinging" to it, frees the part from its part-like truncated condition, and imparts the quality of the whole to it.

We are not talking about a Platonic ideal, where the higher spiritual reality is given primacy, and the lower physical one is considered marginal and insignificant.  The Torah sees Godly presence in the realness of physical substance that has come into qualitative contact with a human being. 

This Godly presence is not conditional on man distancing himself from physical reality, to nullify his own tangible experience,  but the exact opposite:  To delve ever deeper into the tangible experience, to explore it, and to discover the perfection that is latent in it, that awaits only his  creative spirit, to draw it forth from a potential to an actual state.

No subjective perception of objective reality here, as the hologramic approach is sometimes considered.  It is an objective perception of truth - objective because it reflects reality's deeper dimensions, and not just its superficial two-dimensional presentations, with height and depth removed.

In 'mei meriva', they had been meant to delve more deeply into the reality that outwardly appeared to be a rock.  Instead they said: "From this rock, can we take out water for you?"

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A detailed procedure accompanies Aharon's death, in which he sheds his priestly garments, and they are donned in turn by Elazar, his son.  We see here too that great care must be taken when attending to externals - in this case, getting free of the externals in order to attain eternal life.

A copper snake?  It's the dimension of height.

"Can a snake cause death?  Can a snake give life?  But rather, when Israel would look upward, and subject their hearts to their Father in heaven, they would be healed."  (Rashi) 

Here before us it is expressed clearly: The need to break free of the external, two-dimensional, flat plane environment, the need to create a connection - a "clinging" - from the dimension of depth to the dimension of height, though these dimensions are not visible on the outer surfaces of the two-dimensional plane.  Exposing the vertical track that runs between depth and height creates a connection between the part and the whole, and turns the part - whole.

"Therefore let it be said in the book of the battles of God..."  "Then did Israel sing this poem-song..."  Discovering one's innermost point, one's qualitative center, and connecting it with the dimension of height, transforms reality into poetry.  Here follow psukim that are simple, pure and sublime poetry, though ostensibly they are a dry accounting of names of places, of journeys, and of the events that befell the people of Israel.

To teach us that by uncovering that central axis, that runs vertically from depth to height, we uncover spiritual presence in apparently superficial reality.

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