Parashat Truma

Rav Haim Lifshitz

Essays and Articles:

Go to Hebrew site

 Translated from Hebrew by S. NAthan

l'ilui nishmat Esther bat mordechai

“‘...And this is the gift:’  “By way of the truth, this is the same as: ‘And God gave wisdom to Shlomo.’  Thus it is also written: “...and this is what their father spoke to them and he blessed them.’  And it is written: ‘And this is the bracha.’  And it is written: ‘From God has this been.’  And it has already been hinted at in the midrash – from the elders I will deepen my understanding.  And anyone who understands this will deepen his understanding.”  (Ramban)

A parallel to our discussion in parashat Mishpatim, regarding “Behold I will send an angel-messenger before you,” these quotes brought by the Ramban seem together to posit reciprocity as the basis for morality.

Since there is no reciprocity in nature, we cannot speak of a natural morality.  The question is, must one take a localized pinpoint approach or an all-encompassing approach.  It is the direct view versus statistics, which addresses the dimension of chance.

Rabi Eliezer ben Azaria and the nasi of ahm Yisrael represented opposing views.  Rabi Eliezer ben Azaria was a tenth generation descendant of Ezra HaSofer, and therefore represented not only his personal localized presence.  Rather he bore the entire weight of the illustrious lineage of his forefathers.  This load that he bore protected him from the spiritual displeasure of the nasi who, too, represented the weight of illustrious lineage.

The ability to focus on one defined subject beckons as a longed-for wish in the heart of one attempting to increase his control over reality.  Improving one’s memory, one’s decision-making ability, striving toward a goal – all these join the wish to focus on one localized point of effort. 

Those who distrust focused concentration congregate on the other side, and call such exclusive involvement one-sidedness, narrow-mindedness, and ignoring the surround which in extreme cases may even become compulsive obsession – crazy in one area.

These accuse those of floating superficiality, and those accuse these of ignoring, of detaching, and of being generally irresponsible and unreliable.  Both can justify their claims along the winding maze-like paths of the labyrinth garden that is existence.  When there is no dimension of height, existence’s components crouch menacingly opposite one another, like the beasts of prey that do battle over every scrap of existence, hastening to hide each morsel in their lairs, the joy of bloodlust at having managed to bite into the flesh of their adversary surpassing the joy of victory at having discovered any bit of truth.

“Whoever says ‘I have nothing except Torah,’ has not even Torah in him.”

“Why was Jerusalem destroyed?  Because they based their words on the law of the Torah.”

“A Torah scholar in whom there is no wisdom, a carcass is better than he.”

A single truth runs like a crimson thread through these sacred words of Hazal, and its source is the opening passage of the Shma:  “And you shall love God, your Lord with all your hearts,” meaning “with both of your urges.”  “…And all your soul and all your might:” A focus that sweeps mind and emotion with it, and body and soul, and man and environment.  “He and all that is his.” 

This is an all-encompassing concentrated focus, and it is the formula that guides God’s servant along the paths of the labyrinth garden.  This commandment is an instruction that comes equipped with real-world support.  The Torah does not suffice with imperatives.  The Torah does not command unless it first equips God’s servant with the means to attain the goal.

The dimension of height – of Godliness – offers means that are directly connected to the other two dimensions of existence, which are man and universe.  It is of these means and of this connection that our parasha speaks.

“And this is the gift.”  Let it not occur to the interpreter that “and this” intends to indicate an exclusive focus on a narrow formal track for actualizing sanctity, and that this track is being substituted for the former cyclical encompassing form of relating in which man and universe perfect the cycle of Godly presence.  Rather, the Torah is here deepening, broadening, and raising the presence of sanctity through a definition of boundaries.

This is the Ramban’s meaning, in his code of riddles: “This is the same as: ‘And God gave wisdom to Shlomo.”  Should the fear rise in your heart that perhaps you are not worthy of comprehending truth – for after all you are not equipped with a spiritual-intellectual capacity comparable to the Creator’s, who is the Owner of absolute truth, and therefore you are not permitted to point to your own opinion as to the truth, you cannot say of your understanding of the truth, kazeh re’ai v’kadesh, “like this see it, and sanctify it” – the Ramban offers you this hidush: God gave permission to Shlomo to understand all the creatures and all the created beings, through the powers of his human mind, by virtue of the covenant that was established between God’s servant and his Creator.

Shlomo died, but his Torah lives on forever, and it is given and accessible to anyone who seeks God through toiling in Torah.  Lest you say – it is not in the power of flesh and blood to understand God’s Torah from his own heart, “God showed Moshe everything that every talmid vatik, senior Torah scholar, would ever in future innovate [in Torah wisdom],” and “not in heaven is it.”

We have before us a localized point of truth that is given to broad and encompassing access by every talmid vatik.  Similarly: “And this is what their father spoke to them, and he blessed them.”  Yaakov’s bracha to his children:  Yaakov, man of truth, who was privileged to bring absolute truth down from heaven to human beings, bequeathed this truth to his children.  “And he blessed them,” with the ability to attain this truth. 

By attributing the subject of acquiring truth to the pasuk “and this is the gift,” the Ramban is broadening the issue, and taking it to its profoundest depths.  “Knesset Yisrael, the gathering of Israel, which itself is a gift, as is said: ‘Sacred is Israel to God, the first of His crop.’”  In what way can Kneset Yisrael express its being a gift, if not by the power of the covenant which obligates its uniting with God, through dvaikut, through the joint bearing of responsibility, together with the other side of the covenant.  If anyone would like to know, adds the Ramban, in what way the other side of the unifying covenant expresses devotion and participation, the following midrash from Shir HaShirim will answer their question:

“And God said further to them: ‘I sold you My Torah, and kivyachol  I was sold with it, as is said: ‘And they will take Me a gift.”  The gift is for Me, and I am with it, as in: “My beloved is for me, and I am for him.”

The meaning of the hidush before us is deeper and wider than the ocean.  It indicates “would that they had left Me, and kept My Torah.”  The utterly vast and unfathomably deep wisdom of the Creator is to be found in the Torah that was given to Israel.  “It is lying in the open market,” there for the asking.  “Whoever wishes to take of it, let him come and take.”

The madrega that contains the Godly realm is within hand’s reach of every Jew.  “Like everything that I show you, because I am the One showing you’, and it said ‘showed you – otcha’, hinting to the word ani, I.”  These words seem to indicate the same distinction that we teach in our own bet midrash.

Ani, ‘I’ is the Godly abode in man.   From it, and around it, Godly-human qualities come.  It must be distinguished from ego, the material vessel intended to serve and to grant tangible substance to ‘I’’s qualities.  To the extent that the ani rules, from the top down, it acquires the privilege of sanctifying matter, and of granting Godly meaning to the surround, which encompasses within itself a Godly kernel.

With the Mishkan, a small parceled lot of God descended to the world, which radiated sacred purity onto the surround, though the surround is steeped in coarse, restrictive materialism.  It did not descend as an unidentified object.  Rather, it was brought down by the human gardener, who tends his earth with love and dvaikut, in the sense of “He shall atone His earth, His people.”

Yeshayahu complains: “A vineyard did my friend have, in Kerem Ben Shamen, and he urgently tended it and he removed its stones and he planted it…and he hoped to make grapes but he made rotten fruits…because the vineyard of the God of Hosts is the House of Israel, and a Jewish man is the planting of His delight.” (5: 1-8)

The gardener bears the responsibility for the Garden of Eden that God has planted in the world, but unlike the original Garden of Eden, man is this time granted the privilege and the obligation of participating as a partner who shares equal rights, who is active and responsible. 

Toward this end, man must cultivate the connection that encompasses past, present, and future, to the fullest extent of his capacity – “as far as his hand can reach.”  It is insufficient for him to relate to a localized point, in relating to himself, surely, for that causes him to have contempt for his own ability.  Rather he must see himself as a link in the chain of the generations, and bearing their weight.  He must see his own intention as bearing the seal of the Creator.  Therefore “a stain on the garment of a Torah scholar obligates him to the death penalty.”

We see then that life’s wisdom is not a compromise between what is and what should be.  It is not a de facto perception.  Rather, it is truth from heaven prevailing in full glory upon a specific human situation.  The situation itself is ephemeral, but not the “justice from heaven” that is reflected through the halacha and through the wise who labor to apply it.

This Godly-human track is hinted at in “behold I will send an angel-messenger before you,” as we discussed in Mishpatim.  By the power of the reciprocity that rises and blossoms from the little parceled lot of God that is all miracle, which is opposed in principle to the law of mechanical brute force that inheres in the world of asiya. 

This means that it is sufficient for man that he strive for justice.  It is this that is required of man.  Man is not required to attain that justice that reflects absolute truth, but rather to strive devotedly to apply it to the existential situation that has been created by force of circumstance.  Enough for him with this. 

This ambition – the moment that it sees the light of day, the moment that it enters the world through human birth pangs, by the one who has accepted the yisurim, the torments of his existence with love, by one who aspires to imprint a Godly seal upon his distress – transforms behavior purged by the yisurim of avodat hamidot, into a tangible actualization of justice that presents Godly truth.

The yearning for truth, steeped in tormented devotion, transforms an ordinary act into an act that bears the seal of Divine justice, and there is no need to put this justice to the test of absolute truth.

There is thus no need for laws of probability and statistical devices, which attempt to exchange the yardstick of direct truth for an approach that bypasses the truth.  The t’hushat halev of a pure heart, the pure heart’s sense – attained by one who toils in Torah and in his midot, which have been purged in the furnace of Torah through a devotion that is reserved for the anav – is able to hit exactly, to zero in on absolute truth.  This is because when his heart’s sense landed on earth through his initiative of free choice, a daughter of heaven appeared, and stretched forth the compassionate hand of hashgaha to lead him into the innermost chambers of the palace.

“My heart tells me,” a phrase that the mouths of the sublimely sacred of all the generations were accustomed to uttering, grants legitimacy and the endorsement of the truth covenant to the heart’s natural wisdom, to intuition, and to common sense mainly, without which there is no truth and no justice and even no wisdom.

Thus what is common to the truth is common to the heart’s morality.  Neither of them is to be found in the “nature” of creation.  Both of these grow in God’s parceled lot, which grows in the ground of the covenant, and both of these are subject to the laws of reciprocity.  A coarse heart cannot be an abode of truth, just as the survival system that inheres in man’s animal/natural side cannot be an abode of morality.

Had the Torah not been given, man could have learned ways behavior from the animals, but these would not have taught him the moral judgment that is needed when man reaches a crossroads and is required to decide upon the direction his path will take.   These would not avail him then – neither accumulated life experiences nor road signs.  Take no counsel from the ignorant one, Hazal warn.  “For his own life, he cares not.  For your life, would he care?”

When the tendency toward a localized, pinpointed focus opposes an approach that is broad in scope, it is occasionally, and tragically expressed when one sins.  “No man sins unless a spirit of idiocy enters him.”  Or, what’s an intelligent person like you doing with idiocy like this?  Meaning, is it not an act of madness, this act of the sinner who risks losing everything he toiled for all his life for one moment?  Would he have the wisdom to disconnect himself from the immediate localized pinpoint of the fleeting present-moment attraction, would he only view the matter from a perspective that encompassed the whole of his situation, and that would include the fraught-with-disaster results that he risks bringing on as the result of a very temporary insanity of attraction, then coveted equilibrium would return, to cool the heat of fleeting enticement.

The moment equilibrium returns, he will weigh anew “the reward of sin against its loss,” and he will run for his life as though fleeing fire. 

The intention of focus – as opposed to the intention of the encompassing approach, which is to include in its scope the entire matrix of all the factors given in the environment – is to locate the point of the present moment, and to return it to its proper place as the connecting link in the chain that bridges past and future.  In the narrow space of the present moment no benefit is to be had, being saturated with the stimulations and influences of the environment besides the component of enticement.

The localized present contains public opinion, fashion, fear of appearing out of place or cowardly, in addition to the stimulation itself which promises immediate gratification – the source of which is a reality that has been traded for a wish that is being given preference to the reality that is being denied.

It is “a spirit of idiocy” because wishes that are perceived as reality characterize childish, egocentric behavior that is focused upon itself while ignoring the environment.  One who possesses a childish personality lives in a narrow present that is detached from past and future, and he is wholly an “eved nirtsa” to immediate environmental stimulation.

A child does not learn the lessons of painful results so easily.  Pinuk, overindulgence “blinds the eyes of the wise” and causes the m’funak to blame others for what happens to him, just as the spoiled child is accustomed to expecting others to take care of problems he has the power to confront.  A m’funak does not understand or deserve midat harahamim, and must eventually learn his lessons the hard way, through midat hadin.

 Go To Top