1. Self\Ego
   
   
2. Creativity\Self-preservation
   
   
3. Being\Doing
   
   
4. Pleasure\Duty
   
   
5. Belonging\ Freedom
   
   
6. Head/Hand/Heart
   
   
7. "Two Scriptures That Contradict One Another" The Third Scripture: Dimension of Height
   
   
8. Patriarch:"Measure Of Jugment"\Matriarch: "Measure Of Compassion
   
   
9. Inner/ Outer
   
   
10. An Axis that Connects "the Lower One's Awakening" (Hear O Israel...One) with "the Higher One's Awakening"

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I.  Introduction to Terms

Psychology - A New Jewish Approach

Is Psychology a Science?

The traditional and popular sense of psychology as a scientific discipline needs examination and clarification. A scientific framework, as such, is assumed to be fixed, containing defined components, with clear and established dynamics, excluding involvement of any factors not part of the pre-defined framework. The operative question that should be asked is: Can the key factors driving human behavior be captured in such a framework?

Attempts to reduce human behavior to scientific models are inevitably self-contradictory. Psychology as a discipline emerged with the diagnosis of bodily pain, generally referred to today as clinical pain, whose physical causes were not clear or identifiable. Those symptoms, which we refer to today as "psychosomatic", are believed to originate in some undefined area hovering between the physical and the mental/spiritual. There is little consensus or clarity here. There are those who attribute psychosomatic phenomena to neurological changes in the brain, those who insist on purely physical explanations, and others see mental/spiritual components. However, there is no school of thought which attributes purely spiritual origins to psychosomatic symptoms.

As generally viewed, mind exists as an expression in the realm of consciousness and its components, and is formed and fixed by external factors. And it is here where much confusion lies in providing mental/spiritual explanations to behavior. Analyses done examining the efficiency of various therapeutic approaches show no difference in success between somatic, spiritual, and social scientific methodologies. The respective results are more indicative of the population treated rather than in technique used. That is, the best results can be expected with children, impressionable personalities, weak dependent populations lacking confidence in their ability to solves their own life problems with a relatively undeveloped sense of free choice. Psychology patients are victims of a technological culture that is only capable of addressing "how" questions, and futilely tries to reduce values and ideals that address the "what for" questions of life to technique.

Human behavior, from the point of view of Judaism, is complex and multifaceted. It has a material component, which gives expression to the legitimate physical requirements of the meaningful life, and also has a "dimension of height", whose source is a continuum of values which originates and derives authority from the divine above and whose base sits in the realm of human morality. There is also a "dimension of depth", whose source is in the human soul, at the center of which is the spark of the divine, through which is transmitted human originality, talent, and personality.

Individual Uniqueness - That Which Distinguishes Each Individual

Free choice is the factor residing at the center of discriminating behavior, and its basis is the individual's sense of confidence in his ability to choose his way, to improve or impair, and to be an equal partner, with concomitant rights and responsibilities, in his own micro- world and in the micro- world at large. Completion of self, understood as a high level of qualitative perfection, enables the individual to deviate from the circle of his personal micro-world and influence the macro-world at large. Such self-completion may be understood as a complementary balancing between the spirit, matter, and the self.

It is here we make the distinction between the ego and the self, between material and spiritual needs, and we begin to understand the creative impulse as the challenge to bring to realization the uniqueness of each individual. Self-realization of this nature goes beyond survival as an existential objective and becomes the creative expression and crystallization of the unique and original quality hidden within each individual.

According to this approach, there exists a behavioral dynamic that integrates the natural contradictory and opposing forces of the microcosm and creates a complete and original unity.

Summary: Principles of Jewish Psychology

Psychology, as popularly understood, defines human behavior as driven by the principle of survival, or alternatively, the instinct for self preservation. Human behavior from a Jewish perspective is seen as a creative axis giving rise to expression to the unique original quality of the human being.

Values - Human behavior should be understood as the individual unique expression of goals rooted in the divine. The value-driven goal drives and is expressed through the realization of original quality.

The material and the spiritual converge and the focus and concentrate around human reality.

The value of man - Free choice is of central importance in defining the ability and value of the individual. It reflects the status of man as an equal partner in creation with his Creator, and his ability to repair and impair himself and the world at large. Through free choice we also understand the importance of conscience and how it can be used as a vehicle for constructive goals.

Man needs guidance as opposed to "care." The notion "care" implies that the individual does not have the ability to take responsibility and solve his own problems. Guidance, however, assumes that the individual is indeed capable of solving his own problems but needs objective guidance in identifying his unique qualities. The individual is not capable in alone identifying these qualities, following the talmudic principle "A prisoner cannot release himself from prison."

Clarification and identification of such qualities must come from outside. The individual, working alone, has access only to those parts of himself that are rooted in the ego and driven toward the objective of self-preservation.

Judaism rejects any approach that views human reality within a superficial and two dimensional construct of good and bad. The distinction between the self and the ego does not imply nor instruct that one should focus on one's self and do battle with one's ego. The "self" in our sense is the good inclination or drive. The "ego" is the evil inclination or drive. Rather, the ego, the evil inclination, is the vehicle through which the self is given tangibility and brought to sensory actuality. Thus the directive: "And that shalt love the Lord they G-d with all thy heart" - that is, with both your drives, good and evil.

Reward and punishment, that occupies a central role in most religions, plays a far more marginal role in Judaism. Reward and punishment, as generally understood, conceives of a distant and superior role to the Creator which stems from a primitive, two-dimensional, and inherently materialistic construct of strong versus weak. Judaism, in contrast to this, is built on the notion of reciprocity between men. The reciprocal relationship as such also exists between Man and his Creator. This understanding points to the need for the individual to look inward in search for his uniqueness and to appreciate the interaction between those aspects of it derived from the "on- high" and their basis below. Psychology in its popular and traditional sense, constructed in the famework of science, ignores internal human quality and looks only to the material outside for influencing and causative factors.

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II.  THE NEED FOR DEFINITION

A list of definitions is essential if we wish to communicate our understanding of Jewish psychology to the western reader. Not every term that is accepted by western perception is compatible in its meaning with our perception. The term self for example does not differentiate between the self that is the source of quality, and the ego. This distinction is critical to our attempt to describe human activity. The distinction between mechanical activity and qualitative activity is somewhat foreign to the western conception, whereas for us it serves as a key and a cornerstone. Another point is categorization: Dividing personalities according to type – an approach that we apply extensively in order to describe behavior based on the differentness inherent in individual human qualities. It is superfluous to point out that the western perspective, built as it is upon the quantitative and the mechanical, attempts to ignore differentness among human beings, limiting itself to a quantitative grading of the relationships between personality components. Differentness in Intelligence Quotient is purely quantitative, while a qualitative perception would attempt to define differentness in the qualities that determine behavior. It would define quality of talent and not merely level of talent – rather, the level of the character and the personality. Our qualitative perception strives to define the uniquely original as a determiner of differentness, and we grant the uniquely original a legitimate and even ideal status, whereas for the quantitative perception, being different constitutes an ethical problem, in that the quantitative perception strives for a definition of the common denominator among all human creatures. It is forced to buttress its position by calling upon liberalism, in order to justify the reality of differentness; it is called the inevitable exception. We have no problem at all with differentness, in that it is a trait of uniquely original quality and thus an ideal, first choice state.

Furthermore, we relate qualitative behavior to certain traits of character. We view these traits as the identifying feature that will aid us in defining the category of personality. We are not alarmed by the prohibition that liberalism has decreed against categorizing personality types.  [1]

Superficiality and broad generalization have never been the indicators of the scientific approach. One must not mix social/political perceptions with scientific inquiry, which strives for an objective truth that is free of fear or prejudice. We therefore maintain that one person may be more endowed than another with any one of the qualities of which the human structure is comprised, just as knowing how the relationship between the qualities is different from one individual to another will make it easier for us understand an individual's behavior and an individual's response to self and to environment. Along with each quality, we note the category derived from it: May it afford pleasure to the open and curious reader.

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III. JEWISH PERSPECTIVE 

An Explanation of the Structure of the Worlds
A Human Being's Place

The Jewish perspective deals with a human being's place in the cosmos. Human placement within the universe reflects relations of reciprocity that inhere between human beings and the cosmos. The human being is perceived as a microcosm whose presence embodies the essence not only of the entire cosmos, but of the Godly Presence Itself in all Its glory. Here we derive the exclusive importance of the human being in the universe, and from this importance is derived human responsibility for the creation, and human ability to create rather than merely to flow with creation. Hence the capacity for choice, which obligates, and which also grants reward and punishment, and above all the capacity and the privilege of being an ally to the Creator of the universe – an ally whose influence over the creation weighs - if such were possible - on a scale with the Creator's own power.

This fundamental perspective characterizes Judaism, and sets it apart from all other religious perspectives, which give man a modest place in the creation, and capabilities that are not substantively different from those of any other creature. The mystical belief systems, needless to say, decree an insulting and humiliating reduction of stature upon the human being. They view him as the victim of cosmic powers; their influence decides his fate.

In the Jewish perspective, a human being possesses powers that surpass every existing power in the created universe, without exception. Only the Creator is greater than the human being. Only to one's Creator may one feel bondage and obligation. Here we derive the obligation to view – and to relate to – existence through the Divine prism. To this end, God endowed human beings with Torah and mitsvah. "Let all your deeds be for the sake of heaven." By way of heaven, one contemplates one's existence, and rules over it, and over all of creation. If a human being were to try to relate directly to existence – that is to say, not through the Divine prism, "the mosquito preceded you" God rebukes the suffering Job. One loses one's Godly power – one's quality - the moment one presumes to throw off the yoke of obligation to one's Creator.

Or HaHaim, in his commentary on the Torah (Vayikra 22) captures the essence of the Kabalistic perspective with succinct and methodical clarity: (The Kabalistic perspective has become an established element of the Jewish worldview, including its differing factions who have adopted it with no objection.) "And I have seen fit to awaken human hearts to the great mystery alluded to in this portion: Know, that Hazal have said (Sanhedrin 93A) that the nation of b'nei Yisrael – their rank is above the rank of the angels. And they have said further that God created four worlds, one above the other. And they are listed (hinted at) in the pasuk in Yeshayahu (43:7): 'All that is called, by My name and for My glory – I have created it, I have formed it, I have even made it.' 'For My glory'; the supreme world, which is called atsilut, nobility. 'I have created it'; which is called olam habria, the world of creation. 'I have creatively formed it', yetsira, 'creative forming'. 'I have done it', asiya, doing."

Or HaHaim adds that a parallel exists between the structure of the worlds and the structure of a human being. In a human being the levels are physical/emotional life force - spirit - soul. Just as the worlds are one above the other, and a dynamic vector exists that binds and unites them according to a fixed order, from the lower world to the one above it, so a dynamic vector exists in a human being, which binds the purely physical needs to the material/emotional needs, binding these in turn to the spiritual needs, and these to the needs of the soul. (Incidentally, this dynamic vector has nothing in common with Abraham Maslow's humanistic theory. Maslow too ranks human needs from basic to higher – and even to "peak experience". According to Maslow, a higher need cancels the needs below it, whereas in the gradation of naran: nefesh, ruah, neshama – physical/emotional of life force - spirit - soul, all of the stages unite into one texture, with each component having its own well-defined, active role within the whole structure.

Human beings are found only in olam hayetsira, "the world of creative forming". (See section on creativity.) In the world of yetsira, a human being is sole ruler. Within a human being's own boundaries only, a human being is omnipotent. Human influence is decisive; the human being determines the state of affairs, and their meaning and their value. Human activity is qualitative rather than mechanical. We mean by quality the ability to create meaning, and to grant new and ever-changing validity and value to that which exists.

We should note that the world of yetsira is one's own private world, tailored to one's own size, and bearing the unique features of one's own authentic personality. Human creative activity is expressed in one's ability to use the raw materials found in olam ha'asiya, "the world of doing" which is the world of physical matter, and which includes all the components of the survival instinct that are found in existential reality.

According to this perspective, there is no significance – neither positive nor negative – to what transpires in olam ha'asiya. A human being alone determines their function for good or for evil. In relation to a human being, "the world of doing", the world of physical matter serves as a reservoir of raw materials, which lack any feature or capacity of their own. From olam habria, "the world of creation" which is the world of ideas – the world of spirituality, values, and quality – human beings draw values, ideas and qualities, which they then process, and fit to their own existential conditions according to the levels of nefesh, ruah, and neshama, physical/emotional life force, spirit, and soul. The use one makes of these qualities finds practical expression in giving meaning to the existential reality in which one is immersed and which is subject to one's control. The self belongs to the world of yetsira. Ego is subject to the world of asiya. According to the rules that characterize these values (ego, self) ego is subjugated by self when one activates one's creative will. Alternatively, self is subjugated by ego when one does not make one's presence felt in the creative world, when one is found doing (creating) nothing – merely immersed in the material level of one's existence that is found in the world of asiya. The moment a human being activates the self, a union is formed between the three worlds. In the cover diagram one can see clearly the connection of ego with its subjugation to "the world of doing", and the self, with its close attachment to olam habria, "the world of creation", of ideas and spirituality. On the other hand, we point as well to the connection that exists between ego and one's subjugation to "the world of doing". When a human being activates olam hayetsira, all the other worlds unite around it. One bestows the raw materials, as mentioned, and the other the spiritual meaning. As they merge together, an encounter takes place in the world of creativity. This is the moment of grace. When a human being neglects his duty in olam hayetsira, a rupture forms that is potentially disastrous, dividing the worlds from one another – a consequence of the absolute antagonism that exists between them. As the Or HaHaim writes: "...You must know that materialism opposes the spiritual connection more than fire opposes water." Hence the split, the terrible ripping apart that one experiences who does not fulfill his role as a creator, who does not activate his self's uniquely authentic quality. Such a rupture finds expression not only in one's body and physical/emotional life force, but in all of creation as well, in cosmic clash and natural disaster, in that the entire reason nature was created by the Creator of the worlds was to serve the human being, God's servant. When one neglects one's role, the very nature of creation's functioning is affected. Hence, the polar distance that separates the Jewish perspective from the other religions, which grant the Creator a central-exclusive role, with man filling a passive, docile, powerless role; self- nullification sustains his existence opposite the Lord. This opposition is sharpened further in comparison with the Far Eastern religions, which see in man's final and absolute merging into the cosmic vastness, the ultimate goal of his existence. Opposite these views of God and universe stands the Jew, as the leader who bears the burden of creation on his shoulder, and whose influence is felt throughout the worlds. "Everything is beneath his feet." Actualizing and consolidating the self and its authentic quality is nothing less than actualizing God's presence in the universe. 

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The self does not accept outside orders. Its activities are not dictated by the external stimulations of the environment. Rather, the self is activated by an inner dynamic born of its Godly element, which aspires to be actualized in the real existential world, through the human being who has been given the mandate to actualize it, within the framework of his role in the universe, for it was to fulfill this role that his soul came down to the universe, by force of a law that says that all talent, or any other feature of quality whose source is in God, aspires to move from potential to actual, from inner to outer.

The self possesses an energy that in principle subjugates every existing force of nature found in man and in his environment – to the extent that this energy is activated by will. The capacity for free choice, for balanced judgment, for arriving at a verdict and for making a decision, has its source in the self. Discerning truth from falsehood and good from evil, accepting personal responsibility, and all the rest of moral considerations belong to the territory of the self.

From the distinction between self and ego, a category for a leader personality is derived: A leader is distinguished by a self that is strong, original, qualitative, and powerful, that takes initiative, and that takes control of the mechanical system, as we have mentioned. This is also true of all true artists, and of all those blessed with a uniquely original quality, in their talents, and in their characters.

Ego

Ego belongs to the mechanical system that inheres in the nature of the universe. Ego is activated from without, by the law of brute force; strong versus weak, where the stronger vector activates or controls the weaker.

An additional feature of ego derives from this, which represents the system of the world of matter. It is comprised of the needs of matter, which are a survival or self-preservation mechanism.

These needs divide into three elementary components: Kina, ta'ava, vekavod. Envy – possessiveness, lust – the body's needs, and honor – social needs; a mechanical system devoid of the abilities that characterize the self. It is devoid of will, decision, determination, moral/spiritual judgment, free choice, or personal responsibility. This is a blind system that is not autonomous and that is not self-activating, just as a machine is not self-activating, but is activated by an outside force.

An interaction exists between the self system and the ego system, which follows the classic prescription for relations between Yaakov and Esav: "When 'the voice is the voice of Yaakov,' then 'the hands, [which] are the hands of Esav,' do not rule."

In principle, originally, the self was meant to activate ego, as a tool giving material realness and expression to the self. Therefore, when the self takes initiative and control, ego yields and is subject to the self.

When the self (Yaakov) is inactive, then ego (Esav) is activated by stimulations that originate from the external environment. Therefore, our distinction must necessarily catalogue every egoist as a prisoner of his environment, as a weak character, rather than as a leader with a big ego, as a western perception would view him.

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Creativity moves along a vertical axis. At its base lies the self. At its summit are gathered the values that belong to the "dimension of height" in the structure of reality. "Dimension of height" is the "third scripture" defined in section seven, which deals with the structure of the "two scriptures that contradict each other until the third scripture comes and resolves them".

It is important to emphasize the difference between the prevailing notion of creativity and what we define as creativity. In the common understanding of the term, creativity is anything that deviates from predictable action or that deviates from a structure of routine activity. Creativity in our understanding is a feeling, insight, or action that has its source in the uniquely original quality of a self that is specific to a particular private individual, and that differs from person to person.

Creativity is not a response to an external stimulus as is its opposite partner, the self-preservation mechanism. Creativity is original talent as it aspires to move from potential to actualization, to direct and mold action in accordance with its own original way, unique to itself. The ambition towards self-actualization characterizes every force that is in a state of dormant potential.

This ambition does not depend only on stimulations that come from the external environmental system, as Western psychology believes, for they may not be compatible with the original uniqueness of the talent that aspires towards expression. Originality recoils from external directives, for they are the result of external stimulations that do not suit - that are not amenable to – the inner need to express that talent unique to the self.

The dimension of height is the source of those values that provide creativity with direction and goal, and that answer the question: Is this activity justified?

To What Purpose?

Creativity does not confine itself to art, music, and other minor actions. Every human activity is accompanied by a creative indicator if that activity is adequate to express one's unique talent, and if it has a value-oriented goal that is compatible with one's authentic quality. Thus, an activity in the field of business or social organization or even political activity can join the creative aristocracy as long as it is tailored to the unique size of the one involved in it, and as long as it expresses character, talents, and the values that endow that particular activity with meaning, content, and justification. When this is the case, creativity wins the yetser tov's seal of approval.

Self-Preservation

Self-preservation is the action opposed to creativity. Its source is a technical mechanism that attaches to the structure of materialism/brute force. This structure contains a mechanism that is blind and that is devoid of qualities, values, or originality. It cannot answer the need for expression that the qualities of the self have, such as will, free choice, balanced judgment, and talent.

The need for survival is what exists at the bottom of the self- preservation system. It does not differ, in man, from the instinctual system that characterizes every animal. It belongs to the material nature of creation. It has no workings of awareness, balanced judgment, or will, but is activated, like every mechanical system, by an external vector that exerts force on it. The name of the game in every material/mechanical system is brute force.

The Torah denies self-preservation as a fundamental perspective or as an approach to understanding existence, accepting neither the disappointments and fears that derive from this approach, nor even the "positive" view found in its achievements. It sees these as temptation, the aim of which is to repress and to distance the influence of an existentialism that can be found only in the cycle of creativity.

The Torah sees creativity in the symbol of Yaakov, and self- preservation in Esav. Just as Yaakov's hand grasps Esav's heel, so did creativity and self-preservation come down to this world joined together. According to the Godly plan for the creation of man, survival is required to minister to and to obey creativity's needs and will, and to serve as the tool that gives substance to creativity, which in turn gives meaning to human existence.

"And nation from nation will grow mighty, and the greater will serve the younger." "When 'the voice is Yaakov 's voice', then 'the hands that are Esav's hands' cannot rule [Ya'akov]." We see here that a constant tension rules between these two opposites: Who will dominate whom?

When creativity rules self-preservation--the yetser hatov (the 'good-creating urge') rules the yetser hara (the 'evil-creating urge') and thus is fulfilled a cardinal rule of God's service: "'You shall love God, your Lord, with all of your hearts.' [The sages explain:] with both of your creating urges." The yetser hara, against its will, replies 'amen' to the yetser hatov, and serves it humbly.

When creative activity grows weak, the survival mechanism prevails over it, and drafts it into its own service. Thus a creative thief is possible, and a uniquely original murderer – though their ultimate purpose is civilization's destruction.

This is because survival was not created in order to ensure its own continued existence, despite its name, but rather to bestow realness and substance on and to serve as the tool of the yetser hatov, as a means only. When survival becomes the goal of existence, it becomes a vicious cycle that destroys itself and everything in its path.

Behavior based on creativity will be remarkable for its innovativeness and its courage, and for its intellectual and artistic achievements. It will preserve its own uniqueness. It will be capable of dealing with pressures and confrontations, which the war of existence saves for those who are faint-hearted and weak in character, who draw their sustenance and courage from the self- preservation mechanism: The more they drink from this false source, the weaker they grow, and the more they succumb to the environmental pressures that surround them in a vicious cycle – reminiscent of a thirsty man attempting to relieve his thirst with salt water.

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"Being" and "doing" are concepts that derive from the very sense of existence. A form of existence exists that can be defined as 'being,' and as opposed to this, or alternatively, man can live with a sense that expresses itself in activity, in "doing".

The sense of being is controversial. Some maintain that every sense of existence is attached to a practical view, to an action that expresses it. As far as they are concerned, there is no existence – and mainly no sense of existence – without activity. On the other hand it appears to us that no activity has a chance of becoming a sense of existence if it lacks a dimension of "being", an experience that penetrates into or derives from the inner space of the self.

This means that the self has forms of expression that endow its existence with substance, and these are not necessarily dependent on being attached to activities that take up space in the dynamic world of mechanical "doing".

Lovers' very experience of 'being together' is a "love is not dependent on something else", and it is sustained even when no sign of external communication passes between them, nor any practical cooperation. 'They're just happy being together,' without utterance or sound. This experience of existence is one of deep and unifying silence.

The experience of "being" is built on an intimate contact that takes place within the depths of the self; between the self's need for expression and actualization and the environmental conditions that respond to this need. Any other happening that merely passes through the environment, that is not absorbed by the senses, that does not exist in the "being" dimension, lacks all significance for that person's existence.

We must note that the need for a "being" experience becomes more vital and necessary the more the component of the self takes central place in an individual's personality. An individual with a richly original personality cannot drown it in forgetfulness among the riotous noises of "doing" that are happening in the environment. The self that is in one must receive its appropriate attention, directed toward one's qualitatively unique needs and sensitivities. Small talk is not to one's liking, nor is following the crowd one's habit. One can never finish reading a book just because it is fashionable, or join the "in" crowd, or fit the style of one's existence to external directives. One's "doing" is attached by a direct bond to the self's expression of inner being, and takes orders to action only from the headquarters of one's own specific personality.

"Doing"

"Doing" that is not bound to "being" is that activity which takes its directive from the external mechanical system: From fashion, from the pressure of the crowd, from the intrusion of the public sphere into the Holy of Holies of the private space. Such "doing" is not necessarily opposed to "being", as long as it does not substantively contradict the needs of the self. Only the "doing" that is capable of interfering with those life needs that characterize uniqueness of personality – the "doing" that does not serve as an expression for the self's sensitivity and need for creativity – such "doing" does as it pleases, makes up its own rules, and threatens one's very sense of existence.

It should be noted that in a world that seethes like a madly bubbling cauldron due to a multitude of artificial stimulations that is nearly infinite, which peep out of every corner every day anew, one who possesses a rich and authentically original personality feels that he is floundering in deep waters; there are no fish.

Whereas a meager personality – a person of paltry uniqueness – on finding himself in the mad cauldron, feels quite like a fish in water. Because of his lack of inner experiences and sources of stimulation, he is in need of stimulation from the outside. He is like that extrovert who requires deafening thunder, extracted from a grotesque system of amplifiers and drums, in order to conceal his absence of any experience with the inner happiness of existence, and his lack of ability to convey the minimal experience he has. There is no need to speak when deafening noise rules the atmosphere, and serves as a substitute for the void, emptiness, and lack of experiences that derive from the source of the self.

This explains the increase in the external/competitive element: Grades and tests serve as a substitute for study for its own sake, the indicator of creativity.

This explains the constant and desperate search for a system that will boost work activity in business and industry, instead of awareness of the need to fit "the right person to the right job" or, as we would put it, the need for a "doing" that fits and expresses the "being" – the needs of the self.

It is important to note that excessive emphasis on "doing" can choke the self, by turning the personality into a machine devoid of human sensitivity. "A break in the fence calls for a thief", calls for a cruel harshness toward human needs, and calls for the declaration of every liberal, humanistic theory, as lip service and as an empty vessel.

The human element that flowers around the inner kernel of the self is responsible for behavior that overflows with tact, and for the balance between emotion, mind, and "doing". A deficiency in the human element causes a destructive clash between mind and emotion, and is a prime cause of personality deterioration and mental illness.

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Pleasure does not draw its resources only from the self- preservation instinct, as they believe in the mechanical-materialistic west. Pleasure is the result of the self's own fulfillment, having succeeded in expressing and actualizing its own uniqueness. Such pleasure has no quarrel with the sense of duty. On the contrary, duty supports it, and celebrates its victory with it.

The self cannot move from dormant potential to actualization except along an axis of creativity, which is supported at its upper end, as mentioned, by the values of the "dimension of height". From these values, duty draws its strength. According to this introduction, pleasure would be the expression of creativity in its perfect state.

Pleasure is comprised – and embraces – the merging of all emotions, intuition, imagination, and desire. With their help, it becomes an excitingly dynamic vector, opening – for the one experiencing pleasure – the vastness of the horizon, enabling one to embrace the sensation of one's own existence.

This is a sensation that allows one control over it. One governs it according to one's own will and aspirations, out of happiness and the soaring vision of free choice made tangibly real.

Duty

Action done out of duty that belongs to the survival instinct, coerces man into compulsive behavior, enslaving and strangling every power of imagination, excitement, and joy of creation that were in him.

There does indeed exist a duty that is not related to the survival instinct, but rather draws justification for its existence from the great umbrella of values that shelters over the entire vastness of existence, and that includes both pleasure and duty in its scope.

This being so, we view duty as the fulfillment of a creative need: It is meant to support and to fortify the value of the self, and to build the foundations of positive and negative self-image.

Duty is an expression of responsibility. The feeling of duty is not caused as a result of fear of punishment, but rather from the will to experience and to explore one's capabilities.

Thus is duty tied to feeling, and to the will to bear responsibility – because responsibility is an expression of the self's ability to take control of reality, to get things moving, to determine, to decide, and to lead.

This is the most tangibly real expression of the power of the self, as opposed to ego, which is directed by the self-preservation instinct, which is made up of nothing more than existential fears.

The act of taking control requires fuel. Duty's energy is drawn from pleasure, and its components are joy and excitement, as pavers of the emotional path. Through this path flow creative imagination and intuition, and all other central components of creativity, pouring meaning and quality into the activity by which the self takes control of the existential system.

Thus pleasure and duty join together in mutual complementarity, along the self's creative route, whereas on the plane of the survival mechanism, both are left behind, mutually hostile and mutually exclusive: Duty source lies in existential fear, while pleasure is the compensation for that fear.

Balance between duty and pleasure is created through the "third scripture", which is the value-based "dimension of height" that makes possible the impossible: To enjoy duty, and to relate responsibly to pleasure.

Judaism thus rejects the compulsive moralist no less than the wanton hedonist who takes no responsibility for his actions.

Judaism does not view either side as offering a solution for a perfect human being, unless both unite together under the "dimension of height". Introducing the "dimension of height" gives perspective to duty and pleasure, enabling these two opposites to cooperate and pursue a common goal.

An ideal requires, in order to be realized, the soaring momentum of pleasure ignited by the fire of the ideal, and in order to take a stable and serious course, the element of duty, while both of these are motivated by an elemental motivating force, the power of will. [2]

This enables them to break free of the self-preservation mechanism, which merely revolves around itself.

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On the one hand, belonging is a goal, the heart's desire. Happy is one whom everybody likes. Quantitative evaluation of the measure of popularity decrees the fate of a candidate's achievements: To life or to death – and not only politically, but professionally as well, and even academically. Here we derive a criterion of the similar and accepted one as the positive one, and the dissimilar one as negative, or at least as strange.

Yet on the other hand, psychology sees the march of human development as a march along an axis that opens with dependency and concludes in independence. What guides society in its search for an appropriate punishment for the deviant, if not the removal of his freedom for a given period of time.

Individual rights parallel individual liberties, and are built around the principle of the right to freedom: Freedom of expression, freedom of movement, and the freedom to belong!

Absurdity arises out of this: An individual's willingness to renounce a considerable portion of the right to freedom, in order to choose belonging: To a spouse, to family, or to some other social, religious, or cultural framework. These are frameworks that impose strict conditions on those who seek to belong to them, the common factor in all of which is a renunciation of personal freedom for the sake of belonging to that specific, demanding framework.

This paradox confounds even the proper procedures of democracy, because liberalism, which calls civil freedom sacred, and raises it to the top of the scale of values, falls from grace the moment it gets into government and must put on garments of flesh and blood like ordinary people.

This ordinary person of flesh and blood loses his liberal patience the moment he is forced to relate to another ordinary person whose bad luck it is that he does not belong to the accepted and enlightened camp. To this fellow, the principles of liberalism and social justice do not apply at all. One may persecute him and slander him until he is torn out by the roots and eliminated from the liberal landscape of enlightened society.

Enlightenment, as is well known, is a synonym for liberal, and liberal, as is well known, is a synonym for belonging to the camp that for some reason sees itself the correct camp. Here we see a freedom that is turned into a belonging that is restrictive, harsh, and intolerant, and that ultimately makes a sham of the freedom to belong and the right to self-definition.

Our perspective sees freedom as a derivative function of the self, of the unique, the authentically original, and the different that characterize one's quality. It is not only every human being's right, it is also every human being's obligation to pursue self-definition and self-expression, on the basis of the self's unique quality. This right is canceled only and whenever one person's right obstructs another's path to personal freedom.

Human development too from the first stages of childhood to maturity can be explained as traveling along an axis from belonging to freedom: A newborn's sign is absolute belonging while in its mother's womb. It undergoes a rather cruel wrench from the umbilical cord as part of the separating liberation.

The stages of its development are characterized by a continuation of the transition from belonging to freedom, which finds expression in an increasing need for independence – until the ideal stage of belonging through freedom, through the choice of a spouse. "Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and cleave to his wife." So one turns from belonging to freedom and from freedom to belonging, and it is free choice – the value-oriented embodiment of freedom, created by introducing the "dimension of height" – that creates the new belonging: Belonging through freedom.

Protecting and developing this freedom requires a protective framework, a preserving vessel. This protective framework is the need to belong. The vital importance of this need is derived from that other basic and universally accepted need, the need for freedom.

A baby belonging to its mother, and a child to its family, and a man to his wife and to his society, is not secondary to the need for freedom but rather parallels it in its vital necessity to human existence.

If a person does not succeed in attaining the conditions necessary to his belonging (for instance, in the wake of a war or tragedy that severs his ties to close friends and family) he may forego his freedom, casting it away as a useless vessel and even, in the extreme case, despising his own life. "Why should I live life, if no human being would feel my absence?" a man demanded once of me, immersed in depression over his lack of belonging. This man was a healthy and successful person by all conventional criteria.

Belonging and freedom do not exist and are not nourished each respectively from its own separate source. The need for belonging draws from the need for freedom, and vice versa. They complement one another despite their being essentially antithetical, and this is due to the mutual nurturing and fertilizing between them: Belonging is what connects the materials, stimulations, and conditions of the environment to the self's needs for expression and creativity. Belonging is what enables a selective, differentiating attitude, unique to the authentic needs of the self. The self dictates belonging's goals, and determines its path and the conditions under which it operates. The self is what raises the issue of its unique needs (freedom).

A person has no need of a belonging framework if this framework is inadequate to provide the self with an expression for its uniqueness, with an attentive ear, with empathy, with support, and with protection of its freedom.

This existential absurdity is the secret of belonging to God: This is a belonging that flows along an axis of hashgaha pratit, Divine Providence at its top (belonging) and free choice at its base (freedom). This axis is positioned vertically toward the "dimension of height", and along its course a unique experience of existence flows, that receives direction and definition from the "dimension of height". The "dimension of height" acts as the "third scripture" that resolves two scriptures that appear to contradict each other by their very essence – belonging and freedom.

When freedom and belonging are balanced, these two elements truly come into their own: They find their fullest and most tangible expression in the framework of the family – a microcosm of its own – and their noblest and most exalted expression in the bond between man and his Creator. On the one hand: "I am dust and ashes." On the other hand: "His heart grew proud in the ways of God".

It should be pointed out that the freedom/belonging paradigm can be used to diagnose and to understand various human behaviors, as well as determining a wide range of personality categories. As a diagnostic tool, this paradigm has consistently proven sound.

We mean by this classifying according to human intellectual qualities, and according to those that find their expression in art, and even determining separate categories for male and female. As the role of the intellectual component increases, so the need to belong decreases, in favor of the need for freedom.

Objective thought aspires to free itself from bias, from sticking to the known and fixed tracks, even attempting to free itself from structures of thought, and concepts that have the tendency to get in through the back door of "self-evident" and other mixtures of thinking habits, the rotten fruit of routine and mental laziness.

The more the influence of the survival mechanism increases, the more the scales tip toward the eternal vicious cycle, the blind mechanism that pulls toward belonging, being that the survival instinct itself is a prime feature of belonging to the mechanical system of the material nature of creation.

This belonging mechanism [3] is a blank, vacuous mechanism, completely void and devoid of any hope of an ability to break free of itself. Freedom then would be a prime indicator of spirit, which rises above the limitations of belonging to space and time. 

Belonging Through Freedom--Woman

To speak of family is to speak of woman. "Honored is the king's daughter within." "His home – that is his wife." "She is the mainstay of the home."

It is woman's very nature to create belonging - attraction to her and from her, the man's attraction to her, and her attraction to him. A woman has the power and the ability to create a connection – to make another belong to her, and to belong to another. Even woman's liberation and her ability to create are crowded into the narrow framework of belonging. This explains the jealousy that characterizes woman more than man. "One woman envies the other's loin", Hazal teach us, and also "a woman recognizes [the true nature of] the guests", and also "much more insight was given to the woman". Woman is bound in belonging to the natural biological mechanism more than man. She demonstrates quicker and superior ability to adjust (to belong) to the environment, and to sudden change, and is blessed with senses and with survival/existential instincts that far surpass the man's in their efficiency.

She is the framework that creates the container that expresses and preserves all that her man has to offer (if he has anything to offer). Alternatively, she will show impatience and indifference to a man who is not compatible, in his content, with her ability to create an actualizing container.

Here we can understand woman's natural belonging to space and to time – to the extent that the Torah saw no need to obligate her to perform time-bound commandments. These were intended to ground the man, who lacks belonging, and to attach him to a tangible reality that possesses dimensions of space and time.

The principle of ideal union between belonging and freedom finds its prime human expression in the love of man and woman, toward realization of the ideal union between cosmic male and female. "For all is in heaven and in earth."

From the religious perspective, belonging brings one to awe of God, to humility and to bitul hayesh, canceling ego. Freedom brings one to love, which means initiative and choosing to belong.

"A slave is comfortable with moral abandon," meaning precisely the slave, who represents the extreme of belonging, separated from all freedom – precisely this belonging causes a reaction to the opposite extreme, to a freedom that lacks belonging – moral abandon; freedom without responsibility.

A law of the fundamental structure of creation: It is built of opposites that complement one another by virtue of (their merging through) "the third scripture". "By God's word, Heaven was made." "For in His high mightiness, He created the high vault of the heavens."

This is the "third scripture" that unites – and creates a dynamic vector out of – the tensions born of the two opposing factors. The dynamic vector creates unity and complementarity between antagonists.

When there is no such triangular structure, there is no service of God, and relating to the "dimension of height" is not feasible since a relating that creates awe but not love exposes itself to pressure from the opposite direction, and eventually succumbs to that pressure, becoming freedom's opposite reaction: "Insolence thrives," moral abandon.

Love that is a product of freedom with no container, flows into channels that stimulate it and drag it into becoming a love with no "dimension of height", which becomes a love that enslaves, erases the self, blurs the image, and then repeats the process.

A dynamic vector operates within belonging: The initiative to belong to the good versus the urge to belong to evil. Oy li miyitsri v'oy li miyotsri. "Woe to me from my creature('s urge) and woe to me from my Creator('s urge)." The freedom that enters the picture then chooses the positive belonging – belonging out of free choice:

• Belonging/hishtadlut, investing effort
• Freedom/bitahon baHashem, confidence in God.
• Choice.
• Hishtadlut and bitahon regulate one another by relating to the "dimension of height", to awe and to love.

This dynamic relationship fluctuates according to one's dependency on the "dimension of height". What was confidence, bitahon, today might be the obligation to invest effort, hishtadlut, tomorrow, and vice versa.

Of Yissachar, the pack-bearing donkey, the Zohar says (section 1, 242; 2) that he did not love his duty because of its pleasingness and goodness, but rather desired it because of its yoke and its burden (belonging). For there is no greater rest for the spirit than the bearing of burden willingly (belonging) through choice and through freedom.

Hishtadlut in the direction of the "dimension of height" saves one hishtadlut in the direction of the battle for existence; a value- oriented hishtadlut in place of an existential hishtadlut.

An artist and a child stand on opposite sides of the fence: The artist stands on his freedom – freedom of the spirit. The child is tied by his umbilical cord to his mother, to his family. Grant the child freedom and he will not know what to do with it, and he will bring it to his mother. An artist seeks to reveal the unique and the authentic. Routine is the artist's enemy; it is the very embodiment of belonging to the material frameworks. Soaring vision and imagination run away from any belonging to the present, to space and to time. Hence, the artist's tendency to reject conventional assumptions – of society, of fashion, of religion, of family, and of all the other frameworks of belonging that chain an individual to society, to the public, and to all the other conventional assumptions.

Attitude to the Law

Our attitude to the law is an embodiment of obligatory social belonging. A model for the developmental process of this belonging can be found in research conducted by Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget.

Piaget investigated children's attitude to the law through their attitude to the rules of playing marbles. At age six, the children related to the rules of the game as to an absolute and sacred value. The rules originated in God, they reasoned, or in the House of Parliament. One could never, and it was forbidden to change the rules of the game in any way, under any circumstances. At age ten, the children attributed the rules of the game to the big children in the eighth grade. Only they were allowed to change the rules of the game.

It was only at age thirteen that Piaget received an answer at the democratic level: Children of our own age invented the rules of the game, and if all agree, we can decide to change the rules any way we wish.

A citizen's attitude to the law indicates his level of maturity no less than his level of culture. Excessive recourse to the law represents the grasp of a drowning man, in a sea of reality that is too complex for his level of maturity: A belonging that does not stand in balanced relationship with one's freedom.

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Their union is choice's goal – the very heart of choice, with the help of a device called will.

Head, hand, and heart are symbols that point to three paths through which attitude and activity flow between oneself and one's universe, between oneself and one's environment. Some use, with a similar meaning, the symbols of thought, speech, and deed: Thought-head, speech-heart, and hand-deed, activity. These are tools that express the talents that are the devices that create the sense of existence.

A guiding principle: Note that each of these relates to only one dimension of the sense of existence, and is inadequate to fill or encompass it all.

'Head'

One thinks in order to fill existence's need to understand events, and to predict in order to be able to plan ahead, to organize one's existence around a goal that gives it meaning, and that answers the need to know: "For what purpose?" "Why?" ...Intelligence.

'Heart': Binat HaLev, the Heart's Insight

Heart as the source of emotions, as in emotions of love, hate, fear, and all the other emotions that make possible a personal relationship to existence. Yearning, aspiring to attain a goal with which one identifies as the object and purpose of one's existence, getting excited, devoting oneself, undergoing personal change, rejecting, withdrawing – and all the other emotions capable of halting one's sense of existence.

Mechanical-Quantitative Intelligence
Qualitative Intelligence

It is customary to view intelligence as the ability to attribute connections and causes, and to build a unified structure out of existence's components, in the present, past, and future. Intelligence today is defined quite well, and has even won numerical measurement, in the framework of I.Q. It is divided into defined sections according to the various functions of thought.

It appears to us that an intelligence assumed as such can be no more than partial. It expresses thinking's technical ability – technical-functional – which measures and evaluates dynamic relationships between the components of a given situation. We call this function by the name of 'connecting intelligence', and its role is to study the dynamic field created by the components of a defined, given situation. It includes memory (input/output), absorption and discharge of information, and its functional application.

IQ tests suffice with measuring absorption and discharge, with the functions of precision, order, and method, and speed of grasp. From here we can see that a person possessing a high Intelligence Quotient is different from a person possessing a low Intelligence Quotient in the capacity to absorb and discharge information, in precision and speed, and in the ability to apply information to a given situation. We may add that this ability helps in finding solutions to problems. Helps only, but cannot bear sole responsibility for the solution of the problem, because a person with a high Intelligence Quotient is able to think with greater efficiency and precision than the person with the lower Intelligence Quotient, but he is not able to think differently than him, or with greater originality and innovativeness – with greater efficiency but not differently. Therefore, we call Intelligence Quotient by the name of mechanical-quantitative intelligence, as different from qualitative intelligence that does not flow through the path of 'head' but rather through the path of 'heart' specifically.

Emotion – Imagination – the Heart's Insight

The heart's insight includes intuition, which is composed of an inner sense of emotional identification with the object that is being thought about, with imagination joining the party. Thus is born the intellectual experience. This is an immeasurably richer experience than mere intelligent thinking. Intellectual quality, in addition to and as different from intelligence as a device, contains also values. It binds together thinking, emotion, and personal identification, which encompass and penetrate the inner essence of the object being thought about, connect the thinking person with the object being thought about, and turn it into a new existential experience; into creativity as we define it. (See creativity/self-preservation).

Measuring Intelligence Quotient lacks the intelligent quality, the components of which are: Originality, sensitivity to subtleties, and creative imagination. These are the components of quality, and without them, the experience of intellectual innovation is not feasible.

Mechanical-quantitative talent deals only with examining what exists, with criticism, comparison, and measurement, with the methodical evaluation and arrangement of material; in short, with scientific research, but not with artistic innovation or creation.

From here we draw the conclusion that high level literary artists such as Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Lawrence, Flaubert, and others, demonstrate an ability to penetrate and comprehend the human mind that far surpassed that of Freud and other great figures in the "science" of psychology. Likewise, an artist demonstrates an intelligence that in quality far surpasses that of Aristotle, Newton, and Einstein, whose inventions are impressive only by virtue of their mechanical functionalism, and their benefit lies only in their pragmatic utility for the external functioning of existence, having no trace of a contribution to the quality of life. It would seem that even a mechanical/quantitative intelligence superior to that which served the man of science would have been necessary in order to write the sort of works that many of the literary artists wrote.

Qualitative Intelligence

As different from quantitative-mechanical intelligence that reaches maturity during adolescence (age fifteen) qualitative intelligence is only just beginning. Therefore a person whose development is arrested at this age will not attain qualitative intelligence at all, in that emotional maturity is crucial to the development of qualitative intelligence, for its purpose is to shape human quality.

Emotional maturity is given to definition and to treatment, in our opinion, just as every human ability deserves education and treatment in order that it might continue to thrive.

For emotional maturity to grow and thrive, confrontation with the very experience of existence is required – a wide range of experiences that require contending and coping with the environment and with oneself. We do not mean the one-sided coping that deals with 'head' alone, or with 'hand', with the life of action only, as is typically forced upon young people who have not yet completed their maturity. Security obligations in the form of required military service, or the labor of earning a living at too early an age, would constitute an example of 'hand' coercing 'head' and 'heart', paralyzing the wellsprings of wisdom and feeling, closing the heart's openness, and its ability to receive and to learn new lessons.

Spoiling

Spoiling is the danger from the opposite direction, for it too prevents one from personally contending with the experience of existence and confronting hardships. A spoiled person expects others (parents and friends) to solve problems that he would have been capable of solving for himself. This person finds himself on the sidelines of life, which passes by him as a spectacle in which he takes no part.

The Rich Personality

A third factor in emotional maturity is complexity and richness of personality. The more a personality is multi-faceted and rich, the more time it requires to mature.

Heart: Abode of the Talent for Humanness

Whereas qualitative intelligence requires the services of mechanical intelligence – in which quality and quantity merge with one another as content and container – the talent for humanness guards its aristocratic independence and its special quality.

This human talent, the talent for empathy, grants the ability to understand behavior, to detect its external factors and its internal causes, through the miracle of identifying with another.

For a miracle it is, since the capacity to identify with another does not derive from any combination of causes, nor from any analysis of personality components. It is intuition, deriving from an emotional empathy that has no rational explanation. It would seem correct to associate empathy with art, or even with spiritual values. Understanding another is art mixed with values.

Artistic talent does not unfold at the binary level, nor does it deal with re-hashing what is already known and given. The artist deals with what exists, but his aim is to move past superficial reality. He seeks after the causes and laws that are above and beyond the given.

An artist is capable of reaching into the depth of an image and revealing its hidden roots, and then illuminating it by a light that the image itself could not have brought forth.

An artist attains this revelation by sensitive, penetrating introspection, through personal involvement, and sometimes even through a mystical bonding with those higher roots of a humanness that belongs to the Godly core. For humanness is the uniquely original quality that characterizes a private individual, who is an entire universe unto himself, something of a microcosm of all the worlds, and not a detail, not a cog in the general machine.

Human talent – empathy – is not dependent on talents of any other category. It is a talent that is rarely occurring, and found at its best only in a small segment of society. Women have been blessed with it more than men. This talent is found usually – though not necessarily – in combination with a high level of sensitivity. Despite the fact that it belongs to its own independent source, it is bound to causative thinking-- of the sort that aids in understanding, and in reasoning, and that is far removed from linear or mathematical thinking.

For this reason, those who possess the quality of human empathy, tend to be uninterested in numbers, chess games, and technical issues. Their thinking is closer to 'the heart's insight,' that intuitive wisdom that is comprised of emotion and imagination, and removed from the colder external/objective forms of analysis. Human insight takes place in the inner spaces of the self, being related to the human quality, which is the abode of creative original thinking, and of understanding causality – traits that have their source in God.

A person who possesses the gift of human empathy is destined for human work, for dealing with people. The greater his human quality, the more he will be involved with the innermost view of human behavior, and the less he will be satisfied with involvement in the "doing" fields, such as business, sales, marketing, and even medicine or law, but rather only issues that are educational and emotional/spiritual.

An interesting detail characterizes these people: They incline away from one specifically defined profession, and are in perpetual doubt as to which profession to choose, in that their curiosity drifts from one occupation to another.

It appears to me that this multi-faceted tendency derives from their destiny for a human calling, which relates to human beings who are all different from one another. Therefore one who is occupied with them and discerns the heart of each one of them, must himself contain a broad range of tendencies that can encompass the tendencies of many people.

What is common to those people who tend to work at a wide spectrum of occupations is that they possess "human talent", and that it occupies a central place in their personality.

We must note further that "human talent" can accompany those who possess intellectual personalities, just as it can be found among deeply emotional people, and even among practical and business people, being that "human talent" dwells at the crossroads, where head, hand, and heart intersect.

It contains them, yet they do not contain it, and therefore, I would tend to place human talent – the talent for empathy – at the top of the scale of talent priorities.

The cooperative role of head, heart, and hand, and the damage incurred by an absence of one of them from the functioning system.

Whenever any one of these operates in isolation, it turns into a destructive force, which results in the following symptoms:

'Head' without 'hand' and 'heart': [4]

The absent-minded professor or the detached genius.
Skeptical responses; lack of certainty.

Thinking that is empty of anything personal, anything original. Binary, critical thinking that is limited to the ontological, the here and now, within a framework and within rules that characterize systematized, global patterns:
Only what is there.
Thinking devoid of personal involvement, lacking in concrete realness.

Accompanying sensations:
Despair, cynicism, warped judgment, distorted logic.
Excessively speculative thinking
Lack of straightforward 'common sense' comprehension.
Senility.

'Heart' without 'head' and 'hand:' [5]

Lack of permanence and consistency. Indiscriminate expression of emotions that are fleeting, that come and go, born of the external environment. The intuitive inner space lacks tangible realness, seriousness, or responsibility, in that value-oriented thinking is the result of a cooperation that unites the three.

Isolated emotionalism drags in its wake an approach to reality that is influenced by the outside stimulations of the self- preservation mechanism, in that this mechanism is composed entirely of environmental conditions.

Characteristic features: Egocentric, childish attitude lacking in scope and balanced judgment, lacking in stability and permanence, inability to withstand pressures.

This egocentric attitude is accompanied by a contradiction in the form of perpetual distress from the frustration of the human- social need, because 'heart' requires social belonging, yet egocentricity impedes the stable, responsible bonding processes, which is based on the element of reciprocity.

This contradiction creates excessive – yet fleeting – emotional involvement to the point of loss of self, undiscriminating excitement – a car without a steering wheel. Symptoms: Anger, insult, jealousy-hatred or falling madly in love, panic, attacks of temporary insanity, mental ailments, helplessness, psychosomatic symptoms such as blood pressure, chronic fatigue, breakdown.

'Hand' without 'head' and 'heart' [6]

A cruel machine. Harshness that obeys environmental directives. Pushes aside personal involvement and encourages brutal and reactionary behavior.

Mechanical behavior, "doing" without "being", absence of moral/human balanced judgment. Dependency upon experts.

Childishness, emotional retardation.

Systematized behavior that erases the original/personal, which is rejected as "over-qualified".

An objective, scientific, logical-mathematical approach dominates all areas of life.

A danger of the entire package of head/hand/heart coming undone out of a blind belief in the scientific-objective system, plus an arrogant contempt for anything to do with the language of heart and spirit. This explains the absence of creativity, values, or morality. Sexual deviations, physical lust unchecked by mind or values – what is common to all parts of the package that has come undone is an inability to cope with life.

Certainty:

Separation between the three immortalizes doubt, in that each one cancels out the other. What the 'hand' discovers, the 'head' and the 'heart' will declare void, and vice versa. The sense of certainty is the result of a merging between all three, from which grows "the heart's insight". "My heart tells me." Harmony between the three is a vital condition for peace of mind.

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The concept of Godly unity creates a dynamic vector within a dualistic, antagonistic structure. Two elements that are antithetical in their essence, yet possess the potential to complete one another, create unity in their encounter.

The condition of completeness is created by the intervention of a third side, by the intervention of the Creator of the universe, or of his representative, the human being.

Shamayim – heaven – is derived from esh – fire – and mayim – water. "By God's word, Heaven was made." "For by His rebuke He created the vault of the heavens." God "rebuked" the two opposing elements – fire and water. His rebuke was the "third scripture," the third component that was introduced into the system of two antagonistic elements. In its merit, it prevailed over the two opponents, and encouraged the potential for complementarity and compatibility that lay hidden in them.

So it is in the whole of creation, and so too in heaven, including the Godly force that rules creation, which too in its dynamic view consists of a fusion of two complementary forces: Dukra, male, and nukva, female. When the human being, who represents God in the creation, succeeds in uniting these two opposites, his sphere of influence rises to the heights, even exerting a unifying effect on the dynamics of heaven, upon dukra and nukva. (Union is reflected in the two kruvim, 'cherubs' of the mishkan: At a moment of grace, the 'cherubs' of the Temple were found embraced, as male and female during union. At a moment of wrath, they turned away from each other, their faces averted.)

Through this imagery we are to understand the constructive and destructive dynamics in the behavior of the creation: "A time for war and a time for peace," and all the other "times" that are in Kohelet, Ecclesiastes. This three-dimensional structure contains two opposing elements, while above them the role of the human being, which is to seek or to find, and to firmly place into a given situation the element of values – the "dimension of height"– in the form of an aspiration or a goal that endows the situation with meaning and direction.

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Nevertheless, it seems to me that the creative workshop where human relations are formed and consolidated, at their earliest stages – before they come forth into the light of day by being exercised through social channels – is in the pair 'patriarch' – 'matriarch.' This is their birth place, through a fusion of the basic components of the Divine, which is reflected in the foundation and in the mystery of the forming of creation.

Dukra / Nukva
Male / Female

The kruvim, "cherubs" in the Beit Hamikdash that sheltered over the aron habrit, Ark of the Covenant in the kodesh kodoshim, Holy of Holies were formed in the image of children, in which one was male and one was female. At a time of grace in heaven, they would unite.

The kodesh kodoshim in the Mikdash and the Mishkan were an earthly reflection of heavenly sanctity. "For all is in heaven and in earth. Yours, God, is greatness and might, etc." The Mikdash, as is known, constituted a place of encounter between heaven and earth, in which the most basic opposites of the creation, matter and spirit, attained completion. This encounter came about through the reflection of the heavenly structure within the earthly structure.

Earthly male and earthly female are a faithful reflection of the heavenly structure, which too relates to creation by an image composed of united male and female. Male is the actor, the influencer, and female is the acted upon, the influenced. Alternatively, giver and receiver, or contained and container.

We have before us a structure that reflects power and spirituality in two forms – influencer and influenced. In heaven, masculine power contains judgment and the power that receives, that is feminine, contains compassion.

When the universe was whole, and connected to heaven, the heavenly reflection was discernible in the form of 'the measure of judgment' and 'the measure of compassion.'

Once the Temple was destroyed, the package came undone (from a superficial perspective only). Earthly male and earthly female became mere power vectors, fixed from that time onward into a dynamic of tension between opposites, between conquering male and conquered female, "and he shall rule her," including all the conflicting tensions inherent between male and female, which reach their peak and their fiercest intensity in the human creature, for better and for worse. It is in the human creature also, that they attain reconciliation.

In the heavenly reflection, 'male' was expressed as the 'measure of judgment', as mentioned. This is the harsh measure, straightforward and direct, reflecting truth, in its naked and pure form. The "measure of judgment" is measured in absolute power, in that it draws its strength from the measure of truth and justice, which serve as both its expression and its basis.

With the great break between heaven and earth, at the destruction of the Beit Hamikdash, the "measure of judgment" (of truth) was left in heaven, while coarse and brutal force was left in all its nakedness on the face of the earth. This force did not recognize, nor was it supported by any values of truth at all.

Hazal reveal to us that "the Holy Blessed One saw that the universe could not stand with the 'measure of judgment,'" [with the harsh measure, Ramban adds,] "therefore He stood and mixed the 'measure of compassion' with the 'measure of judgment.'" From that time onward, brute force could not stand alone and continue to exist, and it was forced to accept marriage with the soft "measure of compassion".

"Patriarch" from that time on, is that which reflects coarse brute force, which finds expression in human relationships, between private individuals and in the public domain. "Patriarch" is that which exploits its greater strength to subjugate and dominate the weaker.

At the level of the heavenly reflection, power appears charged with the 'measure of judgment', a measure that expresses the values of judgment: Justice, honesty, honor, awe, and authority. Its business is the direct response between a sinner and his punishment.

When it is not mixed with the 'measure of compassion', this measure appears in a state devoid of mercy, kindness, flexibility, tolerance, and all other issues of loving, forgiving consideration that eat at the table of "the measure of compassion".

"Until the third scripture [the 'dimension of height'] comes and resolves them." It will teach them both how the measure of awe stands firmly, and bows humbly before the measure of love, and learn tolerance from it, and leniency and consideration for human limitations, and more of compassion's measures of the same kind.

As opposed to this, 'the measure of judgment' enhances love with regularity and discipline, and a scale of good and evil, and boundaries, and other similarly marketable currencies from the world of "doing".

Thus love comes out strengthened and in control, and empowered to distinguish and to discriminate between "love that is dependent on something else" and love that is not. It learns the meaning of "one who is compassionate toward the cruel will end by being cruel toward the compassionate", and by making judgment into compassion and compassion into judgment, confusing the orders of universe and society.

They come forth arm in arm, in the end, in the figure of Father – the 'measure of judgment,' that establishes boundaries and principles and goals, and Mother – imbuing Father's principles with love, concerned with fitting them to the children's capacity to absorb.

Indeed it is into the microcosm of the nuclear family that the elements of heaven come and receive their existential tangible substance. We see from this that male and female, when there is love and unity between them, bring heavenly male and female to perfect unity-which is good for heaven and good for the universe.

Similarly awe and love, and judgment and compassion assist one another and arrive at unity, and coarse materialistic brute force cannot celebrate its victory, as it has celebrated it in the historical past, marked and stained with the blood of citizens persuaded by nationalistic movements, the offspring of brute force that appears in the center arena when the people have no vision to unite them around a ideological, moral, or spiritual goal.

How very wretched then becomes the relationship between the opposites, patriarch and matriarch, when the "third scripture" does not resolve them. Wretched, for the simple reason that brute force knows no other pleasure than humiliating its weaker rival: "Because you drowned someone, they drowned you, and in the end, your drowners will be drowned," Hazal warn. What you caused to others will be caused to you. When one gets to the top of the mountain, there is no higher to go. One will come down in the end, to make room for another.

The ancient states, tribes, and races teach us this important lesson through their own stories. Rome, mistress of kingdoms, attained the pinnacle of brute force in the ancient era, only to be broken by savage tribes in the end.

No more did the world believe in the eternity of brute force. Turning its back on might, it found its total antagonist from the opposite direction – matriarchalism. Pity and love, identifying with the other, understanding (psychology!) and tolerance promised protection and stability at an apparently lower price than its brutal adversary.

Both of them, brute force and pity as well, had bloomed in the garden of survival. Brute force promised survival through the use of force and subduing the adversary, the enemy, by modes of cruelty and fear, and a hierarchical, authoritarian rule that imposed law and order, while the competing matriarch offered peace among nations, which cancelled the need for war and aggression, automatically canceling the need to be stronger.

The slogan "make love not war" is an illusion capable of seducing pacifistic souls who labor under delusions, which must eventually crash to the ground of existential and historical reality. Christianity carved the seduction of love upon its banner, stumbled on its own path, and never hesitated to make use of the swords of Crusaders and Inquisitions that sowed destruction and murder in their path to religious redemption.

The United States as of today represents the peak flowering of the matriarch, and we have the opportunity to examine and to compare what has become of this compassionate approach. The world that flows with signs of matriarchalism overflows with blood. Bloodshed and cruelty seem to have moved up a grade in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which preen themselves with the feathers of liberalism, tolerance, and love.

Also in the human microcosm, in the bosom of the family of man, in which the father represents the patriarch, the man of principles and order, and the mother – love, compassion, and tolerance, the situation has never been brighter in the matriarchal era.

The young criminal blossoms as part and parcel of primitive societies, where the beast stumbles over his own sword – yet he flourishes just as well in the matriarchal society, among the wellborn, from the best families, well-treated and pampered.

We have before us additional proof for our claim that without the "dimension of height", sheltering over the pair of opposites, hostility blooms between them, and separates them. When each does not complete its fellow, the patriarchal is left with its cruelty and the matriarch with its loose weakness, lacking any stable principles or red lines, and ending by being compelled to defend itself against the strong one, who would conquer it, take its place, and rule the family of man.

These things actually turn out to be quite illuminating at the microcosmic level of the family: In patriarchal societies, the father takes the central role, as single and solitary ruler, to whose will, all must bow. The mother takes a secondary place; she lacks all authority, being nothing more than the meek servant of father and children. We do not need to exercise our imagination excessively in order to predict the behavior of children who have been raised in the lap of cruel brutality, devoid of consideration for the rights of others. The rule is: Whoever is stronger is more admired, and his right to live is greater than the right of the weak, who is a scorned and contemptible creature.

In a matriarchal family (a contemporary family) single-parent families bloom – meaning, families where the mother plays the exclusive role. The father serves as a milking cow, whose role is to fill the duties of butler, servant, and menial laborer.

One would have expected of the matriarchal family – where the atmosphere, values, and education that prevail are imbued with love for the other – that it would produce progeny of pleasing ways, for whom love, kindness, and compassion would be their guiding light. Yet here to everyone's disappointment, the progeny comes forth an overindulged egoist who expects the measure of kindness and mercy from others, whereas he himself relates to others as though they are obligated to him. For his part, he himself feels no commitment toward others, and ends by robbing his fellow creatures, and finding himself in prison in the company of his fellow criminal from the patriarchal society. One by virtue of brute force, and the other by virtue of a compassion that lacks any understanding of the principle of balance between receiver and giver, united in service of the "dimension of height", which unites them through a commitment that is at once value-oriented, spiritual, and moral.

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Will is not related to any of the other forces that make up reality's cybernetic cycle. It is not part of any larger mechanism, nor stimulated by any outer vector. It is its own primordial force from which a human being begins to activate his behavioral mechanism in all its aspects.

Will does not exist in the other creatures, and was given directly to human beings by the Former of human beings. In the ability to activate the power of will, a human being resembles the Creator Himself in all His glory. Recognizing the basic nature of will is prerequisite to understanding free choice.

A precondition of the ability to activate will is liberation from the mechanical systems, for it sends its stimulations from the outside. Whereas will belongs to the qualitative inner essence, the mechanical system belongs to the outside, to the environment.

From this, an equation:
Will = Inner Space = Quality = Uniqueness = Self = Creativity.
Outer Space = Mechanism = Materialness = Brute Force = Ego = Self- Preservation.

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The initiative taken by human choice arouses itarut dil'aila, the Higher awakening", as a response to: "My beloved's voice is knocking [at my door.]" This response is expressed by personal attention from heaven to the individual or to the community that has taken the initiative. It is a response of hashgaha pratit, "private Providence" that is granted human beings in proportion to and to the extent of their awakening from below through choice. Thus is formed the bond between human being and Creator.

Quality differs from person to person, and it is that which determines one's different and unique character. The greater the quality, the more powerful the will. Quality's will dominates, enslaves, and occasionally even pushes aside the survival mechanism's existential needs.

Thus a sense of existence that relies on expectations of the mechanical systems' proper functioning, is substituted for a qualitative experience of Godly will, as it is expressed both in human beings and in the Torah.

In this way, the existential axis of inner-outer is canceled in favor of an axis of inner-higher, according to the following structure: "For your saving I have hoped, God. I have hoped, God, for your saving. God, for your saving I have hoped."

This is a three-staged mechanism. At the lowest stage, one still feels dependent on the existential needs of the survival mechanism.

At the second stage, one feels the awakening of yearning to connect with height.

At the third stage, one feels the need to identify with God, on one's journey towards self-actualization as a Godly presence. One no longer feels ego's sense of existence.

The three stages might be defined thus:
From outer to inner, as a first stage.
From inner to outer, as a second stage.
From inner to higher, as a third stage.

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Footnotes:

[1]  For example, two pairs of qualities that are fundamental – strong/weak and wise/foolish – are erased from psychology's "politically correct" list of personality and behavior components, not to mention values, which met the same fate.

[2]  See section 9, Power of Will, regarding this term.

[3]  The belonging decreed by the survival mechanism is devoid of the power of free choice. Compulsion and enslavement stamp their image on such behavior.

--The Peter Principle and Parkinson’s Law celebrate, and create the systematic method, which seizes control of all functional systems. Frankenstein turns on his creator. Human beings find themselves trampled by mechanical systems that swell to grotesque proportions. The rules of the game slip out of human control.

--“Politically correct” behavior prevents people from being spontaneous. Language itself loses its main function as personal expression, and turns into a communications system. Also written language loses the personal tone. (The accepted style for academic research is notorious for its barrenness and ugliness.)

--Bureaucracy instead of a personal relationship, and localized thinking undoes all good achievements even in medicine, which treats the disease, loses the patient, and drives other patients into the warm, natural arms of alternative holistic medicine.

--The primitive person is the real victim, in that he has difficulty adjusting to a complex and arbitrary system that does not consider the immediately felt reality. He becomes entangled with the law, which is the prime expression of arbitrary systemization. He talks back to the judge and is indicted for contempt of court.

--Statistics, with its scales of probability, push aside the real local components of reality. Clinging to reference sources puts quotation in place of understanding and explanation – though the Talmud asks: “Why do I need text? It is simple reasoning” – and in place of creative thinking and judgment, and suppresses originality.

--One refrains from taking responsibility, evades the need to stand behind one’s actions, and takes advantage of the cover of the system. Blame for wrong decisions is placed on the lowest-ranking recruit. Administration is never wrong.

--The most painful result is the arrest of human/emotional development at the age of childhood, the signs of which are emotional retardation, a lack of comprehensive and balanced judgment, localized responses according to immediate environmental stimulus, a dependency upon immediate and fleeting gratification, and a loss of the ability to withstand pressures.

--Lack of human/personal relatedness . Politeness devoid of content in place of profound gratitude. Human values are pushed aside.

--Compassion for animal and plant life, at the expense of the real needs of man, who is pressed into crowded building blocks and ghettoes so as not to disturb the scenery or the earth.

--Tactlessness.

--The law’s intervention in interpersonal relationships, and the damage this causes to human/spiritual values: Enslavement to the law in a compulsive and blind fashion appropriate to a six-year-old's conception of law makes a sham of the principle of mutual agreement, and becomes a legal dictatorship. The citizen loses his rights to the system, which decides his needs for him according to rules of a game that is devoid of sensitivity to individual rights and needs.

“Pious fool” is the term the Sages of the Talmud apply to the man who fears the prohibition of contact with a woman and therefore refrains from rescuing a drowning woman. “With purity of the vessels he is strict, and with bloodshed he is lax.” Purity of vessels, that is, technical laws, cause contempt for the most severe prohibition of all--bloodshed.

--Refusal to provide medicine when it is known that this refusal is life-threatening, because the patient does not have a doctor’s prescription, etc.

--Lack of the “dimension of height” abandons the opposites, “belonging and freedom” to their own destructive clash. Freedom is pulled toward abandon, and belonging is pulled toward slavery. This conflict creates a reverse reaction. “A slave is comfortable with moral abandon.” Abandon meets slavery, and gives birth to treason. Treason brings guilt, in a vicious cycle that goes round and round, tightening its grip at every turn. Freedom and belonging together form the noose around one’s neck: Strangulation and creativity.

--Similarly, a vicious cycle can appear with the duty/pleasure pair of opposites.

[4]  Linking emotion to mind: Though he was constantly reading religious philosophy books, the Talmud scholar was tormented by religious doubts. I advised him to focus on developing the emotion of personal gratitude.

[5]  Linking "doing" to feeling: For example: Hatavat halom, "improving a dream." A young girl dreams a painful dream about her father. Hatavat halom links the painful feeling created by the dream to the mind, which gives a positive interpretation to the dream – alongside a practical linking: Doing the action required for "improving a dream", fasting the "fast for a dream", actions such as repentance, prayer, and charity, and the actual going to the sage who improves the dream.

[6]  Lack of reciprocity creates a flawed morality, in that this morality serves the ego, and is not linked to the value or the objectivity of the ‘head,’ nor to the values of spirit.

‘Heart’ and ‘hand’ without ‘head’ create enslavement to and dependency upon the brute force level of reality, according to the mighty-weak law of the jungle. This level is characterized by immorality, because it lacks the “dimension of height”.

Behind every fact stands a theory, but behind every theory, it is not certain that there stands a fact..

‘Head’ and ‘heart’ without 'hand': Politics, detached ideology.

This is the reason, apparently, that women do not show interest in politics, thanks to their bond with reality, stronger in degree and in kind than the man's, Politics, like business, is a result of the package coming undone: Head and hand without heart, and sometimes head and heart without hand, or alternatively, heart and hand without head, and it all runs according to the system of external pressures, because they belong to the type of behaviors that run in the following direction: From outer to inner, and even from outer (the self-preservation system) to outer. Absurdity celebrates in either case.

According to this, the leader's personality can be seen in a new light. A leader in general, and the modern leader in particular, requires a harmonious personality, in which are merged 'head,' 'hand' and 'heart' in solid, indivisible form that makes them, most importantly, resistant to pressure.

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