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Shavuot:
Torah and Rebirth
by Rabbi Haim Lifshitz
footnote:
* a reference to the Almighty
–“Ha’Makom”
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The festival of Shavuot is
concerned with the emergence of a qualitative reality from the
ground of freedom – freedom acquired via the festival of Pesach. The
experience of time works to negate this emergence. Indeed, we serve Time
rather than serving the Space.*
Why? Because time cancels our notion of being
in control of our own existence. We are carried along by time; we can
neither stop its inexorable advance nor turn it back. The ambition to
realize human potential, when it does not include control over the
dimension of time, must be considered a failure. The Torah does not intend
that the dimension of time – which escorts man through life willy nilly –
should be ignored. To the contrary, the Torah places a great deal of
emphasis on methodology for engaging the dimension of time. The range of
such methodologies is comprehensive and covers the gamut of Tora life:
from the manner of one’s relating to the practical commandments (Mitzvot)
– wherein the element of time plays a key role, to the devices described
in the Torah for integrating time into one’s personal reality – a reality
which is meant to control time, infusing it with its own quality, values
and content.
In
respect of Time, its unique constructions and its exclusive class of
influence, the Torah has allocated a complete Mitzva – the Counting of the
Omer. This Mitzva is meant to penetrate to the specific component elements
of which Time is constructed – the countable days and weeks, infuse them
with the qualitative significance of Man and thereby incorporate them into
an existential system that is meaningfully under his control. This
parallels the general principle established by the Creator, that, so long
as Man is properly engaged in generating such qualitative significance,
the elements of mechanistic force in Creation may be controlled and indeed
stand only to serve that quality. In a similar vein we have elsewhere
explained the promise of longevity found in the Gemara Berachot to one who
regularly completes the weekly parsha – “Twice the Scriptural text and
once the Targum” – as an imperative to introduce Torah content into the
dimension of time structured as weekly units. Thus does Man bestow the
qualitative value of Torah on the dimension of time, thereby incorporating
it into the Service of the Almighty; Time is not left to the imposition of
the merely physical – the mundane and the arbitrary.
Mastery of time is an essential pre-requisite for the achievement of a
goal even more significant – the commandment to renew, to be born afresh,
to be altogether unsatisfied with the mere fact of one’s biological birth
– a birth that can remain thoroughly bereft of the redemption of free
choice. The status of one’s personal reality, the standing one has
as a citizen of the universe, is not fixed. It is neither a datum of one’s
birth, nor is it necessarily acquired as a function of environmental
influence. We have been taught, “Take care with the sons of the poor, for
it is from them that Torah will emanate,” viz. the acquisition of Torah
standing is not determined by the environmental or the hereditary. To the
contrary, it is fundamentally rooted in the obligation to exercise free
choice. Torah is both the essential ingredient and the primary catalyzer
in the birthing of one’s personal reality, an ongoing birth that
constantly renews – in quality, originality and scope of achievement.
This view is rather different from common, everyday assumptions.
Conventionally, a person develops a sense of self, based on career as well
as national, ethnic and religious associations. Little, if any, attention
is given to the changing quality that is being continuously created
along the course of one’s existential path. It is this essence of
accumulated experience, precipitating as it does to the base layers of
one’s personality, which branches forth to color one’s views,
relationships and indeed one’s response to all that transpires in the
surrounding reality. A person’s views are not determined as a direct
function of stimuli in the environment. Rather, they are fundamentally
mediated by the qualitative existential essence that is created within.
This essence is the fruit of an ongoing creative process that is willfully
enacted via the exercise of choice.
The above-described quintessential humanness constitutes an
original point of departure for processing the information of one’s
environment; in its crucible the perceived facts of practical, theoretical
and spiritual reality become plastic and are uniquely imprinted by that
humanness – effectively governing their effect on one’s beliefs, behavior
and even physical health. Thus, people will process the food they ingest
with an individual qualitative response, with differing responses
resulting in benefit to one, yet harm to another. Likewise will each
individual respond to the same surgical procedure in a unique way.
More obviously, each student will absorb different meanings and benefit in
different ways from the same academic material.
The qualitative human essence we have been describing develops and is
renewed primarily through the study of Torah.
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tanslated by
Rabbi
Y. Gottlieb |