Parasha Eikev: Deuteronomy 7:12-11:26
"Shas Happens"
"Yes, I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes. You'd know what a drag it is to see you."
Jewish Renewal www.jewishrenewal.info
Jewish Spiritual Renewal http://rabbiarthursegal.blogspot.com
Jewish Spirituality
EcoJudaism
Hilton Head Island, SC, Bluffton, SC, Savannah, GA
"Beware for yourselves lest your heart be seduced and you turn astray...Then the wrath of God will blaze against you. He will restrain the heaven so there will be no rain, and the ground will not yield its produce, and you will be swiftly banished from the goodly land that God gives you." (Deut. 11:16- 17). Ouch!
A liberal movement of Judaism deleted this portion of the Shema from their prayer books. They did not believe, post-Shoah, in a God who dishes out reward and punishment. Neither do I. Yes, God is the God of all. He is One. But life is not a bowl of matzoh ball soup and if it were, some would be fluffy and float and others would sink to the bottom.
Not so long ago, Shas Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef said that the six million who died in the hands of the Nazis, may their names be blotted out, were "all the reincarnation of earlier souls, who sinned and caused others to sin and did all sorts of forbidden acts...They came back to do atonement for their sins." And God, as promised in the verses quoted above, got them all rounded up by Nazis and sent them to their deaths in the slaughterhouses of
Why does mankind suffer? Is it divine payback for our sins as the Torah teaches? The Kabbalah gives a much different answer. Mankind suffers because God suffers. It is not mankind who suffers, but God. The suffering we feel is not our suffering but God's suffering experienced through us as if it were our own. Therefore, the Kabbalah teaches, before we can liberate ourselves from suffering, we most first liberate God from His suffering.
The Zohar teaches that we know God suffers because mankind suffers. Genesis 1:27 says, "God created man in the image of Himself, in the image of God He created him." Therefore, as the Ba'al Shem Tov, the then-leftist reform founder of the now-rightist orthodox Chassidic movement said, "Man is a part of God, and the want that is in the part is in the whole, and the whole suffers the same want as the part." We can infer that God suffers because we know that mankind suffers.
"From what does God suffer?" the rabbis ask. God suffers from His exile from Himself. He suffers the separation in His Name - the "YH" divided from the "VH" - that took place when He created the world. He suffers to return to the Unity - the wholeness in Himself - that was shattered when He created the world. Therefore God suffers and man is commissioned to redeem Him from His suffering by returning Him to His former state of unity. This is what the Kabbalists say we mean when we say in the Aleinu adoration prayer: "On that day the Lord shall be One and His name One." (Psalm 22:29).
The rabbis then ask, "How can we liberate God from His suffering? How can we return Him to Himself?" The answer is that we must be watchful and alert all the time for God. As King David wrote, "at dawn I hold myself in readiness for You." (Psalm 5:3). We need to listen for God's voice: "I am listening. What is God saying?" (Psalm 85:8). Then we must speak the words that we hear God tell us and follow them. This is the Guidance that we get from meditation.
To quote the Ba'al Shem Tov again: "When I fix my thoughts on the Creator, I let my mouth speak what it will, for the words are bound by higher roots. The Holy sparks that fell from Himself when God built and destroyed worlds, man shall raise and purify back to their source: All things of this world desire with all their might to draw near man in order that the sparks of Holiness that are in them should be raised by Him back to their source. And who with good strength of his spirit is able to raise the Holy spark from stone to plant, from plant to animal, from animal to speaking being? Man leads it to freedom, and no setting free of captives is greater than this. It is as when a king's son is rescued from captivity and brought to his father. Then you will release God from His suffering and He, in turn, will 'fill your mouths with laughter and your lips with song' (Psalm 126:2)."
This is the Kabbalistic concept of Tikun Olam, repair of the world, which is a credo of some modern Jewish movements, and therefore cannot philosophically exist side-by-side with the second part of the Shema that we find in this week's parasha, in their opinion.
Please note however, that it is my experience that most who use this phrase Tikun Olam are using it incorrectly. They are using it as a synonym for either tsaddakah (charity), good deeds, or even acts of chesed (kindness). It is a much more spiritual concept because every time we bring two people together in God's love, we help peal back a husk that has been formed on one of the many sparks of light that left His face on the day of creation. If an hour later, we treat someone else with disrespect, we have just negated all the good we have done. Tikun Olam implies a way of life, a way of walking with God every moment. It is true derek eretz (literally walking the earth, but meaning living by treating every human with love and in an Eco-Judaic sense, treating the earth that we walk upon, with love as well.)
"Nowhere is this enantiodromia - this conflagration between good and evil - more clearly seen than in the constant interplay of the two opposing Sephirot (ten manifestations of God), Chesed (good) and Gevurah (evil) - which individually constitute the Right and the Left sides - light and darkness, the yin and yang of the Tree of the Ten Sephirot," writes Rabbi Yakov Ha Kohain. It is out of this balancing act that this Tree is born.
Our Tikun must not only include acts that appear to be overtly good to our fellows, but acts that literally help repair the earth, and not continue to harm it. In reality, Tikun Olam, literally repair of the world, is repairing God's face, which was contracted while He created the world and all of its inhabitants.
Humankind's continual consumption of the earth, gobbling it as if we were death row inmates at our last meal, actually will cause us, with in time, to be looking at our last meal brought from the earth. If we gobble food, especially fruit, and do not bless God for it, the Talmud calls us thieves (Talmud Bavli Tractate Beracoth 35b). More so, because in Kabbalistic terms the sephirah tree's ninth level, yesod, or foundation, also contains regenerative powers. Hence it is assigned the male element, or phallus, or lingam in Vedic terms. The female component, is the tenth level of the sephirah, the malkhu, or yoni in Vedic terms.
The Zohar, the Kabbalah's book of Radiance, teaches that while the female tree bears the fruit, the male fruit is needed for fertilization.
Hence, when we eat a fruit and do not bless God, we are not thanking God for His abundance, and are being ungrateful. This ingratitude causes the angel who would normally begin to help the process of producing another fruit, does not. Hence we have robbed from our fellows, our parents and even God. So when Jeremiah 51:44: says: "I will make him disgorge what he has swallowed, " and Job 20:15 reads:"the riches he swallows, he vomits," literally becomes true for we humans who consume without limits and not caring about the earth for our fellows, or even for ourselves for ''tomorrow.''
We truly become , as Proverbs 28:24 says a ''comrade of the Destroyer,'' in Talmudic terms having our yetzer ha ra rule us in pure selfishness and self seeking, or in Vedic terms, become ''Death, the Destroyer of worlds. '' (Quoting Vishnu in the Bhagavad Gita, chapter 11, verses 31-33).
Now, if Judaism calls us Destroyers of the World, just by us forgetting a beracha over a piece of fruit, imagine how more so we are doing negative Tikun Olam, when we waste the earth's nutrients on cattle production, or produce emissions from methane or fossil fuels, or pollute our waters, or chop down trees that bear fruit, or cut down forests that are holding nutrients in the soil so they are not washed away by hard rains.
The part of the Shema that is removed is truth. Whether one wants to believe in a stern Hebraic God that is doing the banishing from the land, and indeed removing humankind from the planet, or a Talmud Judaic God that has given us good orderly directions to live by, so that when we ignore them, we bring our own punishment on ourselves. Living a life, thinking that our actions do not matter, and have no cause or effect, is plain delusion. It frankly is life that is without God, and no life at all.
We suffer, and hence God suffers along with us.
The idea of a suffering God is not only part of Christian theology. It is part and parcel of Judaism as well. Jewish philosophy believes that God, the Father (not His "son," as we are all children of God) suffers not on a cross on earth, but in Heaven. But we humans suffer on earth and can literally loose the earth. He suffers not because we sin, but because of His separation from Himself. His former Unity has been shattered. His Holy Queen, the Sheckinah, has fallen and She yearns to be lifted up and returned to Her King. This is why in Pirkei Avot one reads so many references to the ways one can bring back the Sheckinah, i.e. studying Torah with another, discussing Torah while three or more eat together, etc.
For Tikun Olam to be done, for God to know and repair Himself, He first must be known by man. But for man to know himself, he first must know God as well. The Torah shows us how God perfects man in increments. God perfects man in order that man may perfect Him, in Zohar terms. This is what Karl Jung meant when he wrote, "God must become man precisely because He has done man a wrong through Job. He, the guardian of justice, knows that every wrong must be expiated and Wisdom knows that moral law is above even God. Because His creature has surpassed Him, God must regenerate Himself."
According to the Kabbalah, God went from being whole to fragmentary during the act of creation. His "face" was shattered during His choice to contract, zimzum, to make room for the earth and its creatures, including us. He needs man as His partner to end His suffering and do the Tikun (repair). Liberal movements in Judaism agree that humans have a responsibility to fix our globe and are not concerned that doing ritual or not doing ritual determines if good or evil things to occur. Yet in practice because Talmudic Judaic study is rarely done, and many Jews at best know just enough Hebraic Torah to become bar or bat mitzvah, their homes and even temples are built on land that had fruit trees cut down to make room for buildings, not realizing this in a negative mitzvah.
Of course this leads to the question, "Is God good?" The sages answer yes and quote Exodus 34:6: "God, God, a God of tenderness and compassion." But they further ask, "Why does He permit evil?" They answer that "evil is the throne of good," and that good comes from evil. "The indwelling Glory of God, embraces all worlds, good and evil...How can he then bear in Himself the opposites good and evil? But in truth there is no opposite, for evil is the throne of good." So if good comes from God, where does evil come from? Evil also comes from God. "Now the spirit of God left Saul and an evil spirit from God filled him." (1 Samuel 16:14). The perfection of God lies not in being merely one thing or another, but all things at all times. God is darkness and light and goodness and evil. He is One. Satan, according to traditional Jewish belief, is not an opposite of God, but part of God. He is the left-hand side of the Mind of God. He is the left side of the Tree of the Ten Sephirot. Satan is not a "he," but an adversarial thought in God's mind. Satan is God's yetzer ha ra, His evil inclination.
In the month of Av we are taught that great evil befell us on the ninth day (destructions of the Temples, etc.) but that great good came to us on the fifteenth day when no more people died in the wilderness of Sinai, peace came to the tribe of Benjamin, the northern tribes were allowed to travel south to Jerusalem again, and the martyrs of Behar (122 C.E.) were allowed to be buried.
The Kabbalah says that good things are born from evil. They forecast that the Messiah will be born on the ninth of Av. Holiness must be found in impurity, just as we as Jews have made the mundane into the sacred. There is no Torah law commanding us to say a prayer before we eat. This mitzvah is a rabbinic Talmudic law from Talmud Bavli Tractate Berachot 35A. As stated above, the rabbis posit that one who eats before he says a prayer of thanks to God, is like one who steals from God. There is the mitzvah of saying grace after meals in this week's parasha (Deut. 8:10).
God loves us, but we are taught traditionally that He can also hate us. God even tried to kill Moses! "When Moses had halted for the night, God came to meet him and tried to kill him." (Exodus 4:24). Where as in the previous parasha we are commanded to love God, in this portion we are commanded to "fear God" (Deut. 10:12) as well as love Him. King David in Psalm 111:10 writes, "The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, and they that have sound sense practice it." Or as Jung says, "Even the enlightened person remains what he is, and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and as vast as the sky."
How do we as modern Jews today reconcile these theological differences? What does it mean to us to be fearful of God? Do we walk around waiting for lightning to strike us because we drove on Shabbat? Do we curse God when bad things happen, or worse yet, accept the Shas rabbi's view that we sinned somewhere in the past and we are being justly punished?
The answer lies in this parasha. In Deuteronomy 8:11-17 we are told: "Guard yourself...lest you eat, be satisfied, build nice homes, live in them…and become haughty, and forget God... and say my own might and the strength of my hand have made me all of this wealth." Talmud Bavli Tractate Sotah 5A teaches that we are commanded not to be haughty. When we are arrogant and haughty, we are actually forgetting God. When we are arrogant, we gobble and consume. We do not think about our fellows or the generations that came before us or will come after us. We do not think or even care if we harm the earth, and certainly do not care if we harm our fellows. We become spiritually disconnected and spiritually ill.
We as spiritual Jews need to remember the many blessings we do have from God and continually thank our Creator for them. We need not do it in the traditional formalized prayer, but we do need to do it. If we forget about God by being haughty, and only call upon His name when bad things happen, then our understanding of God is shattered, as we only view Him as a selfish bandage for our suffering.
As spiritual Jews, we need to continually love God, be thankful to God, be ever mindful of God, be in awe of God, but not fear God. We must put these ideas into concrete action. We must do acts of love and peace towards our fellows, but also must continually do acts of love and peace and repair toward the earth.
The reformer, the Ba'al Shem Tov, says not to do mitzvoth because of fear of divine retribution. He says that is childlike. He says to do mitzvoth for our own spiritual growth. Talmud Tractate Berachot 39A says there is no tangible reward for doing mitzvoth other than a spiritual one. Rabbi Akiva in Talmud Tractate Beracoth 61B compares a Jew without God and Torah to a fish out of water. If we as modern Jews do not develop a healthy sense of spirituality when things are going well, it is awfully hard to do so when things are going poorly. This is the punishment of God's "blaze" and "banishment." It is of our own making. The second paragraph of the Shema needs to be reminded to us daily but in a Judaic light and not in a Hebraic one.
The parasha's name of Eikev has even caused much debate. In simple terms, it means "if," as in part of a contingency contract. Rashi translates it as "because." Onkelos translates it as "reward," and the Midrash says it means "heel."
What the Midrash is teaching is that it is not the big commandments that folks tend to forget. Almost all Jews go to synagogues on Yom Kippur and seders in homes on Passover. The rabbis are trying to teach that it is the ethical man-to-man laws that we tend to trample with our heels. Rabbi Aaron Kotler writes that in our day-to-day encounters we have many opportunities for good deeds that we trample under our feet in our pursuit of "greater" things in life. Simple kindness and manners are often overlooked. He writes that these seemingly insignificant encounters ultimately define us.
And one of the major items that we trample under our feet is the very earth we walk on!
As the songwriter Jackson Brown sang, "Our character is what we do when we think no one is looking." The Mishna asks, "what is the path that a person should cling to?" It does not answer, "halachah" (Jewish ritual law), which actually comes from the Hebrew word for "path." The rabbi's answer is, "shachein tov" (be a good neighbor!). A good neighbor would not destroy his next door neighbor's house. Yet we do, when we waste, destroy, chop down fruit trees, block rivers, put pesticides into drinking water, etc. We may be each waiving hello and saying 'shalom' to our neighbors, but each of us in our own way, is being a Destroyer to them, their future offspring, and to ourselves as well.
When we say, well, ''we can afford it,'' (i.e. we can afford the individual cost of the waste), I am reminded of R' Shimon bar Yochai's parable in Midrash Vayikra Rabba 4:5 of the fellow on the boat, drilling a hole under his seat. When the other passengers screamed for him to stop it because they will all drown, the fellow said that it was his seat, and he was just drilling under it, and not theirs. "Similarly," says Rabbi Shimon, "a person must remember that we are all riding in the same life-boat. Every good deed we do affects everyone and every sin we commit affects not only us but the entire world!"
All we as spiritual Jews can do is the best that we can do as people. As Isaiah, the author of this parasha's Haftarah says, "We are to be a light to the nations." (Is. 49:06). Our goodness and kindness to others will yield its own spiritual reward. Shas will happen. Our role as good Jews and good people is not to be haughty, but to do ahavath chesed, acts of loving kindness, to help each other when the inevitable bad things of life do occur, and to tend to our earth via Eco-Judaism. This is the essence of our Jewish way of life. This is how we can deal with the universal truth that "shas happens."
Shabbat Shalom,
Jewish Renewal www.jewishrenewal.info
Jewish Spiritual Renewal http://rabbiarthursegal.blogspot.com
Jewish Spirituality
Eco Judaism
Hilton Head Island, SC, Bluffton, SC, Savannah, GA
Jewish Renewal www.jewishrenewal.info
Jewish Spiritual Renewal http://rabbiarthursegal.blogspot.com
Jewish Spirituality
Eco Judaism
facebook.com/RabbiArthurSegalJewishSpiritualRenewal
Hilton Head Island, SC, Bluffton, SC, Savannah, GA
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