Sixty years ago, film icon Marilyn
Monroe (then 29 years old) jotted down her new year’s
resolutions.[1] They
reveal how seriously she was committed to acting and how deeply she wished to
take full advantage of the opportunity to study with Lee Strasberg which had
recently come her way. She wrote in her address book:
Must make effort to do
Must have the dicipline [sic]
to do the following –
z – go to class – my own always – without fail
x – go as often as possible to observe
Strassberg’s other private classes
g – never miss actor’s
studio sessions
v – work whenever possible – on class assignments – and always keep working on the acting
exercises
u – start attending Clurman lectures – also Lee Strassberg’s
directors lectures at theater wing – enquire
about both
l – keep looking around me – only much more so – observing – but not only myself but others and
everything – take things (it) for what they (it’s)
are worth
y – must make strong effort to work on
current problems and phobias that out of my past has arisen – making much much much more more more
more more effort in my analisis [sic]. And be there always on time – no excuses for being ever late.
w – if possible – take at least one class at university
– in literature –
o – follow RCA thing through.
p – try to find someone to take dancing
from – body work (creative)
t – take care of my instrument – personally & bodily (exercise)
try to enjoy myself when I can – I’ll
be miserable enough as it is.
2015 is launched. Did you make new
year’s
resolutions? I want to recommend one more for all our lists. I’d like to
see us all open our minds about the nature and meaning of Torah. Much of the
internal turmoil and conflict in the Jewish world originates in our seemingly
eternal squabbling about what Torah “says,” “requires,” and “means.” Torah
has always been, shall we say, “an open book.” I would offer that what we need in
order to read it constructively as a community is open minds. I’m aiming
for something broader than אלו
ואלו דברי אלהים חיים הן “both these [the opinions of Bet
Hillel] and these [the opinions of Bet Shammai] are the words of the living God” (BT Eruvin 13b), which is
about halakhah (Jewish legal decisions). I’m hoping to open an umbrella so wide
that Eruvin’s famous
pronouncement will seem somewhat narrow in the scheme of things and our big, broad,
diverse, wonderful Jewish world can all stand beneath it, keep dry, and make
room for everyone. Toward that end, as we open Torah this week to Sefer
Shemot (the Book of Exodus), I offer these thoughts (which admittedly are
far too long but I trust you’ll
read as much as interests you).
Sefer Shemot (the Book
of Exodus) recounts the saga of slavery in Egypt, Redemption from bondage,
encounter with God at Mount Sinai, and construction of the Mishkan (Tabernacle)
in the Wilderness—not
to mention many laws. The Book of Exodus is contained in Torah, yet tells the
story of Israel’s
receiving the Torah at Mount Sinai… but
just what is Torah itself? And what role does it play in the world and in our
lives? The answers to those questions depends upon how you understand and
define Torah. From Torah’s
perspective—the story
it tells of itself—it
is God’s word
revealed directly to Moses at a particular time and place and containing a
particular content. From the perspective of secular scholars, it is an ancient
text cobbled together from oral traditions that circulated in ancient Israel,
that was edited and (for the most part) canonized by the time the Second Temple
was destroyed in 70 C.E.[2] and
further edited by the Masoretes[3] in the
6th through 10th centuries.
Prof. Lawrence Schiffman (New York
University) writes:
The unfolding of the history
of Judaism… takes
place against the background of the interpretation of a revealed, authoritative
body of literature. For Judaism this corpus is the text of the Hebrew Bible.
The notion of a canon provides a fixed consensus on the contents of this body
of sacred literature and, therefore, helps to give unity to the diverse
interpretations proposed by the varieties of Judaism encountered throughout
history. (From Text to Tradition: A History of Second Temple and Rabbinic
Judaism, p. 58.)
Schiffman is saying, in essence, that
Torah is a unifying text for a community that lives by its interpretations. As
the “anchor,” Torah facilitates not only a variety
of interpretations, but a diversity of forms of Judaism. Ironically, it goes
further: the Jewish interpretative tradition extends to diverse understandings
about what Torah itself is. The conversation about just what Torah “is” dates back to before the time that
the content of the text was fully fixed. Sometime before the Masoretic period,
the Rabbis wrote a midrash in which they envisioned a Primordial Torah—a
metaphysical Torah—which
God used as a blueprint to create the universe:
The
Torah declares: “I was the working tool of the Holy One,
blessed be God.” In human practice, when a mortal king builds
a palace, he does not build it from his own skill but with the skill of an
architect. The architect moreover does not build it out of his head, but
employs plans and diagrams to know how to arrange the chambers and the wicket
doors. Thus God consulted the Torah and created the world, while the Torah
declares, In the beginning God created (Gn. 1:1), בראשית/“beginning”
referring to the Torah, as in the verse, יְהוָה--קָנָנִי,
רֵאשִׁית דַּרְכּוֹ The
Lord made me as the beginning of His way (Proverbs 8:22).
(Bereishit Rabbah 1:1)
Just as a king hires an architect to
build a palace, and the architect works from a blueprint, so God opened the
Primordial Torah, gazed inside, and created the universe. This
conceptualization of Torah is very different from a defined text composed of
specific words in a particular order—however open to interpretation we
hold that text to be. The Primordial Torah is more akin to the singularity
point and the laws of physics that emerged when the universe came into
existence.
In another midrash, most likely
written between the 9th and 11th centuries, Torah has taken on the
characteristics of a specific text, but what is significant here is how
precious it is to God: as precious as a daughter is to her father. The midrash
is explaining
God
said to Israel: “I have sold you my Torah and it is as if I
were sold together with it, as it is written, [Speak unto the children of
Israel,] that they take for me an offering” (Exodus
25:2).” It can be compared to a king who had an only
daughter. Another king comes to the kingdom, marries the king’s daughter, and asks to be allowed to go home
to his kingdom with his bride. The bride’s
father says to his new son-in-law: “I have given
you the hand of my only daughter in marriage. I cannot bear to be separated
from her nor can I order you not to take her with you because she is now your
wife. Therefore, I ask you to do me this one favor: Wherever you live, please
construct for me a small room so that I can live together with the two of you
because I must be where my daughter is.” Similarly, God
says to Israel: “I have given you the Torah. I cannot bear to
be separated from it nor can I order you not to take it with you. Therefore,
wherever you live, I ask you to construct for me a home so that I can live
there, as it is written, And let them make me a sanctuary (Exodus 25:8)].”
(Shemot Rabbah 33:1)
This brings us to an even later and
fascinating understanding of Torah that was offered by Rabbi Menachem Nachum
Twerski of Chernobyl (1730-1787). The Chernobler rebbe was a hasidic teacher,
himself the student of Dov Baer, the Maggid of Mezeritch. Writing about this
week’s
parashah, Shemot, he tells us:
We
all know the secret meaning of our exile in Egypt: דעת (being
mindful of God) itself was in exile. We knew nothing of the Creator or God’s
Torah. In the generation of the Flood people said: מַה-שַּׁדַּי כִּי-נַעַבְדֶנּוּ What is God that we
should serve Him? (Job 21:15) Even though Torah hadn’t
yet been given in the generations before the Flood, it existed in this world as
the power of the Maker within the made. It had not yet been garbed in specific
worldly forms, such as it would have after being given.
From his first words, Rabbi Menachem
Nachum is telling us that he views the Exodus—the entire story—as an
allegory for a metaphysical truth: It’s about being mindful of God, and the
danger of losing that awareness. The Torah that interests him here is,
likewise, the primordial, metaphysical Torah: “the power of the Maker within the
made.” Torah is the inherent potential
within the universe to burst into existence. This Torah, like the one the
Rabbis spoke of in the midrash from Bereishit Rabbah (quoted above),
which was analogized to an architect’s blueprint, existed long before
Sinai, and indeed, as the Chernobler will go on to say, before the Flood, an
event that marks a great change in the relationship between people, God, and
Primordial Torah.
…But
at the time of the Flood, humans were so wicked that they cut both world and
Torah off from their connection to the Creator. Both world and Torah were
separated from their Root; that is why the Flood came to destroy the world.
Evil comes about when people sever
their connection with the Source of all, the Root: God (or more accurately, the
godhead, since we’re
in the world of metaphysics here). Evil is, most fundamentally, a state of mind
in which one sees oneself as separate from everything else, disconnected from
the whole of the universe and the Source of existence (God and Torah). From the
Kabbalistic viewpoint, when people become enmeshed in the physical world,
losing perspective on their lives and how they fit into the bigger scheme of
things, they descend into darkness, a place where evil is not only a possible,
but even a likely, outcome.
In the wake of the horrific and
meticulously planned and executed attack on the offices of the French satirical
magazine Charlie Hebdo—as I write this, it is being reported
that 12 have died—does
this notion resonate? At this time, the gunmen are presumed to be Islamist
terrorists who feel no connection to anyone unlike them, anyone who does not
share their convictions and worldview. No connection, no understanding, no
compassion. The result is the unleashing of evil, a flood of blood.
Rabbi Menachem Nachum goes on to say
that the result of the evil and the Flood that ensued was that Torah was cast
down into a shell. This sounds much like the divine sparks of the “Shattering
of the Vessels” in the
initial “Big Bang” of Kabbalistic cosmology[4]. We call
that shell Egypt. What a marvelous image! The Hebrew term for Egypt is Mitzrayim
which means “narrow
place” or “straits,” a constrictive, imprisoning shell.
Egypt, therefore, was a place of Exile from the very mindfulness, or awareness
of God, that we need and seek to be whole and connected to one another and to
the universe. Again, in accordance with a Kabbalist reading of the Exodus story
as allegory, the Chernobler rebbe tells us, “Israel
had to go down into Egypt, to raise up fallen Torah.” The
Exodus, then, is the release of Torah and mindfulness of God from the shell of
Egypt, from exilic separation from people.
By now you might be asking yourself:
How could the Chernobler make this claim that Torah and God were released from
Exile when Israel left Egypt, if Israel in the Chernobler’s time was
still living in galut (Exile)? How could he conceive things this way?
And that is precisely the wonder of his interpretation. He challenges our
conventional understanding and perspective, saying that Exile is not merely an
historical condition; Exile is a spiritual state of mind that is not constrained
by historical reality. Our minds are free to achieve mindfulness and rise above
the historical and physical conditions of our existence. This is a keen and
shining psychological and spiritual insight.
The next question we might ask is:
How do we free ourselves to achieve this mindfulness? The answer, not
surprisingly, is through the sefirot, which in the Chernobler’s thinking
means cultivating the middot (character attributes) of divinity: love,
awe, glory, compassion, etc. This is a beautiful tie-in with Musar (Jewish
ethics) which was not yet a full-blown movement in Twerski’s time,
but was definitely in people’s
minds and on the horizon. The Chernobler is quick to assure us that using the middot
as vehicles to attune ourselves to God and Primordial Torah does not mean
that we have to perfect each attribute:
Everyone
knows that reality of God [i.e., that God exists] (may God’s
Name be blessed) and has mindfulness/knowing in proportion to his proclivity.
Yet our qualities are veiled in exile: we have improper loves, improper
awe/fear, and thus we use these attributes in ways that violates the will of
the Creator (may God’s Name be blessed), who shaped and
apportioned these attributes only for the service of God (may God’s
name be blessed)…If every one of us remembered that
mindfulness/knowing itself was once in exile, but came forth from it, and we
became aware of God’s existence, it would be easier for us to
bring those personal qualities, as well, into goodness and away from evil. We
would then use them only in ways that accord with mindfulness/knowing of God.
We don’t have to be perfect, we don’t have to
be models of morality, we don’t have to get everything right. How
reassuring! What is more, there is a marvelous positive feedback loop here:
When we recall the Exodus (as happens in both morning and evening prayers), we
become mindful of God, who is made manifest through the middot, and in
practicing the middot, we become attuned to God.
This is a message that speaks far
beyond the boundaries of the Jewish community. It speaks to Paris and to
everywhere in our world where failures of love, awe, compassion, kindness lead
to brutality. It speaks to the Exile of primordial Torah from our midst and our
inability to see the humanity of others and one’s place in the universe.
Returning to the Jewish world:
Imagine that our focus in the Jewish community were not on the minutiae of
kashrut and ritual, and defensive claims of “authenticity,” but rather on what binds us together,
strengths us, and assures not just our survival (too often the highest communal
goal Jews aspire to) but our creativity, our flourishing, and the wisdom we
have to offer the world. I know I’m probably “preaching
to the choir” but the pain of the present situation—especially
as it is played out in the State of Israel today—is intense. With this in mind, please
give some consideration, and perhaps make a new year’s resolution,
concerning how you might contribute to the broader umbrella of Torah for the
sake of Israel now and in the future.
© Rabbi
Amy Scheinerman
[1] Marilyn Monroe, Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes,
Letters, pp. 152-3.
[2] Arguments ensued for some time concerning the content of
the larger compendium of Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible), specifically the status of
Proverbs, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, and Esther. Talmud records some of these
discussions.
[3] The Masoretes were communities of scholar-scribes who
lived primarily in Tiberias and Jerusalem in Eretz Yisrael between the 6th and
10th centuries. Recognizing the need for a uniform biblical text, the Masoretes
determined the canonical text of Hebrew Scriptures from among extent variant
versions and added a diacritical vowel notation system for pronouncing the
heretofore unpointed text. The result is the version of the bible we have
today, also known as the Masoretic Text.
[4] Here’s an excellent piece by Howard
Schwartz on the central myth of Kabbalistic cosmology. It is entitled “How the Ari Created a Myth and Transformed Judaism”—http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/how-the-ari-created-a-myth-and-transformed-judaism.
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