Elevated Vision: The Netivot Shalom on Elul

I’m going to share some thoughts from one of my favorite commentators, the Netivot Shalom.  Before I start, here’s a brief introduction to him.  He was the Rebbe of the Slonim Chassidim.  He was born in 1911 in modern-day Belarus, and was a Rosh Yeshiva by 1941 in Israel.  He died in 2000.  For anyone interested in Chassidic thought, he is one of the most accessible writers out there, with a beautiful focus on the spiritual meaning of the Torah, and its application to our personal journey.

We are in the middle of a forty-day journey starting with Rosh Hodesh Elul and ending at Yom Kippur.  While the holidays keep going… and going… and going… for most of us the mood changes suddenly after Yom Kippur.  The themes up to then are reflection, awe, and vulnerability.  Afterwards the focus is on physicality in the building of the sukkah, and joy, perhaps enhanced by some l’chaims in the sukkah.  The Netivot Shalom connects the length of forty days to the Noam Elimelich’s idea that it takes forty days to create lasting change in ourselves. 

What do we have to change?  To answer this question, the Netivot Shalom brings a parable from Duties of the Heart, a work by the Spanish Jewish philosopher Ibn Pakuda.  Suppose a person was born in a king’s prison, and never left.  All of the person’s needs, food and water, were provided in the prison.  After many days, the prisoner begins to praise the king, for all of the prison and everything within it belongs to the king.  The king’s servants, hearing this, mock the prisoner, for its silly to praise a king who has dominion over so many wonderful things for a cell and some basic provisions.  Our role in the parable, of course, is that of the prisoner.  We are often guilty of having a narrowness of vision.  Even when we put aside our own concerns and praise G’d, we often praise him for minor things, things that are almost beneath the dignity of the creator of the Universe. 

The Netivot Shalom connects this idea to the verse from Isaiah Chapter 40:  ‘Lift up your eyes and look to the heavens: Who created all these?’  He re-reads the verse as speaking, not of literally looking upwards, but rather elevating our vision.  We should look at creation in an inspired, broad manner.  Rambam famously says that, through science and the wonders of nature we can come to an appreciation of G-d’s greatness.  The Slominer takes a similar but distinct path, suggesting we meditate on G’ds infiniteness and our own infinite smallness relative to G-d. 

Psalm 24, which most congregations say often during the period between Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, states: “Who will ascend G’d’s mountain and arise to his holy place?  One of clean hands and a pure heart.”  Clean hands means that we have good deeds, and a pure heart is holy thoughts.  We can get there through another verse in that Psalm, “Raise up your heads, gates!  Arise, infinite doorways!  Let the King of Glory enter!”  Our eyes and heart are the gates and entrances to ourselves.  When we raise up these parts of ourselves, and focus on the infinite greatness, the Netivot Shalom says we can more easily shake away those things that cause separation between us and G-d, material temptations and pleasures that, perhaps in the short run are satisfying, but in the long run narrow our vision and leave us trapped.  May we merit a vision that helps bring the King of Glory into our lives.

Ki Tetze

This week we read about one of the most troubling commandments in the Bible.  The first paragraph talks about when a Jewish warrior encounters a beautiful female during the conquest of an enemy city.  What follows is a kind of extended, ritualized rape.  The warrior must take the woman into his house, where she has thirty days to mourn.  Afterwards he can have his way with her.

It’s one of the tougher sections to read in our central holy text.  Some responses, like the midrashic commentary Sifre, retreat into pilpul, perhaps with the motivation of limiting the application of the law. The Sifre asks, what if the captive is ugly, rather than beautiful, as the Torah specifies?  Do the laws still apply?  It’s a question that only the Rabbis would have thought to ask. 

Classic apologetic responses note that rape is often an inevitable part of war, and the ritual as dictated by the Torah slows down the process to offer some protection to the woman.  She has to change her clothes and let her fingernails grow, measures to reduce her attractiveness and perhaps make consummation less likely.  The passage of time might also reduce the likelihood of actions that seem inevitable in the heat of battle.  I don’t find this a productive effort.  Underneath all the details, rape is inescapably ugly, and it is hard to accept it as an inescapable part of human conduct.  Why does the Torah seem to condone it, even with reluctance and perhaps with an attempt to indirectly legislate it out of existence?  Also, I’m certain that the Israeli military Rabbinut today would not permit anyone to actually do this, which leaves us with seemingly useless sections of the Torah.  If every word of the Torah is precious and divine, what do we do with that, other than groan and skip over it?

Being mystically inclined, I try to read this section as a lesson for moral growth with our individual struggles to become better people.  I wander far away from the literal meaning of the text on this journey, but have plenty of company in doing this among our people’s sages. 

In the world we see, it is often too easy to forget our sins.  We can do damage of one sort or another, and then just walk away from it.  The spiritual world, according to Jewish tradition, is completely different.  Rabbi Chaim Vital, as quoted by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, talks about how every bad deed creates a malevolent spirit, called a ‘Mazik’ or ‘damager’ in Hebrew.  These Mazikim are tied to their creator, and follow the creator around.  Each of us has an unseen entourage of such creatures, who are restrained from fulfilling their intended harm to us only by G-‘d’s kindness. 

I find this image terrifying.  I love the images of mercy that are present in the upcoming holidays, and the implied access to forgiveness and a new clean slate in the New Year.  This is the opposite, a trail of blemishes that can’t be erased or escaped. While I hesitate to take the image of Mazikim literally, the idea has helped me put off doing one or two things that I wouldn’t be proud of.

I think the laws of the captive woman are a parable-like message, like this concept of the mazikim, that we need to consider the effects of our actions.  On the battlefield, it would be all too simple for a warrior to see a captive woman as an object of plunder.  Her nation, perhaps even her extended family, was just trying to kill you, and maybe killed some of your comrades.  While I’ve never been in combat myself, I’ve hated people enough to want to hurt them, and it is so easy to write off their subjectivity, their perspective and feelings. 

Taking the woman into the house, and giving her time to mourn, opens up a possibility of change.  How can you ignore someone who is in the depths of grief and loss?  It creates a doubtlessly awkward and painful relationship with the warrior, a reminder of the captive’s humanity.  On the battlefield, a warrior could satisfy a momentary urge and, in his eyes, be done with it.  Having brought her into the house makes the warrior confront the magnitude and lasting impact of his action.  It’s similar to the idea of Mazikim being created by sin.  If you have a continuing, even permanent, relationship with your bad deeds, it makes those deeds less appealing.  Hopefully, incorporating such awareness into our lives can make us better people.

I bless us that, in the coming weeks and New Year, we have the wisdom to, as Ethics of the Fathers says, ‘envision the result’ of our actions in all its fullness.  May such expanded vision help us to do things that heal whatever damage we do, and focus on things that heal the world. 

Love and Awe: Tanya Chapter 39

Rabbi Steinstaltz states in his commentary on the premier work of Chabad Chassidut, the Tanya:

Love and awe are wings that make a mitzvah 'fly' and raise it up from this world.  Just as a bird cannot fly without wings, so too it cannot fly with only one wing.  A person needs love and awe together in order for his or her service of G'd to rise up to heaven.  In truth, it is impossible for there to be true love without awe; when love is serious it is accompanied by awe, a worry that loss of the love will occur.