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.