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.
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