A young lawyer, starting up his private practice, was very anxious to impress potential clients. When he saw the first visitor to his office come through the door, he immediately picked up his phone and spoke into it, making believe he was actually talking to someone. "I'm sorry, but my caseload is so tremendous that I'm not going to be able to look into your problem for at least a month. I'll have to get back to you then." He then turned to the man who had just walked in, and said, "Now, what can I do for you? Make sure to do this fast, as I am in a mad rush, as you can see from the endless telephone calls of clients."
"Nothing," replied the man. "I'm here to hook up your phone.”
Torah laws always have more than one meaning. The Torah, as the human being it comes to instruct and enlighten, consists of both a “body” and a “soul.” Each law, story or message in the Torah also has a deeper, spiritual import; each legal technicality also addresses the inner world of the human soul.
The Sanctuary that is discussed in this week portion Pekudei is more than a physical edifice dedicated to the service of G-d; it is also the model after which man is to construct his own self and life as a “sanctuary” to house and express the divine. G-d commanded that “They shall make for Me a Sanctuary and I shall dwell within them” as our sages point out, “The verse does not say ‘I shall dwell within it’ but ‘I shall dwell within them,’ meaning, within each and every one of them.” Thus, the Torah describes in great detail the various components and vessels of the Sanctuary thirteen chapters in the book of Exodus, or 35% of the book, are taken up with the details of the Sanctuary’s construction!, for they each correspond to another of the faculties and attributes that comprise the human being.
When one studies about the Sanctuary from this perspective, it all comes to life in a new way. We have here a map of the human psyche and all of its “neurons,” of the entire human organism, with all of its faculties. Every nuance detailed in the story of the Sanctuary corresponds and mirrors a particular dimension of the human psyche, teaching us how to understand its purpose and function and develop it as part of the home we create for the Divine. The works of Jewish philosophy, Kabbalah and Chassidut dedicate much space to try to excavate some of these truths.
Many of the vessels of the human “sanctuary,” representing a person’s various intellectual and emotional faculties, may, at times, become tainted by various influences and they need an immersion in a mikvah. My thoughts, instincts, moods, cravings, inclinations, emotions, feelings, attitudes, perspectives, can all become tarnished and contaminated in some way. We are prone to depression, sadness, anger, hopelessness, addiction, confusion, resentment, envy, immoral thoughts, and proclivities. Abuse, negative experience, pain, grief and challenges of all sorts, can burden us heavily and blemish the purity, joy, wholesomeness, confidence, the holiness of our personality.
But the “altars” of the soul, her capacity for complete devotion and sacrifice for her creator, are not susceptible to contamination.
True, this inner core of purity is not always visible or readily accessible. It may be coated by “gold” or by “copper.” The glitter of material life, represented by gold, or, conversely, the despair of hardship and poverty, represented by copper, may obscure the soul’s intrinsic commitment to her G-d. Sometimes too much money or too little money can derail our beautiful pure essence. Sometimes, too much stress and hardship can cause to lose our way and lose our true power. But these encumbrances, be they of “copper” or “gold,” are mere coatings on the altar of our souls. They may eclipse it but never ever destroy it. The coatings are ultimately subservient and secondary in the face of the incorruptible wellspring of sacrifice within—of our pure, endless, powerful oneness with G-d we have at all times, in all places, and under all circumstances.
Rabbi Eliezer, who is known in the Talmud as Rabbi Eliezer the great, was a disciple of Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, and colleague of Raban Gamaliel whose sister he married. He is the sixth most frequently mentioned sage in the Mishnah. He once said about himself:
In all my days, a person never came before me to the House of Study. Neither did I sleep in the House of Study, neither a permanent sleep nor a temporary sleep, and never did I leave a man in the House of Study and exit, and never did I converse in idle conversation, and I never said anything which I did not hear from my teacher at any time.
The Midrash relates:
Reb Yehoshua once walked in to the yeshiva of Reb Eliezer. He began kissing the stone upon which Reb Eliezer would sit. He said: This stone is compared to Mt. Sinai, and the man who sits on it is like the Ark of the Covenant.
For Rabbi Eliezer, who never said anything he did not hear from his teacher, the commitment was so profound that even the coverings of the “altar” were immune to impurity. Even the outer layers were “adamah,” were like the selfless earth, one with G-d. For Reb Eliezer nothing could conceal the altar of the Jew—even the gold and the copper were part and parcel of that same essence.
Yet the Sages spoke not only to people on the level of Rabbi Eliezer, in whom the external and the internal were always one, in whom the outer layers too were holy and Divine, but also for the many of us who do surrender at times to external layers of “gold” and “copper” that cloud our vision and tarnish our holiness. Yet they maintained that these are only layers, covering but never obliterating, the pure and wholesome altar within.
I once read a letter from the Rebbe to a Jew, who wrote to him, after challenging the Rebbe about many fundamental principles of Judaism. “If you would meet me and get to know me personally, probably your opinion of me would be better.”
To which the Rebbe wrote back: “Let me assure you that my opinion of you is, in all likelihood, far superior to your opinion about yourself!”
Some people just believe in other people—in that which lay stored in them, even if dormant—more than they can ever even see in themselves.
The Jewish writer, Sara Yocheved Rigler, relates the following story and lesson. It is one of those stranger-than-fiction true stories:
One sweltering day in the summer of 2008, near Hardwar, India, the pilgrimage city at the headwaters of the Ganges, an incongruous scene unfolded. Amidst the dhoti-clad men and sari-clad women, two Chassidic men from Israel, with long peyot and black kippahs, strode quickly through the crowded streets. When they reached their destination — the ashram of Anandamayi-ma, India’s most adulated woman saint of the 20th century — they hesitated at the entrance to the courtyard. Idolatrous statues dotted the courtyard. As religious Jews, they wondered whether they were permitted to enter.
Standing there, they saw the guru, Swami Vijayananda, garbed in the ochre robes of a monk, exit from one of the buildings. He took his seat on a stone bench in order to receive the long line of waiting devotees. One by one, they approached the 93-year-old guru, bowed on their knees, and took the dust of his feet — a Hindu gesture of honor, whereby one touches the guru’s feet with one’s hand, and then one’s own forehead. Each devotee had barely a minute of the guru’s attention to ask or utter a few words. Then, still kneeling, the devotee found a place on the ground some distance away to continue to bask in the presence of the guru.
The two Chassidic men were Eliezer and his friend Natti, heads of the Jewish Home, a chain of Jewish centers situated throughout India in locations such as Hardwar and Goa, where thousands of post-army Israelis congregate. Although Eliezer and Natti spent a lot of time in India, standing there at the entrance to Anandamayi-ma’s ashram they were as out of place as a klezmer clarinet at a sitar concert.
After a few minutes, the guru noticed the two religious Jews. The next devotee at the head of the line was about to approach the guru, but he stopped him. He gestured to the two attendants who flanked him to block the line. Then the guru beckoned to the two religious Jews to come to him. While the long line of devotees, many of them Europeans, looked on in surprise, Eliezer and Natti directly approached the guru. No bowing, no taking the dust of his feet, no kneeling on the ground. The guru motioned for them to sit beside him on the bench.
Eliezer’s question was different than that of the devotees who asked Swami Vijayananda about the purpose of life or the way to higher consciousness. Looking directly at the guru, Eliezer asked, “I heard that you’re a Jew. Is it true?”
The guru smiled. Yes, he had been born in 1915 into a Chassidic family in France. Although his grandparents were Chassidim, his parents were more modern but still fully observant. He had gone to Talmud Torah and had been raised with all the traditions of Judaism. In his twenties, he told Eliezer and Natti, he abandoned Jewish observance. He became a doctor. Then the Holocaust descended. He told them about his Holocaust experiences, and about how he gave his tefillin away to a religious fellow because he wasn’t using them anyway.
The guru related that, after the war, he was on a ship bound for the nascent State of Israel. A woman on the ship asked him why he was going from one war to another. “Where should I go?” he asked her. She suggested India, a place of peace, with no anti-Semitism.
Off he went to India.
In India, in 1951, at the age of 36, he met Anandamayi-ma. Already at that time, hundreds of thousands of Indians venerated her not only as an enlightened soul, but as an Incarnation of what they called the “Divine Mother.” He became her faithful disciple, taking on the monastic name of Swami Vijayananda. After her death in 1982, many Indians and Westerners gravitated to him as their new guru.
Looking at Eliezer and Natti, he said, “There are two levels of spirituality: a lower level and a higher level. The lower level is religion; the higher level is the recognition that everything is one.”
This was his way of saying that the Jewish religion was only an introduction to his form of spirituality, where all is one.
Eliezer looked back at him and rejoined: “There are two levels of love: a higher level and a lower level. There is love for every person in the world, and there is love for your own wife and family. If you’re not able to love your own family, your love of the whole world is fake.”
“I agree,” nodded the guru.
“So,” continued Eliezer, “You’re Jewish. Before you go out and love the whole world, you should practice loving those who are closest to you, the Jewish People. You have a special connection to the Jewish people.”
The guru laughed. That started their discussion. As the attendants looked on nervously and the many devotees in the line fidgeted restlessly, the guru and the Chassidim sparred back and forth for a long time. “He was trying to show us that we were wrong,” remembers Eliezer, “that religion is not the Truth.”
With neither side conceding to the other, Eliezer suddenly switched gears. He asked, “What did your mother call you when you were a child?”
Something switched on in him upon hearing that question. Tears came to the guru’s eyes, and he murmured, “Avrimka. My name was Avraham Yitzhak. My mother called me Avrimka.”
Eliezer continued to probe: “Do you remember a Shabbos table when you were a child?”
The guru closed his eyes. Then, from out of hazy depths 70 years dormant, he started to sing “Eishet Chayil, A Woman of Valor,” the song sung before Kiddush at every Shabbos dinner. With tears streaming from his closed eyes, he sang the entire song, from beginning to end. Electricity filled the air of the ashram courtyard, igniting a charged atmosphere that reached both backward in time and heavenward in intensity.
The two attendants, who had never before seen their guru cry, became afraid. They moved to eject the foreign men, telling them that their time was up. The guru opened his eyes, suddenly back in the present, and waved the attendants away.
Eliezer pulled out of his backpack a Torah, a Hebrew Bible, and presented it to the guru.
With a wistful smile, the guru told him, “I already have one, and I’ll tell you from where.”
Relating the story like a Chassidic tale, he told how, in the 1980s, an Israeli with a dilemma came to him here at the ashram. The Israeli had been a soldier in the first Lebanon War. Traumatized by the war and the ceaseless specter of more wars in Israel, the non-observant ex-soldier had decided that he wanted to sever all connection with Israel and with Judaism. He became a Christian, but he was unsatisfied and unsettled. So he came to India and started to practice Hinduism. But here, too, he felt unsatisfied. Coming to Swami Vijayananda, he complained, “Maybe the reason I’m not finding myself in India, and I can’t get rid of this Jewish feeling, is that I still have the Bible they gave me when I was inducted into the Israeli army. Is it proper to throw it away?”
“No,” the guru replied, “don’t throw it away. Give it to me.” He proceeded to tell the ex-soldier the story of Rabbi Akiva, who, as the Romans were flaying him alive, recited the Shema. When his agonized students asked him how he could perform the mitzvah of Shema while being tortured, Rabbi Akiva replied that all his life he had yearned to get to the place of serving G-d with his very life. “I told him,” related the guru, “Do you know the difference between Rabbi Akiva and us? After all we went through [in the Holocaust and the Lebanon War], we asked, ‘My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?’” The guru had been relating the story in English, but at this point he quoted the line from Psalm 22 in its original Hebrew. Then he continued in English: “’But Rabbi Akiva,’ I told the Israeli soldier, ‘understood that his suffering was not a punishment, but rather a path to the highest spiritual state of attaining complete unity with God.’“
The guru explained to this soldier that there were two ways to respond to suffering. One as a punishment, or worse, as abandonment. But there was another way. Rabbi Akiva’s way: as a moment of the deepest closeness to G-d.
The guru peered at Eliezer and Natti. “I don’t know where he is now, but I think he must have come back to Judaism after what I told him.”
This was Eliezer’s opening. “Maybe it’s time for you, too, to come back. You’re not young. Do you want to be cremated and your ashes thrown into the Ganges? It’s time for you to come back to Judaism.”
At that ,the attendants of the guru felt they must step in. They got agitated and angry. “You’re trying to take our guru away from us,” they accused the Jewish visitors.
Eliezer made one last try. “G-d loves every Jew, and wants every Jew to return to Judaism.”
The attendants had heard enough. Furiously, they evicted the two Chassidim.
In April 2010, Swami Vijayananda, 95, died at the ashram in Hardwar.
Here we have the message the sages are making in the above Mishnah. Every Jew has what is called a Jewish soul-spark that can never be snuffed out. No matter how far a Jew strays, no matter how vociferously he repudiates his Jewish roots or how diffidently she ignores her Jewish soul or how many decades have elapsed immersed in a different religion, the Jewish spark is always there, ready to be ignited anew.
However, the Jewish spark, in each of us, is waiting to burst into flames of joy, love, and fulfillment.
Shabbat Shalom and Chodesh Tov,
Rabbi Yoseph Geisinsky
Tom Peacock wrote...