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Friday Night
THE EXPRESSION IS,
“You only get one shot at a first impression,” and in life, a first
impression can mean everything. A good one can open doors for a person who
might not be that worthy, and a bad first impression can leave a worthy
person always fighting uphill.
The Hebrew word for
impression is roshem, which
may not mean that much…unless you learn Kabbalah.
Then it means a ton, because the Roshem
is why we’re here at all, and why we have all that we do and so much more
than we don’t yet even know about. The amazing thing about this roshem is how so very
little can result in so very much. It’s like watching a rough building
sketch in the sand rise into a state-of-the-art skyscraper on the spot, and
then some.
I have chosen to
write about this now because I am currently involved in translating some
material on the topic and am super amazed by the idea. I am also writing
about it now because the material is from Rabbi Shlomo Elyashiv, zt”l, whose yahrzeit is next
Monday, b”H, on
the 27th of Adar. And you may notice that “Leshem Shevo v’Achlamah” is mentioned in
this week’s parsha
(Shemos
39:12), which also happens to be the name of all of Rabbi Elyashiv’s seforim. How’s that
for hashgochah pratis!
The problem is that
understanding and appreciating the idea of the Roshem requires a lot of background
information, some of which I have mentioned piecemeal over the years, and
most of which I have written about in my books. It would take too long and
too many pages to do that here, so I feel like that rabbi who succumbed to
temptation and golfed a hole-in-one one Shabbos
morning on his way to shul.
As God told some very confused angels (even a hole-in-one on a Shabbos morning is
Divine Providence), “Who’s
he going to tell?” In my case it is more like, “What am I going to tell?”
Maybe we should start
with an analogy. It’s like a class that is supposed to have a new teacher.
If the teacher introduces themself to the class on their first day, they’ll
have a tough time from the beginning. But if the principal, whom the students
fear, is the one to introduce the new teacher and ask for cooperation, the
teacher may have a more respectful environment in which to begin. Even
after the principal has left the room, the impression he leaves behind is
usually enough to set the proper stage for the new teacher.
Now comes the hard
part: translating a simple analogy into a sophisticated kabbalistic idea.
God can do anything
He wants, any
way He wants to do it. We can’t even confirm if our reality is actually
occurring, or just taking place in our minds, whatever our minds may
actually be. The mishnah
in Pirkei Avos
(5:1) questions why God made Creation in 10 statements because it knows
that God could have done it in one, even none. When a human does something
a specific way, it is often because of some limitation. When God does, it
is only to give us the greatest good, and perhaps teach us something about
life along the way.
We haven’t strayed
from our topic. We’re just working our way towards the answer.
Shabbos Day
THERE ARE DIFFERENT
levels of appreciation. The average person walking the street might marvel
at a fancy car or enjoy a good steak, but rarely thinks about how amazing
life is, or the world that supports it. A scientist who studies that world
and pays closer attention to how it works should have a higher level of
appreciation, but may pay little regard to how any of it became possible in
the first place. He may not care about the process God used to make the
potential that is the basis of all existence, especially if He has a
difficult time believing in Him.
There is a difference
between being God and just a
god. All kinds of ancient societies believed in several gods at one time,
which meant that each one had limited existence and power. Even though Zeus
in Greek mythology was the boss, he was still dependent upon others to do
his bidding. His thunderbolts could only do so much. He was limited.
God, on the other
hand, shares nothing.
He is infinite, omnipotent, and omniscient. He is not in the world. The world,
by definition, is within Him
(though He does an amazing job of hiding this from the
unworthy). That’s a problem, because according to our understanding of
infinity, nothing else should be able to exist besides God’s infinite
light, especially us and our finite world.
We don’t know how that works, just how it came to be. God
told us. God wanted to reveal Himself to something, though we don’t know
why, other than that He is all good and wanted to do good to something
else. Go figure. So He emanated a spiritual light from His Essence, which
we don’t understand or talk about, and created a concept called Tzimtzum—Constriction.
Nevertheless, this only resulted in Ohr
Ain Sof—Light Without End, a spiritual light that was still
very infinite except that it also possessed the potential for the future
world of man.
The next step was to
constrict that light even more, and this resulted in a spherical area
called the Challal—Hollow.
Compared to infinity it is very small, but compared to our universe, it is
massive beyond comprehension though—and
this is really important—quite limited. In fact, so limited
that it resulted in something we take totally for granted but, which is
what allows us to exist and make life meaningful: measurement. Without
measurement nothing finite can exist, and there can be no up or down, right
or left, small or big, etc.
The Challal therefore, was
the net result of withdrawing Ohr
Ain Sof back from a single point to a certain “area” beyond
that point. What God was left with was a spherical area in which Ohr Ain Sof is no
longer, surrounded by nothing but Ohr
Ain Sof infinitely on all sides and in every direction, kept in
place by nothing other than the will of God. The Challal is a spiritual
“hole” that God “excavated” within Ohr
Ain Sof in order to be a “construction site” for the future
Creation.
Only one problem (at
least). Excavating a hole only provides a place for future construction.
Construction itself requires all the necessary materials which have to come
from somewhere else, in this case the Ohr
Ain Sof that was just evacuated. The Challal meant that
Creation could now happen, but seemingly at the cost of losing the very
potential to make it happen.
Unless of course, the
Ohr Ain Sof,
on its way out, left something behind…like a roshem, for example.
Seudas Shlishis
IN GENERAL, THE word
means “residue.” If you let the water out of a bathtub, some water will
remain on its walls that you can’t do much with, perhaps together with a
soap film, but it certainly tells you that water once filled the tub.
That’s the “impression” the water left on its way out.
Likewise, the roshem left by the Ohr Ain Sof on its way
out, compared to the Ohr
Ain Sof from which it came, was like residue of residue.
Relative to its source, it was practically non-existent. And yet, it
contained all the potential for any world that would ever exist, everything
that would ever exist within it, and all that would ever occur. Compared to
the Ohr Ain Sof
it was next to nothing. Compared to anything we know, it is everything.
Nothing would have
ever come of that potential though had God not let some more Ohr Ain Sof (Kav Ohr Ain Sof) back
into the Challal
to actualize the potential in the Roshem,
but that’s an even longer story. Excavating for a skyscraper leaves nothing
but a hole. “Excavating” for Creation left the possibility of a finite
world and everything necessary to make it happen.
This was not the only
level at which this occurred. This process of emanation and withdrawal
happened all the way down, and still does. The emanation brings the
potential down to a new and lower level, and the withdrawal leaves that
potential behind in roshem
form to later be actualized.
Even more amazing is
how we, human beings, are the product of the same process and live by it as
well. From birth we have all this potential that we do not know about or
even sense, until something comes along to make us access it. The light
that first led to our conception gave it to us, before withdrawing to
another plane.
When it comes time to
actualize a specific potential, God will emanate a new light that will
result in some kind of event, perhaps a crisis of some sort, to cause us to
act in a way to bring that specific potential into reality. It’s very
similar to how the Kav
Ohr Ain Sof later re-enters the Challal to activate potential in the Roshem to create new
worlds and everything in them.
The point is that we
have no idea of our potential unless we have already actualized some of it.
We tend to look at life as just one random event after another, at least
the ones that we don’t plan. But God knows exactly what we’re capable of,
and when we need to find out for ourselves, the events of lives occur to
help us do exactly that.
Change your approach
to daily life. Get used to asking: What potential might this event, planned
or unplanned, help me to actualize?
Ain Od Milvado,
Part 32
THIS WAS THE Mishkan. Yes, it was a
house of worship and spiritual focal point for the Jewish people. But it
was also an “event” God sent our way to push us to new spiritual heights,
just in the building of it. The events that led up to its construction,
including the incident of the golden calf, were custom-designed to move the
Jewish people to the next level at that stage of history. That’s the way it
always works.
But what is it all
leading towards? What is all our potential supposed to help us do? To
become increasingly real with the realization that there is nothing other than God,
because this is the ultimate
potential waiting to be actualized. It sounds kind of trivial, but it is
the basis of the ultimate prophecy for mankind: “God will be King over the entire
earth. On that day, God will be One, and His Name, One” (Zechariah 14:9).
Obviously billions of
people need to move up quite a few levels with respect to ain od Milvado. But
even people who believe that they’ve got this idea down are capable of
reaching much greater heights. It’s one thing to quote it, paint it on your
car window, or make it into a bumper sticker, but it is something that is
supposed to be forefront in our minds no matter what we experience.
For example, this
means never getting frustrated or angry. God is behind what you’re going
through, and it is for your good, as bad as it seems to you. If you watch
the news, you shouldn’t hear a human anchorman, but God talking through
their mouth saying, “Hi, I’m God. You want to see what I did today, as
crazy as it may seem to you?”
You constantly hear
today, “This world is so crazy!” or “People are so crazy!” It is true, but
it is also all
God. When Rebi Akiva said after his personal misfortune, “All that God does
He does for the good,” he wasn’t simply just calming himself down. He was
accepting that all of it had been to push him to a higher level of ain od Milvado, and
it did.
The rabbis of the Mishnah said that
they’d rather not live during the time of Moshiach’s arrival. They knew how
confusing and difficult it would be to stay spiritually aligned. Today, you
can’t afford to only talk ain
od Milvado. You have to walk it too, and that is what all of
the events of today have been sent to lead us to.
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