[continued from part 1: the nature of exile and soul casualty]
Parashat Vaera begins in this way:
וארא אל־אברהם אל־יצחק ואל־יעקב באל שדי ושמי יהוה לא נודעתי להם
I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El Shaddai, but I did not make Myself known to them by My name יהוה.
Exodus 6:3
On the level of peshat this verse is simply inaccurate. Torah tells us that God was known by the name י-ה-ו-ה to all three patriarchs (see Genesis 15, 18, 22, 24 and 27 for plenty of examples.) The Rabbinic tradition struggles with this conundrum in various ways, but I turn to the great sage Ibn Ezra here, for he makes this extraordinary claim:
This is, as I will explain, the secret of the whole Torah
Ibn Ezra, commentary on Exodus 6:3
Ibn Ezra (center) Consults the Stars
Like many ancients, Ibn Ezra theorized that humanity is governed by three distinct realms. The first of these is the material, political world with all of its circumstances and hierarchies. The second world is that governed by “the stars” — though today ideas like “physics”. “causation” or “human nature” might apply. The second realm represents the unchangeable rules of moral and physical existence — mathematics, entropy, time, chaos, greed, and human instincts around survival, scarcity and social organization. Ibn Ezra’s third realm is one beyond all of these things: the mystical realm of God, the angels and of what we might call ultimate meaning. We residents of the first world are connected to this third, supernal realm by dint of our our possession of a soul. And it is this connection – the one between the first and third realms – that exile damages or even severs. Nevertheless, Ibn Ezra continues:
should there be at the time of the birth of such a person an arrangement of the stars indicating that evil will befall this man on a certain day, the God to whom this man cleaves will set the chain of events in such a way that this man is saved from the evil that was destined to befall him … Therefore our sages said that God told Abraham, “Leave your astrological calculations.” The statement “Israel has no star” is close in meaning to the latter. … The aforementioned does not mean that the arrangements are destroyed
ibid.
This, then, is the “secret”: evil may be destined to befall us and there may be nothing we can do prevent it. The forces of fate/universal structure/human nature are not subject to change by human action or divine rule-changing. “The aforementioned does not mean that the arrangements are destroyed” means that the rules of physics and human nature are what they are. Ibn Ezra himself was an enthusiastic astrologer and deeply believed in ideas such as fate, destiny and natural consequence. Nevertheless, he says, the person who cleaves to the divine is subject to a kind of reprieve, and is “saved from the evil that was destined to befall [them].”
It is important to note here that in Ibn Ezra’s mind the calamity still happens — the evil still comes. We do not get to control history, human nature or physics through acts of prayer or other meddling. We are not permitted, for example, to to affect the course of history or our own personal fates by petitioning God. This simply will not work, since is relates to the second realm, which neither we nor God (!) controls. What does work, however, is to attend to the third realm and to invest in our connection to it: to speak into it, to struggle with it, to cleave to it.
This idea of cleaving to God became a central idea in Hasidism where it is known as devekut. In the Breslov tradition, devekut is achieved through daily, solitary conversation with God in one’s own tongue (English, Yiddish, Spanish, whatever) — a practice known as hitbodedut. This is a one-on-one encounter, an act of intimacy with the third realm of existence. It is also a radical act of self-connection. In order to speak in everyday language to the Source of ultimate truth in the universe, a person must first connect with themselves. Who am I to say these words to the heavens? To the trees? To the space where I must trust that something sacred dwells? Who actually am I to do that? Sometimes the results of this practice (speaking now as a very novice practitioner of hitbodedut) are … scant. Sometimes, just like in the case of the Besht, there is nothing to be said to God other than a series of banalities: א-ב-ג . Sometimes there is just pain, and all we can talk or think about is that. Sometimes there is loss, or shame, or whatever. But the point of hitbodedut is to open the mouth, breathe with the throat and speak to the third realm anyway.
The “secret” of Exodus 6:3 has one additional aspect. Ibn Ezra, presaging Dr. King in a way, believes that it posits a positive direction to moral history. According to this verse, The Patriarchs may have been told of God’s י-ה-ו-ה name, but they didn’t know this name, at least not in the way Moses did. Moses knew more. He saw more. He understood more. From the widest possible angle, our species is not standing still. We are getting warmer, closer, more connected to the divine with every passing generation. This progress is uneven, and difficult to detect. But it is real. Though the founding generations knew the divine name, they did not know it. We also can ascend to levels of connection that our ancestors were unable to achieve. More is available to us with each passing generation. This is the “secret”.
***
I sincerely wish that 2024 does not occasion great calamity. I wish that we do not elect a proven tyrant as President of this country. I wish that peace comes to Israel and Palestine speedily and now. But I do not place my hope in these particular ideas. Wishes are not hopes. Evil may come. The question is: what do we do if and when it does? I have three ideas about this:
In the first place, in times of suffering and terror, let’s resist blaming ourselves, each other or God for our circumstances. There will be no miracles. There will be no plagues. There will be no magical deliverance. If calamity is destined to befall us, it will. In Heschel’s words, we cannot pray for specific outcomes but rather “we pray in order to pray, to open a door to God, who is a refugee in [God’s] own world.” (See Susannah Heschel, Suffering with God, Plough, 2021.) In doing so we also conform to Ibn Ezra’s idea: to wish for a second-realm miracle is to miss the point. Soul revival depends on a higher connection than this, regardless of the circumstances.
Second and nevertheless: I think we will have to fight. Moses certainly did not take exhillic disconnection sitting down despite his grave doubts about himself and the world. Instead, he started a revolution. He went right up to the source of injustice and challenged it. We too must fight. This is to say that we must take all of the risks that our times require in pursuit of truth and justice. In doing so, some may pay a price.
But here’s the third thing I’ve been feeling: Reb Nosom in the name of Rebbe Nachman wrote:
Only the highest levels and the deepest teachings can reach into the lowest levels to support those who are so distant from God. When a person begins his return to God from such a low level, it is specifically the loftiest of levels, the Keter, which illuminates [their] place. Since the deepest teachings reach out to [them], [their] repentance earns him a deep understanding of Godliness
Likutey Moharan II 1
The more distant and debased a situation, the more deeply messed-up and disordered a scenario, the more potential energy is manifested when it begins to turn. This applies to history as well. Times like our own become “ripe” for numinous and mystical movement and radical reversal. Would any of us choose to live through a year such as we may (God forbid) experience in 2024? Absolutely not! But there is no choice. And it is only in years like this that we are given the chance to deepen our connection to ultimate reality to its fullest depth. The kabbalistic idea of Keter is, per the Zohar, “the most hidden of all hidden things.” This level of understanding is usually completely inaccessible to human beings in the material world. There are no words, no ideas, no theology, that can accurately describe this reality. Within this eminatation lies the very reason that God created the universe in the first place. Its contents can never be fully known.
Humans, as it turns out, were designed for years like these. We were given souls precisely in order to use them in times of crisis and uncertainty. We are accompanied and brought into communion with the highest and most hidden truths only when we face the most difficult of times. There is simply no other way. In the Hasidic mind, the more completely we descend into calamity (God forbid), the more completely alive we are capable of becoming, the greater our capacity for devekut.
So maybe my hope in 2024 is not the usual kind of hope or aspiration. Maybe it is bigger than that. Maybe disaster can be averted, maybe it cannot. Let us fight as hard as we can to ensure that the worst does not come to pass.
But if disaster strikes, I will turn to this deeper hope, because I will know that we as Jews and people of this Earth will have a sacred job to do. Moses was both a resistance leader and a prophet. If the worst happens, we can all expect to be doing both of Moses’ jobs. We will need to become warriors with tongues — speaking justice and challenging Pharaoh with all of our might, at times with minimal regard to our own safety. And we will also all need to acquire something of Moses’s (and Heschel’s) prophecy. To do this, we must follow the Besht and go back to the basics of justice. We must fearlessly and steadfastly name things by their real names: א-ב-ג. We must do this unceasingly until we feel our souls reviving within us, our destroyed memories re-forming themselves. And this is what we hope for 2024 or any other year: that our memories and our own ability to speak the truth will survive and flower.
But our hope must be still greater than this because we will be speaking not only for ourselves, but for those who have died or been erased in righteous struggle. These are the kedoshim – those who die in pursuit of justice or in simple search of a life of dignity and peace. I fear that in 2024 there may be many more kedoshim. We must speak the words that they cannot. We must follow them without seeking out their fate. We must plan and hope to emerge, though we can’t hope to emerge unscathed.
The scars of 2024 will be the emblems of our collective devekut: traces of the devastation and sweetness of another fleshly re-enactment of liberating Exodus. May those of us who continue into the future of the coming decades will live in awareness of our fortune: we will come to know the Exodus story. We will see the dead come back to life in the retelling of its new particulars, its latest chapter. We might need an Exodus in 2024. And those of us who live firsthand the difficulty of what may be ahead will know that this story means something new, something specific. We will breathe into it and the story itself will come radically, impossibly, back to life.
Reflecting further on her father, Susannah Heschel recalled his words:
“the prophets know that unless we understand the very depths of corruption, misery, and despair, the hope we offer is superficial. Only the prophet who gives voice to the silent agony, who rages against injustice, whose passion exudes from every word, can offer true hope that evil is never the climax of history, that redemption will come.”
Amen to that. And bring on 2024: a year of acceptance, defiance and opportunity for ultimate connection.