Eikev. From Scar to Space

And it will be, if/s ince, as (Eikev) you all [plural] will surely hear to My mitzvot … and I shall give you [singular] grass in your field for your animals, and you shall eat and be satisfied.” (Devarim, 11:13–15)y.

In the opening of parashat Eikev, Moshe talks to Bnei Israel about the fruit of spiritual practice. 

The promise made, may sound familiar to your ears: these verses are ritually recited right after pronouncing the Shema prayer.

Yet it is not about this type of spiritual karma (law of causes and consequences) that the Mei Ha Shiloach wants to talk about here.

He wants to tell us about spiritual agency, irah (deep reverence for Life), and the choice to develop qualities that will give us the type of true spaciousness we can call serenity.

The Mei ha Shiloach starts by questioning the oddity of the conjugation of this sentence: 

Why does Moshe’s message, he asks, “begin in the plural voice, and ends in the singular?”

Moving seamlessly between talking to us all together as a community, and addressing each of us individually is not new in the biblical narrative.

To the Hasidic Master, it points to two levels of the human experience: we are both similar in our basic humanness, and incredibly diverse in the way we develop it.

We all seem so similar when we are born. And then we grow to express our uniqueness throughout our lives- for better, and for worse.

As the agonizing war between Israel and Hamas keeps unfolding, the question is reawaken again and again:

Why do some of us become peace activists and some of us terrorists?  

Why do some of us evolve to be heroes and others abusers? 

Why do some of us turn out as Gandhi and others as Sinwar?

Over the past ten months, the news have been replete with stories of heroism and of atrocities.

This cab driver who drove back and forth to save youth at the Nova festival on October seventh. This Bedouin who tried to prevent the terrorists from killing the ones who took refuge in a Shelter.

What has been done- and is being done- to the hostages. What is sometimes being done to our prisoners.

As we move from consolation to horror, from despair to hope about our own shared humanity the question arises again:

If we are all made in the Divine Image, how come we express it so differently?

The Mei Ha shiloach’s addresses this by pointing again to the interplay between the de facto inequality of our levels of consciousness, and  the space of agency we still have.

And once again, he does this via plays on words. 

This time he plays with location. Two places mentioned recurrently in our Jewish Prayers and Psalms- Tsion, and Jerusalem.

To him, these holy loci become metaphors, remezim (hints) to our own states of consciousness.

At first, he reminds us, we all start in the same place.

A space of receiving wisdom/divine instruction (that is, Torah).

כי בקבלת עול תורה היו כל ישראל בשוה, כי כלם רוצים לעבוד את ה', 

In receiving the yoke of the Torah all of Israel were equal, for all want to serve God.

In essence, we are all as one- hence the plural language used in the opening  verse.

But as we evolve, we start distinguishing ourselves from each other. And this is what the singular then points to.

To the ishbitzer, this differentiation happens in two stages. 

The first one is what he calls Tsion, and the second Jerusalem. 

The first points to our state of consciousness, Da’at, and the second to our capacity to respect, revere and honor Life and the Source behind it: Irah. 

Tsion, to the Ishbitzer, points to the way our systems integrate the wisdom we received. He suggests this by playing with the word ‘tsiun’ (impression/mark).

With the impression (tsiun) that the words of Torah make in the heart of man, (...) one’s consciousness is not similar to his fellow. 

הציון שד"ת עושים בלב האדם  (...)  ואין דעת אחד דומה לחבירו.

This is where the first discrepancies appear between us human beings; the first stage by which the plural becomes singular.

But if we are not equal when it comes to our levels of consciousness, it doesn't mean there is nothing we can do about it. 

This is where the notion of agency comes into play.

And this, the Ishbitzer calls Irah. 

He garbs within playing on the word “Jerusalem”:

 “Jerusalem is a remez (a hint) for irah (deep/reverence).”

כי ירושלים רומז על יראה

Jerusalem, the name of our Holy City, the one that the two largest Global Missionary Religions have been disputing to the Jewish People over the past millenia, hints to an injunction: 

“You (shall) “Revere” in a way that is “Whole” (Iruh-Shalem). 

Irah points to our capacity to acknowledge the great mystery of life, to show both respect and admiration for the Source of Life behind it. 

Heschel famously called it “radical amazement.”

It is what is called traditionally, in a Noble sense, “Fear of Heaven”. It points to deep reverence and awe. 

Irah is a practice: it is an invitation to develop the midah (character trait) of both humility -acknowledging how small I am), and awe (marveling at how powerful, mysterious and awe-some, the World, and the Source of Life behind it, truly is).

I can’t choose to be wise. My consciousness is where it is. This is Tsion.

But I can choose to cultivate awe. This is Jerusalem.

So Jerusalem, in that sense, becomes a spiritual practice.

This may be why Jews have been praying for millennia for Jerusalem to be rebuilt- even as it, at least partly, already has.

Jerusalem in that sense, as long as we live in this world, always will be work in progress.

But how do we do that?

How do we embody awe?

The rebbe doesn't leave us there. 

He actually offers concrete spiritual instructions:

Irah (deep reverence-awe), to him, can happen through doing a tsimtsum (self- contraction) of our egos:

“According to the awe of God and the tsimtusm (retractation of the ego) one goes through to honor God, accordingly one will receive reward and God will effuse unto them expansion (harvakha)”

כפי היראה והצימצום שאדם מצמצם א"ע בעבור כבוד הש"י כן יקבל שכר וכן ישפיע לו הש"י הרווחה.

Tsimtsum (צימצום) is a core Kabalistic concept which explains the very existence of the world: it took for God to contract a part of God-Self for everything else in the world to exist- including evil.

Because we are made in the Divine image, we too, are invited to imitate this Divine contraction: 

Tsimtsum is the inner retractation I choose to do within myself in order to make space for something else than me.

It is a movement, at heart, of humility and of compassion, the healthy self- restraint that enables healthy relationships.

It is no coincidence that the hebrew word for the female uterus (rechem), which points to the very physical phenomenon of making space for another life within the mother’s body, has the same root as compassion (rachamim).

On a spiritual level, tsimtusm is compassion.

It means making some space for you within me, in my consciousness. 

And when I make this space, see what happens, adds the ishbitzer: 

The “Schar”, the reward for it, is simply more space:

כן יקבל שכר וכן ישפיע לו הש"י הרווחה.

Yes one will receive reward and God will effuse unto them (the quality of) Space/ Expansion.

When we suffer we feel contracted, constricted. Our bodies get tense, our minds rigid.

But when we feel good we feel spacious. 

Something in us relaxes; something breathes. We feel emotionally spacious- that is, available to feel our feelings, and to welcome others’ too. 

Inner space is the embodied way of expressing the state of consciousness we call serenity.

All of this starts from choosing to make the space in me- some space of humility and of compassion- the embodied mark of irah.

And this is a reminder of the power we do have within our human condition: there is a space of agency between what I received and what I can make of it.

This is the space between Tsion and Yerushalayim.

In these times of War, Tsion, the trace has become a scar. As we have all been impacted so deeply, oh, if we could bridge the gap. If we could move from a Tsion to a Yerushalayim state of mind.

If only we could not stay stuck at the level of wounds we received, but also keep choosing to make space within us for Deep Reverence for Life.

Just like the parents of Hersch Goldberg-Polin, one of the Hostages who has lost an arm, his freedom, and the respect due to his life ten months ago when he was taken in captivity, have so beautifully expressed at the recent Congress of the Democratic Party in Chicago.

As difficult negotiations are still going on between Hamas and Israel about the fate of the Israeli and international Hostages, this seems more important than ever.

As Israel is being shaken by its own internal debates around the cases of abuse of prisoners in our military prisons, the question is addressed to us, too, as a society.

Today is day 322 of the captivity of our hostages.

This week we just finally got to bury the retrieved bodies of six more Israeli hostages killed in captivity. One of them, Chaim Peri, a devoted Peace Activist, used to drive Gazan children to Israeli hospitals.

May the memory of Avraham Munder, Chaim Peri, Yoram Metzger, Alexander Dancyg, Nadav Popplewell and Yagev Buchshtab, zi'hronam le vrakha, be a blessing.

And may their memory help us remember to choose to embody irah, deep reverence for life- the respect they didn’t receive, in the way we will choose to treat ourselves

and others.