Toldot - annexes
The Palace and the Pigeons
By Tzvi Freeman
Once there was a king whose palace had been ransacked by wild hordes. For the wood and stone of the palace he had no tears, but for the crown jewels, passed down for many generations—for these there was no consolation.
The king gathered his wise men, but none could give counsel. The jewels had been scattered by those barbarian hordes throughout the land and throughout many other lands, the most precious of them taken across the seas to the farthest reaches of the globe. But the king had a daughter very dear to him, and in her wisdom she saw what needed to be done.
So the king and his daughter trained many pigeons to return to the palace, to recognize the crown jewels and carry them back on their journey. Each day they would release the pigeons in the pastures about the palace, and some would discover the jewels scattered about and return them to their home. And the king was glad and smiled to his daughter.
Then the king’s daughter sent them further away, and again they returned, carrying a few more of the jewels her father had lost. As far away as they were sent, they hastily returned.
But the most valuable jewels, those in the most distant lands and most hidden places, those jewels had not yet been recovered. The pigeons did not venture far enough to find them—they were too eager to return home.
The king’s daughter knew what must be done, but she could not tell her father, for it was too hard, too dangerous, too awful. But he looked in her eyes and he knew. And so he destroyed his palace once again, razing it to the ground, removing its every trace. When the pigeons attempted to return, they found nothing, no more than an empty pasture with scattered stones and smouldering wood. They were hungry for their food and sick for their home.
Until the most adventurous of the pigeons travelled far abroad and found other palaces, and in those palaces they found hidden the king’s most precious jewels, and gathered them and polished them and kept them in their wings. And at night they cried, for they knew this was not their home.
And now has come the time for them to all return.
I can’t explain to you everything meant by this story. If I could, what would I need a story for? I would just explain it to you without the story. But I can tell you some of the teachings that form its basis.
For one, you need to know what the great Kabbalist Rabbi Yitzchak Luria, known as the Ari Hakadosh (“The Holy Lion”), taught about our world. He taught that there is not a thing in this world that does not contain a holy spark. Even the greatest evil, even the harshest darkness that does everything it can to oppose its Creator and deny any purpose or goodness in the world, even that contains a divine spark. And it needs that spark, because without it, it would not be able to exist for even a moment. Why, then, is it evil? Because the spark it contains is so dim, so concealed, that its only way of expression is to be the opposite of what it truly is.
So you might think that if that spark is so dim, it couldn’t be a very important spark. Maybe G‑d could do without it. But the Maggid of Mezeritch taught just the opposite, that it is the highest sparks that fall furthest from their source. So in places that are warm and friendly to holiness, there are going to be some warm and friendly sparks. But if you want the most powerful sparks, the sparks that talk about the real essence of G‑d, then you need to deal with the places that are furthest from their source.
As long as all these sparks are held hostage in things and places that don’t know the real meaning of what they hold inside, the world is not fulfilled. That is how the Ari describes Torah and Jews: they are the way those sparks become reconnected to their source.
There is one other thing I would like to say about this story; the rest I will leave to you. In our history, the pattern of destruction and exile has repeated itself many times. We began in exile, in the land of Egypt. Then there was the destruction of the first Holy Temple and exile to Babylonia, and then the second destruction and a very lengthy exile, which we still endure. There is no other nation that has been spread so far apart, yet retained identity as a single whole, always with hope to return. And all of it was part of His divine plan, to retrieve all the sparks of holiness. Which is what we did, because wherever we go, we use the materials, the foods, the music, the customs of that place in a Torah way.
But as far as I am concerned, the greatest destruction and the greatest exile began seventy years ago. Because, until then, if a Jewish person was looking for a teacher and a guide to find his or her path to G‑d, or just looking for some spirituality in life, there were tzaddikim just around the corner, and everyone knew that was so. But when the communities of Europe were suddenly and brutally destroyed, along with all but a handful of the great tzaddikim, that is when the greatest darkness began. That is when this bizarre detour began, that if a Jewish soul wants to find meaning, she goes to drink from the wells of others. True, she will never be satisfied from those wells, since they are not her own. But a soul that lived for 3,300 years basking in spirituality simply cannot bear the dry, parched land.
And, unfathomable as it may be, that had purpose as well.
But now has come the time for us to all return home.
The Faith of the Farmer
Based on the teachings of the Lubavitcher Rebbe
Courtesy of MeaningfulLife
Therein lies the specialty of the faith of the farmer. The farmers contact is with the densest, most opaque part of the veil. He is slave to the weather, the contours of the land, the chemistry of the soil; he contends with nature in its rawest, most obstinate, most dictatorial incarnation. So when the farmer recognizes and acts upon the truth that it is the Vivifier of the World who answers his toil with sustenance, this represents the ultimate triumph of faith, the ultimate penetration of spiritual vision through the material haze.
The Final Temple
By Mendy Hecht
With the destruction of the second Temple, G‑d changed His mode of interaction with the universe. Until the destruction, the Temple was the window to G‑d; spirituality had a physical home in Jerusalem.
With the destruction, G‑d temporarily removed the Temple from its geographic location and placed it within us. Instead of traveling to Jerusalem, G‑d wanted us to find Him in our inner Jerusalem. Now, our bodies are our Temples, our souls are our windows, our minds are our kohanim and our animal instincts are our sacrifices. We cannot offer physical sacrifices three times a day, but we can pray three times a day. We cannot attend Temple services three times a day, but we can tap into our souls three times a day. We cannot atone for our shortcomings by sacrificing animals, but we can sacrifice our inner animals—our hormones, our lusts, our desires, our beastly compulsions. We cannot find G‑d in Jerusalem; we must find Him in us.
If the times of the Temple were principally G‑d reaching down to His world, then the times of our exile are us reaching up, from within that world.
This is G‑d’s master plan. First, a sweeping, dramatic outdoor concert of public spirituality, reaching viscerally and tangibly into the everyday, physical reality. Then He exchanges this for an internal, personal, private experience, forcing us to reach up to find Him, bringing the entire Creation along with us. Together, the two experiences lay the groundwork for the third and final Temple—an age that will synthesize both directions of spirituality. An age of where G‑d’s presence inside our hearts and minds and in the physical world is internalized to achieve a whole new reality: the era of Moshiach.
Life on the Inside
By Yanki Tauber
In reply, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak said to his son-in-law: "We cannot make our days longer, nor can we add additional hours to our nights. But we can maximize our usage of time by regarding each segment of time as a world of its own. When we devote a portion of time — whether it is an hour, a day or a minute — to a certain task, we should be totally invested in what we are doing, as if there exists nothing else in the world."
Chabad-Chassidic teaching devotes much discussion to the quality of penimyut. Amongst Chassidim, the greatest compliment one can pay a person is to say that he is a penimi — one who possesses the trait of penimyut. The greatest insult is to call someone a chitzon, which is to say that he lacks penimyut.
What is penimyut? The closest equivalent word in the English language is "innerness". Penimyut means integrity, thoroughness and consistency. It is the opposite of superficiality and equivocation. In the penimi, knowledge cannot be divorced from experience, and knowledge and experience cannot be divorced from deed. You will never encounter only parts of the penimi — his brain, his heart, his actions; rather, you will always find the complete person there. The penimi doesn't merely think a thought, experience a feeling, do an action — he lives them.
When the penimi devotes a portion of time — whether it is an hour, a day or a minute — to a certain task, he is totally invested in what he is doing, as if there exists nothing else in the world.
This is not to say that the penimi lives indiscriminately. On the contrary, indiscrimination is the ultimate mark of the chitzon. The penimi is deeply aware — aware of the differences between important things and things of lesser importance, between means and ends, between journeys and destinations. But in whatever he is involved, he is fully there. He's never just "getting it done" or "getting it over with". When he's on the way to something, he's fully invested in being on the way to something.
This week's Torah reading includes Moses' record of the Israelites' 42 "journeys" through the desert — forty-two journeys which, according to rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov, are replayed in every individual's personal journey through life.
The 42 journeys are, of course, phases and stages in a greater Journey — the progress from the confines to Egypt to the Promised Land. But each is also an entity unto itself — the Torah calls them "journeys" (massaot), not "stations". We're not here to get through life, the Torah is telling us; we're here to live it.
Yes, we are physical beings; but there is something in us that transcends the physical. Man is an amalgam of matter and spirit, a marriage of body and soul. It is our spiritual self that persists in the belief that the past can be redeemed. It is our connection with the spiritual essence of our lives that grants us the capacity for teshuvah--the capacity to "return" and retroactively transform the significance of past actions and experiences.
What is this "spiritual essence" with which we seek connection? And how does it enable us to literally change the past?
Not just man, but every object, force and phenomenon has both a "body" and a "soul." A thing's body is its physical mass, its quantifiable dimensions, its "hard facts." A thing's soul is its deeper significance—the truths it expresses, the function it performs, the purpose it serves.
By way of example, let us consider the following two actions: in a dark alleyway, a knife-wielding gangster attacks a member of a rival gang; a hundred yards away, a surgeon bends over a sedated patient lying on the operating table. The "body" of these two actions are quite similar: one human being takes hold of a sharp metal object and slices open the belly of a second human being. But an examination of the "soul" of these two events—the desires that motivate them, the feelings that suffuse them, the aims they seek to achieve—reveals them to be vastly different deeds.
In other words, man is a spiritual creature in that he imparts significance to his deeds and experiences. Things don't just happen—they happen for a reason, they mean something, they further a certain objective. The same event can therefore mean different things to different people; by the same token, two very different events may serve the same purpose and elicit identical feelings, imbuing them with kindred souls despite the dissimilarity of their bodies.
The body of our lives is wholly subject to the tyranny of time—the "hard facts" cannot be undone. A missed flight cannot be unmissed; a harsh word uttered to a loved one cannot be unspoken. But the soul of these events can be changed. Here we can literally travel back in time to redefine the significance of what occurred.
You oversleep, miss that flight, and never show up for that important meeting. The initial significance of that event: your boss is furious, your career suffers a serious setback, your self-esteem plummets. But you refuse to "put the past behind you." You dwell on what happened. You ask yourself: What does it mean? What does it tell me about myself? You realize that you don't really care for your job, that your true calling lies elsewhere. You resolve to make a fresh start, in a less profitable but more fulfilling endeavor. You have reached back in time to transform that slumbered hour into a wake-up call.
Or you have an argument, lose your cool, and speak those unforgivable words. The next morning you're friends again, agreeing to "forget what happened." But you don't forget. You're horrified by the degree of your insensitivity; you agonize over the distance that your words have placed between the two of you. Your horror and agony make you realize how sensitive you truly are to each other, how much you desire the closeness of the one you love. You have reached back in time to transform a source of distance and disharmony into a catalyst for greater intimacy and love.
On the material surface of our lives, time's rule is absolute. But on its spiritual inside, the past is but another vista of life, open to exploration and development with the transformative power of teshuvah.