The Cherubim shall be with wings spread upward, sheltering the Cover with their wings with their faces toward one another; toward the Cover shall be the faces of the Cherubim (25:20)

It is there that I will set My meetings with you, and I shall speak with you from atop the Cover, from between the two Cherubim that are on the Ark of the Testimony, everything that I shall command you to the Children of Israel (verse 22).

When the people of Israel fulfilled Gd’s will, the cherubim would face each other; and when the people of Israel did not fulfill Gd’s will, the cherubim would face the walls of the room. (Bava Batra 99a)

According to the commentators, the Mishkan (Tabernacle) was to be a continuation of the experience at Mt. Sinai, where the entire people experienced pure Knowledge emanating from Gd directly, or a microcosm displaying the structure of the Creation.  Perhaps these are two descriptions of the same thing. 

In either event, the central feature of the Mishkan was the Aron, the Ark, which housed the two tablets Moshe Rabbeinu brought down from Mt. Sinai.  The Ark sat in the physical center of the Mishkan complex and was crowned with a cover of pure gold, out of which the two Cherubim were hammered.  Just as Gd’s Voice had emanated from the thick cloud on Mt. Sinai, and was congealed into the writing on the two tablets in the Ark, so Gd’s Voice would emanate in the future from between the Cherubim.  And just as at Mt. Sinai only Moshe Rabbeinu could actually hear Gd’s Voice and live, so in the Mishkan, the Voice that emanated from between the Cherubim was audible only to Moshe Rabbeinu, who transmitted Gd’s instructions to us as the Written and Oral Torah.

Our tradition tells us that Gd is at the center of Creation.  In fact, Creation is nothing more than Gd’s self-expression into manifold finite forms, while He of course is completely infinite and unchanging.  If this is so, then somehow the Cherubim and the Ark, sitting at the center point of the Mishkan should somehow model this reality.  Last year we discussed the commandment that the Cherubim were hammered out of the same block of gold as the rest of the Ark-Cover, which we asserted modeled the fact that all finite values are actually representations of the same underlying, infinite “substrate” of existence, in much the same way that all the waves on the surface of the ocean are actually nothing other than the same water of which the entire ocean is composed.  This year I would like to consider the fact that the Cherubim were made facing one another.

In the story of the creation of humankind, Torah tells us that when Gd created the first human, “male and female He created them.” (Bereishit 1:27)  The Midrash fills in that originally Adam was created both male and female, with the male side facing one way and the female side facing the other way, perhaps like the Pushme-Pullyou of Dr. Doolittle fame.  When Gd decided that Adam needed an ezer k’negdo – a helper “opposite” him – He formed Eve out of Adam’s side.  The Midrash interprets that Gd split the female and male sides and allowed each its own standalone existence.  Most important, they could now face each other, which means they could come into a relationship with one another.

On one level then, the two Cherubim, which had the form of a young man and a young woman, model the primal relationship upon which all human civilization and tradition are based.  I would like to take this a step further, and argue that this relationship itself models something deeper and more fundamental.

Since we are created “in Gd’s image” we should be able to get a hint about what Gd is like by considering our own condition (this will be only a hint of course, as Gd is infinite and we are finite – as the Prophet says: As the Heavens are far above the earth, so are My ways far above your ways and My thoughts above your thoughts [Isaiah 55:9]) and extrapolating.  We can say two things about ourselves – we exist and we are conscious.  We can extrapolate that Gd must therefore have these two qualities to the maximum degree – He must be pure, infinite Existence and pure, infinite Consciousness.

We can understand the difference between these two aspects by considering our own experience.  Our existence is our objective aspect; passive as it were and acted upon.  Our consciousness is our subjective aspect; it is the “I” within us that goes out and acts in the world.  It is our consciousness, our subjective nature, that can enter into a relationship with another subject.

When we extrapolate to Gd’s level of course, there is no other subject for Gd to have a relationship with.  As Rambam puts it in his 13 principles of the Jewish faith, Gd is completely unified and there is no unity in the realm of diversity like Gd’s Unity.  Gd’s Unity is not composed of parts – it simply Is.  On the other hand, we all have the experience that we can be aware of ourselves (whether animals have self-awareness is a field of active research).  We would have to assume that Gd as well has Self-awareness.  I would suggest that perhaps we could consider this Self-awareness on the level of the infinite as setting up a virtual duality within the very nature of the infinite.  It is as if the original Unity of Gd’s nature has some faint hint of a relationship within it.  Once this virtual relationship has been established, there can be a dynamic back-and-forth between the two poles of the relationship.  Perhaps it is this internal dynamics, precipitated by the Self-awareness of Gd’s pure consciousness, that we perceive as Creation.

Perhaps this is the underlying meaning of Gd’s taking the original human, created in Gd’s image, and bringing its two aspects into a relationship with one another.  The relationship of a man and a woman, in its ideal state, models the internal dynamics within Gd’s Unity, and the Cherubim, facing one another at the center of the Holy of Holies, model it as well.  In the larger field of human communal existence, the relation between the People of Israel and Gd also models this basic dynamics, at least “when Israel fulfills Gd’s Will.”  Our mission as the Jewish people is, in fact, to come into a “face-to-face” relationship with Gd, as we had, albeit briefly, during the Revelation at Mt. Sinai.  When we reach this level as a people, the whole purpose of Creation will be fulfilled, and all knowledge, on every level, will become Self-knowledge.  May we see it speedily in our day!

Purim March 8

This year, Purim, the Festival of Lots, falls on Thursday, March 8.  Beth Shalom is planning a Purim celebration that week.  Watch for further details in coming Beth Shalom e-mail newsletters.

Thanks for Shabbat Shira

Thanks to Jane Pitt, for her leading the Shabbat Shira service, with her singing, playing and song-leading.   And thanks to everyone who participated in song and/or dance.

Free Trip to Israel for Young Jewish Educators

Below is a GREAT opportunity for a free trip to Israel for anyone in your community who is:

·       Working in part-time Jewish education.

·       Is between ages 18-29.

·       Is Jewish.

·       Has never been on a peer trip to Israel.

THERE ARE ONLY A FEW DAYS LEFT TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THIS. PASS THIS GREAT OPPORTUNITY ON!

PLEASE READ DOWN!!!!

Dear All,

Last summer, the Teacher Trek journey began…and it continues this  upcoming summer.      

Twenty-eight dynamic American complementary Jewish educators participated in Taglit-Birthright Israel Teacher Trek.   The group, which represented educators from a variety of Jewish education settings – congregational, non-congregational, JCCs, Chabads and community schools – developed personal attachments to Israel and participated in professional development opportunities.   Taglit-Birthright Israel awarded the first-ever Teacher Trek with “Best Implementation of a Niche Bus.”

This summer,  PELIE,  the Partnership for Effective learning and innovative education,  will again sponsor Teacher Trek and is excited that they have again expanded the age limit to include participants between the ages of 18-29.

Registration for Taglit-Birthright Israel Teacher Trek is fast approaching!!  We want to make sure all potential participants are aware of this opportunity ESPECIALLY because of the short time window for registration. We also want to alert you to the updates below.

Please pass this email along with our new video about the trip to potential participants AND those that may know potential participants!

1.)    Registration for Teacher Trek begins on February 15, 2012 at 10:00 am ET

If you applied for a Birthright trip in the past, you will have access to early registration on February 14, 2012 at noon ET.  You must log in with the user name (email) and password under which you previously registered.

Register at www.IsraelWithIsraelis.com. Be sure to click on SHORASHIM as the trip organizer and “Teacher Trek” as your trip choice! Please note, the application site has not launched yet, as registration is not yet open.

2.)    Tentative dates for the trip are: June 11-June 22, 2012. Please note that these dates are subject to change!

3.)    Please sign up for updates at www.teachertrekisrael.com to receive the most up-to-date information from PELIE and Shorashim.

Adena Raub Dershowitz
Information Manager
PELIE
318 W. 39th Street, 5th floor
New York, NY 10018
212-284-6879
www.pelie.org

Know that there is a profound idea concerning the manna, which our Sages hinted at and said in Tractate Yoma: Humans ate abirim bread.  “Bread that the ministering angels [from abirim = mighty ones] eat.”  These are the words of R. Akiva.  Said R. Yishmael to him: “You have erred, for do the ministering angels eat bread?!  Is it not already stated in the Torah: Bread I did not eat, and water I did not drink [i.e. if Moshe, who was a human being, didn't eat or drink while he was in Heaven receiving the Torah, can we imagine that the angels eat?]  Rather abirim bread is bread that is wholly absorbed in the limbs [evarim].”

   The meaning of what Rabbi Akiva said is: The sustaining of the ministering angels is through the radiance of the Shechinah, and thus did the Sages expound and say: ‘The verse You give them all life and the legions of Heaven bow to You [Nechemiah 9:6]: You are the sustenance [m'chayeh] of them all.’  And about this sustaining radiance it is stated, ‘Sweet is the light’ [Eccl 11:7] because the angels realize in it a good (“sweet”) taste.  The manna was a derivative of this supernal light, which assumed material form by the will of its Creator, may He be exalted.  Thus it emerges that the people of the manna and the ministering angles were nourished from the same substance. (Ramban to 16:7)

When the Israelites complained that they had no bread, having run out of the provisions they took with them out of Egypt, it’s not clear exactly what they expected Moshe to do for them.  After all, they were in a desert, and you can’t grow wheat in a desert, especially if you are moving around and can’t tend the fields.  However Gd tells Moshe to tell them that He would rain down bread from heaven.  When they awoke in the morning they found a layer of dew on the ground, and when the dew evaporated, there was a white, scaly substance that remained.  This was the manna, so named because the Israelites asked man hu / What is that?!

The manna had several miraculous properties: no matter how much you gathered, you came home with 1 omer per person per day, except on Fridays when you got two omers, one for Friday and one for Shabbat.  The manna tasted like whatever you wanted it to taste like, unless that flavor were harmful (e.g. cabbage for a nursing mother).  Any manna left over till morning got wormy and stunk – except from Friday to Shabbat when it was fine (the commentators point out that generally food spoils before it gets wormy, but the manna got wormy first, so the transgressors who tried to stockpile manna would not smell it overnight and throw it out – rather they’d have to throw it out in broad daylight, to their embarrassment).  Finally, the manna was completely absorbed in the body; apparently the generation of the Exodus didn’t have to excrete waste for the 40 years of their wandering.  Our Rabbis have said that only a generation that ate manna was fit to receive the Torah.  Whether this means that only a generation that deserved manna would be on a high enough spiritual level to receive Torah, or alternatively, the manna had a purifying and spiritually elevating effect, I don’t know – perhaps both.

All that having been said, Torah doesn’t ever really say what manna actually was.  Ramban, interpreting the Midrash, fills in this gap.  Astoundingly, he posits that the manna is actually the same supernal Divine Radiance that sustains the ministering angels.  It is only made slightly more concrete so that human beings can pick it up, measure it out, cook it up and eat it.  This actually gives us a whole new definition of the idea of “food.”  Clearly, angels, which have no material bodies, do not need material input – their substance is purely spiritual, and their sustenance is also purely spiritual.  Human beings have both body and soul, and they need both physical and spiritual nourishment.  Generally those two are distinct; we can’t eat a Beethoven symphony and a tuna casserole warms the body, but not really the soul unless grandma made it specially for you.  In the case of the manna however, that boundary line got blurred; the same manna that nourished the body completely, so that there was no waste, also nourished the soul, so that those who ate it were able to sustain the experience of the Divine Revelation at Mt. Sinai (and then just barely).

Now let us take this idea a little bit further.  Modern physics has shown that all the particles of which material creation is made are nothing more than the modes of vibration of various abstract fields.  Further, the thrust of much of modern physics has been an attempt to describe these various, different fields as simply different aspects of one, underlying field.  Thus many believe that physics will be able to show objectively what virtually all spiritual traditions have been saying for millennia – the world we see, the world of material forms and phenomena, is in actuality nothing other than the activity of a purely non-material, infinite, unbounded level of pure being.  This pure being in fact permeates all of creation, not as something different from creation, but as the actual substance of everything in creation.  It is not “somewhere else” – it is the eternal Here (haMakom in Hebrew, one of the Names of Gd, literally “the Place”).

If this is the case, then every bite of food we eat is, just like the manna, simply congealed pure being, the congealed “supernal light” of the Shechinah.  What is the difference then between the two?  On one level, the objective level, we might say that the manna is somewhat less congealed than grandma’s tuna casserole, and definitely a lot less congealed than a Big Mac (even a kosher, Israeli one).  Thus, those of us who are less spiritually developed than the generation of the Exodus (all of us) can sustain ourselves on this grosser fare, but the downside is that this grosser fare keeps us on grosser levels of perception, thought and action.

The ultimate purpose of our life here on earth is to refine all aspects of our personality so that we can see through the surface values of Creation and enjoy the glory of the pure being at its basis.  What we eat has an effect on our perception and our thinking (besides our physical health of course), but perhaps more important is what our bodies do with the food we give it, and this depends on how refined a level our bodies can function on.  Our tradition gives us numerous techniques to refine our personality – prayer, mitzvot, Torah study, meditation.  Gd may not rain down manna from Heaven on us, but He has given us a way, practically speaking, to take our ordinary food and virtually convert it into manna inside ourselves.  Every time we say a b’rachah before we eat, we bring out the spiritual value of the food – we bring it closer to the level of manna.  Every mitzvah that we perform enlivens our awareness of the One Who commanded us to perform this mitzvah, and refines thereby the rest of our perception.  If our eyes are open manna is all around us; we just have to gather in each day’s portion and enjoy.

And they shall be for frontlets between your eyes.  (13:16)

  Therefore, because a constant awareness of the principles of faith is the best bulwark against heretical thoughts, [the Sages] stated: Be as scrupulous in performing a minor commandment as in performing a major commandment (Avos 2:1), for all of them are in fact major and exceedingly beloved, [my bold] since through them a person is constantly acknowledging his Gd.  For the ultimate objective of all the commandments is that we should believe in our Gd and acknowledge to Him that He created us…

  And that is in fact the ultimate objective of the Creation itself, for we have no other explanation for the first creation, and the Most High has no desire for earthbound creatures except this, that man should know and acknowledge to his Gd that [Gd] created him.  And the purpose of raising one’s voice in the prayers, and the purpose of synagogues and the merit of communal prayer, is this: that people should have a place where they can gather and acknowledge to Gd that He created them and caused them to be, and where they can publicize this and declare before Him, “We are Your creationsl”…

  Through recalling and acknowledging the great, manifest miracles of the Exodus a person ultimately acknowledges the hidden, miracles of everyday life, which are the foundation of the entire Torah.  For a person has no share in the Torah of Moses our Teacher unless he believes that all our affairs and experiences are miracles, that there is no element of nature and “the ordinary course of the world in them at all, whether regarding the community or the individual.  Rather, if one observes the commandments his reward will bring him success, and if he transgress them his punishment will destroy him  all by the decree of the Most High, as I have already mentioned.  (Ramban ad loc, Artscroll translation)

One of the great beauties of Ramban’s commentary on Torah is he takes the opportunity to explicate the Jewish view of the fundamental questions of religion, and indeed, the fundamental questions of life.  There is no more fundamental question than “Why?” (as every two-year-old knows).  Why did Gd create the universe?  Why did he create human beings?  Why do human beings suffer, and perhaps more to the practical point, why do human beings cause other human beings to suffer, whether intentionally or unintentionally?  Science can attempt to answer the question “How?”  How did the human body evolve on earth?  How did the stars form?  How does the ecosystem function and how can we avoid shifting it to a different style of functioning that will be to our detriment?  But the question why we are here and what we should be doing with our lives is the realm of the spirit, immeasurable and therefore beyond the purview of science.

Ramban takes as his starting point the mitzvah of tefillin, which is the way we fulfill the command “you shall bind them as a sign upon your arm, and they shall be for frontlets between your eyes.”  One of the four passages in the tefillin (there are the two in our Parashah; the other two are the first two paragraphs of the Sh’ma, which are found in Devarim / Deuteronomy) indicates the purpose of wearing tefillin – “so that Hashem’s Torah should be in your mouth” – that is, always with you.  That is, Torah is telling us that the ideal of life is one in which our awareness is constantly on Gd’s Word, and by extension, on Gd Himself, to the extent that we can have such an awareness.

In the passage I have quoted Ramban gives us an explanation of why this is the ideal of life and how we can get there.  Ramban states that the purpose of creation is that “we should believe in our Gd and acknowledge to Him that He created us…”  While we associate belief with blind faith, I think that to our Sages it meant something much more – it was a faith born of experience.  We can truly hold a belief only so long without corroborating experience, and while people have a tremendous ability to distort their perception of reality to match their preconceived notions, still, at some point reality does intrude.  So when Rambam says we need to have “correct opinions” about Gd, and when Ramban tells us that we need to “acknowledge Gd,” I think they are both saying that we need to have deep enough experience of Gd and His interaction with the world that we know that Gd exists and that He created the universe and that He takes personal charge of everything that goes on in the universe.

Why is this so important?  Ramban states that this was Gd’s desire in creating the universe “for we have no other explanation for the first formation, and the Most High has no desire for the lower worlds except this… .” [my translation].  Why then does Gd desire that human beings attain knowledge of Gd?  Certainly Gd has plenty of angels who know Him a lot better than we know Him, or ever will know Him!  I think that the answer may lie in the fact that human beings have free will.  It is not possible for an angel to not know Gd – the proximity is too close, perhaps we could say that Gd’s light is so strong and unobscured on the celestial planes that any falsehood would immediately be flushed out, and could not sustain itself.  In the lower worlds however, there is considerable hiding of Gd’s light – our tradition calls this hester panim / hiding of Gd’s Face.  In this situation, falsehood can flourish, particularly near election time, and one has enough freedom that one can, and must, choose whether or not to go for the truth or otherwise.  The more we go for the truth, the more we find it – that is, the closer we become to Gd, the Truth with a capital T.

Apparently it is in the return to Gd from the extreme distance of the lowest world that gives Gd the greatest pleasure, so to speak.  As Ramban points out, Gd has no need for any of creation.  Gd is infinite and beyond any limitation, beyond pleasure or pain.  Further, as our sages tell us, “Gd is the Place of the world, the world is not His place.”  Yet in some way, it appears, the distancing of the creation from Gd and its subsequent return, at least on the level of human awareness, completes the circle of creation, thus fulfilling Gd’s original plan.  We have no words to describe this level of reality; we can only give it the human term “pleasure.”

We have a bit of evidence that Ramban’s assessment of Gd’s “motives” is correct in the fact that Gd has given us a procedure to return to Him.  That procedure is called mitzvot, as Ramban points out.  One meaning of the root of the word mitzvah is “signpost.”  As Ramban describes, each mitzvah we perform is a signpost pointing our way back to Gd.  Whether the mitzvah is “major” or “minor,” it focuses our awareness on Gd.  Thus, since a Jew’s day is full of mitzvot, we are constantly training ourselves to be aware of Gd and to act in accordance with Gd’s Will.  This opens our mind and heart to Gd until gradually, in the fulness of time, we begin to have glimpses of His presence among us and His direction of our lives.  That is why, as Ramban says, all mitzvot are major.  Each one is a step in training ourselves and purifying every aspect of our personality, so that we can reflect Gd’s greatness most fully in our awareness.  Whether this gives Gd pleasure I certainly can’t say.  But it certainly is the most pleasurable way to live for us!