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Parashat Naso 5781 — 05/22/2021

Parashat Naso 5781 — 05/22/2021

We are taking a break from Rambam this week, and instead presenting a talk I gave at our synagogue during the traditional Shavuot all-night study session (tikun leil Shavuot)

The Gap – Torah and Liminal Space

Tikkun Leil Shavuot 5781 – Sunday 16 May 2021

We almost always read parashat Bamidbar right before Shavuot. I recently read a fascinating analysis of the structure of Sefer Bamidbar from R. Jonathan Sacks z’l, that I’d like to share with you. I believe we can gain insight into the nature of Torah by going deeply into the ideas R. Sacks presents.

R. Sacks starts by comparing the challenges faced by Moshe Rabbeinu in Sefer Shemot vs. Sefer Bamidbar. We see that while on the surface the challenges appear to be the same – complaints over lack of food and water, a fake nostalgia for Egypt, Moshe’s reaction is completely different. In Shemot, whenever a situation arises, Moshe turns to Gd, receives a solution, and implements it as necessary (10 plagues, splitting the sea, quail, water from rock, manna). Simple. Israel complains, Moshe and Gd handle it. Israel is quiet for a little while. Parents of nursing infants will recognize this pattern. It does not speak highly of Israel’s level of maturity.

In Bamidbar we see Moshe Rabbeinu losing it time and again. Despairingly he asks Gd to just kill him, that he can’t bear the burden any more. As if sensing his weakness, the spies, Korach, and even seemingly Aharon and Miriam, question or challenge his leadership. R. Sacks writes:

What has changed is not Moses but the specific nature of the leadership task he faced in the two books. A helpful distinction is the one articulated by Ronald Heifetz between technical challenges and adaptive ones. A technical challenge is one where there is a practical problem and people turn to the leader for a solution. An adaptive challenge is one where the people are the problem. It is they who must change. Here the leader cannot solve the problem on his or her own. Leaders must educate the people on the need for change. They must be able to hand the problem back to them, giving them safe space in which to think the problem through and the confidence with which to solve it.
   In Exodus, the leadership Moses was called on to show was essentially technical. The people were thirsty; through Moses, Gd provided water. They were hungry; Gd sent food. They were trapped between the sea and the approaching Egyptian army; Gd divided the sea. The people sinned; Moses prayed for forgiveness. No change of character was called for. The people had a problem, they turned to Moses, Moses turned to Gd, and the problem was solved. The book is about technical challenges and how they were met by miracles.
   In Numbers, the challenge was quite different. The people were no longer escaping from Egypt. They were preparing to enter the land. That would involve battles and dangers demanding courage and collective responsibility No longer would Gd fight their battles for them. He would give them the strength to fight them for themselves. They now had to become a people that acted, not a people that were acted upon. They had to adapt, to change. If they did not, they would no longer have a problem. They themselves would be the problem.

So Sefer Bamidbar is about the transformation of the Israelites from a rabble of slaves, unable to take any initiative, passive and therefore always feeling victimized, into a proud and resourceful people, able to seize the moment and, with Gd’s help, succeed.

R. Sacks goes on:

Once we understand what is involved in adaptive leadership – the transformation of a people through accepting responsibility for their own destiny ~ we begin to see that not only does it need time (a new generation), it also needs a special kind of place. Hence the significance of the book’s title, Bemidbar, “In the Wilderness.”’ In the second essay in this book, I argue that the best way to understand the wilderness is by way of two concepts developed by the anthropologists Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner. One is the idea of a rite of passage – the transition from one life phase to another. The other, closely related, is liminal space, the place that is neither starting point nor destination but the place between. That is what the wilderness was: liminal space in which the Israelites could make the transition from a collection of tribes linked by ancestry and shared fate (in Hebrew an am) to becoming a body politic (edah) formed by a covenant with Gd.

Liminal space plays a significant role in the Torah. It is no accident that the Jewish journey begins with Gd’s command to Abraham to leave his “land, birthplace and father’s house” (Gen. 12:1). These three factors – country, culture, and kin – are the primary sources of conformity. We behave as do the people around us. Precisely because Gd wanted Abraham to be different, it was imperative that he leave and go elsewhere, to a place where he would be seen as ger vetoshav, “a foreigner and stranger” (23:4).

lt is also no accident that Jacob, who gave the people of the covenant its collective name, had his most intense encounters with Gd in liminal space: on his outward journey when he had the vision of a ladder set on earth whose top reached heaven and on whose rungs angels rose and descended (Gen. 28:10-17), and on his return when, alone at night, he wrestled with a mysterious stranger until dawn and was given the name Israel, meaning one who wrestles with Gd and man and prevails ( 31:21-31). These, especially the latter, were for him rites of passage, involving a change of identity. …

According to van Gennep, there are three stages in a rite of passage. The first is separation, a symbolic break with the past. That is what happened when the Israelites left Egypt, the most advanced civilization of its time. The key moment occurred when the Israelites passed through the divided Red Sea, passing irrevocably from the domain of Pharaoh into the desert. The third stage is re-incorporation, re-entering society with a new identity. That is what Moses was preparing the people for in the book of Deuteronomy, a book dedicated to teaching the people about the society they would be called on to make once they entered the land. In between is the transition, the point at which the person – here, the people – is remade, reconstituted, reborn.

What van Gennep and R. Sacks are describing is a phenomenon known as “the Gap.” Not the clothing store. The Gap is a universal phenomenon wherever there is change or transformation. In any change, the old state is destroyed and the new state is created. What happens “in between”? That is the gap – it is an intermediate state that is not the old state, which is no more, nor the new state, which has not yet come into being. I think a very good example is the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly. After eating its way through the plants in your garden it spins a cocoon around itself, and some time later emerges as a butterfly. The time in the cocoon is a transition time, and the state in the cocoon is neither a caterpillar nor a butterfly. It is a transitional state. The cocoon itself is the space where the transition takes place, the “liminal space” for the caterpillar/butterfly.

There is another gap that we can sometimes experience within ourselves. We make transitions between states of consciousness: waking, dreaming and sleeping. Between each there is a gap, and since the gap also has the quality of consciousness, we can sometimes experience it. When we’re refreshed after a good night’s sleep and are transitioning into wakefulness, we sometimes experience a state that is very restful, like sleep, but wakeful as well, only without any awareness of anything concrete outside ourselves, as we will have when we fully wake up. This is a fourth state of consciousness, transcendental to the other three, and it can be experienced by allowing the mind to settle down until the activity of the mind ceases and consciousness is left alone in itself, awake and aware of its own nature, but not focused on any boundaries in the outer world. This gap is sometimes called Transcendental Consciousness.

In truth, this gap exists every time there is a transition from one state to another, although it may be but momentary. What these gaps speak to is a state of transcendence beyond the particulars of any state.

Now there are some interesting features about this gap. First of all, there is memory that carries through it. This is just logical – if there were no memory of the old state which has dissolved, how would it know which new state should emerge from it. Furthermore, all the laws of nature that give rise to the new state must be contained within this transcendental state, or else even if it knew (from the memory embedded in it) what new state it should create, it wouldn’t know how to create it.

We see that this gap is

  • a. Transcendental
  • b. Has memory
  • c. Contains all the laws of nature
  • d. Is the background for all the activity of creation

Now I want to turn to Torah, and specifically what the Zohar says about Torah. According to our esoteric tradition, Torah is the blueprint of creation: “Gd looked into Torah and created.” This means that Torah must be transcendental to creation, otherwise how could Gd have “looked into” it? But since there cannot be two eternal, uncreated entities, we have to say that Torah is in some way co-extensive with Gd. It must be somehow part of Gd’s nature. Obviously when we refer to “Torah” in this way we don’t mean the Sefer Torah we read in synagogue, and perhaps not even the Torah that was revealed to Moshe Rabbeinu at Sinai, or the Torah that he transmitted to us, because in those latter two cases we are dealing with something that is transmitted through and to human beings. Even Moshe Rabbeinu “only” reached the 49th level of wisdom; the 50th was beyond him. The Torah we are discussing is the “Supernal Torah,” written with black fire on white fire. What is the nature of this Supernal Torah?

We have some hints in the Torah itself. To begin with, it describes the process of creation as Gd’s speaking. Vayomer elokim y’hi or / “And Gd said, ‘Let there be light.’” The question is, to whom was Gd speaking? Especially with the first utterance, before He had created anything, Gd could only have been speaking to himself. There’s a hint of this in the last verse of Naso (Bamidbar 7:89): …vayishma et hakol midaber elav… What is mIdaber with hirik instead of shwa? Rashi says: k’mo mitdaber Kvodo shel m’alah lomar ken, m’daber beino lven atzmo, uMoshe shome’a me’elav / Like [the reflexive] mitdaber – Gd was speaking with Himself and Moshe listened in on his own.

Torah then, is a record of Gd’s internal conversation, while at the same time being the blueprint of creation. Thus all of creation is actually Gd’s speech, or put another way, the internal, vibratory dynamics of Gd’s own nature. As Chazal put it, the world is not the place of Gd, Gd is the Place of the world.

This gives us a different perspective on both the Torah and the Gap. The Torah is structured in the transcendent; it is the internal dynamics of the transcendent, and it is these dynamics that appear on the surface as creation and its changes. The Gap, which we originally located between two states of existence, is now seen to be the all-pervasive substrate of all states, eternally existing, giving rise to one state as it accepts the fall of the previous state back into it. Think of the ocean giving rise to one wave as the previous wave sinks back into it.

I think this is one way to look at why Torah was given bamidbar – in the Gap, in the liminal space between Egyptian bondage and freedom in our own Land. It is precisely because Torah is structured in the Gap. When our awareness is gripped by the changing boundaries and states of creation, we see the gap as transcendental. Once our awareness has expanded to see Gd and Torah as one and creation nothing but their expression, then there is no Gap, only unbroken wholeness.

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Commentary by Steve Sufian

Parashat Naso “Lift Up”

In this parshah, Gd gives Aaron and his sons, through Moses, the Priestly Blessing, three blessings that raise us up: Numbers 6:24-26:

“May HaShem Bless you and Safeguard you”

“May HaShem Illuminate His Countenance for you and be Gracious to you.”

“May HaShem Lift His Countenance to you and Establish Peace for you.” (Art Scroll Stone Edition Chumash)

“Bless,” “safeguard,” “Illuminate His countenance for you,” “Be Gracious to you,” “Lift His countenance to you,” “Establish Peace for you” — all these combine to bestow Gd’s Name on us, the result of which is that Gd blesses us.

What does it mean to have Gd’s Name (not “Names”) bestowed on us?

It means that the complexities of life are simplified, the many ways we experience Gd are united into One and our life becomes one with Gd, not separate from Gd: “All Your names are one” we know from the Aleinu “It is our duty” prayer we recite daily.

What additional lifting up occurs when Gd blesses us?

This means that within the Unity, the Oneness, the diversity still exists: we are One with Gd and yet also continue to play our roles as individuals, roles in which we continue to behave devotedly to Gd, to “Love Gd with all our heart, and soul and all our might” and to love Gd’s expression: Nature , including all people, to “love our neighbor as ourself. Gd, from His Point of View, blesses us, raises our individualities higher and higher so that there is no distance between Gd playing the role of Gd and Gd playing the role of Creation and us.

May today and every day we lifted up to experience deeper and deeper openness to the Priestly Blessings, to Gd’s Name, to Gd’s Blessings and to living these and sharing these will all and all.

Love and Baruch HaShem