Beha'alotkha (Hasidism)

Two Trumpets - Two Half Forms

This week’s portion contains a potpourri of different subjects. One of these seemingly technical details—the instruction to make two silver trumpets to gather the people and to be sounded at the Temple on festive occasions—serves as the occasion for one of the best-known teachings of the Maggid of Mezherich. This passage is invoked by writers and scholars of Hasidism as an example of Hasidic mysticism at its most intense. It appears in Maggid Devarav le-Yaakov, §24 (Schatz ed., pp. 38-40):

“You shall make two silver trumpets… (hatzotzrot)” [Num 10:2]. That is, two half forms (hatzi tsurot), in the sense of, ”And seated upon the [image of the] throne was the likeness of a human form above it” [Ezek 1:26]. For man (adam) is only dalet mem (dam; i.e., blood), and speech resides within him; but when he attaches himself to the Holy One blessed be He, who is the “Aleph” of the world, he becomes “man” (adam). And the Holy One blessed be He underwent numerous contractions, through various worlds, so that He might unite with man, who is unable to stand His great brilliance. And man must separate himself from all corporeality so as to ascend through all the worlds and to achieve unity with the Holy One blessed be He, to the point of negating his own existence; and then he is called man.

This teaching begins with two rather far-fetched puns, a favorite Hasidic homiletic technique. First, the word hatzotzrah (“trumpet”) is broken down into hatzi tzurah—a “half form,” that is, something incomplete unto itself. Second, the word for “man,” adam, is interpreted as an amalgam of the letter Aleph, which symbolizes God (the “Aleph” of the world) and dam, blood, signifying man’s biological nature.

One’s immediate association to the figure of the “half forms” is that of lovers. The image of two lovers as two halves seeking one another is a natural one, both in human culture generally and in Jewish tradition specifically. Various Rabbinic sources speak of man and woman as incomplete without one another; a person is only complete in marriage, like Adam seeking his lost rib. “This one is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh… And he shall cleave to his wife, and they shall be one flesh” (Gen 2:23-24). In our text the image of two halves seeking and completing one another is applied to the longing of man and God for one another. This seems to be an even stronger image of the love between man and God than the lyrical imagery of Song of Songs, with its numerous midrashim. Here, both man and God are utterly incomplete without one another.

In the next section, the imagery of intertwining of God and man is even more strongly stated. The Maggid interprets the image of the Divine chariot in Ezekiel, and specifically the image of the human figure seated on the throne, as at once alluding to the perfected, complete human person, and of God. Or, perhaps better, the “cosmic figure of primordial man” is in some sense identical to God (for more on this, see below). Note: in this passage, as in Isaiah 6, Daniel 7:9, and elsewhere, God is portrayed in blatantly anthropomorphic terms, as a human figure seated on a throne. To understand the simple sense of these chapters, one must set aside all modern, rationalistic theology about the pristine, abstract, incorporeal nature of the Jewish God concept, and accept as given a God portrayed in human imagery.

And this is “upon the image of the throne” (kisei)—upon which He, may He be blessed, is concealed (mekhuseh); as in the phrase “and a great cloud and fire flashing forth” [Ezek 1:4]. For at first darkness rests upon a person, when he is unable to pray with excited passion, and thereafter [he is like] burning fire, which is the passion. And this is “the image on the throne,” for He, may He be blessed, is concealed. “The likeness of a human figure”—that is, just as he is awakened, so is there an awakening above by Him, may He be blessed. If love is awakened within the righteous man, so too is love awakened in all the worlds; and so on regarding all the attributes. And this takes place when he brings himself with great purity above all the worlds and is united with Him. For He, may He be blessed, thinks only to benefit man, as is said: “the whole world was only created to serve me.” And all the supernal worlds and all the attributes are under his control, and he is within them like a king over a battalion. As King David said, “and your saints shall sing out” [Ps 132:9]. And it asks in the Zohar, “Do not your Levites sing out to You?” But as the righteous man wishes, so does the Holy One blessed be He wish.

Three important points here. First, as in many other passages we have studied this year, we find concern with the varying moods of the person who sets out to pray: at first he is beset by darkness, by spiritual dullness, and afterwards achieving “greatness of mind” (expanded consciousness?), becoming enthralled with religious passion.

Second, the idea of mutuality and constant interaction between man and God. If the worshipper—specifically, here, identified with the Tzaddik, the righteous man— focuses upon, say, love (Ahavah =Hesed), then God himself is awakened to act upon His own attribute of Hesed. Thus, the mystic affects change in the upper realms; what scholars of religion call ”theurgy”: acting upon God, even forcing His hand, as it were.

Third, since God’s actions are intended to benefit and please man, in a strange way the man, or the Tzaddik, ought to feel that “the whole world was only created to serve me.” (One is reminded here of the Rabbinic dicta: “R. Dosa said, ‘The whole world was created for Haninna my son, and Haninna my son is satisfied with a handful of carob fruits” [Ta’anit, Ch. 1]). The Tzaddik thus enjoys mastery over all things in heaven and earth.

And even the acts of intercourse mentioned regarding the patriarchs are an entire Torah, for they are written in the Torah. For were the verse, “And he also went in to Rachel” [Gen 29:30] or “And Jacob loved Rachel” [Gen 29:18] to be lacking, the entire Torah scroll would be unfit. For they did everything with attachment to God, may He blessed. And the Holy One blessed be He took pleasure in them, and it was made into Torah. And the Torah and the Holy One blessed be He are all one. For even though this is very carnal, the Holy One blessed be He gets pleasure from this.

Here, the Maggid turns to the idea of avodah begashmiut, of serving God through corporeal actions in the world. The example brought here is specifically from the most grossly corporeal (“very carnal”), lust-filled, seemingly “non-spiritual” of all areas, that of sexuality, making the point all the more powerful. Since the Torah makes explicit mention of Jacob’s sexual acts, this implies that they too must be part of Torah. There is a paradox here: he states earlier that man achieves true self-realization as man only when he transcends corporeality and negates his own self. But this need not imply refraining from corporeal acts; rather, the Tzaddik acts with a kind of mental detachment from his bodily acts. Only then, it would seem, do they achieve the level of supreme holiness.

And this is, “two trumpets of silver.” For man is half a form, for he is only blood, and the Holy One blessed be He is called the Aleph of the World. But when they are attached together they become a complete form. “Silver” (kesef): from the language of desire and longing (i.e., kisufim, a pun on kesef), that he shall always desire the Holy One blessed be He, and the Holy One blessed be He shall love him.

Interestingly, this passage is discussed by no less than three modern academic scholars of Kabbalah: Gershom Scholem, Rivka Schatz, and Yoram Jacobson. Though each one has a slightly different take on it, they all see it as a particularly salient example of intense mysticism or, as Scholem puts it, “mystical intoxication.” Scholem notes that the experience described here verges on what is known in religious studies as ”unio mystica,” often (and erroneously) thought to be absent in Jewish mysticism. Scholem writes:

Of the two most conspicuous pupils of the Baal Shem, Jacob Joseph [of Polonnoye] is the relatively sober one, whereas Rabbi Baer of Mezritch has gone far on the way of what might best be described as mystical intoxication…. He is no longer the friend of God and the simple folk, who roams through the markets. He is the ascetic whose gaze is fixed on, or, I might rather say, lost in God. He is a mystic of unbridled radicalism and singularity of purpose. His predilection for the more paradoxical figures of mystical speech colors his sermons to a degree equaled by few of his predecessors in the history of Jewish mysticism.

Jacobson elaborates upon this, saying that the goal of this mystical longing is not so much man’s self-abnegation, but rather his refinement and sanctification so as to become “the reflection, the manifestation and the actualization of the hidden divine image.” Man’s highest calling is thus that of “endless yearning” for God.

But there remains a problem. Who is the figure on the throne, in the Maggid’s reading of the verse from Ezekiel? And why is God also a half form? What does it mean to say that man at his best is an “actualization of the hidden divine image” or the “cosmic figure of primordial man”? I would like make more explicit what these learned scholars only suggest: that the boundary between man and God is somehow blurred, not only on the part of man, who unites with God in mystical ecstasy, but also on the part of God. We have here what Heschel in the title of one of his books called God in Search of Man. Man’s soul is within God and God is within him. In an immanentist view of the Divinity, God Himself is inter alia composed of the souls of the entire Creation, and of all humankind. Thus, God and man reach out for one another, not as utterly different beings (I almost used the words “members of different species,” but that is to understate the case by several orders of magnitude), but also, in a paradoxical sense, as belonging to one another, as sharing a certain identity of substance or being. This is a tantalizingly possible reading of man’s being created “in the image of God.”

Once again, we must remember that the personalist image of God constantly used in the Bible, in Midrash, and in the Prayer Book, is only a figure of speech, a means of giving man a concrete image to grasp unto so as to comprehend God somewhat. (Indeed, Judaism prohibits the making of images, of pictures and statues of God, because these lead the human senses entirely astray; but in fact, even the allowance made for word- and conceptual-images of the Divine is also a certain compromise with the ineffable and utterly inexplicable nature of God, albeit an unavoidable one. See HY I: Yitro). In truth, what He is cannot be understood or explained in human language. But what is clear is that the language of persona, of God being a person having distinct boundaries, is ultimately no more than metaphor. Kabbalah and Hasidism, in using such terms as “Ein Sof” (the Infinite), and even more so the paradoxical “Ayin” (“Nothing”), hint at this.

SHAVUOT POSTSCRIPT: The Two Sets of Tablets

A final postscript to Shavuot. The four volume-set Or Gedalyahu might be considered as a sort of contemporary Hasidic book. This is a posthumous collection of teachings by Rav Gedaliah Schorr ztz”l, late rosh yeshivah at Yeshivat Torah ve-Da’at in Brooklyn, who died in 1989. It presents an interesting amalgam of “yeshivish” Torah and Hasidism; Rav Schorr was not a Hasidic rebbe, but a rosh-yeshivah in a traditional Lithuanian-American yeshivah, but his teachings are filled with Hasidic and Kabbalistic sources; in almost every one of them he quotes Sefat Emet, and the midrashim on which Sefat Emet is based; R. Zaddok ha-Kohen of Lublin and other Hasidic works are quoted frequently as well. (I was once privileged to daven Ma’ariv with Rav Schorr one festival evening, in a small Beit Midrash in deepest Brooklyn; the atmosphere of awe, intensity and devekut of that prayer has stayed alive in my memory these many years.)

In a certain sense, his writing may be compared to that of Rav Yitzhak Hutner, rosh yeshivah at the nearby Yeshivat Hayyim Berlin during the same period. Rav Hutner’s multi-volume Pahad Yitzhak also incorporates Kabbalah, Maharal of Pargue, and other mystical currents. Such a combination of “Litvish-keit” and Hasidut is not entirely unknown in the twentieth century; with the emergence of modernity, the old rivalries and ideological polemics between Mitnaggedism and Hasidism became largely muted. Then, too, from mid-19th century Hasidism gave greater stress to the study of “revealed” Torah (Talmud, Shulhan Arukh, etc.), and many Hasidic yeshivot were established. Two outstanding gedolim of the early twentieth century with close connections to Hasidism were the ”Rogochover,” the eccentric genius from Dvinsk; and Rabbi Meir Shapira, founder of Yeshivat Hakhmei Lublin and promulgator of the Daf Yomi—the wold-wide program for study of a daily page of Talmud—who was a Chorkover Hasid.

In any event, the volume of Or Gedalyahu devoted to Moadim contains an essay (pp. 155-160) on the two sets of tablets given to Moses at Sinai, whose salient points I shall summarize. The former set of tablets, hurled down by Moses in fury when he saw the Golden Calf, was entirely Divine. Even the physical tablets themselves, the stone on which the words were written, were made by God (Exod 31:18; 32:16; their supernatural character is why they were made at twilight of the first Sabbath eve, according to Avot 5.8). The second tablets, by contrast, were hewn by Moses after God forgave Israel for their sin (Exod 34:1, 4), but the words of the commandments were inscribed upon them by God (thus based on Alsheikh and 34:1; but ignoring vv. 27-28).

Rav Schorr sees this difference as paradigmatic of the relationship between body and soul within the human being. The writing on the tablet represents the living presence of the spirit, while the inert stone on which it is written corresponds to matter, to the body. The first tablets symbolize a continuity of body and spirit; immediately after Sinai, the people were on a level of purity, of compete integration of body and soul. There was no conflict between the corporeal and the spiritual (compare the above teaching of the Maggid). In Kabbalistic language, the zuhama shel nahash, the “corruption” implanted in the human race after Eve and Adam did the serpent’s bidding and ate the forbidden fruit, had been removed from them.

But after the sin of the Golden Calf, the Israelites lost their ability to assimilate the brilliance of the light of the Divine, and once again descended to the level of living a bifurcated existence. The dual nature of the second set of tablets—earthly matter, but Divine writing—symbolizes the human condition, fraught with ambiguities and antinomies, marked by constant conflict between man’s biological nature and impulses and his spiritual yearnings. This is the source of the enormous struggle and effort needed to achieve any real insight and wisdom, or to accomplish anything lasting in the spiritual life.

This discussion takes us to some of the most basic fundamental issues of philosophical anthropology: What is the essential nature of man? Speaking in very schematic terms, there are three basic positions:

1) That human nature is fundamentally evil, sin-ridden. Historically, this is the classical, Christian position, based upon the Pauline concept of Original Sin (which many contemporary Christian theologians are questioning, revising, and reinterpreting). It is this view that requires the deus ex machina, so to speak, of Divine intervention in the presence of the Redeemer. This is essentially the position of all dualisms: Manicheanism and other schools of Gnosticism, Zoroastrianism, etc. It was evidently the world-view of the Judaean Desert sect who authored the Dead Sea Scrolls, whom many scholars today see as kind of precursors of Christianity. But this option was one which, by and large, has not been adopted by Judaism—not even by the gloomy Musar schools of Navaradok or Kelm or the medieval Hasidei Ashkenaz.

2) That man is essentially good: that all evil is the consequence of negative environmental, political, or socio-economic factors. If man were only left to grow, without the deleterious effects of parents, society, well-intentioned but wrong-headed educators, etc., he would be naturally good and innocent. This idea is quintessentially modern, hearkening back to Jean Jacques Rousseau and the celebration of the “Noble Savage,” and to other Enlightenment thinkers. It is also the implicit position of many people on the Left. Eliminate the evils of the system, and all the criminals shall beat their pistols into paintbrushes and their heroin stashes into organic rice. But it is really a double-edged sword, because alongside the belief in innate human goodness there comes a kind of almost mechanistic determinism, eliminating individual responsibility for negative behavior.

If, during much of the twentieth century, Jewish apologetics focused on the differences between Judaism and Christianity, noting the Judaic rejection of the thoroughgoing pessimism of Pauline theology, I think that today equal attention needs to be paid to the pitfalls of excessive optimism, and blindness to the dark side of human nature (which seems strange, as it is difficult to overlook in wake of the blood-soaked history of the twentieth century, and its corruption and misuse of the most humane and idealistic ideologies).

3) Human nature is fraught with ambiguity and ambivalence. Man is a tabula rosa, constantly faced with choices between two paths. Life as an arena of constant moral struggle and testing, the battlefield on which is fought milhemet ha-yetzer, the war between our two conflicting impulses. God weighs and judges our deeds. This third position seems to me the high road in Judaism. We may have a messianic vision of redeemed human nature—of lions lying down with lambs and children playing with adders and scorpions, of the poison of the snake being lifted and the Yetzer Hara being once and for all defeated -- but this is no more than an Edenic or perhaps eschatological vision.

Some of these issues were touched upon in the great Gafni debate (see HY IV: Kedoshim). (NB: This was written in 2003; today I question whether Gafni's views need to be take seriously at all as a seriosu intellectual position, seeing as that they were rooted in a personal path that was deeply tainted, emotionally, religiously, and ethically.) Leaving aside the historiographic and textual issues, which take us far afield into the arcane intricacies of scholarship, Gafni’s fundamental error, in my opinion, is that he subscribes to an overly optimistic view: he already anticipates perfected, Edenic man in this world, in real life. He seems to imply that it is possible to achieve in actuality the higher level of consciousness needed for the desired synthesis of eros and ethics, of pagan passion and prophetic mastery over unruly and potentially dangerous emotions. He writes: “Sin is but the illusion of separation. Sin is not evil; it is merely tragic. Not only do we lose the source of life’s greatest pleasure, but we would undermine the building blocks of connection without which the world would ultimately collapse.” Here, sadly, he errs in his evaluation of human beings. (But more on this subject in a future article to be published in Tikkun, alongside Rabbi Gafni’s reply, which I hope to share with my readers in due time. Hint: compare Freud & Marcuse)