Where is the world really heading? Should we be overtaken by panic and fright at the prospect of global terrorism? Should we expect the worst and prepare for it? Or should we perhaps keep our cool and go about our business as usual as the hellish drama in the Middle East increases from day to day?
The All-White Man
The two Torah sections of this and the previous week, Tazria-Metzora (Leviticus chapters 12-15) discuss the laws of tzaraas, a spiritual illness whose identifying mark was a white patch or patches appearing on the skin of a person, the walls of a home or on a cloth or leather garment.(1)
Here we encounter a strange anomaly in biblical law: If the white patch appears on only part of a person's body, he or she is deemed spiritually impure. However, the Bible states, "If the affliction will erupt on the skin and it will cover the entire skin of the afflicted person from head to foot... When the priest sees that the affliction has covered all the skin, he shall declare the afflicted person to be pure. Now that he has turned completely white, he is pure."(2)
Apparently, this makes little sense. A patch of whiteness on a person's arm, for example, demonstrates a case of moral and spiritual impurity, while if this patch spreads over his entire body -- head to toe, front to back -- he is considered pure and clean. This would be akin to saying that a small infection in one part of the body deems the infected person ill, while if the infection spreads to his entire body, he then is declared healthy.
What is the logic behind this law?
The Messianic Age
An intriguing Talmudic passage concerning the end of days recalls this strange biblical instruction about an all-white man.(3)
Says the Talmud: "The son of David," (the Moshiach, or Messiah), "will not come until the entire kingdom converts to heresy."
"Rava said, 'What is the verse [that foretells this prediction]? 'Now that he has turned completely white, he is pure.'" Just like when the affliction of whiteness spreads over a person's entire body it is a sign of purity, so, too, when the entire kingdom, from top to bottom, disintegrates into heresy, we know that the time of redemption, the moment of universal purity, has arrived.(4)
How are we to understand all of this?
The Pains and Blessings of Exposure
Our generation, steeped in the tradition of psychoanalysis and therapy, needs no explanation of the distinction between the "outside" and the "inside," how that which is on the outside may be diametrically opposed to that which is on the inside. Some people desperately hold on to the belief that their lives are functional and put together, though they feel some symptoms of anxiety and misery. They remain totally unaware that on a deeper unconscious level they are disintegrating and decaying. A powerful gulf separates their inner state from their outer conscious condition.
Many couples have learned how to behave respectfully toward one another on the surface, while on a more subtle level they are haunted by profoundly repressed feelings of anger and animosity toward each other.
The prerequisites for healing and integrating the two layers of self are awareness and exposure. As long as the outside is beautifully arranged like a museum, while the inside is rotting away, redemption is impossible. For any true change to occur, all of the inner grit and gravel must come gushing forth, generating pain and fear, but opening the opportunity for a new path.
Living in Denial
The most tragic story of modern Jewish history, the story of Israel over the past decade, is a case in point.
For ten years, a great part of the Israeli population ? and millions of Jews and non-Jews worldwide ? fell prey to the romantic dream that their neighboring Arab leaders craved peace and coexistence in the same way that Israel and its leaders yearned for such a day.
"They do not really want us dead," was the prevalent Jewish notion. "The war is merely a result of their frustration over occupied land." If we could somehow give them parts of the land and allow them to create a state of their own, a dawn of tranquility would descend upon the troubled region.
Based on this understanding of the Arab condition, Israel made tremendous sacrifices. It resurrected the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which states in its charter its objective to annihilate all of Israel, and allowed it to enjoy autonomy and self-governance in most of Gaza and the West Bank. Israel even gave this Palestinian Authority large amounts of weapons and money to enforce security and stability in the region.
It took six years and rivers of Jewish blood to wake us to reality. As the Arabs went on a crusade to murder Jewish babies, children, women and men in the most sadistic and brutal ways, targeting them in their bedrooms, buses, restaurants, at religious feasts and in their parents' arms, many finally awoke from the fantastical illusions that we are dealing with essentially good and decent human beings who crave for life and for peace.
The evil Arab terrorists, by piercing nails through the bodies of innocent children and burning them alive, demonstrated to the Jewish people that no life is sacred. As the bloodbath continued, we slowly began to face the truth of the moral depravity of the Palestinian culture so many of us were denying for so long. Many Israelis realized that peace would only be possible after an absolute defeat of the bloody terrorists and their assistants.
This realization, despite all of the pain involved, is the beginning of the cure. Having a cancerous growth in your body is horrible. But denying that you have this growth is the epitome of hell. To live with the illusion that "everything is just fine" is worst of all, for that makes it impossible to embark on the road to healing.
Facing Your Evil
Now we may understand the rationale behind the biblical law that a white patch on part of the body represents impurity, while if the same patch spreads to the entire body the person is deemed pure.(5)
As mentioned above, the skin affliction described in the Torah was essentially a spiritual and moral malady expressing itself in the physical symptom of a white patch. This skin disease developing on a person's body was an outward manifestation of some of his inner coarseness, immorality and evil being.
Yet, only part of this person's inner negative energy came to the fore in the form of a white patch. What about the remainder of it? This was comfortably concealed in the inner chambers of his psyche, veiled and eclipsed by multiple layers of denial and illusion. Therefore, the afflicted person was declared to be morally impure.
However, when the skin affliction spread to the person's entire body, it demonstrated that his inner moral depravity had been completely disclosed. The evil was no longer secretly lingering in the subconscious and enjoying the protection of scores of bodyguards of lies (to paraphrase Winston Churchill's famous description of truth during wartime). Such a person can no longer run from reality.
Such a human being stands on the threshold of recovery and liberation. He can now walk along the path of purity.
In other words, it is not the white patch appearing on the skin per se that makes a person impure, but rather that which remains behind, shrouded in mystery and refusing disclosure. It is these hidden demons, knowing full well that exposure equals suicide, that pose the worst threat to a moral life.
Yet, when our dark skeletons are released, our inner ugliness exposed and all of the evil in all of its manifestations is brought under the spotlight as denial and ambiguity perish -- the time of redemption is here.
Collapse of Structures
This is the meaning behind the intriguing prediction given by the Talmudic sages for the Messianic times ? that the Moshiach "will not come until the entire kingdom converts to heresy."(6).
The prophet Daniel presents a strange description of the Messianic era. It will be a time, Daniel writes, when the true nature of many people and matters will become clear, apparent and elucidated.(7) Clarity may be painful, since it exposes some very uncomfortable truths, yet it is the prerequisite for all healing and transformation. As long as you are capable of defining evil as good, illness as health, darkness as light and frivolousness as liberty, there is absolutely no hope for redemption. Only when the ugliness of a person or a situation is fully disclosed can it be supplanted with another path and an alternative direction.
This is the world, dear brothers and sisters, which we inhabit today ? a world in which so many tremendous and powerful structures of life and religion are beginning to disintegrate before our eyes. Their inner flaws, myths, inconsistencies, distortions, corruption and evil, disguised for centuries, are finally being unveiled for all to behold.
Indeed, I once heard from one of the great religious personalities of our generation, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, that the hallmark of our era in history lay in its power to "expose disguised evils, which will ultimately lead to their collapse."(8)
Distortions of Four Structures Exposed
Four of the greatest structures of humanity have, in recent times, been struck by this blessed fate.
The first was the death of communism.(9) For 70 years, this evil regime held hundreds of millions of people in its grip of terror. My own grandfather, Simon Yakobashvili, sharing the same fate of another 40 people, was sentenced to death, in a Moscow prison one Friday night in 1937 (his decree was subsequently waived in lieu of an exile verdict of 25 years in Siberia).
And then, as though out of the blue, this titanic empire faded away into oblivion. It did not happen by means of a war waged by the free world against the USSR that cost thousands of people their lives, as was the case of the French Revolution. Rather, it happened from within. The communist regime was based on a big fat lie; namely, absolute corruption disguised in the mantle of a utopian dream promising freedom and equality for all. The system of Soviet communism was rotten at its core. After years of endless lies and cover-ups, like a viscous tumor, the empire ate itself up from the inside, and it awoke one day without a soul.
The next stage of exposure is presently occurring in Islam. This religion, born in Arabia in the seventh century, contains splendid kernels of truth mixed with rotten seeds of evil.
This immoral depravity contained in some of its doctrines and in the hearts of its thinkers and leaders, has been eating at it for centuries. Now, finally, the day of exposure and reckoning has arrived. The moral ugliness of millions of Muslims who find it praiseworthy to kill countless innocent children, women and men is out in the open for all to behold.
Christianity, too, has been challenged in a profound way. The many cases of priests molesting children is a revealing commentary about the nature and success of celibacy, that powerful but distorted doctrine of the church that segregated heaven from earth. If priests are "human" and need to have an outlet for their intimate passions, let them get married, for heaven's sake.
Finally, right here at home, at the blessed shores of the United States, the disguised evil contained in the sophistication of open-minded liberalism that advocates absolute moral relativism, has come to the fore. When a university professor can compare President Bush to Adolph Hitler, you know that there is something deeply rotten and frightening about a doctrine that refuses to define good vs. evil in absolute terms and is incapable of defining Saddam, bin Laden, Hitler, Stalin and Arafat as evil men.
Time to Get Ready
Indeed, we encounter this phenomenon of exposure and clarity wherever we look, both in the corporate world and in our personal lives.
This also is happening increasingly in many Jewish circles today, where exposure of the false natures of many Jewish trends is occurring. Young women and men are discontent with half-truths and ambiguous cultural rituals. Teenagers are asking their parents, "What do we believe? If we believe that the Torah is real, that it is G-d's word, let's keep it. If not, why bother with any of it?"
Thus, in the final analysis, despite all of the genuine pain and horror of recent years, these are not frightening times. They are exciting times. History is changing; redemption is unfolding and we are privileged to be part of it.
The Rebbe would often say that our generation has been chosen to serve as the bridge between exile and redemption, between the past and the future, between war and peace. Our challenge on this day is this:
As all the disguised evil erupts, and disillusionment sweeps the world, as the "heresy" and depravity of so many kingdoms emerge, we must be present, mentally and spiritually, to inspire ourselves and the entire world with those unwavering and eternal moral truths, given by the Creator to all of His children, Jews and non-Jews, that are included in His blueprint for life, the Torah.
We must help ourselves ? and the world ? embrace a new, pure morality and spirituality that will bring genuine peace and dignity to all of mankind.
(This essay is based on three public addresses by the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Shabbas Tazria-Metzora 5742; Purim 5747 and Shabbas Toldos 5750 -- April 24, 1982; March 15, 1987 and December 2, 1990.(10))
Footnotes:
1) Not every white patch indicates tzaraat. There are several secondary symptoms that determine whether the person (or house or garment) should be declared tameh (impure). For example, in the human body, one of the signs of tzaraat is if the white patch subsequently caused (at least) two hairs in its area to turn white.
2) Leviticus 12:12-13.
3) Sanhedrin 97a. Cf. Talmud end of tractate Sotah.
4) Rashi to Sanhedrin, ibid.
5) A similar answer to the one presented below is found in Ibn Ezra, Ralbag, Abarbenel to Leviticus, ibid. Cf. Tur Haaruch, Panach Raza, ibid. and Kli Yakar to Leviticus 13:7. For another rationale to this law, see Likkutei Sichos vol. 32, pp. 77-81.
6) Cf. Maharal to Sanhedrin, ibid. for his very similar interpretation to this Talmudic statement.
7) Daniel 12:10.
8) The Rebbe stated this in a public address, on Purim 1987.
9) See Sefer Hasichos 5750 vol. 1, Parshas Toldos.
10) These talks are published respectively in Likkutei Sichos vol. 32 pp. 82-83; Hisvadoyos 5747 vol. 2, Purim address. Sefer Hasichos vol. 1, Parshas Toldos.
[My thanks to Rabbis Simon Jacobson, Manis Freidman and Sholom Moshe Paltiel for their contribution to this essay in content. My gratitude to Shmuel Levin, a writer and editor in Pittsburgh, for his editorial assistance.]
--------------------------------------------------------
Rabbi Jacobson is an internationally known lecturer on Israel, Torah and Jewish mysticism. He can be reached at YYJacobson@aol.com.
************
Spend Passover with Arutz Sheva at a resort in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv or Kfar Pines (near Hadera). Click here for info.
The All-White Man
The two Torah sections of this and the previous week, Tazria-Metzora (Leviticus chapters 12-15) discuss the laws of tzaraas, a spiritual illness whose identifying mark was a white patch or patches appearing on the skin of a person, the walls of a home or on a cloth or leather garment.(1)
Here we encounter a strange anomaly in biblical law: If the white patch appears on only part of a person's body, he or she is deemed spiritually impure. However, the Bible states, "If the affliction will erupt on the skin and it will cover the entire skin of the afflicted person from head to foot... When the priest sees that the affliction has covered all the skin, he shall declare the afflicted person to be pure. Now that he has turned completely white, he is pure."(2)
Apparently, this makes little sense. A patch of whiteness on a person's arm, for example, demonstrates a case of moral and spiritual impurity, while if this patch spreads over his entire body -- head to toe, front to back -- he is considered pure and clean. This would be akin to saying that a small infection in one part of the body deems the infected person ill, while if the infection spreads to his entire body, he then is declared healthy.
What is the logic behind this law?
The Messianic Age
An intriguing Talmudic passage concerning the end of days recalls this strange biblical instruction about an all-white man.(3)
Says the Talmud: "The son of David," (the Moshiach, or Messiah), "will not come until the entire kingdom converts to heresy."
"Rava said, 'What is the verse [that foretells this prediction]? 'Now that he has turned completely white, he is pure.'" Just like when the affliction of whiteness spreads over a person's entire body it is a sign of purity, so, too, when the entire kingdom, from top to bottom, disintegrates into heresy, we know that the time of redemption, the moment of universal purity, has arrived.(4)
How are we to understand all of this?
The Pains and Blessings of Exposure
Our generation, steeped in the tradition of psychoanalysis and therapy, needs no explanation of the distinction between the "outside" and the "inside," how that which is on the outside may be diametrically opposed to that which is on the inside. Some people desperately hold on to the belief that their lives are functional and put together, though they feel some symptoms of anxiety and misery. They remain totally unaware that on a deeper unconscious level they are disintegrating and decaying. A powerful gulf separates their inner state from their outer conscious condition.
Many couples have learned how to behave respectfully toward one another on the surface, while on a more subtle level they are haunted by profoundly repressed feelings of anger and animosity toward each other.
The prerequisites for healing and integrating the two layers of self are awareness and exposure. As long as the outside is beautifully arranged like a museum, while the inside is rotting away, redemption is impossible. For any true change to occur, all of the inner grit and gravel must come gushing forth, generating pain and fear, but opening the opportunity for a new path.
Living in Denial
The most tragic story of modern Jewish history, the story of Israel over the past decade, is a case in point.
For ten years, a great part of the Israeli population ? and millions of Jews and non-Jews worldwide ? fell prey to the romantic dream that their neighboring Arab leaders craved peace and coexistence in the same way that Israel and its leaders yearned for such a day.
"They do not really want us dead," was the prevalent Jewish notion. "The war is merely a result of their frustration over occupied land." If we could somehow give them parts of the land and allow them to create a state of their own, a dawn of tranquility would descend upon the troubled region.
Based on this understanding of the Arab condition, Israel made tremendous sacrifices. It resurrected the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which states in its charter its objective to annihilate all of Israel, and allowed it to enjoy autonomy and self-governance in most of Gaza and the West Bank. Israel even gave this Palestinian Authority large amounts of weapons and money to enforce security and stability in the region.
It took six years and rivers of Jewish blood to wake us to reality. As the Arabs went on a crusade to murder Jewish babies, children, women and men in the most sadistic and brutal ways, targeting them in their bedrooms, buses, restaurants, at religious feasts and in their parents' arms, many finally awoke from the fantastical illusions that we are dealing with essentially good and decent human beings who crave for life and for peace.
The evil Arab terrorists, by piercing nails through the bodies of innocent children and burning them alive, demonstrated to the Jewish people that no life is sacred. As the bloodbath continued, we slowly began to face the truth of the moral depravity of the Palestinian culture so many of us were denying for so long. Many Israelis realized that peace would only be possible after an absolute defeat of the bloody terrorists and their assistants.
This realization, despite all of the pain involved, is the beginning of the cure. Having a cancerous growth in your body is horrible. But denying that you have this growth is the epitome of hell. To live with the illusion that "everything is just fine" is worst of all, for that makes it impossible to embark on the road to healing.
Facing Your Evil
Now we may understand the rationale behind the biblical law that a white patch on part of the body represents impurity, while if the same patch spreads to the entire body the person is deemed pure.(5)
As mentioned above, the skin affliction described in the Torah was essentially a spiritual and moral malady expressing itself in the physical symptom of a white patch. This skin disease developing on a person's body was an outward manifestation of some of his inner coarseness, immorality and evil being.
Yet, only part of this person's inner negative energy came to the fore in the form of a white patch. What about the remainder of it? This was comfortably concealed in the inner chambers of his psyche, veiled and eclipsed by multiple layers of denial and illusion. Therefore, the afflicted person was declared to be morally impure.
However, when the skin affliction spread to the person's entire body, it demonstrated that his inner moral depravity had been completely disclosed. The evil was no longer secretly lingering in the subconscious and enjoying the protection of scores of bodyguards of lies (to paraphrase Winston Churchill's famous description of truth during wartime). Such a person can no longer run from reality.
Such a human being stands on the threshold of recovery and liberation. He can now walk along the path of purity.
In other words, it is not the white patch appearing on the skin per se that makes a person impure, but rather that which remains behind, shrouded in mystery and refusing disclosure. It is these hidden demons, knowing full well that exposure equals suicide, that pose the worst threat to a moral life.
Yet, when our dark skeletons are released, our inner ugliness exposed and all of the evil in all of its manifestations is brought under the spotlight as denial and ambiguity perish -- the time of redemption is here.
Collapse of Structures
This is the meaning behind the intriguing prediction given by the Talmudic sages for the Messianic times ? that the Moshiach "will not come until the entire kingdom converts to heresy."(6).
The prophet Daniel presents a strange description of the Messianic era. It will be a time, Daniel writes, when the true nature of many people and matters will become clear, apparent and elucidated.(7) Clarity may be painful, since it exposes some very uncomfortable truths, yet it is the prerequisite for all healing and transformation. As long as you are capable of defining evil as good, illness as health, darkness as light and frivolousness as liberty, there is absolutely no hope for redemption. Only when the ugliness of a person or a situation is fully disclosed can it be supplanted with another path and an alternative direction.
This is the world, dear brothers and sisters, which we inhabit today ? a world in which so many tremendous and powerful structures of life and religion are beginning to disintegrate before our eyes. Their inner flaws, myths, inconsistencies, distortions, corruption and evil, disguised for centuries, are finally being unveiled for all to behold.
Indeed, I once heard from one of the great religious personalities of our generation, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, that the hallmark of our era in history lay in its power to "expose disguised evils, which will ultimately lead to their collapse."(8)
Distortions of Four Structures Exposed
Four of the greatest structures of humanity have, in recent times, been struck by this blessed fate.
The first was the death of communism.(9) For 70 years, this evil regime held hundreds of millions of people in its grip of terror. My own grandfather, Simon Yakobashvili, sharing the same fate of another 40 people, was sentenced to death, in a Moscow prison one Friday night in 1937 (his decree was subsequently waived in lieu of an exile verdict of 25 years in Siberia).
And then, as though out of the blue, this titanic empire faded away into oblivion. It did not happen by means of a war waged by the free world against the USSR that cost thousands of people their lives, as was the case of the French Revolution. Rather, it happened from within. The communist regime was based on a big fat lie; namely, absolute corruption disguised in the mantle of a utopian dream promising freedom and equality for all. The system of Soviet communism was rotten at its core. After years of endless lies and cover-ups, like a viscous tumor, the empire ate itself up from the inside, and it awoke one day without a soul.
The next stage of exposure is presently occurring in Islam. This religion, born in Arabia in the seventh century, contains splendid kernels of truth mixed with rotten seeds of evil.
This immoral depravity contained in some of its doctrines and in the hearts of its thinkers and leaders, has been eating at it for centuries. Now, finally, the day of exposure and reckoning has arrived. The moral ugliness of millions of Muslims who find it praiseworthy to kill countless innocent children, women and men is out in the open for all to behold.
Christianity, too, has been challenged in a profound way. The many cases of priests molesting children is a revealing commentary about the nature and success of celibacy, that powerful but distorted doctrine of the church that segregated heaven from earth. If priests are "human" and need to have an outlet for their intimate passions, let them get married, for heaven's sake.
Finally, right here at home, at the blessed shores of the United States, the disguised evil contained in the sophistication of open-minded liberalism that advocates absolute moral relativism, has come to the fore. When a university professor can compare President Bush to Adolph Hitler, you know that there is something deeply rotten and frightening about a doctrine that refuses to define good vs. evil in absolute terms and is incapable of defining Saddam, bin Laden, Hitler, Stalin and Arafat as evil men.
Time to Get Ready
Indeed, we encounter this phenomenon of exposure and clarity wherever we look, both in the corporate world and in our personal lives.
This also is happening increasingly in many Jewish circles today, where exposure of the false natures of many Jewish trends is occurring. Young women and men are discontent with half-truths and ambiguous cultural rituals. Teenagers are asking their parents, "What do we believe? If we believe that the Torah is real, that it is G-d's word, let's keep it. If not, why bother with any of it?"
Thus, in the final analysis, despite all of the genuine pain and horror of recent years, these are not frightening times. They are exciting times. History is changing; redemption is unfolding and we are privileged to be part of it.
The Rebbe would often say that our generation has been chosen to serve as the bridge between exile and redemption, between the past and the future, between war and peace. Our challenge on this day is this:
As all the disguised evil erupts, and disillusionment sweeps the world, as the "heresy" and depravity of so many kingdoms emerge, we must be present, mentally and spiritually, to inspire ourselves and the entire world with those unwavering and eternal moral truths, given by the Creator to all of His children, Jews and non-Jews, that are included in His blueprint for life, the Torah.
We must help ourselves ? and the world ? embrace a new, pure morality and spirituality that will bring genuine peace and dignity to all of mankind.
(This essay is based on three public addresses by the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Shabbas Tazria-Metzora 5742; Purim 5747 and Shabbas Toldos 5750 -- April 24, 1982; March 15, 1987 and December 2, 1990.(10))
Footnotes:
1) Not every white patch indicates tzaraat. There are several secondary symptoms that determine whether the person (or house or garment) should be declared tameh (impure). For example, in the human body, one of the signs of tzaraat is if the white patch subsequently caused (at least) two hairs in its area to turn white.
2) Leviticus 12:12-13.
3) Sanhedrin 97a. Cf. Talmud end of tractate Sotah.
4) Rashi to Sanhedrin, ibid.
5) A similar answer to the one presented below is found in Ibn Ezra, Ralbag, Abarbenel to Leviticus, ibid. Cf. Tur Haaruch, Panach Raza, ibid. and Kli Yakar to Leviticus 13:7. For another rationale to this law, see Likkutei Sichos vol. 32, pp. 77-81.
6) Cf. Maharal to Sanhedrin, ibid. for his very similar interpretation to this Talmudic statement.
7) Daniel 12:10.
8) The Rebbe stated this in a public address, on Purim 1987.
9) See Sefer Hasichos 5750 vol. 1, Parshas Toldos.
10) These talks are published respectively in Likkutei Sichos vol. 32 pp. 82-83; Hisvadoyos 5747 vol. 2, Purim address. Sefer Hasichos vol. 1, Parshas Toldos.
[My thanks to Rabbis Simon Jacobson, Manis Freidman and Sholom Moshe Paltiel for their contribution to this essay in content. My gratitude to Shmuel Levin, a writer and editor in Pittsburgh, for his editorial assistance.]
--------------------------------------------------------
Rabbi Jacobson is an internationally known lecturer on Israel, Torah and Jewish mysticism. He can be reached at YYJacobson@aol.com.
************
Spend Passover with Arutz Sheva at a resort in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv or Kfar Pines (near Hadera). Click here for info.