Repairing Relationships
Ammunition had run out for a unit in the Russian army, but it was still under fierce attack.
"Take out your bayonets," said the corporal, "we are going to engage the enemy in hand-to-hand combat."
"Please sir," said Pvt. Finkelstein. "Show me my man. Maybe he and I can reach some kind of agreement."
The Final Month
Two weeks ago commenced the last month of the Hebrew calendar, known as the month of Elul, when we bid farewell to a year gone by, and prepare to embrace a new one in its stead, beginning on Rosh Hashanah.
The great sage and mystic Rabbi Nathan Shapiro (died 1640 in Krakow, Poland) writes(1) that the four Hebrew letters of the name Elul (spelled Aleph, Lamed, Vuv, Lamed) is the acronym of the four Hebrew words "Aron, Luchos, V'shevrei, Luchos" (which also begin with the Hebrew letters Aleph, Lamed, Vuv, Lamed). These words, a quote from the Talmud(2), mean this: "The Ark containing the whole tablets and the broken tablets."
Let me explain.
In the book of Exodus(3), the Bible captures the dramatic tale of how, following the Revelation at Sinai, G-d carved out two tablets of granite, engraved on them the Ten Commandments and presented them to Moses on Mount Sinai. When Moses descended the mountain, however, he observed that the Israelites had created a golden calf as an idol. Moses threw the tablets from his hands and smashed them into pieces.
After a powerful confrontation with G-d, Moses persuades Him, as it were, to forgive the Jewish people for their betrayal. Moses then, acting on G-d's instructions, carves out a second pair of tablets, to replace the smashed first ones.
When an Ark was made to be located in the holiest chamber in the Tabernacle the Jews erected in the desert, both sets of tablets were placed therein: the second whole pair of tablets, as well as the fragmented pieces of the first tablets smashed to pieces.(2)
But what is the connection to the month of Elul? Why does the name of this month symbolize this idea of the Ark containing both sets of tablets, the complete ones and the broken ones?(4)
The Survivor
To understand this, let me share with you the following story:(5)
After the war, a Holocaust survivor came to visit his one-time spiritual master, the famed Rebbe of the Chassidic dynasty of Ger, Rabbi Avraham Mordechai Alter.(6)
This broken Jew had been deported to the death camps together with his wife, children, relatives and entire community. The man's wife and children were gassed, his relatives decimated and his entire community wiped out. He emerged from the ashes a lonely man in a vast world that had silently swallowed the blood of six million Jews.
The Jew lost one more thing in the camps: his G-d. After what he experienced in the hell of the Nazi death camp, he could not continue believing in a G-d who allowed for an Auschwitz. Although after the war he made aliyah to Eretz Israel (what was then known as Palestine), he completely abandoned Jewish practice and observance. Yet, he missed his old Rebbe and went to visit him in Tel Aviv.
The Gerer Rebbe himself lost large chunks of his family in the Holocaust. In addition, nearly all of his 250,000 followers were wiped out by the Germans. Through an extraordinary web of connections, involving some high-level Nazi officers, the Rebbe of Ger and some members of his immediate family managed to escape German-occupied Warsaw in 1940. They arrived in Eretz Israel soon after.
Upon hearing the story of his disciple, the Rebbe of Ger broke into sobs. The man and his Rebbe sat together mourning what they had lost. They wept for an entire world that was destroyed. After a long period of weeping, the Gerer Rebbe wiped his tears and communicated -- in Yiddish -- the following idea.
"Before Your Eyes"
In his farewell address to his people, Moses recounts the moment when he descended from Mount Sinai with the two Divine tablets to present to the Jewish people:(7)
"I descended from the mountain," Moses recalls, "the mountain was still burning with fire and the two tablets of the covenant were in my two hands. I immediately saw that you had sinned to G-d, making a cast calf. You were so quick to turn from the path that G-d had prescribed.
"I grasped the two tablets, and threw them down from my two hands, and I smashed them before your eyes."
Moses proceeds to relate how after much toil he succeeded in "convincing" G-d to forgive the Jewish people for their sin. He then, as mentioned above, carved out a second pair of tablets to replace the smashed first ones.
Though the two sets were identical in content, containing the Ten Commandments, the second pair did not possess the same Divine quality as the first tablets, which were "G-d's handiwork and G-d's script."(8) The second tablets were Moses' creation, endorsed by G-d, but not made by the Almighty.
Now, considering the well-known meticulousness of each word in the Bible, Moses' words "I smashed them before your eyes" seem superfluous. Suppose Moses had turned around and broken the tablets out of view. Would that in any way have lessened the tragedy? Why did Moses find it important to emphasize that the breaking occurred "before your eyes"?(9)
Two Worlds
What Moses was saying, explained the Rebbe of Ger, was that "I smashed the tablets only before your eyes." The shattering of the tablets occurred only before your eyes and from your perception. In reality, though, there exists a world in which the tablets have never been broken.
What Moses was attempting to communicate, the Rebbe of Ger explained, is that what seems to us as pure destruction and chaos does not always capture the complete story. "I smashed them before your eyes." Before your eyes there may be nothing but destruction and devastation. Yet, what in our world bespeaks total disaster may, in a different world, be wholesome.
"As inexplicable as it may seem," the Gerer Rebbe went on to say, "there is meaning in the absurdness of history; there is dignity in the volley of tears. The wholesome G-d -- a G-d who transcends all human logic and imagination and can appear to us as evil and cruel -- is present in every human experience.(10) G-d was present in the gas chambers and crematoriums; He was being gassed, as it were, together with two million holy Jewish children.(11) And if He was present, their brutal deaths could not be the end of the story.
"As hard as it is for you and I to believe," the Rebbe concluded, "I want you to know that the decimation of our families, our communities and our people occurred only 'before our eyes.' There remains a world in which the Jewish people are wholesome. Beneath the surface of our perception there exists a reality in which every single Jew from Abraham till our present day is profoundly alive.
"Today, all of this cannot be understood. Why does even one child need to suffer? We dare not believe that we have the answer. But the day will come," said the Rebbe of Ger, "when that other world will be exposed. G-d will transform our perceptions and paradigms. He will mend our broken tablets and our broken nation. We will discover how the tablets were really never broken and the Jewish people were always complete."
Only a man who experienced the horrific sufferings of the war on his own flesh is entitled to utter these words. Those of us who, thank G-d, haven't seen life in its darker manifestations, ought never to become philosophical experts on theodicy, pontificating to others how "everything is really for the good." Pain is not an intellectual subject; it is raw, personal and real. If you haven't been there, you ought to keep your mouth shut. You ought to stand in humble awe before a survivor of tragedy.
You must remember that the heresy of a Jew from Auschwitz may at times be holier than the faith of an American Jew whose greatest crisis in life is that he lost the keys to his second car or that the sushi in the restaurant was not fresh.
When the Rebbe of Ger spoke these words, he spoke them with a sense of personal grief. He was not an objective preacher of "religious truths"; he felt the pain from inside. Thus, his words gave back to this broken Jew his soul, his faith, his courage.
Shattered Dreams
Notwithstanding the grand distinctions, the above messages can be applied to our lives, as well.
Many of us once owned a set of sacred tablets that at some point in our life were destroyed.
It may have been the death of a mother or father at a young age, bringing to an abrupt end the nurturing and security a child so desperately needs from parents. It may have been any other form of pain, abuse or loss that you experienced during your life that denied you the love, joy and optimism you once called your own. It may be fear, shame, insecurity, guilt, resentment, disappointment, mistrust or other forms of emotional trauma that began to afflict you at some point in your life, shattering your inner sacred and divine "tablets".
Many of us create for ourselves a second pair of "tablets" in order to substitute for the first ones that were lost. But they are not quite the same. The second set of "tablets" lack the magic and the innocence of the original "tablets" that no longer exist. In the depth of our hearts, we crave to reclaim something of the wonder of the old tablets. But it is to no avail: the clock of life never turns back.
Here lay the empowering message of Moses to his beloved people before his own demise: there is a secret world in which your first tablets were never broken. Notwithstanding the abuse and pain you experienced, each of you possesses a tiny corner in your soul that forever remains invincible, pure and sacred, filled with confidence, love, joy and hope.
What is more, when your perception expands, you might discover how your shattered dreams may be part of your individual path to wholesomeness. Wholesomeness does not come in one shape; for some it comes in the form of a broken heart. What is broken in one level of perception may be wholesome in another.
The Power of Elul
Here lies the unique power of this month in the Jewish calendar, the final one of the year, the name of which spells out the words "the Ark containing the whole Tablets and the broken Tablets."
This is the month that allows you to build in your personal life an "ark" that will contain not only your second complete tablets, but will also embrace the broken pieces of your first tablets. This is the time when you are empowered and can pick up the broken pieces of your life and discover that there is a part of yourself that was never really broken.
What is more, during this month, you may go back and, with tender love, lift up every broken piece of your life, learning how each of them constitutes another rosebud in your soul's wholesome orchard.
Footnotes:
1) Sefer Megaleh Amukos.
2) Bava Basra 14b.
3) Chapters 32-34.
4) On a literal level, the connection might be this: On the 29th of Av, at the end of Moses' second 40-day period on Mount Sinai, G-d agreed to give the second set of tablets to Israel. The following day Moses ascended the mountain again, and remained on it throughout the month of Elul. On Yom Kippur, he descended with the new set of tablets (Rashi to Exodus 33:11).
5) I read the story in a sermon by Rabbi C. M. Weinberger, shlita, spiritual leader of Aish Kodesh Institute in Woodmere, N.Y. Afterward, I heard it from an elder Gerer Chassid who still remembered the Imrei Emes from his youth in Poland.
6) Rabbi Avraham Mordechai (born in 1866), known as the Imrei Emes, was the third Rebbe of Ger and passed away in 1948 in Jerusalem. The city was under siege at the time, so he was buried in the courtyard of his yeshiva. Currently, his grandson, Rabbi Yakkov Alter, serves as the spiritual leader of this great Chassidic group, centered in Jerusalem.
7) Deuteronomy 9:15-17.
8) Exodus 32:16.
9) Cf. Abarbanel to Deuteronomy 9:17. Likkutei Sichos vol. 9 p. 241; vol. 26 p. 252.
10) Cf. Tanya section 1:26; section 3:12; section 4:11.
11) The Bible, the Talmud and all of Kabbalistic and Chassidic literature discuss the of the Shechinah, the divine presence, experiencing the pain of every human being. The Kabbalah takes it a step further: Since the human soul is an aspect of G--d, a "fragment" of G-d, as it were, when a soul suffers, it is in essence a piece of G-d suffering. According to Kabbalah, the ultimate question is not why G-d allows good people to suffer so horribly, but why does G-d allow Himself such suffering?
[My gratitude to Shmuel Levin, a writer and editor in Pittsburgh, for his editorial assistance.]
All contents copyright © 2004 Rabbi Yosef Y. Jacobson.
Ammunition had run out for a unit in the Russian army, but it was still under fierce attack.
"Take out your bayonets," said the corporal, "we are going to engage the enemy in hand-to-hand combat."
"Please sir," said Pvt. Finkelstein. "Show me my man. Maybe he and I can reach some kind of agreement."
The Final Month
Two weeks ago commenced the last month of the Hebrew calendar, known as the month of Elul, when we bid farewell to a year gone by, and prepare to embrace a new one in its stead, beginning on Rosh Hashanah.
The great sage and mystic Rabbi Nathan Shapiro (died 1640 in Krakow, Poland) writes(1) that the four Hebrew letters of the name Elul (spelled Aleph, Lamed, Vuv, Lamed) is the acronym of the four Hebrew words "Aron, Luchos, V'shevrei, Luchos" (which also begin with the Hebrew letters Aleph, Lamed, Vuv, Lamed). These words, a quote from the Talmud(2), mean this: "The Ark containing the whole tablets and the broken tablets."
Let me explain.
In the book of Exodus(3), the Bible captures the dramatic tale of how, following the Revelation at Sinai, G-d carved out two tablets of granite, engraved on them the Ten Commandments and presented them to Moses on Mount Sinai. When Moses descended the mountain, however, he observed that the Israelites had created a golden calf as an idol. Moses threw the tablets from his hands and smashed them into pieces.
After a powerful confrontation with G-d, Moses persuades Him, as it were, to forgive the Jewish people for their betrayal. Moses then, acting on G-d's instructions, carves out a second pair of tablets, to replace the smashed first ones.
When an Ark was made to be located in the holiest chamber in the Tabernacle the Jews erected in the desert, both sets of tablets were placed therein: the second whole pair of tablets, as well as the fragmented pieces of the first tablets smashed to pieces.(2)
But what is the connection to the month of Elul? Why does the name of this month symbolize this idea of the Ark containing both sets of tablets, the complete ones and the broken ones?(4)
The Survivor
To understand this, let me share with you the following story:(5)
After the war, a Holocaust survivor came to visit his one-time spiritual master, the famed Rebbe of the Chassidic dynasty of Ger, Rabbi Avraham Mordechai Alter.(6)
This broken Jew had been deported to the death camps together with his wife, children, relatives and entire community. The man's wife and children were gassed, his relatives decimated and his entire community wiped out. He emerged from the ashes a lonely man in a vast world that had silently swallowed the blood of six million Jews.
The Jew lost one more thing in the camps: his G-d. After what he experienced in the hell of the Nazi death camp, he could not continue believing in a G-d who allowed for an Auschwitz. Although after the war he made aliyah to Eretz Israel (what was then known as Palestine), he completely abandoned Jewish practice and observance. Yet, he missed his old Rebbe and went to visit him in Tel Aviv.
The Gerer Rebbe himself lost large chunks of his family in the Holocaust. In addition, nearly all of his 250,000 followers were wiped out by the Germans. Through an extraordinary web of connections, involving some high-level Nazi officers, the Rebbe of Ger and some members of his immediate family managed to escape German-occupied Warsaw in 1940. They arrived in Eretz Israel soon after.
Upon hearing the story of his disciple, the Rebbe of Ger broke into sobs. The man and his Rebbe sat together mourning what they had lost. They wept for an entire world that was destroyed. After a long period of weeping, the Gerer Rebbe wiped his tears and communicated -- in Yiddish -- the following idea.
"Before Your Eyes"
In his farewell address to his people, Moses recounts the moment when he descended from Mount Sinai with the two Divine tablets to present to the Jewish people:(7)
"I descended from the mountain," Moses recalls, "the mountain was still burning with fire and the two tablets of the covenant were in my two hands. I immediately saw that you had sinned to G-d, making a cast calf. You were so quick to turn from the path that G-d had prescribed.
"I grasped the two tablets, and threw them down from my two hands, and I smashed them before your eyes."
Moses proceeds to relate how after much toil he succeeded in "convincing" G-d to forgive the Jewish people for their sin. He then, as mentioned above, carved out a second pair of tablets to replace the smashed first ones.
Though the two sets were identical in content, containing the Ten Commandments, the second pair did not possess the same Divine quality as the first tablets, which were "G-d's handiwork and G-d's script."(8) The second tablets were Moses' creation, endorsed by G-d, but not made by the Almighty.
Now, considering the well-known meticulousness of each word in the Bible, Moses' words "I smashed them before your eyes" seem superfluous. Suppose Moses had turned around and broken the tablets out of view. Would that in any way have lessened the tragedy? Why did Moses find it important to emphasize that the breaking occurred "before your eyes"?(9)
Two Worlds
What Moses was saying, explained the Rebbe of Ger, was that "I smashed the tablets only before your eyes." The shattering of the tablets occurred only before your eyes and from your perception. In reality, though, there exists a world in which the tablets have never been broken.
What Moses was attempting to communicate, the Rebbe of Ger explained, is that what seems to us as pure destruction and chaos does not always capture the complete story. "I smashed them before your eyes." Before your eyes there may be nothing but destruction and devastation. Yet, what in our world bespeaks total disaster may, in a different world, be wholesome.
"As inexplicable as it may seem," the Gerer Rebbe went on to say, "there is meaning in the absurdness of history; there is dignity in the volley of tears. The wholesome G-d -- a G-d who transcends all human logic and imagination and can appear to us as evil and cruel -- is present in every human experience.(10) G-d was present in the gas chambers and crematoriums; He was being gassed, as it were, together with two million holy Jewish children.(11) And if He was present, their brutal deaths could not be the end of the story.
"As hard as it is for you and I to believe," the Rebbe concluded, "I want you to know that the decimation of our families, our communities and our people occurred only 'before our eyes.' There remains a world in which the Jewish people are wholesome. Beneath the surface of our perception there exists a reality in which every single Jew from Abraham till our present day is profoundly alive.
"Today, all of this cannot be understood. Why does even one child need to suffer? We dare not believe that we have the answer. But the day will come," said the Rebbe of Ger, "when that other world will be exposed. G-d will transform our perceptions and paradigms. He will mend our broken tablets and our broken nation. We will discover how the tablets were really never broken and the Jewish people were always complete."
Only a man who experienced the horrific sufferings of the war on his own flesh is entitled to utter these words. Those of us who, thank G-d, haven't seen life in its darker manifestations, ought never to become philosophical experts on theodicy, pontificating to others how "everything is really for the good." Pain is not an intellectual subject; it is raw, personal and real. If you haven't been there, you ought to keep your mouth shut. You ought to stand in humble awe before a survivor of tragedy.
You must remember that the heresy of a Jew from Auschwitz may at times be holier than the faith of an American Jew whose greatest crisis in life is that he lost the keys to his second car or that the sushi in the restaurant was not fresh.
When the Rebbe of Ger spoke these words, he spoke them with a sense of personal grief. He was not an objective preacher of "religious truths"; he felt the pain from inside. Thus, his words gave back to this broken Jew his soul, his faith, his courage.
Shattered Dreams
Notwithstanding the grand distinctions, the above messages can be applied to our lives, as well.
Many of us once owned a set of sacred tablets that at some point in our life were destroyed.
It may have been the death of a mother or father at a young age, bringing to an abrupt end the nurturing and security a child so desperately needs from parents. It may have been any other form of pain, abuse or loss that you experienced during your life that denied you the love, joy and optimism you once called your own. It may be fear, shame, insecurity, guilt, resentment, disappointment, mistrust or other forms of emotional trauma that began to afflict you at some point in your life, shattering your inner sacred and divine "tablets".
Many of us create for ourselves a second pair of "tablets" in order to substitute for the first ones that were lost. But they are not quite the same. The second set of "tablets" lack the magic and the innocence of the original "tablets" that no longer exist. In the depth of our hearts, we crave to reclaim something of the wonder of the old tablets. But it is to no avail: the clock of life never turns back.
Here lay the empowering message of Moses to his beloved people before his own demise: there is a secret world in which your first tablets were never broken. Notwithstanding the abuse and pain you experienced, each of you possesses a tiny corner in your soul that forever remains invincible, pure and sacred, filled with confidence, love, joy and hope.
What is more, when your perception expands, you might discover how your shattered dreams may be part of your individual path to wholesomeness. Wholesomeness does not come in one shape; for some it comes in the form of a broken heart. What is broken in one level of perception may be wholesome in another.
The Power of Elul
Here lies the unique power of this month in the Jewish calendar, the final one of the year, the name of which spells out the words "the Ark containing the whole Tablets and the broken Tablets."
This is the month that allows you to build in your personal life an "ark" that will contain not only your second complete tablets, but will also embrace the broken pieces of your first tablets. This is the time when you are empowered and can pick up the broken pieces of your life and discover that there is a part of yourself that was never really broken.
What is more, during this month, you may go back and, with tender love, lift up every broken piece of your life, learning how each of them constitutes another rosebud in your soul's wholesome orchard.
Footnotes:
1) Sefer Megaleh Amukos.
2) Bava Basra 14b.
3) Chapters 32-34.
4) On a literal level, the connection might be this: On the 29th of Av, at the end of Moses' second 40-day period on Mount Sinai, G-d agreed to give the second set of tablets to Israel. The following day Moses ascended the mountain again, and remained on it throughout the month of Elul. On Yom Kippur, he descended with the new set of tablets (Rashi to Exodus 33:11).
5) I read the story in a sermon by Rabbi C. M. Weinberger, shlita, spiritual leader of Aish Kodesh Institute in Woodmere, N.Y. Afterward, I heard it from an elder Gerer Chassid who still remembered the Imrei Emes from his youth in Poland.
6) Rabbi Avraham Mordechai (born in 1866), known as the Imrei Emes, was the third Rebbe of Ger and passed away in 1948 in Jerusalem. The city was under siege at the time, so he was buried in the courtyard of his yeshiva. Currently, his grandson, Rabbi Yakkov Alter, serves as the spiritual leader of this great Chassidic group, centered in Jerusalem.
7) Deuteronomy 9:15-17.
8) Exodus 32:16.
9) Cf. Abarbanel to Deuteronomy 9:17. Likkutei Sichos vol. 9 p. 241; vol. 26 p. 252.
10) Cf. Tanya section 1:26; section 3:12; section 4:11.
11) The Bible, the Talmud and all of Kabbalistic and Chassidic literature discuss the of the Shechinah, the divine presence, experiencing the pain of every human being. The Kabbalah takes it a step further: Since the human soul is an aspect of G--d, a "fragment" of G-d, as it were, when a soul suffers, it is in essence a piece of G-d suffering. According to Kabbalah, the ultimate question is not why G-d allows good people to suffer so horribly, but why does G-d allow Himself such suffering?
[My gratitude to Shmuel Levin, a writer and editor in Pittsburgh, for his editorial assistance.]
All contents copyright © 2004 Rabbi Yosef Y. Jacobson.