Chasidic Thought - Blog

The Jewish Religion vs. The Jewish Reality

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 09:36:51 +0700

Men are keepers of the Jewish religion. That's why men are rabbis.

Women are keepers of the Jewish reality. That's why women are mothers.

Men need ritual to feel connected to G-d because men need to be active.

Women do not need a program or a schedule for their Jewishness because women can just "be."

Shuls were invented as a place for men to feel connected to G-d, otherwise they would hardly ever feel connected.

This takes care of the problem of figuring out how to include Jewish women in rituals like the synagogue service. Women don't need to be more participatory in the Jewish religion. It's men that need to feel more at home in the Jewish reality.

Do want to know the greatest proof that it is the Jewish reality -- not the Jewish religion -- that preserves us through eternity?

Anybody who was ever attracted to make a radical change and become more observant has done so not because of an experience they had in shul, but because of an experience they had in a Jewish home.

תולה ארץ על בלימה

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 14:44:26 +0700

'He suspends the world over an open void.' -- Liturgy, Rosh HaShannah

Do Dead People Bleed?

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 22:02:34 +0700

I’m reminded of another joke, one that was told to me as a child by my psychologist father. A lady goes to the shrink and tells him all her friends think she’s crazy. “Why do they think that?” he asks. “Because I’m dead and no one believes me.” “Ah,” says the therapist. (Therapists have to say, “Ah.”) The lady is happy to be believed. “But tell me,” says the therapist, “Do dead people bleed?” “No,” says the lady, “They most certainly do not.” “Aha!” says the therapist as he grabs the lady’s hand, sticks her finger with a needle that he’s presumably been carrying in his pocket for just such an occassion and squeezes out a drop of blood. “What do you say to this?” he demands triumphantly. “Well, what do you know,” says the lady in wide-eyed disbelief, “Dead people do bleed.”

140 Characters or Less

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 23:41:08 +0700

Some guy is tweeting all of Moby Dick 140 characters at a time.

I wondered if you could tweet the whole Torah a verse or two at a time.

The longest verse in the Bible is Esther 8:9. Look it up. It doesn't fit.

Why this interested me long enough to write this post, I do not know. I think it had something to do with substitutions and transpositions of letters.

Will, Chance and Essence

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 00:42:52 +0700

The name Purim comes from a Persian word for a lottery because the evil Haman cast lots to determine the month in which to carry out his plan to exterminate the Jews. It seems odd to name a holiday after the method our enemy sought to employ for our destruction. We don't call Channukah by a name like Institutional Religous Perescution or Forced Assimilation. What's the secret of the lottery that makes it an apt name for a celebration of Jewish survival?

According to how chasidus explains this story, it is evident that Haman either knew or at least intuited quite a bit about the mysteries of creation. Haman intentionally used a lottery as his means of carrying out his evil plan because he wanted to circumvent the natural order of the universe. He somehow grasped that according to S.O.P., his attempt to destroy the Jews was bound to be thwarted by G-d. That's how things work. Mess with the Jews and G-d gets mad. But by using a random method of carrying out (or at least picking a date) for his attack on the Jews, Haman sought to bypass the rules that normally govern the universe, particularly the hard and fast rule that the Jews are eternal and that, in the end, G-d is always on their side. In the entropy of randomness, however, no such rules exist.

In other words, Haman had a will -- to destroy the Jews. But G-d has a will -- to keep them around. In a battle of wills, G-d always gets what He wants. But beyond will there is luck. Rather than exercising his will in choosing the date for the annihilation of the Jews, Haman left it up to chance. And when it comes to a lottery, every player has the same odds.

What Haman didn't realize is that just as beyond will there is chance, beyond chance there is essence.

When I choose something, I am exercising my will. When I let fate choose for me, I am leaving things up to chance. But when something happens automatically with no option of choosing at all, that is an expression of essence.

You know what they say? You can choose your friends but you can't choose your family. Our relationship with G-d is not solely a matter of our having been "chosen," although we are famous for it. We are G-d's people because our bond with Him lies beyond choice. We are G-d's children. What makes me my father's son has nothing to do with his will. He didn't choose me to be his child. He exerted no will in endowing me with his DNA. I am an extension of my father which requires no choosing at all. I am his essence.

Happy Purim

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 00:02:11 +0700

For you Purim related viewing pleasure, something my brother, Dovid, put together for Purim a couple of years ago. Click here.

Man and the Machine

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 20:43:58 +0700

Chasidus speaks at length about the doctrine of two souls. Particularly, the Alter Rebbe's Tanya describes the nature of these two opposing spiritual forces which are called the animalistic soul and the G-dly soul. In short, the animalistic soul is the drive for self-preservation, the life-force and the will of the body. The G-dly soul is the force that craves unity with G-d above all else.

Tanya teaches us to appreciate the true purpose of our existence and empowers us to choose behaviors that serve as an outlet for the G-dly soul.

But the question is asked: "Who does the choosing?"

The simple answer is "you." "You" do the choosing. Why does it have to be any more complicated than that.

But you ask, "Who am I?"

Okay, let's got complicated. In technical chasidic terms, the "you" that chooses between the animalistic soul and the G-dly soul is actually another soul called that rational soul. Before we procede, a point of clarification is in order. In English, the word "soul" carries with it certain unwanted connotations when searching for the proper translation of the Hebrew word "nefesh." While the English word "soul" implies, well, soulfullness, nefesh is a far less romantic word. A nefesh is merely a drive or a force which has the potential to animate innert matter such as the body. Yes, a nefesh is a "spiritual" force inasmuch as it itself is intangible, but again, the English language puts us at a disadvantage because "spiritual" here does not mean holy, altruistic or transcendent. It just means non-physical much like gravity and magnetism are non-physical, although their effects on the physical are empirically observable.

So, there is this third soul, the rational soul, that does the choosing. If the animal soul judges everything based on how it affects the self and the G-dly soul's single criterion for evaluating anything is it's gratification of the will of G-d, then the rational soul's basis for choosing what it does is whether or not it makes sense. The rational soul is amoral. It is moved by logic, not by sentiment or whim. It is not concerned with adhering to any particular code or upholding any particular loyalty. It's only concern is to be consistent. It interprets stimuli and makes the objective decision most consistent with the information with which it is presented. That's why the rational soul can side with the animalistic soul at one moment and with the G-dly soul the next. It's truly impartial -- completely sincere in its readiness to hear out any argument.

Interestingly, the Tanya --which is a guidebook for making better decisions -- speaks very little about the entity that does the deciding. The Tanya describes both the animalistic soul and the G-dly soul in great depth, yet of the rational soul it hardly makes the faintest allusion. Why is that so?

The Tanya doesn't speak ABOUT the rational soul because the Tanya speaks TO the rational soul. It speaks TO the "you" that makes the decisions. In other words, the entire book is speaking TO the chooser... ABOUT his choices.

One of my favorite self-help books was written fifty years ago by a Los Angeles plastic surgeon named Maxwell Maltz. The book, Psycho-Cybernetics, comprised the essence of Maltz's discoveries on the subject of identity and self-image.

Among Maltz's main points and the basis for the term he invented -- psycho (of the mind) cybernetics (computer or a machine) -- is that man is not a machine, but man uses a machine. That machine is the "goal-striving mechanism" called the mind. Like any other machine, it has no will of its own. It is a super-computer which performs those functions for which it is programmed.

In other words, the machine is not moral or immoral. The machine is not happy or unhappy. The machine just runs and has no opinion about how it's used. That's why it can just as well be implemented as a failure mechanism as a success mechanism. It does whatever YOU tell it to do.

But who is the "you" that orders the machine? Ah, but this is the thesis of Maltz's book: that self-image is king. The machine will always work automatically, effortlessly to produce the results consistent with whatever self-image man holds.

In other words, we program our machine by deciding who we are, that is, by way of identification. So, in terms of Tanya, if we identify with the agenda of the animalistic soul, then the rational soul will make sure that we behave in ways that prove that the animalistic soul is right. If, on the other hand, we teach ourselves to identify with the G-dly soul, then we quite literally re-program the rational soul to feel logically compelled to make behavioral choices in-line with that which is important to the G-dly soul.

When we tell the GPS unit in our car that we want to go "home," the GPS doesn't care what we choose to define as "home." It only knows that it is going to tell us how to get there as quickly as possible.

The study of chasidus is our way of telling the GPS what "home" is. Chasidus is not entertainment or fun or inspiration. It is the intellectually rigorous task of re-programming the machine.

Tired of Being Tired

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 13:34:43 +0700

Abba Eban is famous for having once quipped, "History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives."

It seems like a cynical view, but Eban was, in the main, spot on with this remark. It's rare that a person will get totally honest with himself and admit that his way isn't working until he's already gone through a good deal of misery. That's why it's hard to convince people to make a positive change -- be it in thoughts, feelings or behaviors -- until they've reached a state of desperation.

In some circles, we call this "getting tired of being tired." Some call it "surrender." Others call it "getting real." Whatever it's called, it speaks to a nagging truth about us that until we're laid out flat, we just can't seem to throw in the towel no matter how bad of beating we're taking.

In chasidus, we speak of the state of bitul -- self-nullity and self-abnegation. All growth comes from bitul. Lack of growth is the result of the opposite of bitul -- rigidity of ego.

Chasidus uses a metaphor to explain why we have to become nothing before we can become a new something. A seed is a something. It is a seed. If you put it in the ground and tend to it, it will become a tree. But in between being a perfectly good seed and being a tree, the seed falls apart. At the moment the seed ceases being a seed, it's not yet a tree. The old seed is lost but the new tree has yet to grow.

There's a valuable secret hidden in this teaching. To become a new something, we have to first become nothing. We can take one of two routes through this process. The first is to keep doing the same old stuff until we're so beaten up that we're forced to listen to reason. The second is to choose to humble ourselves, to willingly let go of self, to surrender our something-ness, submit to a temporary state of nothing-ness and let G-d make a new and better something out of us.

The former is called humiliation. The latter is called humility. We can choose whichever we like. But , knowingly or not, we always choose.

Sermon for Lech L'cha -- Finding Your Song

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 09:15:44 +0700

Getting it Right
     An opera singer had just given a rather lackluster performance. He was ready to leave the stage in shame, when, suddenly, a man stood up in the back row and started screaming, “Encore! Encore!” The singer’s spirits were lifted. He obliged the request and repeated the aria from the opera. As soon as he finished, however, the same man in the back row started cheering again, “Encore! Encore!” so the singer sang the aria again. When he finished for the second time, the fan again yelled for more, “Encore! Encore!” The singer, feeling quite awkward by this time, called out to the man, “My good sir, I am happy that you enjoy my music but how many times do you want me to perform this same piece?” The man shouts back, “Until you get it right!”

Staying Put or Moving On
     Insanity has been defined as repeating the same behavior and expecting different results. On the other hand, there’s that old, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” How do we know when we need to stay where we are until we get it right and how do we know when to admit that what we’ve been doing isn’t working and that it’s time to move on?
      To phrase this quandary spiritual terms: each one of us was created with a mission. Our souls were embodied and given an exact number of days and hours to complete the tasks unique to us. But how do we know when we are getting closer to our mission and how do we know when we are simply stuck in the same place and wasting our time.
     When we were kids, we used to play a game where one kid was 'It' and leaves the room. The other kids choose an item in the room that ‘It’ has to locate and when he returns, everyone says “hotter” or “colder” as he gets closer or farther from the item until he finds it. Now, if only life could be that simple. Imagine if, as we negotiated through our life, G-d would call out to us, “Hotter! Colder!” We meet a new person, apply for a job, consider a geographic relocation, and G-d is shouting, “You’re getting warmer. Warmer! Oh, now you’re red hot!”

Abraham's Move
      This week’s portion begins with G-d’s command to our father, Abraham, to “Go away from your homeland, your father’s house and your birthplace to the land that I will show you.” (Genesis 12:1) Abraham was a man on a mission. Abraham knew when he had to do. True, it required faith to leave behind all that was familiar without foreknowledge of his destination. But. on the other hand, he had clear instructions. G-d told him to get up and go and G-d told him that He would show him where to stop when he got to where he needed to be. That’s a lot more information than the rest of us will ever have to go when traveling the road of life. Abraham was a prophet. He heard the word of G-d. The rest of us, it seems, are just trying to do our best – going on hunches, taking advice and sometimes just plain guessing. But do we ever know that our lives are going in the right direction? Do we even know what the right direction is?

G-dly Direction for the Rest of Us
      The fifth Rebbe, Rabbi Shalom DovBer of Lubavitch once taught, “From the very moment that God instructed Abraham to leave his homeland and set out on his journey, the cosmic process of refinement began. Divine Sparks lay embedded in the physical world, awaiting their redemption. Saintly individuals, who possess clear vision, can perceive on their own just where the captive sparks they are meant to refine are located and go there on their own. The rest of us are led by Divine providence to places or situations in which the sparks we are meant to liberate await us.”
      There are those rare, holy men and women who are clear conduits for the expression of G-d’s will. They are men and women who are completely in tune with the purpose that G-d has for them. They “see” where their mission lies and seek out the people, places and situations that are consonant with their true calling in life.
     The rest of us – those who do not see the G-dly sparks or even know where they are to be found – are guided by another system: Divine Providence. We may not hear G-d’s booming voice or see our destiny laid out before us in a prophetic vision, but we are always being guided, always being subtly pointed in the direction we must go. We need only keep our eyes open, be sensitive and learn how to take a hint.
      A story is told of the Rebbe’s wife, Rebbetzin Chaya Mushka. Often, she would get away from her Crowh Heights, Brooklyn neighborhood and be driven to a park in Long Island where she would enjoy the fresh air and quiet. One day, as her car neared the park, the driver found the regular route was closed and was forced to travel along a parallel street. Suddenly, the sounds of a woman screaming frantically in Russian could be heard. When the driver stopped at the next traffic light, the Rebbetzin asked that he turn the car around and return to where they had heard the woman’s cries.
     They saw a woman, obviously distraught, standing on the curb and weeping while movers carried furniture on to the county marshal's truck. The Rebbetzin asked her driver to find out what the situation was all about so he got out of the car and approached the marshal who proceeded to explain that the woman had not paid her rent for many months and was being evicted.
     When the driver returned to the car, the Rebbetzin asked him to go back and find out from the marshal how much the woman owed, and if he would accept a personal check. The family owed approximately $6,700. The marshal said that he had no problem accepting a personal check, as long as he confirmed with the bank that the check was good. When the driver informed the Rebbitzin of the details, she took out her checkbook and wrote a check for the full amount.
     The marshal made a phone call to the bank and then instructed the movers to take everything back into the house. At her request, the Rebbitzin was speedily driven off before the woman ever realized what had happened.
     Curious to understand the Rebbetzin's motive for this magnanimous act of kindness toward a stranger, the driver asked the Rebbetzin what had prompted her to give such a large amount of monet to someone whom she had never even met.
     The Rebbetzin explained: “Once, when I was a young girl, my father (the Sixth Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak) took me for a walk in the park. He sat me down on a bench and started to tell me about the idea of hashgachah pratis (‘divine providence’). He told me, 'Every time something causes us to deviate from our normal routine, there is a divinely ordained reason for it.' When we were forced to detour from our route, it occurred to me that there is a purpose for this. When I heard the sound of a woman crying I realized why we were led this way.”

Finding Your Song
     This week, a program on NPR told the story of Moshe Cotel.
     Cotel was raised as a religious Jew, but by age 13, the genius child prodigy had written his first symphony and, as he relates it, embraced classical music as his religion. At 23, he won the prestigious American Academy Rome Prize for music composition and studied in Italy for two years. Eventually he was appointed to the faculty of the Peabody Conservatory of Music at Johns Hopkins University and rose to chairman of the composition department.
     Although he had drifted from his Judaism, Cotel still indentified strongly as a Jew and in the mid-1990s, composed an opera called “Dreyfus" which depcited the notorious anti-Semitic trial of a Jewish officer in pre-World War I France. The opera was performed in Germany and Austria and Cotel was invited to conduct. To brush up on his German, he began taking language instruction from an elderly German widow, to whom he explained his opera. The old German lady was clearly moved by the story but said little more about her feelings about the theme of the opera.
     Sometime afterward, Cotel was walking to synagogue one Shabbos morning when a familiar voice behind him greeted him in Hebrew.
     Cotel turned and, to his surprise, there stood the elderly woman who had tutored him in German.
     “Where did you learn Hebrew?” he asked.
     “I’m taking lessons now,” she replied. “I never told you when you took those German lessons from me that I was born Jewish. During the war, my parents placed me in a Catholic orphanage to save my life. In my old age, I’m coming back to my Judaism, and it was because of you.”
     Cotel was stunned. “My life changed in that moment,” he said. “I knew I had to become a rabbi. It just flew down into my head. Without knowing it, I had changed this woman’s life in her final years. One of the basic teachings of Judaism is that everyone is born into this world with a task, with a mission, and our challenge is to discover what that mission is, to hear it above all the static we have in our heads.”
     So, as a world renown composer in his mid-50s with a lifetime of accomplishment behind him, Cotel resolved to leave music behind and begin a new life because of the effects of a serendipitous encounter with an old woman.
     But the story doesn't end there. There were more sparks for Cotel to redeem and G-d's gentle providence led him to those as well.
     As he finished his studies, Cotel proposed, out of laziness, to perform a rabbinical thesis rather than write one. So he was permitted to give a piano recital in which he paired traditional rabbinical monologues with pieces of classical music. To his surprise, he soon found he had something of a hit on his hands.
     Word about the piece, “Chronicles: A Jewish Life at the Classical Piano,” quickly spread among rabbis, cantors and Judaica scholars. Over the last five years, Cotel has performed it 64 times across the United States.
     “The whole thing kind of grew. None of this was on my life plan. If you told me my life would move that way a couple of years before it happened, I’d have said you were crazy. But G-d works in strange ways.”

Knowing the Flow
      We've all heard the expression, "Go with the flow." That's certainly better than fighting the flow, denying reality or brooding about frustrated expectations. But it's not enough just to sit back, relax and watch things happen. Finding our calling, zeroing in on our G-dly sparks, means that we have to have the awareness and presence of mind to "know the flow." How do we know which direction G-d is really leading us?
     When life takes an unexpected turn, we need to look around and think, "Look at where I am. How am I needed in this place? What unique opportunity to be of service is presenting itself now? Or am I needed in another place? Can I be more useful somewhere else?"
     Wherever we find ourselves at this moment, G-d is giving us ample indication as to whether to stay or go, and if we are to go, which direction we must travel. We often make life decisions based on a preconceived plan or a script of the kind of life we think we ought to have. But living up to our purpose means letting go of all that and having the courage and sensitivity to follow the music of life to the place where we are needed.

Dihydrogen Monoxide

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 10:39:28 +0700

Have you heard about the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide? Here are just some of the insidious effects of DHMO.
Death due to accidental inhalation of DHMO, even in small quantities.
Prolonged exposure to solid DHMO causes severe tissue damage.
DHMO is a major component of acid rain.
Gaseous DHMO can cause severe burns.
Contributes to soil erosion.
Given to vicious dogs involved in recent deadly attacks.
Of course, dihydrogen monoxide is none other than two hydrogen atoms bonded to a single atom of oxygen, better known as H2O. Dihydrogen Monoxide is water. (See more about the dihydrogen monoxide hoax.)

All year round in the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, the priests would pour libation offerings of wine upon the alter. On Sukkos, however, there was the special "water libation" in which simple water was offered before G-d.

The drawing of the water on Sukkos was the cause for much joy. As the Talmud declares, "One who has not experienced the joy of the water drawing festival has never experienced true joy in his life."

What was the big to-do about this unusual offering?

Chasidus explains that there are two kinds of spiritual experiences. One is likened to wine for it appeals to our senses and arouses our hearts and minds even to the point of intoxication. The other kind of spiritual experience is much more plain. Like water, it is life-sustaining but lacks any special taste or appeal.

A wine-like spiritual experience is typfied by the rousing stimulation of deep meditation, fervent prayer or focussed study, whereas the spiritual experience that is like water is far more subtle. It is the simple, tasteless experience of surrender -- when one submits to the will of G-d without any particular feeling or understanding.

So again, what is the cause for such joy in simple surrender?

The answer lies in the difference between wine and water. Ask a thirsty man in the desert which drink he prefers. The sophisticate and the deep thinker are like the vinophile with discerning pallate. They are unmoved by water. They hardly notice it. They see thier drink as a sensorial experience. But the simple Jew knows the pleasure of plain water. He knows the bliss of receiving pure life even when it does not stir the senses. For in his tasteless, colorless, odorless drink is the greatest pleasure one can experience -- the pleasure of life itself.