Renewal

Everything Is Constantly Rising Higher and Nothing You Can Do Can Stop I

The Rebbe on optimism in the face of disappointment and failure

By Tzvi Freeman

The Objective

Our universe was created through a cascade of descent.

It began with the emergence of infinite light, the unbounded, unknowable wisdom of the Creator. Then that light was entirely removed. Darkness, emptiness. And then a fine, carefully aimed trickle of light, a glimmer of the divine state of consciousness that had departed. And then a stepping down of that current of consciousness, finely tuning itself again and again to invest within yet more and more discrete restrictions of time and space, and yet lower and lower.

As the human psyche compresses the unbridled energy of raw desire into a tame and ordered intellect, and then sweeps aside that intellect so that palpable emotions may emerge, and then ekes out a dim shadow of those emotions as the articulations of conscious thought, which then emerge out of consciousness to become audible words and even physical gestures—

—so too, but on a vast cosmic scale, the divine consciousness compresses and constricts itself, stepping down and down again and again in uncountable descents, until our tangible, measurable, hard and solid reality could emerge.

A universe of such constricted consciousness, like a pebble lying on the ground, it knows no roots. A reality that looks and feels as though it has no origin beyond itself. A thing that just is.

Light became darkness, oneness became otherness.

The objective:The objective: That afterward will follow ascent after ascent. At every moment, a more receptive world. At every moment, a greater light than has ever shone. That afterward will follow ascent after ascent. At every moment, a more receptive world. At every moment, a greater light than has ever shone.2

Since that was the divine objective, that is what actually occurred. Once the descent was complete, a relentless ascent ensued.

“And the heavens and the earth were complete…on the seventh day.”3 The word for complete—ויכולו— also means to yearn. Heaven and earth began to yearn to return upward, as the Creator desired they should.

The souls that dwell in their heavenly place above perceive this, as do the tzadikim in this world. The sages tell us that those who devote their lives to the pursuit of Torah wisdom have no rest, neither in this world nor in the World To Come, because spiritually they rise constantly higher and higher.4 Why had they not reached this higher place beforehand? Because a moment ago it did not exist. At each moment, through their persistent toil of wisdom, a new, higher realm of existence emerges into being out of hidden mystery, to which they then ascend through the labor of their souls.5

The rest of us, however, perceive only a world of cyclical rise and fall. Indeed, that is how history is described by the Kabbalists. As the moon waxes and wanes, they explain, so the souls of humankind have their times of glory and luminance, and their times of diminution and darkness.

But the truth is that what appears to us as descent is a crucial stage within a continuous ascent. It is, after all, the entire objective of the universe which preceded its creation. Indeed, it preceded all of existence. And if so, there is no place from which even a seed of an idea of opposition to this ascent could emerge. Nothing, not you nor I nor any of G‑d’s creations could possibly stand in its way.

The Spiral Staircase

The Baal Shem Tov provided a magnificent analogy for this illusion—encapsulating in a single image that for which the Etz Chaim, the principal work of Lurianic Kabbalah, spends many chapters:6

Imagine yourself standing at the foot of a tall pillar. At the top of this pillar you can make out the entryway into a house. So you begin your ascent on the stairway upward.

But the stairway turns out to be a spiral staircase.With your first step, the spiral has already taken you to the backside of the pillar. With your first step, the spiral has already taken you to the backside of the pillar. Your objective has fallen out of view—and you fall into confusion. You thought you were on the path to ascent, but instead you’ve entered into darkness.

Nevertheless, you persist to the next step and to the next. Eventually you come back around to the front of the pillar, to see that you were rising higher and closer all along.

In this way, the Baal Shem Tov explained the verse, “Seven times a tzadik falls and rises.” The fall, the descent, is actually a step towards rising yet higher. It is a necessary and crucial development in the act of being a tzadik.

Why? Because, as explained in many other instances at length,7 between one stage and a higher stage there is always an intermediary stage—the painful stage of leaving the first stage behind.

Even in the chain of descent by which this universe was originally created this was true: A lower state of being could only emerge once the original, higher state was utterly submerged and hidden, as though it were not in existence. And so the chain continued until it arrived at our material realm of existence.

All the more so when it comes to an ascent to a higher state of being. If it is a true ascent, it requires a complete divestment of all sense of form and self.

Think of the acorn that must begin to decompose in the earth before it begins to grow into a mighty oak.Think of the acorn that must begin to decompose in the earth before it begins to grow into a mighty oak. Or how a caterpillar must dissolve its form within its cocoon before transforming into a butterfly. Or how a caterpillar must dissolve its form within its cocoon before transforming into a butterfly. So too, for the tzadik to enter a higher state of being, he must traverse the back side of the spiral staircase—the stage of dissolution of self.

This bitul, this abandonment of your previous stature, feels like a great fall. But if you could view yourself from a larger context, you would see you are steadily rising.

This is what the Baal Shem Tov meant when he said that, although he was capable of ascending to heaven in a storm like Elijah the Prophet, he wanted to undergo the process of “and to dust you shall return.”

Why? Because the lowest possible descent—returning to dust—is a preparatory stage to a yet higher ascent than rising to heaven in a storm.

And since such a preparation is crucial in order to attain this higher level, it is in truth not a descent at all. Rather it is a stage in a yet higher ascent.

https://www.alephbeta.org/playlist/sabbath-day-significance

COVENANT & CONVERSATION

The Duality of Jewish Time,

EMOR • 5771, 5777

Rabbi Sacks

Alongside the holiness of place and person is the holiness of time, something parshat Emor charts in its deceptively simple list of festivals and holy days (Lev. 23:1-44).

Time plays an enormous part in Judaism. The first thing God declared holy was a day: Shabbat, at the conclusion of creation.

The first mitzvah given to the Jewish people as a whole, prior to the Exodus, was the command to sanctify time, by determining and applying the Jewish calendar (Ex. 12:1-2).

The Prophets were the first people in history to see God in history, seeing time itself as the arena of the Divine-human encounter. Virtually every other religion and civilisation before and since has identified God, reality and truth with timelessness.

Isaiah Berlin used to quote Alexander Herzen who said about the Slavs that they had no history, only geography. The Jews, he said, had the reverse: a great deal of history but all too little geography. Much time, but little space.

So time in Judaism is an essential medium of the spiritual life. But there is one feature of the Jewish approach to time that has received less attention than it should: the duality that runs through its entire temporal structure.

Take, for instance, the calendar as a whole. Christianity uses a solar calendar, Islam a lunar one. Judaism uses both. We count time both by the monthly cycle of the moon and the seasonal cycle of the sun.

Then consider the day. Days normally have one identifiable beginning, whether this is at nightfall or daybreak or – as in the West – somewhere between. For calendar purposes, the Jewish day begins at nightfall (“And it was evening and it was morning, one day”). But if we look at the structure of the prayers – the morning prayer instituted by Abraham, afternoon by Isaac, evening by Jacob – there is a sense in which the worship of the day starts in the morning, not the night before.

Years, too, usually have one fixed beginning – the “new year”. In Judaism, according to the Mishnah (Rosh Hashanah 1:1), there are no less than four new years. The first of Elul is the new year for the tithing of animals. The fifteenth of Shevat (the first according to Bet Shammai) is the new year for trees. These are specific and subsidiary dates, but the other two are more fundamental.

According to the Torah, the first month of the year is Nissan. This was the day the earth became dry after the Flood (Gen. 8:13)[1]. It was the day the Israelites received their first command as a people (Ex. 12:2). One year later it was the day the Tabernacle was dedicated and the service of the Priests inaugurated (Ex. 40:2). But the festival we call the New Year, Rosh Hashanah, falls six months later.

Holy time itself comes in two forms, as Emor makes clear. There is Shabbat and there are the festivals, and the two are announced separately. Shabbat was sanctified by God at the beginning of time for all time. The festivals are sanctified by the Jewish people to whom was given the authority and responsibility for fixing the calendar.

Hence the difference in the blessings we say. On Shabbat we praise God who “sanctifies Shabbat”. On the festivals we praise God who sanctifies “Israel and the holy times” – meaning, it is God who sanctifies Israel but Israel who sanctify the holy times, determining on which days the festivals fall.

Even within the festivals there is a dual cycle. One is formed by the three pilgrimage festivals: Pesach, Shavuot and Succot. These are days that represent the key historic moments at the dawn of Jewish time – the Exodus, the giving of the Torah, and the forty years of desert wandering. They are festivals of history.

The other is formed by the number seven and the concept of holiness: the seventh day, Shabbat; the seventh month, Tishri, with its three festivals of Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Succot; the seventh year, Shemitah; and the Jubilee marking the completion of seven seven-year cycles.

These times (with the exception of Succot that belongs to both cycles) have less to do with history than with what, for want of a better word, we might call metaphysics and jurisprudence, ultimate truths about the universe, the human condition, and the laws, both natural and moral, under which we live.

Each is about creation (Shabbat, a reminder of it, Rosh Hashanah the anniversary of it), divine sovereignty, justice and judgment, together with the human condition of life, death, mortality. So on Yom Kippur we face justice and judgment. On Succot/Shmini Atseret we pray for rain, celebrate nature (the arba minim, lulav, etrog, hadassim and aravot, are the only mitzvah we do with unprocessed natural objects), and read the book of Kohelet, Tanach’s most profound meditation on mortality.

In the seventh and Jubilee years we acknowledge God’s ultimate ownership of the land of Israel and the children of Israel. Hence we let slaves go free, release debts, let the land rest, and restore most property to its original owners. All of these have to do not with God’s interventions into history but with his role as Creator and owner of the universe.

One way of seeing the difference between the first cycle and the second is to compare the prayers on Pesach, Shavuot and Succot with those of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The Amidah of Pesach, Shavuot and Succot begins with the phrase “You chose us from all the peoples.” The emphasis is on Jewish particularity.

By contrast, the Amidah for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur begins by speaking of “all You have made, all You have created”. The emphasis is on universality: about the judgment that affects all of creation, everything that lives.

Even Succot has a marked universalist thrust with its seventy sacrificial bulls representing the “seventy nations”. According to Zechariah 14, it is the festival that will one day be celebrated by all the nations.

Why the duality? Because God is both the God of nature and of culture. He is the God of everyone in general, and of the people of the covenant in particular. He is the Author of both scientific law (cause) and religious-ethical law (command).

We encounter God in both cyclical time, which represents the movement of the planets, and linear-historical time, which represents the events and evolution of the nation of which we are a part. This very duality gives rise to two kinds of religious leader: the Prophet and the Priest, and the different consciousness of time each represents.

Since the ancient Greeks, people have searched for a single principle that would explain everything, or the single point Archimedes sought at which to move the world, or the unique perspective (what philosophers call “the view from nowhere”) from which to see truth in all its objectivity.

Judaism tells us there is no such point. Reality is more complicated than that. There is not even a single concept of time. At the very least we need two perspectives to be able to see reality in three dimensions, and that applies to time as well as space. Jewish time has two rhythms at once.

Judaism is to the spirit what Niels Bohr’s complementarity theory is to quantum physics. In physics light is both a wave and a particle. In Judaism time is both historical and natural. Unexpected, counter-intuitive, certainly. But glorious in its refusal to simplify the rich complexity of time: the ticking clock, the growing plant, the ageing body and the ever-deepening mind.