What does this have to do with Beha’alotecha, this week’s parasha(Torah portion)?
By MICHAEL M. COHENPicture From the Parasha(photo credit: YORAM BARAK)
From time to time during my elementary school years, I would ponder what was beyond the edge of the universe. If it was expanding, what was it expanding into? I would try to wrap my head around that question and get stuck. In Journey of the Universe, Mary Evelyn Tucker and Brian Thomas Swimme write:Let’s begin at the beginning. How did it all start? An awesome question, certainly, but it appears there really was a beginning.... All of space and time and mass and energy began as a single point that was trillions of degrees hot and that instantly rushed apart. The discovery that the universe has expanded and is still expanding is one of the greatest of human history.... What we’ve discovered is that we are living in a universe that is expanding at just that rate necessary for life to emerge.Related to this expansive nature of the universe, we note one of God’s names in Judaism is Ein Sof or Endless.What does this have to do with Beha’alotecha, this week’s parasha(Torah portion)? In its text we read the tabernacle is called “hakodesh,” the sancta/the Holy-Sanctified Place (Numbers 8:19). The word “holy” and its derivatives are found more than 800 times in the Bible. It is also part of the basic formula of many brachot, the blessings we say: “asher kidshanu; which we sanctify/make holy.” Abraham Joshua Heschel, who reminds us the first use of the word “holy” in the Torah is related to time (Genesis 2:3), teaches: “We must not forget that it is not a thing that lends significance to a moment; it is the moment that lends significance to things” (The Sabbath, p. 6). The stone blocks of the Western Wall are not holy in and of themselves – they become holy when we approach and see them that way.Time, as Rabbi Michael Graetz points out, is the exis-tential who we are, gifting us with opportunities and possibilities.He reminds us the Hebrew word “l’zamen,” created from its core root-word “z’man”/time, means to be alive. In essence, the tradition says one way we become fully alive is to take advantage of the numerous moments during the day to sanctify what we experience.What does it mean to make something holy? Calling something holy on its deepest level is the recognition that everything shares that same origin point from that beginning moment of the universe and reality. That awareness allows us to experience the distant, transcen-dent moment of Creation in an immanent way.But it comes with a challenge. Rabbi Elie Munk teach-es, “For the contemplation of physical objects has its danger: the symbol can take the place of the idea that it represents” (The Call of the Torah, Numbers, p. 33).This is one of the fundamental reasons for Judaism’s opposition to idolatry. Idolatry says God can be limited to “a graven image or a pillar” (Leviticus 26:1). Idolatry is a reductionist theology running counter to the core of Jewish belief of how the world and universe are con-structed.Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan points out, “The unity of God, or monotheism, implies that all things that exist do not constitute a multiverse but a universe, and that the universe is so constituted that by conforming to that which makes it a universe, particularly the cosmic polar-ity of independence and interdependence, men and nations can achieve fulfillment or salvation of their total nature” (The Ten Commandments Today, p. 5). On its most profound level, that awareness forces us to recognize the inescapable truth that we are all part of the same story. One of the great teachers of Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, Moshe Cordovero, teaches: “Each of us emerges from Ein Sof and is included in it. We live through its dissemination. It is the perpetuation of exis-tence.”While we have our own individual journeys, all those journeys have the same origin moment.In a society and world of conflict, that orientation is essential to reframe how we look at those we disagree with or are in conflict with.Conflict causes divisions and separations. And yet those demarcations can also be the way out of conflict. The word “kodesh”/holy has within it the meaning of separate. That is because the first step to understanding the unity of everything, the holiness of it all, is to see its diverse parts, and only then be reminded that all is con-nected and interconnected. That spiritual approach to conflict, while not easy to achieve, when harnessed, can change people and the world; that is the cornerstone of the work of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Malala Yousafzai.Tucker and Swimme write:Within an unimaginably vast and complex universe, we seek meaningful orientations in order to live an integral human life.Humans have always sought answers to ques-tions such as What is the nature of the universe? What is our role? By pondering such questions we are hoping to become more fully and deeply alive in this emerging planetary era in which we find ourselves.Our bodies echo the universe, with most of the ele-ments that make up our bodies found in stardust. Our brains have some 69 billion neurons, as the universe itself is filled with billions of galaxies.In Frontiers in Physics, Franco Vazza (astrophysicist at the University of Bologna) and Alberto Feletti (neurosur-geon at the University of Verona) remind us that, within both systems, only 30% of their masses are composed of galaxies or neurons. Within both systems, galaxies and neurons arrange themselves in long filaments or nodes between the filaments. Finally, within both systems, 70% of the distribution of mass or energy is composed of components playing an apparently passive role: water in the brain and dark energy in the observable universe.Mysticism is the attempt to recover our awareness of that primary unity and construct of the world and the universe. The Life Force of the universe is made apparent when we take the time to pause and see the integrative timeless holiness that permeates everything. It is why some call that Life Force, Hakadosh Baruch Hu, the Blessed Holy One, the Blessed Holy Origin of All.The writer is rabbi emeritus of the Israel Congregation, Manchester Center, Vermont, and a faculty member of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies and Bennington College.
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