Rebbetzen Tziporah

 Dear friends,

The war is still on. Every day when I get up, daven, have breakfast, and head out to Bnos Avigail and Neve, the awesome silence of peace and goodness here in Har Nof touches me more deeply than it did the day before.

I imagine what the men of the Golani fighters felt when their officer led them in saying, "Hashem melech, Hashem malach, Hashem yimloch (Hashem is king, was king and will be king)". They know far better than I do that their lives are in His Hands and that their survival is only determined by Him. 

I saw a clip in which a soldier wearing earrings and no kippah showed the viewers his tzitzis hanging out. "I'm not religious, but I belong," he says. "l know what it says when you say shema, do you? It says that you'll love Hashem and keep his mitzvot." I don't know what that meant to him, but I imagine that it similarly means more to him than it does to me. For him, the choice to find some light in darkness is a much more significant one than it is for me when I do what looks like the same thing.

HARD CHOICES

There is something to say for hard choices, the kind that they make moment by moment, and the kind that I try to make when I attempt to stay spiritually alive. There's a story about the Baal HaTanya. His grandson liked clothes, and he had a coat that was the height of fashion at the time. It had a fur collar that was really "shtaddy" (the yeshivishe word for sharp). His grandfather, the Baal Hatanya, saw the coat as a symptom of his grandson's growing infatuation with the non-Jewish world. 

He was right. When he spoke to his grandson about taking a vacation from his jacket, the response was "l can't". Notice that his objection wasn't that he doesn't want to, or doesn't feel that the request is one that is on target, or even that he didn't see anything wrong with the jacket. The Baal HaTanya recognized that what was at stake for his grandson was the most precious thing anyone can call their own, their identity. He also knew that his grandson's higher self wouldn't give in without a fight. There was still hope, the battle wasn't lost yet. "If you give up the jacket, I'll learn with you," said the Baal HaTanya. 

Those words would have been worth a piece of the heart of any one of the Rebbe's thousands of chassidim, but R' Nachum, the grandson, struggled and lost. Finally, the Baal HaTanya said, "If you give up the coat, you will be with me in Gan Eden." Nachum couldn't say no to this promise. He had enough emunah to know what it meant, and that was it. When the story came out, people didn't know what to make of it. How could the Rebbe make this kind of promise? Who knows who this grandson will be at the end of his journey? The Rebbe told them something that they didn't expect to hear. "It wasn't just the coat, and it wasn't just the style."

KABBALAH 101? NOT REALLY

He explained to them a concept that many of you are familiar with, (at least partially because although the concept is Kabbalistic, it is explained in the Tanya as well as many other sefarim) and has deep and practical implications. Stay onboard for the ride. 

The concept is called "klipot", which means shells or peels. It is also sometimes used to mean the chaff of wheat or even the leaves that grow before the fruit emerges on most fruit trees. The outside layer is there to protect the inner layer, the fruit. Your soul needs protection against meaningless living, of not gaining anything from being here in this material world. 

You can't produce the "fruit" – the fulfillment of your life's purpose until you proactively choose to discard the peel and search for the fruit. The way you do this is by choosing meaning over chaos. This idea is based on the Kabbalistic view that when Hashem created the world, He infused it with profound and brilliant spiritual light. You or I may call this, "the potential for good and redemption". He also created "vessels" to contain the light. The vessels burst. Why? The world wasn't, as of yet, populated by humans, so there was no one to use their minds and hearts to uncover the light and make it their own. 

The world was left a shell of vessels that once held spiritual light, meaningless and chaotic in the deepest sense of the words. It is left to each Jew to discover the spiritual light, use it to illuminate his life, and make sense of the world. Before this possibility arose (by creating humans) the world was in a state of being called "Olam HaTohu", the world of chaos. The reality that you and I live in is called the "world of Tikkun", the world of rectification. Each of us has the task of finding the light as it "hides" under the cover of the klipot.

BACK TO REAL LIFE; TURNING CHAOS INTO TIKKUN

The word galus, exile, has the same root as the verb "lihigalot" to reveal. Exile is the word we use when we are not yet ourselves in the perfected sense. It is real, encompassing, and created to give you the possibility of finding light in the midst of chaos. The Baal HaTanya had discerned that his grandson was heading towards deepening his personal galus through his admiration of the corrupt society in which he lived. 

It is beyond my capacity to envision anything darker than Oct. 7. Until recently I refrained from watching the vivid, no holds barred clips. I felt that it was overwhelming, and could even be voyeuristic and desensitizing to "watch" horror as a spectator (perhaps my childhood, where awful horror movies like "The Thing That Ate Chicago" feeling exactly the same as watching the nightly death and violence "show" from Vietnam on the news every night, is part of my avoidance). 

Then I saw some of the light of tikkun emerging, in the midst of the dark spiritual chaos that surrounds us. This chaos takes the form of liberals who side with the Palestinians, ignoring that they shamelessly want us to disappear so they can rule from the river to the sea, and feminists who go on and on about microaggressions while silently tolerating scenes in which mutilation and rape are done again and again.

TIKKUN

I began to question where I fit into the scenario of galus. The Jewish response of unparalleled giving, unity, and prayer tells me that we are emerging from galus. Is there more to do? I want to conclude (oy vey. My students know that this means at least another 15 minutes...) with words that were found in Rav Gershon Edelstein's pocket. It was written by his brother, Rav Yaakov.

1 – Ask for Hashem to pour out compassion for someone every day

2 – Learn mussar for 5 minutes a day

3 – Say a few chapters of Tehillim every day

4 – Judge everyone favorably even in your heart

5 – Don't speak critically about others

6 – Appease anyone who you know has something against you, and don't hold anything against others.

May we all get out of galus very, very soon,

Love,

Tziporah