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RABBI ARTHUR SEGAL:JEWISH RENEWAL:ROSH HASHANA:TALMUD YERUSHALMI:TESHUVAH:JEWISH SPIRITUAL RENEWAL
Shalom:
Now that we are in the month of Elul, with the holiday of Selicoth arriving on 9/20/08 and Rosh Ha Shana on the evening 29th, with Yom Kippur on October 8th in the evening, it is interesting to see what Talmud Yerushalmi has to say about Teshuvah. Since it is the month of Elul, the Talmud which we study, instructs us to begin to wish all a L'shana Tova and may you be inscribed into the Book of Life. May I humbly offer this prayer to one and all.
Rabbi Yochanan teaches in Talmud Yerushalmi Tractate Rosh HaShana 1:3: There are three account books before God: one for the fully righteous, one for the fully wicked and one for the intermediates. With the regard to that of the fully righteous, they have received verdicts of life by Rosh Hashanah. With regard to that of the fully wicked, they have received their verdict by Rosh Hashanah. With regard to that of the intermediates, the ten days of repentance between
Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur were given to them. If they repented, they are inscribed with the righteous; and if not, they are inscribed with the wicked.
Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur were given to them. If they repented, they are inscribed with the righteous; and if not, they are inscribed with the wicked.
What is the proof? 'Let them be blotted out of the book' refers to the wicked. 'Of the living' refers to the righteous. And 'not be written with the righteous' refers to the intermediates. ( Psalm 69:28. יִמָּחוּ מִסֵּפֶר חַיִּים וְעִם צַדִּיקִים אַל־יִכָּתֵבוּ׃ [ May they be blotted out of the book of life And may they not be recorded with the righteous]
Teshuvah is not a part of era of Judaism that is long gone. It is an integral part of living Judaism. Unfortunately few Jews today do true Teshuvah.
The Talmud in many places, and the Tanak, teach us that no man is 100% wicked, and that no man is 100% righteous. It is repeated many times over on many pages.
Hence everyone is in the middle category. And the Talmud tells us that if we owe amends to a person, to do take care of that long before we go to the synagogue and beat of chests asking for God to forgive us. Hence we all need to make amends and all of us have much work to do between now and Yom Kippur.
Without doing a full program of Teshuvah, of return, of renewal, of Jewish Spiritual Renewal, one walks out of a synagogue at the conclusion of Yom Kippur, full of the same character defects that one entered the synagogue that morning. This is not Judaism. This is a social event. Who ever looks the hungriest gets the biggest bagel at the break-the-fast.
If a man said, "I will sin and repent, and sin again and repent", he will be given no chance to repent. [If he said,] "I will sin and the Day of Atonement will effect atonement", then the Day of Atonement effects no atonement. For transgressions that are between man and God the Day of Atonement effects atonement, but for transgressions that are between a man and his fellow the Day of Atonement effects atonement only if he has appeased his fellow - {Talmud Bavli Tractate Yoma 8:9}
The purpose of the autumn Holy days, {doing a chesbon ha nefesh [accounting of our souls] , vidui [confession], forgiving those who hurt us, finding our sins to be abhorrent, asking God to remove them by doing the ritual of tashlich, doing teshuvah to those we harmed with sins, and ONLY then ask God forgiveness} seems all but forgotten in Judaism now.
The Talmud says we live in an ''upside down world'' where good people get hurt, and bad people honored. This is just the yetzer ha ra of human kind working hard and man still being spiritually disconnected from God. This is nothing new. We Jews must work harder being true Jews is the only answer for us. Judaism is not some antique we wear on our sleeves. Judaism is what we must practice walking hand- in- hand with God each minute.
We do teshuvah not for TESHUVAH M'YIRAH, fear of God, but TESHUVAH M'AHAVA ,love of God. I wonder how many of those who call themselves Jews, truly believe in, trust in, have faith in, and daily experience God. If we truly believed in God, why do we treat our fellows, who are created in the image of God, cruelly?
If we treated someone or someones incorrectly and have not made immediate Teshuvah, now is time before Yom Kippur to do Teshuvah. All of us fit in the middle category of rabbi Yochanan above. When we collect a life of amends unmade, it pushes the scales toward the category of being wicked.
Yet we are can see how the wicked, those who scoff at God, and have never said ''I am sorry'' in their lives do well, while the humble man, who is just, can live a life of hardship.
I would like to address the concept of bad happening to the good, and good happening to the bad, along with the need for teshuvah . But in the opposite order.
The death of ego is a wondrous event. Our Talmud uses any occasion that it can, any holiday or Holy day that it can, to teach us to get rid of our ego, love God, and love our fellows.
The best way to do Teshuvah is not to do wrong in the first place. If we truly do the Shema and the V'Ahavata, not as some pledge of allegiance, or some Jewish oath, or as some rabbis say some ''watchwords of our religion,'' but as tephila, self judging, asking ourselves with each phrase, 'how am I doing with this?' we would find ourselves, truly living a life of derech eretz, and not needing to be making amends to folks we have harmed with our egos, our selfishness, our petty jealousies, our puny wills, etc.
This week's parasha, Ki Tetze, has 74 mitzvoth in them, more than any other parasha in the Chumash. When we look at almost every one, they are all about negating our selfish will and ego. This is true whether we are dealing with the selfish glutton wayward son, whether we are telling soldiers who already have enjoyed the fruits of their trees or marriages not to look for a way out of the army because we are exempting some others, or telling a soldier, he can not have some Yefat Toar, some gorgeous woman captured in battle, for his selfish reasons, until 30 days have passed, and his selfish libido has had time to peter-out, and have some blood flow to his brain to make sure he really wants to marry her for the long term.
Whether it is putting aside one's own personal ego, to love one's multiple wives and children equally, or showing compassion to a hen, or to be extra kind when collecting money owed, or returning a lost article, all of the mitzvoth are about negating our ego, and going beyond the letter of the law...lifnim mishurat ha din.
Why do the good suffer? Or putting it on a greater scale, where was God during the Holocaust, or where was God on 9/11/01?
With the 7th anniversary of the viscous attacks on the USA on September 11, 2001, I have been asked numerous times: "Where was God on 9/11?''. For years prior to that, I was asked: ''Where was God during the Holocaust?'' The answers, Judaically, are the same.
Where was God on 9/11/2001? Crying along with us. How do we know God cries or suffers? Because man, who was made in His image, cries and suffers.
Why does mankind suffer? Is it divine payback for our sins as the Torah teaches?
The Kabbalah gives a much different answer. Mankind suffers because God suffers. It is not mankind that suffers but God. The suffering we feel is not our suffering but God's suffering experience through us as if it were our own. Therefore, the Kabbalah teaches, before we can liberate ourselves from suffering, we most first liberate God from His suffering.
The Zohar teaches that we know God suffers because mankind suffers. Genesis 1:27 says that "God created man in the image of Himself, in the image of God He created him." Therefore, as the Ba'al Shem Tov , the then-leftist reform founder of the now-rightist orthodox Chassidic movement said, "Man is a part of God, and the want that is in the part is in the whole, and the whole suffers the same want as the part." We can infer that God suffers because we know that mankind suffers.
"From what does God suffer?" the rabbis ask. God suffers from His exile from Himself. He suffers the separation in His Name--the "YH" divided from the "VH"-- that took place when He created the world. He suffers to return to the Unity--the wholeness in Himself-- that was shattered when He created the world. Therefore God suffers and man is commissioned to redeem Him from His suffering by returning Him to His former state of unity. This is what the Kabbalists say we mean when we say in the Aleinu adoration prayer "On that day God shall be One and His name One"(Psalm 22:29).
The rabbis then ask "How can we liberate God from His suffering? How can we return Him to Himself?" The answer is that we must be watchful and alert all the time for God. As King David wrote "at dawn I hold myself in readiness for You" (Psalm 5:3). We need to listen for God's voice "I am
listening. What is God saying?"(Psalm 85:8). Then we must speak the words that we hear God tell us and follow them.
The Zohar teaches that we know God suffers because mankind suffers. Genesis 1:27 says that "God created man in the image of Himself, in the image of God He created him." Therefore, as the Ba'al Shem Tov , the then-leftist reform founder of the now-rightist orthodox Chassidic movement said, "Man is a part of God, and the want that is in the part is in the whole, and the whole suffers the same want as the part." We can infer that God suffers because we know that mankind suffers.
"From what does God suffer?" the rabbis ask. God suffers from His exile from Himself. He suffers the separation in His Name--the "YH" divided from the "VH"-- that took place when He created the world. He suffers to return to the Unity--the wholeness in Himself-- that was shattered when He created the world. Therefore God suffers and man is commissioned to redeem Him from His suffering by returning Him to His former state of unity. This is what the Kabbalists say we mean when we say in the Aleinu adoration prayer "On that day God shall be One and His name One"(Psalm 22:29).
The rabbis then ask "How can we liberate God from His suffering? How can we return Him to Himself?" The answer is that we must be watchful and alert all the time for God. As King David wrote "at dawn I hold myself in readiness for You" (Psalm 5:3). We need to listen for God's voice "I am
listening. What is God saying?"(Psalm 85:8). Then we must speak the words that we hear God tell us and follow them.
To quote the Ba'al Shem Tov again "When I fix my thoughts on the creator, I let my mouth speak what
it will, for the words are bound by higher roots. The Holy sparks that fell from Himself when God built and destroyed worlds, man shall raise and purify back to their source: All things of this world desire with all their might to draw near man in order that the sparks of Holiness that are in them should be raised by Him back to their source. And who with good strength of his spirit is able to raise the Holy spark from stone to plant, from plant to animal, from animal to speaking being? Man leads it to freedom, and no setting free of captives is greater than this. It is as when a king's son is rescued from captivity and brought to his father. Then you will release God from His suffering and He , in turn, will 'fill your mouths with laughter and your lips with song'(Psalm 126:2)."
it will, for the words are bound by higher roots. The Holy sparks that fell from Himself when God built and destroyed worlds, man shall raise and purify back to their source: All things of this world desire with all their might to draw near man in order that the sparks of Holiness that are in them should be raised by Him back to their source. And who with good strength of his spirit is able to raise the Holy spark from stone to plant, from plant to animal, from animal to speaking being? Man leads it to freedom, and no setting free of captives is greater than this. It is as when a king's son is rescued from captivity and brought to his father. Then you will release God from His suffering and He , in turn, will 'fill your mouths with laughter and your lips with song'(Psalm 126:2)."
This is the Kabbalistic concept of Tikun Olam, repair of the world, which is a credo of the modern Jewish movements.
"Nowhere is this --enantiodromia--this conflagration between good and evil-- more clearly seen than in the constant interplay of the two opposing Sephirot (ten manifestations of God), Chesed (good) and Gevurah (evil)--which individually constitute the Right and the Left sides--light and darkness, the yin and yang--of the Tree of the Ten Sephirot," writes Rabbi Yakov ha Kohain. It is out of this balancing act that this Tree is born.
The idea of a suffering God is not only part of Christian theology. It is part and parcel of Judaism as well. Jewish philosophy believes that God, the our Divine Father, suffers in Heaven. He suffers not because we sin, but because of His separation from Himself. His former Unity has been shattered. His Holy Queen, the Sheckinah, has fallen and She yearns to be lifted up and returned to Her King. This is why in Pirkei Avot one reads so many references to the ways one can bring back the Sheckinah, i.e. studying Torah with another, discussing Torah while three or more eat together, etc.
For Tikun Olam to be done, for God to "know" and repair Himself, He first must be known by man. But for man to know himself, he first must know God as well. The Torah shows us how God perfects man in increments. God perfects man in order that man may perfect Him, in Zohar terms. This is what Karl Jung meant when he wrote,"God must become man precisely because He has done man a wrong through Job. He, the guardian of justice, knows that every wrong must be expiated and Wisdom knows that moral law is above even God. Because His creature has surpassed Him, God must regenerate Himself."
According to the Kabbalah, God went from being whole to fragmentary during the act of creation. His "face" was shattered. He needs man as His partner to end His suffering and do the Tikun (repair). Judaism has placed responsibility on us, as people, to fix our globe, and not think that doing ritual or not doing ritual determines if good or evil things to occur.
Of course this leads to the question "Is God good?" The sages answer "yes" and quote Exodus 34:6 "God, God, a God of tenderness and compassion." But they further ask, "Why does He permit evil?" They answer that "evil is the throne of good", and that good comes from evil. "The indwelling Glory of God embraces all worlds, good and evil...How can he then bear in Himself the opposites good and evil? But in truth there is no opposite, for evil is the throne of good."
So if good comes from God, where does evil come from? Evil also comes from God. "Now the spirit of God left Saul and an evil spirit from God filled him" (1 Samuel 16:14). The perfection of God lies not in being merely one thing or another, but all things at all times. God is darkness and light and goodness and evil.
He is One. Satan, again a part of traditional Jewish belief, is not an opposite of God, but part of God. He is the left-hand side of the Mind of God. He is the left side of the Tree of the Ten Sephirot. Satan is not a "he," but an adversarial thought in God's mind. Satan is God's , yetzer ha ra,His evil inclination.
In this past month of Av we are taught that great evil befell us on the 9th day (destructions of the Temples) but that great good came to us on the 15th day (no more people died in the wilderness of Sinai, peace came to the tribe of Benjamin, the northern tribes were allowed to travel to the
south to Jerusalem again, and the martyrs of Behar (122 CE) were allowed to be buried). The Kabbalah says that good things are born from evil.
They forecast that the Messiah will be born on the 9th of Av. Holiness must be found in impurity, just as we as Jews have made the mundane into the sacred. There is no Torah law commanding us to say a prayer before we eat. This mitzvah is a rabbinic Talmudic law from Tractate Beracoth 35A. The rabbis posit that one who eats before he says a prayer of thanks to God is like one who steals from God There is the mitzvah of saying grace after meals (Deut. 8:10).
God loves us, but we are taught traditionally that He can also hate us. God even tried to kill Moses! "When Moses had halted for the night, God came to meet him and tried to kill him"(Exodus 4:24). Where as in one week's parasha we are commanded to love God, in the following portion we are commanded to "fear God" ( Deut.10:12) as well as love Him.
King David in Psalm 111:10 writes "The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, and they that have sound sense practice it." Or as Jung says "Even the enlightened person remains what he is, and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no knowable boundaries , who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and as vast as the sky."
Until God is repaired and no longer suffers, man will have its 9/11s, man will cry and suffer, and God will cry and suffer with us.
We can begin this process this Elul, by perfecting ourselves, ridding ourselves of defects, and making Teshuvah to those we owe.
It has long been my contention that we inscribe OURSELVES into the books of Chaim or Met depending on or actions or lack thereof.
This is why the modern Jewish movements took the punishing-God part out of the V'ahavta and other parts of our siddurim. Our covenant is intact for those of us who believe in God.
Deuteronomy tells us we do the mitzvoth for 'our own good.' Hence we sin for 'our own bad.'
The Talmud tells us that God, knowing man's nature, as it was He who created us, with a yetzer ha ra and a tov, created teshuvah before He created the world and humankind.
If we wish to be un-humble, and arrogant, and egotistical, and deny God, and be cruel to our fellows, and not take advantage of the gift of teshuvah, we write our own selves into the book of Met.
Living a life of ego, of being cliquish , of thinking we can control others, of being exclusive and not inclusive, only causes us to living a life of detachment from others. Even if there is someone we do not like, for example in a Torah class, we are to love them so much, that we are to push them away with our left hand, but at the same time, draw them close with our right hand. ''Not like Rabbi Yehoshua ben Perachiah who pushed away his student with both hands." (Talmud Bavli Tractate Sotah 47a)." This is what the Talmud teaches and this is Judaism. Ben Perachiah's actions caused us 2000 years of tsourres. He did not do teshuvah.
Making teshuvah is not old fashioned. It is one hundred percent living Judaism. For those who are not being taught exactly how to live Judaism as modern Jew, check out articles on Google at "jewish spiritual renewal" - Google Search . There are step by step articles on how to prepare, as modern Jews, for the Holy days, by doing a chesbon ha nefesh, (an inventory of our souls), vidui (confession), real tashlich so our defects of character say in that moving water and do not jump back into our pockets, and how to do teshuvah to those we have harmed. One can truly for the first time make the Holy days what our Talmudic sages meant them to be.
There is no perfect human, and there is no truly evil human. Even Haman, may his name be blotted out, was kind to his sons. So all of us fit into the middle slot.''There is no one so righteous in the world who does only good, but has never sinned." (Proverbs 7:20). Hence all of need to do teshuvah. 'Rabbi Yaakov used to say, "One moment of repentance and good deeds in This World is better than all of Life in the World-to-Come" (Pirkei Avot, 4:22).
We should do Teshuvah because we love God and we choose life, not because we fear God and fear death. "Great is Teshuvah, for sins done on purpose are converted to accidental sins." But didn't Resh Lakish say, "Great is Teshuvah for sins done on purpose are converted to good deeds?" The resolution is that the first statement is true when the Teshuvah is done out of fear of Heavenly punishment; the second is true when the Teshuvah is done for the love of God. (Talmud Bavli Tractate Yoma 86b).
I beg of all of you, with all of the earnestness in my heart to use the month of Elul , between now and Selicoth (September 20th), and then toward Rosh Ha Shana, and finally ending with Yom Kippur, to ask God to rid yourself of ego, your grudges and resentments, and ask God to help you forgive those who have harmed you, even if they have not asked you for forgiveness.
Talmud Bavli Tractate Rosh Hashanah 17a - "Only if you forgive others will God forgive you. " Talmud Bavli Tractate Shabbat 151b - ''One who is merciful toward others, God will be merciful toward him .''
Find your list of sins to be objectionable to you, ask God to remove them from you and to cast them upon moving waters during tashlich, and then do sincere teshuvah, to all of those you have offended. I have done this, and live a life like this, and I can tell you, its wonderful.
Shalom and many blessings for a L'shana Tova where you can inscribe yourselves in the book of Chaim,
Rabbi Arthur Segal
Hilton Head Island, SC
Bluffton, SC
Jewish Renewal
Jewish Spiritual Renewal
