Jewish Mysticism A Sermon by Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis

Temple Valley Beth Shalom Encino, CA March 1, 1974 (This is a transcription of an audio recording which can be found at www.schulweisinstitute.com)

A Hasidic parable. A deaf man who walked down the hall, looked through the window and saw men flinging their arms wildly and shaking them themselves back and forth, and rolling their heads back and fro, perspiring, springing in the air, making all kinds of the grimaces and observing all these wild gestures. He concluded that this was indeed an assembly of madmen. Because he was deaf, he could not hear the music and so he took the dancing as insanity.

There is a strangeness in Jewish mysticism. There is an oddness about it for most of us brought up in a pragmatic, rationalistic and utilitarian society. And you and I may not wish to dance its ritual choreography but the very least we can do is to understand the theology, which is the music of mysticism, to understand why it is that some people have this intensity and this passion and this concern for ritual and for liturgy.

What does it mean that in the 16th century, , your ancestors and mine, rose at midnight, dressed themselves in black, veiled their heads, removed their shoes, stood besides the door posts, placed ashes from the hearth upon the forehead of their heads, the place where they had placed the tefellin before, flung themselves upon the ground, cried, wept, sobbed, recited the on rivers of of Babylon, there we sat, there, we cried how shall we sing the song of the Lord in an alien and strange land it.

It is true that some thousand years, before Safid, thousand years before the 16th century, there was a Talmudist who said that the night is divided into three watchers, and at each watch, the Holy One roars like the lion. Woe unto me to have destroyed my house and burned my temple and sent my children into exile amongst the Gentiles. And with it, God cries and let's fall in His eyes two drops, which are like fires that fall into the sea. What does it mean that in the middle of the night, at midnight, there is the ritual which now spreads throughout the entire diaspora called Tikkun Chatzot, the repair of midnight? Or if for example you will take hold of any Luach, any Jewish calendar, you will find a little line usually once-a-month called Yom Kippur Katan, which means the minor Day of Atonement, and it is celebrated on the day before Rosh Chodesh, and the day before the new moon, and the day before the new month. And Jews who are of this mystic dimension will fast and will do penance.

Temple Valley Beth Shalom © 2013 Page 1

How could it be that a people can make out of Rosh Chodesh, which is traditionally a day of celebration and joy, a day of mourning and repentance. Where does it come from? What does it mean that Hoshana Rabbah, the 7th day of Sukkot, is now transformed by Luria into a day of great severity, a day of judgment when it normally should be a day of great joy? And what does it mean that Jews stay up all night long before Hoshana Rabbah and the Jews stay up all night long, studying on the eve before Shavuot. Stranger yet, at the very burial of the dead, there are ten men who dance around the grave and make a circle, and they recite Psalm 91 against the shedim, the demons, the klipot, and refuse to allow the sons and the daughters of the deceased to attend the corpse, refused to allow them to stand on the place of interment. There is such vitality in this Lurianic .

Do you realize that Lecha Dodi and Shalom Alechem of course you know that. That Z'mirot comes from Luria of the 16th century. Do you realize that the idea of the Melava Malka, the idea of having the fourth meal to accompany the queen Sabbath comes from ? Do you realize that when the first Jewish born fast on the eve of Passover, Tenit Bechor is not an old, old ritual that comes from Luria? And do you realize that the recitation of the Eshet Chayil, the 31st chapter of the book of Proverbs on the in the praise of the women comes from the Kabbalah.

Now what does this mean? I want to go beneath the fasting and the celebration to understand the passion and the intensity of our ancestors. To understand the mystic mind, you have to understand it the cosmogony of the mystic. How it is that they understood how the world was created. The original theology, the way in which they understood God and man and Israel and history, because Lurianic Mysticism is the last religious movement that penetrated every single corner of the diaspora, Sephardic or Ashkenazic Jews, Jews from Poland, Jews from Turkey, all of them felt the impact of Luria. Now the central idea, the central myth of Luria grew out of the soil of the Spanish exile.

This which occurred in the end of the 15th century, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and from Portugal was from the Holocaust of the Jews of the 15th century, a people long rooted in Hispanic culture; a people having produced poets, writers, philosophers, advisors to kings and to princess were now savagely uprooted, forcibly converted to Catholicism. Some were martyred at the Ortedefai. Some who chose to live, even to kneel at the altar and were willing to even hold the crucifix in their hands by compulsion, nevertheless, at night would crawl into the cellars where they would like light the Shabbat candles and at night, when no one heard, they thought, would recite the Shema Yisrael.

This is terrible phenomenon, this uprooting of people, this expulsion, this exile, how could be explained? How do you explain the absurdity of the world, the cruelty, the

Temple Valley Beth Shalom © 2013 Page 2 humiliation, the suffering, the degradation of this chosen people? And what good is it to read Maimonides or to read Sadgeh, to read all of the rationalists who are going to explain the world in terms of intelligence when the world is irrational? There has to be something else to explain why it is that God who is so omnipotent, so powerful can look at the destruction of innocence and laugh in the heavens. For the mystic of the 16th century, there is amending but in order to understand the meaning, you must not go only to the surface of analysis. You must not go to history. You must not go to the jotting edge of reality. You have to pierce into the inner reality of life.

The roots of reality are buried in the soil of heaven. And unless you can understand it that history is born and shaped in the heavens, unless you understand what the puts, you will not understand the mystery of life. That what is below is above, that what is without is within, and that what is revealed can be hidden. comes upon a remarkable theological inspiration and he breaks with the whole theory of the tradition of creation. In the early Kabbalah, in the Kabbalah of the 13th century and earlier than that, God is considered to have projected his creative power out of his self, very much likely Neoplatonic philosophers, God is emanating his goodness, God is like a fountain that flows over his goodness and fills the world with his presence.

But for Luria, this explanation does not make sense. How could it be, if God is everywhere, if God fills the entire universe, if God is present everywhere, in every nook and every cranny, how could it be that there is a world? How can finite men and women live in the presence of the infinite? Or to put it much more simply, how if the world is full of God, is there so much evil, so much hate, so much destruction, so much fear and so much terror? “No” Luria said, “It is different.” And he speculated though speculation was of a kind of a mystical intuition that originally, the world was filled with God but God wanted there to be a world that could exist independent of him. And so he did something which is unheard of. He voluntarily withdrew into himself. He contracted, he concentrated himself. He withdrew himself, from himself into himself. God put himself into exile and he left a space empty, a vacuum, and that vacuum is the place where finite men will be able to live with the ideal of being able to come and to embrace God because of the function of all of life is for men to love God, and there cannot be any love unless there is a division, a separation, a distance between me and God, between the world and God.

Here is some great mystic wisdom. You remember that according to the Kabbalah, men, Adam is originally born bisexual, he is male and female. And because he is male and female, and the male and female belong to each other as undifferentiated being out, man is lonely. Until God takes this androgynous, this bisexual being and splits them asunder into a male and female part, and then they can love each other because love requires separation, love requires distance. This is not love, it is absorption, it is domination, it is subordination. And so it is with God and the world that there must be

Temple Valley Beth Shalom © 2013 Page 3 separation. And so takes place. God withdraws from the world leaving a vacuum, and now God, out of his great love it for men, pours forth beams of lights, into the emptiness of the world. And these beams of light are to be captured by word, by HaKelim, by vessels so that they can be preserved and identify those lights. And then there comes a tragic flaw, some cosmic accident, something that is catastrophic. The HaKelim, the vessels break. This Shevirat HaKelim means that the sparks of divinity now are scattered and strewn throughout the world and they sink into the lowest depths of primordial space and are lodged in Klipot, in husks, in course material later on, some Kabbalists say, demons.

Is it an accident this breaking? Or is it perhaps that which is necessary for creativity? For there is, in Kabbalah, the notion that the birth of the world, the breaking of the vessels is like a breakthrough of birth. When you break the sack and embryo emerges, there also is the attended with that a release of many waste products. And together with the convulsion of the organism, there is also the contamination of filth. The seed must burst in order to sprout and blossom. What is to be done? The Shekinah, God is found in the dust because of the sparks of divinity both of man -- man's holiness and God's holiness are now trapped. The Shekinah and Israel are both united in their homelessness.

I think we have to stop here to understand what's being said here. What is being said here it is that exile, the exile of the Jewish people, the homelessness of the Jewish people is not a political event. It is an event that has greater metaphysical significance. It is not that the Jewish people are in exile. God is in exile. The world is absurd. The world is misplaced. There is no, no, no salvaging of divinity because of this terrible catastrophe. And you have to understand the Kabbalah, when the Jewish people is in exile, when the Jewish people is threatened by annihilation, it is not simply the Jewish people as another ethnic group that is threatened. God can be extinguished. If anything should happen to the Jewish people, God will die.

This makes out of exile not the matter of the political, military, economic catastrophe. If this makes out of exile a metaphysical disaster. What do you do? From here we have the genius and the originality of mysticism, which for the first time is no longer elitist. No longer it is it a contemplative, meditative kind of escape from the ugliness and the filth and the contamination of the world. For the first time, Luria says, the Jewish people need God but God needs the Jewish people, because without Israel, God is diminished. He is weak. And therefore, it is our function to do what is Jews? We have to rise up the sparks that have been scattered upon over the four corners of the earth. You know what you have to do, not to save yourselves, not to save yourselves. You have to save God. Redemption is not to redeem the Jewish people. Redemption is to redeem the Shekinah, and the way to do it, and this is the term that's so very important in all of Lurianic Kabbalah, the whole of literature isn't the word Tikkun and Tikkun

Temple Valley Beth Shalom © 2013 Page 4 means to mend, to repair, to restore, to make restitution. And the way you do it is by using prayer and ritual and Torah and study but not the way you are used to using it to study for the sake of being smart or to daven for the sake of getting it over with, not mechanical way of davening.

There has to be a concentration, the purpose of which is not to simply understand what the words mean, that's kavvanah. But with Luria, it is kavvanot, and kavvanot means to understand how we can unite the God who is broken. God is broken, that's our problem. The problem is not man, or Israel, or it's administration. The problem is God is broken. God is in exile and what one has to do is to so use of the ritual and the wisdom and the Torah and the mitzvots that we can somehow rather put together God, who is not one but is fragmented. And thus you will read in the prayer book of a Rabbi Yitzchak Luria, one formula that repeats itself again and again. I do this particular act whatever the act may be. It may be the blowing of the shofar, it may be putting on a Tallis or a Tefillin.

I do this so that the Yud Hei the name of God shall be united with the Vav Hei of God so that the God of mercy and the God of justice will become reunited and healed. Thus it is that your grandfather and mine, who, whether Lurianic, mystics and not already and by that spirit told us when you recite the Shema Yisrael, you must prolong the last word, the sixth word Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Ehad. Because when you extend is the voice, it gives you an opportunity to combine the name of Adonai with the name of the Elohim and that is the ultimate function of my life because only I, as a Jew, am able to lift up the sparks and return them to the original wholeness which belongs to God. Everything is in this way, everything is this way.

When you put on, for example, the Tallis, and you know what you normally say, you take the four fringes, and I say it is well, well to the Lurianic Kabbalah, it was not simply I will take these four fringes and I will gather them, and we will have Israel back again, and all the Jewish people will be one. That's Zionism. This represents the raising up of the sparks from the four corners of the earth which are lodged in the husks of apathy, indifference and despair. When, for example, I put on my Tefillin to the Lurianic Kabbalah, the notion of binding means that I am now committing an act of marriage. Whose marriage? The marriage of God, the male part, the stern part of God, with the female part of God, the God of mercy.

And thus it is that when you turn those three little thongs around your middle finger and you recite from Hosea, and I betroth thee unto me with justice and with truth, with mercy and with righteousness, that is a from Hosea but the author of that, the one who insisted upon that was Nathan Hannover, a Kabbalist of the 17th century. And so it is even with the 4 cups of wine. Four cups of wine to the Kabbalah means the four letters of the name of God. Know why it's important for every Jew to drink 4 cups of wine and

Temple Valley Beth Shalom © 2013 Page 5 not less, because it is symbol of the interdependence of Yod Hey Vav Hey. This means, good friends, that in the 16th century, our ancestors began to take man very seriously. Man is much more than himself. Man has the capacity to move the world.

Everything that man does has an imprint on the world. His breath, his deeds, his words, his thoughts, man is not Adam, says one of the Kabbalists. Adam, which mints from the Adama, from Earth. Man is from Adameh. I will compare myself unto God. Man is exalted in the Kabbalah because God needs men. Do you understand what it is that you're saying when you say Baruch all the time? Baruch blessed are thou Lord. Who is blessing whom? By what right do I have the Chutzpah or you, the audacity, to praise God, to bless God? To the Kabbalah, not only do I have that as of right, that is an exercise that is mandated upon me because God, without the Jewish people, is diminished, weakened and as of naught. Yitgadal Veyitgadash Shemei Rabbah means we are the ones who give God power. That's why when you read that Psalm 27, you remember, Havu L’Adonia, Kavod Vaoz, it says there in the transition, a real Ashkenazic rationalist translation, ascribe unto the Lord, glory in power. But to the Kabbalah, it means you, man, Israel, Jews, give God power and glory. You transfuse your blood in to him.

Now this Zohar means the following. Every man below, every move below calls forth a movement above. I don't -- I try to see now how we can put it. You may read. You may read. That man is a body. I'm a body. But to the Kabbalah, I have 248 limbs and I have. I have 365 sinews and they correspond to the 248 positive mitzvot and to the 365 prohibitions together, which is the 630 mitzvot, that's me. That is man who has within himself that Kedushah. Understand now, if we can recapitulate what it is that is being said. The old Kabbalah, the old idea of creation was that God created the world, finished. One way created the world, but now there is something else. Now there's a rhythm in the universe.

And just as God withdrew into himself and then expanded into himself, the world is a heart. And if you're religious mystic, you have got to hear the pulse of the universe. You have to understand that there is a systole and a diastole. There's a contraction and there's an expansion. There is a giving and there is a taking. And there is a giving and taking from above and from below. And thus it is that one can say with the mystics that God creates, from the beginning, every single moment in the inhalation and exhalation of the activities of men and the response of the upper realms, the world. The Zohar says whenever the thing below starts itself, there is simultaneous stimulation of its counterpart above.

My ancestors who gave this theology to the chasidim, maybe you understand, maybe the chosid a little better, maybe not. Maybe you must understand why it is that the chosid moves so nervously, what he thrashes around and why he waves his hands,

Temple Valley Beth Shalom © 2013 Page 6 and why there is such an intensity, and why he is not ashamed of the fact that you may laugh at him. Because as the Balshemtov have once said, if a man is drowning in the waters, and he thrashes his hands around to find some sort of saving of his soul, no one should consider him foolish.

To the mystic, the world is intoxicated with God and there is no prosaic moment. There is nothing ordinary neither eating, nor drinking, nor sexuality. Everything that I touch becomes sacred. And thus, the most famous of all of the stories is that of Enoch, the Shoemaker, who when he stitched his all, every single of his all, which joined the upper level with the soul when he had directed his mind to what he was doing through the kavvanot, he joined the upper world to the lower world.

And finally, it is this day, the Shabbat which is the triumph of the Kabbalah, because the Shabbat is to the Kabbalist, an intimation of a repaired world. And the Shabbat, the lights of the upper world burst into the profane world over six days. It is on this Shabbat that there's a special soul that enters into man. It is on this particular day in Sephard that the mystical marriage takes place. The Shekinah is identified with the queen of the Sabbath and the queen of the Sabbath with every single Jewish housewife. And so it is that on Friday afternoon, the Kabbalist of Sephard and would clad themselves in white, because white is a symbol of mercy whereas red and black is a symbol of justice and stringency, and enter into the open field and welcome the Shekinah It was the custom that when they sang the , they would shut their eyes tight, not merely for concentration, but because the Zohar speaks of the beautiful virgin who has lost her sight out of weeping for the exile of the Jewish people. And therefore, in a symbol of emulation, the Kabbalist shuts his eyes tight.

It is found in the Shulkhan Aruch of the Ari that one should, on the Sabbath, kiss the hands of one's mother, and recite Eshetchail because it is the woman who plays the role on earth of the Shekinah It is the custom on Friday evening to eat fish, not as the joke. It is because of the Friday evening, the marriages were consummated in the act of sexuality. And sensuality is not by mere physical contact. It is a symbol on earth of the kind of bliss and joy and delight that will come when God will be one, when we greet the Sabbath, we greet it with song. And when we bid farewell to the Sabbath after the Havdalah, there is a fourth meal called the Melava Malka, the accompanying of the queen, for the Sabbath is a secret. And in the heart of the Sabbath, there is the great dream of the Kabbalists to save God, to redeem God, to lift up the sparks of holiness. I want you now to hear the secret of the Sabbath, which comes from out of the literature of the Zohar, and which is sung in accordance with the mysterious essence of Shabbat, the secrets of the Sabbath.

Temple Valley Beth Shalom © 2013 Page 7