The Divine as Mirror of the Human Soul Human being soar higher and higher, for awesome strengths are yours, you own wings of spirit, wings of noble eagles. Don’t deny your abilities, for if you do they will deny you- Seek your strengths, and you will find them immediately. Rabbi A.Y. Kook, Orot Hakodesh 1:64 Man is the mirror which God holds up to himself, or the sense organ with which he apprehends his being. Carl Jung At their source, sound and sight are united. Only in our limited, physical world, in this alma depiruda (disjointed world), are these phenomena disconnected and detached. It is similar to our perception of lightning and thunder, which become increasingly separated from one another as the observer is more distanced from the source. If we are bound and limited to the present, if we can only perceive the universe through the viewpoint of the temporal and the material, then we will always be aware of the divide between sight and sound. The prophetic vision at Mount Sinai, however, granted the people a unique perspective, as if they were standing near the source of Creation. From that vantage point, they were able to witness the underlying unity of the universe. They were able to see sounds and hear sights. God’s revelation at Sinai was registered by all their senses simultaneously, as a single, undivided perception. Rav Kook Dear Pastor Amstutz, 28 March 1953 …My criticism of the Yahwistic God-image is for you what the experience of the book was for me: a drama that was not mine to control. I felt myself utterly the causa ministerialis of my book. It came upon me suddenly and unexpectedly during a feverish illness. I feel its content as an unfolding of the divine consciousness in which I participate, like it or not. It was necessary for my inner balance that I made myself conscious of this development. Man is the mirror which God holds up to himself, or the sense organ with which he apprehends his being. So-called progress makes possible a tremendous multiplication of man and leads simultaneously to a spiritual inflation and to an unconsciousness of God (genetivus accusativus!). Man confuses himself with God, is identical with the demiurge and begins to usurp cosmic powers of destruction, i .e., to arrange a second Deluge. He should become conscious of the tremendous danger of God becoming man, which threatens him with becoming God, and learn to understand the mysteria Dei better. In the Catholic Church, faith is not so dangerous in practice. C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 111-112 "Hebrew letters and words do not follow upon physical reality; they precede it. They are the empirical manifestations of an a priori language constituting the inherent spiritual ideas or forms which are at the root of created reality. Hebrew words or names express the very nature and reality of what they represent. Hebrew letters are the means through which physical reality comes into being and manifestation." Naftali Tzvi Horowitz of Ropczyce, Zera Kodesh 2:40a, Jerusalem, 1971 in Schochet, J.I. The Hebrew alphabet is not simply a collection of abstract linguistic elements, like the English alphabet is. All Hebrew letters have names and identities, and in post-Biblical times were even rendered numerical value. It is said that they contain the precise plan of the principles of creation. Each letter (or auth) is a crystallisation of one of the aspects of manifestation of the divine word. Each letter corresponds to a number. Each letter is thus connected to the creative forces in the universe. First there are three mother letters, or Imahot: Aleph, Mem and Shin. They represent the three dimensions of space. They act as a prism which transforms… Symbolically this means that Aleph combines the divine, the spiritual and the physical world. In Or Torah, Rabbi Dov Ber, the Maggid of Mezritch, explained first words of Torah: Bereshit Barah Elohim Et (Gen 1:1). “Note that et is an untranslatable word used to indicate that “a definite direct object is next” (thus there needs to be an et before the heavens and the earth).” But R. Dov Ber points out that et is spelled – Aleph-Tav, an abbreviation for the Aleph-Bet. Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Since God did this before creating the heavens and the earth, the letters are considered to be the primordial building blocks of all of creation. (In his most personal novel to date, internationally best-selling author Paulo Coelho returns with a remarkable journey of self-discovery. Like the main character in his much-beloved The Alchemist, Paulo is facing a grave crisis of faith. As he seeks a path of spiritual renewal and growth, he decides to begin again: to travel, to experiment, to reconnect with people and the landscapes around him. Setting off to Africa, and then to Europe and Asia via the Trans-Siberian Railway, he initiates a journey to revitalise his energy and passion. Even so, he never expects to meet Hilal. A gifted young violinist, she is the woman Paulo loved five hundred years before—and the woman he betrayed in an act of cowardice so far-reaching that it prevents him from finding real happiness in this life. Together they will initiate a mystical voyage through time and space, traveling a path that teaches love, forgiveness, and the courage to overcome life’s inevitable challenges. Beautiful and inspiring, Aleph invites us to consider the meaning of our own personal journeys: Are we where we want to be, doing what we want to do?) In the following dramatic piece I have made some comments on Laurence Kushner’s insightful translation but whose comments somehow seem to miss the radical nature of the Rebbe’s theological trajectory. Following his Master Reb Mendel of Rimanov, Rabbi Naftali Tzvi of Ropczyce stretches his midrash to breaking point by the daring suggestion that Revelation was connected to the very image making at the dawn of creation. That Revelation was in fact an act of recognition of the Divine by humans. And furthermore this image was the very basis for understanding the verse in literally and as a “klal gadol” the central :תָמִיד לְנֶגְדִּי יְהוָה שִׁוִּיתִי :Psalms principal by which we approach the Halachic life, the prerequisite posture we must approach the Shulchan Aruch and our daily lives. Far from being a behavioural approach focusing on the minutiae of halachic ritual his mystical view seems to point us in a totally otherwise direction. This act of mirroring, as I will attempt to demonstrate, carries the historical biblical account of Sinai into the daily devotions of the devotee. It moves the behavioral praxis from mere rote to the demands of leading a moral and pure life as demanded by Reb Moshe Issereles (RAMO) some three hundred years earlier, in his gloss to the very first chapter of the Shulchan Aruch. It also solves the textual difficulties for the Rebbe in which the Deuteronomist claimed the Israelites “saw no image” .בְּחֹרֵב אֲלֵיכֶם יְהוָה דִּבֶּר בְּיוֹם ,תְּ מוּנָה-כָּל ,רְאִיתֶם לֹא כִּי yet in earlier he claims they saw “God face to face” .בָּהָר עִמָּכֶם יְהוָה דִּבֶּר ,בְּפָנִים פָּנִים Finally the age old problem of understanding the meaning of the verse הַלַּפִּידִם-וְאֶת הַקּוֹלֹת-אֶת רֹאִים הָעָם-וְכָל how can the people “see” the thunder? a question bothering most commentators. Let us begin with Kushner: What really happened up on Mount Sinai is, for Jews, the whole kazoo. Everything depends on it. Like similarly preposterous claims at the center of every religion, not only is Sinai logically impossible, but how you reconcile its paradox determines everything yet to follow. Sinai is impossible for the simple and logical reason that the infinite cannot meet the finite without one of them getting destroyed. You may claim that God literally spoke and wrote the words on the tablets—in which case God effectively becomes finite. Or, you can resort to the poetry of Midrash Tanchuma (s.v. B’reishit), for example, and say God wrote the Torah in “black fire on white fire,” in which case, in order to read Torah, the reader must become infinite. But there’s more. If God somehow could speak all those words and, therefore, what we have in the Torah is an infallible record of the divine will, then liberal Judaism not only is no longer viable, but is also a terrible mistake. If, on the other hand, the words are essentially human (for example, Moses was “inspired”), then the Torah has no more claim on our behaviour than any other equally “inspired” literature and orthodoxy, and in turn, collapses. Neither option is acceptable. The trick is to find some way to maintain that something really happened on Sinai but it is not literally what the Torah says. (Welcome to liberal Judaism.) OK Rabbi K. enough of the polemic, let’s get to the text already! R. Naftali Tzvi Horowitz of Ropshicz (1760-1827) quotes his teacher, R. Menachem Mendel of Rimanov (1745-1815), to the effect that God only pronounced the first aleph of anochi. He then explains that the letter is written as א aleph represents the name of God, Yahweh, because the a combination of two yods and one vav, which is the numeral equivalent :The human face also represents the same numeral equivalent .הוה-י of the two eyes stand for the two yods, and the nose stands for the vav. This indicates that humans are a reflection of the divine.