Pierre Teilhard_de_Chardin

This week’s Torah portion, bamidbar (Numbers 1:1-4:20), is the first Torah reading in a book of the same name (referred to in English as Numbers). The word bamidbar (במדבר) means “In the wilderness”.

Wilderness is the backdrop of most of the Torah. It is where all the drama of the people of Israel as a people, as opposed to a family, takes place. And it unfolds in the space of 40 years, after which, supposedly, our forefathers crossed the Jordan river and entered the Promised Land.

But have we really left the wilderness? Have we really entered the Promised Land?

Think about it. For thousands of years, every Simchat Torah we start reading the Torah from the beginning, from the Torah portion of Bereshit. And after fifty weeks or so, towards the end of the cycle, we read the last chapter of the Torah, Deuteronomy 34, in which we find a powerful image: Moses goes up to mount Nevo, from which he has a view of the land of Canaan, and, Y-H-V-H tells him:

זֹאת הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר נִשְׁבַּעְתִּי לְאַבְרָהָם לְיִצְחָק וּלְיַעֲקֹב לֵאמֹר לְזַרְעֲךָ אֶתְּנֶנָּה הֶרְאִיתִיךָ בְעֵינֶיךָ וְשָׁמָּה לֹא תַעֲבֹר:

“This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, saying, ‘I will assign it to your offspring.’ I have let you see it with your own eyes, but you shall not cross there.” (Deuteronomy 34:4).

Moses passes away, the Torah ends, and we start from the beginning. The entry into the land of Canaan, which is described in the book of Joshua, is not part of Jewish life cycle.

Notice also that God is not referred to in the Torah as “the God who took you into the land of Canaan.” He is only referred to as the one who took the people of Israel out of Egypt. As, for example, in the first of the Ten Commandments:

אָנֹכִי יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ אֲשֶׁר הוֹצֵאתִיךָ מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרַיִם מִבֵּית עֲבָדִים.

I, Y-H-V-H, am your god who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage. (Exodus 20:2)

The Promised Land is spoken of as something to prepare for, something that will happen in the future. In the book of Deuteronomy Moses repeatedly uses the expression-

…עַל הָאֲדָמָה אֲשֶׁר אַתֶּם עֹבְרִים אֶת הַיַּרְדֵּן שָׁמָּה לְרִשְׁתָּהּ.

…the land that you are to possess upon crossing the Jordan. (Deuteronomy 32:47).

We are out of Egypt; getting into Canaan is something that is going to happen in the future; so where are we now? In the wilderness.

What is this condition, that we call it “the wilderness?” We are no longer in mitzrayim (מצרים), a word which means Egypt but literally means duality of boundaries. And you are not yet in Canaan, the Promised Land, a land flowing with milk and honey, a land of heaven on earth, although you long for it, you yearn for it, you are oriented towards it, you are informed by it, you move towards it.

You can never really get there. We are told that the people of Israel had to stay in the desert for 40 years until the last person who was a grown up when they had left Egypt—the last person who still had slavery to programmed in them—dies out. Only those who were one-pointedly and wholly to freedom and to the One, who had no trace of duality in them, were fit to cross into the Holy Land. May I suggest, that we are still waiting for those people to arise.

The human condition is not perfect. Perfect saints exist in Renaissance paintings. We all have the devil in us as well. That is what makes it interesting: because even though are bodies are firmly rooted on earth, our consciousness is grounded in Heaven and we can abide in that heaven right now. But we cannot deny duality, we cannot deny our body, we cannot deny those aspects of our lives that constantly pull us towards mitzrayim, towards the duality of boundaries.

So we are here in this in-between land, the land of bamidbar. This is where our unique drama unfolds. We were given an awesome task: the partake in the task of the creator, of moving creation towards more and more consciousness, towards higher and higher order. And how do we do that? As God tells Cain:

לַפֶּתַח חַטָּאת רֹבֵץ וְאֵלֶיךָ תְּשׁוּקָתוֹ וְאַתָּה תִּמְשָׁל בּוֹ:

Sin couches at the door; his urge is toward you, yet you can be the master. (Genesis 4:7)

You still have Egypt in you, it still exerts its pull, but you can make a choice. And that choice has cosmic implication, it is the most direct way towards tikkun ‘olam, towards the repair of the world. This is our task here on earth.

* * *

But does it make sense to aspire towards an elusive Holy Land which one can never reach? I’d like to bring one modern answer to this conundrum, that of the great French scientist, philosopher, theologian and educator, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955). He conceived of the idea of the Omega Point. Omega, of course, is that last letter in the Greek alphabet, which is why Jesus says in the Book of Revelation: “I am the alpha and the omega, the First and the Last.” (Revelation 22:13)

In Teilhard de Chardin’s theory of evolution, the universe perpetually evolves towards higher levels of material complexity and consciousness, starting from simple inanimate matter and culminating, thus far, in us, humans (emphasis on “thus far”). The Omega Point was for him the ultimate point of complexity and consciousness which acts as an attractor, as a point that the universe constantly evolves towards. It is both transcendent and real, and acts as an imperative—everything must evolve towards it, it cannot be undone, and its very existence exerts an irresistible pull on the whole physical matter.

I propose that the same is true of the idea of the Holy Land, the Promised Land. That land does not exist in time and space. The world we live in, the physical world, is the world of the wilderness. The Promised Land, a very real but transcendent concept, is something we can see, we can aspire for, but cannot cross towards. Yet its existence has had a transformative cohesive influence on the Jewish people for thousands of years.

So yes, we are still bamidbar, in the wilderness, in the desert. And that is the good news. Because in choosing to align ourselves with the move towards the Promised Land and away from mitzrayim, away from bondage, we are co-creators of a better world. This is Tikkun Olam at its best. And from a certain perspective, that is what we came here to do.

In a nutshell: after the people of Israel received, collectively, a revelation of God’s voice, including the Ten Commandments, they signed on the dotted line by famously declaring na’aseh ve-nishma’ (נעשה ונשמע) “We will do and listen” (Exodus 24:7). The midrash takes these words to signify their complete trust, since the word na’aseh, “we will do”, preceded the word nishma’, “we will listen”: they committed themselves to obey the Torah even before they heard it fully.

But when Moses goes up the mountain to receive the word of God for them and stays a while, the following happens:

Aaron yields to the pressure. He collects the golden earrings from everybody and fashions a golden statue of a calf. Almost instantly, the Israelites start worshipping this idol, saying:

אֵלֶּה אֱלֹהֶיךָ יִשְׂרָאֵל אֲשֶׁר הֶעֱלוּךָ מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרָיִם:

This is your god, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt!
(Exodus 32:4)

As a school kid, I found this story incomprehensible. How could they do it? In the four months that have passed since the exodus from Egypt, the Israelites witnessed dozens of miracles, each of which, on its own, should have knocked any doubt even out of the worst cynic: the ten plagues; the parting of the Red Sea for the Israelites and the drowning of the pursuing Egyptian forces; the manna and the quails to feed them and the water from the rock to quench their thirst; the “cosmic GPS”—the pillar of light to guide them by night and the pillar of smoke by day; and to top it all off, the collective experience of the revelation of the Ten Commandments, the first of which is the ban on worshipping any idols.

Over the years, I have come to relate to this story as a metaphor for the perils of the spiritual path that many committed spiritual practitioners are familiar with. Anyone who has had a “peak experience”, a moment of clarity in which the screens that normally veil one’s perception lift from one’s eyes and one gazes directly at Truth face to face, knows how one’s sense of self momentarily changes. One’s existential doubts, anxiety and neurosis dissolve in a moment; trust, love, surrender and freedom take over and one is convinced that life will never be the same.

In very rare cases, such an experience leads to a profound and permanent transformation. In most cases, however, the experience fades, and one finds oneself in a predicament—one has fallen deeply in love, but the object of one’s love is nowhere to be found. And for someone new on the path, this can cause a kind of panic, a strong desire to retrieve the clarity of the initial experience and an almost frantic exploration of ways in which that experience could be stabilized.

I am reminded of the first years of starting to meditate. At first, meditation was its own reward. Soon, within months, we (new meditators) kept our ears opened to see if there was anything that we could do to hasten out “spiritual growth.” Maharishi, we notice, wore coral beads; should we wear coral too? Should we be vegetarians? Should we be celibate? Golden calves come in various shapes and forms. The Tibetan teacher Chögyam Trungpa called this spiritual materialism.

What is the moral of the story? For a spiritual aspirant, it is that of patient commitment. Don’t draw conclusions about the nature of ultimate reality based on your emotional experience, even if it is a peak emotional experience. The ultimate reality is One; it is beyond good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant. As long as our interpretation of our closeness to God is based on the quality of our experience, we are still in the land of mitzrayim (מצרים), Egypt, which means the duality of boundaries.

* * *

As I said, this Torah portion continues to deal with the construction of the temple. Readers of the previous two entries of this blog will remember, that I have emphasized the need to understand the tabernacle not as a physical structure outside oneself, but rather as a “structure” that we create within our consciousness for the shekhina (the divine presence) to dwell within us (the Hebrew word lishkon, to dwell, comes from the same root as shekhinah, which is also the root of the word mishkan, the Hebrew name for the tabernacle).

Here is what Rabbi Ephraim of Sudilkov, the grandson of the founder of Hassidism, the Baal Shem Tov, wrote in his in his commentary on this week’s Torah portion, ki tisa:

בודאי לא לחנם נכתב מעשה המשכן וכל כליו בתורתנו הקדושה אלא כדי להורות לנו הדרך האיך הוא בכל אדם שיוכל לבנות משכן וכלים להשראת השכינה בקרבו כי זה היה כל מעשה המשכן כמו שכתוב (שמות כה, ח) ועשו לי מקדש ושכנתי בתוכם. בתוכו לא נאמר, אלא בתוכם ממש.

Surely, the story of the tabernacle and all its tools was not written in our Sacred Torah except for one purpose: to instruct us regarding the way in which every person could build within themselves a tabernacle and tools for inspiring the shekhinah [to dwell] within them. This was the whole story of the tabernacle. As the Torah tells us (in Exodus 25,8): “They will build me a sanctuary, and I will dwell within them.” It does not say “[They will build me a sanctuary, and I will dwell] within it”, but literally “within them.”
(From Degel Machane Ephraim, commentary on ki tisa).

And if we apply this mode of interpretation to the story of the golden calf, we may conclude that under the momentary pressure of doubt, the Israelites regressed to relying on their animal nature as a source of ultimate meaning and happiness.

The Torah does not deny our animal nature or advise us to suppress it. Quite the opposite: it seeks to incorporate it into our spiritual life. But just like in the story of Jacob and Esau, the important message is who gets seniority. Jacob, which stands for our spirituality, has to be senior; Esau, the hunter, cannot be the ultimate good. Likewise, the mistake here is taking the golden calf and referring it as the God that “brought you out of the land of Egypt”. There is only one ultimate reality.

Copyright © 2014 Igal Harmelin-Moria
(Copyright does not pertain to illustrations)