The Talmud relates a story in which Rebbe Yehoshua ben Levi meets Elijah the Prophet at the entrance of the tomb of Rebbe Shimon Bar Yochai in Meron. Rebbe Yehoshua asks, “When will the Messiah come?” Elijah responds, “Go and ask him yourself, he is sitting at the entrance of town.” So Rebbe Yehoshua goes to the Messiah and asks, “When will you come?” And the Messiah answers, “Today.” The next day Rebbe Yehoshua returns to Elijah and says “He lied to me. He said he would come today, but he didn’t.” Elijah answers, “He meant ‘Today, if you heed His voice” (Psalms 95).
Rebbe Nachman teaches “Today, if you heed His voice”: ‘This is a basic principal in service of Hashem – that a person should not place in front of his eyes anything other than that day. Both with regards to one’s livelihood and general needs, one must not think from one day to the next, and also with regards to spiritual work, a person should not place in front of his eyes anything but that day and that moment. Because when one wants to enter into the service of Hashem, it seems like a big heavy burden, and its impossible to carry a heavy burden like this. But when he realizes that all he has is that day, then it isn’t a burden at all. And furthermore, a person should not push something off from one day to the next, saying ‘tomorrow I’ll begin, tomorrow I’ll pray with the correct intensity’, and similar comments about other service of Hashem. For there is nothing in the world for a person other than the day and moment he is presently standing in – tomorrow is a completely different world altogether. “Today if you heed His voice” Specifically “Today.” Understand this.’
The Midrash on Bereishit tells of the change that took place in the world after Adam took the advice of the snake and ate the forbidden fruit of the tree. On the third day of creation God told the ground to produce “fruit trees bearing fruit,” what actually appeared were “trees bearing fruit.” What happened, tells the Midrash, is that at the outset of creation the tree itself was edible and had the same taste as the fruit, but when Adam sinned and ate from the fruit instead of eating from the tree, the earth was cursed along with him in that the tree lost its taste and the only pleasure was left in the fruit. This explains why the Torah mentions the “tree of life” and the “tree of knowledge of good and evil,” interchangeably as if they were the same tree. The “tree of life” is the tree itself, and the “tree of knowledge of good and evil” is the fruit that it bears. In the future, we are told, as soon as man repents from this sin, by abandoning the fruit and taking a bite into the tree, even though it at first seems coarse and tasteless, the world will revert to its original state with extraordinarily attractive and tasty trees.
Rav Kook explains that the tree represents the process of any given goal while the fruit represent the goal itself. In the Garden of Eden, being in the process was experienced with the same pleasure as reaching the goal, the goal was experienced within the process and the process within the goal – they were one. When Man listened to the snake who told him to yearn for the future when the goals will be reached and not to try to enjoy the moment where we are in process, he was thrown out of the Garden of Eden. The evil snake then took residence within the depths of mans subconscious, to forever flash its Vegas-style billboards promising jackpots and rewards if only you join the game. Or if Vegas is out of your range, he can enslave you with college entrance exams, student loans, internship, bar exams, credit card bills, the stock market, job promotions, mortgages, 401k’s, retirement plans… Unless you boldly snatch it by its tail and tell it, “No longer will you control me – now you are my walking stick, take me out of Egypt.”
Again, as we spoke about last week, if your sole intention is to completely free yourself from the troubling process, then you lost. You are not told to throw away the snake, rather use it as your walking stick. To live in the moment is not to be free from the moment, rather to be completely involved in the moment with all of ones energy. Remember the nachash, snake, is the same numerical value as moshiach, messiah. This is what gets us out of Egypt, this is what redeems us.
Once again we see why the only place for a Jew to live is in the Middle East. The job of a Jew, as it is with everything, is to work the paradox into reality, bring the infinite into the finite, to bring God into the world. Y-H-V-H, “was, is, and always will be,” is above time, our job as part-infinite part-finite beings, is to bring the two together. To express the inner part of us which is above time in the part of us which is bound by time. To bring the infinite part of us into each action and object we come in contact with.
Yes, it is true that like the maan, “he who increases (work) won’t gain anything, and he who decreases won’t lose anything,” as the Mishna Brura says, extra effort won’t increase your livelihood. So if I am driving myself crazy by working like a slave in order to meet some quota, if all my involvement in the world is in order to gain some future reward, then I must stop.
But after I take time off to get in touch with that infinite part of me, I must bring it out into the world, into my actions and into my effort, because that finite part of me is still stuck in Egypt and needs to be redeemed.
If you have no idea what kind of action can express this infinite light of yours then let me welcome you to the great world of Halacha (Jewish Law). We have no shortage of time-bound actions. But remember, to truly experience the infinite light through them, they must be done not for the sake of any future reward. As Rebbe Nachman teaches, when one does a mitzvah with all his energy for the sake of the mitzvah itself, without desiring material or spiritual benefit that it will bring, not even desiring the future reward of the World to Come, then he experiences the infinite pleasure of the World to Come in this world at that moment within the action of the Mitzvah. As the Talmud says “the reward of the mitzvah is the mitzvah itself.”
When one enters into the world of Halacha and wonders “how am I going to do all this?” He’s missing the whole point. The only thing that exists is this moment. All you need to do is live to your full potential in this one moment, do one small act with your entire being and that’s it!
It may seem like a coarse tree at first, but sink your teeth in, and taste its delight. Halacha means to walk… “But where are we going and when are we going to get there?” If you stop asking that question and just take one full step forward you are guaranteed to hear the answer.
In the Parasha which talks about our rewards, “if you walk in my statutes, and guard my mitzvot,” the highlight of the reward is “I will walk among you and be your G-d and you will be my people, I am Y-H-V-H your God who brought you out of the Land of Egypt from being their slaves, I broke the pegs of your yoke and walked you up standing.” Rashi brings the Midrash that explains “I will walk among you,” that God is saying, “I will walk with you in the Garden of Eden, as one with you.”
The Talmud says, “if a Mitzvah presents itself don’t let it turn to chametz (leaven).” Mitzvah is Matza with a vav, the connection between heaven and earth, infinite and finite, timeless and time. Because Mitzvah is about moments, every moment that passes is a missed opportunity. But don’t worry, I promise there is moment right now, another unique opportunity, jump on it. If we wouldn’t have run, we would never have gotten out of Egypt.
This is why Reb Natan the closest student of Rebbe Nachman wore two watches. As Reb Natan Greenberg, our Rosh Yeshiva, once said “a person needs to be in time and above time and the same time.”
Moshe, who received his name because he came “from the water,” represents the sefira of netzach (eternity). And as Rav Daniel Kohn, our other Rosh Yeshiva, explains, eternity of netzach is experienced when one is fully invested in something because s/he realizes that this opportunity and present circumstances will never return again. As apposed to eternity of ‘living forever’, in which nothing has any meaning and nothing is enjoyable since everything would be available an endless number of times, true eternity is experienced only in the passing moments. If G-d is endless and infinite, why did he desire to create our bodies and this finite, time-bound world? Ramchal answers, to give us joy in the World to Come, and as Rebbe Nachman explains, to experience the Joy together with us, in the moments, in the mitzvah. The joy when the finite and infinite unite.
Only Moshe can take us out of Mitzrayaim, which literally means “the constricted sea”. And the Egyptians final death can only come through drowning in the Yam Suf, which literally means “endless sea.” The Jewish people “Halchu Walked on dry land, in the midst of the sea.” The time within the timeless. The finite within the infinite. And where were they going? Did they cross the sea to the other side, and use it as a shortcut? No, they came back near the exact spot that they left from. Because they began to learn it’s not about meeting a quota of bricks anymore, the destination is the journey.
The Talmud relates a story where Yeravam Ben Nevat asks Hashem how it is going to be in the Garden of Eden. Hashem answers “Me, you, and Moshiach ben Dovid will be strolling around together.” Then, Yeravam asks, “Who will be leading?” Hashem answers “Moshiach ben Dovid.” It can only be the finite that leads the infinite on this journey. It is our physical actions in the passing moments in this finite world that redeems us.
May we be blessed with the strength to grab the snake-stick and learn how to walk.
One step at a time.
Beginning NOW!