As I start to write this, I seek to take off the clothes of trying to be a teacher. I am not writing something I already know -- I am trying to learn something new. The great Sufi poet Rumi writes that if I sit with you in silence, and suddenly I am filled with words, then it is because of the depth of your soul that I am tapping in to that I am able to speak so eloquently. So Hashem, You who knows who reads this, open me up to the deepest parts of them.
And then I listen...
It's so easy to fall into the trap of thinking. Yes. As I sit here and I am wondering, given my extraordinarily vast knowledge of the parsha, its feelings and patterns and intricacies, Which of these beautiful strings will the Lord pluck for the sake of our reading audience...? And then I remember one of the The Rules: always know what mental baggage and expectations you are carrying into a situation. Not that we should not have expectations, but we should be aware of them. So I am thinking I'll open myself and write on the parsha, but maybe Hashem has something different in mind. I think I am open, but I am so closed. Even my openness is closed. Every word I write is limiting compared to the unspoken, the yet-unwritten..
I think this is related to our new protagonist, Yitzhak. Bound on the altar, he is forced to recognize that there is another story besides what he is thinking. He realizes Destiny, something so far beyond him, in which he is the key actor, but only an actor, or maybe even a puppet. His life is stamped and sealed with this knowledge, so much so that he cannot act -- his wife must be found for him. We live on this precarious line on which we act, we see the world in front of us and we act on it, and are affected by it. We are caught in its drifts, in its peaks and lulls. But Yitzhak, whom we know almost nothing about, is other-worldly, because he does not act.
And by not acting, he ACTS, he is moved like a chess piece. We may well be afraid to be moved, literally and figuratively. But he holds himself back -- and THIS IS HIM. He is acting by not acting, he is creating around himself, by his active passivity, the possibility of G-d really acting through him, by him, with him. He lets Hashem speak through his silences, his deep understanding is deepened by his silence. And people in front of him feel UNDERSTOOD by him as he listens, afraid even to guide with a question.
He is the ultimate understaning that there is more, there is so much that can come in, that will come in, if we let it. He was forced on the altar to realize this, forced to realize his complete importance and complete irrelevence. He is the lynchpin to God's revealing His destiny-plan for the world, but must do it by not doing anything at all. We must learn this from Yitzhak. We must be humble about our role in our own destiny, must know the place of our own hands in our own fate.
Thanks, readers. I didnt know this before.
Rav Gavriel Goldfeder
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Rav Gavriel Goldfeder is one of the first semicha recipients of the yeshiva. A graduate of Drew University in Religious Studies, he came to Bat Ayin after stints in other yeshivot and found a spiritual and intellectual home. Here he met his wife, Ketriellah, who was a student in our short-lived Women's Yeshiva. Upon graduation, Gavriel took the position of rabbi of the Aish Kodesh Congregation in Boulder, Colorado and together with Ketriellah and their growing family, they are busy creating (in Gavriel's words), "a community infused with Torah values, passion for learning and prayer, consideration of one another, and action, as well as deep celebration of the joys of life." |