kabbalah

Parts of Creation

/ Leiah Moser / Leave a comment

From the Zohar, parashat Toldot: 

Come and see: Everyone who busies themselves with the Torah, they preserve the world and preserve every single one of God’s works in its proper form. And there is not a single part of the human body which does not have an aspect of creation which corresponds to it. For indeed, just as a human is divided into many body parts, and all of them exist on their own level and are arranged in relationship to each other, so too is  the world. All the aspects of creation are like body parts which are joined together and arranged in relationship to each other — it is a real body! And everything is like the Torah, since the whole Torah is divided into parts and sections joined together, and when all of them are arranged properly, they from a single body. When David saw this work, he opened up and said, “How great are Your works, Adonai – You made them all with wisdom. The earth is filled with Your creations!” (Psalm 104)

What Rabbi Chiyah is articulating here is a kabbalistic concept sometimes expressed in the form of the acronym עש״ן (ashan, “smoke”), standing for olam, shanah, nefesh — world, year, and person. The idea is that phenomena existing at all different levels of being, from the individual human up to the world as a whole and the cycle of the year, share a common structure. 

Just as the human body is an organic whole comprised of individual parts with a defined relationship to one another, so too does the world constitute such an organic whole on a different scale. And not only that, but the distinct parts of the one correspond functionally to those of the other. In other words, there is a part of the world which is geographically equivalent to the back of my right knee. And similarly, there is a part of my body which corresponds anatomically to Mexico City.

The key takeaway from this way of thinking is, I believe, the idea that every part of the world is as necessary to the greater whole as each part of my body is for me. Some of humanity’s greatest moral transgressions arise from ignoring that principle. Every person is sacred and necessary to the organic being of the world, and every people likewise. For one people to attack or oppress another is as absurd, and as self-defeating, as if a person’s stomach determined to wage war against their liver. This is no mere metaphor. As Rabbi Chiyah forcefully asserts, “it is a real body!”

There is a blessing customarily recited in the morning (and also after going to the bathroom) which praises God as the former of the human body, asserting that if even one of the body’s many vessels and channels were to be inappropriately opened or closed, “it would not be possible to survive and to stand before you, even for one hour.” Just as we rely upon the interdependent network of our body in order to survive, we need to cultivate the awareness that we really, fundamentally, cannot do without each other. Because right now it seems like we are dying of the sort of autoimmune disorder where the body is at war with itself, and such a body cannot stand, “even for one hour.”

“Establish the work of our hands…”

/ Leiah Moser / 1 Comment

Holding on to the value of our work in a volatile world.

Being a congregational rabbi gives you a very particular perspective on the world’s events. People tend to share things with me about what’s going on in their lives, and in the lives of their relatives. From all those little conversations I tend to get a picture of what people seem to be worried about, what problems they’re currently facing, how they’re trying to deal with those problems — a highly localized picture, to be sure, but as the teachers of the kabbalistic tradition remind us, the microcosm is often a mirror of the macrocosm.

One thing that emerges from that microcosmic picture these days is that a lot of people are either actually struggling with job loss or in the position of having to worry about their job security because of the massive upheavals going on right now in the U.S. federal government. This kind of disruption has a tremendous impact on people’s financial wellbeing, as they suddenly find themselves scrambling for a job or having to help relatives in that situation. But this also has a spiritual impact, because most of us care deeply about the work we do, and it is a wrenching experience to see the work we’ve dedicated our lives to upended seemingly on a whim.

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I was in communication recently with a person who has a book that’s about to be published. They are feeling really concerned now that the book they have been working so hard on might end up facing book bans and other forms of pushback in the current political climate. They asked me for a prayer appropriate to the moment and I searched my head and came up with this one from Psalm 90:

ויהי  נעם אדני אלהינו עלינו ומעשה ידינו כוננה עלינו ומעשה ידינו כוננהו׃

“May the favor of the Lord, our God, be upon us, let the work of our hands be firmly established for us, and make firmly established the work of our hands!”

Note that the last part of the verse could also be read to say, “and may the work of our hands make God firmly established!” This, for me, is the prayer of the moment, because this is the way it works: We pray to God to establish the work of our hands, but we also do our best to make sure that our work is establishing God in the world by promoting a just and righteous society and helping people in need. When that is happening, our hands and God’s hands work in partnership, the same hands dedicated to the same good ends. 

In times such as these when, as the sages of the Zohar might put it, the attribute of Gevurah seems to have reign over the world, it can be incredibly hard to hang on to that perspective — which is a pity, because maintaining that attitude toward the work we do is even more important at such times. Come what may, may God establish the work of our hands, and may the work of our hands help establish a godly world.