"I soon found myself more isolated in my own land, than I had been in a foreign country. For a while I wanted to fling myself into a world which said nothing to me and which did not understand me. My soul, not yet worn out by any passion, sought an object to which it might be attached; but I realized I was giving more than I received. It was not elevated language or deep feelings that were asked of me. My only task was to shrink my soul and bring it down to society's level."
      
                                                                          --François-René de Chateaubriand, René



We feel the spiritual muteness.
            Woe, how much do we need to speak, how great is the measure of the light of justice and wisdom with which we are illuminated in the depth of our soul?
            But how shall we reveal this, how shall we explain, how shall we express it, how shall we make evident the tiniest part of this supernal radiance?
            In that regard, the gates are closed before us.
            We begin with prayer, we knock with petitioning, we give forth our voice with song and praise, and we speak with metaphor and logic.
            We stand attentive at the doors—perhaps they will be opened a hairsbreadth, and all of our mouths will be filled with a flood of speech and all of our tongues will become like streaming rivers, streaming currents of honey and butter.


                                                                            --Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Kook

ליבא לפומא לא גלי

The heart does not reveal to the mouth...

                                            --Midrash

Psalm 65

 Silence is praise to you,
    Zion-dwelling God...
    You hear the prayer in it all.

I have a tale to tell
Sometimes it gets so hard to hide it well
I was not ready for the fall
Too blind to see the writing on the wall

A man can tell a thousand lies
I've learned my lesson well
Hope I live to tell
The secret I have learned, 'till then
It will burn inside of me

I know where beauty lives
I've seen it once, I know the warm she gives
The light that you could never see
It shines inside, you can't take that from me

The truth is never far behind
You kept it hidden well
If I live to tell
The secret I knew then
Will I ever have the chance again

If I ran away, I'd never have the strength
To go very far
How would they hear the beating of my heart
Will it grow cold
The secret that I hide, will I grow old
How will they hear
When will they learn
How will they know

                             ---Madonna 

To seek Truth is to prefer Being above all else, even in a catastrophic form, simply because it exists.
                     
                                           --Jean-Paul Sartre

I am continually with you; 
    You hold my right hand....
25 Whom have I in heaven but You?
    And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides You.
26 My flesh and my heart may fail,
    but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

                                            --Psalm 73

The Tzemach Tzedek writes: The love expressed in "And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides You..."(Psalms 73:25) means that one should desire nothing other than God, not even "Heaven" or "Earth," the highest spiritual planes of the Garden of Eden, for these were created with a mere ray and drop of His Light...

The love is to be directed to Him alone, to His very Being and Essence.

This was actually expressed by my master and teacher, the Alter Rebbe whenever he was in a state of ecstatic clinging to God, unio mystica, he would exclaim as follows:

I want nothing at all! I don't want Your Garden of Eden, I don't want Your World to Come... I want nothing but You alone.

The Greatest Love of All--PART 5

Farewell, farewell! but this I tell

To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!

He prayeth well, who loveth well

Both man and bird and beast.

He prayeth best, who loveth best

All things both great and small;

For the dear God who loveth us,

He made and loveth all.   


     --Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

                    

Students of the  Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi asked him:

"Which is the superior service of God, loving Him or loving others?"

He replied: "Scripture is explicit: `I have loved you, says the Lord.' (Malachi 1:2) It follows that loving others is superior - for you love whom your beloved loves."

                                                                                

The Utter Audacity of Jewish Hope

ב"ה

The Utter Audacity of Jewish Hope

True hope is swift, and flies with swallow’s wings;

Kings it makes gods, and meaner creatures kings.

                              --William Shakespeare

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -

And sore must be the storm -

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm-

                             --Emily Dickinson

Those who hope in the Lord
    will renew their strength.
They will soar on wings like eagles;
    they will run and not grow weary,
    they will walk and not be faint.

                              -- Isaiah 40:31

As a child growing up in New York, the month of December was always a time that I would feel within a tinge of collective jealousy. Seeing the dazzling, colorful array of lights and decorations that many houses displayed so prominently in honor of Christmas often left me crestfallen and convinced that the Jewish people were gypped because the Channukah candles seemed just so…wimpy. Even those that would get more creative and hang up a multi-colored “Happy Hannukah!” sign, trying to liven things up a bit, or the truly adventurous families that would really go all out and actually hang up a machete dreidel with a smiley face…didn’t quite match the excitement and aesthetic allure that shined from the surrounding houses’ walls and rooftops covered with lights, sleighs, and other fascinating decorations.

My consternation was further compounded when I got a little older and learned that Channukah is not only climatically a winter holiday. The military victory and subsequent miracle of the oil were actually the last national triumphs that the Jewish people enjoyed as a nation before the beginning of the long, winter night of the exile that we are still presently enduring. It was almost as if God gave us one last going-away present at the time of the Second Temple before its destruction and the ensuing Diaspora. Knowing that we would have miles and miles of suffering to go before we could finally sleep again as a totally sovereign nation, He gave us the Channukah candles to illuminate Jewish homes wherever they might be on the globe, and they were to shine even during the times of all the horrors we suffered over the centuries. They were to warm us, and lead the way. (This is the reason why many have the custom to sing the Ma’oz Tzur song, which recounts all the exiles and the future Messianic redemption, by the lit candles. It is as if we are proclaiming that just as the Jews were granted this previous redemption of Channukah, we believe that we will soon reach the final, utopian Messianic redemption.)

Why then just a few measly candles? If this holiday’s commemoration was to insure our survival in exile, why did He not leave us with a real bang, a really exciting, eye-opening, show-stopping, loud, lively and sparkling display of lights and colors and heat? 

He did.

But we need to stare deeply at the resounding elegance of the candles to see it and hear their message. All the power and vigor needed to surmount any challenge is conveyed and displayed in the deceptively small flames of the Channukah candles. They might not be apparent immediately; one needs to listen to what the candles are whispering. For their message is too profound to be accessible without effort.

---------------------------------

President Obama titled his book about reclaiming the American dream, “The Audacity of Hope” based on a sermon he had heard from Reverend Jeremiah Wright. The beautiful idea that Wright delivered in that sermon was actually a comment on a painting by the great Victorian artist George Frederic Watts called “Hope”.  The

 “painting depicts a female allegorical figure of Hope…sitting on a globe, blindfolded, clutching a wooden lyre with only one string left intact. She sits in a hunched position, with her head leaning towards the instrument, perhaps so she can hear the faint music she can make with the sole remaining string”.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hope_(painting)#cite_note-nydailynews.com-1)

"With her clothes in rags, her body scarred and bruised and bleeding, her harp all but destroyed and with only one string left, she had the audacity to make music... To take the one string you have left and to have the audacity to hope… that's the real word God will have us hear… from Watt's painting,"

said Wright. The painting is indeed quite austere, and the melancholy state of the figure so dire, that G.K. Chesterton cynically scoffed that a more accurate name for the painting would have been Despair. Watts defended his work, however, and explained that,

"Hope need not mean expectancy. It suggests here rather the music which can come from the remaining chord".

What an extraordinarily powerful message! Hope need not mean expectancy. To hope is simply to grab tightly that last string and play on. No matter what. Keep making the music even though one is certain that the future shall not yield any real positivity. It is the music itself, the hope for better, that is the end itself, and not just the means to reach a rosier reality. That is the audacity of hope. Living with a vision of a better tomorrow, utterly inspired by that vision, letting its melody carry you, while knowing full well that the pictured tomorrow shall probably never arrive.

 As the Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti explained his inspiration from Virgil’s timeless hero,

“Aeneas is beauty, youth, ingenuousness ever in search of a promised Land, where, in the contemplated, fleeting beauty, his own beauty smiles and enchants...”

As Moses viewed with bliss the Promised Land from the distant peak of Mount Nebo, it is the contemplation alone of visions of hope that elicits radiant beauty and enchantment from within. They are not at all dependent on actually crossing the Jordan.  Because

“It is the place where one’s will and thoughts are directed that is the true location of a person”.

                   --Ba’al Shem Tov

That is the hauntingly inspiring and surprisingly audacious music of hope. It is beautiful music; it is transforming music. Hope allows one found in the most despondent situation to be lifted up, to transcend the bitter reality within which one might be trapped, to see new vistas of a Promised Land, shimmering with an expansive aura of goodness, serenity, and peace, totally independent of actual empirical circumstances.

I think that is why the great singers of the human condition, Isaiah, Shakespeare, and Dickinson all compared hope to a bird. A “mean creature” caught in a “sore storm” that Chesterton would have termed desolate despair can soar and fly out with the swift, mighty wings of hope that “never grow weary… not be faint.” Hold dear that last string of hope! Pluck at it with your whole being and allow that music to reshape your internal landscape, though you know that the external one might never get better… "Hope need not mean expectancy. It suggests…rather the music which can come from the remaining chord". Because it’s the music, the hope itself, regardless of any actual outcome, that will make present reality smile and enchant.

----------------------------------------------

But let us go deeper. Come, let’s get the sweet music of the lone string to resonate louder…

At the same time that Watts was painting, there lived in Russia an intensely passionate, mystical rabbi, Rabbi Shalom DovBer Schneerson of Lubavitch. He was not content with this understanding of hope. He declared hope to be much more daring.

 For since the beginning of the world men have not… perceived by the ear, neither hath the eye seen… what He hath prepared for him that waiteth for Him.

                                                  --Isaiah 64:3

 “The meaning of “him that waiteth for Him” is one who has hope. Hope is necessary only for something that one does not know if it will be. For something expected, hope is not needed... Our souls await God; we therefore hope for something that might be radically distant, something that can never be rationally conceived to occur, something that we cannot even fathom how it can ever happen and indeed seems impossible that it will. Yet hope is the ardent belief that it shall, indeed, come to pass.” 

To hope is not just to picture with no expectancy a permanently elusive state. Judaism exhorts us to hope, but not a hope that is only a wistful dream, a fantasy that might serve to raise one out of despondency though quite possibly lacking any eventual fruition. We hope...with expectancy. To hope is really to await. Because our hopes grow out of a trust in God. We hope with expectancy because we do wait for Him, and therefore know to expect a better future. 

Sore must be the storm -

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm-

Do you understand that this is why no storm has ever silenced the bird of Jewish hope? Throughout the centuries, the song of Jewish hope was sung during pogroms, crusades, and even in concentration camps.

  

 Because we do expect. And wait. And trust. And therefore never, ever stop hoping. That things will actually change and get better. 

Nothing the Jews faced caused us to stop plucking at the one string left on the harp. 

And the little, forlorn bottle of oil that the Maccabees found... was that one remaining string of the harp. It proved that hope should truly be expectancy. The priests in the Temple lit the menorah with it, they had the utter audacity of Jewish hope and dared to play a melody with the small, solitary string...and it indeed burned for eight days. And the candles are still today whispering that secret, telling us to hope for and expect the impossible.

-----------------------------------------------

But their message is not only the inspiration to continue “to take the one string you have left and to have the audacity to hope.” The Channukah candles are also explaining to us how we can do it- how in the face of any sorrow or adversity, we can so persistently “never stop - at all-” living with the trust and hope for the concrete actualization of better times.

 "The candle of G-d is the soul of man” (Proverbs) means that souls…are, by way of illustration, like the flame of the candle, whose nature it is always to scintillate upwards… In like manner does the soul of man…naturally desire and yearn to separate itself and depart from the body in order to unite with its origin and source in God, the fountain-head of all life.”

     –Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, Tanya

There are many scientific opinions about the nature of hope. From where in the soul does it come? Which aspect of the psyche allows a vulnerable, tender victim of fate to refuse to surrender to the challenges it's facing and continuously retain the yearning for a better life? Some claim hope to be an emotion, others consider it a state of mind.  In truth, neither is correct. The mighty pinions of ascending hope are manifestations of the inherent essence of the soul, the candle of God, His lover with an unquenchable passion for Him, ever striving to fuse with Him. As a flame perpetually rises, refusing to yield to any force that tries to bind it, the soul is constantly trying to soar up to its Beloved, the source of all positivity and goodness, the Infinite Light of God. Expectant hope results from the soul’s essential, innate striving towards God taking the specific form of a confident lens through which to evaluate and perceive reality.

The road is long; there are mountains in our way

But we climb a step every day

Love lift us up where we belong

Where the eagles cry on a mountain high

Love lift us up where we belong

Far from the world we know, up where the clear winds blow.

                      –Joe Cocker & Jennifer Warnes

The graceful persistence of the Channukah flames are demonstrating and reminding us that the soul’s constant love and yearning for God can indeed lift us up from the harrowing, vanquishing, hurtful world we know to the place of winds of clarity and serenity, the place where the soul belongs, His embrace. Hope is the soul’s wings.

We need to recognize the source of the positivity we often are blessed to feel within, to fathom what it really is. It is not naïveté. It's your soul striving to unite with God, trusting that it will, and hence having the utter audacity to unshakably hope for a better future…

And especially our expectancy for the greatest bird of history. As all Jews of Hungarian descent know, Rebbe Isaac Taub of Kalov’s song about the Messiah, “Sol a kokosh mar”, gave all of our ancestors much hope for a brighter future. And now we understand its meaning…

 The sun is rising now... Near a green forest, is a wide field, where a bird walks around. 

What sort of bird is this? What sort of bird is this? 

With yellow feet, and a pearl-whi​te beak, he is waiting to go home. With yellow feet, and blue-gree​n wings, he is waiting to go home. 

Wait,​ birdy, wait! Wait, birdy, wait! 
Until​ God decides it is the right time, then you will go home. 

But when will it be? But when will it be? 
When "The Temple is rebuilt and then the city of Zion will be filled" - that is when it will be. 

The Greatest Love of All--PART 4

"What we experience is that God loves- not that God is love. In the love He draws too near for us still to say He is this or that; in that love we experience only that He is God, but not what he is. The what, the essence remains hidden. It hides precisely by revealing itself."
                                                          --Franz Rosenzweig

Explanation, and of PART 3--click here   (from 56:50)

The Greatest Love of All--PART 3--UPDATED

"God is not life, God is Light. He is the Lord of life, but He is as little alive as He is dead; and to state one or the other about Him, as the ancient man states, that "He lives," and as the modern man states, that He "is dead," betrays equal pagan partiality. Only that neither- nor of dead and alive, only that fine point where life and death touch and melt into one does not forbid the typical terminology. God neither lives nor is dead, but He gives life to what is dead, He--loves."
                                          --Franz Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption

Why does one betray pagan partiality by declaring God to be dead or alive, but can comfortably state that He loves? 

Aristotle, in fact, postulated the opposite.

Since that which moves and is moved is intermediate, there is something which moves without being moved, being eternal, substance, and actuality...The final cause, then, produces motion as being loved, but all other things move by being moved.

                                                  --Aristotle, Metaphysics 12:7

This is Aristotle's famous concept of God as the Unmoved Mover. Whereas all other beings must move themselves in order to move another, the ultimate Mover, the Final Cause, moves all things without Him needing to move. The metaphor he gives to explain this, is that God moves the world as the beloved moves the lover. The beloved need not take any notice of the lover, even as the current of the lover's whole being might be mightily, steadily flowing towards the beloved, and the lover's whole life and daily schedule is focused on the beloved. So, says Aristotle, is He the drive and purpose and magnet of all things and realms that strive towards Him in constant, arduous love and attraction- yet He remains unmoved and oblivious to it all; His only occupation is contemplation of Self, the essence of perfection.

The nature of the divine thought involves certain problems... For if it thinks of nothing, what is there here of dignity? It is just like one who sleeps. And if it thinks, but this depends on something else, (He thinks about something else) then (since that which is its substance is not the act of thinking, but a potency) it cannot be the best substance; for it is through thinking that its value belongs to it. Further...what does it think of? Evidently... it thinks of that which is most divine and precious, and it does not change; for change would be change for the worse, and this would be already a movement... Therefore it must be of itself that the divine thought thinks (since it is the most excellent of things). 

He is not even aware of us, in Aristotle's opinion. That would be a stain on His perfection. How can Rosenzweig say that anthropomorphic terms of life and death are demeaning to Him- but love is not?

TO BE EXPLAINED...

The Greatest Love of All--PART 2

The whole problem of our time is the problem of love: how are we going to recover the ability to love ourselves and to love one another? The reason why we hate one another and fear one another is that we secretly or openly hate and fear our own selves. And we hate ourselves because the depths of our being are a chaos of frustration and spiritual misery. Lonely and helpless, we cannot be at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves, and we are not at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God.

                        –Thomas Merton

The Greatest Love of All

אהבתי אתכם אמר ה'

מלאכי--

"I have loved you," saith the Lord.

--Malachi 

...הנך יפה רעייתי, הנך יפה

עד שיפוח היום, ונסו הצללים-אלך לי אל הר המור, ואל גבעת הלבונה

כולך יפה רעייתי, ומום אין בך

איתי מלבנון כלה...ממעונות אריות, מהררי נמרים

ליבבתיני, אחותי כלה; ליבבתיני באחת מעינייך

מה-יפו דודייך, אחותי כלה; מה-טובו דודייך מיין, וריח שמנייך מכל-בשמים

נופת תיטופנה שפתותייך, כלה; דבש וחלב תחת לשונך

שיר השירים-- 

How beautiful you are, my darling!
    Oh, how beautiful...
    Until the day breaks
    and the shadows flee,
I will go to the mountain of myrrh
    and to the hill of incense.
You are altogether beautiful, my darling;
    there is no flaw in you.

Come with me, my bride….from the lions’ dens
    and the mountain haunts of leopards.
You have stolen my heart, my sister, my bride;
    you have stolen my heart
with one glance of your eyes…
 How delightful is your love, my sister, my bride!
    How much more pleasing is your love than wine,
and the fragrance of your perfume
    more than any spice!  Your lips drop sweetness as the honeycomb, my bride;
    milk and honey are under your tongue.

--Song of Songs

                                               

For so many people, so many holy, broken, badly hurt people, this is the hardest, most frustratingly elusive faith to achieve. To actually feel or even believe that God loves us with a passionate fiery love seems like a painfully distant, dreamy Arcadian island of fantasy. Long after the mind has reached a level of comfort in believing in God's existence, either by way of realizing that the intellectual proofs positing His being, though far from utterly conclusive, comfortably outweigh the arguments against; or through allowing the pure, stronger, innate faith of the soul to outshine the precious cognitive faculties because of the realization that "one does not kindle a candle in order to see the sun" (Petrus Damiani)- there are still miles to go before one can sleep and snuggle comfortably in the loving embrace of the Shade of the Wings of the Omnipresent, in the greatest love of all. Like a lonely, melancholy bud that cannot succeed to open its petals and receive the warming rays that are always tenderly hovering around it, the person who must struggle to escape the dungeon of terrestrial solitude and trust God's assurances that He is enamored with us suffocates within his inability to face the Infinite Love that shines with overpowering discreetness. 

While His existence can be logically exhibited, His love never can.

When Christianity (Judaism and Islam say the same-S.B.) says that God loves man, it means that God loves man: not that He has some 'disinterested', because really indifferent, concern for our welfare, but that, in awful and surprising truth, we are the objects of His love. You asked for a loving God: you have one. The great spirit you so lightly invoked, the 'lord of terrible aspect', is present: not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist's love for his work and despotic as a man's love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father's love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes. How this should be, I do not know: it passes reason to explain why any creatures, not to say creatures such as we, should have a value so prodigious in their Creator's eyes.
                         --C.S. Lewis

If only we loved Him as He loves us...Let us believe Him when He declares that He does...

A...good way for a man… to arouse and kindle the light of the love that is implanted and concealed in his heart, that it may shine forth with its intense light, like a burning fire, in the consciousness of the heart and mind, to surrender his soul to God, together with his body and [material] possessions, with all his heart, and all his soul and all his might, from the depth of the heart, in absolute truth, is… to take to heart the meaning of the verse: "As in water, face answereth to face, so does the heart of man to man." This means that as [in the case of] the likeness and features of the face which a man presents to the water, the same identical face is reflected back to him from the water, so indeed is also the heart of a man who is loyal in his affection for another person, for this love awakens a loving response for him in the heart of his friend also, cementing their mutual love and loyalty for each other, especially as each sees his friend's love for him.

Such is the common nature in the character of every man even when they are equal in status. How much more so when a great and mighty king shows his great and intense love for a commoner who is despised and lowly among men, a disgraceful creature cast on the dunghill, yet he [the king] comes down to him from the place of his glory, together with all his retinue, and raises him and exalts him from his dunghill and brings him into his palace, the royal palace, in the innermost chamber, a place such as no servant nor lord ever enters, and there shares with him the closest companionship with embraces and kisses and spiritual attachment with all heart and soul— how much more will, of itself, be aroused a doubled and redoubled love in the heart of this most common and humble individual for the person of the king, with a true attachment of spirit, heart and soul, and with infinite heartfelt sincerity. Even if his heart be like a heart of stone, it will surely melt and become water, and his soul will pour itself out like water, with soulful longing for the love of the king.

In a manner corresponding in every detail to the said figure and image but to an infinitely greater degree, has the Lord our God dealt with us. For His greatness is beyond comprehension, and He pervades all worlds and transcends all worlds… it is known of the infinite multitude of worlds, and of the countless myriads of angels in each world …[and] before Him, all of them are accounted as nothing at all and are nullified in their very existence…All these [angels] ask: "Where is the place of His glory?" And they answer: "The whole earth is full of His glory," that is, His people… to bring them near to Him in true closeness and unity, with a truly soulful attachment on the level of "kisses" of mouth to mouth, by means of uttering the word of God…also with a form of "embrace," namely, the fulfillment of the positive precepts…of the King…

Like one who betrothes a wife that she may be united with him with a perfect bond, as is written: "And he shall cleave to his wife, and they shall be one flesh." Exactly so, and even infinitely surpassing, is the union of the divine soul…with the light of the blessed En Sof (Infinite).

Therefore did Solomon, peace unto him, in the Song of Songs compare this union with the union of bridegroom and bride in attachment, desire, and pleasure, embrace and kissing…For through the union of the soul with, and its absorption into, the light of the blessed En Sof, it attains the quality and degree of the holiness of the blessed En Sof Himself, since it unites itself with, and is integrated into, Him, may He be blessed, and they become One in reality…for the corporeality of the body does not prevent the union of the soul with the light of the blessed En Sof, Who fills all worlds, and as is written: "Yea, the darkness hideth not from Thee."

      --Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, Tanya Ch. 46