Those Unheard are Sweeter...PART 1

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter...

In his famous “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the great Romantic poet John Keats described how he dreamily gazed at the scenes portrayed on an urn, scenes of beauty and happiness that for centuries have been on the verge of reaching their culmination. We do not know how those scenes actually played themselves out, if their fruition was as tasty as their promise. And that’s okay. He prefers it to remain that way. Because “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.” Very often harsh, concrete reality is quite imperfect, and often does not attain the sweetness contained in the imagining and striving for that reality and those scenes. Melodies anticipated and imagined can at times bring more contentment than their manifestation in the real world, the romantic Keats believed, and something real can only be disappointing compared to the imaginary.

In Jewish mystical tradition, we find a seemingly similar idea about the sweetness of silence.

On Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, the shofar is blown. But according to the mystics…the booming, piercing sound that’s heard….is actually silence. It is the unheard melody of the heart which is incomparably sweeter than the melody of the mouth.

                  Their heart cried unto the Lord…

                                       Lamentations (Eicha) 2:18

There is a running of the soul to God that is expressed through silence. When the soul’s yearning for the Divine has become so passionate and desperate, it is no longer able to be expressed vocally, but it rather cries out from the heart an ineffable scream—and that can only be manifested through the Cry of the Shofar, which the Zohar refers to as “An inner voice that can never be heard.”

                                --Rabbi Shalom Dovber of Lubavitch

We do hear the melody of the shofar. But we are hearing the Sound of Silence. The sweetest melodies, usually unheard, are being sung.

 And the people bowed and prayed

To the neon god they made

And the sign flashed out its warning

In the words that it was forming

And the sign said, "The words of the prophets are

written on the subway walls

And tenement halls

And whispered in the sounds of silence…”

                                  

                                   --Simon and Garfunkel

The shofar transforms us into those prophets. And the synagogue becomes the subway wall and the tenement hall where the deepest type of communication is taking place.

But we do not have the dread of flawed expression by which Keats was assailed. The Jewish Mystic on Rosh Hashanna is not seeking utter, literal, and total silence. He is not afraid that the melody as it reaches physical, heard reality will be disappointing and lacking.

He does not say, as Keats does,

therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;

Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,

Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.

 For the shofar is heard, it is expressed. Its melody is loud and clear.

 And yet—it retains all the sweetness. 

To the extent that…the Hebrew word “shofar” is derived from the words for beauty and pleasure, and on the High Holiday, we actually say in our prayers that with the unheard melody of the shofar, we "seduce" God Himself…

אפתנו בשופר

What is so beautiful, what “seduces” God, by the shofar expressing the ineffable? What does it mean to make the unheard melody…heard?

To be continued....

Are You Truly Your Beloved's?

                    Now that my ladder’s gone,

I must lie down where all ladders start,

In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

                                       --W.B. Yeats

I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.

                         Song of Songs 6

Sometimes we are granted by God inspiration to be His. He calls us. He brings us. He sends us ladders with which to climb to Him. People, events, or moods through which we are able to feel His love openly, enabling us to feel that My Beloved is mine.

But then sometimes, He takes it all away. And we feel as if our Beloved...stopped loving us. 

I opened for my beloved,
    but my beloved had left; he was gone.
    My heart sank at his departure.
I looked for him but did not find him.

        Song of Songs 5

Only then...can we truly begin to prove...that I am my Beloved's.

Dealing With Theological Doubt--PART 2

It seemed God let thee flutter from his gentle clasp:

Then fearful he had let thee win

Too far beyond him to be gathered in,

Snatched thee, o'er eager, with ungentle grasp.

                                                --Robert Frost

Up then, noble soul! Put on thy jumping shoes which are intellect and love, and overleap the worship of thy mental powers, overleap thine understanding and spring into the Heart of God, into His hiddenness where thou art hidden from all creatures.

                                                --Meister Eckhart    

Even though it is not just in tastes and other trifles, but also in matters of virtue and ethics that there are many differing opinions and philosophies among men, those differences are generally in regard to the details and practice of those virtues and not so much the inherent value of them. Pursuit of truth, the meaning of goodness and the nature of existence have been the matter of debate since time immemorial; but no thinking person ever declared it unnecessary to seek truth, act goodly, and exult in existence.

Not so when it comes to faith.

 It is treasured as the rarest of the soul’s jewels; it is rejected as the opium of the masses. It is seen as the apex of man’s achievements; it is ridiculed as the practice of fools. It is revered as the Highest Light one can taste in this life; it is scoffed at for being the Abyss of Darkness that prevents man's fulfillment.

What is it about faith that elicits such acutely opposing reactions?

Faith is the highest passion in a person….the person who has come to faith (whether he is extraordinarily gifted or plain and simple does not matter) does not come to a standstill in faith. Indeed, he would be indignant if anyone said to him, just as the lover resents it if someone said that he came to a standstill in love; for, he would answer, I am by no means standing still. I have my whole life in it.

                              ---Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart.

                                                          

                                --Rabbi A.J. Heschel

Faith is the crown of the soul; just as the crown rests on top of the head, faith is the faculty of the soul that transcends intellect.

                                   --Zohar

Faith is believing something you know ain't true. 

                                        --Mark Twain

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.

                                        --Friedrich Nietzsche

Faith is the surrender of the mind; it’s the surrender of reason, it’s the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It’s our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.

                                       --Christopher Hitchens

Is faith really a surrender of reason? Is it indeed a cop out? Or is it the ultimate fulfillment of the very nature of the human mind?

Let's see what one of history’s greatest minds, Immanuel Kant, postulated about the fate of the mind, not surrendering itself, but rather reaching its maximum potential.

Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.

The perplexity into which it thus falls is not due to any fault of its own. It begins with principles which it has no option save to employ in the course of experience, and which this experience at the same time abundantly justifies it in using. Rising with their aid (since it is determined to this also by its own nature) to ever higher, ever more remote, conditions, it soon becomes aware that in this way-the questions never ceasing-its work must always remain incomplete; and it therefore finds itself compelled to resort to principles which overstep all possible empirical employment, and which yet seem so unobjectionable that even ordinary consciousness readily accepts them. But by this procedure human reason precipitates itself into darkness and contradictions; and while it may indeed conjecture that these must be in some way due to concealed errors, it is not in a position to be able to detect them. For since the principles of which it is making use transcend the limits of experience, they are no longer subject to any empirical test. The battle-field of these endless controversies is called metaphysics.

                                                       --Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

In other words, the mind used to its fullest potential will continuously question and seek deeper explanations for matters of existence. Human intellect must use the cognitive tools it has available to reach understanding, and will use them to ascend more and more to higher levels of comprehension. 

That’s why in Jewish mysticism, the intellect is likened to a bird. As opposed to the coarser, sensual parts of the human that constantly seeks self-gratification through physical desires being fulfilled and is therefore likened to a beast, the human mind when fully engaged with utmost integrity is willing to forego all comforts and pleasures in order to reach the total mental serenity that only full understanding brings. It is never satisfied with a partial knowledge, but continues to fly higher to more profound explanations and wisdom.

But, as Kant says, that serenity shall never be achieved. “But by this procedure human reason precipitates itself into darkness and contradictions” and “its work must always remain incomplete”, because the cognitive process can only use tools that are part of a person’s empirical experience. Whether one’s epistemological beliefs are aligned with Rationalism or Empiricism, it is clear that human reason can never traverse into the realm that completely transcends its experience.

We can investigate physics. But can never really understand metaphysics. The mind’s eye can never see what transcends its field of vision.

Which in very simple English means, that although I can know that 1+1=2, I can never possibly comprehend what made that idea so.

And although my mind can perceive certain logical rules and maxims, I can never prove their validity, as my mind only experiences them as they manifest in my empirical experience, but not as they are in themselves.

Those familiar with the history of philosophy know that this ultimate attack on the human mind, showing that in truth it cannot ever prove anything, was begun by David Hume, whose book woke Kant from his dogmatic slumber, as he testified. But Kant finished off the process, and showed the foolishness of man that tries extending reason beyond what is knowable. His brilliant Critique of Pure Reason brought the mind to reflect critically upon itself in order that it establish and learn to respect its own proper limits.

In the words of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, “Godliness is exalted above human understanding, and even those ideas about the nature of the Divine that intellect can grasp are not perceived as they truly are,  for by virtue of them being Godly, they are amorphous, and hence unknowable by intellect whose cognitive abilities are always using limitations and definitions.”

And many bemoaned the loss of the ability to prove God's existence after Kant's conclusive results that the mind can never do so. They felt that he was the Executioner of Religion, by virtue of the fact he showed how we are not capable of knowledge of things beyond the realm of what can be experienced. Since, by definition, God transcends experience, we cannot know God. Any attempt to know God will be warped because our reason is inadequate. Scholastic Philosophy was indeed dead. All the elaborate, logical proofs of God’s existence and nature that abounded in thousands and thousands of pages written throughout the Middle Ages were seen as obsolete and useless.

But here, the Mystic smiles. Because it is only by truly recognizing the limits of reason, and going beyond it...that God CAN be experienced. Experienced for what He really is, as He really is.

“Of course the mind cannot understand God.” says the Mystic confidently, "Relative to His Infinite Light, the greatest human intellect (and in truth, the greatest spiritual intellect) and slushy mud- are equidistant.

By all means, use the mind to its utmost. I agree with Kant’s charge that:

“Our age is, in especial degree, the age of criticism, and to criticism everything must submit. Religion through its sanctity, and law-giving through its majesty, may seek to exempt themselves from it. But they then awaken just suspicion, and cannot claim the sincere respect which reason accords only to that which has been able to sustain the test of free and open examination.”


Indeed, examine theology with a clear and rational mind. Whatever distance logic can travel, journey freely along that road and make sure religion is plausible intellectually. But you yourself, Mr. Kant, admit that there comes an end to logic’s reach, where the sidewalk ends.


That is when faith begins shining. 


And it is at that point that He “Snatche[s] thee, o'er eager, with ungentle grasp.”

TO BE CONTINUED....

Dealing With Theological Doubt

"Remember, young man, unceasingly," Father Paissy began, without preface, "that science, which has become a great power, especially in the last century, has analyzed everything divine handed down to us in the holy books. After this cruel analysis the learned of this world have nothing left of all that was sacred. But they have only analyzed the parts and overlooked the whole, and indeed their blindness is marvelous. Yet the whole still stands steadfast before their eyes, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Is it not still a living, a moving power in the individual soul and in the masses of people? It is still strong and living even in the souls of atheists, who have destroyed everything! For even those who have renounced Christianity and attack it, in their inmost being still follow the Christian ideal, for hitherto neither their subtlety nor the ardor of their hearts has been able to create a higher ideal of man and of virtue…”
                                           
                                             --Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

It is related that the Alter Rebbe once came into a synagogue in the city of Shklov, Russia where many Jews had assembled to hear him, including several young Torah scholars who were opposed to the Chassidic movement, and had prepared legal, Talmudic questions with which they planned to challenge and antagonize him and his movement.

The Alter Rebbe sang a soul-stirring niggun (melody), and all the questions in the listener’s minds were answered. They ran toward the Alter Rebbe in their eagerness to become his disciples....



Have you ever stood too close to a gorgeous painting, only seeing a tiny piece of it? Did the incoherence and banality of what you saw cause you to reach a conclusion that you're not seeing a masterpiece? Or were you wise enough, brave enough, and humble enough to take a step back, and lift your gaze up to see all that's being conveyed?

Letting go of details is intimidating sometimes. One can get lost in the whole, lose the tenuous grasp that allows the feeling of being in control.


But imagine,for example, making life decisions based on details instead of considering the whole picture. Imagine rejecting a job, a relationship, a home because a few details aren't in synch with one's expectations.

There are some people that insist on getting caught on the small issues. They don't seek happiness in life, but rather insist on complicating things because deep down they seek pain. 

 לְבַד רְאֵה זֶה מָצָאתִי אֲשֶׁר עָשָׂה הָאֱלֹהִים אֶת הָאָדָם יָשָׁר וְהֵמָּה בִקְשׁוּ חִשְּׁבֹנוֹת רַבִּים

This only have I found: God created mankind straight, but they have gone in search of many schemes.

Ecclesiastes 7:29

The path to the Divine is the same. Of course there are and always will be certain aspects of religion and theology that are bothersome. There is no body of wisdom void of frustrating questions. We are not granted sight of utter perfection in this physical world.

But we need to sing the song of the Divine. And the questions slip away.

It's hard sometimes to allow one's self to become vulnerable by being absorbed in the whole. But beauty, truth, love, and happiness are wholesome. 

And God most of all.

Wholesome, simple faith touches on the utterly simple Essence of God.

                                                                                 --The Baal Shem Tov

Take a step back. Look again.

The Music of Life

In the middle of a song or symphony, at times there is a moment of silence. Utter quiet. Yet, not only is that moment PART of the song, the richness and beauty of the song is FELT in that silence.

Now, seemingly, that silence is exactly the same as a moment of silence that’s not straddled by music on both sides. Silence when no noise is present at all. The silence itself is the same.

Or is it? Is there not a qualitative difference? Don't we hear the moment of silence in the song as melodious?

Does the mind of the listener do that? Or does the music emit itself INTO that silence?

But…then there is the moment of silence at the END of a song. There is a bitterness and feeling of loss and even of sadness in that moment. Cessation of beauty is felt there. And again, we must ask if that moment is essentially the same as a regular moment of silence, which is bare of dreariness just as it’s not straddled by excitement; and as the textured, sensual moment of quiet within the song.

And if it is indeed not, what then brings that negative vibe into that moment? It’s not the music emanating into it-for the music is beautiful. And it’s not the nothingness that follows the moment, for the regular, content moment is surrounded by nothingness, and yet feels no lack.

Rather, it must be the actual experience of cessation of sound that radiates the felt melancholy.

What about a moment of silence after a radical halt of song, sudden and not heard as part of the melody, and not known whether it is the finale or if even greater crescendos shall follow?

That is the road we all have to travel - over the Bridge of Sighs into eternity.

                                                                      --Kierkegaard

Send out your light and your truth;

    let them lead me;

let them bring me to your holy hill

    and to your dwelling!

 Then I will go to the altar of God,

    to God my exceeding joy,

and I will praise you with the lyre,

    O God, my God.

 Why are you cast down, O my soul,

    and why are you in turmoil within me?

Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,

    my salvation and my God.

                                             --Psalms 43

The Flame of the Rotating Sword [4] PART 2

I walk amongst men as the fragments of the future: that future which I contemplate.

And it is all my poetisation and aspiration to compose and collect into unity what is fragment and riddle and fearful chance.

And how could I endure to be a man, if man were not also the composer, and riddle-reader, and redeemer of chance!

To redeem what is past, and to transform every “It was” into “Thus would I have it!”— that only do I call redemption!

                               --Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Chapter 42

Neitzsche viewed life, chance, and his fellow human beings as pieces of a grand puzzle- pieces which he has the capacity to connect to form a cohesive, glorious picture. Stated differently, he hoped to shape the future by weaving together the 'present' fragments of life--- not as a god, but rather as a human. He termed man's ability to unify life's multiplicity- our "redemption."



Jewish mysticism incorporates and enhances this same concept, but empowers mankind even further. Not only does man as an individual experience personal redemption through unifying the fragments of life, he also fulfills the entire purpose of creation. By meditating upon God's unity, the All permeating the parts, the present physical separations are elevated into a divine whole.

The corporeal world....is called "public domain" and "mountains of separation." And these are transmuted to light, and become a "private domain" for His blessed Unity, by means of [prolonged contemplation of] this faith [in the unity of the world within God].

                                --Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, Tanya, Chapter 33

Combine Nietzsche's idea with the Tanya's, and you land up with this idea from Thomas Merton:

Our discovery of God is, in a way, God's discovery of us. We cannot go to heaven to find Him because we have no way of knowing where heaven is or what it is. He comes down from heaven and finds us. He looks at us from the depths of His own infinite actuality, which is everywhere, and His seeing us gives us a new being and a new mind in which we also discover Him. We only know Him in so far as we are known by Him, and our contemplation of Him is a participation in His contemplation of Himself. 

We have become contemplatives when God discovers himself in us.

At that moment the point of our contact with Him opens out and we pass through the center of our own nothingness and enter into Infinite Reality, where we awaken as our true self.

                                 

                                   --Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, Chapter 6

Why does our contemplation of God's unity redeems us? Says Merton, because through us meditating upon G-d, we enter His consciousness. When we enter His consciousness, we create the bridge that allows us to traverse from our limited, tiny human fragments into the wondrous land of Ultimate Infinity. We become a part of God Himself.  At that point our true self awakens. For what is truly us- is actually God.

A modern day mystic drives the point home:

The prophets (Ezekiel 16, etc.) liken the pain necessary to reach redemption to the pain of childbirth. There are, unfortunately, many types of suffering in the world. Why to this pain?

Because to heal all other maladies, the medicine needs to be brought from someplace else. Salvation from the pain of childbirth comes from taking out what lies within.

Each man is pregnant with the capability of bringing about Redemption.

                              --Rabbi Moshe Leib Rabinowitz, Grand Rabbi of Munkatch  

Jewish Mysticism teaches that the deeper meaning of Man's banishment from Eden was to turn the entire Earth into a Garden of Eden.

That is done by transforming every aspect of the diverse world into another portal back into the Garden. It means feeling Him in every aspect of the world, humanity, and one's self. 

Uniting the two waters.

Becoming "men, whose darkness is illumined not by lightning, but by some kind of crystal or similar stone, or other substances that possess the property of shining during the night." 

This means arousing the Godly selves that lie dormant within us and coaxing it forward to act as the blazing, guiding lantern which will eradicate the darkness of "fragment and riddle and fearful chance".

Redemption lies within. True redemption is the birthing of the soul.

Renaissance [5]

All new horizons begin with a sense of the ineffable. Everything newly born, everything purely good, everything real. It is that overwhelming elation that inspires all new undertakings. Only it can give the strength of spirit necessary to blaze a new trail and create something totally new and yet undiscovered.

We started our lives as children with the constant sense of the ineffable. A child is amazed by all that he discovers. The world and all its’ phenomenon are an endless source of wonder that causes him to be in a constant striving to unravel the secrets that ineffable reality hides. We tend to get exasperated by a child’s fascination with the menial and mundane; but within that exasperation is a tinge of jealousy, a slight longing for that time when we were so…open to wonder.

 “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. ....get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.” 
― Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

Later, as we grew and felt acquainted with our immediate surroundings and they stopped arousing within us the sense of the ineffable, we then felt an indescribable calling, a challenge to conquer the world, an indescribable call to growth, maturity, and success. Some hear that call for a while, but then become deaf to its' siren. Not those whose humanity is laced with the mystical. Their openness to the mystical ameliorates their humanity and facilitates it being constantly fertile. Every great endeavor in history resulted from an indefinable need to reveal something beyond all that has been already defined.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SswMzUWOiJg

And of course, all true love begins with a sense of the ineffable. A sensing of sweetness, of  indescribable longing, a feeling of completion that the beloved causes within that has been the subject of countless magical words that have all failed to truly describe the experience of utter love.

And only those lucky ones that have “dreamed a dream in time gone by, when hope was high and life worth living ,[and] dreamed that love would never die” are all too often the truly unlucky ones, who know that it never pays to dream, for they know the ineffable feeling of emptiness and pain over loss and death.

But, of course, ‘tis only that ineffable pain…that breeds the new vistas of rebirth and life that come thereafter.

When the night has been too lonely

and the road has been too long…

Just remember in the winter

Far beneath the bitter snows

Lies the seed that with the sun's love

In the spring becomes the rose.

                                            --- Amanda McBroom

                                    

But most importantly, an authentic, penetrating connection with G-d…begins and is only able to be developed and enhanced with a sense of the ineffable.

Because to really forge a bond with Him, one must have the constant sense of wonder and sincerity of a child [1], the unquenchable thrust to growth of robust youth [2], and the unyielding passion of a lover that knows that “Purity of the heart is to will one thing” [3](Kierkegaard).

Birth…Growth and daring to search for innovation…Love…The bond with God.

In King Solomon’s words:

All night long on my bed
    I looked for the one my heart loves;
    I looked for him but did not find him.
² I will get up now and go about the city,
    through its streets and squares;
I will search for the one my heart loves.
    So I looked for him but did not find him.
³ The watchmen found me
    as they made their rounds in the city.
    “Have you seen the one my heart loves?”
⁴ Scarcely had I passed them
    when I found the one my heart loves.
I held him and would not let him go
    till I had brought him to my mother’s house,
    to the room of the one who conceived me.

                                         Song of Songs 3

---

[1] 

[2] Tanya, Chapters 15, 47

[3]