Wednesday, May 30, 2007
DAILY DOSE: Perceptive Repair
B"H
Perceptive Repair
-----------------
If you see what needs to be repaired and how to repair it, then you have found a piece of the world that G-d has left for you to complete. But if you only see what is wrong and how ugly it is, then it is yourself that needs repair.
A Daily Dose of Wisdom from the Rebbe
-words and condensation by Tzvi Freeman
Sivan 13, 5767 * May 30, 2007
Perceptive Repair
-----------------
If you see what needs to be repaired and how to repair it, then you have found a piece of the world that G-d has left for you to complete. But if you only see what is wrong and how ugly it is, then it is yourself that needs repair.
A Daily Dose of Wisdom from the Rebbe
-words and condensation by Tzvi Freeman
Sivan 13, 5767 * May 30, 2007
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Is G-d an It, an I, or Nothing? By Tzvi Freeman
Listen to the Fingerprints
How do you get to that? How do you tune in to G-d's wisdom, compassion, etc.? Thinking all day and night won't get you there--just more of your own wisdom, but not His. You're just spinning in circles.
Like we said, His wisdom is in those fingerprint articulations of the Ein Sof that generate a universe. Only that, on the way down, generating lower and lower worlds, the complexity approaches the chaos-point and noise overwhelms the signal. Information becomes gobbly-gook, i.e. our world. The whole thing begins to look like a Wikipedia article that went awry.
Fortunately, there have been certain clear minds in history, both Jewish and otherwise, that were capable of tuning in to the signal as it sounds above, before it begins all its convolutions on the way down. Not through pondering, philosophizing, demolishing competitive theses and getting published with Cambridge University Press--but by freeing their minds from the maddening noise of the material world and opening it up to the bright light of higher realms.2 Up there, you get a pure, clear signal. And if you are a truly fine-tuned receiver for that signal, it will come down into your mind, your thoughts and even your words, straight into this world for others to hear.
Now imagine one of those human signal-towers so tall, so finely tuned, so devoid of inner noise, the ultimate in super-conductivity because his ego presents zero friction to the transmission energy. Imagine that he picks up the core vibrations of the universe, straight from the original source. Imagine that he transmits that signal to a mass of diverse people in an intelligible form, even managing to amplify it so that all can tune into it directly. And then, to ensure that the signal is preserved for posterity, he spends forty years with his people wandering in the desert, drawing it even further down, into physical writing on leather parchment. His hand writes stories, cryptic instructions and tallies of numbers--all directly extended from that core signal, as first-level harmonics extend from string vibrations.
Then he provides the decrypting code to his students who utilize it for the next three and something thousand years to figure out what to do in every possible situation.
Of course, if someone were to come and tell me that some bearded gentleman had tuned into the inner vibrations of the cosmos and heard that I'm supposed to hang knotted threads from my four-cornered garments and avoid turning on light-switches on Saturdays at all costs, I would probably just return a kind smile. But we Jews have no choice but to believe. We were there at the time and saw it happen for ourselves. And if it didn't happen, then what on earth are we doing here today? That event is the only explanation we have of our existence that works.3
So that's what Jews believe: That in this Torah and in these mitzvahs are found the fingerprint of the Ein Sof, that which has no definition and can never be known. That this intangible No-thingness chooses to relate to us, to be found there in our profoundly finite, perhaps even childish dreams and aspirations, melodramas and concerns, the way we eat, sleep, love, quarrel and make a living--all this is found in G-d's fingerprint, in this Torah of His. And that by absorbing this Torah--and allowing ourselves to be absorbed within it--we achieve perfect union with the Essence of All Things. We have Him, just like the little boy had his father. Him in all His essence. Or it. Or whatever.
Perhaps that's why small children have no trouble relating to G-d--because they have no notions of who and what He is supposed to be. Perhaps that's all we really need to do: To think again like a naïve, simple five-year old and just say, "G-d, I really want a bicycle."
And then all the questions slip away.
Perhaps, then, this was the whole purpose of your journey: That you should come to a deeper understanding of how utterly insane it is to be a Jew and believe you can talk to the Infinite as your best friend. Because it is. Just as it was insane for Rabbi Yochanan to be a horse. But for the child and the father to connect, as for the child to inherit the father, as for us to become one with the Ein Sof--none of that will be through intellect. It will be through that utterly insane point of freedom that lies at the core of every human being and of all things. Aka G-d.4
How do you get to that? How do you tune in to G-d's wisdom, compassion, etc.? Thinking all day and night won't get you there--just more of your own wisdom, but not His. You're just spinning in circles.
Like we said, His wisdom is in those fingerprint articulations of the Ein Sof that generate a universe. Only that, on the way down, generating lower and lower worlds, the complexity approaches the chaos-point and noise overwhelms the signal. Information becomes gobbly-gook, i.e. our world. The whole thing begins to look like a Wikipedia article that went awry.
Fortunately, there have been certain clear minds in history, both Jewish and otherwise, that were capable of tuning in to the signal as it sounds above, before it begins all its convolutions on the way down. Not through pondering, philosophizing, demolishing competitive theses and getting published with Cambridge University Press--but by freeing their minds from the maddening noise of the material world and opening it up to the bright light of higher realms.2 Up there, you get a pure, clear signal. And if you are a truly fine-tuned receiver for that signal, it will come down into your mind, your thoughts and even your words, straight into this world for others to hear.
Now imagine one of those human signal-towers so tall, so finely tuned, so devoid of inner noise, the ultimate in super-conductivity because his ego presents zero friction to the transmission energy. Imagine that he picks up the core vibrations of the universe, straight from the original source. Imagine that he transmits that signal to a mass of diverse people in an intelligible form, even managing to amplify it so that all can tune into it directly. And then, to ensure that the signal is preserved for posterity, he spends forty years with his people wandering in the desert, drawing it even further down, into physical writing on leather parchment. His hand writes stories, cryptic instructions and tallies of numbers--all directly extended from that core signal, as first-level harmonics extend from string vibrations.
Then he provides the decrypting code to his students who utilize it for the next three and something thousand years to figure out what to do in every possible situation.
Of course, if someone were to come and tell me that some bearded gentleman had tuned into the inner vibrations of the cosmos and heard that I'm supposed to hang knotted threads from my four-cornered garments and avoid turning on light-switches on Saturdays at all costs, I would probably just return a kind smile. But we Jews have no choice but to believe. We were there at the time and saw it happen for ourselves. And if it didn't happen, then what on earth are we doing here today? That event is the only explanation we have of our existence that works.3
So that's what Jews believe: That in this Torah and in these mitzvahs are found the fingerprint of the Ein Sof, that which has no definition and can never be known. That this intangible No-thingness chooses to relate to us, to be found there in our profoundly finite, perhaps even childish dreams and aspirations, melodramas and concerns, the way we eat, sleep, love, quarrel and make a living--all this is found in G-d's fingerprint, in this Torah of His. And that by absorbing this Torah--and allowing ourselves to be absorbed within it--we achieve perfect union with the Essence of All Things. We have Him, just like the little boy had his father. Him in all His essence. Or it. Or whatever.
Perhaps that's why small children have no trouble relating to G-d--because they have no notions of who and what He is supposed to be. Perhaps that's all we really need to do: To think again like a naïve, simple five-year old and just say, "G-d, I really want a bicycle."
And then all the questions slip away.
Perhaps, then, this was the whole purpose of your journey: That you should come to a deeper understanding of how utterly insane it is to be a Jew and believe you can talk to the Infinite as your best friend. Because it is. Just as it was insane for Rabbi Yochanan to be a horse. But for the child and the father to connect, as for the child to inherit the father, as for us to become one with the Ein Sof--none of that will be through intellect. It will be through that utterly insane point of freedom that lies at the core of every human being and of all things. Aka G-d.4
Sunday, May 06, 2007
Lag BaOmer - Holidays
Lag BaOmer - Holidays: "The Chassidic masters explain that the final day of a righteous person's earthly life marks the point at which 'all his deeds, teachings and work' achieve their culminating perfection and the zenith of their impact upon our lives. "
