Behaalotjá 5777 - English

By Rabbi Dario Feiguin

B´nei Israel Congregation, Costa Rica

Between the Self and the Absence

Is the glass half full or half empty?

This is often one of the most important questions, demanding an answer.

The truth is that, in Life, there is no such thing as totally full or totally empty.  Even at the lowest of human degradation, in Auschwitz, in the midst of the atrocious cold, agonizing hunger, and raw misery, there were tremendous expressions of greatness from the Human Soul.

It is all in the eye of the beholder.  Everything depends on how we understand and interpret Reality.

In this week’s Parashah, Parashat Beha’alotcha, there is a particular verse into which I’d like to delve this Shabbat.

It is written in the Torah, in Bemidbar 11:6:

V’atah naf'sheinu y'veshah eyn kol bilti el-haman eyneynu.

“But now, our soul is dried out, for there is nothing at all; we have nothing but manna to look at."

According to the Pshat, the literal interpretation, Nafsheinu, our soul, should be understood as our throat.  It means that our throat is dry from eating only Manna.

But Chazal, our sages of blessed memory, already tackle this problem from another perspective.  They view non-conformism differently.

In the Talmud, in the Yoma tractate, Sheet 74, page 3, there is a difference of opinion between Rav Ami and Rav Ashi, regarding the true reason why the children of Israel are complaining.

One says, “You cannot compare one who has bread in his basket with one who has none.”

What does this mean?

That they were afraid that the Manna would stop coming.  They lived hand to mouth, they had no bank accounts, no savings of any type, and thus feared for the most basic need: their “Parnasa”, their sustenance.

The other one says, “You cannot compare one who sees what he eats with one who does not see what he is eating.”

What does this mean?

That the children of Israel always saw the same food on their tables, and therefore ceased to enjoy it.

According to this interpretation, they were not concerned with a possible lack of food, but with the routine.  It was more than an issue of sating the hunger, but rather of responding to boredom with diversity.  Of imbuing a gray and flat life with more color, more movement, and more interest.

In other words, Life is not just absence and shortage, or presence and abundance.  Both can generate fear.  Both can leave us with a feeling of senselessness.

As we were saying at the beginning, everything depends on how we see the glass, through which lens.

Life is “Yesh” = being, existence, presence; but it is also “Ayin” = absence, lack of, not being.  Only God is “Ein Sof”.  Only He is infinite.

And this which seems so basic and elementary is extremely difficult for us to understand.  Perhaps due to our arrogance, perhaps due to that pathological fantasy of our own omnipotence.

Absence may be understood as a form of existence.  As a reality with its own life.  Or it can also be understood, according to Kabbalah, as “Heeder”, that is, lack of existence.

In other words, one may believe that darkness exists, or one may think that darkness is just the absence of light.

What we should not do is deny that darkness is a part of our Lives.  Just as we cannot deny that each one of us is a vessel of light and also of shadows.

Faced with routinary absence and presence,  we often take extreme, and I believe wrong, stances.

One of them is to try to conquer and possess, believing that this will quench our thirst for being and existing.

We divide the world into Winners and Loosers, and struggle to posess, believing that the more we have, the more winners we will be, as if Human Life was measured by quantity instead of quality.

Another option is to live by impulses: If it is not as I want it, then it should not be at all.  We choose this path, without realizing that then we will also be missing the lights that pierce into the darkness we criticize.  Our criticism of shadows will not let us see the light.

Other extreme positions are depression, asceticism, or the voluntary annulment of the Self; when our reaction to the evil system is to become sick and give up, or to relinquish this World and all the good in it, just because we cannot fight the establishment.

Hippies, punks, rastas, artists, mainly writers, painters, musicians and actors, denounced, through their social movements, that there are plenty of things in our society that smell bad.

And among them, I include the biblical Prophets, the Tannaim of the Mishnah,  the Amoraim of the Talmud and Midrashim, the medieval philosophers and scholars, the Kabbalists and Hasidim.

Each and every one of them, in their own way, teach us how Life is at the same time, routine and surprise, existence and absence, but always, much more than just “having”.  In fact, we come and go from this journey with nothing.

All of them taught me that we do not choose the rules of the game, that we do not control everything, and that if we so want, we can recover the optimism lost by the generation that departed from Mitzrayim, who were never truly able to rid themselves of Mitzrayim and its narrow-mindedness which they carried within.

We may recapture hope, if we accept the Yesh and the Ayin.  We may reactivate faith, if we confront light and darkness, even the one that lives inside our souls.

We may choose between lack of and abundance, to stop measuring, controlling and counting.

We may attempt to be, to love, to create, to believe, to vibrate, to dream.

This dimension, and no other, will be the one that will provide us with a healthier Life, filled with more Meaning and more Shalom. 

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Darío Feiguin

B´nei Israel, Costa Rica