Printable PDF available here. Prior pieces on Behar/Bechukotai are available here, here and here.
Rav Kook (Based on Ein Ayah, Gemara Berachot 43b)
I am the Lord your G-d who brought you out from the land of the Egyptians to be their slaves no more, who broke the bars of your yoke and made you walk erect (lit. קוממיות). (Vayikra 26:13)
One may not walk with an upright posture (lit. קומה זקופה), for one who walks with an upright posture, even only four amot, it is as if he pushes away the Divine Presence, as it is written (Isaiah 6:3) “The entire world is full of His glory.” (Gemara Berachot 43b)
In Gemara Berachot, our Sages teach that it is prohibited to walk with an upright posture. One who does so arrogantly “pushes” – so to speak – the Divine Presence away from the world. While we can all agree that arrogance is a bad character trait, this teaching seems to contradict an explicit verse in Parshat Bechukotai. G-d declares that He freed us from Egyptian slavery, so that we could walk ‘קוממיות’ – upright! How are we to make sense of this apparent paradox?
To answer this question, we must understand that our Sages are speaking (as they often do) on multiple levels. After all, your posture is more than just a matter of how your vertebrae are aligned. It is a function of how you see yourself and your inner world. It is the latter that our Sages are primarily concerned with.
Every person is created with various abilities and talents, both physical and spiritual. By actualizing our potential, we can attain completeness, contentedness, and the ultimate blessing of Divine closeness. We were all created with a yearning to elevate ourselves, to express our talents on the highest dimensions and to continually erase the border between the potential and the actual. But this process is not one we undertake out of a sense of raw ambition or self-centered desire. It is a religious task, one that must be undertaken with consciousness of the Divine taskmaster who has given us the abilities that we seek to develop and express.
One who views his talents through a spiritual lens will always be conscious of a guiding Divine hand. He will exert himself to the best of his abilities, but also retreat and place a limit to his ambition when G-d or His Torah demand it. Although he realizes that he was put in the world to achieve and accomplish, he knows that the yardstick for his accomplishments comes from Above – and not from his family, friends, or society around him.
In other words, this person “walks” upright – but not to the fullest extent possible. His “posture” is somewhat bowed, because he knows that no matter how much he achieves or accomplishes, there are certain places he could take his talents that G-d has put off limits.
This is the resolution to the contradiction we started with. The Torah indeed declares that G-d wishes us to walk erect (lit. קוממיות) – but this is not the same thing as the ‘upright posture’ (lit. קומה זקופה) condemned by our Sages in Gemara Berachot. The latter refer to someone who walks entirely upright, who acknowledges no limits to his powers or talents. In this way, he “pushes away the Divine Presence” and leaves no room for Divine influence to guide or impact the actualization of his potential.
