Printable PDF is available here. Previous pieces on Bamidbar are available here and here.

Rav Kook (Based on Ein Ayah, Gemara Shabbat 20a)

These were the names of Aaron’s sons: Nadab, the first-born, and Abihu, Elazar and Itamar; those were the names of Aaron’s sons, the anointed priests who were ordained for priesthood. (Vayikra 3:2-3)

A mishna teaches that one may kindle a fire in a [particular chamber] of the Temple on Shabbat eve just before nightfall and allow the fire to spread throughout the entire bonfire. [And we are not concerned that the Kohanim will stoke the coals and violate Shabbat.] The reason is because Kohanim are vigilant (lit. כהנים זריזים הם), and they will certainly not come to stoke the coals. (Gemara Shabbat 20a)

On the most basic level, our relationship with G-d expresses itself in two dimensions – the intellectual and the emotional. The world of the intellect – where rigid structure, poise and clear consciousness dominate – is primarily associated with Torah study. The world of the emotions – of prayer, love of G-d, song and poetry, among other – is far more stormy and turbulent. Preserving the proper balance between these two worlds is a challenge.

Consider the dangers of unbridled emotional religious fervor. A person swept up in an emotional current of religious experience is liable to become unmoored from the structure and guidance of Torah law. Such a person can lose clarity and cease to be grounded in the Divine structure of “Thou shalt” and “Thou shalt not.” These imperatives constitute the supernal architecture that bring heaven down to earth, that lift us up to a higher level of existence – but they can be swept away in a flood of shortsighted emotive fervor, with the claim that “Love covers up all faults” (lit. על כל פשעים תכסה אהבה) (Mishlei 10:12).”

But this is a mistake. True closeness to G-d cannot come through the world of emotion alone. The intellect, the revealed and structured dimension of Torah, must guide the soul’s emotive faculties and channel them in an appropriate direction.

This was the greatness of the Kohanim, whom our Sages permitted to kindle a fire in the Temple immediately before sundown on Friday, so that they could warm themselves on the Sabbath day. The Sages were not concerned that the Kohanim would stoke the coals and violate Shabbat. Our Sages are speaking on multiple levels, for this teaching is about more than just a literal bonfire. Fire represents the ‘warm’ aspect of emotional Divine service, as opposed to the ‘coldness’ of intellect. Even when the Kohanim transitioned from intellect and engaged their emotions, they maintained a sense of vigilance (lit. זריזות). Their sense of judgment did not remain dormant. They maintained consciousness of the Sabbath and the restrictions of Torah law, and would not ‘stir the coals’ of emotional fervor in breach of the Divine law.

While not all Jews are Kohanim, we are all Divinely tasked to strive for harmony in our inner worlds, between our emotion and our intellect. “If you will obey Me faithfully and keep My covenant… you shall be to Me a kingdom of Kohanim and a holy nation” (Shemot 19:5-6). We must be a “kingdom of Kohanim” – with a wealth of spiritual passion and sentiment – and also a “holy nation” – with the transcendent[1] and structured perspective conferred by the Holy Fire of the Law (lit. אש דת, a reference to Devarim 33:2).

[1] The word קודש has a connotation of being separate and set apart.

Food for Thought

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (Covenant and Conversation, Ha’azinu): Emotions matter. They guide our choices. They move us to action. Intellect alone cannot do this. It has been a failing of intellectuals throughout history to believe that all we need to do is to think straight and we will act well. It isn’t so. Without a capacity for sympathy and empathy, we become more like a computer than a human being, and that is fraught with danger.

It was precisely this point – the need for emotional intelligence – about which Rabbi Soloveitchik spoke in one of his most moving addresses, ‘A Tribute to the Rebbetzin of Talne.’ People, he said, are mistaken when they think there is only one Mesorah, one Jewish tradition handed on through the generations. In fact, he said, there are two: one handed down by fathers, the other by mothers. He quoted the famous verse from Proverbs 1:8, “Listen, my son, to the instruction of your father (mussar avikha), and do not forsake the teaching of your mother (torat imekha).” These are two distinct but interwoven strands of the religious personality. From a father, he said, we learn how to read a text, comprehend, analyze, conceptualise, classify, infer and apply. We also learn how to act: what to do and what not to do. The father-tradition is “an intellectual-moral one.” Turning to “the teaching of your mother,” Soloveitchik became personal, speaking of what he learned from his own mother. From her, he said:

I learned that Judaism expresses itself not only in formal compliance with the law but also in a living experience. She taught me that there is a flavour, a scent and warmth to mitzvot. I learned from her the most important thing in life – to feel the presence of the Almighty and the gentle pressure of His hand resting upon my frail shoulders. Without her teachings, which quite often were transmitted to me in silence, I would have grown up a soulless being, dry and insensitive.

To put it in other words: Torat imekha is about emotional intelligence. I have long felt that alongside Rabbi Soloveitchik’s great essay, Halakhic Man, there was another one he might have written called Aggadic Woman. Halakhah is an intellectual-moral enterprise. But aggadah, the non-halakhic dimension of rabbinic Judaism, is directed to the broader aspects of what it is to be a Jew. It is written in narrative rather than law. It invites us to enter the minds and hearts of our spiritual forebears, their experiences and dilemmas, their achievements and their pain. It is the emotional dimension of the life of faith….

We are all called on to develop both sensibilities. But they are radically different. Halakhah is part of Torat Cohanim, Judaism’s priestly voice. In the Torah, its key verbs are le-havdil, to distinguish/analyze/categorize, and le-horot, to instruct/guide/issue a ruling. But in Judaism there is also a prophetic voice. The key words for the prophet are tzedek u-mishpat, righteousness and justice, and hessed ve-rahamim, kindness and compassion. These are about I-Thou relationships, between humans, and between us and G0d.

The priest thinks in terms of universal rules that are eternally valid. The prophet is attuned to the particularities of a given situation and the relationships between those involved. The prophet has emotional intelligence. He or she (there were, of course, women prophets: Sarah, Miriam, Deborah, Hannah, Abigail, Huldah and Esther) reads the mood of the moment and how it relates to longstanding relationships. The prophet hears the silent cry of the oppressed, and the incipient anger of Heaven. Without the law of the priest, Judaism would have no structure or continuity. But without the emotional intelligence of the prophet, it would become, as Rav Soloveitchik said, soulless, dry and insensitive….

Without the prophetic passion of an Amos, a Hosea, an Isaiah, a Jeremiah, without the music of the Psalms and the songs of the Levites in the Temple, Judaism would have been a plant without water or sunlight; it would have withered and died. Intellect alone does not inspire in us the passion to change the world. This is a life-changing idea: If you want to change lives, speak to people’s feelings, not just to their minds. Enter their fears and calm them. Understand their anxieties and allay them. Kindle their hopes and instruct them. Raise their sights and enlarge them. Humans are more than algorithms. We are emotion-driven beings. Speak from the heart to the heart, and mind and deed will follow.

Encyclopedia Judaica (Emotions): Genesis introduces feelings of Love, Joy, Fear, and their opposites (in, e.g., 3:6; 4:5; 29:18; and 37:3) that are later found in such figures as Saul and David, the psalmist, and the lovers of the Song of Songs. Similarly, in His initial appearances G-d is portrayed as a deity who acts out of deep feelings of compassion and anger (Gen. 4:10; 15; 6:5; 8:21; 18:17; 29:31), emotions which are revealed at Sinai as essential to His nature (Ex. 20:5, 6; 34:6). The Israelites encountered G-d’s fearsome, possessive love, frequently expressed in jealous wrath and moral indignation, in their desert wanderings, and the prophets tended to identify with these same emotions (see Ex. 19:3; 32:9; Num. 14:11; 17:8; Isa. 65:3; Jer. 7:19; Ezek. 16:36). However, the Torah advocates a different set of relationships and emotions as an ideal, one in which G-d loves His people and wishes them to respond in love as well as fear (Deut. 6:5; 10:12, 15), and in which man is exhorted to rid himself of hatred and lust, relate to his fellow man in love and kindness, and joyfully observe G-d’s commandments (Ex. 20:14; Lev. 14:17, 18; Deut. 16:11).

Questions for Discussion/Further Thought

1. Rav Kook writes that intellect must serve as a guide for emotion. In “Food for Thought” above, Rabbi Sacks claims “Speak from the heart to the heart, and mind and deed will follow.” Who do you agree with, and why?
2. What aspects of Jewish life are associated with the intellect? What aspects are associated with the emotions?
3. Rav Kook talks about the danger of excessive emotionality. What are some of the dangers of an excessive emphasis on the intellect?
4. According to Rav Kook, the Kohanim embodied a proper balance between the intellect and the emotions. How did they accomplish this balance? Where did it come from?
5. As noted in Encylopedia Judaica in “Food for Thought” above, Tanach is replete with descriptions of Divine emotion. What might this mean about the role of emotion of religious life?

Printable PDF available here.

Last year’s post on Bamidbar is available here.

Rav Kook (Ein Ayah, Gemara Shabbat 92a)

Aaron and his sons shall finish covering the Holy and all the vessels of the Holy when the camp is set to travel, and following that, the children of Kehat shall come to carry [them], but they shall not touch the sacred objects for [then] they will die. These are the burden of the children of Kehat for the Tent of Meeting. (Bamidbar 4:15)

[In matters of Hilchot Shabbat, one is normally only liable if they perform a prohibited act in an ordinary manner.] R. Elazar taught regarding the prohibition of carrying (lit. הוצאה) that one who carries an item above ten tefachim is liable, because we find that this is how the children of Kehat carried the sacred items of the Mishkan. (Gemara Shabbat 92a)

Unlike the angels, man’s feet are planted on terra firma, and it is the surface of this world that serves as the domain of his activity and initiative. Man cannot – and G-d does not expect him to – totally transcend his earthly nature and rise heavenward with his entire essence, with all of his existence and aspirations. G-d created us as physical beings and not angels. Our Sages expressed precisely this thought when they taught (Gemara Sukkah 5a) that the Shechina, the Divine Presence, never descended below ten tefachim above the ground, nor did Moshe or Eliahu ascended beyond ten tefachim above the ground. It appearsthat this isn’t meant only  on a literal level. Rather, our Sages are telling us not only that despite His act of revelation, G-d remains transcendent and hovers above our earthly reality, not becoming merged and constrained by it. But they are also teaching us that our human reality is limited and inseparable from the earthly world that we live in.

However, R. Elazar comes in Gemara Shabbatand provides a fuller picture. It is true that we are unable to entirely transcend our earthly nature. But our task and sacred obligation in this world rests precisely upon what we carry “above ten tefachim,” in the G-dly realm. Our task, which we must express in action and ethical values, at every moment and in every place, is to serve as bearers of G-dliness in this physical world. This is not an abberant, burdensome consciousness that bursts into our reality from the transcendent heavenly spheres. It is the most normal and natural form of existence, for which G-d has designated us and created us. This is the deeper meaning of R. Elazar’s teaching that “one who carries an item above ten tefachim is liable, because we find that this is how the children of Kehat carried the sacred items of the Mishkan.”

Food for Thought

Rav Samson Raphel Hirsch (Collected Writings Vol. 9, pg. 127): Jewish ideology does not teach destroying the earth to reach the heavens, but rather lifting up the earth toward heaven. It teaches that all earthly endeavors of man are to be a sanctuary unto God, that all the earth be raised into an altar of God, and that God’s glory descend upon earth. Heaven and earth are no longer to be contrasts; heaven and earth are to embrace; life to come is to blossom already on earth. Jewish pride consists not in overcoming death but in rising above earthly life, and adorning an earthly, fleeting life with heavenly, eternal blossoms.

Gemara Erachin (11a): The requirement for the Levites to accompany the Temple offerings with song is derived from here: “But unto the sons of Kehat he gave no wagons, because the service of the holy things belonged to them – they bore them [yisa’u] upon their shoulders” (Bamidbar7:9). By inference from that which is stated, “upon their shoulders,” don’t I already know that they “bore” them? Why must the Torah state “yisa’u”? The answer is that it conveys a deeper level of meaning, of “yisa’u” in the sense of an expression of song. And similarly, the verse states: “Take up [se’u] the melody, and sound the timbrel,” and another verse states: “They lift up [yisu] their voice, they sing for joy.”

Rav Aharon Lichtenstein (Mah Enosh”: Reflections on the Relation between Judaism and Humanism):  Judaism has regarded the nature of man in the light of a basic antinomy. On the one hand, man is a noble, even an exalted being. His spiritual potential and metaphysical worth are rooted in his tzelem Elokim, “the image of G-d” with which his Creator has invested him. The phrase is doubly significant. It describes man’s metaphysical essence, on the one hand, and it suggests a kinship on the other. “Beloved is man that he is created with an image. Particular love is manifested to him in that he is created in G-d’s image, as it is said, ‘For in the image of G-d He made man.’” Man was imbued with a transcendental spark—endowed with personality, intelligence, and freedom—because divine grace destined him for a special relation with itself. Individually and collectively, man is therefore the object of particular Providence, and, as a spiritual being, a subject capable of engaging his personality in a dialectical community with G-d.

Faith in the essential worth of man, independently considered, is basic to Judaism. As regards his relative cosmic position, however, the tradition has harbored conflicting views. Thus, Maharal placed man at the very apex of creation, while Rambam insisted the angels were ontologically superior. Similarly, Rambam strongly rejected the notion, often cherished by humanists, that the universe as a whole exists solely in order to serve man. Just as G-d willed the existence of man, so He willed that of other beings, each for its own sake…Yet numerous texts expound the very position the Rambam rejects…

On the one hand, then, man is regarded as a majestic and exalted being. And yet, on the other, we are confronted by the radical pessimism of Kohelet: “For that which befalls the sons of men befalls beasts; even one thing befalls them; as the one dies, so dies the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that man’s pre-eminence over the beast is naught, for all is vanity.” For devotees of biblical criticism, it would of course be easy to dismiss this apparent contradiction on historical grounds, to regard the conflicting statements as the contrasting expressions of individual personalities or the Zeitgeist of different periods. Not only easy, however, but facile. The Rabbis, in any event, thought otherwise. They insisted on incorporating both attitudes in adjacent passages of one of the oldest and most august of our standard prayers, the ne‘ilahrecited at the end of Yom Kippur:

What are we? What is our life? What is our goodness? What our virtue? What our help? What our strength, what our might? What can we say to Thee, Lord our G-d and G-d of our fathers? Indeed, all the heroes are as nothing in Thy sight, the men of renown as though they never existed, the wise as without knowledge, the intelligent as without insight. For the multitude of their actions is empty and the days of their life vanity in Thy sight; and man’s pre-eminence over the beast is naught, for all is vanity. Yet, from the first Thou didst single out man and acknowledged him [as worthy] to stand in Thy presence….

Rav Yehuda Amital (Jewish Values in a Changing World, pg. 195): There has been a tendency in recent years to idealize great rabbis, to the point of total disregard of their human feelings and weaknesses. The Torah presents the opposite approach: Every person has a human side, which must not be denied. Even the prophets had doubts and difficulties. The Torah recognizes that man lives in this world, and has no expectation that he behave as if he were living in an ideal and unreal universe.

Derashot haRan (#5): For a man has two orientations, an upper orientation and a lower one; when he reflects upon and perfects himself in the realm of intellect and cultivates good character, he breaks away from the terrestrial and rises upwards; and when he leaves the realm of intellect and inclines to the material, he descends downwards. This is intimated in the visions of our father Jacob in the dream of the ladder, (Bereishit 28:12): “And, behold, the angels of G-d ascending and descending on it.” It was revealed to him that that place was propitious for prophecy and that from it men could rise to perfect themselves, but that so long as they were alive it was impossible that this be a continuous, unbroken rising, but that, rather, they would rise so long as they occupied themselves with the needs of their souls and fall to the extent that they ceased from this to occupy themselves with the needs of their bodies. And the implication to be drawn from this was, as far as possible, to increase those things which abet rising and decrease those which compel falling.

Questions for Discussion/Further Thought

1. How does the gemara in Erachinin “Food for Thought” above connect to Rav Kook’s ideas?
2. Much of modern society regards religion in general, and Orthodoxy Judaism in particular, as something aberrant and abnormal. Where do we differ with them and why are they wrong?
3. Rav Kook writes that G-d does not expect people to totally transcend their physical nature. Where in the Torah or halacha do we find this expressed?
4. Is it ironic that the Torah’s message about the normalcy of man’s spiritual side is derived from the generation of the Midbar? Why or why not?
5. Where in halacha do we find the idea that one is only liable if they perform a prohibited act in an ordinary manner? Do you know anyone that has ever had to rely on this leniency in the context of hilchos shabbos?