Shed a little light

I am struggling to digest. Struggling to digest all the donuts and potato pancakes I ate (it is customary to eat a lot of anything cooked in oil on Chanukah) and struggling to digest all the information I learned about the festival. What a beautifully symbolic holiday accompanied by a great story featuring Jew as victorious warrior, valiant strong-minded women, miraculous miracles, driedels a-spinning, candles burning low, everyone getting down on the happiness and light........ My favorite topic of discussion this year was olive oil. Let me preface the story with the fact that I love olive oil…extra virgin, first pressed, olivey oily olive oil.

So let’s talk about oil…as if it isn’t on the forefront of all your minds these days anyways with the price of barrels unsteadily increasing. The word oil in hebrew is “shamen”. Its properties are pretty unique; firstly, oil doesn’t mix with other substances. What happens when you pour oil into water? It separates. Another thing is oil’s incredible ability to penetrate. It seeps in, soaks through, and imbues itself into whatever material it comes into contact with.

Biblically, oil is also unique. It is what Moses used to inaugurate the tabernacle in the desert. It was used for anointing the kings, the only substance sacred enough to light the menorah with in the Temple (Beit Hamikdash), today we are not allowed to rub it onto our bodies during Shabbos, and even the coming of the Moshiach (Messiah) is closely related to oil since the name literarily translates to “the anointed one”. What’s the meaning of all this oiliness?

Oil is described in Kabbalah as chochmah.

(quick lesson in Kabbala: there are 10 attributes of G-d, meaning to say that the great and awesomeness of HaShem was too intense for the world to handle so through series of contractions, G-dliness was manifested into 10 character traits...3 intellectual and 7 emotional. They are the building blocks of the world and human psyche. If you’d care to learn more about Sefirot go to http://www.ucalgary.ca/~elsegal/Sefirot/Sefirot.html )

Of the 10 attributes of G-d, oil is said to be like the one called ‘Chochmah’. What is chochma? Chochma is (simply put) wisdom. But it is more than wisdom, it is the actual conception of wisdom, the seminal point, the Aha moment, like lightning that appears to emerge from nothingness. Chochma happens before the mind has a chance to start processing and understanding, because once analysis takes over the thought moves into the seferot called ‘binah’ which is the cognitive faculty. But Chochma is more primitive than Binah’s. Chochma is also the spark of G-dly wisdom with every human being. And that is what oil represents.

I am skipping around but I swear this will come together to make a point soon...trust me. Today, I also learned that unlike all other Jewish holidays, there isn’t an actual established meal that should be eaten during Chanuakah….bummer, I love ritualistic eating. Chanukah is supposed to be a spiritual holiday, focusing on something internal, the light inside of us….but we eat anyways. We eat foods saturated in oil.

All fruits and vegetables, with the exception of grapes and olives, are considered to decrease in spirituality when they are squeezed into juices or other forms. For this reason wine has a special blessing. Following this line of thinking, shouldn’t olive oil have its own blessings? But it doesn’t have its own blessing…why? The reason is because olive oil isn’t eaten alone.

And here’s the big point: Oil is ungraspable, unfathomable, unknowable. Oil is transcendence. Oil can’t be eaten alone. The only way you can digest oil is if you fry it up in a latka or in chicken, slip it into the system through a backdoor. This kind of knowledge, chochma, can’t be approached directly; it’s the deepest kind of truth, the incomprehensible kind. And this is how G-dliness needs to be understood. It can’t be completely digested.

Chanukah is about the battle between the Jewish nation and the Greeks. The Greek's never ending search for beauty and wisdom relied too strongly on human comprehension. According to the Greeks, truth was solely based on human logic, that which could be tangibly felt and grasped by the human faculties. However, the sacredness of oil is that understanding G-d and truth is beyond human intellect. The infinite truth is separate and above all else, above the natural order, yet it manages to penetrate everything.

Personally speaking, the hardest part of my journey was taking that step from human reasoning and going beyond what is externally understandable, as the Greeks saw it. Yes Socrates was a brilliant man, but he limited his understanding by limiting truth to only what a human can perceive as within bounds of reason. (To any Greeks or Greek enthusiasts, I mean no offense and do not deny there magnificent contribution to civilization, this discussion is symbolic)

This blog entry is in dedication to a friend of mine who instilled in me the love of olive oil and the importance of the never ending quest towards it. On a vacation to Spain, we spent the last day on a mission to find the purest olive oil imaginable. Exhausting hours spent going from shop to shop, inquiring and searching until lo, we found some really good stuff. We almost missed the plane back to the US. My family thought I was completely nuts when they picked me up from the airport with a suitcase in one hand and 3 gallons of olive oil in the other…but as I see it, you can never have too much of the substance, the infinite wisdom.

The Sin of Sodom

Perhaps I'm being presumptuous, but I assume that most are familiar with the scandalous biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah. It is the story in Genesis about the notoriously sinful town that had fire and brimstone rained upon it. The story left such an impression that from the city’s name, we derive many words used today. If you ask most people what the people in Sodom did that was so bad, they’ve collectively concluded that sexual deviation was the cause of the divine wrath. Many religious organizations even use this passage to support their campaigns against homosexuality and other cultures that don't conform with the 'norm'. This blog entry is to introduce another view on the matter, the way classic Jewish texts view Sodom and what the fatal sin actually was.

I was surprised to learn that the sin of Sodom was not that they were promiscuous, but rather that the inhabitants lacked any compassion for one another, they lived by the motto "what is yours is yours and what's mine is mine". This means to say that each person lived only for themselves. I'll mind my business and go about my life…and you do the same. We won't bother each other and all is well. What implications does this philosophical approach have? Growing up in the US, we are practically taught that this is an appropriate ideology for the sake of self-preservation, maintenance of our economic standing, keeping a competitive edge over another person. I dare say, it’s the very foundation of capitalism.

The people of Sodom were said to have had all the riches in the world. They ate well, they had material goods, and their land was a fertile. However they didn't share with each other. This middot (Hebrew word for 'personality trait') is not unique to the people of this ancient village, remote and lost in the distant past of biblical stories. Unfortunately, people exhibit this mentality today. Rashi, a French Commentator famous for his simple yet meaningful explanations, provides a precise definition of someone who exhibits the trait of Sodom as "they enjoy, but never lack". Meaning that a person doesn't go out of their way ever, even if doing so wouldn't cause them any loss. They don't want to see any others benefiting. To fully illustrate the concept here's an example, if you're out of town and your neighbor asks to use your driveway because their mother is in town and needs somewhere to park, and you say no, even though you lose absolutely nothing, this is Middot S’dom.

Acting with Middot S’dom was viewed and treated as a grave sin. It was even outlawed in ancient Israel during the times when the Rabbinical courts (Beit Din) had jurisdiction over the land. This means that a court could legally enforce a person to be a decent human being. If the plaintiff could prove that the defendant would suffer no loss at all for them parking in their driveway while they were away on vacation, then the courts could coerce the neighbor to allow it. Crazy right? The republicans in the United States would have a field day on this one!!! Even today in Israel, people can chose to have their case heard and litigated before either the secular courts or the Jewish court system. In the Jewish courts, Middot S’dom is still and enforceable standard.

But what does this mean to us? Think about it. Sometimes we do other people favors and are so quick to congratulate ourselves for being nice, for being moral, for doing a ‘mitzvot”. Nevertheless, according to Jewish law most of our acts of kindness are not truly acts of kindness, the are merely being a decent nice person and as we just learned, being nice is only the minimum requirement, merely complying with the law.

Acting with kindness is on a whole other level. Acting with kindness is when we go above and beyond. When we benefit not at all, and perhaps loose a little (not always financially, but perhaps in effort or time). This only happens when acts of kindness are rooted in absolutely no self gain, instead they are grounded in genuinely caring for another. Kindness is highly regarded in Jewish thought. The word in Hebrew for kindness is chesid and its one of the three pillars the world is build on. What qualifies as being chesid is elaborated on quite a bit in the Talmud. An example of ‘kindness’ being expounded upon is in last book of the Mishna (the oral tradition) which is called Ethics of Our Fathers. Ethics is a beautiful collection of good advice and parables to live by. In Chapter 5. Verse 13 it states:

There are four traits which differentiate people:

He who says, "What is mine is mine and what is yours is yours"--this is the common type

He who says, "What is mine is yours and what is yours is mine"--he is an ignorant man.

He who says, "What is mine is yours and what is yours is yours own"--he is chassid

And he who says, "What is yours is mine, and what is mine is mine"--he is a wicked man

The first of the four is often called the type of Sodom because this is the character trait that ultimately leads to Sodom’s destruction. Imagine living in a world were a favor was never given, a hand was never offered, it is said that a traveler coming through Sodom would die of starvation. In our daily lives, familial relations, business transactions, in intimacy, in general…. How are we? Do we act warmly, welcomingly, are we generous with our time, thoughtful in our listening, openhanded in our efforts, considerate, compassionate….or are we just scraping by being decent? According this mishna, being polite, civilized, and courteous don’t really make the cut.

Somewhere down the line I learned that acting like a decent human being is the ultimate and we should strive for it, but perhaps we should set our markers just a little bit higher, a little higher than the letter of the law, to be kind human beings, to be Chassids.

The search for beauty

What’s up peoples! Don't worry I didn't forgot about you, rather I couldn’t bring myself to write. These past few weeks have been kinda of strange. I was having a hard time figuring out where the real me was hiding out. Long story short, a mild identity crisis was experienced and I felt it was inappropriate to write when it wasn’t coming from an authentic place, when I was having a hard time differentiating between my own thoughts and ideas from the ones being presented and taught to me here. And after spending probably too much time in my own head…Jenna stop thinking so much…I was able to come out from my internalizations with a new sense of pride and confidence about where I am, what I am doing, and where I am going.

I would be straight up lying if told you I haven't changed since leaving the US three months ago. But change is not necessarily bad, the problem started when I momentarily lost sight and then one morning I woke up, looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize myself. I panicked, becoming alarmed at how quickly and easily I shed the garments of myself that I so deeply identified with as being me, how quickly the opinions I had such conviction about started to change, how my views on the world began to shift. Was I becoming a brainwashed robot!!???

After about a week of intense searching…I looked everywhere, under my bed, through my personal affects, in the pile of clothes in the corner of my room, and I couldn’t find me anywhere. I know I am super forgetful, clumsy, and a bit oblivious at times, but how the heck can I excuse misplacing myself? I even tried the good old back-tracking technique; you know what I’m talking about? When you sit still, close your eyes, and think really hard about the last place you saw something before loosing it. Then suddenly (and thank G-d) I was struck with clarity…I was looking in all the wrong places for self recognition.

As it always ends up being, it was in this weeks Torah reading that I found the answers to break free from my internal dramas (mirror mirror on the wall…who is the most dramatic of them all?). This week in Va-Yetzei, Jacob meets and marries the daughters of Laban...marrying sisters was legit in antiquity. I am sure you’ve heard the story, their 12 sons became the tribes of Israel, the youngest one was Joseph, the one with the spiffy coat who ended up bringing the Jews to Egypt…etc etc, read the Bible if you want more details. The section that really spoke to me was the Torah’s description of Rachel when she enters [stage right] for the first time. It describes her as being beautiful, which at first seemed rather curious since beauty is so exterior, why would the Torah have to use a detail like this to describe a person especially in regards to their merits? Don’t we tsk tsk magazines and mainstream culture everyday for putting such an emphasis on beauty?

However the next words clarify the type of beauty being referenced here. The Torah says “Rachel was beautiful in her features and in her complexion”. At first glimpse these two adjectives seem redundant. However it is expounded that these two descriptions refer to very different standards of attractiveness. ‘Features’ refers to one’s outward appearance while ‘complexion’ refers to something more internal; a person’s charm or charisma. A good example is a doll, which can be extraordinarily beautiful with symmetrical eyes, pouty lips, trendy clothing but without life, the doll is nothing but a cold statue.

On a parallel plane, the features-focused type of beauty refers to our outward presentation, the way we express ourselves to the world. It is said that our soul is clothed in three garments: thought, speech, and action. But these three pieces of clothing are not actually US. They are merely vehicles used to express the real us and can be shed just as quickly as put on. What gives this clothing form is the passion that exists inside of us, the ‘complexion’.

When you look into someone’s face, most notably their eyes, it is the charm which shines through, their passion, their excitement, their life-force. This intangible energy is what prompts a person’s mind to start thinking and heart to start feeling. This undefinable element is the step beforehand, before anything becomes an externalization. Once we start thinking ideas and feeling emotions, they take on a form of their own. But our truest essence exists as part of us, rather than as an independent entity...this is our true self. Once we start speaking and doing, we create something that is detached and separate from us.

Ideally, both beauties work in tandem, that our passions drive the thoughts we think, the words we speak, the things we do and create. This realization gave me the ability to look past the material expressions of self. Yes my lifestyle is slightly different; yes my diet has changed, I dress more modestly, my social circle has been modified. But at the end of the day these alterations in my lifestyle have allowed for me to focus more making my garments match the internal beauty.

It’s said that man is made in the image of G-d. The more I learn, the more I trust that this is NOT a reference to the shape of our noses, our limbs, and our physical bodies. This is obviously referring to our internal form, our passions and life energy. It is this spark that is made in the likeness of G-d, our charisma that permeates our entire being and all we do in the world. And needless to say, Rachel’s beauty inspired me to see that I was simply searching for identity in all the wrong places. Me’s not lost; me is just being expressed in a different way.

May your inner charm be infused into all you do!!!

Tragedy in Mumbai

I interrupt my normally cheerful update to report the grievous incident that happened this weekend in Mumbai, India. A terrorist attack on both local and foreign civilians, including the local Chabad House, left 170 people murdered. As we try to grapple with these terrible and seemingly senseless events, let us take this opportunity to transform the darkness into light and give some charity tomorrow...whether it be through money or just by being there and offering emotional support for somebody.

Kodak moments

Apologizes for the lack of pictures, my camera was stolen when I was traveling through Seville, Spain (long story that ended with me bathing in the a Starbucks bathroom sink) but anyways, I have compiled some pictures from the women on my program..

Waterfall in Ein Gedi. Look at the sopping lush moss.

An ancient mikvah (ceremonial bathhouse) from the time of the Second Temple. You enter the mikvah on one side, demonstrated by girl in gray sweatshirt, and emerge clean in order to enter the temple to give a sacrifice during the three annual festivals.

A Shabbos spent in Ramat Beit Shemesh with Rebbetzin Chinn. She taught me the hebrew alphabet when I was 9 years old and B''H we were reunited in Israel.

The Henna of my Yeminite girlfriend who is getting married in two weeks. Mazel Tov Zipporah! First you put the Henna in the flowered carrier, parade around singing arabic festival songs and waiving candles (definitely a major fire hazzard) to honor the bride.
then......

You dance for hours to the drumming of some incredibly talented and holy Yemenite Women, breaking only to eat traditional Yemenite delicacies baked specially for the occasion.

Finally once the wax from the candles melt into the henna, everyone takes turns painting it onto the bride-to-be.

The story behind the tradition of the Henna is that the plant is used as a metaphor for the relationship between bride to her groom. In the olden days, henna was grown as a hedgerow around vineyards to hold soil against wind erosion. A henna hedge, with its dense thorny branches, protected vulnerable and valuable crops such as grape vineyards from animals. The hedge also had clusters of fragrant flowers. Henna is symbolic of a "beloved", who defends, shelters, and delights her lover. How romantic.

Even though I am not of the Sephardi tradition, I think a tribal drum circle and henna painting is the most appropriate of ways to celebrate a wedding, so I think I'll have one one day too....lamma lo (why not?)