Experience and Questioning -- Kal Victor

Experience and Questioning -- Kal Victor

           

As time has gone by here at Yeshivat Maaleh Gilboa, and as I’ve continued learning Torah, Talmud, theology, and philosophy in the Beit Midrash, I’ve noticed that while I can be dazzled by a certain insight into the psyche of Moshe in the weekly Torah portion, passionately incensed by a finicky Talmudic argument about hashavat aveida (returning lost objects), or inspired to introspection and self-evaluation by a Chasidic allegory, when I come to reflect upon any of my lessons, I’m often left with a prickly sensation of self-distraction, the feeling that, while the knowledge I’ve accumulated thus far is all well and good, I’ve been ignoring some broader, grander questions looming in my mind. 

Part of the reason why this feeling is so baffling is that I can never seem to express those bigger questions concretely.  Sometimes it’s a matter of characterizing and justifying the relationship between ethics, Halakha, and the Divine; sometimes it’s a matter of defining a perception of God and faith in a modern world; sometimes it’s the thought that my entire vantage point is skewed, that my questions and the assumptions underlying them need to be drastically reexamined and reformulated; sometimes it’s as simple as how to internalize the experiences of this year, how to make sure they won’t remain suspended in time in a “gap year” that seems to be treated so often as a deferral of the progression of life, rather than the link in the chain of my personal evolution I hope it to be. 

When I try to pin down the exact source of this uneasy feeling that sometimes disturbs my learning, to find out why exactly I feel so existentially fidgety, I encounter an often unnavigable muck of worry, uncertainty, internal paradoxes, doubt, and desire—all my struggles and issues which seem to mix together into one overwhelming, amorphous angst, angst that I’m avoiding something that I should have been confronting as soon as I got here, that I’ve been shirking my responsibility to engage and grapple with what really matters.

I think, in many ways, that this phenomenon is actually a reflection of my impatience to reach a long sought-after intellectual maturity, the kind where I finally have the ability to cut through the formalism in my learning and reach the real substance.  But in other, often more striking ways, it represents to me the opposite, the fact that I haven’t yet learned to really learn, to look at a source and take it for what it is in its own right, not focused on what it represents or how to make it mine.  It is not that those two latter things aren’t extraordinarily important, because contextualizing and internalizing knowledge is essential in all learning, especially limud Torah, but if I’ve learned anything this year, it’s that you gain nothing from a text if you force it through a presupposed intellectual filter, reading only to verify your own assumptions and boost your ego.

            But, thankfully, I’ve had much time to think about all of this, time to pick the brains of some of the greatest thinkers of all time, time to engage my caring, attentive, and perceptive teachers, friends and family, and hopefully, some of what I’ve learned will come to light in the rest of my musings here.  Something that’s becoming clearer to me throughout this process is that articulating the right questions is just as important as finding the answers, even more so in the sense that answers are only as meaningful as the questions that incite them.  Recently, I came across this passage from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet (http://www.carrothers.com/rilke4.htm), that added an entirely new dimension to this insight: 

You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

            The idea that somehow questioning, learning, and experiencing are all deeply intertwined is something that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently.  Rilke’s words had a powerful impact on me, and their messages have only been echoed and enhanced by my other learning here in Yeshiva.  Rebbe Nachman, someone who I never encountered before this year, but who has provided me with many fascinating insights into Torah and faith, allegedly gave his students the task of learning one torah (a piece in his book of teachings, Likutei Moharan) everyday for one month and keeping a journal with two halves: one to see how the world around you seems to conform to lessons learned from the torah, and one to examine how the torah itself seems to conform to things learned from the world around you.  While I’ve never done anything like that, in a similar vein, I always enjoy tying in the themes of different shiurim, which tends to happen almost organically a lot of the time.  I always try to seek out how what I’ve learned can be relevant to my life, but many times it seems to prove itself on its own accord.  Hopefully this will make itself evident in the thoughts and Divrei Torah I’m going to share now.

Recently, Rabbi David Silber of Drisha, a feminist Orthodox beit midrash, came to visit and gave a fascinating shiur on Shmot (he’s written a really great Haggadah, too, which I strongly recommend).  He has a very literary approach, which I’m kind I’m partial to, and it is worth sharing for its emphatic simplicity and the ideas it engendered, which maybe I can embellish a little bit.

The theme of the talk by Rabbi Silber was “yedia” (knowledge) in sepher Shmot.  After citing numerous examples of the usage of the root Y.D.’ in the story of Shmot, most notably as it pertained to Pharaoh (i.e Shmot 5:2 and 1:8), he proceeded to ask what sort of yedia we are supposed to take away from the story of the Exodus.  In short, his answer was that we are supposed to gain empathy, empathy for the oppressed and the weak, the stranger and the pariah.  In Parshat Mishpatim, which follows in the Torah soon after the relating of the Exodus story, God cites our past suffering as a reason for numerous ethical commandments.  The inui (suffering) and avdut (slavery) that Bnei Yisrael experience are described in the brit bein ha’betarim (covenant between the pieces) with Avraham as something foretold for our future, a prerequisite to the other parts of the bargain --  involving our freedom, leaving in great wealth, etc.  Only after we had underwent the entire journey from slavery to freedom, grounding our success in the humbleness of our beginnings, were we ready and able to receive the law, to understand commandments regarding the treatment of the less fortunate and the other in society. 

One of Rabbi Silber’s most fascinating comments was that we really need to turn to Yitro in chapter 18 of Shmot to internalize this lesson. In 18:11, Yitro expresses his own form of yedia, “now I know that Hashem is greater than all the other gods.”  But at the beginning of the perek (chapter) the narrative tells us that Yitro had previously heard, “vayishma,” about all of the wonders and miracles done by the Hebrew God.  If he had heard about all of the mighty deeds of Hashem already, why is it that he waits until verse 11 to proclaim a form of definite yedia that Hashem is supreme?  The truth is, he had heard about all of the Israelites successes and miracles, but it’s Moshe’s revelation of the defeat of Amalek that really clinches Yitro’s belief in Hashem.  Yitro learns to see Hashem as not only powerful and vengeful, but as the savior of the oppressed, as well, who, on the “derekh” (way) from Egypt (verse 8) were attacked by the ruthless Amalekites, who always prey on the weak and the weary.  It is specifically here, after learning that God is the champion of the underdog, when Yitro can proclaim his yedia and “vayichad,” he rejoiced.  He had originally heard what is generally depicted of deities by most religions of that time—that they perform amazing, nature-defying spectacles of strength, that they are great and triumphant—but his real yedia, his real acceptance of God comes from the knowledge that God defends the downtrodden.  He knew that Moshe lived by that justice-seeking ideology, because of what he did for his daughters at the well, and now he verified that Moshe’s God does the same. 

An idea learned in a parsha shiur for Bo with one of the Roshei Yeshiva, Rabbi Yehuda Gilad, seemed to fit in very well with Rabbi Silber’s talk.  Rav Yehuda spoke about an inconsistency in the text surrounding the commandment for the eating of matza that is reflected in how matza is defined within the Haggadah.  He began by addressing the fact that the commandment for eating matza is found in the text before the event of the Exodus actually occurs.  In Shmot 12:8, in the midst of the commandments for the rituals of the Pesach Seder, matza is mentioned, only to be readdressed in 12:39.  But rather than citing the previous commandment as the reason for the obligation to eat matza, the narrative cites the one we all are familiar with: because, in the haste of leaving Egypt, the bread of the Israelites didn’t have time to rise.  Although, oddly enough, the commandment to eat matza precedes its coming into existence as an event in history, we don’t cite the commandment in the Pesach Haggadah, but rather the reason found in 12:39.  The question is: which reason was it?  Did the ancient Israelites eat matza because they were commanded to, or because the circumstances of the Exodus demanded it?

Rav Yehuda’s answer was fascinating.  Contextualized within the broader narrative of the Torah, chapter 12 of Shmot is the first time the historical account of the Israelites, told in the form of a story, breaks to allow for the direct commandment of laws, here regarding the Pesach Seder.  Rav Yehuda claimed that the commandment was intentionally repeated and the origins of matza deliberately blurred, in order to demonstrate the merger of the God of our history and development with the God of our laws and statutes—the God of our past and the God of our future.  Regardless of whether you think of the biblical narrative as a collection of parables and lessons, an accurate account of history or some sort of fusion of the two, it’s clear that the story of the Exodus is meant to occupy the psychological niche of a joint “memory” belonging to the Jewish people.  God wants to emphasize here that the “memories” of the Torah and the actual commandments are one fluid entity, that He commanded matza before it happened historically specifically to demonstrate that His mitzvoth are commanded because of what will happen—not just because of what has happened—and that the Torah, its stories and its law, are eternal and transcendent. 

I think that Rav Yehuda’s insights added another important facet to the yedia we are supposed to gain from the Exodus and all of the commandments surrounding it, be they ethical or ritual.  The goal here is seemingly to create a sort of all-encompassing Torah consciousness, where morals flow seamlessly from the past—its stories and narratives—to the future, with enduring commandments passed on through a tradition meant to preserve this unique state of mind and foster the natural inclination to help others, especially those less fortunate.  This is why we have the commandment to remember the Exodus twice daily; this is why God continually cites it as a reason for mitzvoth, even when reasons for commandments are so seldom offered; this is why the Pesach Seder is such an iconic, timeless ritual that even unaffiliated Jews seem to cling to as an expression of their identities.

            Many people, just as I have, struggle with what it means to “know God,” have faith, and find meaning.  The Rav Shagar (z’’l), a fascinating thinker whom I also just found out about this year (one of our classes, by his son-in-law, Zevik Kitzis,, is devoted to his writings), deals with an offshoot of this question: the tension between post-modernism and religion. He aims, by embracing what many call neo-chasidut and other modern philosophical tenets, to find the opportunity for a stronger faith within the seeming existential predicament (a bio: http://www.siach.org.il/Contents.asp?pageName=Rav+Shagar+ZT%22L&pageID=347).

It seems to me, and here I’ll attempt to address some of the same questions that Rav Shagar dealt with, that religious experience has become increasingly important in an intellectual framework where what used to be basic assumptions about the world and the way it works don’t always hold up.  This is what occurs under the scrutiny of a post-modern lens.  While I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about post-modernism, one thing that does resonate with me is its emphasis on pluralism (I’ll talk more about this later), which makes having an absolute faith in God and Halakhah—knowledge that they are true, (i.e Rambam’s view of religion)—very hard to sustain.  “Absolute faith” has always struck me as a rather oxymoronic concept—faith is something that is, by its nature, a leap, something that cannot be proven in objective terms.  This is where a shift to experience, rather than logical proofs as the foundation of a religious life seems to be essential.  To be clear, I don’t disparage those that view faith in the same way the Rambam did, and in fact, a lot of the meaning I find in Judaism is built on ideas espoused by him, like searching for purposes and reasons in mitzvoth, for example (although, without getting into specifics, we certainly differ in how much stake is put into this quest).  And genuine religious experience is something that’s hard to come by these days, making its modern status as a prerequisite for religious observance, as I think many people naturally expect, problematic to the religious, Halakhic lifestyle.  But what I mean here by religious experience is not only referring to those moments where an individual can really feel the presence of God in the mystical sense (Rav Bigman always quotes Emanuel Levinas about believing in the mystique of God, not the mysticism of God, meaning a belief in His transcendence, not necessarily in a magical sense, but rather a metaphysical sense; but that is another discussion), but also to something much more communal, much more effable.  I am talking about the religious experience of our history, our collective consciousness that has been birthed by the study of the same sacred texts and a focus on the same values (more or less), as alluded to above.  Yetztiat Mitzraim takes on an even more significant role within the post-modern age.  In a world ripe with moral relativism, sometimes the mere commandment to open your arms to the stranger in your midst doesn’t quite cut it for some people, practically speaking.  But as soon as you’ve experienced something that can produce a real, human emotion that you cannot deny, you can have true conviction.  We must first be slaves before we are worthy of receiving the Torah because God knows that the only way for his ethical and moral commandments to truly resonate with His people, the only way to produce the empathy needed to sustain those laws, is to ground them in experience—an eternal, immutable collective memory, history, and intellectual tradition.  In the same way Rilke called for experience and living in order to truly imbue meaning in questioning and learning, so too does God desire that one’s life and one’s learning feed off each other in a beautiful symbiosis, one that grounds thought in feelings and feeling in thoughts.