Today as I write is the second day of Hanukkah -- a gorgeous pause between rainstorms. I'm looking out my window, over my computer monitor, at piles of red duff on the ground, a bare-branched little almond tree, old, ratty shrubs I've been meaning to cut back. It's looking like winter around here.I've been indulging in a thoroughly modern journey through the Old World these past few days, sitting at my computer and googling up testimonies and memory books of shtetls and cities where Hasidism thrived up until the holocaust. (Look at www.jewishgen.org -- incredible!) I'm interested in Hasidism now because of our class. It's made me hungry to learn more, to try to envision a community in which those ideas and those figures were real and alive. It's a bit hard to imagine for me, for reasons well beyond the holocaust. It's hard to imagine a fabric of intact faith and hope such as I'm reading about in Nadvorna or Horodenko, hard to imagine rabbis and teachers such as the Admorim of old who could so inspire their followers. Without putting myself down in any way, I am completely different than these glowing masters of the Hasidic courts, who were able to look into the souls of their followers and see all worlds at once.
I read of one rebbe, "In the four corners of the brain of the Kaminker rabbi resides the entire Torah -- in one corner the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmud, in the second all the books of the Poskim, in the third all the books of the Kabbalah, and in the fourth allthe midrashim and aggadah -- while in the center there is the locus of the"Fear of Heaven" which illuminates all the corners with its brightness."
Here's a visual image I'm in love with, from a follower of the Radomsker Rebbe in Oswiecim (of all places, Auschwitz): "Hasidism in Oshpitzin [another spelling, I believe, of Oswiecim] was as natural as breathing air. When a Rebbe came to town, the entire Shtetl became one Hasid, and all went to honor the Rebbe. When the Bobover Rebbe, Rabbi Benzion Halberstam, came on a visit to Oshpitzin, everyone lit candles in their windows that night, and everyone, young and old, went out to greet him." Mmmm -- candles in every window, and not even during Hanukkah, but to honor a visiting guest as he walks into town. What could be a lovelier greeting?
It's the candles in the window, not to mention the light at the center of the four corners of the Rebbe's brain. These folks, in their dark shtetlach, knew something about light. It seems that a fundamental teaching which unifies the many different Hasidic sects is that the divine light is embedded in everyone and everything. It may be encased in shells. It may be buried in sin or denial. It may be only a "pintele," just a tiny point. In one of the wilder corners of the Hasidic imagination, I was reading a bit about the transmigration of souls. Apparently a soul needing redemption might well be reborn into the body of, say, a kosher fish. The eating of gefilte fish on Friday night redeems that trapped soul through the blessing and enjoyment of those at the table. Of course this proposition brings with it some argument: "Rabbi Meir Rosenbaum of Kretchinev thought that the opinion that a large fish meant that a very important righteous person was transmigrated in it was incorrect. To the contrary, the fact that the gilgul (reincarnated soul) was not corrected until the fish matured and added to its weight does not speak well for the gilgul."
I'm charmed as I read this and not at all disdainful. I think, in fact, that I believe this. Maybe not the details of fish size (though I can't resist thinking that what we now know about the accretion of mercury in larger fish supports the Kretchinever's) It's the idea of the hidden potential at the center of everyone and everything, the possibility of cracking the shell, peeling back the skin, lifting the cloud, and exposing the spark of God that is incipient in every person, every creature and every act. In this way I am no different than any Hasid -- I believe in this possibility.
Martin Buber offers a fantastic image: "In the primordial time of being, in the time when God built worlds and tore them down, sparks have fallen into all the things of the world. In a material shell, in a mineral, in a plant, in an animal the spark is hidden a complete figure like that of a man, doubled up, his head on his thighs without being able to move his hands and feet, like an embryo. Only through man is there redemption for him. It is up to man to purify the sparks out of the things and beings that he meets day by day, and raise them to ever higher rungs"
Two centuries before the rise of Hasidism, the great kabbalist Isaac Luria proposed a theory (or, one might say, a poetry) of divine emanation. Somehow in God's infinite, unfathomable God-ness, God decided to make contact, to emanate. So there are dimensions of God -- from utter distance to complete presence -- in everything and every experience. Buber says that Hasidism took that theory and brought it into the realm of the human heart. So our beloved Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav says that we must all find in ourselves, and in everyone around us, that point of pure good that emanates from God.
Apparently the Rebbes, when someone came to them who was ill, would often give them a coin wrapped in a cloth. And sometimes people were healed. Why a coin? Not to buy medicine, I'm sure. Perhaps because it is shiny. Perhaps because it was touched by the holy hand of the Rebbe. Perhaps because it is a little material thing which, like everything, has a spark of the divine embedded in it, and it can be easily handed from one person to another, invested with hope for healing. Even I have occasionally written an amulet on paper for someone who is ill. I don't know what I believe about the supernatural powers of that little piece of paper. But I know that it takes me an hour or so to make one, and that I spend that hour deep in concentration, writing the Divine Name, and the names of various angels, thinking as I do about the person for whom I am doing the inscribing, hoping for their wellbeing. I can understand this act of inscribing as making myself aware of that ladder, or Tree, of divine emanation, my soul ascending a bit for a time, carrying the thought of that other soul with me.
It seems like a good way to live, this sparks-consciousness. It seems useful, and certainly delightful, to look at everyone around us, at ourselves, at the plants and animals and things of our life, as though they have that folded-up spark, like an embryo, a potentiality, deep inside. It seems hopeful to look at everything as though that inner being was -- ever so slowly, perhaps -- stretching out a bit, shifting, preparing to raise its head and eventually to stand up tall. It seems wholesome to see ourselves as though we might have some small role in offering a hand to those folded-up sparks, through blessing, enjoying, serving, or contemplating.
Our beloved festival of Tu B'shevat falls on the full moon this month (Jan. 24 -- see details below.) Tu B'shevat is about that most hidden and interior shift, the rising of the sap from deep in the roots of the tree in the frozen ground. We bless and eat fruits to release their sparks, hoping that the movement takes hold and all is lifted up towards the Source of Life. In this chilly wintertime maybe there are sparks even in the cold itself. Or at least sparkles! Happy Tu B'shevat!
© 2005 Rabbi Margaret Holub
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Updated 12/27/2004 (rge)