This post dedicated to Avrum Weisss - friend, chavrusa, scouter of sources of Torah, who listens to my ravings with interest, and encourages me to write them down. Thanks Avrum. This post is your fault!
Sometimes various realms of reality come together in a strange way. One new piece of information or an experience of learning triggers bits of information that have been stored away until a connection arises. You can glorify this by calling it random access memory or, perhaps more accurately - stream of consciousness, or free association.
I recently had an experience of this type, during a shiur where we were learning from R. Noson’s Likutei Halachos, Orach Chaim, Hilchos Tefillas Mincha, 4:1.
R. Noson brings from Rebbe Nachman how careful we have to be at the time for dovening Mincha. It was at this time, just before the creation of the world, that God somehow withdrew or contracted his presence so that something else could exist. This is the afternoon before “and there was evening, and there was morning”.
R. Noson goes on to speak about questions and doubts for which we have no apparent answers. The answers to these questions are beyond our understanding, and so we must rely on our Emunah to accept that they are Truth. These kinds of questions, he says, are formed from the Chalal HaPanui - that Unoccupied Vacuum - from which God removed himself (and continues to do so at this time every day) in order for the world to exist.
Therefore, says R. Noson, if one were to actually be able to answer these questions, and therefore fill that vacuum, then one would locate God there - which is impossible - for to do that would eliminate the Chalal HaPanui which allows for Creation to be, and thus this world would cease to exist. So it is forbidden to seek the answers to these questions.
R. Yitzchok Bell, our teacher, explained that there are actually three levels of God’s presence implied here - 1. the heavens, where His presence is complete, 2. in this world, where His presence is concealed, and 3. in the Chalal HaPanui, where His presence is absent. Yet, R. Noson goes on to say that God is always present, even in the Chalal HaPanui! Don’t ask me how that works. I don’t know. This is an unresolvable contradiction.
It is one of those things that are impossible to comprehend. Reb Noson says the only approach to such things is through Emunah - that is the only way we can live within this state of contradiction.
That brought to mind one of the corollaries of Murphy’s Law: “There are Some Things Which are Impossible to Know, But it is Impossible to Know these Things”.
Then the old Spritual, from the days of slavery in America, called Rocka My Soul, came to mind. It goes like this (at least this is one version):
Rocka My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham,
Rocka My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham,
Rocka My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham,
O Rocka My Soul, O Lordy,
So high you can’t get over it,
So low you can’t get under it,
So wide you can’t get around it,
Ya gotta go in through the door.
My cranial synapses crackled and sparked and came up with this: this song is perhaps about how to co-exist with existential questions that have no answers - they are too high, too low, and too wide - so you have to enter that world through the front door - Emunah. Abraham was the ultimate man of faith - Emunah - who encountered the unknowable All Present, and who marched unquestionably into the unknown when commanded by God. Father Abraham, please hold us close, and give us of your Emunah, so that we can live meaningfully despite our profound inability to fully understand.
Those snapping neurons then came up with something else regarding the three worlds of God’s presence - heaven (all present), this world (concealed presence), and Unoccupied Vacuum (no presence).
There was a series of recordings way back in the enlightened age of the 60’s and 70’s by a group called Firesign Theater. They were a surreal comedy group, that recorded complex tales containing multiple levels of allusion and reference, which were primarily listened to by stoned out hippies and college students (of course, I was neither of those!). You could listen to them over and over, and hear new things that you hadn’t noticed in the first 100 listens. (Wow ! Far out !).
Now, I have also been listening to the University lectures of Jordan Peterson, of the University of Toronto. He’s a Clinical Psychologist who wrote a book entitled Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief. Simply put, it’s about the psychology of religion, although it’s really much more than that. It’s about how to find meaning in life.
He emphasizes that it is the nature of human beings to explore the unknown and plumb it for the riches (moral, psychological, social, physical, etc.) that are hidden amongst the dangers that lurk there. He talks about the archetypical Hero who has the “heroic willingness to encounter the unknown, articulate it, and share that with people. There’s no nobler vision than that”.
According to Peterson, it is essential for individuals to encounter what is beyond what they know in order to grow and thrive. People are very complex, and so these encounters take place on many inter-related levels, primarily in the realm of social interaction. Each level he calls a Map. It is when all of our maps stack up and align along a single axis, when we find the coherent thread that is common to them all, that we discover the value structure in our lives. That is the Map of maps, the Meta-Map. Hence, Maps of Meaning.
He points out how essential it is to discover the meaning in our lives through ACTION, because what we value is revealed to us via what we do, though it may remain consciously unarticulated.
I have been profoundly affected by this series of 12 lectures, and also a simpler version of his book, entitled 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote for Chaos.
So, bringing this back to R. Yitzchok’s shiur - he talked about Rebbe Nachman’s concept of Niggun - which he said is best described as harmony. A niggun is commonly understood as a chasidic wordless melody, but Rebbe Nachman’s concept of Niggun is much more than that. It seems to me that, like action, Niggun expresses what has not been articulated, and is understood without speech, which would limit its completeness. We can learn from Niggun, or our actions, what is meaningful to us even if not articulated, just like the harmony that is revealed when levels of maps of meaning are aligned via their common element, or when we listen to a symphony, or when we get a joke. That’s how something we hear or see may instantly resonate within us, and express an as yet unarticulated truth.
This is possible because, according to Peterson, the articulated world is like waking thought. It strives for coherence by selecting for what is relevant, and imposing order. Dream thought is inarticulate. It strives for completeness by paying attention to everything, ascribing equal relevance to all experience. “Waking thought sacrifices completeness for coherence, whereas dream thought sacrifices coherence for completeness”. We have to limit our perceptions in order to focus on a coherent view of our reality in order to function in the world, despite knowing very little of it. “You have to move through the entire world even though you don’t know it in detail”.
Niggun may be a form a dream thought. Incoherent, yet complete. Perhaps like the idea of Shira in the Torah. I wondered about the possibility, through art or music, of fully expressing Shir shel Yam without the words. How could such an experience be completely expressed in mere words? I wish the Niggun had been preserved as well.
OK, so, getting back to the inherent contradictions in the concept of Chalal HaPanui. Peterson talks about how the ideal state of existence is to have one leg in the “explored” world, and one in the unknown, the world of chaos. Chaos, like water, is “a constant source of renewal - drink the chaos of life - chaos is water - washing away too much order.” “The proper amount of chaos is the water that nourishes the garden”. Just like a river flooding it's banks restores fertility to the land.
That edge zone where we encounter contradiction, the flood plain, is the place where the known and the unknown meet. What we can understand, and what we might never understand. And that place of contradiction is itself a source of energy and creativity. God created Contradiction (He is, and yet He isn’t), through which the world could come into Being. In the terminology of Ecology, this is a concept called the “edge effect”. Where two different ecosystems meet, this is where the most bio-diversity is found. It is where nature is most prolific.
The known (the absence of contradiction) is a comfortable and safe retreat from the encounter with contradiction (the unknown), but only a respite. It is not a healthy or permanent state. We regroup in the known, in order to return to the exhausting yet energizing creative state. The Friction of Contradiction is what creates energy and existence, like the generation of electricity through the interaction of oppositely charged magnets.
As Peterson says “Being is a problem. If you want to have no problems, then there is no Being”. As I understand it, the unanswerable questions are a problem. But, if you remove them, you eliminate Being itself. They are there expressly for us to grapple with, because that struggle generates Being. Without the struggle, it all disappears.
This reminded me of something that Rabbi Menachem Goldberger brought down from his Rebbe, Rabbi Shloime Twersky, ztz"l. To paraphrase: we grow in leaps from one level to the next. At each level, we rest and assimilate what we have learned. Then, we make the next leap. It is during the leap between levels that we encounter the Eternal.
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| peekaboo ! |
(see https://isitjustme-nisan.blogspot.com/2014/07/absurdity-these-and-these-are-both.html)
He writes:
“The moment the existential paradox becomes resolved is when we react to something by laughing. We can’t explain how a single undifferentiated unity lies at the center of a world of pluralities, being and nothingness. Existence is comprised of the jarring fusion of singularity and plurality, being and nothingness. Humor consists of a living example of a single concept imbued with multiple incompatible concepts, the coexistence of opposites. At the moment of laughter we get it. We understand not through thought or reason, but our sense of humor is indeed just that, an awareness of the single undifferentiated whole lurking behind our pluralistic existence. Humor and existence ask and answer the same question in the same way. ‘Is it, or isn’t it?’ Both!”
Which is exactly what I did (laugh, that is. Not too loud I hope) in the midst of the shiur. Because, as Sherlock Holmes would say, “the game is afoot!”
Now, I have to say that I take some exception to the idea, presented by R. Noson, that certain things are simply forbidden to ask questions about. To my mind, that is a serious error. Doing so pushes people away. But perhaps at the time he was writing, the circumstances were so dire that this was prudent. I do know that in the 12th century, Rambam’s books were burned, by Jews, in France. I also know that centuries later Rebbe Nachman explicitly lists Rambam’s Guide to the Perlexed as forbidden to read, because of the danger of polluting holy thought with foreign knowledge. Rebbe Nachman’s own teachings, as well, were considered too dangerous to learn by the Chernobyl chasidim and their offshoots. So there seems to be enough of this kind of thing to go around.
Peterson constantly uses the analogy of the dragon and his horde of gold. The unknown is dangerous, but that’s where the gold is. It's where Bilbo Baggins has to go to fulfill his potential. As Peterson says, "Don't let what you are stop you from being what you could be". To my mind, that encounter is what keeps existence afloat. The dragon, chaos, the unknown and perhaps unknowable, is in Tenenbaum’s terms “the single undifferentiated whole lurking behind our pluralistic existence”.
Is any of this true? Is this correct? Or is it just the result of random free associations in the confused mind of a geriatric student of life?
I don’t know. But if you are ever wondering why I am staring whimsically off into space, or making random puns and associations, uttering non sequiturs, singing obscure songs, or even laughing out loud, you’ll know that chaos is getting the better of me.
Or is it just me?
