Saturday, February 17, 2024

The Four Worlds and the Mishkan in Terumah

The Four Worlds of the mystics of Spanish Kabbalah in the 13th Century, including Azriel of Gerona, then Moses de Leon, Isaac b. Samuel of Acre, and later Moshe Chaim Luzzatto (first half of 18th Cent. from Padua), in The Way of God, derived the concept of the Four Worlds from Isaiah (43:7) which is also in the haftarah for B’reisheet כֹּ֚ל הַנִּקְרָ֣א בִשְׁמִ֔י וְלִכְבוֹדִ֖י בְּרָאתִ֑יו יְצַרְתִּ֖יו אַף־עֲשִׂיתִֽיו׃ “All that is called by my name for my glory (Atzilut) I have created it (Beriyah) I have formed it (Yetzirah) and I have made it (Assiyah)." The four worlds also describe the primal elements of the natural world: Action or earth; Emotion or water; Intellect or air; Essence or Spirit or the energy of fire. Assiyah is the physical world: the material universe in which we live and perform actions and deeds. Yetzirah is the world of angels or energies: of emotion, creativity, and expression; Beriyah is the world of the soul forces that receive guidance and of thought and intellect; Atzilut is the eternal unchanging Divine world of God’s emanations and influences. The Tabernacle or Mishkan, from the word, Shakan, meaning dwell, consists of a courtyard outlined by lace hangings, and a Tent of Meeting, divided into two sections, containing holy golden objects. The outer courtyard of the Mishkan represents the world of Assiyah, doing, where sacrifice is offered, washing is done, and confession and prayers are offered. The outer half of the tent with the golden menorah giving light for the eyes, the Incense altar with its hypnotic scent and smokey, almost tangible cloud, the table or shulchan with sweet tasting bread, and the sound of tinkling bells from the High priest's robe, represents the world of Yetzirah: the emotions created by engaging all the senses creating feelings of uplift, wonder, and reveling in all the magnificent beauty of the gleaming golden furniture. The inner half of the tent represents Beriyah, the Holy Aron or ark, the place of the words on the tablets of the Ten Declarations, which require intellect, thought, and choice, the command center of the human being from which all emotions and actions flow. The world of Atzilut is represented by the space between and above the wings of the angels on the ark, from where God's voice could be heard. The Mishkan was a physical representation of how human beings create and live in this world. All the spiritual teachers say that thought and choice produce emotion, and lead to deeds, all of which create our world. The design of the Mishkan imparts this knowledge and deep wisdom, showing us that, similar to the teachings of the Chassidic masters and to Buddhism: right thought leads to joyous and uplifting emotions, which lead to blessed action and happy lives. Choosing to think of and care about the Divine and each other, which the 10 Commandments help us to do, and appreciating the Divine and the beauty, goodness, and uplift we receive through our senses, lead us to enjoy our lives and express our joy though an active, expansive, and good life. The design of the Mishkan can speak this to us: be guided by your intellect. Choose the good and beautiful. Choose joy. Enjoy everything that comes to you through your senses, and act, living life fully and joyously.

Tuesday, December 19, 2023

Links to Rabbi Jill Hausman's Published Articles on the Web

https://www.tikkun.org/hiding-in-plain-sight/ (Vayakhel) 2023 Tikkun Magazine online; https://www.jta.org/2011/10/18/ny/the-gift-for-eating-forbidden-fruit (B’Reisheet) 2011 NY Jewish Week, Times of Israel; https://www.jta.org/2012/10/16/ny/in-the-wake-of-the-flood (Noach) 2012 NY Jewish Week, Times of Israel; https://www.jta.org/2019/11/05/ny/the-quest-for-perfection (Lech Lecha) 2019 NY Jewish Week, Times of Israel; https://www.jta.org/2014/10/28/ny/the-road-to-jerusalem (Lech Lecha) 2014 NY Jewish Week, Times of Israel; https://www.jta.org/2021/10/21/ny/abraham-had-faith-but-not-blind-faith (Vayera) 2021 NY Jewish Week, Times of Israel; https://www.jta.org/2015/11/10/ny/the-good-parent (Toldot) 2015 NY Jewish Week, Times of Israel; https://www.jta.org/2020/12/10/ny/the-blessing-of-a-forthright-confession (Vayeshev) 2020 NY Jewish Week, Times of Israel; https://www.jta.org/2017/12/26/ny/a-deeper-level-of-forgiveness (Vayechi) 2017 NY Jewish Week, Times of Israel; https://www.jta.org/2018/12/24/ny/the-promise-of-the-unknown (Shemot) 2018 NY Jewish Week, Times of Israel; https://www.jta.org/2014/02/04/ny/the-essence-of-jewish-royalty (Tetzavah) 2014 NY Jewish Week, Times of Israel; https://www.jta.org/2018/02/27/ny/the-lesson-of-the-golden-calf (Ki Tissa) 2018 NY Jewish Week, Times of Israel; https://www.jta.org/2020/04/21/ny/the-holy-ties-that-bond (Tazria) 2020 NY Jewish Week, Times of Israel; https://www.jta.org/2015/07/08/ny/the-violent-passion-of-pinchas (Pinchas) 2015 NY Jewish Week, Times of Israel; https://www.jta.org/2018/08/08/ny/the-circles-of-giving (Re’eh) 2018 NY Jewish Week, Times of Israel; https://truah.org/resources/the-paradigm-of-a-perfect-world/ Chukat 2015 T'ruah.org;

Wednesday, December 13, 2023

If There Were No Chanukah, There Would Be No Christmas

If there were no Chanukah, there would be no Christmas. Why is that so? Toward the end of the Greek Empire, the Greeks were feeling tremendous pressure from the new power in the world, the Roman Empire, which was threatening to engulf them. We are familiar with the Nazis trying to exterminate all the Jews and so many others, Catholics among them, during the Second World War. In the 2nd Century BCE, a similar thing was happening, only the Greeks were not attempting to kill the Jewish people, although many were murdered; they were trying to destroy the Jewish religion. The Seleucid ruler, Antiochus IV’s idea was to resist Rome by making his Syrian Greek Empire thoroughly Greek. Only Greek Gods could be worshipped, only Greek culture could exist. The Jewish religion must be wiped out. A band of Jewish rebels resisted swearing allegiance to the Greek Gods and to the worship of Antiochus IV himself as a God. Jews were forced to eat pork, prohibited from observing the Sabbath and from circumcising their children. A band of them, later called the Maccabees, ran into the hills to train as a guerilla army. The Greeks sent larger and larger forces against them, even elephants, the “tanks” of the day. Then “a great miracle happened there,” (symbolized by the letters on the dreidel): the few defeated the many; the weak overcame the strong. When the Jews returned to Jerusalem, they cleaned and rededicated the great Temple. There is a legend that a small amount of holy oil burned for the eight days of the re-dedication celebration. However, most importantly, Judaism survived, and Jesus, also known as Rabbi Joshua, could be born, about a hundred and fifty years later. There is a growing acknowledgement from Christians that Jesus really lived as a Jew and died as a Jew. And there is a small but growing acknowledgement from within Judaism that Jesus’ teachings are fully Jewish, and that he was an important prophet, in the tradition of the prophets Elijah and Elisha. So if the Jews had not defeated the Greeks, there would have been no Rabbi Joshua, to become Jesus, the great teacher to Christendom. As we celebrate this holiday season, may we appreciate our common roots, accept and love each other, and know that we are much more interdependent than we realize. Happy Chanukah! Merry Christmas! Happy Holidays! This article was previously published by Times Square Chronicles online, Tuesday, December 16, 2014. Jill Hausman is the Rabbi and Cantor of the historic Actors’ Temple in NYC.

Sunday, November 5, 2023

My Solution to World Peace

My solution to world peace is that everyone should move to Queens (NY). Then we would all take the subway together: the #7 Train and the E and the F trains. We would all get along, and then after having lived in Queens, if people want to go back to their countries, they can. Living together in Queens would definitely create world peace, but NY City might have to build a few more home and subway lines.

Friday, October 13, 2023

A Prayer for All People

A PRAYER FOR ALL PEOPLE By Rabbi Jill Hausman: Eternal Source, as you are The One who gives life to all, We pray for all our brothers and sisters, Of every race, religion, nation, and neighborhood. Help us to see you in every human face; To feel you in the warmth of every human heart. Teach us to love and to heal each other; To make peace and to respond to each others’ needs. As we inhabit one Earth, we are one human family, With one Divine Parent. As you send blessings to us, Please bless all of our brothers and sisters, With good health, prosperity, insight, wisdom, and joy, And help us to be a blessing. If we have a vision of a time of peace and harmony, Surely we and You, Eternal One, Have dreamed it together.

Tuesday, October 10, 2023

An Out of Body Experience - V'Zot HaBeracha

On Simchat Torah we read the very spare account of the Death of Moses (Deut. 34:5). At the beginning of the Chapter, The Holy One shows Moses the Promised land: north from Jerico to Gilead, east of the Jordan River, and even farther north to the territory of Dan. Moses sees southward to Jerusalem and continuing south, all the way to the Negev in the very south of Israel, and all the way west to the Mediterranean Sea. The sages point out that this is a physical impossibility. No one on earth, even on a mountaintop, could possibly see all that standing in one place. I suggest that this is a description of an out-of-body experience, one in which Moses traveled outside his physical body to see the entire land. Then in verse 5, the Torah tells us that "Moses died there," "by the mouth of God." Rabbis have suggested he died by a Divine Kiss. Perhaps he never re-entered his body, and became wholly that non-physical energy which we experience on earth as Soul. He left the physical and never returned to that incarnation, easily, it seems, and hopefully, with great joy, having seen what he journeyed to see for forty years, fulfilled and blessed.

Wednesday, October 4, 2023

It's All About Perspective (Yom Kippur 2023)

I'm going to tell you 3 stories, and then ask you what they might have in common or what they illustrate. The Baal Shem Tov told this story: Once, a musician of great but unknown talent. came to town. He stood on a street corner and began to play. Those who stopped to listen could not tear themselves away, and soon a large crowd stood, enthralled by the glorious music whose equal they had never heard. Before long they were moving to its rhythm, and the entire street was transformed into a dancing mass of humanity. A deaf man walking by wondered: Has the world gone mad? Why are the townspeople jumping up and down, waving their arms and turning in circles in the middle of the street? "Chassidim," concluded the Baal Shem Tov, "are moved by the melody that issues forth from every creature in G d's creation. If this makes them appear mad to those with less sensitive ears, should they therefore cease to dance?" A second Story: R. Aryeh Levin, originally from Eastern Europe, who immigrated to Israel in 1905 and died there in 1969 has been called a Tzaddik In Our Time, the name of the book one of his students wrote about him (P. 339, 413). He lived in Israel during very difficult economic when there was much poverty, which included Rabbi Levin himself, and difficult political times, times in which the British jailed and executed many Jewish patriots living in the territory of the Palestine Mandate. Rabbi Levin's friend the eminent scholar R. Chayim Berlin, made a vow with one of his friends, R. Yitzchak Blaser, that whichever of the two died first, the other would visit in a dream and tell him about the world beyond. Indeed, after his death, Rabbi Blaser appeared to R. Berlin. One of the things he related was, The Profundity of the Divine judgement is immeasurable." Perhaps on the basis of that information, R. Levin taught that Rabbi Akiva used to say, whatever the merciful God does, is done for the good. And Nachum of Gamzu used to say, This too is for good. Rabbi Levin explained that while R. Akiva's approach is that whatever happens, some good will come out of it, Gamzu taught that whatever happens is goodness itself right now, even though we may not perceive it. In other words, from God's perspective, it is all good. A third story, based on the metaphor of one spiritual teacher:* There was an apartment building with many floors. The people who lived on the first floor would look out their windows and see garbage, crime, dirt, homeless people sleeping on the street, and hear loud noises. The people on the middle floors would look out their windows and see a park with trees, grass, and hear birds singing in the trees. And the people on the top floor would look out their windows and see beyond the park, a beach with palm trees and an ocean. When someone from the middle floor met someone who lived on the first floor and remarked how beautiful the park was at that season, the person on the first floor exclaimed, oh no! There is no park here, there is only dirt, crime, and deprivation. And when a person from the upper floor remarked to the people on the first floor and the middle floor, isn't it wonderful to live in a place where we can see the beach and the ocean? The people on the lower floors said, there is no beach, there is no ocean here. You are mistaken. What do these stories have in common? What are they saying to us? I would like to suggest that these three stories tell us that the difference in how we see life is more about us than about life itself. The author Ken Keyes wrote: "we see things not as they are but as we are." We can see that this is true in our conception of God through the ages. The God of Torah is, as the 13 attributes of Exodus tells us, compassionate, gracious slow to anger, great in kindness and truth, forgiving and cleansing (34:6-7). But also God is portrayed as angry, jealous, and whose destructiveness is to be feared (Ex 20: 5 and elsewhere). The people who lived at the time when the Torah was written lived in a time of more hand-to-hand combat, destruction, and fear. We can also see this in the human conception of the Greek Gods, who were seen as having the human traits of capriciousness, jealousy, unpredictability, and taking revenge. As we have changed and evolved, our conception of God has changed. The Torah says, that God made us in God's image (Gen. 1:27); but truly we make God in our image. Perhaps a quotation by the quantum physicist Max Planck will clarify this point further. He said, “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” A corollary to that is, when we change, the things we see will change. It's as if we are each living in our separate alternative universes. They are parallel universes, but your universe is completely or almost completely different from mine. I have spoken and written about one of the Chassidic masters in 19th Century eastern Europe, Rabbi Elimelech of Lizhensk. In his commentary on the Torah portion Behar in Leviticus, he enlarges on an image his brother, Rabbi Zusha of Hanipol, described: a pipeline of blessings from above. Rabbi Elimelech wrote: "When the holy One created the world in goodness, God created pipelines that carry Shefa, an abundance of blessings to fulfill humankind's needs. The blessings are ceaseless, but when we fall from our spiritual level and lack trust in our creator, a true provider who supports and sustains everything in never ending abundance, one causes a stoppage, a disruption of the Shefa, with impure thoughts and lack of faith and trust. A person needs to trust completely. Trust in God with all your heart, and the abundance of blessings will run interrupted always then you shall never lack for anything." So what stops the flow? My teacher, Rabbi Joseph Gelberman z'l of blessed memory wrote about this in his little book, Spiritual Truths. He suggests that persistent negative thinking is the culprit (P. 23). He was from the Chassidic lineage of the Baal Shem Tov and Rabbi Nachman of Breslov. These Chassidim found the keys to the kingdom, so to speak, in advocating joy always as their main value. They saw the results of choosing joy in their own lives. Rabbi Gelberman used to say, I am not always happy but I am always joyful. He also stressed that joy is a decision and a choice. Our task then, is to move from the bottom floor of the apartment building, where what we see is unpleasant and unpredictable, to the middle floor and hopefully move to one of the top floors where we see beauty and appreciate being alive. The Torah tells us in Bechukotai, a portion at the end of Leviticus, that it all comes from us. We think that events are coming at us, but really, the Torah says, "the same will be done to you" (Levit. 26:16). In other words, the world is actually mirroring us, not acting upon us. What we experience is a reflection of our own thoughts, words, deeds and emotions. It doesn't seem that way, but everything in Torah is testable. We don’t have to take the teachings of Torah on faith. My grandmother used to say, "try it, you'll like it." And that's what I'm suggesting here. All change begins with the person and shows up in our experiences. As I said on Rosh Hashanah, everything is energy and energy can be changed. Thoughts produced that energy and thoughts can be changed. You all remember the Broadway production of Peter Pan, which was shown on television in 1955 and has been available on video for decades. It starred Mary Martin and I think it was shown each year for many years. In the script, one of the children asks Peter Pan, "Can you really fly?" Pan answers, "I’ll teach you how to jump on the wind's back and away we'll go! How do you do it? You just think lovely, wonderful thoughts – and up you go! Now, think lovely thoughts." The children suggest: Fishing, hopscotch, candy, picnics, summer, sailing, flowers, Christmas! And they all rise up into the air. There is more wisdom here than we know. Some of you know that I insulate myself from TV news because it doesn't increase my happiness, and can pull anyone down. We can preferentially look at the good and have a vision of ourselves as happy, living the lives we want to live. We can open our hearts. Albert Einstein once said, "there are two ways to live your life – as if nothing is a miracle or as if everything is a miracle." This view, appreciating and enjoying everything about our lives, helps us to rise up to a higher floor and live there. We are each in our own alternative universes depending upon what we are willing to think about. The power rests with us, and as I said in my talk on Rosh Hashanah, I have taken the word impossible out of my vocabulary, as God asked Moses in the Book of Numbers, is God limited (11:23)? The flow of the shefa, of blessings, is unlimited. It is limited only by what we are willing to think about, to choose, and to become. There is no price to be paid for happiness. It is its own blessing and we can start to live that blessing today. Let us free ourselves from persistent negative thinking, from fear, from a limited perspective, and rise to see the beach, the palm trees, and the beautiful ocean of blessings that can flow to us. Eloheinu means our power. May we use our power, the power to join with the Divine, for good for ourselves, for each other, and ultimately for the Oneness of all. May you have a blessed year of happiness and joy. *Caroline Myss