Sh'lah on the Torah
…con’t.
Parshat Acharei - Kedoshim (Part II)
The following translation by Mr. Eliyahu Munk is an excerpt from the book Shney Luchot HaBrit -- the Sh'lah
The other five miracles mentioned in our Mishnah, are the ones we have termed “positive” miracles. We again find reminders of three kinds of awareness respectively as in the Mishnah of Rabbi Akavyah, and two illustrations of Tikunim, measures designed to repair damage caused by previously committed sins. Between them they represent the right hand.
“The wind never prevailed over the column of smoke that rose from the altar.” The column of smoke alludes to the reminder of “where you came from” in Rabbi Akavyah’s statement. The souls within the body are reminded of their original holy origin. Their root is with the One of whom it is said: “He makes the winds His messengers” (Psalms 104.4). The smoke which connects the meat of the offerings to the Higher Regions is viewed as a ladder of souls. All the souls stood at the foot of Mount Sinai at the time G-d gave the Torah and the Ten Commandments to spiritualized man and when the Mountain was enveloped in smoke. This was the moment, when, according to our tradition, the angels, protested that G-d would hand over His glory to Moses, to mortal man who had risen to take the Torah from Heaven. G-d then instructed Moses to engage in debate with the angels. At the end of the debate the angels said to g-d: “Give Your glory upon him” (Shabbat 88). This is the meaning of the statement in the Mishnah that the “wind,” (messenger sent by G-d) did not prevail over the column of smoke.
The next miracle, that no disqualifying defect was ever found in the “Omer, the two loaves which were presented on Shevuot, nor on the showbreads,” alludes to Rabbi Akavyah’s second awareness that of knowing where one is headed. When one considers that only the righteous, i.e. those people who have managed to attach their bodies to their souls instead of vice versa, are headed for eternal life, this is a potent reminder not to sin. The Torah (Deut. 8,3) has taught that man does not live on bread (physical) alone, and the three sacrifices mentioned here which all involve offerings of one kind of bread or another are the perfect symbol for this lesson. The spiritual “bread,” i.e. whatever emanates from the mouth of G-d, is what sustains the Tzadik. The reason that the Rabbi mentioned three separate examples of bread elevated to a spiritual dimension is that they represent the spiritual dimension of the weekday (Omer), the spiritual dimension of the Sabbath (showbreads), and the spiritual dimension of the festivals (the two loaves of Shevuot). The sanctity of all three kinds of bread “evolved” through the manna, the “heavenly” food the Israelites were fed during their wanderings in the desert. These three sanctities of bread also allude to three levels of the human soul, the Nefesh, Ruach, Neshama respectively. These basically spiritual breads had to become manifest so as to enable one to examine whether any had been disqualified through some defect.
The way the Israelites rehabilitated themselves for shortcomings in appreciating the relative significance of spiritual food, i.e. the value of their souls, was that while they stood pressed together, they prostrated themselves before G-d and suddenly did not find themselves hemmed in any more. The tightness experienced while standing symbolized the smelly drop of semen, their putrid origin, whereas the spaciousness experienced when prostrating oneself before G-d represented the spiritual uplift experienced by their souls. As long as their concerns had been centered around physical progress the Rabbis’ injunction not to be boastful, not to “make waves,” was fully applicable. Hence, even while in the precincts of the Temple, they experienced the tightness of space. Only when their main concern had become a spiritual one did they no longer find space confining.
It is the mark of a truly great Torah scholar that he becomes more and more humble. Our sages have already said that “whoever raises himself up, will experience that G-d will lower him” (Eyruvin 13). The reverse is also true. The author of the Mishnah simply gave us a recipe. If someone desires prominence in this world, i.e. he stands upright, he will experience that space in this world is at a premium, if, on the other hand, he is prepared to prostrate himself before the Lord, to assume a low profile, he will find that there is no shortage of space. This is the way to rectify any error one had committed in the direction in which one was headed,i.e., meaning that no disqualification would be found in the way one utilizes both one’s physical and one’s spiritual “bread.” This then is the moral message of “no disqualification was found in the Omer, etc.”
We have been exhorted by our sages (Avot 1,6) to appoint a Torah authority for ourselves, and the Talmud (Sanhedrin 19) said that anyone who teaches the child of his neighbor Torah is equivalent to having given birth to him. This statement refers to the soul of the person, since Torah is like a soul to a body. The Mishnah continues by stating that neither serpent nor scorpion was ever reported to have inflicted harm on people in Jerusalem. We may also understand this in a spiritual sense, namely that the words (fire) of scholars (Avot 2, 15) do not harm the soul; should these scholars have been provoked however, their words have been compared in power to that of serpents and scorpions.
The Mishnah next lists the fact that no one was ever heard complaining that Jerusalem was so crowded that he could not find lodging for the night. This corresponds to Rabbi Akavyah’s third awareness, that one needs to constantly be aware of before whom one will eventually have to give an accounting of one’s conduct.