Q&A: On a Divine Constellation
On a Divine Constellation
Question
I’ve been feeling a strong need for some time to share my thoughts with the Rabbi. A few years ago I secluded myself, in the manner of Breslov Hasidim, and cried out to God in despair: What do You want from me? What do You really want from all of us? Why do You need this whole world that You created, with all the difficulty and everything we go through here?
And the question kept coming back: What do You want? Until one time, when my heart was uplifted, I heard a voice (internal, of course) that answered me: I want to exist.
And suddenly everything became clear to me. In the beginning, there was God. One. But if there is one without zero, is He really one? Does He really exist when everything is within Him, even the opposite, so to speak?
So He desired to create for Himself a dwelling place in the lower realms, and that is the need for service and the great secret. For without the world, so to speak, His existence would also contain His non-existence.
And therefore He needs us: praying, calling in His name, fulfilling His commandments. That way the rope is held at both ends. On the one hand, He is One and there is nothing besides Him, and the contraction is not to be understood literally. On the other hand, “The Lord is one and His name is one”; He is King and we are a people; He was, is, and will be.
And now what? After He already exists and we call in His name? Now you have free choice to choose life like Me, or not. And even more — want whatever you like, in the secret of “I will be what I will be.”
And on this basis He built a constellation of prayer and repentance. Yes, it is spiritual. I could lay it out here, but many greater and better than I already have.
I am a student of the Rabbi in many areas. I receive a great deal from the Rabbi. Ever since I heard the Rabbi a few years ago in a lecture to secular students about sobering up from postmodernism, and through his wonderful criticism of many halakhic and conceptual patterns that absolutely require us to do serious soul-searching and to adopt a much leaner Jewish worldview than what is being offered today. At the same time, I think that what I wrote above does not contradict the Rabbi’s words anywhere.
There is nothing preventing Him, may He be blessed, from creating, as a reflection of the physical world, a spiritual reflection of angels and seraphs, while at the same time saying that creation occurred through nature and physics and exists subject to the laws of physics.
Maybe I’ll dare and throw out here a piece of intuition about prayer. Let’s say I want to persuade the Rabbi to buy me a toy. So I turn to him and ask. It could be that if I approach him in a way that he predetermined would be pleasing in his eyes, then he will indeed buy me the desired toy. So too, God established such a constellation in accordance with His laws of nature. Consequently, one does not pray over a fetus in its mother’s womb, but permission is given to pray, and even to be answered, if indeed we have struck the mark.
Moreover, in prayer we advance the initial divine will — we call in His name. In addition, that is where our struggle with the other side is expressed, the side that is despairing of the will to live — because supposedly there is no reason. The will to live and to act is again, so to speak, placed upon us.
The Rabbi’s response would make me very happy.
Answer
Hello.
I don’t know what to say here. As for His need for us, I already wrote about that in Column 170. I agree with everything you wrote up until prayer.
As for prayers being answered (the toy analogy), my view is already known.
Discussion on Answer
Apparently WordPress turns the URL I put in the comment into an embedded video — so, laughs — enjoy 🙂
First, it would have been better to post this as a talkback on Column 298.
As for your actual point: if everything we do is the work of His hands, then we do not exist. The question is who is it that says we do not exist (me?). These are contentless statements about contraction not being literal, like the other combinations of words that are devoid of content and meaning. I don’t know what to say to someone who declares: I believe in a contradiction. What should I tell him — that it is contradictory? That doesn’t bother him. There’s no point talking with people who hold such an approach (?). I wrote about it at length in the second book of the trilogy; take it from there.
The Rabbi wrote in Column 298: “But either way, one may of course ask what there is to thank or praise the Holy One, blessed be He, for what He did not do.”
So that’s exactly what doesn’t fit for me with several assumptions I have, and I’m trying to understand whether the Rabbi disagrees with one of them, and if so I’d be glad if the Rabbi could explain why.
I assume that before the Holy One, blessed be He, created the world, He was one.
There is no time for Him, meaning that the very existence of the world serves His eternal purpose.
In order to create the world He “contracted Himself” (as portrayed in the teachings of the Ari).
At the same time, “His glory fills the world,” and “there is nothing besides Him,” and “there is no place devoid of Him,” as portrayed in Hasidic teaching. (And as Adi Ran sings so hilariously — I had to post a link, but apparently that’s not possible here, so you can copy and paste 😉
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecu4brStJx0&pbjreload=10 )
So the world is inherent to divinity. And every human and natural will and act is the doing of the Holy One, blessed be He. In the sense that all is foreseen, yet permission is granted.
Again, I’d be glad for the Rabbi’s response.