Shavuot: From the Depths of the Sea to the Top of Sinai
Rosh Chodesh Sivan, 5773
We know that prior to the redemption from Egypt and the revelation at Sinai, the nation of Israel had sunk to its lowest level in history, the 49th level of tumah. We also know that it is from that lowest of lows, from the bottom of a split sea, that we were catapulted to the highest level of prophecy, the experience of revelation of G-d's will to the peoples of the earth.We are all afraid of the deep and the dark. We tend to think of that which lacks light as something to be avoided or destroyed, but it is in the deepest and darkest parts of our souls, in the most painful moments of our lives, and in the most catastrophic events in our history that the truth hides.
The reason that we call the deep and the dark by those names is simply because they elude our senses. We don't understand those places because they conceal the eternal truths under a surface which is more clearly visible yet much more confusing and painful.
In the darkroom of our doubts, everything that we encounter seems to us an obstacle, a setback. We look back on the Holocaust as we do on the Egyptian catastrophe that claimed most of our nation, as unmitigated disasters.
But faintest flicker of light is enough to begin to recognize the outline of those objects, and when the light of Torah burns bright, we can fully expose the blessing and appreciate the indispensability of the challenges before and behind us.
When we let a sense of divine perspective illuminate our history, we see that the furnace of Egyptian bondage forged our nation, and that a Jewish state sprouted in the ashes of Auschwitz. As history has proven to us many times, the seeds of catastrophe are also the seedlings of redemption. For we could not have come to where we are are, nor proceed to where we are destined to go, without the hardships to guide us. It could not be any other way.
The "Sin" of David haMelech
What applies to the history of the world applies to each of us as individuals. David haMelech, the most exalted king and grandfather of the messiah, provides a striking example of how G-d buries his truths behind some of our most confusing and painful episodes. On the surface, David haMelech wrote the book on corruption--the use of political means for personal ends. David sends a man to his death in order to take his wife. It doesn't get more political or more personal than that. And on the surface, David spends the rest of his life in heartbroken repentance and ceaseless calamity. Yet the gemara says that "he who thinks that David sinned, is mistaken."But under the surface of that seemingly heinous crime was a tikkun, a rectification of a much more heinous crime that goes back to the beginnings of history. In the first war mankind wages, Cain kills his brother Abel, ostensibly for the right to sow the land. The midrash tells us that the "land" actually refers to their sister, who, in a time when the entire human genome is sharply divided among three people, is the only one through which they can populate the earth. Just as Adam sinned by not waiting for Shabbat to eat from the fruit, Cain sinned by not waiting for his turn to mate with their sister, and forced G-d's hand by killing his brother.
This midrash tells us that David is the reincarnation of Abel, Uriah the Hittite is the reincarnation of Cain, and Bathsheba is the reincarnation of their sister. David/Abel, in his prophetic vision, sees that he needs to "kill" Uriah/Cain and take Bathsheba/the sister in order to rectify the sin. Moreover, haShem arranges for this to happen in a kosher way--he has Uriah sleep at the gate of the David's palace, despite orders from the king to go back home to his wife. In doing so, he incurs the death penalty that devolves on anyone who violates the king's command, and based on this transgression David is morally justified in sending Uriah into a battle that the king knows will kill him.
As Uriah leaves for war, he issues his wife Bathsheba a conditional get, freeing her to marry someone else--i.e., David--if he does not return. David is thus exonerated even on the surface of history as he corrects the first injustice perpetrated by man.
In the story of David, two layers of truth and judgement can be peeled apart and exposed, one a surface truth according to which he sinned and repented, and another, deeper truth, according to which he righted the earliest and most catastrophic wrong since we left Eden.
Thus a negative or evil element, once returned to its context, becomes the fulcrum against which wrong becomes right.
Threads in the Fabric
So what was David's sin in the end? Why did he need to repent at all?The answer lays, once again, in timing. Just as Adam did not wait to eat from the fruit, just as Cain did not wait to lay with his sister, so did David not wait until the moment of Uriah's death to take Bathsheba. And for that he incurs the rebuke of his friend Natan, the mortal dread of which haunts him for the rest of his plague-ridden life, while out of the depths of his despair he calls out to G-d--"Mima'amakim karaticha haShem"--as his ineffable remorse for the sin raises him to the heights of human expression and national redemption. So even here, in David's "sin", sprout the seeds of our national power, descended through the house of David to our final redeemer.
In fact we see several strands of these apparent wrongs, these half-truths, woven together in the lineage of King David to a glorious culmination. The matings of Lot and his daughters, Judah and Tamar, and Yishai and Nitzevet, all tainted with sin, are mixed into the pure seed of Jacob, and elevate and complete it, just like the pungent, musky Chelbona, when added to the pure ketoret, is precisely that which gives the incense its heavenly essence.
Likewise we know from the dirtiest, most pestilent substance, earth, comes the highest expression of nature--food, more exalted than all of the animal sacrifices, loftier than the ketoret, because it is what enables the human body to perform the highest mitzvoth.
The Other Side of Greatness
"Mima'amakim karaticha Hasehem." From the depths of David's depression our king was inspired to write the most beautiful poetry in our history and lead our nation to some of its most glorious moments. The example of David teaches us that it is precisely from the deepest, darkest moments of our lives that the strongest light can emerge.Surface-oriented thought tends to regard depression as something bad, something to be avoided, analyzed or medicated away. The deeper truth is that psychologists have only now begun to understand the vital role that depression plays in civilization. We now know that depression, can be the springboard for the loftiest and most inspired moments in our lives, as we have always known that without pain and discomfort there is no growth or progress. And we know that the creative fires of the most brilliant people are driven by the deepest and darkest currents in their characters, for the same gifts that elevate and expose great men are the very ones that must sometimes weigh them down and isolate them.
The Surface and the Depths
There is a saying that still waters run deep.When we think of the power of the ocean, what image comes to mind more than any other?? Waves?? Wrong!! Waves are only the surface, and much more powerful than any tsunami are the slow, massive currents that turn in the depths our our oceans and generate all of the world's weather patterns.
The surface of history is that of the stormy ocean, with with waves and hurricanes sweeping empires and ideologies one after another. Our oceans and the weather they generate seem to move in a random, chaotic way, but in fact they are driven by the deepest, most silent, ponderious and powerful forces. In the deepest, darkest recesses of our planet lie the greatest mysteries that drive the forces of natures, and so too is history moved by ponderous and all-reaching forces directed by G-d.
The Small and the Great
"And the spirit of G-d hovered over the surface the deep."It's a common saying that we know more about the surface of the moon than about the ocean bottom. Our knowledge of the physical world is that of microscopes and telescopes. Science, technology and the arts tend towards particularity. Modern civilization focuses increasingly on tinier particles and narrower avenues of thought, inquiry and expression, like the teasing out of ever tinier and thinner threads from the surface fabric of reality. In astrophysics, they even have a name for these threads, called superstrings, that we now believe tie the universe together. But how all of these strands connect, how all of the minute particles of human experience and history are woven together, is a secret that only the Torah can reveal in full depth and truth. Just as the threads of David's ancestry are woven together to a kingly culmination, so too will the depths behind our time on this earth be illuminated in the climax of history.
"And the spirit of G-d hovered over the surface the deep." There will come a day when the microscopic strings of our knowledge and our history will tie back together before our eyes. As we receive the final revelation of G-d, the sea will split once again, the deepest currents of history will well up to the surface, our most painful episodes as a people and as individuals will be illuminated, and the tikkuns of the past will bear their fruit and shine their light onto the future redemption.
Hag Shavuot Sameach!
