#chasidut

What is the meaning of the ladder in Jacob’s dream? The chasidic sage Simchah Bunim  teaches that in spiritual pursuits we have to go step by step. We cannot leap past a step. The work is slow and gradual with each step of our personal development following ineluctably from the previous step.   

He adds that simchah-joy is a requirement for the ascent.  Joy?  Jacob is heading into years of suffering. He will be tricked into working for twenty years for his deceptive uncle, he is deceived into marrying a woman he does not love. His two wives are jealous of one another, and one will suffer childlessness for years.  And to top it off - in the coming week he will confront a brother who he thinks wants to kill him. What kind of happiness is this?

What do we do when we see the world around us broken into little pieces? What do we do with the hurt and suffering?  What is Simchah Bunim pointing towards with this? 

As we survey the wreckage around us. Not only our personal hurt, but the hurt that we have caused to other, of a world broken and twisted, we are sometimes offered a ladder.  We can’t skip a step, as Simchah Bunim points out, of our ascent. The pain might be that critical next step.  Our own mistakes are not incidental to the ascent, then, they are part of it.  The world’s pain is not in the way - it is on the way.  

Last week was a bit of a hell. 

I have been trying to make plans for New York so I was trying to find basement apartments or roommates to live in queens, thinking that my mom would support me in a small way. My mom told me she does not want me going so she will not help-as usual- she has not supported me with any of my decisions thus far. I don't understand it with parents- like, i am still going to go on my own path and if it is something that i truly care about i am going to fight for it, so instead of bringing me down you should just support me emotionally. Parents think that they are doing the right thing but in reality they are ruining your relationship, it is so awful.  

But after she told me that, i burst into tears- cried for about an hour.

You know those tears where you literally cry from the bottom of your stomach and your heart aches and you just have heavy cries and the warmest tears - the dead sea could have really used my tears.

I did not know what to do. I felt stuck. 

I got chizuk from the lady i used to do chesed by in israel- she told me it was time to separate myself from my parents- it is time to grow up.

the next day a miracle happened- i found a family in queens that is going to let me board for free. they do this as their form of chessed- MAMISH TZADDIKIM.

oh Hashem

 Once, a famous Serbo-Croatian  poet Branko Miljković wrote this  verse:  "Will freedom be able to  sing like captives sang about her".

 Questioning ambivalence of this verse  bounds with the spell. It casts a  haunting shade over both- captives  and the freedom which  they eagerly seek.

 In it's subtle melancholy projected in  future, slowly as only poetry  knows  how, verse sneaks under readers  emotional  blanket and gently takes it  for itself,  leaving him freezing in the  wind of hopelessness. As if this song  of  captives, their expression of  yearning  for freedom, is greater then  the very  freedom they hope for. 

 As if freedom will come to be it's very  own betrayal.

What lays behind Branko's dilemma is a deep unsolvable apory, The Grand Collision of two opposing and simultaneously experiential states- Freedom from Captivity Vs. Captivity by Freedom. This conflict, that can only result in it's own meaninglessness, is paradoxically propelled by it's own status quo- the unbearable state of human existence which yearns for freedom, only to realize that when freedom is once accomplished, it will become yet another captor.  

In the world of Branko, in a world that he shares with so many solitaries (!), solitaries of 20th ct, grouped in varying schools of Occidental thought- suicide is a legitimate option. That is only true if one is not up to the task of the most challenging quest of the secular heroes- to endure life despite it's meaninglessness. These heroes do not live, they endure life.

When freedom, of and in itself, is the highest value, then one has to accept above mentioned paradox and either live against it or die from it. In the war between freedom and confinement humanity shortly falls as it's first casualty. 

Tomorrow night, this year for 3500th time, Jews will gather around their tables and once again pass over their inner Branko through his battlefield. This procession is called Seder and it inaugurates the holiday of Pesach (derived from heb. verb- to pass over, therefore- Passover). They will teach him how is one to survive the The Grand Collision, not by waging war, not by surrendering and surely not by merely enduring,  but by passing over.

He will learn that in order to resolve this prime conflict he will have to find unity in two opposites. They will show him that this is not done in a way of imposing a power that transcends freedom and confinement and to which they both utterly surrender their entire being. Then they would be at peace with each other because they are both under the influence of the same force, but their being would not be at peace - their being is simply ignored. Neither is it done by finding a middle ground where the two beings meet. The two are at peace where they meet on that middle ground - but the rest of their territory then remains apart and distant.  They will teach him that heroic quest of life, a silent heroism of the meek, is to reveal the essence of every aspect of the two beings as one and the same; that freedom and confinement, infinity and finiteness are equally Divine. He will then merit to taste the mystery of Matzah (unleavened bread) a bread of Emunah (faith), not a sub-rational faith - faith in dogma, but super-rational faith- an intuitive knowledge, consciousness of a higher reality, a glimmer of the infinite within the finite human being.

And only then will they lovingly whisper a poem, a song of freedom:  

How long will you remain a boy? Dawns must end. Behold the angels of old age.  

Shake off temporal things then the way a bird shakes off the night dew. Dart like a swallow from the raging ocean of daily events 

and pursue the Lord in the intimate company of souls flowing  into His virtue. 

Meditation by Judah HaLevi (12.ct)