Choosing Your Calendar...

I discussed Parashat Bo (last week's haftarah) with my Rabbi and we came to this fascinating and beautiful place...

The commentaries of the parasha focus much on the different "starting points" of the Jewish Calendar. Rosh Hashanah marks the beginning of the "world" or creation, while this Hebrew month (Nissan) marks the first months of the year. In other words, there are several simultaneous calendars going on in Jewish life (lunar, solar, weekly, liturgical etc...)

What we opened up was that there are lots of calendars in every person's life and that the calendars we value most or incorporate most in our lives say much about our values and interests. There is the school calendar, the natural calendar, the familial calendar, the sports calendar, the National calendar, the Marital calendar, the biological (especially for women) calendar etc...The question arises: what do we do when events on our calendars conflict? What do we do when the NCAA finals are on TV during the night of the Passover Seder? What do we do when choosing between attending a funeral and maintaining joy on Shabbos?

Moreover, which calendars serve merely as reference and which are lived? Do we simply check in on sports scores in the paper or internet, or do we live each win and loss with our favorite teams? Do we take note of the changing seasons so that we can change our clothes, or do we smell and see each change in nature in a visceral way. Do we note the Jewish holidays so we can see when we're off from work and when we have to eat matzoh, or do we dance in the rhythm of the Jewish year--from the heights and ecstasy of the High Holidays in the Fall to the beauty of Sukkot, to the hope in the darkness of Hanukkah? Do we live for the weekend or does Shabbos live for us?

Modernity has increased the volume of calendars exponentially; these choices are difficult and complex and often, if you're like me, idiosyncratic. But even in so being, they always say something deep about a choice that seems so banal.

Redemption Can Be Simple?

There are many long treatises in Jewish philosophy about ways of bringing about redemption and what this redemption will be like. But I read the following in the introduction to my English translation to the Ishbitzer Rebbe's book Mei Hashiloach. This is the same text I quoted from before this shabbos about not believing in "graven principles."

Listen:

"Thus through personal refinement in accordance with [a person's] illumination...he develops the consciousness of the presence and intentions of God. In this way, redemption is really just a change of consciousness."

Nothing Is Carved In Stone: The Ishbitzer Rebbe on Parshat Ki Tissa

So this is one of my favorite interpretations not only of the breaking of the first set of commandments but also of the injunction that one shouldn't make graven images. Particularly relevant in this week's Torah portion because of the story of the Golden Calf, Jews (and others) have long taken the "graven image" commandment to be a prohibition regarding making idols. The Ishbitzer Rebbe, however, interprets this commandment differently (here and elsewhere in the Torah). In his Torah Commentary Mei Hashiloach or, Living Waters, The Ishbitzer writes:

"'Do not make molten gods.' (exodus 34:17)

"Molten or graven images means principles."

How revolutionary!!!! Elsewhere, he writes, "do not make any carved form, meaning positive commandments, and any image, meaning the prohibitive commandments, for nothing is revealed to man until it reaches its completion [and the Ishbitzer doesn't believe ANYTHING can 'reach its perfect completion' except God itself]"---

So...another way of saying this is: don't believe anything so much that it's as if carved in stone--not even that which is actually carved in stone! Jewish law bears this out--all mitzvot can be negated for the protection or preservation of life for instance, or for the preseravtion of human dignity (lying so as to not embarrass someone publically etc...) What a deep idea to think about. The question of course, is whether the rule about not interpreting anything in a "graven" or "fixed" way, is in itself, a graven law!

This also helps partially explain the decision by Moshe to destroy the Golden Calf by throwing the original tablets of the ten commandments at it--the commandments themselves (and the stones they are written upon) are not nearly as important as the dignity of the people who were humiliating themselves by supposing that God was ONLY in one place--the sin of the golden calf, from a nondual perspective, is not that they believed that the molten calf was God and that they prayed to it--because indeed, if all is God, so is the Golden Calf--the problem was in the supposition that God was ONLY in the Golden Calf, or more clearly, that God could be MORE in one thing than another. The Zohar and the Chassidic masters constantly teach us that Hashem both "fills and surrounds" the world.

Good Shabbos.