Zohar on the
Holidays of Tishrei
As we enter the final gate of the month of Elul, I look
back upon the journey, not only of the past month, or even the past year, and
not just of my life, or even just the journey of the Jewish people, but of a
deeper journey. I notice, as others have
before me, that the year pulses, marked by the rhythm of the holiday cycle,
providing us an opportunity to voyage on what I like to call the
psycho-spiritual journey of the calendar. We not only re-enact our personal
stories through our engagement in Torah, T’filah/prayer and mitzvoth; we can
also get a glimpse of a greater trajectory, that of the unfolding nature of the
cosmic coming-into-Being.
Our sages discovered connections between Rosh Hashanah and
the creation of the world. For example, Sukkot is explicitly associated in the
Torah with the Exodus. And the sages calculate Yom Kippur as the very day on
which God fully forgave His People Israel for the sin of the Golden Calf. In
the text of the Zohar (our foundational mystical texts) the sages read the
holidays from Rosh Hashanah through Sukkot as not only rooted in the
Jewish storyline, but also as telling a story themselves, one of the
great cosmic drama at the heart of Jewish life as they understood it. For the
Zohar, this drama is the struggle of good against evil, of health against sickness
and of love against alienation and oppression. In the eyes of the sages, the
holy Jewish story, from the Five Books to the details of Jewish law today, is
all about this great cosmic drama. They understood that, by keeping the
commandments and live Jewish lives, we help God ensure that goodness,
health and love overcome their opposites.
Rabbi Shaiya Rothberg, of the Conservative Yeshiva in Jerusalem (and who was
one of my favorite teachers during my studies), writes: While the Zohar expresses this cosmic drama
in many forms, the paramount symbol or metaphor is that of two lovers. In the
spirit of Jewish mysticism, both of these lovers are understood as aspects of
God: the Holy One and the Matronita (Lady) or Shechinah. Goodness, health and
love are symbolized by the holy union of the lovers. Evil, sickness and
alienation are symbolized by the lovers being torn apart (think of the Song of
Songs). The lovers are brought together or torn apart by our actions here in
this world. Since the Shechinah is the immanent aspect of God, She is tied to
our world.
How can we understand this intimacy in today’s world that
seems so harsh and unkind? By giving
ourselves the personal responsibility for repairing the tears in our personal
worlds (and isn’t interesting that you can read that word in two ways: tears
that are cried and tears that rip!), we can imagine that we’re also repairing
the rifts on that cosmic level (which the mystics emphasize vibrate with the
effects of our behavior). In this sense,
we ourselves are central players in the Zohar's cosmic drama.
Interestingly, the complete cycle of this work is not
finished until Sukkot, when on Sukkot and the Eighth Day (Shmini Atseret/Simchat
Torah), we are commanded to be joyous; at that point, comes the embrace of the
two lovers so that, at the very end of the holiday cycle of Tishrei, we taste
the complete redemption: a world of goodness, health and love – the world that
God set out to create from the very beginning.
May our journey from this moment
onward be filled with the deep soul-work of introspection, both of our personal
selves and the soul of our people, Israel, and may we come to the joy of
Simchat Torah with song and dance, delighted at being whole again, even if just
for a moment!