Reflections
D'vrei Torah by Rabbi Ellie Shemtov
Spirit in the Sky (Norman Greenbaum)
When I die and they lay me to rest Gonna go to the place that's the best When I lay me down to die Goin' up to the spirit in the sky Goin' up to the spirit in the sky (spirit in the sky) That's where I'm gonna go when I die (when I die) When I die and they lay me to rest I'm gonna go to the place that's best A wealthy chassid once boasted to his Rebbe that he has a separate house where he resides only on Passover, and no chametz ever enters the house. In this way he is absolutely certain that he is in complete compliance with the Torah requirement to be free of all chametz on Passover. The Rebbe however, was not at all impressed. “What you are doing is actually contrary to the wishes of the Torah. The point is precisely to have chametz all year round, and to dispose of it on Passover. Not having the need to search after chametz and clean the house thoroughly defeats the purpose.”[1] In this story chametz is a symbol representing the yetzer hara, the evil inclination; the drive to gratify our physical impulses. Instead of battling his yetzer hara, and overcoming his desire to have chametz on Passover by removing it from his house, the man just moves into his other house that is already free of chametz. In rabbinic thought every human being has two inclinations or instincts, one pulling upwards, the other pulling downwards—the good inclination or yetzer ha tov, and the evil inclination, the yetzer hara. Judaism says that everything God creates is good including the yetzer hara. What draws us to the evil inclination is our impulse to self-alienate. When we separate ourself from others, the world and even ourself, we are more likely to be drawn to do bad things. The following parable is a good example: Once two men were traveling together on a boat….One man casually took out a hand drill and began to drill a hole under his seat. The other man was startled and asked him: “What are you doing? Don’t you know that you’re going to sink the boat?” The first man simply replied, “What, I’m not drilling on your side. What’s the big deal? It’s not my problem.” The man drilling is incapable of seeing how his actions are affecting someone else – someone sitting right beside him. This blindness to the interests of anyone or anything else around ourself, and even to our own greater self-interests beyond the moment, is the yetzer hara, the evil inclination, because it usually results in negative outcomes. So, how is this evil inclination that we all have, not so bad? Well, sometimes in order to achieve a goal we have to be pretty focused on ourself and driven by our own needs. The rabbis would say: If not for the yetzer hara, no one would build a house, marry, have children, or engage in a trade.[2] The point is to not repress the yetzer hara in each of us, but to suppress it. We should be aware of those thoughts and feelings, and then control them so that they do not run amok and become part of our character. As Judaism teaches, we either become our mind’s master and the master of our evil inclinations, or it masters us.[3] In Pirket Avot, Ben Zoma asks: Who is mighty? One who controls his evil inclination.[4] Having a yetzer hara is part of being human but we all must work diligently to rid ourselves of it. Not to have chametz i.e. a yetzer hara, is to be an angel and we are asked to be holy humans not angels.[5] This is in part what makes us different from animals. Humans unlike animals, have the capacity through self-reflection, to improve themselves.[6] In teaching Bali the place command which he did very well until recently – but that’s another story -- Bali has certainly improved himself. But it wasn’t his choice. It was mine. He may do it to make me happy but he didn’t do it to improve himself. Humans also have the capacity to think about the goal and purpose of their existence. While it’s true that not all humans take the opportunity to reflect on the purpose of their existence, they have the ability to do so. Animals do not. Humans can also reflect on the consequences of their actions and have the capacity to control their anger.[7] Yeah, I know, that’s a hard one to swallow, but what I said was we have the capacity to control our anger. I didn’t say we always succeed at it, because we don’t. Humans also have the capacity to forgive.[8] Again, we have the capacity but do we forgive? A human being has the ability to choose between right and wrong. A human being has the ability to be charitable, to sacrifice of him and herself and of their belongings to help other humans, even strangers. A human being has the ability to be compassionate.[9] If you think about it, human beings may be the only living creatures that are truly free.[10] Even animals in the wild are not truly free because they are controlled by their bodies and can’t make a free choice. If an animal is hungry, it must search for food. An animal can’t one day decide to fast as many of us have chosen to do over the next 24 hours—although Bali seems to occasionally make that choice. The ability to defy a bodily desire is unique to humans. It is only fear of retribution that will keep an animal from fulfilling a bodily drive. If a jackal is foraging for food and spies a carcass being feasted on by a huge tiger, it will stay away for fear the tiger will eat him as well. If you take all the traits unique to man and group them together, the sum total of these are what can be referred to as the spirit. Those who put these capacities to use can be called spiritual people. Those who put these capacities to use set aside their personal will and adopt the Divine will. Again, this is something beyond the reach of any living thing other than man.[11] Much of what I have just described comes from the writings of Rabbi Abraham Twerski of blessed memory. Rabbi Twerski was an Orthodox rabbi, the descendant of several Hasidic dynasties. He was also a psychiatrist and a respected authority on addiction who was drawn to the 12-step approach central to Alcoholics Anonymous. Rabbi Twerski believed spirituality was not so easy to define, but a starting point might be to explain what spirituality is not. Spirituality is not withdrawing from society and isolating oneself as a recluse, eating the bare minimum to remain alive and sleeping on the ground, spending the entire day in prayer and meditation. So, what is Rabbi Twerski’s definition of spirituality? -- becoming the best person you can be by thinking about a purpose in life—by thinking about how you can improve yourself and become a better person. Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham in their book The Spirituality of Imperfection describe it this way: Truth, wisdom, goodness, beauty, the fragrance of a rose – all resemble spirituality in that they are intangible, ineffable realities. We may know them we but can never grasp them with our hands or with our words. [12] Like love, spirituality is a way that we “be.” Spirituality is also a paradox in that what underlies it is the sense of incompleteness. To be human is to be incomplete, yet yearn for completion; to be uncertain but long for certainty; to be imperfect yet long for perfection; to be broken yet crave for wholeness.[13] The Lizensker Rebbe, Yosef Meier Mayer, who passed away a few years ago, once said: Only God is perfect. Man’s actions must be basically defective in part. If one believes his good deed or holy study to be thoroughly pure and perfect, this is a sure sign that they are thoroughly bad.[14] Some describe the difference between religion and spirituality this way. Religion is for people who are afraid of going to hell; spirituality is for those who have been there.[15] Rabbi Twerski described spiritual growth as being different from physical growth in that it never comes to completion and it can sometimes feel like you have regressed rather than progressed.[16] One of my favorite parables describes this regression very well. The parable states: “The closer you get to the light the more obstacles there are.” The analogy provided to demonstrate this parable is an army attacking a castle. Successful in their battle to get closer and closer to that castle, once the army was virtually on its doorstep, well—that was the moment when the enemy poured boiling oil down on them in order to deter their entry. That isn’t to say the army didn’t eventually conquer the castle, but in order to accomplish that task they needed to be vigilant in their efforts. As I mentioned above, spiritual people set aside their personal will and adopt the Divine will. This concept, this belief, is the cornerstone of the 12-Steps. For instance, Step 2 states: Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. As Jews we may find this statement uncomfortable. We may hear it as being saved by something or someone outside of ourselves. We may hear it as salvation in a Christian sense, with someone redeeming us. But, Step 2 says “could restore us” not will restore us. Moving from potential to actual depends on us. Moving towards sanity you simply have to take one step that moves you outside the trap of yourself, of total self-involvement.[17] The 12-Step program requires the surrender of one’s will and accepting the will of God—or more generally a higher power. It requires searching out one’s character defects and correcting them. It requires making amends to those we may have offended. It requires helping others. It requires rigorous honesty. It provides a method whereby a person can become truly spiritual.[18] Without spirituality a human being is motivated and driven by all the animalistic emotions for maximum comfort and pleasure—the goal being self-gratification. [19] If you are of the belief that the 12-Steps are Christian, please understand there is nothing more Jewish than the 12-Steps. As Rabbi Twerski has written: The twelve-step program appeared to have its roots in the Oxford Group [a Christian organization], but I have quipped that if Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, were alive today, I would have him sued for plagiarism, because everything in the twelve-step program seems to have been taken from the Talmud and Mussar writings.[20] Mussar, dating back to the medieval period, is a Jewish spiritual practice focusing on virtue-based ethics and personal transformation. Judaism is a spiritual approach to being a human being in the world, but Judaism does not close itself off to outside disciplines of knowledge and wisdom. In Pirkei Avot the Ethics of the Fathers, the same rabbi Ben Zoma, who asked: Who is mighty, also asked: Who is wise? One who learns from all men.[21] One of the lessons we can learn from Judaism and spirituality is that Judaism makes room for doubt. Doubt is not the opposite of faith. That would be complacency or hubris, acting as if we have it all figured out. The opposite of faith therefore is not having the courage to remain open-minded and to continually ask life’s most important questions. Judaism also leaves room for us to cultivate our own relationship with God. Truthfully, there is no one Jewish way to believe in God. The only real dogmas in Judaism are that God can never be a human being and that there is one God alone. We are still responsible for doing our own spiritual digging, by learning and reflecting on our own experiences as they relate to spiritual ideas and practices. One of the key words of this High Holy Day season is Teshuvah, repentance. The word comes from the verb root meaning “to return.” It is the process by which spiritual transformation or change happens. Change can occur in our character, in our behavior. We can’t change what was done but we change the present. If we can come clean, then the past becomes a stepping stone to success, rather than ending in failure. The truth is if we are unable to change and our character is hopelessly trapped by its early development and past deeds, what point would there be to the future? As the Chassidic master Reb Nachman of Bratslav once noted: If we are not better tomorrow than we are today, then why have tomorrow?[22] Teshuvah is an action not a thought or feeling. We can certainly think we’d like to change or be sorry for what we’ve done in the past, but until we actually do something about it, we have not done teshuvah. Step 4 of the 12-Steps mirrors this process of teshuvah. In Step 4 we take a moral inventory of ourself, looking at people, institutions, systems and even ideas we resent. Cheshbon ha nefesh an accounting of the soul, is a very Jewish concept. This is the way Judaism views the Step Four inventory. The entire month of Elul just before Rosh Hashanah is devoted to a piercing moral scrutiny.[23] The philosopher Martin Buber once said: “You cannot find redemption until you see the flaws in your own soul…. whoever shuts out the realization of his flaws is shutting out redemption. We can be redeemed only to the extent to which we see ourselves. Facing who we are and who we have become is the most difficult task of recovery and spiritual renewal. But it is also a turning point. It puts us in the direction we are going-- home to ourselves and a loving God.”[24] Recognizing the magnitude of Teshuvah, the Talmud stands in awe of those who sincerely go through its process, declaring: “Even the most righteous among us cannot stand in the place where one who has done Teshuvah stands. [25] In his parting words to the Israelites in the Book of Deuteronomy, Moses says: This instruction (the Torah) which I enjoin you this day is not too baffling, nor is it beyond reach. It is not in the heavens….No, the thing is very close to you in your mouth and in your heart…..[26] Throughout these last chapters of the Torah, Moses uses the phrase היום today, this day, over and over again.[27] Moses is telling the Israelites to focus on today, not yesterday or tomorrow. All of us can face the challenges of just one day. It’s only when we add the burdens of yesterday and tomorrow that we break down. Right now, those burdens of yesterday and particularly tomorrow are as difficult as they have ever been to ignore. But, in the words of another 12-step slogan, Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift. That’s how we live spiritually – one day at a time. Oh set me up with the spirit in the sky (spirit in the sky) That's where I'm gonna go when I die (when I die) When I die and they lay me to rest I'm gonna go to the place that's the best Go to the place that's the best G’mar Chatimah Tova [1] Abraham Twerski, Twerski on Spirituality (Shaar Press, c1998), 11. [2] Genesis Rabbah 9:7 [3] Paul Steinberg, Recovery, the 12 Steps and Jewish Spirituality (Jewish Lights, 2014), 42 [4] Avot 4:1 [5] Abraham Twerski, Twerski on Spirituality (Shaar Press, c1998) [6] Ibid. 14 [7] Ibid. 15 [8] Ibid. [9] Abraham Twerski, Teshuvah Through Recovery (Mekor Press, c2016) 58 [10] Abraham Twerski, Twerski on Spirituality (Shaar Press, c1998) 15-16 [11] Ibid. 77 [12] Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham, The Spirituality of Imperfection (Bantam Books, 1992), 15 [13] Ibid, 19 [14] Ibid. [15] A well-known 12-Step slogan [16] Abraham Twerski, Twerski on Spirituality (Shaar Press, c1998) 195 [17] Kerry M. Olitzky and Stuart A. Copans, Twelve Jewish Steps to Recovery (Jewish Lights, 2009) 9-10 [18] Abraham Twerski, Teshuvah Through Recovery (Mekor Press, c2016), 60 [19] Ibid, 61 [20] Ibid, 86 [21] Pirkei Avot 4:1 [22] Paul Steinberg, Recovery, the 12 Steps and Jewish Spirituality (Jewish Lights, 2014) 82 [23] Kerry Olitzky, Recovery from Codependence, (Jewish Lights, c1993) 29 [24] Ibid, 34 [25] BT Brachot 34b [26] Deuteronomy 30:11-14 [27] Abraham Twerski, Twerski on Spirituality (Shaar Press, c1998),, 327 Comments are closed.
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