Poetic notes on the parashat Ki Tavo*
The world sits on the point of a pin,
a point of a pin that has been sliced and diced
and shattered by sin
All the frightened elements are in a vibrating spin
Even if Humanity could be
in perfect unity,
a being at one with itself,
and even if its self love and awareness
could be as great as a galaxy,
or a universe of galaxies,
if it was all of this,
but without God,
it would be as shattered and lonely
as an individual child lost and alone,
a lonely speck in a vast cosmic ocean
Why do the nations rage
and the peoples imagine a vain thing?
They distract themselves
from the great pain of their human loneliness,
the constant feeling that Godless Humanity is caught in
Humanity’s whole life is now in the prison of its sin
It has abandoned all true knowledge of God
Every mitzvah is now a command to repent
Honestly, we don’t know where truth went
But all is normal in the everyday mind
The Godless say nothing is wrong
and no one is spiritually blind,
that everything is all of one material kind
and will take billions of years to unwind
There is nothing, really nothing, to find
Nothing is wrong, they say,
while Israel is always breathing
what seems like the air of her last day
Only an eternal miracle keeps it from being that way
Yet her redemption is just a breath away
The God of heaven and earth
is deep in her heart and deep in her lungs
She is the first-fruit of all His acts of righteousness
She thankfully returns to Him the tithe of life,
the tithe of her beating heart,
the tithe of the birthpangs of her soul,
also of her exhausting labour and dwindling strength
She returns a tithe to His representatives,
to the Levite, to the destitute, to the widow
and to the stranger in her midst
Hear Oh Israel, The Lord, the Lord your God is one
It is only Israel who hears
Adam crossed a restricted bridge
to a dead man’s curve
He crawled down a dead end road,
she slid down a suicide rope
Eve sought to change evil to good,
to change the poison of transgression
into the living water of the eternal mitzvah
She exclaimed that God had shared his existence
and that therefore all things were possible!
She did it for the sake of her seed-body, her young
She thought she would forever be
the Mother Of All the young and free
But God investigated her tongue
And she was convicted of dishonesty,
convicted on two accounts
First, she was found to have said:
I will transgress so that I can acquire repentance like a jewel
For repentance is the foundation of the eternal world
For this reason her sentence was passed
At last, no way of repentance would be open to her
And second, she said to Adam, I have done this, you do it too
For this reason her sentence was passed
At last, no way of repentance would be open to her
Yet when she was tried she cried: I was beguiled
Then a way of learning was opened to her
A doubly impossible way of repentance
was created for her
Prophetically she saw Abraham wearing tzitzit
Adam saw her envision Abraham and he called her Eve,
truly the Mother Of All Living
Adam saw that Eve would be a handmaid of Sarah
Adam envisioned Eve as she became the very first
to take hold of the tzitzit of Abraham
and to say to him, “Let us go with you,
for we have heard that God is with you!”
Eve could no longer alone be the Mother of All
She could not undo what she had done
She could be a goy like any or every goy
And her husband’s fate was with her
She had been beguiled
She was captured by the other side
along the river side
that flowed with blood from the place of the garden
but was meant to have flowed with eternal life
Eve was shattered, scattered, torn and battered
like fragments of stars,
between the hand of her adversary
and the hand of her God
She sat on the shore and wept,
feeling that she was like grains of sand
crushed to dust by God’s strict hand
But then she learned that through Sarah
and her son, and the son of her son,
she could be redeemed and again be one
Accordingly, a ship from heaven carried Israel away
down to Egypt on the very darkest day
The higher the tower the further it falls
Jacob fell down all the way to the feet of Pharaoh,
the ruler of sin and transgression
On their way back from the Egyptian snake pit
Israel would learn that the clothes God’s justice fit
But nothing fit so well as God’s absolute mercy
These are the principles of teshuvah
Should God have built all things
on the principle of repentance?
Should God have desired
to make His dwelling place
in the realm of repentance?
Did God need a home?
Was God homeless?
What was the reason God desired a house?
Did God desire a house in order to give it life?
To build a living house…
A home having His eternal life…
A place where the loneliest creature
could come and live and not die?
Could come and love and not cry?
Where even the sinner could turn around
and be at home with God?
Where love could erase sin?
And loneliness could never creep in?
And broken commandments could
became whole again?
Eve was deceived
by the inferences of the serpent
to think that if
she shared in the existence of God,
then she and her husband necessarily had to exist
She thought this meant
that they were even greater than death
She thought this meant
that she could transform evil into good
simply by judging what was for the greater good
And this was her rationalization for
eating of the fruit of the tree growing in the garden
that God had not planted as food for Adam
She imagined that God
must have actually intended her to do this,
wanting her to assert herself
and create a place for his presence
even in the place of sin,
in the domain of the lowest place of creation possible,
that he wanted her to sin that grace might abound
And Adam agreed with her in all of this
The error they made
was not to realize
that while God did share his existence with them,
only God necessarily existed
and they did not necessarily exist at all,
nor were they, therefore, greater than death
Therefore all their thinking was deceived,
as the place of sin is, in fact,
not the lowest place in creation possible,
for sin is not in truth a possible place in creation
For any place created by and for sin will be destroyed by God
and will be as though it never existed
Rather, the lowest place possible in creation
is the place where there is temptation,
but where it has been resisted and thus transformed
into a place of obedience to God,
if not at first, then by innocent teshuvah
This is in that place that God desires to dwell
that he might have a home here in this physical world
Is it not for this
that God desired a house and home
of obeidence and repentance in Israel?
God said to Israel, Oh Israel, Hear!
With you I will build my house
Do not return to the ways of cursed Adam
Or to the death ships of Adam’s slavery
They will carry you again into Egypt
You were not in bondage there for the sake of your sin
But for the sake of Adam’s redemption
If you return, it will be on account of your own sin
This is the absolute justice and the absolute mercy of God
for one Adam and for all
The Torah of Israel is the permission to Adam
to learn the teshuvah that leads from death to life
Therefore God has given his trust to Israel, saying,
Build the foundations of My house!
For the world sits on the point of a pin
And time was thin
And the gate of repentance was too narrow
to let anyone in,
but now it is just enough wider
*Being a meditation on a Torah classes on parashah Ki Tavo, delivered in 5781 by Rabbi Baitelman of ChaBaD Richmond, B.C., based on the series, Torah Studies, by Rohr Jewish Learning Institute. Neither Rabbi Baitelman nor the JLI have reviewed or approved of the content of this post.
For 5782, a reference to Likutey Moharan part 1 Lesson 51 is added.