Above-Below

It's been awhile. But that shouldn't surprise.

For one, I haven't exactly been inundated with responses!

Secondly, once the election got going, the pattern was getting all too clear. What else was there to say when Big Brother O was taking over?

No - it was no more time for ranting. The Unbee Yid needs to know when t be quiet and ride the waves of history and wait for the appropriate Torah portion for responding:

"Habet na", G-d tells the first patriarch in last week's portion as he takes him "outside" to view the stars. The phrase means to gaze DOWN upon, like in looking at the starts from a position ABOVE them.

"So too will be your progeny", the Alm-ghty continues. We're all imbued with this capacity of getting above it all.

Each and every Jew.

Really now. Just contemplate this a bit. THIS is our spiritual root. Habet na... which leads up to that first great Mitzvah for the Chosen Nation: Circumcision.

To fully access it, however, you must first have a proper translation.....


MILA


A Translation
for the Perplexed



*
Dedicated to

FELIX ben SHOSHANA NOOMI

a very precious, young cousin

who I hope will one day

read this

*


בס " ד

They called it "the Covenant of Circumcision". No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't come up with a better translation for Bris Mila for the life of me!

Suddenly I was shaken from my reverie as a young man with flowing hair and stud earring strode past and began speaking, animatedly, with the Mohel[1]. I raised an eyebrow and was told by a guest, in a whisper: "hair dresser!"

Perplexed, I observed that even after the Sandak[2] was called, positioned himself on the appointed throne, accepted the holy infant on his lap, held him firmly and began to exude an awesome radiance (as only Sandak's do)… the exchange continued! Soon the Mohel is nodding to the hairdresser and placing his right hand over his. Next these two sets of hands are slipping the Mogen[3] over the startled baby's outstretched Orla[4] while the Mohel's free hand is picking up the Izmel[5]. He then turns squarely to this man, whom I now figured must be the father, lifts up the Izmel and asks aloud, with a wry smile:

"Are you suuure?"

"Yesss," he intones, closing his eyes.

The nearly fifty friends and relatives who were increasingly crowding themselves towards the center let out a nervous chuckle. Soon they're silent. Awestruck is probably more accurate.

The Mohel now puts the knife into his right hand and repositions the father's hand above it. With his left hand he picks up a laminated card containing all the blessings in transliterated English and indicates, urgently, for the father to begin.

Dad, ashen-faced and eyes aflutter, proceeds to recite the blessings, gasping to hold back tears. The Mohel, oblivious to the emotional outpouring, deftly leads his "upper hand" through the cut.

"Bris KOIdesh!"

"MAZAL TOV!," the crowd responds, in wild joy.

Hair-dressing Dad is now sobbing.

"What can I say?", he tells me shortly afterwards, though a mixture of tears and ecstasy, as he's removing his Yarmulke. "I'm an emotional guy."

I didn't believe him.


*

Since then, for about six months now, I've been a student of Mila, taking particular note of deeply moved parents (even when not so directly involved) who have very little connection to Judaism. There are plenty. I have come to the conclusion that it's not so much due to the holiness being stamped onto the body of their precious progeny, rather the unique connection to the heart that the whole ordeal provides. As we learn in the weekly Torah portion Ekev[6]:

Therefore Mal
the Orla
of your heart
and your obstinacy
shall Be rigid No longer

And as stated a few portions later, Nitzavim, usually associated with the Messianic era[7]:

And G-d shall Mal
Your heart And the hearts
of your offspring
to love the Etern-l your G-d
with all your heart
and with all your soul
that you may live

Furthermore, I have become profoundly inspired to discover that the above verse is brought down into LAW that once a year, for an entire month, every single Jew is treated to the Holy One's very own heart-Mila! As stated in the Kitzur Shulchan Arukh[8]:

"And G-d shall Mal
Your Heart And the Heart of your offspring"
(Es Levavkha V'es Levav zareikha)
contains the head letters
E.L.U.L.
(…) an allusion to
repentance
(during this month)

Now let us make no mistake. How the exclusive activity of the Alm-ghty alludes to the repentance of an individual is a paradox best left for the mystics to contemplate. Once it's legally applied to a particular time of year, however – that's a different story; one that should get even the simplest Jew thinking about the nature of Mila.

Hence I've done some research.

According to Rabbi S. R. Hirsch's classic study of the fine nuances of the Torah's language[9], Mila has four cognates: Mul, Malei, Nimal and Mallel, which roughly mean oppose, fill, cut away and meagerly express. The latter is particularly relevant as it first appears in a scene directly after the original Bris Mila[10]:

The aged Matriarch Sarah has just given birth. Though it was way past her natural bearing age, her husband had prophetically heard, some seven months earlier, the imperative to not only perform Mila on himself but on the boy who would be born through her, on his eighth day in this world, and to pass on this tradition, eternally, to his descendents.

Thus she exclaims, as she's cuddling this miraculous newborn yet to receive his Mila: "Mee millel to Avraham that Sarah suckled sons…".

The plural in sonS is key, explains Hirsch. She's totally in awe over the fact that this little guy is going to be the father of so many great people. Unbelievable amounts of Tsaddikim! WHO can possibly express her gratitude…

Similarly we find in one of the psalms in the Slichos prayers said during this month[11]: "Mee Yimallel the might of G-d?" WHO can truly express His power? Anything we say will barely scratch the surface…

Or how about another psalm, from the Shabbos prayers[12], in reference to the accomplishment of man: "In the morning it blossoms and is rejuvenated; in the evening yimollel v'yovesh, it crumbles and withers. Through the agency of mallel (The Creator's humbling reality-check) the initial boon of man's affect on the world has barely left an impression.

So too the core meaning of Mila. Our first holy grandparents knew that no matter how wonderful a Divine Signature they were about to impress upon their child's physical being, it would be a meager beginning. From there would need to emerge a very long, determined process of learning (to use the other cognates) how to "cut away" and "oppose" that which obstructs him from ful"fill"ing his Maker's Will.

The Mitzvah of Mila thus has NOTHING to do with the surgical technique of a circumferential incision, known as circumcision! To say so is to scandalously divest it of its spirit.

As for Orla, according to Rav Hirsch, it is referring to an "unruly, intractable" energy[13]. NOTHING specifically about "foreskin"! The fact that it is used in relation to lips[14], ears[15], unseemly characters[16], trees [17] and of course the heart [18]should make that resoundingly clear. That its letters also spell raal, poison, and l'raa, towards evil, should close the case! It's all about a spiritually contrary force which is particularly concentrated around the male reproductive organ but by no means limited to it.

In a word, the Mitzvah of Mila is to battle against the "conscience deadening" forces all around us, wherever and whenever they present themselves[19], and a crucial momentum for succeeding in this battle is begun with physical Mila.


*


The problem with this illuminating definition is that it flies in the face of a few, seemingly contradictory traditional ideas.

For one, while the classic Kli Yakar Torah commentary[20] concurs that "the reason for external Mila is to come by way of it to the purity of the inner heart," he asserts that this was not needed by the first recipient of Mila as he had already achieved his heart Mila (as plenty of previous verses attest). If so – how could he have gotten there without the assistance of physical Mila??

For another, if Mila is so important to kick start the spiritual refinement process of mankind, then why wait so long to institute it? At the least, shouldn't it have been given at the first moment that the patriarch was chosen to be the progenitor of the Chosen People, at the age of seventy five, instead of in his ninety ninth year??

Finally, if Mila works as a constant antitoxin to Orla, in its various manifestations, how does it apply to the messianic / Elul version which only refers to Mila of the heart without any mention of Orla whatsoever??

I believe the answer to all of these important questions emerges exquisitely from something I heard recently from a great and righteous scholar in our community. Someone had asked him how a common Jew could be expected to remove all the Orla from his heart, which according to most interpretations is composed of all of one's desires for forbidden pleasure, when in fact we know that some of the most righteous people struggle to rein in such feelings their entire lifetime? Conversely, if it was a matter of gradual purging, then why use the same language as that of physical Mila and Orla, which imply an elimination of something very real!?

The Rav thought for a few minutes.

Finally he looked up, eyes ablaze, and shared that he recalled seeing in a rare Hebrew translation of Maimonides' Guide to the Perplexed[21] that the secret of Mila is gamishius b'nefesh – a novel concept which roughly translates as spiritual flexibility, buoyancy or what I prefer: resiliency.

Pshhh… Now THAT's a purpose in life worth making a covenant over, I thought.

"Perhaps that's why the numerical value of Mal is seventy, as per the tradition that there are seventy different dimensions to Torah?", I asked.

He profoundly smiled, nodding at the folks all around, indicating that we were onto something. Indeed we must have been, as I found myself subsequently overwhelmed with the following insight that was much bigger than anything I could have cooked up on my own:

The importance of totally removing physical Orla, as soon as possible, is not because Judaism is fanatically at battle against Orla, on all levels, at all costs. The problem is that the physical manifestation functions as a kind of anchor holding back a ship from even leaving the dock! Emotional Orla, on the other hand, is a much finer reality which allows for certain interplay with the individual's growth process, kind of like a sea bound ship with delinquent sailors. If the captain attempts to "straighten them up" in one fall swoop, he might lose his whole ship!

On the other hand, the ship can only stay afloat so long without a functioning crew. At some point some serious sobriety needs to kick in if the ship is to survive the tumultuous waves ahead (the Judgment of the High Holidays and the End of Days).

So too, our first patriarch could be said to have begun his religious odyssey with this basic concern: Perhaps there's an Eternal Source of life that is not only good but gamish, resilient, in the way He cultivates goodness?

Indeed the Sages teach[22] that Avram's first philosophical inquiry was about how a burning palace (an idolatrous world) could be ownerless. Shouldn't there be some-One to intervene?? After agonizing over this issue for quite some time, says the Midrash, the Creator suddenly "peeked out at him and said: 'I'm that Owner'" – but nothing more. Nothing whatsoever about how to squelch those fires!

The present Slonimer Rebbe, shlit"a, explains[23] that the Midrash conveys the tradition that while the patriarch began his career with incisive claims on the cosmos, as it were, he was Answered in a supremely dismissive manner, saying in affect: If you can believe the simple fact that there is a singular guiding force to this world, then you can trust that your role in squelching those fires will be revealed to you – in due time.

And so the young philosopher-cum-theologian began Teshuva, Repentance. He searched long and hard to learn how to divest himself of all his subconscious claims on his Creator. Finally, one bright day at the ripe age of seventy five, he had a break-through.

"I need guidance," he prayed.

"Are you suuuure?," came the Reply.

"YES!," he rejoined.

"Then Lekh-lekha (Get going!)… towards a land which I will show you"[24].

"Land", say the mystics, is an allusion to physicality; the context for the coarsest of Orlas.

And thus was born the first disciple of Mila. He placed his hand over his Mohel's, as it were, patiently following His every move with total tomimus – wholehearted, unquestioning devotion (as per the Kli Yakar). Eventually, by the time he reached his ninety-ninth year, they were ready to BEGIN. That's when he was informed of an upgrade.

"Walk before Me and BE tomim"[25], his Mohel Commanded. Time to become the LOWER hand.

To be sure, making such a shift requires major resilience. Upper hands don't like becoming lower ones! Thus the Creator's hesitancy in informing mankind of physical Mila. For while there always were devotees of spiritual restraint, exemplified by Noach, who was noted for being Tsaddik tomim, wholeheartedly righteous in his walk "with G-d"[26], only ninety-nine year old Avraham was ready to walk before Him and BE tomim – to internalize the wholeheartedness and actually lead the process of impressing gamishius b'nefesh, spiritual resilience, onto the heart of the world.

We can accordingly explain why our messianic/Elul passage of G-d performing heart Mila makes no mention of Orla and emphasizes the importance of connecting to the next generation. It's because it's talking about a period of time when the need for spiritual resilience is already so impressed on the hearts of an entire nation that the world's struggle will no longer be to achieve it but to expand it.

The lower hand now becomes the upper hand in the guidance of others.

Your heart And the hearts
=
E . L . U . L .

*


To bring all this back to real-life, this amazing connection between the Mila and the challenge of spiritual resilience could be said to reflect the tension that many among our holy people feel between being called "Jewish" versus "Jew."

Undoubtedly, every child born to a daughter of Israel is as Jewish as the next, no matter if he's had a Bris Mila or not (that's the law!). The big question is our JEW-ness. Physical Mila is a crucial means for getting there, comparable to severing the ish from Jewish! Once that happens, the soul of the Jew (and those who are intimately related) begins to SOAR…

That's when the Mitzvah of emotional Mila kicks in. The unshackled, ish-less Jew is now beckoned into the eesh {person}, if you'll pardon the pun, deeper and deeper, towards a place where no Orla can exist, whatsoever. Now it's just you and your Maker.

THAT's scary!

It's the point when many of us take off our Yarmulke's…

Until those special moments when we realize that the Captain of the ship, the Owner of the palace, has caught onto our game. Suddenly we sober up and pray: May we start anew, joining the nation known for Mila, "as one entity, doing Your Will with a complete heart"[27].

A heart gushing with eternal, spiritual resilience.

~~~~~~~~~~~~


[1]Circumciser
[2] holder of the baby
[3] shield-clamp
[4] foreskin
[5] the traditional double edged knife
[6] Deut. 10:17
[7] Ibid 30:6
[8] Laws of the Month of Elul, 128:1, based on the Tur commentary on Deut. 30
[9] now neatly compiled in Clark's "Etymological Biblical Dictionary of Hebrew", Feldheim publ.
[10] Gen. 21:7
[11] Ps. 145
[12] Ps. 90
[13] Hirsch on Deut.10:17; 30:6
[14] Ex. 6:12
[15] Jer. 6:10
[16] Hab. 2:16
[17] ??
[18] see also Lev. 26:41
[19] Hirsch on Gen. 17: 10
[20] end of Gen. 17:10
[21] a medieval classic of Jewish philosophy
[22] Midrash.Rabba on Parshas Lekh-lekha, Gen. 12
[23] Darkhei Noam I:1
[24] Gen. 12
[25] Gen 17
[26] Gen. 6:9
[27] High Holyday prayer Book