Before I Came to Be
The primordial view from Mount Champlain, Maine earlier this summer (photo Ezzy Shulman)
Dear friends,
The last weeks of summer are a primordial state of mind. Summer has happened. The year is over, but the next one has yet to begin. We yawn our way through the yawn-like days waiting to be reborn, thrown back into the world. In the meantime, we might catch a minute of sweetness here and there as happy hour keeps getting a few minutes earlier each day.
In one of those amorphous moments of sweetness this week I got to read a 13th century poem with a few of you, which describes the time before we existed.
טֶרֶם הֱיוֹתִי חַסְדְּךָ בָאִָני
הַשָּׂם לְיֵשׁ איִן וְהִמְצִיאָנִי
She who makes something out of nothing,
She conceived me
Her kindness came to me
Before I came to be.
It’s tempting to hear in this a poem about a mother. That is probably your humble translator’s fault. Solomon Ibn Gabirol, the Paytan who penned the words was likely thinking about God. The period of time in question is probably not the 9 months of pregnancy, or even the months or years before it, but the unquantifiable, primordial end of the summer of the never-ending cycle of being and dying. “Before I came to be,” we learn, is a time of chesed, enduring love, ever-present kindness.
The early Kabbalists also tended to talk about primordial, pre-creation moments as sweet, or sublime. In Sefer Yetzira, the most ancient of the Kabbalistic books we find the following description of primordial chochmah, or wisdom:
“a pure and completely unalloyed light of life, inscribed and sealed in the splendor of the supreme vault, which is called The Naught, devoid of any notion.”
Before wisdom came to be it was not pieces of thought, ideas floating around with no form. It was a completely thought-free light. This sounds right to me. Most of the meaningful insights about my life come from a place of quiet, rather than from a place of busy internal conversation. Inhabiting such a place of quiet is a rare gift, a moment of chesed, out of which further gifts sometimes come.
In the 12th century in Provence, the practice of Kabbalah began to take its first baby steps toward becoming. Still close to its primordial time, these early Kabbalists seem to retain a memory or instinct for what that primordiality is about, and how it relates to them. In his commentary on Sefer Yetzirah, the greatest Kabbalist of his generation, known as Isaac the blind wrote:
“All things return to the root of their true being.”
Isaac reflects the time before existence back onto the time after it. If “before I came to be” is a root of who or what we will become, it is the same space we will return to after we cease to be; a space of chesed, loving kindness, of sweet, pure quiet.
The High Holidays, and Yom Kippur in particular invite us into that type of space. There, grudges, anger, disappointment, self criticism make no sense, while forgiveness becomes a no-brainer. Ibn Gabirol ends his poem going back to the beginning:
How could I ever conceal my sin from You?
Even before I came to be
Your kindness came to me.
Whether he’s talking to his mother or his god, the primordial intimacy makes holding onto any negativity mute.
As this summer rolls away from us, let’s try to enjoy the sweet, empty spaces of pre and post-existence it offers us, before we’re swept into another year of being.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Misha