Time to Break it
Mystical artwork by Danielle Alhassid, piano Damian Olsen
Dear friends,
There come times when the only thing to do is to break the rules; to go against the foundational principles; to do the exact opposite of what you always believed to be right. Is this one of those times? The world seems in bad enough shape to warrant a shakeup. Tomorrow night we will harken back almost two thousand years to a time when the human situation was so bad that ten mystics decided that the only way to heal was to break the most foundational laws, the pillars on which our entire faith stands.
עת לעשות ליהוה הפרו תורתך, they declared,
It is time to do for God – so break the Torah!
This is the first verse quoted by Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai in what is called the Great Gathering, or the Idra Raba, a wildly poetic segment of the Zohar which we will delve into tomorrow. It describes a nighttime rabbinical retreat to the forest designed to alter the spiritual position of the divine realm, during a time of continuous wars and real threat to the continued survival of Judaism.
Bar Yochai’s reading of the verse is, of course, subversive. The line from Psalms is usually understood differently: “It is time do for God – for they have broken your Torah!” But Bar Yochai builds on the earlier subversive sages of the Talmud who suggested switching one vowel in the sentence to another to twist scripture into a new meaning. HEferu becomes HAferu, and thus turns the verb “to break or undo” from third person plural past tense (they have broken) to second person plural imperative (Break!).
This begins the process of taking the worst offense in our faith – giving form to the formless abstraction we call God – and turning that offense into a divine commandment. In this transgressive story, the rabbis understand that the way to realign the divine world, which will then flow into humanity, is to paint into existence the face of God. Their method is poetic exegesis: they take biblical verses to create an image of God’s face: skull, brain, eyes, nose, ears, beard. Then they chart how each facial element relates to the millions of worlds and planets and realities of our world.
While they’re at it, they decide to break down the next holy cow, the notion of one God. Once the God of Compassion is established, they paint the face of a second God – the God of Judgement. And once he is completed, they paint the Goddess. Finally, they unite the three through the poetry of love, and bring harmony back into the universe.
There are countless levels on which we stand to learn from this psychedelic mystical recounting. The act of intervening in the flow of the universe denotes a belief in human power that we have lost. The method of intervening, which combines faith, art and knowledge with a political intention is very different to the ways we have been fumbling about trying to change things. The courage to smash our holy structures in order to allow for a new flow is key to the release that a new reality would demand.
The Zohar is notoriously difficult to grasp. It needs to be invited into your senses. So the pieces of text we chose for our final Kumah event tomorrow night will both be explained by Rabbi Abby and me during the event, and, more importantly, accompanied by music and art. We will be joined by pianist Damian Olsen, performance artist Danielle Alhassid and vocalist Chanan Ben Simon. Much like the Idra Raba itself, we will proceed through structured improvisation to produce the beauty and wonder which we hope will afford a smooth internal and external flow between us and the source of all.
Join us tomorrow night at the 14th Street Y to break down the structures of reality and use the shards of that reality to paint a new world into existence.
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha