Conscious Community: The Goal of Our Association, II
Continuation of Andrew's a my Conscious Community chavruta notes:
... We do not perceive the divine intent nor sense the illuminating beauty of His presence. Our minds become closed and our hearts blocked. We seek instead to be on the level described in Torah: "You are chidren of G!d" (Deuteronomy 14:1). Whenever we do G!d's work, whether we study, pray, or perform any of the mitzvot, we wish to feel that we are always growing closer to Him.
When a child cannot see his father, he misses him terribly, and he is overjoyed to see him again. When we serve G!d, we want to feel just like that: our soul yearns for G!d day and night, and now she rushes out and up to dissolve in His holy embrace.
Our minds become closed and our hearts blocked. This sentence seems to parallel the previous: our minds being closed is associated with lack of perception of the divine intent, and our hearts being blocked is associated with not sensing the beauty of His presence. The mind-function is perceptive and understanding, and the heart-function is feeling and aesthetic.
"You are children of G!d" ... we wish to feel that we are always growing closer to Him. At first this seems like an odd choice of metaphor, because the experience of the child is one of ever-increasing differentiation from his parents. The neshamah's Divine core (see discussion of "sparks" in our notes from last time) could be seen as a kind of hereditary link to the "Father," but that doesn't explain the feeling of always growing closer. The way I understand this metaphor is in the adult experience of coming to appreciate the struggles and striving of one's parents in a mature personal way as one, according to the common (half-)joke, "turns into his/her father/mother." After all, as Andrew pointed out, R' Shapira specifies the time when we feel this "close"ness to G!d as when we are doing His work. There is a particular closeness I feel with my biological parents when I realize that I am doing work that is inherited from their character and narrative. R' Kalman describes an analogous closeness we should aspire to feel with G!d, by way of realizing that we are doing work inherited from the singular character and narrative of the Divine "parent."
When a child cannot see his father, he misses him terribly, and he is overjoyed to see him again. Here is where we may be helped by thinking of the neshamah's inherent Divine core as an inheritence from its cosmological source. The soul, just like the child, yearns to be reunited with its source.
She rushes out and up to dissolve. The dissolving can be understood in terms of the trappings of the soul giving way or becoming transparent such that the G!d-spark of the soul is not distinguished from its Divine source. But what do we make of "out and up" exactly? "Out" of (the illusion of) separation? "Up" to (the realization of) Holy One-ness?
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As you know, I'm working through the same text now. Our rabbi brought in an interesting piece of history that illuminated the quote above about a child yearning for a parent.
R' Shapira apparently was revolutionary in all sorts of ways. During his time, very young boys were sent to yeshiva and stayed there all day learning in the dark study halls. R' Shapira's yeshiva, on the other hand, encouraged fathers to come eat lunch with their sons. He really understood the true pain that went through a child when they felt abandoned for the day at school.
At least this is what I'm told. :)
In any case, that image of a real child in anguish at feeling abandoned helps me connect more with this concept.
By Evenewra, at 7:36 PM