Creating heaven on earth

Yitz was once visited in a dream by Elijah the Prophet. Elijah told him: “you have one opportunity to glimpse what no mortal man has ever seen”. Yitz replied “in that case, please show me Heaven and Hell. Let me see how the righteous are rewarded and how the wicked are punished!”

First Yitz is taken to Hell. There he sees something that appears to shake the very foundations of his faith. Long lush tables are piled high with the most mouth-watering delicacies you can imagine. There are golden bowls and golden plates and men and women sitting around the tables, each one holding a long golden spoon, fondly caressing the aromatic contents of the bowls.

Yitz is about to hand the prophet the return portion of his ticket to Hell when suddenly he notices that the faces of the inmates of Hell don’t look happy. Then he sees why. There is something very unusual about the arms of its inmates – they don’t bend! There is no way they can get that irresistible food into their desperate drooling mouths. Yitz turns to Elijah and murmurs “I understand! A worse hell than this I couldn’t imagine! Now please take me to glimpse Heaven!”

Yitz is taken to Heaven. Here he views an identical sight. The long, lush tables piled high with goodies, the golden bowls and plates, the men and women seated all around the tables with long golden spoons in their hands reaching down to the food. And, yes, to his horror, he sees that the arms of these folk too are unable to bend – and so there’s no way those golden spoons will reach their mouths.

Yitz turns angrily to Elijah and cries out: “Is this how it is – the same for the righteous as for the wicked?” And the prophet replies: “Look more carefully!”

Then he sees the radiance on the faces of the people as they scoop each spoonful of the heaping bowls of food – and, stretching forward, bring each spoonful carefully and lovingly to the lips of those seated opposite them. Declared Yitz approvingly, “This indeed is true Heaven!”

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The parable of Yitz teaches us a very powerful lesson. Heaven and Hell are created by how we behave and react to the circumstances that befall us.

R’ Eliahu Dessler (1892-1953), pillar of the Mussar (Jewish ethics) movement, writes that the human race may be divided into two groups – givers and takers.

Admittedly there are moments when even the most self-centred individual may be motivated to give or the most selfless of individuals finds him or herself on the receiving end. What R’ Dessler means to convey is that for the takers of the world the principal challenge is “how can I acquire more, accumulate more efficiently?” Conversely, the ever-guiding life-principle for the giver is “what can I do to make his (her) lot a little easier”. The message is essentially that heaven can be created right here on earth by our acts of giving, of reaching out to the other.

In Judaism there are mitsvot, Torah-based duties, between man and G­D and also between man and man. R’ Nachman of Breslav (1772-1810) startlingly cites a third category of mitsva – those between man and himself. An extraordinary concept! What does R’ Nachman mean?

The word mitsva means ‘connection’. If I connect, I reach out. I give of myself. What R’ Nachman is saying in his visionary way is this: even the things in life we do for ourselves, for our own betterment, spurred on by our own ambition, can be mitsvot if we retain the essential, outer-directed perspective that our self-betterment matters cosmically, that our self-improvement will benefit the world outside, or even one other person in some small way.

A flashback to the bi-millennial Sydney Olympics is in order. When Cathy Freeman passed the finishing line in that memorable 400-metre race to claim gold, it was fascinating to witness the sequence of emotions that she evinced. She could have been expected to throw her hands in the air and perform cartwheels of joy Instead she took several deep breaths, closed her eyes meditatively, and gave what was described by a TV commentator as a palpable sigh of relief. A burden had been lifted from her shoulders. Her overwhelming feeling, above joy, above triumph, was relief that she hadn’t let down all those Australians to whom her success meant so much.

Yes she had ambition. Yes she constantly strove to break new barriers of achievement. But she embraced a vision beyond herself. She grasped that her achievements weren’t for her alone.

Our Rabbis say that were it not for ambition no person would ever build a house and were it not for desire no-one would ever marry and raise a family – but even in the pursuit of our ambitions, even in the fulfilment of our desires, we can retain an essentially outer-directed perspective. The more successful we are in our careers, the more others will benefit. The more content we are in our marriages, the happier our spouses and our children will be.

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At the end of the long, dramatic, tense High Festival musaph service the chazan sings out to a joyous melody the words ha-yom ta’amitseinu, “today You will strengthen us!”, ha-yom te-varekheinu, “today You will bless us!”, and we respond each time with a vigorous Amen. What is the great and sudden upsurge of joy we feel at this point?

I venture to suggest the following idea. For the past few hours we have been baring our souls before G­D, expressing our hearts’ desires. “Please G­D let it be a good year! please give us health, strength, the material wherewithal that we need to live! help our children! Inscribe and seal us in the book of life!” And why? Why have we been praying with such feeling?

I would daringly argue that prayer, tefila, belongs in the category of R’ Nachman’s mitsvot bein adam le-atsmo, duties between man and himself. Indeed the very word le-hitpalel, to pray, actually means ‘to examine oneself’.

But, as we interpreted R’ Nachman’s concept earlier, that does not mean that our prayers are exclusively about ourselves. They reach beyond the self. We focus on the needs and desires of our family, community, fellow-Jews, of Israel and of the world.

If we are capable of ascending another spiritual notch, we shall focus too on G­D’s desires for us as individuals, as family members, as community members, as Jews, as Australians, as global inhabitants.

And having given ourselves over to the tefila experience for all those hours, having run the marathon to the utmost of our ability, we feel somehow liberated as we cry out “today You will strengthen us, today you will bless us!” ‘We have done all that we can, the rest is up to You!’ And, like Freeman, we feel that a burden has been lifted from our shoulders.

That’s the ideal.

The reality is that many of us don’t feel that sense of exultation as we utter those words. Some of us – dare one say it – regard the thrice-a-year shul experience as something akin to purgatory.

Let’s remember Yitz. He learned the lesson – and we can too – that even hell can be transformed to heaven when we become givers. It is equally true of all kinds of giving. If we don’t give of ourselves to the prayer experience, how can we expect to turn a kind of purgatory into a slice of heaven?

My revered teacher Rabbi Eli Munk ztl used to say that when it comes to Jewish character traits you cannot have a split personality. You cannot say “I’ll love all Jews and hate all goyim”. Nor, I believe, can you say “I’ll be a giver when it comes to humanity, but from G­D I’ll be a taker! I’m only going to pray if it does something for me, if it gives me a buzz, if it’s meaningful to me – if not, I won’t!” Or like someone once told me: “I stopped putting on tefilin because it didn’t electrify me anymore!” Who ever said that mitsvot are like narcotic injections, there to give you an instant ‘high’?

We don’t go visit our sick neighbour in hospital because of what we can get out of the experience. And if we profess to be humanitarians concerned for the wellbeing of the other while our attitude to Jewish observance is only “what’s in it for me?” we may be suffering a severe case of schizophrenia! Because truly one cannot have a split personality when it comes to giving and taking.

Abraham taught us that. In the quintessential drama of the whole Bible, the Akeda (Binding of Isaac), Abraham is told “take your son and offer him up to Me”, then at the last moment he is told “don’t you dare sacrifice him – take him down, it was a test!” Pages and chapters and volumes have been written on the significance of this story, so much so that we have perhaps lost sight of the most straightforward and simplest of all of its lessons – namely, G­D wished to demonstrate graphically once and for all that there can be no conflict between loving G­D and loving man. You cannot give to G­D by denying life to another man – and, by the same token, you cannot be a giver to man in any real sense if you deny G­D; because if G­D did not create man, man is not man, man is just another of the animals that roam the world and it’s the law of the jungle that holds sway.

The story of the Akeda speaks to us on many levels, not least that of the dynamics of the parent-child relationship. On a personal note, I thought a lot about that relationship when my late father suffered a cerebral haemorrhage. As he lay slowly recuperating in a hospital bed, I found myself focussing on how being a parent and grandparent equals being a giver, how the bestowal of life upon another human-being, the bringing of another soul into the world is the consummate act of giving and how having children of one’s own and facing the constant challenge of raising them effectively makes one appreciate the trials our own parents faced in raising us and how they rose to those challenges.

We cannot ever give back to our parents what they gave to us. Yet we are expected to try, to do our utmost to fulfil the mitsva of honouring our parents in life and their memory after life.

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    The first word of the most celebrated prayer of this time of the year is Avinu. Our Father. G­D is our Loving Father. Can we begin to enumerate His blessings? Can we begin to quantify our debt of gratitude to Him for the very air we breathe in freedom, in health, in comfort, every new day, every New Year? We cannot. Yet we must try!

 Tefila is self-evaluation – in R’ Nachman’s terms, a mitsva between us and ourselves.

On Rosh HaShana and Yom Kippur especially, we pray for our needs, for the realisation of our dreams, our ambitions, our desires, while realising that our lives are not meant to be lived for ourselves alone.

We try as well to accomplish teshuva, a renewed desire to make His will our will. And we focus on tsedaka, reaching out to others selflessly, discovering their needs and how we can satisfy them, identifying their pain and how we can help to heal it.

And we will unexpectedly discover that, as our High Festival Makhzor declares, tefila, prayer, teshuva, repentance and tsedaka, charity ma’avirin et ro’a ha-gezera avert the harshness of the sentence.

 If we develop a non-selective, non-schizophrenic total giving personality, we shall escape the severity of any decree. Nothing will harm us. Even when, G­D Forbid, tragedy strikes, we shall overcome.

Let us remember well the lesson of Yitz. Let us give of ourselves and, in so doing, inject ourselves not with instant shots of Valium but rather the greatest of all blessings – heaven right here on earth!