Parashat Yitro: Your “Soul” Focus

“Belief applies not to what can be known. Belief relates to the unknowable essence. To believe in something is to be irrationally drawn towards it with all your being since it is part of you.” – Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi.

How can something be part of us unless we have experienced it? Perhaps there are ways we can experience things spiritually without having done so physically. If so, spiritual time may not necessarily conform to our usual concept of time. According to modern physics, time is not linear, even if we do usually experience it that way. But what does this mean practically for us?

In this week’s Parashat Yitro, the revelation of Gd at Mount Sinai changes our relationship with Gd forever. We are given the Ten Commandments which are not just directions, but tools to be conscious co-creators with the Divine. It all started at Mount Sinai. 

It is a well established belief that all Jewish souls that ever will be were at Mount Sinai (Midrash Tanchuma, Nitzavim 3), also mentioned in the Zohar (Yitro 83b). So today, in some way, we have all experienced a direct encounter with Gd in our past through spiritual time. 

But if spiritual time is not always linear, maybe Mount Sinai is also our experience of Gd in the future. There are various different Jewish beliefs about the “afterlife”, some of which do involve encountering Gd directly on a spiritual level. Who can say what might be? And in any case, we may all have different experiences. According to another midrash (Shabbat 88b), during the revelation at Mount Sinai, the Israelites die, and Gd has to restore them to life, reuniting soul and body. When taking into account spiritual time, we may have multiple lives and deaths and not necessarily experienced in the order we assume. 

The Zohar (Yitro 83a) explains that according to R. Simeon, when the Almighty began to speak (however we understand that), the utterances caused the Israelites to tremble and their souls to leave their bodies. Were they not prepared for Gd’s “voice”? Gd does not make mistakes, so maybe this loss and restoration of souls was all part of Gd’s revelatory process. Perhaps this was symbolic of the transformational nature of these events: body and soul being given new life as Gd established a new relationship with each person, the Israelite people as a whole, and, in a way, all of humanity also. The giving of the Torah rippled out through time and space and has had an impact on our whole world. We know that Gd likes to do things with concealed and revealed beauty. 

The Zohar continues to tell us of R. Simeon’s understanding: at Sinai, the divine word came down from heaven, engraved upon the four cardinal winds. Then it rose and drew balsam from the mountain’s peaks. It then reached earth, enveloped us (the Israelites) and brought back our souls. Then the divine proclamation encircled us once more, imprinting itself upon stone slabs until each commandment was on the tablets. Every word contained all sorts of hidden and derivative information for us to learn and discover,. 

But it’s even more interesting than that.

Rabbi Isaac explains that the Torah was created with the fusion of black fire on white fire (84a). The black fire represents Gevurah (possibly to be understood here as a constriction of light) and the white fire represents Chesed (Gd infinite and continuously giving to us and all creation). So here, Gevurah is superimposed on Chesed. Without the black fire upon the white, we would have no meaning to our life. We live to make corrections (tikkunim) and the black light inspires that in us. Combined with the midrash about Gd creating the Torah before the world as a “blueprint” for the universe (Bereshit Rabbah 1:4), this means that this black on white fire is responsible for all of Creation.. All of this is derived from a phrase found near the end of the Torah: מימינו אש דת למו “from His right, fire-law, to them”

I also talk about these ideas in my book Better Than You Wished For: “the black are the words we read and white is the parchment they are written on, but maybe we can understand the white fire more as the “words” in between the written words. When we look carefully at the Torah scroll, we see that there is more white than black…”

With the Ten Commandments, as with our Torah scrolls today, perhaps there was more white than black? The Zohar on Parashat Yitro talks a few different times about the divine attribute of Chesed (white fire) on the right side of the sefirotic “tree” and Gevurah (black fire) on the left uniting. To note, the sefirot can take on all sorts of colors, but these choices of colors are for this specific explanation. The uniting of these divine attributes from the left and the right sides, produces the balanced, centered Tiferet -harmonious beauty. 

Rabbi Avraham Arieh Trugman and his wife Rachel, explain that the giving of the Torah was what today we would call a synesthetic experience (1), where information was conveyed through all the senses. In fact, the Torah tells us explicitly that we saw a thick cloud, but that there was also smoke, thunder, lightning and the ground also shook. If Gd was trying to provide a sensory experience when receiving the Ten Commandments, we can perhaps assume that in addition to the awe/fear described, there was also some sense of beauty involved, which links to the synthesis of Tiferet I described. 

According to R. Abba in the Zohar (84a), a blue flame came up from Mount Sinai, flaring up high, then reducing and emitting a smoke of all the smells  of the Garden of Eden that appeared as the colors of  white, black and red. A little bit later he is cited again, saying that the words of the commandments were not actually engraved, but fluttered as black and white fire, again to demonstrate a union between the right and the left (as discussed above). All of this imagery seems to connect the sense fo sight and smell to the experience of divine revelation.

The Zohar also adds something else interesting about the tablets and their black and white fire: that the word for tablets (לחת) is written unusually, without any vavs to symbolize that the two tablets were like one tablet. The Torah says that both surfaces of the tablets were engraved (Exodus 32:15), but the Zohar takes it as meaning that all the words from one tablet were seen on the reverse side of the other tablet, with the tablets being transparent, so you could look through each tablet and see the words of the other tablet overlapped. This too is a merging of left and right (tablets). 

This brings a number of other ideas to mind. For example, quantum superposition, which allows a particle to exist in multiple states simultaneously until we consciously observe and see the difference. This principle can be likened to the dual nature of the Ten Commandments, which balance directives pertaining to our relationships with Gd with ones about our relationships with each other. There is a correspondence between the commandments in the same position on the different tablets (which in the Zohar’s description would actually be superimposed on top of each other). For instance, the second position would have not worshipping idols (between us and Gd) and not committing adultery (between one person and another), but in a way, idol worship is like committing adultery against Gd. The words exist in both states until we choose to think about either our relationship with Gd or with other humans, and then coalesce to a specific set of words from one side or the other.

Another thought is that our souls being at Sinai is a bit like quantum entanglement: once two particles interact, they continue to have an influence on each other despite great distances apart in space and time. Add in the dimension of soul, and this is like our relationship with Gd and the other Jewish souls at Sinai. Once we were entangled with each other there, we continued to be connected throughout space, as well as time, to the past, present, and future.

We can perhaps agree that our experience at Sinai was quite emotional, allowing sensations to permeate the intellect and eternally engrave our soul with Gd’s eternal truth. Among the surprising natural phenomena going on at the revelation at Mount Sinai was the cloud that descended off the mountain. The Hebrew word the Torah uses when it tells us that all of Mount Sinai was smoking is “ashan” (עשן) (also described in Isaiah’s vision in the haftarah). The Arizal explains that in the Book of Creation, Sefer Yetzirah, that the three letters of this word stand for three dimensions: space (olam/עולם), time (sha-ah/שעה) and soul (nefesh/נפש) (specifically, the part of our souls most connected to the physical). But why did these three things matter at the giving of the Torah? This explains the midrash of all Jews being present and suggests that the spiritual is a dimension just like time and space.  

The same way that every day one is  supposed to renew the relationship with one’s spouse, we need to do the same with Gd. We may not consciously remember the exact sensations of we experienced at Sinai, but from the words of the Torah and our own unique feelings from these few soul-dimension memories, we can more easily imagine and keep re-experiencing in new ways the emotions our soul had when Gd revealed Himself at Mount Sinai. Perhaps “remembering” that purely beautiful moment is all we need to find inspiration in our renewed relationship!

1https://thetrugmans.com/time-space-and-soul/

For the elevation of the soul of our spiritual and physical soldiers how:

Abraham Albert Robert Bensaid Bat Rose

Julie Bat Tefaha ve HaRav Sidi Freddj

Peace for all ans the coming of Moshiac now