War vs. Oneness

A friend recently asked me how to square the belief in God’s absolute oneness with the notion of evil and the imperative to fight against enemies who refuse to coexist. If God is One, then where does evil come from? And if we are ultimately one with all, then what is an enemy – if we are fighting others, are we not truly fighting ourselves?

In this week’s parsha, Shelach, our forebears struggled with similar questions. They were instructed to enter the land of Canaan, but they preferred to remain in the desert. The simple explanation is that they lacked faith in God’s ability to deliver them the land. But the Chassidic masters explain that these were people of tremendous faith who had witnessed the ten plagues and the deliverance from Egypt, the splitting of the Sea, and the giving of the Torah on Sinai. Their dilemma was not a lack of faith, but rather a lack of understanding of their relationship to an infinite God in a finite world.

The desert was a place of tremendous connection and spirituality where manna fed them from heaven. There they could study Torah constantly with no need to till the earth and toil to earn a livelihood. In the desert, the clouds of glory protected them from wild beasts and human enemies, whereas in the land they would be required to build fortified homes and walled cities and fight to defend themselves from natural threats and national attack.

Why would they leave a realm where God’s dominion was daily manifest to enter a place where it was hidden and withheld? Furthermore, why would God create a place where His presence was concealed and where His children would be forced to struggle without Him? Could He possibly desire for us to distance ourselves from Him and engage in strenuous daily labor that would distract us from the study of His wisdom and will? Yet this is precisely what He instructed us to do by leaving the womb of the desert and immersing ourselves in the conflicts of the unsettled land.

The question can be extrapolated further. Why did God create a universe at all? Why fashion a world of multiplicity where His presence can be denied and where conflict would therefore ensue? The desert is a representation of a pre-Creation realm of peace and divine connection, while Canaan represents the universe where the Creator is hidden and the creations battle one another, unaware that they are from the same source and of the same stuff. Why did God desire multiplicity over Oneness, concealment over revelation, conflict over peace?

The Chassidic Masters answer that God desired a “dirah b’tachtonim/dwelling place in the lower worlds.” He created “lower worlds” of darkness in order that His light should be revealed there, for light that comes from darkness is more brilliant and luminescent. He created beings that could not see Him in order that we would find Him and make Him manifest. Union that follows division is more precious than a singularity that never experienced diversity or adversity.

Accordingly, we can now understand that evil does not exist in the context of God’s infinite reality. It is simply the concealment of His immanent presence. In the “olam ha’emes/world of truth”, there is no evil, there is only Godliness. Yet we have been sent from that realm to inhabit and cultivate the “alma d’shikra/world of falseness” where Godliness is concealed and therefore evil seems to exist.

Our job here is reveal God’s oneness and to thereby transform all “enemies” into allies. We fight begrudgingly, and only against those forces that refuse to admit and acknowledge that we are one. While we proclaim the truth of our ultimate unity and work daily to make it manifest, we must simultaneously toil in the land that we were commanded to inhabit – that is, to live by the natural laws of this world until we are able to reveal the light that underlies all darkness and to usher in the universal peace that will soon supplant all conflict.

— Pnei Hashem is an introduction to the deepest depths of the human experience based on the esoteric teachings of Torah.  www.pneihashem.com