The yerushalmi shul was very family centered, with lots of children running around, all feeling part of what was going on , yet the adults were surprisingly calm, not getting too worked up about the awesomeness of the day. The enjoyed singing together the traditional songs and humming at key places in the tefila. The other minyan on the other hand was fully of fresh energy of people wanting to pray deeply and be transformed.
A superficial assessment would be that in the Yerushalaimer shul they were content and not really excited about Judaism as opposed to the baal tshuva shul where a fire burned in their hearts. Yet I feel that it is deeper than that . The yershalmim give the feeling that their calmness is not a result of laziness or lack of interest rather it reflects the essential spiritual nature. They are connected to the holiness of sameness and rootedness. That is one of the ways that God is revealed to us - the Eternal unchanging Lord. In order to manifest that aspect of the divine we need to find in our personal selves and in our society a point that doesn't change. A point of consciousness within that reflects the awesome reality of “You are God before the creation of the world and you are the same God after the creation of the world.” (One is reminded of the kabbalistic teaching that Shabbos is the the center with all the days of the week circling around her.) People who focus on this revelation tend rank the stillness of the soul over enthusiasm. The momentary enthusiasm contradicts the eternal chill. Also they focus a lot of energy on continuity, that their children should look and feel like their grandparents. Here too they seek to manifest the unchanging Eternal. This is not the conservatism that says the new is untested and dangerous, rather it is a denial of the whole concept of “new”. There is no newness in eternity.
The people of this camp can be seen fighting, both literally and figuratively, for Judaism in a way that can be mistaken for fanatic enthusiasm but when you look carefully you reveal that it is not that. They are on the defensive. They are protecting their community from what they perceive as forces of change that undermine this calm principle of eternity. It has nothing to do with missionary zeal.
The eternal sameness is a but a sliver of the Truth. There is newness and growth which is also a revelation of the divine. The world was created in order to make room for the possibility of birth, of development, of growth. The reigning in of the infinite allows the entity called change to exist. So there are people who work to manifest this revelation with a focus on renewal and growth. They spurn things set in stone; old thoughts and habits that hinder the transformation towards God.
So we have two contradictory ways of walking with God. And this contradiction is part of the plan and the warring parties will come to peace. The Prophet tells us that in the end of days the tribes of Yosef and Yehuda will be united and the enmity between them will be gone. Yosef is called the Tzadik, a solid rock unmoved by temptation. He is also the revealer of the divine aspect of Yesod meaning foundation, which is also related to reproduction- continuity, the physical manifestation of eternity.
Yehuda and is grandson David have a different way, the way of the Master of Return. They both fell and got up showing us that change is possible. And that God desires a new song. That we with our small growth and movement can make the entire project of constriction of the divine and the creation of the world worth the cost.
Who will fix this world? We are told that it is Mashiach ben David. For he is the singer , the dancer, and the renewer of the cosmos. He will pull us out of despair of ever changing.
But that is jumping to the end of the story, before that comes Mashiach ben Yosef to prepare the way. In order to make a divine transformation we need to connect to the eternal Divine.
(The disciples of the Gaon of Vilna said he had the soul of Mashiach ben Yosef, and the disciples of the Baal Shem Tov said he had the soul of Mashiach ben David. This was told over by Reb Y.M. Morgenstern shlit”a. )
One time the Arizal was in the fields and he communed with the souls of Shmaya and Avtalyon and they told him the following secret. In the Shmona Esre prayer at the words “and the throne of your servant David please prepare” one should pray that Mashiach ben Yosef should not be killed. Shmaya and Avtalyon were gerim, they were clearly of the way of newness. But they were telling the holy Ari, “Please pray for the way of old, the way of eternity that it should part of the redemption.” We need to connect so deeply to the unmoving infinity that when the newness of redemption comes it does not make us feel that the ground is being pulled out from under us, but rather we will feel that in some mysterious divine way the new redemption fits with the divine eternity.
On Succos the festival of joy there was a holy dance. It was the dance of the Chasidim and the Baalei Teshuva. The chasidim would sing “How happy are we that we lived our whole lives with unchanging purity.” The Baalei teshuva would sing “How happy are we that grew, and changed from the way of our youth.” Both groups would then sing together, “Happy is he who did not sin, and he who sinned let him return to God, and He will accept him.”
This was a miraculous moment when Yosef and Yehuda would look at each other and recognize the Godliness of there respective ways. It only happened in the joy of Simchas Beis Hashoeva when the divine spirit drawn.
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