VaYakhel: “The heart, in those days, was small”
When I was a kid, my mother used to read me a story called, “In a Dark, Dark Wood.” It began like this:
In the dark, dark wood, there was a dark, dark house.
And in the dark, dark house, there was a dark, dark room.
And in the dark, dark room, there was a dark, dark cupboard.
And in the dark, dark cupboard, there was a dark, dark shelf.
And on the dark, dark shelf, there was a dark, dark box.
And in the dark, dark box, there was a big white ghost! (Ruth Ware, “In a Dark, Dark Wood”)
Thankfully, I’m much less scared of the story 25 years later.
But I was thinking about it as I reread this week’s parshah, VaYakhel.
In VaYakhel, the Israelites follow Moses instructions to build the mishkan, the Tabernacle.
First, the outer walls. Within them, a courtyard. Within the courtyard, the mishkan itself. Within the mishkan, two chambers: the Holy Place, and Kodesh Hakodashim (the Holy of Holies). And within Kodesh Hakodashim, the Ark of the Covenant.
What is easy to miss among the immense and intensive detail of the parshah is the vast number of barriers between us and God. And of course, only Moses and Aaron (and after Aaron’s death, whoever was the High Priest) were allowed to even enter Kodesh Hakodashim. Most Israelites never got past the courtyard.
The last partition – the curtain that stands in front of Kodesh Hakodashim – is called paroḥet ha- masaḥ, “the covering curtain” (Ex. 35:12).1 While a curtain might seem mundane, I think that it might help us better understand the nature of the mishkan’s many barriers.
Rashi, the 11th century French commentator, connects the term paroḥet ha-masaḥ to two other biblical verses that have the same root as masaḥ (Rashi on Ex. 35:12).2
In the book of Job, Satan – the Prosecuting Angel – complains to God that Job is only righteous because, “saḥta ba’ado – you have made a barrier around him,” i.e. God has protected Job. By connecting the paroḥet ha-masaḥ3 to God’s protection of Job, Rashi suggests that the paroḥet ha- masaḥ serves a defensive function.
In what way could the curtain covering Kodesh HaKodashim be said to serve a defensive function?
Several weeks ago, in parshat Yitro, we read how, after God first spoke to the Israelites at Mount Sinai, they told Moses that continuing to hear His voice would kill them (see Ex. 20:16). Perhaps the paroḥet ha-masaḥ, – as well as all of the other barriers of the mishkan – offered a buffer between the Israelites and the overwhelming immensity of God’s presence.
But Rashi’s analogy to Job adds another layer of meaning to the paroḥet ha-masaḥ. In the book of Job, God eventually stops protecting Job and instead begins to test him. Perhaps the Israelites, too, viewed the Mishkan’s barriers with a sense of apprehension, nervous lest the barriers someday be removed and God’s terrifying presence burst forth once more into their midst (see Ex. 33:3).
In his comment on the paroḥet ha-masaḥ, Rashi also invokes a quote from the book of Hosea, in which God, describing future punishments he will inflict on Israel, threatens, “Hineni saḥ et darkeḥ basirim– I will close up your roads with thorns.” By connecting the the paroḥet ha-masaḥ to this quote from Hosea, Rashi perhaps suggests that the paroḥet ha-masaḥ also serves a punitive function – it closes the people off from God, maybe as punishment for the Golden Calf.
Overall, Rashi appears to frame the paroḥet ha-masaḥ as a barrier with a range of meanings and associations: a fortification and an obstacle, a punishment and a shield, a source of comfort and a source of anxiety.4
Like the Israelites, we, too, have experienced the multifaceted nature of barriers over the past two years of the pandemic.
Masks and social distancing have felt, at various times, like a protection, a penalty, a lifesaver, a drag, a tease, a necessity, a political statement, and a holy obligation.
Thankfully, we find ourselves in what appears to be a denouement – slowly, we seem to be returning to a “normal” state; we’re back together in person, and I imagine we’ll slowly readjust to seeing each other in three dimensions.
But social distancing and masks aren’t the only kind of barriers we’ve experienced these past two years. For two years, we’ve also been forced to build barriers and boundaries within ourselves.
We’ve lived with a constant backdrop of anxiety, and we’ve learned to stop getting our hopes up. We’ve numbed ourselves to the monotony of Covid with TV, Facebook, and endless walks around the neighborhood. We’ve numbed ourselves to the fact that we’ve spent a full two years living with the pandemic. And we’ve numbed ourselves to the still-mounting death toll and immense economic catastrophe.
Those barriers have, of course, protected us. They’ve given us a sense of control, and they’ve allowed us to keep it together enough to go about our days.
But those barriers have also come with a cost. In The Prophet, Ḥalil Gibran describes the experience of trying to avoid pain as living in a “seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears” (“On Love”).
As we begin to lower our physical barriers, perhaps it’s time to lower our internal ones, as well.
Where do we begin?
I think a critical part of allowing ourselves to slowly and carefully lower the walls within ourselves is recognizing that our isolation and self-alienation on an individual and societal level go deeperthan Covid.
Without a doubt, Covid has exacerbated these feelings, but it did not create them. If there is yet one more thing to be learned from the pandemic, perhaps it is that even before 2020, each of us was living to some extent in a dark box on a dark shelf in a dark cupboard in a dark room in a dark house in a dark wood in a dark, dark world.
Surely, we weren’t always this way. Rabbi Kalman Kalonymous Shapira, the Piaseczna Rebbe, who lived in 20th century Poland and was martyred in the Shoah, describes how children are often more open to their own emotions than adults. “When one speaks with a child,” he writes, “one feels if one is speaking with their soul… The child gives their whole heart in responding. I am not asking you to be as thoughtless as a child, but just that you be whole and honest.” (B’nei Machshava Tova, ch. 15).5
In the years since childhood, I imagine that each of us has been taught, time and again, to clamp down on our feelings, our empathy, our yearnings. We’ve been told not to cry when someone causes us pain, not to let the suffering and violence on TV affect us to deeply, not to express our love too early, not to yearn too fully for a different world. In the words of feminist scholar and activist Audre Lorde, “We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings” (“The Uses of the Erotic”).
Why? Where do all of these barriers that we erect around our hearts come from?
In her poem “Of the Empire,” Mary Oliver argues that the very structure of our society requires and reinforces a deep hard-heartedness. She writes:
We will be known as a culture that feared death
and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity
For the few and cared little for the penury of the
many…
…All
the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a
commodity. And they will say that…
…our politics was no more
than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of
the heart, and that the heart, in those days,
was small, and hard, and full of meanness.
Mary Oliver describes how the commodification, violence, and inequality of our society has limited our ability to feel. She reminds us that we live in a world of political systems – racism, antisemitism, militarism, economic exploitation – that thrive on division, alienation, and hierarchy.
As we return to a post-omicron world, relearning how to feel is vital first and foremost for our own mental, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing.
But deepening and expanding our emotional range has benefits that go beyond our own lives. If oppressive systems depend on our numbness and apathy, then perhaps the very experience of feeling more deeply is itself a challenge to those systems. Rav Joseph Soloveitchik, the great 20th century Talmudist and theologian, wrote,
Judaism… wants man to cry out aloud… [For w]hoever permits his legitimate needs to go unsatisfied will never be sympathetic to the crying needs of others. A human morality based on love and friendship, on sharing in the travail of others, cannot be practiced if the person’s own need-awareness is dull. (“Redemption, Prayer, Talmud Torah,” p. 65)
Learning how to feel more fully allows us not only to care for ourselves better, but also attunes us to others’ needs and feelings.
This isn’t to say, of course, that feeling more deeply on its own will fix everything. There’s still the reality of Covid, as well as the reality of injustice. But, as Rav Soloveitchik and Mary Oliver remind us, feeling our own needs and emotions is an important first step towards building a more moral world.
What does it take, then, for us to teach ourselves how to feel once more?
The Piaseczna Rebbe argues that one of the first steps is to take note of the ways we instinctively seek to dull our feelings as they arise. “Whatever movement arises within oneself,” he writes, “do not abandon it, but rather use it as a key to the soul! … Do not even ignore your groaning, for even a slight groan… can reveal one’s soul… (Bnei Machshava Tovah, #9).
It is tempting, particularly when we feel difficult emotions – our groaning, our painful empathy, our sadness – to do our best to distract ourselves. And sometimes, of course, distraction is what we need – we can’t always feel everything. But when we notice our difficult emotions as they arise and rather than try to escape them, we take the time to explore them, we begin to find that our capacity to feel the whole range of emotions is more powerful.6
Now, as we begin to re-meet each other physically, perhaps it’s time– slowly, carefully, and hopefully – to begin to open ourselves back up to the full range of our emotional experience.
We need to cry, to laugh, to sing, to dance, to grieve. We need, in the words of the Piaseczna Rebbe, to wake our souls back up. And when we do, we’ll be able to bring our fullest selves to the work of healing our beautiful, groaning world.
I will conclude with the words of the Prophet Ezekiel, through whom God long ago told us: “I will remove the heart of stone from your body and give you a heart of flesh… And men shall say, ‘That land, once desolate, has become a garden of Eden’” (Ezekiel 36:26, 35).
May our stone hearts become flesh, and may we set our soft, scarred hearts to the task of turning this world back into a paradise.
Ken yehi ratzon, bimherah beyameinu. May it be so, soon and in our time.
There are a number of different translations of the term paroḥet ha- masaḥ. Here, I have used the translation by the New American Standard Bible, not because it is the most accurate but because it seemed the simplest, and I didn’t want to use a more confusing (even if more accurate) term that might distract people. See footnote 2.
In context, Rashi appears to be troubled by the fact that the root s-ḥ-ḥ often denotes a covering from above, i.e. a sort of roof, and explaining why in this context, it denotes a vertical partition. See the Be’er Yitzchak and Rashi K’Pshuto ad loc.
The term “paroḥet ha-masaḥ” implies a definite object, but I have included the term “the” for comprehensibility. I have not done the same with Kodesh HaKodashim because the latter is a more familiar term.
Other sources describe other ways in which barriers have a dual nature. A popular theme in Lurianic Kabbalah is that God created divisions – or at least the experience of divisions – within Godself so that existence could exist (see, for example, Likutei Moharan 64). A similar, but slightly different, motif in Jewish mysticism, is that God has placed boundaries between us and God lest the power of God’s infinite light annihilate us (see, for example, Abarbanel on Ex. 40).
Both motifs are related to the Kabbalistic system of the sefirot, alternately understood as attributes of God and stages of God’s “emanation.” Ḥesed (love, the fourth sefirah) and din (judgement,the fifth sefirah) are understood in Jewish mysticism to be, respectively, the flow of infinite Being and the boundaries that allow form to exist within that flow. Evil, according to many strands of Kabbalah, occurs when the forces of din become too strong or gain a quasi-independent (or, perhaps, fully independent) existence. The Kabbalistic concept of the independence/excess power of din is also related to galut haSheḥinah (“the exile of the Presence”) – the notion of a rift within God (specifically, between the tenth sefirah, known as Sheḥinah, or “presence,” and the upper nine sefirot) which leads to the brokenness of the world. (For more, see I. Tishby, The Wisdom of the Zohar vol. 1, “The Sheḥinah”).
Though, for the sake of simplicity and comprehensibility, I do not use this framework in the drash, it is operating in the background. If I were to restate the thesis in explicitly Kabbalastic terms, I would argue that the barriers and divisions within ourselves and each other are a cumulative product of our social arrangements and have been exacerbated by Covid. The boundaries and systems (forms of din) necessary to create a functioning society have taken on a semi-independent existence and perpetuate themselves, making it difficult for us to experience the full range of Being (ḥesed). By making the choice to feel more deeply, we undo the powers of din and remove the barriers between the Sheḥinah and “the rest” of God, thereby reopening the channel of ḥesed from the Godhead into the world.
Similarly, R’ Avraham Yehuda Chein writes, “A child isn’t stricken with the illness of ‘what’s come before’ or obsolescence – he has no ‘what’s come before,’ he has no ‘obsolete,’ and regularity and its fixity do not have a hold on him at all” (BeMalḥut HaYehadut vol. 2, p.245)
Consider, too, bell hooks’ words: “In our culture privacy is often confused with secrecy. Open, honest, truth-telling individuals value privacy. We all need spaces where we can be alone with thoughts and feelings-where we can experience healthy psychological autonomy and can choose to share when we want to. Keeping secrets is usually about power, about hiding and concealing information… Widespread cultural acceptance of lying is a primary reason many of us will never know love. It is impossible to nurture one’s own or another’s spiritual growth when the core of one’s being and identity is shrouded in secrecy and lies. Trusting that another person always intends your good, having a core foundation of loving practice, cannot exist within a context of deception… To know love we have to tell the truth to ourselves and to others.” (All About Love, 44-45, 48).
In her essay, “how to feel a feeling,” written in the wake of the murders of Michael Brown and Eric Garner and the ensuing Black Lives Matters protests, adrienne maree brown offers similar advice: “There is no wrong way to feel a feeling… If possible, once a feeling has gotten my attention, I give it some time and space… However messy and compressed and intense it is, however weak it makes me feel, ultimately I find a peace in myself when I love the feeling, embracing it as part of my life and my journey, a sign that I am still alive.”