Dangerous Kabbalah

My wife and I have been blessed with a baby boy, and almost from conception we chose to follow a particular baby expert’s advice.

We bought all the books, followed her advice meticulously. The promise was that by three months he would be sleeping from about 12-7am. Her schedules dictated every minute of the day of every week and every month. It was true our baby has always been very contented as a result, but as parents we have been miserable and exhausted!

By four months our baby wasn’t sleeping through the night, and my wife was doing everything she could according to the many books that this baby expert had written.

She joined her community website and asked for advice, spoke to other mothers in similar situations, changed, adjusted and did everything she could to make the schedule work, but to no avail, he continued to wake up at least twice in the night.

One Sunday morning about 30 mins before our baby was due his 11 am feed, my wife got a phone call. To her surprise and delight, it was this world famous baby expert that we had been following, calling to help us in our almost direr situation.

My wife was so happy, and the conversation dragged on, and on and I could see my wife getting a little anxious that it was already 11am and she was meant to be feeding our baby. Yet it was ‘The Author’ of ‘The Book’ on the other end of the line, what was she to do, tell her to call back later, because she needed to feed our baby?

My wife, stayed on the line, talked in detail about the problems we were having with the routine, and by this time is was almost 12pm, the baby expert admitted that her routine only really worked with average size babies, and that we would probably have to wait until he was completely weaned before we could expect to get any sleep.

The same problem can happen with Judaism.

Sometimes in our earnest desire to do the right thing, and to be good law abiding Jews we loose ourselves in the rigmarole of the minutia of religious observance.

Now this, isn’t always a bad thing, but if left unchecked and pushed to the back of our consciousness because of internal arguments that claim any deviation from the Shulchan Aruch (the Code of Jewish Law) is giving in to the Sitra Archra (the Other Side) and that any yearning or desire for a more balanced and happy life must be coming from your yetzer ha rah (evil inclination) we leave ourselves open to the inevitable state of ‘frum’ misery and stagnation.

Lost are any whim of real and honest spirituality, healthy relationship with our body and the ‘non-Jewish’ world around us, as we reluctantly give in to the convincing ‘frum’ argument, that if you are keeping Shulchan Aruch then you are doing exactly what God wants you to do at any given moment in the day or our life.

The Torah is God’s Divine Will and as such we lowly Jewish pond scum can only hope for a glimmer of salvation in the hereafter if we try our best to become ‘frum Jews’, to do exactly what God wants us to do.

We the Jewish people are destined to be slaves of the Torah, to leave the slavery in Egypt only to become slaves to God and His obligatory Torah. It seems that we can only find value in God’s eyes if we do our humanly best to fulfil those commandments that we can fulfil – namely to live a life according to the Code of Jewish Law – the Shulchan Aruch! And robotic, unfelt, miserable, mechanical, empty, spiritually void, guilt filled, normative Judaism ensues.

I want you to remember my wife’s predicament, does she stop the conversation with the author of the baby book to do what was written in the book or does she continue the conversation with the author?

The Code of Jewish Law is something like this baby experts meticulous routine, but if it is not working for you then you need to have a chat with the Author, you’ll soon learn that it is more important to have a conversion with the Author than to follow it’s routine to the letter of the law.

The problem is that our observance of Shulchan Aruch is based on a common but false assumption about the nature of the Jewish people and the divinity of the Torah.

1. The assumption is that a Jew is a lowly creature, created by God to serve Him through the Torah/ Shulchan Aruch.

2. That the Torah is the divine will of God Himself that the Jewish people should feel lucky to have been the privilege to inherit and be able to serve God.

The problem is with this assumption is that even according to the Torah isn’t so.

There are two verses which use the word ‘Anochi’ – I am, the first is mentioned in the giving of the Torah and the Ten Commandments, where God says ‘I AM the Lord your God’, and the commentaries explain that the word Anochi – is anachronous for ‘I wrote myself into the Torah’, that God wrote His very self into the Torah.

The other verse says ‘I AM the God of Israel’ and talks about the special relationship that God has with the Jewish people.

The Lubavitcher Rebbe explains:

‘…It is possible to say, that concerning the issue of the ‘I Am’ of the Jewish people, that it is higher than the aspect of the ‘I Am’ that is within the Torah. As it is also known that the source of the Torah and of the Jewish people as they reside in Atzmus, that the source of the Jewish people is higher than the source of the Torah. That the Torah (also as it is after the Giving of the Torah, the idea that, ‘I my soul I have written in it’) it is for the Jewish people.’

The Rebbe explains in the footnote here that ‘…one can even explain this that the Giving of the Torah took place so-to-speak so that the Jewish people would accept it, that also the  ‘I my soul… ’ that is found within the Torah is not from Atzmus itself, and that it is secondary to the Jewish people that their source is in the Essence of God (Atzmus) literally.’

Sefer Ha Maamorim Meluket 4, (Kuntras Hag Ha Shavuos 1990) p.268

So you see the Torah was created FOR the Jewish people and not the other way around!

The Jewish people, and therefore each and every Jew is intrinsically higher and above the Torah. The Torah was created to help the Jewish people discover their innate Oneness and divinity with the God, so when the Torah becomes the very thing that destroys that awareness, when it becomes more important than you, it has become a form of Idol Worship.

Shulchan Aruch is a certain Jewish lifestyle code through which we are meant to serve God but it usually destroys it’s observers, because we don’t serve God but the religious obsessive compulsive community us which has become a form of Idol Worship.

I often wonder, does Shulchan Aruch really help anyone fulfil their true potential, or has it just become a form of religious peer-pressure and one-upmanship?

Authentic Judaism is here to help you discover your true divine nature, it was created for you, to help you to nurture you and to help you to be happy and move beyond your limited view of reality, towards the realisation of your divine self, that is totally ONE with God.

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