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Orchard of Delights
When the Temple stood, these three dimensions reached their
ultimate union on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year, when the
High Priest, the image of the holiest person, would enter the Holy
of Holies, the holiest space. Indeed, Yom Kippur is described in the
Torah as “Shabbat Shabbaton” (the Shabbat of Shabbats; Leviticus
16:31), as it embodies Shabbat’s very essence. In our day and age,
the Divine unity animating all three aspects of reality, as manifest
on Yom Kippur, is especially tangible on Shabbat – a day when the
home is mystically transformed into holy space and the extended
time spent in the synagogue creates the sense of being in the Holy
Temple; a day when time is transformed into a stream of holiness and
the soul experiences its Divine source. Furthermore, since with the
destruction of the Temple every Jew has become the embodiment of
the High Priest, a Jew in his or her home or synagogue on Shabbat can
and should strive to achieve the same levels of spiritual unification as
the High Priest strove for in the Temple on Yom Kippur.
£Moses Gathers the PeopleMoses Gathers the People
££Moses Gathers the People
We will now continue to employ the PaRDeS system to probe the
meaning and context of Vayakhel’s first Hebrew word, “and he
gathered” (vayakhel). From a straightforward, historical perspective
(the peshat), Moses assembled all the people because, according to
Rashi, he had descended from Mount Sinai with the second tablets
on that day. Moses had spent three forty-day periods on Mount Sinai,
totaling 120 days, with almost no breaks in between, and this was his
first opportunity to gather all the people, reassert his presence and
authority, and inform them of God’s commandments.
Commentators throughout the ages have noted that the word
vayakhel (“and he gathered”) is the same word (the letters and
meaning are identical although the vowels are slightly different)
used when the people gathered to demand that Aaron make for them
what would ultimately turn out to be the Golden Calf. Since they
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10 Ki Tisa
in thought.” Rebbe Nachman explains that God was informing
Moses that in order to understand the profound existential matters at
hand, he needed to be quiet and enter a deep state of meditation and
contemplation that would enable him to elevate himself in thought,
so that he could grasp the profound meaning of his vision. (For more
on the deep soul connection between Rabbi Akiba and Moses, see
Return Again: The Dynamics of Reincarnation, pp. 164-171.)
We now return to the question of why Moses was chosen to receive
the Torah instead of Rabbi Akiba. Even though Rabbi Akiba’s
spiritual level appears to be higher than Moses’, Moses’ continual
discomfort with the existential question of evil and God’s acquiescence
to this reality seems to make him the better choice. In fact the Sages
allude to this when they state that the secrets of the Torah are only
given to one who is “worried in his heart” (Chagigah 13a). Moses fits
this description perfectly and even though this particular mystery
could not be fully revealed to him, he did merit being the vehicle
through which the entire Torah and its profound mysteries were
revealed to humanity.
But, why is this discomfort so important? Since Moses by his very
nature was not satisfied with accepting the paradox, he was forced to
probe even deeper than Rabbi Akiba into the secrets of the Torah, and
this allowed him, when necessary, to confront God. His willingness
to defend his people knew no bounds. Even though he understood on
some level evil’s role in God’s plan for the world, he sought a rectified
world that would not require evil to enable humanity to actualize its
full potential. The absence of a rectified world bothered Moses, and it
was something he could not entirely come to terms with.
Indeed, just as Moses worried about this paradox, God Himself
in some deeply mysterious way is also existentially worried about
the state of the world. This very deep idea is deduced from various
sources in the Torah and from rabbinic utterances; for instance, at the
time of the flood the Torah records that God was “deeply saddened
in His heart” that man had become so corrupt (Genesis 6:6). Many
Talmudic and Midrashic statements express God’s empathy, pain,
and sadness, as it were, at the destruction of the Temple and the
exile of the Jewish people. For example, Rashi cites the Midrash
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