|
A
productive life requires an awareness of time's inexorable flow and a
system for time management. To this end, we consult a variety of paper
or electronic grids in which the day's expanse is segmented into hours
and minutes and appropriately color-coded into time-allotments for
work, meals, leisure and repose.
The
reliance on calendar, clock and appointment book is one we share with
all hour-conscious inhabitants of planet time. As Jews, however, we
are also guided by a more subtle calendar, a more spiritual clock: the
calendar and clock of history. As Jews, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are
as central to our concept of morning, noon and evening as the sun's
arc across the sky; Adam, Moses and King David mark our year as
prominently as the turning of the seasons; and the twelve sons of
Jacob, progenitors of the twelve tribes of Israel, are as basic to our
daily schedule as the twelve numerals etched on our clock-face or the
twelve spiral-bound pages hanging on our wall.
The
Twelve Sons of Jacob
As
related in the Book of Genesis, the twelve sons of Jacob were born
from four different wives and are divided into three general
categories:
a)
The six sons of Leah -- Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar and
Zebulun.
b)
The two sons of Rachel, Jacob's primary wife and the mainstay of the
house of Israel -- Joseph and
Benjamin.
c)
The four sons of the two handmaidens, Bilhah and Zilpah -- Dan,
Naphtali, Gad and Asher.
A
similar division defines their roles as signposts in our daily lives:
the sons of Leah embody the activities on our daily schedule, the sons
of Rachel represent the primary modes of Jewish life, and the sons of
the handmaidens run as the auxiliary themes through our day which
accompany our every action and endeavor.
Synagogue,
Study Hall and Marketplace
A
day in the life of a Jew begins with prayer, the service of the heart.
The first conscious thought of the day, and its first uttered words,
are those of the Modeh Ani, expressing our awareness of G-ds
presence in our lives and our indebtedness to Him for our every living
breath. And though formal prayer must by necessity wait until one has
gotten out of bed, washed, dressed and rushed to the synagogue, it is
the very first item on our daily agenda. In the words of the
Shulchan Aruch (Code of Jewish Law), "The time for reciting the
morning prayers begins at sunrise.... From the onset of the time for
prayer, a person is forbidden to visit one's friend ... to attend to
one's personal affairs, or to embark on a journey, before praying the
morning prayers."
After
the morning prayers, the Jew proceeds "from the synagogue to the study
hall" for a daily set time for Torah learning. From there he ventures
out into the secular world to attend to his material affairs and the
business of earning a living.
These
three activities are chronicled by the sons of Leah: Reuben, Simeon,
Levi and Judah represent the various phases of prayer and its service
of the heart; Issachar represents the study of Torah; and Zebulun
represents the Jew's foray into the marketplace.
The
Service of the Heart
Prayer
is "a ladder set upon the earth whose head touches the heavens"
(Genesis 28:12). This ladder consists of four rungs: Reuben, Simeon,
Levi and Judah; or love, awe,
integration and self-abnegation.
The
heart of man is home to hundreds, if not thousands, of identifiable
emotions. But in a most general sense, we recognize two primary
drives: the impulse to approach and come near, and the impulse to
recoil and withdraw. To the first category belong such emotions as
love, yearning, and kindness; to the second category, feelings such as
awe, fear, reverence and humility.
The
repertoire of the heart also includes emotions that combine both these
motions of self. A mature emotional relationship will include feelings
that are both loving and revering -- feelings that integrate a
striving for closeness with a restraining awe.
Indeed,
such a synthesis of love and awe is the heart's highest form of
emotional expression. But an even greater achievement of the heart is
the negation of emotion. For all emotions, whether of the
self-extending, self-contracting or integrating sort, are a form of
self-expression; and to truly relate to someone or something that lies
beyond the self, one must divest oneself of every vestige of
self-interest and self-regard.
These
are the four rungs in the ladder of prayer. In the first phase of the
service of the heart (which culminates in the first section of the
Shema), the objective is to develop a feeling of love towards
G-d, a yearning and craving to draw close to Him. The second phase
(coinciding with the second section of the Shema) is the
development of feelings of reverence and awe toward G-d. The third
phase (associated with the blessing "True and Enduring", recited
between the Shema and the Amidah) is the fusion of love
and awe in our relationship with G-d. In the fourth phase (attained
during the silent recitation of the Amidah) we transcend emotion
itself, abnegating all feeling and desire to achieve an utter
commitment and unequivocal devotion to G-d.
In
the terminology of Kabbalah and Chassidism, love and awe are the eyes
and the ears of the heart. Sight is the most intimate of the senses;
hearing, the most distant and detached. Hence love -- the heart's yen
to draw close -- is its faculty of sight, and awe, the heart's impulse
to retreat and withdraw, is its sense of hearing.
Reuben,
whose name derives from the Hebrew reiyah, sight, and who was
so named by his mother because "G-d has seen my suffering; now my
husband shall love me" (Genesis 29:32), thus represents the first
stage of prayer -- the element of love in our service of the heart.
Simeon -- from shemiah, hearing, so named in response to the
fact that "G-d has heard that I am rejected" (ibid. v. 33) --
represents the second stage of prayer, the heart's recoil in reverence
and awe. Levi, meaning "attachment" and "cleaving" (his birth prompted
Leah to say, "Now my husband shall cleave to me, for I have borne him
three sons" -- ibid. v. 34) represents the union of love and awe in
the third stage of prayer. And Judah,
whose name means "he who concedes" ("This time I shall concede thanks
to G-d" -- ibid. v. 35) represents the fourth rung in the ladder of
prayer -- the self-abnegation to G-d we express in the silent
Amidah.
The
Partnership
Before
his passing, "Jacob summoned his twelve sons and spoke to them ... and
blessed them, each according to his blessing" (Genesis 49:28). Two
hundred and thirty-three years later, Moses did the same with the
twelve tribes of Israel, who now each
numbered several tens of thousands of souls (Deuteronomy 33). Jacob's
and Moses' blessings express the individual character of each tribe
and its distinct role within the community of Israel.
Jacob's
blessings to Zebulun and Issachar were:
Zebulun
shall dwell at the shore of the sea; a harbor for ships shall he
be.... Issachar is a strong ass, couching down between the
fences....
Moses
parting words to the two tribes were:
Rejoice,
Zebulun, in your excursions, and Issachar in your
tents.
Our
sages explain:
Zebulun
and Issachar made a partnership between them. Zebulun dwelled at the
seashore, and would go out in his ships to engage in trade and make a
profit, and support Issachar, who sat and occupied himself with the
study of Torah.
Issachar
and Zebulun thus represent the other two major items on the Jews daily
schedule. After climbing the four rungs of the heart to serve G-d in
prayer, the Jew moves from the synagogue to the study hall to bind his
mind to G-d through the study of the Torah, G-d's communication of His
wisdom and will to man. Following that, the Jew goes out into the
world as a businessman or professional, to "know Him in all your ways"
and "do all your deeds for the sake of Heaven" (Proverbs 3:6; Ethics
of the Fathers 2:12)
Every
Jew, whether by vocation a Zebulun or an Issachar, includes both
activities in his daily schedule. The most involved businessman or
laborer is not free of the obligation to study at least "one chapter
in the morning and one chapter in the evening." And even the most
faithful occupant of the tents of Torah and its most ardent beast of
burden is also a citizen of the material world: by necessity and
design, he, too, participates in the give-and-take of economic life,
and is told that this, too, must be made part and parcel of his life
as a Jew and his relationship with G-d.
Joseph
and Benjamin
"All
the prophets," says the Talmudic sage Rabbi Yochanan, "prophesied only
regarding [the rewards of] the baal teshuvah. But regarding the
perfect tzaddik-- No eye has beheld it save Yours,
G-d."
Rabbi
Yochanan, remarks the Talmud, is expressing an opposite opinion from
that of another sage, Rabbi Abbahu, who stated: "In the place that the
baal teshuvah stands, the perfect tzaddik cannot
stand."
Tzaddik
means "righteous one"; baal teshuvah means "one who returns."
In the most literal sense, a tzaddik is a person who lives his
entire life in complete conformity with the divine will, while a
baal teshuvah is a penitent -- a person who has digressed from
the proper path but subsequently repents his failings and returns to a
life of goodness and obedience to G-d's will.
In
a broader sense, tzaddik and baal teshuvah are two modes
of existence -- two approaches to everything one does in the course of
one's day, from prayer and its service of the heart, to the study of
Torah, to one's dealings in the marketplace.
In
the tzaddik approach to life, a person focuses wholly upon the
good in himself and his world. He sees his mission in life as the
endeavor to cultivate his own positive traits, the goodness he sees in
others, and all that is pure and holy in G-d's world. Anything
negative is to be suppressed and rejected, and utterly disdained. When
evil must, by necessity, be combated, this is to be achieved not by
engaging it, but by rising above it -- by increasing the goodness in
oneself and in the world so that the evil simply dissipates as
darkness melts away before a great light.
The
teshuvah approach is to deal with the negative in oneself and
one's environment: to struggle with it rather than reject it, to
transform it rather than transcend it; to uncover and extract the
kernel of goodness implicit within every object and force in G-d's
creation.
As
the diverse opinions of Rabbi Yochanan and Rabbi Abbahu convey, each
approach has its advantages over the other: the approach of the
tzaddikattains heights which no eye has beheld save G-d's,
while the approach of teshuvah achieves a place on which the
perfect tzaddik cannot stand.
The
tzaddik's service of the heart, undisturbed by any negative
emotions and drives, unleashes the heart's holy passions with a purity
and perfection that the baal teshuvah cannot even hope to
approximate. The baal teshuvah's prayer, on the other hand, is
a war - -a war between the good and evil strivings in his heart,
between its G-dly and animal passions. But this war, this struggle,
fires his love, awe, attachment and self-abnegation to G-d to an
intensity unparalleled by that of the tzaddik. And the process
of this struggle offers the opportunity to ultimately vanquish the
enemy and transform it into an ally -- to strip the heart's profane
strivings of their profanity and redirect them as holy
strivings.
The
tzaddik's Torah study, unclouded by erroneous suppositions and
false leads, assimilates the divine wisdom with a purity and
perfection that the baal teshuvah cannot know. On the other
hand, the teshuvah mode of learning, which struggles through a
maze of fallacies and misunderstandings in its pursuit of truth,
attains a depth of knowledge and a degree of identification with its
subject which cannot be achieved by a mind that follows an
unobstructed path to the core of every idea.
Indeed,
in the teshuvah approach to Torah, the refuted arguments and
the dispelled falsehoods themselves reveal dimensions of the divine
truth that cannot be accessed by the tranquil study of the
tzaddik.
When
the tzaddik deals with the material world, he focuses directly
and exclusively upon those resources which he enlists in his service
of G-d; everything else simply does not exist for him. Thus the
tzaddik achieves a perfect sublimation of material aspects of
his existence, and remains unsullied by his involvement in the
give-and-take of material life. For the baal teshuvah, on the
other hand, the marketplace is a minefield of negative influences and
temptations, which invariably taint him and, at times, even overpower
him. But his struggle with these alien elements, and his ultimate
triumph over them, means that they, too, become part and parcel of his
knowing G-d "in all your ways." Hence, the baal teshuvah
achieves a broader, more comprehensive service of G-d in his material
life than the tzaddik, for his relationship with G-d includes
elements of G-d's creation which remain outside the sphere of the
tzaddik's perfect service.
The
name Joseph means "he shall add" -- upon Joseph's birth, his mother
expressed the hope that "G-d shall add to me another son" (Genesis
30:24). The deeper significance of these words is that Joseph
represents the endeavor of teshuvah to "add an other son" -- to
transform all that is other and alien in oneself and ones world into a
son, thereby adding it to the positive and holy realm of one's
existence.
Benjamin
means "son of the right" -- Jacob so named Rachel's second child
because this was the only one of his sons to be born in the Holy Land. Benjamin thus represents the utter
righteousness and pristine holiness of the tzaddik.
Four
Motifs
The
four "sons of the handmaidens" -- Dan, Naphtali, Gad and Asher -- are
four motifs that accompany the daily life of the Jew: judiciousness,
engagement, blessing and saturation.
"G-d
gave me justice," proclaimed Rachel upon the birth of Jacobs first son
by her handmaiden, Bilhah, and named him Dan, which means "judgment."
"Dan shall be the judge of his people," said Jacob in blessing him
before his passing. If you meet a person, says the Talmud, who is
forever insisting on justice, this is a sure sign that he is from the
tribe of Dan.
Naphtali
means engagement and connection -- Bilhah's second son was so named by
Rachel to signify the fact that "I have engaged my sister, and I have
prevailed."
Both
Jacob and Moses blessed Asher with the blessing of oil. "His bread is
saturated with oil," said Jacob; "He dips his feet in oil," blessed
Moses. In Torah law and Chassidic teaching, oil signifies the quality
of saturation: the nature of oil is that when it comes in contact with
something, it "permeates it in its entirety."
Finally,
Gad means blessing and good fortune. "Good fortune has come," said
Leah upon giving this name to Zilpah's elder son.
As
the Jew prays (Reuben, Simeon, Levi and Judah), studies (Issachar) and
deals (Zebulun), whether with the perfect holiness of the
tzaddik (Benjamin) or the transforming struggles of
teshuvah (Joseph), the four sons of the handmaidens attend his
every deed and endeavor: a judiciousness that measures everything
against exacting standards of right and wrong (Dan); a sense of
connectedness to G-d and perpetual engagement with Him (Naphtali); a
holistic approach to life, in which one is fully invested in what one
is doing so that it saturates ones thoughts, feelings, and every nook
and cranny of one's being (Asher); and the recognition that we cannot
do it on our own -- that everything we achieve must be aided by G-d's
blessing our efforts with success
(Gad). | 
