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Circus of Dreams (Part 18)

By Asher Crispe: December 10, 2012: Category Decoding the Tradition, Inspirations

To Light Up the Night

The night of the world can leave us feeling like we are in constant danger. Fearing the unknown, we might become prone to insomnia. In the trenches of conflict driven reality, we may only reluctantly let go of our self-possessed defense posturing and obsessive vigilance if we become convinced that someone else has our back. “Who will watch me when I am down?”–we want to know. Placing my complete trust and confidence (bitachon) in someone other than myself might be the only effective sleeping pill, for otherwise I am too wound-up to relax. For those who have spent many successive sleepless nights battling to remain awake, the life of the zombie is exceedingly tortuous.

What we need is reliable night security (bitachon)–someone who will always look out for us and who will wake us up when needed. Moreover, this type of trust and confidence is not invested in the success of my own actions but is rather of the passive kind–what Chassidic thought characterizes as bitachon savil or ‘passive trust.’ I have to go to sleep knowing that there is nothing more that I can do, and now be resolved that whatever happens to me when I am unable to help myself will nonetheless be for the best. Everything will be just fine. Breath. Long. Slow.

This iteration of the Samech-circle relates to being whole-hearted (temimut or ‘sincerity’-the inner sense of passive trust) and admits that everything unfolding in the dark is still under friendly observation. In the soul, the passive feeling of security–that which I receive but cannot understand–is call hod. While hod normally relates to ‘splendor,’ it also shares the same root as the word hodayah meaning ‘acknowledgement.’ Securing the perimeter entails 360° protection from intruders. By my own ‘admission,’ when the ‘rounds’ of my security detail adequately rebuff the onslaught of unwelcome foreign invaders, then I can ‘rest assured’ that I will awake unharmed.

Sleep symbolizes the loss of the conscious mind and the firewall protection of my cognitive filters. Naked without my mental armor, I am fully exposed to the incursions of an undefined world filled with potentially injurious experiences unless I am given ‘around’ the clock security detail to ‘shadow’ me in my unconsciousness. While we can easily frighten ourselves with images of an underpaid nighttime security guard falling asleep from a combination of fatigue, boredom and irresponsibility, the sleep therapy of the month of Kislev demands that we accept a regiment of meditations on the highest level of protection possible. The support (Samech) comes from the one Sentry who never bats an eyelid for He simply does not require sleep. Ever. This endorsement derives from a verse in Psalms 121:4 where we learn: “Behold, He [God] neither slumbers nor sleeps–the Guardian of Israel.” Divine supervision can be said to monitor everything everywhere.

However, the above verse does present a number of questions: why, for instance, does God have to be said to neither ‘sleep’ (yanum) nor ‘slumber’ (yeshan)? Commentators differentiate between yanum as a kind of light sleep or drowsiness from fatigue and yeshan as a deep sleep that corresponds with natural sleep cycles. Yet, we might still find this strange in that God clearly doesn’t need to sleep since He has no corporeal qualities or limitations at all. At the same time, when history seems to take a nose dive and tragedy strikes, we are quick to level accusation against the Creator and assume that He is either asleep at the wheel or else gave up driving altogether. “Weren’t you watching when the floods and earthquakes, wars and atrocities of history took place?”

Maybe every time something bad happens, it means that God is taking a nap? In Kabbalah, there are examples of this. While at the level of the Divine essence there is no such thing as sleep and He never misses a beat, nevertheless, at the lower levels of Divine self expression, our consciousness of Divinity waxes and wanes based on our personal and collective performance. I am awakened to God ‘being awake’ (as it were) and involved in the world when I witness an event of hashgacha pratit (Divine providence). Yet, when I only register what seems to be random fluctuations in an arbitrary and chaotic universe, then its as though I am asleep to the Divine hand but interpret it as through that hand is tucked in under a pillow while the Divine agency has gotten into the hammock for siesta time.

The esoteric reading of this verse takes apart the two sleep idioms and assigns them to distinct levels within the economy of Divine revelations. Slumbering refers to the deep sleep of exile. Generally, exile as displacement and misplacement is symbolized as sleep in rabbinic literature. Here it is the external face of Divinity which appears to have fallen asleep and troublingly turned away from worldly affairs. However, just as security forces can use deception tactics to lure and ambush the unsuspecting opposition, so too the Divine can suddenly open His ‘eyes’ revealing that He was watching all along and only feigning to not be paying attention. As a result, once those all knowing eyes pop open, do we know we didn’t get away with anything. In truth, we were being watched the entire time.

On some subtle unconscious level we suspect that we are under constant observation but we manage to convince ourselves that we can fly under the Divine radar. This level relates to what is known as the zeir anpin or small face of Divine self-expression. It’s ‘smallness’ suggests a kind of artificially limited experience and only shows a little bit of the total picture of Divinity. By contrast, the light sleep or ‘slumbering’ refers to the higher dimensional reality of the superconscious crown (keter) or the ultimate will in Creation. The Divine resolve at this level maintains perfect vigilance. According to the sages, there is not a flicker in the feed of the monitors, not a nanosecond for anything to pass unchecked through security. Sometimes this level is further nuanced and detailed as the external aspect of the crown known as arich anpin or the ‘elongated face.’ Showing the macrocosmic face of Divine reality plasters this ‘face’ with its complete expressiveness across the full spectrum of our experience.

While sleep does not occur on either level in any real sense, we do pick up on the distinction. Manifesting the higher level within the lower one would be a redemption of exilic reality. We would then enter a world without sleep, a world of transparency. For the time being, we have to come to acknowledge that we can sleep because God doesn’t. Our task is to reflect on how we are always already in this surrounding (Samech) protective custody with God being the Guardian of Israel (Shomer Yisrael) and by extension, the entire world.

Over and beyond this description of a Night Watchman, our illustration of the safeguarding circle can be extended as an understanding of the biological immune system (chisun). In Kabbalah, the power of the soul known as hod relates specifically to the immune system in that it mirrors its function as maintainer of the self-other distinction. Acknowledgment (hodayah) of the difference between what is me and what is not me, helps to retain the healthy status of the body while combating and expelling ‘inflections’ by viruses and bacteria.

All disease, therefore, can be seen as the loss of this fundamental distinction as alluded to in the expression for the illness of exile in Eicha/Lamentations 1:13 where we are “…sick throughout the day (kol ha’yom davah).” The word for sickness in this context is davah [דוה] which is just a permutation of the word hod [הוד]. In other words, the corruption of the proper acknowledgement of what is my true identity (the real me) verses the foreign substance within me, breaks down my immune defenses. Likewise, this point is further amplified in Daniel 10:8 whereby due to the disfunction of exile “…the splendor [ho’di from hod] of my appearance was turned on me into [something] corrupted…” and my immune system has been compromised. Hence, all healing involves either a re-awaking of the immune system or not letting it fall asleep to begin with. When we come to realize this, then our circular membrane uplifts us out of the darkness and disease, as we find promised in Psalms 37:24 “Should he fall, he will not be cast down, for God supports [somech] his hand.”