Pointing to the Divine Soulmate

The talmud in Taanit 31a describes an incredible scene:

Ulla Bira'ah said in the name of R. Eleazar: In the days to come the Holy One, blessed be He, will hold a circle/dance for the righteous and He will sit in their midst in the Garden of Eden and every one of them will point with his finger towards Him, as it is said, And it shall be said in that day: Lo, this is our God, for whom we waited, that He might save us; this is the Lord for whom we waited, we will be glad and rejoice in His salvation (Isaiah 25:9)

There is something so striking about this image of the righteous dancing in a circle and pointing at God. The word for "this", zeh, in its essence implies pointing, according to the rabbis. In the first commandment of the Torah, החודש הזה לכם = this month shall be for you the head of the months, the word hazeh (this) is taken by Rashi to mean that God is pointing at the moon.

Similarly in the second chapter of Genesis, when Adam, after searching in vain for his helpmate amongst the animals, finally awakes from his slumber and sees Eve, he exclaims (Gen 2:23):

This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.

His use of the feminine word for this, zot, implies he is pointing to and identifying the woman, sensing viscerally that she is his true soulmate.

Just as Adam points to and identifies his beloved, so too the righteous dancing in the circle point to and identify God as their true "soulmate" so to speak. (The reference to God sitting in the Garden of Eden also helps us make the connection between the two disparate texts).

For anyone who goes beyond superficial worship, and is truly authentic about it, relationship with God is complex. But this is the work of faith, to come to recognise God as your soulmate with tremendous clarity: as clear as the moon in the sky.

Often it takes many years of wandering, lost, in various wrong directions before such a thing can occur. Just as it was Adam's time spent fruitlessly trying to find a match amongst the animals that led him to his clarity when finally meeting Eve, it is precisely this wandering that leads eventually to finding the path of truth, and feeling the absolute clarity of the discovery.

And if you are looking for an even higher level of spiritual functioning:

Michael Attias has pointed out that in a dance you move into the place occupied by your friend a moment ago. Thus, each of the dancers described in the talmud gets to see what God looks like from his friend's perspective.

So I would add to this: in this dance, we get to understand how God is a soulmate for another person, in a way different from our own. This is challenging. It truly is work on an elevated spiritual level. For this, someone can be called "righteous".

And Lilith fled

The mythology of the demon queen Lilith appears in a number of Jewish sources. Lilith represents an evil force who, among other things, kills babies. One of the sources where Lilith appears is the Zohar. However the Zohar tells us the story differently from other sources. Rather than being created demonic, she started off as a non-evil spirit:

There is a female, a spirit of all spirits, and her name is Lilith, and she was at first with Adam (Zohar 3:19)

She had union with Adam who was at that time a spirit, in primal undifferentiated form (i.e. encapsulating both male and female, as in the verse in Genesis 1:27). However, once Adam began differentiating into male and female, Lilith fled and became evil.

Thereafter the Holy One, blessed be He, sawed Adam into two, and made the female. And He brought her to Adam in her perfection like a bride to the canopy. When Lilith saw this, she fled. And she is in the cities of the sea, and she is still trying to harm the sons of the world. (Zohar 3:19)

What precisely made Lilith flee? The Zohar does not tell us, though this is an intriguing question in and of itself. It might be because she was jealous of Eve, or upset that Adam now had a body while she did not. But I want to suggest something more. We see that she saw Adam becoming whole – developing male and female aspects, while she remained only female. It seems to me that once Adam had evolved, but she had not, the union became imbalanced and that was why she fled. This is a lesson for male-female relationships. In some relationships, each partner is playing up only half of the aspects of the self - the gendered half. The woman plays up only her feminine aspects to the very masculine man. However, where one partner has developed to be more whole and integrate his/her own male and female aspects, the other partner will have to develop similarly for the relationship to endure and thrive.

A second important point here is that the Zohar’s Lilith was originally not evil. What made her evil was her feelings of offense, or upset, or rejection. The Zohar is making a profound statement about the roots of evil, that lie in our actions and reactions. How much damage rejection can do! I mentioned this already in this post, about Timna.

- - -

I originally ended this post here, with the words:

"Two wounded beings unleash so much bad into the world. How can we help people move beyond their negative emotions? What can we do to add to the world’s healing? Here's one route. "

However, today my teacher Avraham mentioned something that puts a much deeper spin on it, that repesents a spiritual development. He taught that Leah is kabbalistically seen as a reincarnation of Lilith, no less (and Rachel is Eve, with Jacob equivalent to Adam).

Like Lilith, Leah too suffers from tremendous rejection and pain. For her entire life, her husband Jacob has given his love to her sister Rachel. Leah's challenges in her lifetime represent the opportunity for growth and tikkun for the Lilith soul inside her. True repentance, says the Rambam, is only when you are back in the same situation and you act differently. Thus, in her lifetime Leah had a similar experience to Lilith, of rejection - but her response is different. Instead of acting in a childish, unevolved manner and storming off to do angry damage in the world, Leah lives within the situation, tries to resolve it, and even strives to feel gratitude for what she actually has, as we see when she names Judah and says "This time I shall thank G-d."

We all get to face our unique personal challenges again and again, in different forms, so that we can refine our responses and react from a more evolved place each time. This is how we heal the world (and meditation [see the link above] is indeed a very valuable tool, as it teaches us to hold our emotions in a different way).

[Thanks to my teacher Avraham Leader for introducing me to this passage. Translation of Zohar is from this site]