The Torah's Core Question: Who Am I?
Rabbi Tom Samuels
I have so many questions. So much self-doubt. Am I the father I want to be? The friend I want to be? The rabbi I want to be? The truth is, there is no objective answer to these questions. And, taken a step further, deeper, these questions themselves are inherently flawed. Allow me to explain.
In the Garden of Eden story there are two trees: the Tree of Knowledge, Eitz HaDa’at, and the oft forgotten Tree of Life, Eitz HaChayim. Our Sages teach us that the measure of life is not how much you have accomplished. How much you know. How much of the Tree of Knowledge you have eaten from. Rather, what needs to be measured, looked at with radical honesty, taken into account, is how much you have eaten from the Tree of Life. How well did you connect with your own humanity, which is, after all, created as a Mirroring of God, b’Tzelem Elohim.
The great 20th century Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig wrote that creation, redemption and revelation, are the three central activities, the very pillars of the God of the Bible. And that every human being is charged with recreating those three Divine attributes in to our everyday lives. Our relationships. Our behaviors. And so, we mirror God’s creation by creating a life of meaning and purpose. We mirror God’s redemption through acts of caring, compassion and connection. And finally, we mirror God’s revelation when we reveal our core selves to our own selves, warts and all. That is the biggest challenge. The most difficult question. “It is not existential aloneness that is the challenge of our modern world,” write Rabbi Michael Strassfield, “it is a sense of existential unknownness.” Do I know who I am? What I am suppose to do with my fleeting existence? Can I, am I, making a difference? Do I matter?
Back to the b’Tzelem Elohim, the Mirroring of God, theme. In the Book of Exodus (38:8), we read about the making of the Tabernacle, the Mishkan, in the desert. In the midsts of this narrative, we read a cryptic verse: “He (Betzalel) made the copper washstand and its copper base out of the mirrors of the dedicated women, ha-tzove’ot, who congregated at the entrance of the Communion Tent.”
What does “the mirrors of the dedicated women” mean? What does it refer to? Rashi, the great medieval Biblical commentator writes that this refers to the Midrashic story about mirrors, as follows:
"You find that when Israel were in harsh labor in Egypt, Pharaoh decreed against them that they should not sleep at home nor have relations with their wives. Said Rabbi Shimeon bar Chalafta, 'What did the daughters of Israel do?' They would go down to draw water from the river, and God would prepare for them little fish in their buckets. And they would sell some of them, and cook some of them, and buy wine with the proceeds, and go to the field and feed their husbands. And when they had eaten and drunk, the women would take the mirrors and look into them with their husbands, and she would say, 'I am more comely than you,' and he would say, 'I am more comely than you.' And as a result, they would accustom themselves to desire, and they were fruitful and multiplied, and God took note of them immediately. Some of our sages said they bore two children at a time, others said they bore 12 at a time, and still others said 600,000. … And all these numbers from the mirrors. … In the merit of those mirrors, which they showed their husbands to accustom them to desire, from the midst of the harsh labor, they raised up all the hosts.” (Madrash Tanhuma Pekudei)
Imagine that. In the midst of oppression and dehumanization, when the Egyptians sought to permanently end the Israelite nation by destroying normal family life by forbidding the men to return home from the fields at night, the women decided to frustrate Pharaoh’s plan. They used mirrors to make themselves attractive to their husbands. She would say to him, "I'm more beautiful than you," and he would answer her, "No, I'm more beautiful than you."
This was a flirting game, intentionally conceived by the women to restore the sense of self that slavery had taken from their husbands. A sort of game whereby the women were challenging their husbands to see their own beauty. To see their own selves. To reclaim their innate human capacity to imagine freedom. Love. Hope. Dreams.
Professor Aviva Zoerneberg teaches that when you look in a mirror, you are basically always seeing a somewhat changed version of yourself. A distorted version of oneself. A fantasy. But at the same time, it takes an act of this kind, a “performative act of whimsy and imagination,” not looking at things quite straight, in order to open things up.
Our Jewish tradition teaches that every morning we should wake up and recite the prayer: אֱלֹהַי נְשָׁמָה שֶׁנָּתַתָּ בִּי טְהוֹרָה הִיא, Elohai n’shamah shenatata bi t’horah he, HaShem, the soul You have given me is pure. We are all pure, we are all beautiful, we are all holy. And yet, how often do we beat ourselves up? Some of us physically, some emotionally, some spiritually. We forever yearn to be a rose. We may even actually believe that we are that rose, but with our current system of self-judgment, we can only envision ourselves as dandelions. As weeds. Rabbi Ed Feinstein challenges us to see our own selves in this picture. Somewhere. Somehow. To allow ourselves to see our own beauty. And then, to actively learn how to see the beauty in ourselves. To open ourselves up to appreciating the holiness in one another. To see that weeds are flowers too.
All this to rephrase those core questions that we need to ask ourselves, everyday: How can we revive our spirits? How can we rekindle our passions for life? How can we infuse and enrich our lives with Joy and with Meaning? Deep in our souls, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks teaches, we desperately want to live the kind of life that we could look back upon with pride and with deep satisfaction. And so, the deepest question any of us can ask of ourselves is: Who am I?
Rabbi Tom Samuels
I have so many questions. So much self-doubt. Am I the father I want to be? The friend I want to be? The rabbi I want to be? The truth is, there is no objective answer to these questions. And, taken a step further, deeper, these questions themselves are inherently flawed. Allow me to explain.
In the Garden of Eden story there are two trees: the Tree of Knowledge, Eitz HaDa’at, and the oft forgotten Tree of Life, Eitz HaChayim. Our Sages teach us that the measure of life is not how much you have accomplished. How much you know. How much of the Tree of Knowledge you have eaten from. Rather, what needs to be measured, looked at with radical honesty, taken into account, is how much you have eaten from the Tree of Life. How well did you connect with your own humanity, which is, after all, created as a Mirroring of God, b’Tzelem Elohim.
The great 20th century Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig wrote that creation, redemption and revelation, are the three central activities, the very pillars of the God of the Bible. And that every human being is charged with recreating those three Divine attributes in to our everyday lives. Our relationships. Our behaviors. And so, we mirror God’s creation by creating a life of meaning and purpose. We mirror God’s redemption through acts of caring, compassion and connection. And finally, we mirror God’s revelation when we reveal our core selves to our own selves, warts and all. That is the biggest challenge. The most difficult question. “It is not existential aloneness that is the challenge of our modern world,” write Rabbi Michael Strassfield, “it is a sense of existential unknownness.” Do I know who I am? What I am suppose to do with my fleeting existence? Can I, am I, making a difference? Do I matter?
Back to the b’Tzelem Elohim, the Mirroring of God, theme. In the Book of Exodus (38:8), we read about the making of the Tabernacle, the Mishkan, in the desert. In the midsts of this narrative, we read a cryptic verse: “He (Betzalel) made the copper washstand and its copper base out of the mirrors of the dedicated women, ha-tzove’ot, who congregated at the entrance of the Communion Tent.”
What does “the mirrors of the dedicated women” mean? What does it refer to? Rashi, the great medieval Biblical commentator writes that this refers to the Midrashic story about mirrors, as follows:
"You find that when Israel were in harsh labor in Egypt, Pharaoh decreed against them that they should not sleep at home nor have relations with their wives. Said Rabbi Shimeon bar Chalafta, 'What did the daughters of Israel do?' They would go down to draw water from the river, and God would prepare for them little fish in their buckets. And they would sell some of them, and cook some of them, and buy wine with the proceeds, and go to the field and feed their husbands. And when they had eaten and drunk, the women would take the mirrors and look into them with their husbands, and she would say, 'I am more comely than you,' and he would say, 'I am more comely than you.' And as a result, they would accustom themselves to desire, and they were fruitful and multiplied, and God took note of them immediately. Some of our sages said they bore two children at a time, others said they bore 12 at a time, and still others said 600,000. … And all these numbers from the mirrors. … In the merit of those mirrors, which they showed their husbands to accustom them to desire, from the midst of the harsh labor, they raised up all the hosts.” (Madrash Tanhuma Pekudei)
Imagine that. In the midst of oppression and dehumanization, when the Egyptians sought to permanently end the Israelite nation by destroying normal family life by forbidding the men to return home from the fields at night, the women decided to frustrate Pharaoh’s plan. They used mirrors to make themselves attractive to their husbands. She would say to him, "I'm more beautiful than you," and he would answer her, "No, I'm more beautiful than you."
This was a flirting game, intentionally conceived by the women to restore the sense of self that slavery had taken from their husbands. A sort of game whereby the women were challenging their husbands to see their own beauty. To see their own selves. To reclaim their innate human capacity to imagine freedom. Love. Hope. Dreams.
Professor Aviva Zoerneberg teaches that when you look in a mirror, you are basically always seeing a somewhat changed version of yourself. A distorted version of oneself. A fantasy. But at the same time, it takes an act of this kind, a “performative act of whimsy and imagination,” not looking at things quite straight, in order to open things up.
Our Jewish tradition teaches that every morning we should wake up and recite the prayer: אֱלֹהַי נְשָׁמָה שֶׁנָּתַתָּ בִּי טְהוֹרָה הִיא, Elohai n’shamah shenatata bi t’horah he, HaShem, the soul You have given me is pure. We are all pure, we are all beautiful, we are all holy. And yet, how often do we beat ourselves up? Some of us physically, some emotionally, some spiritually. We forever yearn to be a rose. We may even actually believe that we are that rose, but with our current system of self-judgment, we can only envision ourselves as dandelions. As weeds. Rabbi Ed Feinstein challenges us to see our own selves in this picture. Somewhere. Somehow. To allow ourselves to see our own beauty. And then, to actively learn how to see the beauty in ourselves. To open ourselves up to appreciating the holiness in one another. To see that weeds are flowers too.
All this to rephrase those core questions that we need to ask ourselves, everyday: How can we revive our spirits? How can we rekindle our passions for life? How can we infuse and enrich our lives with Joy and with Meaning? Deep in our souls, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks teaches, we desperately want to live the kind of life that we could look back upon with pride and with deep satisfaction. And so, the deepest question any of us can ask of ourselves is: Who am I?