Comments (0)Building Walls
July 30, 2010Rabbi Geoff Basik
Special to the Jewish Times
In this week’s parshah, Moses asks, “What does God demand of you?” His answer contains these enigmatic words: “Cut away the thickness about your heart and stiffen your necks no more.” In practical terms, he explains it as “upholding the cause of the orphan and widow, and befriending the stranger.”
Interestingly, what Moses literally says is, “Circumcise the foreskin of your heart” (Deuteronomy 10:16). We are certainly familiar with circumcision … but of the heart? It gets our attention, but what does it mean?
This curious phrase also appears in Jeremiah (centuries later) as he rails against the unjust treatment of the poor, the corruption of the rich and the absence of morality in his day. “Circumcise your hearts to Adonai. Cut away the thickening about your hearts, people of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem, lest My anger break forth like fire and burn, with none to quench it, because of your wicked acts.”
Indeed, the “holy horror,” Rabbi Malka Drucker’s term for the fiery fury, blazing anger and raging wrath that did rain down on us shortly after Jeremiah’s vain appeal (described in all its vivid violence and pain in the Book of Lamentations, read less than two weeks ago on Tisha B’Av), was God’s response to a society grown indifferent to the suffering of others, an indictment of bystanders, corruption, impiety and injustice.
In Jewish usage, lev (the heart) is not the seat of feelings and emotion alone. It is also an organ of comprehension, a vessel of wisdom, experience, knowledge, conscience and consciousness. Torah speaks of both a lev shomea, a listening heart, and chochmat lev, heart wisdom. It’s where our ideals and truths and ultimate visions lay. Our nature, then, is soft and wise-hearted. But the heart is also the repository of our ignorance; remember Pharaoh’s “hard heart.” There is something that separates us from our inherent or potential perfection, something interfering with our “heartfulness.”
The rabbis of the Talmud speak about timtum ha-lev, the blocked, clogged-up, stopped-up heart. It is the hardening of the spiritual arteries. This is the condition many of us develop; we are battered by life, by the ways of the world, by the “dog-eat-dog,” and we grow scar tissue that renders us insensitive, selfish, callous. We build walls.
Jeremiah draws the analogy between the human heart and a field where crops are planted. The soil must be cleared of weeds and rocks before crops can take root and grow. Just as soil is made fertile, we too must be open and receptive. Something must be removed to achieve a condition of responsive openness to God’s word and Godliness among us. This is Rashi’s understanding, too. If one’s heart is closed or covered, “God” (real understanding, real seeing, real hearing and sensitivity) cannot enter. We would not be able to “impress these words upon [our] hearts.”
Maimonides sees this phrase as the antidote to self-centered obstinacy.
In making decisions, he says, keep your heart open to the teachings of Torah, to the anguish of others, to the mistakes you will make and the need to rectify them.
As with our infant sons, circumcision is an initiation. It is a status change, a “passage.” We can be initiated, as it were, into life’s truths either through sharp experiences, such as bereavement, loss, disappointment, humbling illness … or we can soften our hearts for covenantal relationship through conscious, deliberate practice. What is religion for, if not to provide tangible techniques and mechanisms for the dismantling of our walls, our disconnections, our insensitivities … to cultivate openness, to allow for the possibility of (dare I say) holiness?
Rabbi Geoff Basik serves Congregation Kol HaLev.