ki sisa: give the infinite to hashem
dear friends,
hashem spoke to moshe saying: see, i have called by name betzalel son of uri son of hur of the tribe of yehudah. i have filled him with the breath of elohim: with wisdom, with understanding, with intimate knowledge of all workings...
rav yehudah says that rav said:
betzalel knew how to join the letters with which heaven and earth were created
rabbi yosei bar hanina said:
anyone who asks forgiveness of his friend should not ask more than three times, as it is stated [by yosef's brothers to yosef]: please, please forgive....and now, please forgive
let us understand how these letters are joined.
the name betzalel ("in the shadow of g-d"), the name of this person filled with ruach elohim, has numeric value 153 -- the same value as saying "please/na" three times.
the one person with the wisdom, understanding, and knowledge to build a dwelling-place for haShem contains within his name this limitation on guilt. you have to change who you are, of course. but then you only ask forgiveness three times.
endless guilt, endless worry, are not the way to bring haShem into this world. this world is finite, and we are finite within it.
when establishing the laws of the pesach seder, the rabbis consider a disturbing possibility: what if, after you have searched for and removed all your chametz, some rodent drags leavened bread from someone else's house into your own. "ein choshshin," they conclude, "we don't worry about this. because if we did, we'd have to worry about leaven being dragged from courtyard to courtyard and from city to city."
and if that were so? why shouldn't we worry about that? "ein hadavar sof," they answer. in that case, there would be no end to the worry.
my teacher xava decordova commented on this line: "anything to which there is no end [ein hadavar sof], belongs to the no-end [the ein sof, a kabbalistic name of g-d]"
give your endless worries, your infinite guilt, to hashem.
this is probably my last newsletter for a while. i'm proud of what i've written -- especially for bereishis -- but i appear to have reached the limit of what i can do at the moment. i might post some more short videos, and send out intermittent commentaries when i feel like i really have something to say. i'm very grateful to everyone who spent even a few minutes thinking about what i've written.
good shabbos,
ada