To Light Up the Night

Everything is for the good. Really? How is it possible to make such an outrageous claim given the amount of suffering that exits in the world? When describing the overall trust of Creation, the verse from Psalms 89:3 emphatically puts forth that “…the world is built with lovingkindness [olam chessed yebaneh]….” The Hebrew phraseology provides clues to the hidden overtones that are lodged in such a bold expression. For starters, we naturally associate the ‘good’ with lovingkindness or chessed, which begs the question as to where all the positivity is hiding. There sometimes seems to be such a lack of love in the universe. When I think of the world, I can imagine one that is far better than the one we are experiencing right now.

Joining the first two words together–a ‘world of lovingkindness’–might itself be construed as a question that we could read with a slight ironic lift of the voice: ‘a world of lovingkindness?’ The response can be found in the third word of the expression ‘yebaneh’ which relates to boneh (building) and binah (understanding) as well as hitbonannut (meditation or focused reflection). In order to uncover the positive nature of the world, I must meditate and come to an understanding of how it is built. Reflecting on the entrenched structures of the world will enable me to cultivate a sense of the goodness of Creation.

Sometimes, the cold hard facts of life obscure the essential gift of life, just like the word for ‘world’ (olam) in Hebrew comes from the same root as the word helem or concealment. According to this interpretation, we are given a chance to exist and to live, but no sooner than when we are within our world, we forget this original gift and start taking things for granted. The apparent givenness of the world masks the gift of the world–this is phase one of any meditation.

Moving on to phase two of this set of reflections, we have to work through a more nuanced definition of lovingkindness (chessed). We might say that it is defined as that which leaves everything and anything undefined. The lack of definition or distinction collapses all phenomena back into an undifferentiated whole. Consider a parent-child relationship whereby we have to be justified in giving to our child so we look for merit and worth. We give in proportion to the distinctions that our child has earned and we don’t hand out anything that wasn’t earned. Performance evaluation and judgement (din) drives most but not all of our gift giving. By contrast, we might ask ourselves, what our child ever did (or what we ever did for that matter) to merit being born in the first place? After all, none of us arrived on earth with a proven track record or with an endowment that would allow us to pay our way into the world. Life was/is given gratis. It was an act of lovingkindness in that we didn’t earn it. All life has this same beginning. Even the world wasn’t granted an opportunity to prove itself prior to its genesis. Creation something from nothing might as well be revised to ‘Creation something for nothing.’ With order, life, and existence for free, one begins to wonder are we not all in the same boat? Can we make a blanket statement and assert that all of this emerges from one and the same Divine embrace and act of love? The judgements and severities of the world get built up over this foundational gesture of kindness.

Up until now, we have only contemplated the submerged origin of the world within the infinite source of lovingkindness which lingers in memory as a faded past that we would like to reclaim. Yet, there is another future-oriented sense of everything being good. Any gripping story has all kinds of unexpected twist and turns. The best plots keep the audience guessing right up to the very end. The big pay off for the audience comes when all of the pieces manage to fall into place in a resolution to the story which up until that point has kept us on the edge of our seats. In the darkest moments of a motion picture, our hearts go out to our hero and we deeply want to believe that he or she will somehow survive the impossible and awaken to watch the sun of a new day rising. This grand ending makes all of the roller coaster of the saga worth it. Our familiarity with this narrative style–the unfolding that seems to be going nowhere or nowhere good–extends to the sudden transformation that occurs in the final account once additional information is provided. Those hidden details or deleted scenes make all the difference. We realize that had our character not been lead down a particular road, had he not experienced a certain set of events, then the outcome would have never been so good.

In this instance, the good is deferred until that time when more is known. We may have to wait to judge the film until we have seen the ending which will retroactively shed light and add meaning to all of the exposition that came before. If we accept that we all share in the same ending, then the hidden good in everything that is revealed in that end sends a shock wave back through all of history and revises our perception of it. We may learn to proclaim: ‘gam zu l’tova’–even this was for the good. Furthermore, in Hebrew the words ha’kol tov (everything is for the good) equals 72 which is the numerical value of chessed or lovingkindness.

With reference to the ‘reasons’ for Creation, kabbalistic sources often make mention of the ‘nature of the One [God] who is good, is to do good.’ While at the highest level we cannot assign attributes or qualities to the Divine, nonetheless the infinite aspect within Divinity is essential connected with the idea of the Good. A throwback to this can be seen in the relationship between the English word for ‘God’ and the word ‘good.’ More than anything else, God is good. Henceforth, that good will manifest itself through acts of lovingkindness of which Creation is the grandest example.

Since we intimated previously, the Samech as a circle signifies a state of equality. Besides the idea of those on the circumference of the circle being equidistant to the center, we can also call attention to the rotational symmetry of the circle. No matter how you turn it, it looks the same. With logic of the Samech/circle as one of sameness and equality, we are able to highlight its applicability to the soul power of lovingkindness. Love regards all that are loved the same. Kindness gives equally to all whether they are deserving or not. Everything was conceived as equally good and should ultimately be manifest as such in the redemptive commentaries of the future.

Next up in Part 15, we will examine life in the void and the reign of causality within the natural world.

http://www.interinclusion.org/inspirations/circus-of-dreams-part-15/ 

http://www.interinclusion.org/inspirations/circus-of-dreams-part-13/ 

Print PDF