Tefillah for the Sick

I'd been grappling with whether to be mispallel on behalf of an elderly sick relative of mine.

I approached the issue initially from the place of wanting him to get better, because my family and I love him and are attached to him and would miss him if he were gone. I then tried to find a "justification" for requesting this. I tried to fit it into a rational plan, to make it a tefillah rather than a wish.

Zooming from the cosmic perspective down, it seemed as if it didn't really matter much whether he died today or a few years from now. All humans die; it's part of the cycle of life on earth. And, even in terms of his death's effect on me, I will mourn his loss today or in a few weeks, months, or years- what is the difference really? I have an instinct to preserve myself and avoid/delay pain. But, in the ultimate scheme of things, what is the difference really when I experience this pain? Furthermore, this pain could be used as an impetus to further growth on my part (and the part of others).

Even at this point in my thought process, though, I could not bring myself to not be mispallel for his recovery. It felt wrong to withhold that; I felt guilty about it- even though I was also mispallel in shomaiah tefillah for guidance and clarification on this issue. I guess maybe some magical thinking was seeping into my tefillah. On some level, I felt that requesting his recovery could magically provide a cure. And, I felt that I would be partially responsible for his death if I didn't exhaust all of the options available to me in helping to ensure his recovery. And, it felt like if I really want something desperately, I should ask for it; I shouldn't wait until I can fit it into a rational plan. Also, I suspected it probably would fit into some rational plan, even if I didn't see how yet.(justifications?)

In the past, when I was mispallel for someone's recovery, the rational plan I fit it into often involved something like my peace of mind or my relationship with that person (or someone else's) being maintained so that I (or they) can continue to grow/develop. But, I was so locked into my emotional dalet ammos perspective that I experienced shichichah about this concept.
But, by the end of my Shemoneh Esrei, it occurred to me that he is a thinking person whose additional time on Earth could benefit him and/or other members of my family, including me in their growth.

I'm humiliated about some of these feelings and thought processes I went through. But, I'm sharing them anyway in the hopes that they might be useful to you and that you might help shed further light on this issue for me. Please feel free to question and comment!

Mashal vs. Story

It occurred to me recently that we seem to use mashalim and tanach stories very similarly. We try to connect both to our experience until we can relate to it, and then see what errors or remedies/corrections/alternate frames the mashal/ story is pointing to. We use the mashal or story as a tool to “redefine terms” to see a part of world differently, more realistically. I know that a mashal is something that did not necessarily actually occur that is formed to represent something else, while a story may have actually occurred. But, I was wondering about what the difference, if any, is between how we use each.

The Highways of Perfection

Jake sent me this in an email and gave me permission to post it. The title is his as well.

So I was driving home tonight from the Beis Hatzelamim, ( Brooklyn not YU). I am on the Southern State Parkway and I look into my mirror. What I saw behind me struck me although its nothing I haven't seen before. It was a long line of headlights stretching as far as I could see.Then I looked at the other lane, the Westbound lanes and it was the same thing. Then I looked at my GPS and saw the long expanse of highway.

These cars seemed to go on forever , until you look at the Highway itself which is so much bigger. The great thing about the GPS is you can literally "zoom" out and when I got home just now that's what I did. First all of Long Island appears then New York and New Jersey, then the East Coast then the entire Country . As much as these cars seemed to go on forever, the highway was bigger. As long as the Highway seemed to be the State was bigger as expansive as the State is it pales in comparison to the Continent, the Planet and the Universe. Think about it! That is insane. And every part of this huge universe is governed by law from me sitting in my car at 80 mph to the Planets revolving at their speeds and everything in between.

In short: Wow.

Chore or Gift?

Today, I was out doing some errands and felt grateful for the situation I was in of having needs I had to take care of. I needed a break from thinking and enjoyed getting out and doing some little practical things- the movement, fresh air, interaction with other people, the challenge of finding and picking out the best items...

I realized that there are two possible ways to view errands and chores:

1. a burden, drudgery to get through
2. something I can get some enjoyment out of that contributes to my peace of mind

This reminded me of the rock mashal and the two possibilities of approaching adversity as a blow or an opportunity for growth. It also brings to mind the rachamim of the borei olam- that our needs are so well provided for- both physically and psychologically.

David Rinde- the power of mashal

Hello Rabbi,

I am sitting in the Denver, Co. airport writing to you about a fascinating seatmate I had on the flight, who informed me of something that really brings out your point from two weeks ago about the need for a literary component to Torah if its abstract contents are to be successfully translated into the cultural identity necessary to form an Am.

Ah! Big sentence. My friend hails from New Zealand, and we talked all about that country’s interesting history. One of the points he mentioned to me about the natives (whose name I cannot recall) was that they were an incredibly advanced people with regards to their command of oceanic navigation. Apparently the peoples of the Pacific Rim knew how to travel hundreds of miles on the high seas in canoes, and this is how they migrated, with knowledge of currents, winds, and other relevant science. Thing is they didn’t have a written language. So, what they did - instead of having a large corpus of complex oral knowledge – was encode their science in literary form, in stories that they would pass on generation to generation!

Amazing no?

-David

Dear David

That is a great example of the mashal character of mesorah. I have copied an article on Joseph Campbell which I think explains this well. You can immediately see however, the need for clear ikrim to delimit the meaning or peyrush of Mashal. If there were not these ikrim, people would mistake the imaginings of their hearts for wisdom! This, sadly, is what happened to Campbell himself, as you will see.

Joseph Campbell and Myth

A fundamental belief of Campbell's was that all spirituality is a search for the same basic, unknown force from which everything came, within which everything currently exists, and into which everything will return. This elemental force is ultimately “unknowable” because it exists before words and knowledge. Although this basic driving force cannot be expressed in words, spiritual rituals and stories refer to the force through the use of "metaphors" - these metaphors being the various stories, deities, and objects of spirituality we see in the world. For example, Genesis in the Bible ought not be taken as a literal description of actual events, but rather its poetic, metaphorical meaning should be examined for clues concerning the fundamental truths of the world and our existence.

Accordingly, Campbell believed the religions of the world to be the various, culturally influenced “masks” of the same fundamental, transcendent truths. Indeed, he quotes in the preface of The Hero with a Thousand Faces: "Truth is one, the sages speak of it by many names."

Campbell was fascinated with what he viewed as basic, universal truths, expressed in different manifestations across different cultures. For example, in the preface of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, he indicated that a goal of his was to demonstrate similarities between Eastern and Western religions. In his four-volume series of books "The Masks of God", Campbell tried to summarize the main spiritual threads common throughout the world. Tied in with this, was his idea that many of the belief systems of the world which expressed these universal truths had a common geographic ancestry, starting off on the fertile grasslands of Europe in the Bronze Age and moving to the Levant and the "Fertile Crescent" of Mesopotamia and back to Europe (and the Far East), where it was mixed with the newly emerging Indo-European (Aryan) culture.

Heroes and the monomyth

The role of the hero figured largely in Campbell's comparative studies. In 1949 The Hero with a Thousand Faces introduced his idea of the monomyth (as stated above, a word borrowed from Joyce), which outlined some of the archetypal patterns Campbell recognized. Heroes were important to Campbell because, to him, they conveyed universal truths about one's personal self-discovery and self-transcendence, one's role in society, and the relationship between the two.

Campbell's influence on cinema

George Lucas was the first Hollywood filmmaker to openly credit Campbell's influence. Lucas stated following the release of the first Star Wars film in 1977 that its story was shaped, in part, by ideas described in The Hero With a Thousand Faces and other works of Campbell's. The linkage between Star Wars and Campbell was further reinforced when later reprints of Campbell's book used the image of Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker on the cover.^[9] Lucas discusses this influence at great length in the official biography of Joseph Campbell, Joseph Campbell: A Fire in the Mind by Stephen and Robin Larsen:

I [Lucas] came to the conclusion after American Graffiti that what's valuable for me is to set standards, not to show people the world the way it is...around the period of this realization...it came to me that there really was no modern use of mythology...The Western was possibly the last generically American fairy tale, telling us about our values. And once the Western disappeared, nothing has ever taken its place. In literature we were going off into science fiction...so that's when I started doing more strenuous research on fairy tales, folklore, and mythology, and I started reading Joe's books. Before that I hadn't read any of Joe's books...It was very eerie because in reading The Hero with a Thousand Faces I began to realize that my first draft of Star Wars was following classic motifs...so I modified my next draft [of Star Wars] according to what I'd been learning about classical motifs and made it a little bit more consistent...I went on to read 'The Masks of God' and many other books (Larsen and Larsen, 2002: 541).

It was not until after the completion of the original Star Wars trilogy in 1983, however, that Lucas met Campbell or heard any of his lectures.^[10] The 1988 documentary The Power of Myth was filmed at Lucas' Skywalker Ranch. During his interviews with Bill Moyers, Campbell discusses the way in which Lucas used The Hero's Journey in the Star Wars films (IV, V, and VI) to re-invent the mythology for the contemporary viewer. Moyers and Lucas filmed an interview 12 years later in 1999 called the Mythology of Star Wars with George Lucas & Bill Moyers to further discuss the impact of Campbell's work on Lucas' films.^[11] In addition, the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution sponsored an exhibit during the late 1990s called Star Wars: The Magic of Myth, which discussed the ways in which Campbell's work shaped the Star Wars films.^[12] A companion guide of the same name was published in 1997.

Post-Zoom Reflections

I was speaking with someone yesterday about the interesting observation that when 2 people are dating and 1 is interested, but the other isn’t, it’s difficult for the interested person to not feel rejected/hurt/angry and take it very personally. This is the case even though, in reality, it’s not a reflection on their value as a person at all that someone else thinks they are not what they are personally looking for in a spouse (which includes subjective, emotional factors).

I’ve thought about this many times in the past. But, yesterday, it took on a new kind of significance. This was because I immediately connected this case with the zoom I did recently. My “adversity” example in the zoom had been my apartment flooding. I was able to make the powerful connection today in the moment of seeing the commonality between the cases of the date and the flood. I was able to see that just as my apartment flooding is not a personal attack in the least, but rather an expression of a lawful system(, which includes rain, wind, and physical and chemical properties of various objects) , so too, one person not finding another compatible just “is”. There’s nothing “bad” or personal about it.

Upon further reflection, I was able to even take this a step further. This lawful system which includes rain, wind, etc. is not just neutral and what “is”. Rather, it is actually good. It is beautiful and perfectly worked out to sustain life on Earth. So too, the dating scenario is not just neutral. It is actually good. It is also an expression of certain lawful principles of how man was created with a body and psyche of a kind that helps him to survive, perpetuate the species, and develop as a mind.

As I mentioned yesterday before shiur, this is very different from the experience of the benefit of just “breaking down” a particular distortion. The experience of holding onto the “cosmic perspective” and bringing some of it into my dalet amos in the zoom brought a very interesting added dimension to the whole thing and allowed me to move beyond the insight I’d had about the dating scenario in the past and take it to another level.

In the beginning

Perhaps someone could write a short piece outlining, or exemplifying how the blog will work?