Okay, once again, let's do a little bit of a recap as to what we've gone through so
far in the first two levels of
forgiveness. The first level is this idea that God is constantly supplying
energy to human beings even when they use that energy
contrary to God's will. God nevertheless continues to supply this.
This is a tremendous level of forgiveness.
The Remak, the author of the Tomer Devorah, says that that this is like the "Insulted King" at work
because He ignores the insult to His person,
that we abuse the energy that we get from God. The second level
goes even further and talks about the fact that
our misdeeds create these
negative energy beings that also require sustenance
and require this influx of energy and God also, as it were,
foots the bill for those energy drains as well.
He doesn't send them back to collect energy from us,
He gives us a chance to address our own wrongdoings
and to cause that energy debt to be paid of our own regard.
Now on the third level, this is where God is not
only being of forbearing, that is,
tolerating sin, now this is where He starts to actively be involved in the
forgiveness, that cleansing process, and this is something
(as we shall see) we can also draw into our own lives.
As I've emphasized the last few lectures, Tomer Devorah really is
a pragmatic work that is designed for actually implementing
into our lives. So the third level deals
with this concept of washing away of the sins.
The Tomer Devorah adopts a Kabbalistic approach
which depends on the structure of four distinct worlds
that are beyond the scope of our discussion here but there are different
creatures that are allowed to effect
different worlds. Angels, as it were,
do not have the power to forgive sin. That's something that is reserved for
God alone.
Angels are not created in a high enough
world of these four worlds to be able to remove
the effects of sin. Only God can personally intervene
and forgive sin. Now this is something of
an exception to the general operation of the universe as
Rabbi Cordovero explains elsewhere in his Kabbalistic works
normally God sends out an incredible number of myriads upon myriads of
Angels who direct the functioning of the world as a whole,
but there are certain key things that God as it were reserves for
His personal involvement rather than through the
various energies that He sends out to effect these things.
I know this gets all kind of weird and it's way above my own understanding of these things,
so I'm just sort of saying words that I've read without really deeply understanding them,
but if you'll forgive my own ignorance let's understand how this applies
specifically to forgiveness.
So in this third level
God is compared in Tomer Devorah to
a very very powerful image, a human image
that is of a parent
washing away the filth off a child.
Many of the commentaries really speak about this a great length because
all of us have, as human beings, we have experienced this to one degree or another.
The word that's used in the quotation
that Rabbi Cordovero chooses is the "tzoat binot tzion"
which literally means the "excrement of the daughters of Zion".
That God will wash away the filth of the daughters of Zion
in you know the most human sense of the term filth.
This is something that we as human beings have all experienced in one way or
another in that
you know when we were children, before we were toilet trained,
there was a parent or caregiver who was able to step in
and clean us up. Many of us who have aged parents also understand what it's
like to do the same
in return for a parent. It is an act
of tremendous love and kindness and also it's an act of
phenomenal forgiveness because one
cares for the person so much that
we are willing to
forgoe our own honor in order to benefit this person who really needs
to be cleaned up.
So God, as it were, forgives human sin at this level.
God doesn't send out a messenger or send out employees saying "would you please
clean up this terrible mess here", God personally get involved
and takes care of it. This is a very very high level of forgiveness.
This is why, what the Tomer Devorah is trying to say here
is that we should emulate this in our own interpersonal relationships.
For example: when we see that someone around us has caused us
some sort of harm, we shouldn't say
"well that's their problem, they made this mess
let them clean it up." Now, it is true - it's their mess and they've got to clean it up,
but ultimately a higher level of forgiveness is when we step in
and we say "you know what, for whatever reason they're just not
ready to clean it up themselves. They're not capable of understanding what
they've done wrong,
they're not capable of doing the actual technical cleaning up of the mess,
so we should step in and take care for them." That's a very high level of forgiveness.
I'll share with you a personal vignette that it is kind of a small family tradition
that was not very hard for me to do at all,
but it was a way to express my love for my wife
in such a way that I think is really a good thing for my family.
When we were living in Israel many years ago and and we were studying
in Yeshiva and in Seminary, we were living in this fourth story walk up in the old Katamon
neighborhood of Jerusalem.
We had this this really beautiful terrazzo floor which is a really hard stone floor.
My wife was working in the kitchen, it was a friday afternoon,
and she had this big glass bottle of grape juice that we were using for
Kiddush that night. And as you know, these things happen, it slipped from her hand,
smashed on its terrazzo floor, and there was grape juice everywhere.
That time of the week, when we're just trying to get everything
ready and we're on a deadline, it's going to candle lighting soon...
this can be very frustrating time, and my wife was just kind of like
"oh my gosh", but you know here I was newly married,
I stepped in, I was the big hero
and I said "don't worry, I'll clean it up."
At that point I did clean it up and she was so appreciative
over such a small thing. She was so appreciative that
is sort of evolved from then on that whenever there is that kind of an event,
a spill, especially involving breaking glass and I'm around-
it's my job to clean up. I view it as a tremendous privilege to be able to do that
especially because there are a lot of things that she does for me that
I'm not even going to list here,
but she's constantly doing the same kind of things for me.
So there's something that's deeply ennobling on the one hand
about stepping in and forgiving the other.
In this particular example, obviously there is no sin involved in breaking a glass,
but the metaphor is you know, a person makes a mess you don't say "hey, you clean up your mess."
Step in there and do the right thing and clean it up for them. So there's something
very deeply ennobling about the person who steps in to do that
but at the same time especially if we think of this in terms of a child-parent relationship,
there is a huge deterrent to sin as well.
(Let's say for example that we go back to the metaphor
of a child that soiled himself and has to go to his mother for cleaning.)
If I know that that I let my parents down
and I soil myself and I go to my mother and I need her assistance,
she'll do it for me because she loves me and she cares for me, but on the other
hand I'm humiliated,
I'm a big boy now I should really not do these kinds of things,
it's hard. So it's like a deterrent makes us feel we really should sin because
our parent is the one is going to be cleaning us up and
we really don't want to subject our parent whom we love to that kind
of behavior. How much more so
when the parent is God, in His glory,
God himself will come down and actually engage in the cleanup process.
So this is a very very pragmatic level of forgiveness.
It's a level that we have to work up to to say "okay.
I know I'm not responsible for this mess but I want to do the right thing
and I want to go in there and I want to help take care of the mess."
By the way this is also really very useful with children
you know, we have thank God six children at home (well they're not all at home)
but we have six children and so often when there is something that goes wrong
The very first thing a kid says is you know "I didn't make that mess" you know
"go check out my sibling over there that person should take care of it."
but that's not the point. The point is that we should all chip in together
and when we have strengths we should lend those to others to help them take care of their messes.
Again, this can be abused but the goal here is to
develop ourselves and to develop that muscle of forgiveness.
So we see that this third level of forgiveness has a very pragmatic and
human element to it
but let me take it back to this idea that I mentioned earlier that
the angels themselves are unable to do this.
There are some elements of forgiveness that
you simply cannot delegate these things out, you take of them
yourself. And one of the metaphors that I've seen in my own life is the fact that
we have at home a laptop that many members of the family
individual profiles with their own logins and they could use this laptop.
Every now and then you know one of the kids will download something
or will play some kind of crazy game on the Internet
and bang, we will get some kind of virus and things like that and all of a sudden the computer is
all jammed up, and what are you going to do about it?
So that's when they come to me because
I am the only administrator of the computer.
I have the administrator password and I can go in there
and I can wipe everything clean. I can say we're going to start
all over again. That's the same kind of idea here with God.
That God, as it were, has the ultimate administrator password,
that no matter how badly we messed things up - it is within God's power and God's alone,
to go and just enter that password and say "go back to an earlier state", in
time machine so to speak, and make it alright again. So we have to realize that we
have that power as well
with our interpersonal relationships and there are times when we should bring
that to bear.
Okay, so that's the third level of forgiveness
and hope you'll join us for the fourth level as well.
Thank you