4 Iyar 5768 – Parshas Emor 9 May 2008

Yechezkel Perokim 3 – 9

Well I did not hear from anyone last week so I guess that you all enjoyed it, if not I am sorry and please let know, I even changed my email address to gmail!

Anyway, down to business, things got much worst this week and we have really seen some scary visions being prophesied, whilst having the knowledge that they did come true and sadly some times not only once in our history.

I felt that the climax of the nevuah and what sheds light on what is happening, is chapter eight. Until now we have heard what might happen and how it is going to happen, then almost out of no where, Hashem lets us know what the story in the Temple is. We must not forget that the Temple was not just our spiritual life and the place that we saw the revelation of Hashem, but it also was the one thing that united the Jewish people. Having just spent Yom Ha’atzmaut in Israel, the notion of needing a central place where the nation can turn to and feel pride in, is certainly lacking. So we read that by some means the Navi is being brought to the Temple in Heaven. Now there are a number of points that must be clarified before we continue.

Why is the process of taking him to the Temple so strange? What’s the need to grab him by his payos? Being a payos wearer I can testify that it’s certainly painful and what is this Temple in Heaven? Is it a vision for the future?

Ok, about the payos, Hashem needs to bring the Navi to the Beis HaMikdash NOW. He needs to be shown what is going on, what the people are doing. Therefore, the time did not call for niceties but rather it called for action. We will see soon what was so bad that such urgency was required.

The Beis HaMikdash in shomayim is explained by a number of different sources. The idea is larger than we can fully discover here but it is a good time to explain a little. The world that we see around us i.e. the physical world, the trees, the sun, the moon and even our bodies are all reflections. To explain this point let us take the example of staring at the mirror for a very long time or having a picture taken next to a mirror. It can sometimes be hard to discern what the real image is and what the reflection is. Even when you are convinced that what you are seeing is the real thing, it is merely a reflection.

The same is true at some level here, because for everything in the physical world there is the source of that object in the heavens, in its most complete form possible. Therefore what we see in this world is only a reflection from the real ‘object’. So what Hashem is showing the Navi here is the true Beis HaMikdash. There is a comment by Chazal, that when the Beis HaMikdash was destroyed it was of course a tragic event, but the ultimate tragedy was that the Beis HaMikdash only had that potential to be destroyed because the Beis HaMikdash in Heaven had already been destroy by the Jewish people. So what Hashem is doing here, is showing the Navi who and why is really leading the armies to burn down the House of Hashem.

What the Navi sees at first sight seems to be a rejection of Hashem and pure idol worship. But with a better reading of the verses, one gets to really understand what was going on here.

The history of idol worship is kindly related to us by the Rambam. The story is that people felt the need for a focus for their prayers and chose something from nature to look at in order to help them with this. As I am sure you guessed, it slowly moved away from the item being a point of focus to it becoming an idol and a god in itself. So idol worship is bad and Hashem does not like it, but destroy the Temple? Not sure, but here goes my theory.

If you look at the text the wording should sound like something else you might have read. Ok... it is Noah and the flood. Hashem tells Noah that the world has become full with “Chamas” and then Hashem goes and destroys the world saving Noah with his family and some animals. But here Hashem is going to destroy the Temple because of this “Chamas”. What is the “Chamas”? What is the connection between these two stories?

In essence the deeper problem of what the Navi was seeing was that the order of the Temple had broken down. Each group had certain areas where they were situated and other areas where they were not allowed into. Hashem had prescribed for it to be based on the structure of Mattan Torah. For the woman, they were only meant to go up to a certain point and no further. But here within this vision, the women are in the azarah itself. This was is too far! Now you might be thinking ok, too far forward, too much to the left, big deal!! Well yes it is. The need for order, structure and a system of how the revelation of Hashem is revealed to the world is so important and so critical that in its absence Hashem needed to destroy the Temple for it. There was no manoeuvring space in order that this problem be solved, the only solution was the ‘final solution’ for the Temple.

By rejecting real service for their own service and by violating Hashem’s order with their own they were sending out a message that goes far deeper than that of simply turning away from Hashem. What they were doing was to place man at the centre of the equation, to say that now it is man who decides how a god will reveal itself and whom can perform the service.

This is when the Temple needs to be destroyed, and so to by Noah. In that time it was mankind who decided what was moral, what was theft. There was no longer a system based on the Will of God but rather it was the will of man.

Another place in the Torah that this word comes up is when Yaakov gives his sons a bracha. He tells Reuven and Shimon that they are sons of “Chamas”, since they went out and became the judge, jury and executioner of the Sodomites concerning the episode with Dina. It might have been rightful revenge, but Yaakov tells them that we don’t live like that, we have rules etc.

Now for us, we follow the Torah and try and live a life of meaning. But the question that is a bit harder to answer is who is in the centre of our lives? Can we say that we place Hashem at the centre? Or rather is it a life that when it is easy, we fulfil what we need to do. Can we push ourselves when we don’t understand or don’t want to do?

We must help ourselves walk away from the destruction with positively answering these questions. What really is the centre of my life? Whose will am I really fulfilling?

By Natan Rickman