Dear Friends,

After spending time in Eretz Yisrael things are different. This cities are bigger, the workplace more faceless. On one hand the people who surround you as you walk to the train are more indifferent and on the other hand they are subtly more judgmental. They brand you, and you brand them. It takes an instant. How you look isn't just a matter of your own taste; like it or not, it's your statement about how you want to be seen. 
This effects many things. One of them is how you relate to your mirror.  Is your mirror one of your most precious possessions? It's hard to imagine living without one. The only kind of mirror I don't want to have, is the kind that magnifies every pore. It's easy to think of mirrors and the obsession with appearance that is so ‘Today’ ,as the Tool of Satan and the Weapon of the Vain. This isn't the picture you end up with when you look at the beginning of this week's Parshah.  The laver is described at the very beginning of the narrative. The what?

Come on, be honest, how many of you have any idea of what a laver is?  It's a word like phylacteries and firmament. No one uses any of these words in normal conversation. They do all have an erudite sound to them. Laver means basin. The one described at the Parshah’s beginning was created out of the copper that was made out of the mirrors used by your great great grandmothers during the time of their enslavement. Why did they make themselves mirrors? They were slaves. Who could they possibly be out to impress? The mirrors were for "domestic use only" Before their husbands came home, they used the mirrors that they made by polishing copper to a high gloss to see themselves. They did their best to pretty themselves up, to fish their supper straight out of the Nile, and to have their men come home to the smell of food, and the atmosphere created by a woman whose appearance tells them that she still cares, and wants to bear children. These women saw a future when it looked like there was no future. They had hope when a sane person would have given up.

Nothing could be further from them, than the self-absorption and insecurity that you can easily associate with looking in the mirror. When they saw themselves, they saw women who were strong enough to take the chance of believing.

The laver was used for the Kohanim. They washed their hands and feet (remember, they didn't wear shoes or socks in the Mishkan or the Bais HaMikdash) in the water that poured out of its spigots. This kind of washing, like the washing that we do before eating bread, was for spiritual purity rather than just physical cleanliness - in fact nothing is allowed to intervene between the water and the hands. This kind of purity is the kind of purity that the mirrors in Egypt had absorbed from the women who used them.  
What does this say to you?

Maybe it tells you that your bodies are noble, important and should be taken seriously. Orchos Tzadikim tells you that you should regard your body the way you would regard marble statues in the anteroom of a palace. They are well kept, spotless. If you were responsible for them, you would do everything to see that their beauty remains unmarred. If you did not it wouldn't be just a statement about you, it would be a statement about your relationship to the King.

When Rebbitzen Risha Kotler parted from her father on the railway station, they both knew it would be the last time that they see each other. She was headed to Shanghai with her husband; her father didn't have the papers that would have made his escape possible. The Nazi war machine was swallowing up everything in its way and they would soon capture the ground that they were standing on. He asked her to promise him something. She asked him what he wanted her to promise; she valued her commitments enough to not tell him that she would do something that was beyond her reach. "I want you to see that your shoes are always tied and that you walk straight and not look any man in the eye". His requests were strange; decades later when she told me about this last meeting, there was still a tone of wonder in her voice. She had expected him to ask for more - to keep the mitzvos, or to remember her family's standards. This seemed so irrelevant to what she would be facing in the next chapter of her life's story.
It wasn't.

When the Americans liberated Shanghai, the others marched into its streets with the self-assuredness of victors. They were young, strong, untried by the privations of years of wartime. They were carefree, generous, and arrogant. There was something about the way she carried herself, and the self-possession that everything about her echoed that made them know instinctively that she was out of their range; not for sale and not for the kind of artificial friendship that seemed so natural at the time.
Have a great week and a wonderful "little Purim", the Adar 1 version of the Purim we will all celebrate next month, Adar 2. It is a time of miracles, of redefinition and of simchah
​
Use well!!!
Yours, Tziporah

 
Dear Friends,
When my mother came to Israel for her first lengthy stay, she rented a room with a woman who like herself was an older widow living alone. They had almost nothing else in common, but they soon became fast friends.  They sometimes began the day with enjoying their schmoozing sessions over the kind of leisurely breakfast that two retired woman can afford to permit themselves to indulge in. Their discussions often took them to checking out first- hand what was new in the stores on Machei Yisrael, the Geulah equivalent of Fifth Avenue. They were way past being the fashionistas they may have been over half a century earlier, but shopping was important. The right accessory, or right head-scarf was worth the hunt, and of course the discussion, and finally (sometimes) the “kill”- the actual purchase of the item “captured”.
​
Whether or not you have the time or inclination to mega shop, your purchases tell you more than you think that they do. When you look at your own closet, what do you see? Its contents don’t tell you who you are, it tells you who you wish to be, and how you want others to see you.  Your closet is your armory (whether you think about it or not). It’s where you store your identity and at least to some degree, your defenses.
It is extremely unlikely that you own anything even remotely resembling the Kohein Gadol’s eight garments. When you get to Parshat Titzaveh, you may wonder why they are described in such detail. You may ask yourself what the Torah is telling, not just about him, but about you, since nothing in the Torah is irrelevant..

The significance of their garments is that the Kohen is meant to have an identity that goes beyond the identity of an ordinary individual. When he isn’t wearing these garments, his individual personality is exposed with all of its faults and weaknesses’. When he is wearing the bigdei kehunah he doesn’t appear as he actually is in his personal life, but as she should be.  He must be one with his garments! The Gemarrah tells us that nothing can intervene between the garments and his body. They have to become one unit. Each of the garments brought about atonement for a defined sin by giving us a vision of what the rectified state of the underlying cause of the sin of being would “wear”. Until you know what purity and holiness really look like in real life, you have nothing with which to contrast your own choices, and the norms of the society in which you live.

The materials that were used in making the garments are a statement, as is their purpose and their color. Malbim, Rav Hirsch and others take the difficult esoteric ideas presented in earlier mystic sources and make them digestible.  Here is a small sampling of some of their ideas. The trousers and the tunic were made of white linen. Linen is made of flax, which grows. This tells you that the “vegetative” you, the part of you that enacts sexual activity must be pure. Thus the trousers atoned for transgressions involving your least conscious and most desire oriented self. The message isn’t “don’t have desires”. It is “use your entire spectrum of desires and feelings in a way that is holy”. In contemporary society the laws governing these areas of life are seen as repressive and unnatural. The Torah’s view is that being holy is liberating, and for a Jew nothing is more natural!

The next garment, the tunic, covered the heart, the seat of emotion. The passions that are so much part of your life ultimately are (to quote the Vilna Gaon), the “Captain of the Ship”. Your heart must be informed by your mind; otherwise you are in the unenviable positon of being on a ship that has no navigator. The first time that I read this, I did a flash back to the heroes of my literature classes in High School.  The Shakespearean plays that we were (forced) to read, the tales of the Knights of the Round Table, and many others were beautifully written. They had the gift of making you feel like you are there, feeling what they felt (if you liked literature that is…). These feelings (love of honor, proving  your strength against “the foe” without even questioning whether the label fits, even romantic love which was often lust covered with beautiful lyrics but no content)  had no direction. They narrated the story of a ship with no navigator; there was no underlying purpose to the life. The characters were completely out of touch with their deepest most human side. It’s not for nothing that the tunic which covers the heart atones for murder.  If you are the star of your own show, then potentially every other human being can be your competitor and thus your enemy.
There are six more garments, but there is neither time nor space for me to go into them right now.
You may be wondering why I even began to write about this topic. The reason is that before the Torah was given, Hashem told us that we are a holy nation and a nation of kohanim. That means that, whatever, your personal flaws still remain untouched, you still have a role that you can’t neglect. You are a member of the Jewish people, with a defined mission. You have to exemplify what being holy is. What does this look like in real life?

It looks like a girl who spent a half a year at Neve doing her best to keep the laws of negia. It looks like a girl who spent half that amount of time deciding that she will only date boys who share her values. It looks like a girl who is fully observant and knows the halachot making it clear to the shadchans she speaks to that she wants to build a house built on the foundations of Torah. It also looks like a girl who has a painful home life. She wears her emotions with kedushah. That means, for her, deciding to play the game by her rules and not theirs; even if people say things that are indescribably degrading, she responds with decency because she is committed to be the kind of person who never “kills” anyone by humiliating them. 
 
You all have the ability to be part of the Kingdom of Kohanim. Enjoy the role!

Yours,
Tziporah

Dear Friends,

The last of the Parshiyos about the geulah has arrived! This week is very much a climax to the entire drama of the exodus.

Surprisingly it doesn't say anything at all about the slavery, the miracles of the plagues, the sea splitting or the revelation at Mount Sinai. In fact, when you keep yourself very committed to not going past the surface, it's hard to fathom why this chapter is here to begin with. It narrates the way G-d commanded the Jews to build Him a sanctuary in the desert. Each detail is presented with great care and specificity. Which metals are to be used, what kind of materials for the hangings, how big, how many are the core questions that are answered throughout the Parshah. It leaves you wondering. The Jews were in the desert for only forty years. Even after they entered Israel, the sanctuary that we learn about in such detail was never meant to last forever. The Bais HaMikdash, as was planned all along replaced it.
The key to the Parshah is the phrase, "Make Me a sanctuary, and I will live in you". The sentence doesn't end the way you would expect it to end, "and I will live in it". The sanctuary is an experiential map of how to bring G-d into your life. Each detail reflects a specific way to redefine yourself. This is why it is the climax of the exodus. We didn't get out of Egypt in order to be a nation like any other nation. We experienced miracle after miracle to open our hearts and minds to the Torah, and from that point onward, to actualizing the Torah by letting it touch every aspect of our lives.

The Parshah begins by telling us to bring Trumah. The word is used today to mean contribution or donation. It's literal meaning is to uplift or exalt. What that is telling you is that the real world is there in front of you to exalt, uplift and "recreate" in a certain sense. Take work for instance. I surveyed the girls in my class who had worked in the real world before entering Neve. One girl was a building manager, another an assistant producer, another was a corporate trainer, and the final one was involved in health care. I asked them one question; "Who is your boss working for". The building manager was absolutely clear. He worked for himself-his tenants were a mean towards an end. The assistant producer felt the same was, her boss was there to actualize his creative potentials. Other people were incidental to that goal. The same held true for the others. None of their employers is evil or abusive in any way. They are however totally unaware of the possibility of being uplifted by the way you relate to your work, and even less aware of the potential to uplift the lives of the people who they see every day, or the materials that they work with continually. The first things that we were told to uplift, is gold silver and copper. These metals are often the basis of the currency that we use.

The secular world is not a place that you can easily use as a vehicle to uplift yourself enough to become a sanctuary to G-d. You can see things differently. YOU have to do the uplifting. This is what liberation and Matan Torah is all about. You have the ability not only to not be destroyed by the day-to-day challenges that you face, you can redefine them and leave everyone you encounter higher than they were when they met you. Here's what this looks like when this happens.

I will never forget my Shabbos at Rabbi Yuden's community. My friend drove me to his home a short time before Shabbos. I knew that she still faced a longish drive back to Brooklyn, and that sunset waits for no one. When I saw the house, I said, "Just drop me off now. Don't wait to see me in" and she drove away.  I knocked at the door and an African American man answered. The one thing I knew was that this could not be Rabbi Yuden. I put a Colgate smile on my face, to disguise what was going on the inside. "Where can I go for Shabbos? This is the wrong address. Who do I know in the area. No one!" I asked him, "Do you happen to know where Rabbi Yuden lives?" "Here" He replied, and opened the door wider. I reluctantly entered, and the real Rabbi Yuden soon appeared. He introduced me to his wife, who showed me to my room. I had no way of interpreting what had happened, so I contented myself with getting ready for Shabbos by eating the snacks that they had left for me. As things turned out, the man was a prospective convert. He met Rabbi Yuden when he worked as the shul's custodian. He was so moved by the rabbi's integrity, the truth of his divrei Torah, and his personal treasury of exemplary middos that he wanted to belong to the same "club" and decided to become a Jew.
This is what uplifting yourself and your environment looks like. The sanctuary was divided into sections. The innermost section held the Aron, where the tablets of the law were. There was a partition leading to an outer chamber where there was a menorah, the sacred table, and the incense alter. Each of these represent an aspect of each of us, the mind (the tablets of the law contained within the aron), the heart (the menorah) and the material aspects of life. This isn't even the tip of the iceberg; there are far more numerous and more profound levels of experiential symbolism for each vessel.  The details of the Parshah tell you how to unlock the mystery of their use.
​
Let's say (I know that this is unlikely) that you don't follow the advice that I am now offering; learn the entire Parshah with Rav Hirsh's commentary so that you can learn the "map" of life. The Parshah still has relevance. If nothing else, you learn that relationship is a two-way street. G-d showed us miracles and gave us the Torah. It is now up to you to use the inspiration of the miracles and the laws of the Torah to change yourself, the people you see daily, and the physical world around you.
 
All the best,
Tziporah

Dear Friends,

The winter here is turning rapidly (but not necessarily permanently) into spring, and I have a strong desire to discard the computer and go out to the forest, but I will Be Good.
​
The Zohar compares your mind to a wild horse, that can’t be totally tamed. As soon as I wrote the above sentence, I found myself thinking about being enslaved to routine, which makes sense. Then the wild horse, my mind, took me much further than I had intended to go. Then I began to think about what actual slavery is about, which took me back to reality and from there to this week’s Parshah.

It’s rather surprising that the very first laws to be taught in detail are ones concerning slaves. Rav Hirsch’s take on this is that the way you treat people who have no options is to a large degree the strongest indication of who you really are. In fact, he points out, that the entire contractual side of marriage is stated in regard to a young girl who was sold as a bondswoman. She had to be a girl under 12 or pre-puberty, whose father’s poverty forced him to sell her to someone as a bondswoman for six years (or until she reaches the age of 12 or puberty, whichever comes first). Her father betrayed her in many ways (although it’s not necessarily his fault that he became so desperately poor). The Torah tells you that she must receive full support, have all of her needs met including conjugal rights just like any other woman, it is telling you more about the kind of society that Hashem wants us to develop than what it is telling you about the fate of a young girl.

I was more interested (when I went out of my reverie about the slave girl  and back to the computer) about what it was like to be an actual slave. As many of you know, if a man stole and couldn’t pay his target back, the court was empowered to sell him for six years, and to use the money to repay his victim. If he was married, his new master had to undertake supporting his family (who were not slaves). He also had to treat the slave as almost an equal in regard to his living conditions. Although I understand how a pre-industrial agricultural society was dependent on this sort of labor, I still couldn’t figure out why discussing all of the detailed laws has to be number one. There is a far deeper perspective, and I want to share it with you.
When Adam sinned in the Garden of Eden, his future generations inherited the limitations that he generated just as absolutely as we inherited his body and his soul’s potentials. Towards the end of the Parshah, it says, “My soul shall not resonate within man because he is flesh”. The speaker is G-d. He is voicing a reality that defined the era. People had mad such really awful choices that they could only relate to life physically. They were deaf to Hashem’s presence inside them. Sound familiar?

The next step was that robbery and “grabbing” defined the pre-flood world. Robbery means what you think it does, but grabbing means taking what you want and leaving money for it even though your victim didn’t necessarily want to sell it. This reflects how much that they lived only for themselves. Working towards any goal beyond themselves was outside of their range of choices.  The result was Hashem renewing His covenant with His creation after the flood made it possible to begin again. The Zohar on today’s parshah tells you what happened to the souls of the people who died in the flood. They had not rectified themselves. There was no pre-flood teshuvah movement. In fact they were hostile towards Noach and mocked his mission. Hashem brought them back to this world as the Jewish people. He redefined the rules of the game by creating an entire nation whose role would be to present the rest of the world with a living picture of what humanity is meant to be. In order for us to assume this role there were many lessons to assimilate. One of them was complete dedication to a task whether or not it gives your personal satisfaction. The Jews had to experience slavery in Egypt before they were ready to submit themselves honestly to a framework in which they define themselves as Hashem’s servants. For this reason, one of the first laws they had to learn was the laws concerning slavery. Here are a few insights.

1-Stealing from G-d can also take place.  It means making use, or having pleasure from the world without using it as a bond to its creator. There is a premise that the world’s “calendar” lists 6,000 years of work towards moving beyond this form of “stealing” as our goal. IF we don’t make the right choices,  we will ultimately become so disillusioned that we return to Hashem. Finally at the end of that period, moshiach will come bringing the world and everyone in it to real freedom.  You will no longer enslaved to base desires, status seeking, and all of the other nonsense that you and I deal with on a daily basis. Imagine what it feels like to be really free!

2-A slave serves 6 years. The days of the workweek are ones that parallel his term of labor. Shabbos gives you a taste of the freedom you will have when you finally grow up!
This is the week of shovavim in which you can become freer, not by accepting the Torah’s laws that free you from the worst kind of slavery that there is; slavery to yourself, your routine, your desires, your love of validation.

​Yours as ever,
Tziporah