| The fifteen-passenger van bounces down Broadway. I’m up front with our driver and directly in back of me’s a trio of South Africans. We’re done with the chocolate chip cookies left over from a luncheon at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, and have swung by Ground Zero. Twice. Talk turns to home. Johannesburg is beset with an electricity crisis. |
| I’m somewhat familiar with the blackouts that have become increasingly common. Now, Limor, Ronit and Yehudis fill me in. The situation’s worsening daily they report. The juice for the city is drying up. In fact, the power woes have spread to the point of being declared a national emergency. The outages are not new to the black ghettos. What is new is that now no-one’s immune. These spot blackouts (“load sharing” the government dubs them) have shut the nation's lucrative gold mines. And they’re affecting businesses large and small. Limor tells me matter-of-factly that her customers are not committing to buying winter goods for their boutiques. “One guy told my agent, ‘If I can get through this month, I’ll think about winter stock!’ Another store owner bought himself a generator – but it didn’t help ‘cos people don’t even step into the mall. The place is black!” |
| “You should see what it’s like just before Shabbat,” says Ronit. “Just recently on a Friday afternoon, I got home from work and began preparing a dish for a bar mitzva celebration. In the middle of whipping the cream, the power shut off. Next thing, there’s a bunch of ladies on the street checking if this was another outage or just their personal fuse box. I carried the mixer to my Mom’s because on her block the electricity was still on.” |
Yehudis is wearing a purple coat and a mustard scarf. Both pop her blond hair and piercing eyes into focus. She never fails to crack me up. “It’s nuts!” she effuses. “You know, years ago, when South Africa rejected apartheid; people asked me what I was going to do. I told them straight out, ‘I’m staying, ‘till the lights go out.’” Her accent is thick. She pauses dramatically. “Well guess what! My daughter just wrote to me. She said, ‘Ma? Remember what you said? Ma, the lights have gone out! What we gonna do now?!”
I laughed out loud! There was such a finality and simple starkness in her words. In the back of my mind, I thought of the millions of people living in Soweto, Alexandra and other ghettos. This was nothing new to them. Probably what was new was the fact that for many, any electricity at all was a boon to a life lived by candlelight and fires whenever there was fuel to burn. But a whole city draped in black. Driving at night means dealing with the darkness, the commute to work entails navigating the morning rush without traffic-lights. Meat and fresh produce rots quickly. Bakers’ ovens dump dough that rises, and falls. And in the southern hemisphere, winter’s still a way off. |
| These pictures drove home in a visual, visceral way just how vital light and warmth are to our survival. As we bounced over the Brooklyn Bridge, I thought of a teaching of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. Women are gifted with three potent commands. We light candles prior to Shabbat, we separate an offering of dough from bread we bake, and we immerse in the life-giving waters of the mikva at the conclusion of our monthly cycle, in preparation for marital intimacy. All these acts touch on the most basic needs of a person. We all need fuel for light and warmth, we can’t survive without food, and sexuality is essential to the continuation of the human race, and one of the most powerful forces that drives us. Our mitzvot cover the gamut of people’s most basic needs. They also talk to how we are to relate to our physical lives. In singling them out, G-d is telling us that living Jewishly means engaging with but simultaneously elevating our material existence. Torah does not support asceticism, the closed walls of a monastery and a life apart from the bones of the body. We are asked to eat the cookie – or kasha – but to ever remain the master of that act. Doing so means that all our physical endeavors be directed to a higher purpose. It’s a more challenging path than one that eschews the body’s needs. But it touches on G-d’s ultimate intention that our physical world should become a space that manifests His essence. |
| This concept is alluded to in the week’s Torah portion, Mishpatim. It deals with civil laws. They come on the tails of last week’s dramatic accounting of the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai. That was a thunder and lighting affair, packed with the drama of Divine revelation. And the very next week, we’re dealing with murder, unintentional manslaughter, goring oxen, cattle falling into open pits and more. The two seem worlds apart. Yet Rashi, a foremost commentator on the Bible, tells us that they’re intimately connected. The two portions, he explains, are linked by the words “and these are the laws that you must set before (the people of Israel).” With the word “and,” G-d implies a continuation of what was just said. His message is that just as the Ten Commandments are Divine in origin, so too are these civil laws. At the most basic level, this teaches us that our civil laws are not to be adjusted to the current politically correct fad. They are G-d’s will just as potently as the Ten Commandments. At another level, Rashi is communicating that even our (mere) physical lives must be imbued with the sanctity associated with the Revelation at Sinai. |
| This concept is lucidly communicated in the public address the Rebbe gave on the first anniversary of his wife, Rebbetzin Chaya Mushka’s, passing, which we just commemorated. On Shabbat, one is prohibited from lighting a fire. The prohibition applies even when the purpose of lighting that fire is not for the sake of the warmth or light but rather because one needs the ash that will result from the flames. From the laws of what is forbidden on Shabbat, we learn what we are meant to accomplish in life. Shabbat and the week function as two inverse seals that make up the totality of life and our purpose here. Just as it is a mitzva to rest on Shabbat, so too is it a mitzva to work during the week. Bottom line? We must light fires for the sake of ash. We must polish our beings with the light of G-d, of the soul, of the Ten Commandments. We must illuminate our existence. And at the same time, we must bring all that revelation back down to earth, into the ash dimension of our beings. |
| Practically that means we must engage in spiritual acts, pray and study, but we cannot neglect attending to other’s physical needs – providing light and warmth and food for those who have little, helping brides in need, and the like. On the other hand, when we are engaged in physical acts, when we eat, garner fuel for warmth and light, engage in marital intimacy, we must simultaneously strive to refine and rarify these acts. In describing the Rebbetzin, the Rebbe states that remarkably each day of her life, day in and day out, she lit fires, rising beyond material limitations, and concurrently she made sure to bring all that spirituality back to ashes, imbuing the lowest dimensions with the G-dly light she had touched. |
| Such are my thoughts as we cross the bridge. Once over, our van bumps along Flatbush Avenue. By now, the talk has cut to shopping and Atlantic Mall, Burlington coat factory and what time we have to light candles. There’s no time to stop and shop. The sun is too low. Its light is moving west, daubing another peel of the planet with warmth and brightness. Darkness lies just ahead. But down the road, my candlesticks wait for my match. The lights must not go out. |
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