The Locked Gates

The Shabbat when judgment is still open

Karen Berg begins by placing the day. This is the Shabbat right after Rosh Hashanah, and she says it matters for a very concrete reason. At Rosh Hashanah we learned that the shofar acts like a laser, literally tearing through us and through the negativities we committed. That leaves us somewhere new, a place from which we can see what the next ten days will look like.

And one thing changes everything about this week. Judgment is still open. What was written at Rosh Hashanah may stand for each of us, or it may be changed by our actions in the ten days that run to Yom Kippur. This is not a week of waiting. It is the window in which the decision is still being made.

Rav Ashlag and the places that seem locked

What most of us ask for at this time of year, she says, is an easier stretch. We ask to see our situation clearly, to know where we should go, what we could do and what we should do. It is an honest request. And that is where she brings in Rav Ashlag, who speaks about something quite different.

There are places that seem to be locked to us. And the reason they are locked, he teaches, is so that we are forced to cross the barrier. When we come in through that barrier, we receive all the energy that exists inside it. The lock is not an obstacle placed in the way of the energy. The lock is where the energy is kept.

These are the things that press on us and move us forward. That is why what happens in our lives sometimes looks sad, depressing and so hard. The difficulty is not there in spite of the growth. It is the shape the growth comes in.

The seed needs the earth that covers it

Something beautiful is written in this week's portion, she says. When we plant seeds in the earth, they are covered in mud and soil. Only when the rain touches them and they are able to open do they break through the earth, become grass and, in the end, become fruit. The same holds for us.

The seed is not buried by accident, and it is not buried as a punishment. It is buried because it is down there, in the dark, covered, that it gains the strength to break through. And the greater the difficulty we manage to cross, the higher we can reach at the next level. The same holds for how much we receive.

I am a decent person. Why do I deserve this?

Here Karen Berg does something few teachers do. She does not step over the objection. She says it out loud, the way it actually sounds inside us: "I have done so many things. I am a very decent person and I share when I can. Why do I deserve to go through this turbulence that so often catches up with us in life?"

It is the most honest question there is at this time of year, and it is the one almost nobody asks out loud because asking it feels unspiritual. Her answer is not an argument. She says she told a story the week before, in Los Angeles, and she begins again there.

That was you. The Baal Shem Tov's story

A man went to the Baal Shem Tov and said his life was a mess. His family, his business, everything he saw around him. And he did not know why, because he had spent his whole life being a decent person, doing good things for others, generous and kind. The Baal Shem Tov looked at him and told him to travel to a certain town and look for a certain person.

Three days of travel. When he arrived, he asked after that person and no one seemed to know them. It was as if they had never existed. Until one man remembered: there is an old man who lived here and still lives here, over a hundred years old. If anyone knows that person, he does.

The old man spat on the ground. "Never mention his name again. He was the worst human being who ever lived here. He was mean, he was bitter, he was unfeeling. At his funeral, half the town did not even show up." The man went back to his master with nothing, and the master asked what he had found. "I found nothing. He has been dead for many years, and they say he was a horrible human being who cared about no one." And the master asked: "Did you learn nothing from that?"

And that is why, she says, everything that was happening and breaking into that man's life were tests. They were the locks he needed to cross in order to wash and clean the parts of him still encrusted in that negativity. We are not so elevated, and so we often cannot see the crust on our own life.

No one is asking you to become an angel

Once a year, with the sound of the shofar at Rosh Hashanah, we get the chance to change and alter our destiny, to enter another space. And here she takes the weight off everyone: no one is asking us to become angels, because all of us are going to fall. All of us will commit negative actions. The question is how far we go.

Negativity, she says, is what we offer in order to reach the energy of the Light of the Creator. That is the polarity of life. And a guarantee comes with it, one worth keeping: we are never given more than our capacity to change.

She adds a proof that comes from the body. When Rosh Hashanah closes, we are no longer the same, even though we feel the same and look the same. How do we know it is true? Every seven years the whole body changes. The lungs, the liver, everything changes. We insist on saying "I am still myself, I remember where I have been". But it changes.

Ha'azinu: the body and the soul as witnesses

This portion, Ha'azinu, is the poem and the song Moshe sings, and it is the union between the Right Column and the Left Column. Karen Berg recalls that there are ten songs, or shirim, in the teachings, and that it is written that the last one will be sung at the hour of the Redemption. She says we are very close, and that she knows because she can see the chaos around us.

When Moshe speaks to heaven and to earth, what he is saying is: I am speaking to your body and I am speaking to your soul, and I ask that both bear witness. The reason he calls both is that the body is full of its own desires. The body needs so many things that the soul says "I cannot go there, I do not want to go there".

And that is where she names the struggle in a line anyone recognises: the struggle between what I need to do and what I want to do. Very often the wanting overcomes the needing, and we find ourselves in a situation where it is very hard to love beyond ourselves.

If you go home doing the same things as always

From the first day of Creation there is the Desire to Receive for Oneself Alone. It is written that it was created Yesh Me'Ayin, something out of nothing, and it is the one thing that did not exist within the Creator. Our purpose is not to erase it. It is to transform it, however strong or hard it may be, and bring it to a place where we can use it in the service of humanity.

That starts somewhere small. If we recognise our negativities, if we recognise what we need to change, we begin precisely with that consciousness. And in that consciousness we already have the capacity to transform it and use it for the common good. We are all far from Moshe's level, but we can be ourselves. At the final moment, she says, the angels above do not ask us to be Moshe. They only ask that we be ourselves.

And then comes the warning, which is the hardest part of the class. If we do not reach that potential, if we do not decide that this is a great cosmic opening and we go home doing the same things as always, then those angels we destroyed at Rosh Hashanah come straight back. Every one of them finds its way back inside us. And then, without noticing, we drift slowly, slowly, further and further from the positive energy, to the point where we do not even notice how far we have gone.