The Day the Opponent Disappears

A number that does not add up

The solar year has three hundred and sixty-five days. And the numerical value of the expression the Opponent, השטן, is three hundred and sixty-four.

Exactly one is missing. This is neither coincidence nor arithmetical curiosity: it is the structure. There is a single day of the year over which that force holds no jurisdiction at all, and that day is Yom Kippur.

Notice what that changes about how you cross the day. It is not a day of penance in which we endure something. It is the one day in the calendar on which the adversary is off the field.

The gullet, the windpipe and the ten dimensions

The Zohar teaches that the human body mirrors the ten Sefirot, the ten dimensions that make up reality. Our physical world corresponds to only one per cent of what exists. The other ninety-nine per cent are the invisible source of all joy, wisdom, healing and prosperity.

Each part of the body corresponds to one of those dimensions. And two in particular tell today's story.

The gullet corresponds to Malchut, the physical world, because food and drink descend through it, and they are our material source of sustenance. The windpipe corresponds to Binah, and the reason is precise: no food passes through it at all, only air.

Binah, where you need not eat in order to receive

Binah is a dimension so full of Light and energy that no food or drink is needed there to obtain pleasure or nourishment. The Light of Binah offers far more than the human mind can conceive.

When Moshe stood at Sinai, he reached the level of Binah, and that is where the energy radiating from the Tablets came from.

Hold on to this connection, because it explains the whole day: where there is Binah, you do not need to eat in order to be filled.

Why we do not eat

Now the fast stops being deprivation and becomes an address.

On Yom Kippur we do not eat and do not drink precisely in order to signal the dimension of Binah and the unimaginable spiritual nourishment it offers. It is not suffering offered in exchange for forgiveness. It is our entire physiology pointing at the place where food is unnecessary.

For twenty-four hours the body works like the windpipe: only air passes. And that is why the infinite Light finds a way through.

When the Vav grows and becomes Nun

Here is the mechanism of the letters, and it is disconcertingly elegant.

Gullet, in Hebrew, is written ושט: Vav, Shin, Tet. The Zohar explains that when we are self-indulgent, when the ego and selfish desires grow, the letter ו Vav also grows and stretches until it becomes נ Nun. A Vav is, at bottom, a shortened Nun.

And when the Vav becomes Nun, the same three letters rearrange and now spell שטן. What was our organ of the physical world becomes the name of the Opponent, and it then rules every limb and every artery through the three hundred and sixty-five days.

And when the Nun shrinks back

If the growth of the ego stretched the letter, the reduction of the ego shortens it. That is literally how the Zohar describes the way out.

Just as we reduce the desire to consume food and drink on Yom Kippur, and reduce the ego on Rosh Hashanah, the letter נ Nun contracts and reverts to ו Vav. The letters spell gullet once more.

This is not a metaphor about feeling better. It is an extraction.

The shofar is also an air tube

Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are a single movement, and the piece that joins them is the shape of a tube.

The windpipe is a tube through which only air passes. The shofar is a musical tube through which only air passes. And that is exactly why, just as the windpipe connects us to Binah, the shofar connects us to Binah when it is sounded.

Billy Phillips also draws attention to the visual likeness between the letter ו Vav, the shofar and the human windpipe. The same shape repeats in all three, and the repetition is not decorative.

Sounding the shofar on Rosh Hashanah and making the Yom Kippur connection are, together, the restoration of our link to Binah.

Technology, not tradition

This is the line Billy Phillips repeats and that sums the whole thing up: it is all technology, not tradition.

Through the year we reacted. We were rude, angry, afraid, impatient. Each of those reactions created a blockage, and those blockages clog the arteries of the body, of our relationships and of the world.

The sounding of the shofar, together with genuine remorse and the honest admission of our own self-centred behaviour, clears those blockages. We connect to the territory of Binah, which sends a wave of purifying energy, and the darkness is dissolved.

And then we enter the year with open arteries.