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Creating Bridges: Spirituality & Philosophy:
Kabbalah: "Letters from Heaven:"
Spiritual Guidance from the Hebrew Alphabet
Chaf
Chaf- triumphing over adversity
Before you can fly
You must stumble and fall
True glory lies in answering the Call
by Avigayil Landsman
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Dedication
The older I get, the more I realize how much I am like my father. He's really my hero. Like him, I need to be engaged in interesting projects. Like him, I have a zany way of looking at life and express strange ideas that seem to come out of nowhere. My perseverance, tenacity, loves of: adventure, art, learning, teaching, water and Torah and my generosity of spirit come from my dad. It would take a long time to credit him with all the ways he has influenced me.
This month I dedicate my teaching to my father, Shmuel ben Zeev v'Chava. My father taught me many things but the skill I most treasure is how to look at clouds. Some of my favorite memories with my dad are pointing to clouds and "interpreting" the images emerging from their organic shapes. My father's cloud gazing is an example of his creativity and inventiveness. These inherited traits have helped me to create the illustrations for my letters.
Just do it!
My Dad has come up with many wisdom sayings. Perhaps his most famous is "live like you will live forever." This is an instruction to give the task at hand everything you've got. Obviously no one can really live forever so living like you will indicates that you are your future; what you do now will live on for future generations. You are important; what you do matters, so don't delay and just do it! Your efforts are focused outside of yourself to keep away from self-aggrandizement. Your work is for the benefit of others.
Another one of my father's teachings was to learn to "pull myself up by my own bootstraps." A therapist once pointed out that this is physically impossible, but when it comes to overcoming obstacles, nothing is impossible to my dad. He has his doctorate from the University of Hard Knocks. Despite the lack of opportunity for formal education, he managed to learn everything he needed to build many profitable businesses, draw up blueprints for factories as well as our home, create chemical formulas for his products and become a pioneer in the frozen food industry.
My father once said that he only knew how to build. He's eighty years young and despite severe health problems, he continues to think of new ideas and ways to implement them. He is an active community member, a busy grandfather and great grandfather, a loving husband and engaged businessman. His passion for learning is ongoing. His most famous saying is, "Live with enthusiasm," and he practices what he preaches! When life throws him a curve ball, he hits harder. If he doesn't know about something, he will find out about it. Inquisitive, feisty, tenacious, he lives each day to it's fullest. His greatest achievement he says is his ability to transform adversity into laughter. "I would say unequivocally, this virtue is the panacea that has carried me through the roughest days of my entire life!"
My dad's ability to not only overcome but to triumph over adversity is the energy of the letter chaf.
Torah teaching
Another character who taught me about the energy of chaf was found in the Torah. In Genesis 32: 26-29, Jacob wrestles all night with an angel. There is no light during the night; it is a time of concealment. When the angel announces at the breaking of dawn that he is about to depart, Jacob insists on receiving a blessing. The angel breaks his chaf, Hebrew for hip and says, "From now on you will be known as Israel for you have wrestled with God." And you thought that a tax audit was tough! What you might not realize is that after this all-nighter with the angel, Jacob's next assignment was to meet his very buff brother, Essau who Jacob feared would do worse to him than what he'd received from the angel! And receive is the proper word here, in all its meanings. This fearful man was scared enough to be meeting up with his brother who years earlier wanted to kill him. He'd stayed up all night, tired out from a wrestling match that resulted in a broken hip. This is not the most advantageous condition to meet one's opponent. But, he received a name, Israel: one who wrestles with God. And in case you didn't read the end of the story, the family reunion went really well.
This story in the Torah teaches us that when we thoroughly engage in our struggles we learn most deeply and are transformed dramatically. Jacob must have learned my Dad's teaching of live like you will live forever because the twelve tribes of Israel descend from Jacob. The lesson on meeting adversity is: Don't run away and hide from the tough lessons of life, meet them, get knocked down, knowing you will get up again, a bit bruised, but so much the smarter for having gone through the experience. I liken this to being at the bottom of a swimming pool. The pressure from being at the bottom gives you the place to push off from. The immediate and "pressing" need to get some air into our lungs is a good motivator as well! Often, this is the place we must metaphorically go to in order to change our lives. You've heard the expression, backed into a corner. We must act, or die.
The hipbone's connected to the…
I relate to this story in a very visceral way because both of my hipbones were broken many years ago. The resulting pain gave me the lesson of empathy. The concealed glory of pain is to see it as a gift, as an opportunity to focus inwardly. It is in my stillness that I come to my Torah insights. Chaf is closed on all sides but one. The spiritual light of yud is embedded, or concealed within a hidden place in us, waiting for something in our lives to bring it out! Bliss is the fundamental reality of life but complete awareness of this is impossible to maintain. We don't experience it because we forget it's there, not because it goes away. We need to remember that! Our feelings of disappointment, anxiety, etc. are the klipot, the veils that need to be uncovered to reveal this ultimate awareness.
Let's give a hand to….
While the yud's ancient derivation is the whole hand, the chaf resembles the palm of the hand. The palm is the part of the hand that is hidden. It is shaped like many of the words that it begins. The chaf makes a grating sound; it comes from the very back of the throat. It's the sound you make when you taste something really bitter or disgusting: yech! That's the taste of life's bitter pill; tough to swallow, but "It's good for you!" says Momma. The word chaf is a palm, spoon, glove or ladle, a hollow of the hand or foot, or in the case of the story of Jacob, the hollow of the inner thigh.
Count on it
The numerical value of chaf(20) is twice that of yud(10); it is ten times that of beit(2), the house. Yud, spirituality now has a container, the works of our hands in relationship to others (two pairs of hands equals 20 fingers). In an earlier column, I presented beit as the earthly house, closed in on three sides to protect and nurture the life within, including an extender that I see as a back porch. The extender of beit drops off to form chaf. Metaphorically, this housing renovation moves us away from primary physical concerns to the emotional realm. The number ten comes up frequently in the Torah, most notably, in the Creation and the Ten Commandments. The rabbis say that God made all of Creation with ten sayings. These two things are the foundation of our existence; without Creation, we wouldn't have a place to exist and without the law we wouldn't have a code to live by.
Peek-a-boo with God: revealing the hidden light
Chaf's journey is finding the glory within. Glory is the primordial light that we humans cannot perceive since we are bound by time and physical reality. The glory of God too is hidden. The light of God is hidden in the world and it is through our mitzvot, good deeds that we reveal that light. A reminder of how God loves to play peek-a-boo with us. Cover Mount Sinai with a cloud of glory while Moses is taking dictation, remove it and voila'-- Moses brings down the Ten Commandments with a side order of fries! It is hidden and revealed simultaneously. Revealing what is concealed ultimately isn't as difficult as one might think. If we can free ourselves of our need for immediate gratification, we can align ourselves with this power. What gets revealed is actually what has existed all along.
Revelation is the process of removing the veils, just as the mountains, concealed in darkness are revealed once drawn breaks. Emotionally, the process takes a bit more time; transforming grief into creativity, for example. We all have expectations and when reality doesn't match the script we've written in our minds, we often feel sad and disappointed. The crowning (chaf is the first letter in the word keter, crown) achievement is when we meet another part of ourselves that is clear and grounded. When we can transform our pain and achieve a higher level of awareness, we are like kings and queens. Melech, the Hebrew word for king ends in final chaf. Kallah, meaning bride begins with chaf. Kallah also means to destroy. In destroying the old notions, a new form will arise. This "birth" isn't so much new as it is a return to our authenticity.
Finding the divine within us through doing the inner work is beautifully expressed in the lines of a Rumi poem, "Be Melting Snow":
Lo, I am with you always means when you look for God,
God is in the look of your eyes,
in the thought of looking, nearer to you than your self,
or things that have happened to you
There's no need to go outside.
Image
2nd century Rabbi Meir wrote, "We come into the world with clenched fists, as though to say, 'The whole world is mine to acquire.' We leave the world with hands wide open, as though to say: 'I have acquired nothing in this world.'"(Midrash Ecclesiastes Rabbah 5:21) When I heard Rabbi Jonathan of Kehilat Lev Shalem in Woodstock read these words I immediately knew that this was the inspiration for the chaf card. I thought of a newborn baby with tight fists, defenseless, protecting herself, needing everything, and fearing for her very life. As she grows and matures, she loses this fear and by the time she dies, she has learned that her fear is pointless because "you can't take it with you." Hopefully, through living with our eyes wide open and meeting the challenges of life head on, we lose our fear for survival. This leads naturally to faith in God's loving protection.
The chaf is the palm of the hand, that which receives. We need to hold out our hand to receive the desired as well as the challenging with deference, knowing that the purpose of life is found in the wrestling, not necessarily in the acquiring. And in the end of all that wrestling we acknowledge that it's time to let it all go.
I thank my brilliant son, Philip for helping me with creating this image. The concentric circles speak of the soul's journey to the cosmos. The light inside the palm shows how the concealed light of the soul is released in death as it returns to its Infinite Source of LIGHT. Death is the final letting go of everything to return to the ONE.
Chaf in a reading
If chaf shows up in a reading you are being asked to let go of your defenses and fully submit to the challenge at hand-no pun intended! Denial, rationalizations, and avoidance all delay your ultimate arrival. Know that your destiny can change through perseverance. Push past your resistance to change; don't settle for mediocre and safe. Face your pain. A tenacious midwife will instruct a timorous mother-to-be who is in the throes of hard labor to, "Push past the pain!" The greatest gifts in life often come from triumphing over our adversities, whether they are intellectual, physical, or emotional. And if you can learn to laugh in the face of chaos and disappointment you, like my dad will earn your doctorate from UHK(University of Hard Knocks).
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Avigayil Landsman,
Torah Scholar, Calligrapher, Lecturer, Teacher & Creator of the "Letters From Heaven" Deck
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Avigayil has been a serious student of Torah for the last ten years and has written many d'vrai Torah(Torah lectures). She is the creator of Letters from Heaven, a Jewish divination system that incorporates the mystical meanings of the Hebrew letters, her chiddushim (new insights into Torah) and their application to the challenges of daily life. Her LFH readings offer seekers of all persuasions spiritual direction in finding one's authentic voice.
Avigayil is a multi-media artist who is best-known for the beaded breastplate that adorns the Woodstock Jewish Congregation's Torah. She creates personalized ketubot, beeswax Shabbat candles, shiviti plaques and other judaica as well as secular art in Sculpey, paint, and shadow boxes that combine disparate objects such as feathers, beads and wood.
Her Judaica (beeswax Shabbat and havdallah candles, havdallah spice boxes, shiviti plaques) and calligraphy cards are available for purchase at the Woodstock Jewish Congregation's judaica shop, Miriam's Well and her home. She also does private commissions.
Avigayil has taught enrichment classes in calligraphy for the Woodstock Jewish Congregation's Hebrew school. She prepares children and adults for becoming Bat/bar-mitzvah with humor and deep wisdom that come from her own unique way of living through the lessons of Torah. She has also given workshops and lectures on the spiritual meaning of the Hebrew letters and Letters from Heaven at Omega and Mount St. Alphonsus.
"Avigayil Landsman's interpretations of the Hebrew letters are original, witty, steeped in scholarship, and above all a genuine opening to our own spiritual wisdom." Rachel Pollack, creator of Shining Tribe Tarot Deck
www.rachelpollack.com
Avigayil is available for art commissions and LFH readings in person or on the phone. She may be contacted by e-mail at:
Avigayil1@earthlink.net
Website:
www.jewish-wisdom
-and-art.4t.com
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