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Are you feeling it?

Imagine you bought a new car and after six months it starts to get very sluggish. You take it to the mechanic and he recommends a good wash and wax. “What? Are you crazy? There’s an internal problem,” you say. “Okay,” he says, “how about putting on some of those fancy rims?”

Believe it or not, this is what we do with something even more precious than a new car. When people are feeling negative, sad, or unresourceful, they often opt for an easy superficial solution that is more of a distraction than a cure. Go to a movie, have a drink, eat some ice cream. Sleep. These bandaids don’t address the core issue. The reason why we opt for them is because we really aren’t used to delving into our insides. If you are able to get in touch with what’s on the inside, it’s a very useful thing to do.

One of the elusive things in life is surprisingly very close to your beating heart. It’s called intuition and for most people it has a life of its own. Do you want to have more of a handle on it?

Actually, your mind and heart are in cahoots to form an inner sense called intuition. This elusive part of us can be a powerful tool, if we understand it. Since you’re more familiar with your mind, let’s start with that.

Mental Intuition

In Hebrew the word Binah sometimes refers to intuition, and is one of the main spiritual connections to the Almighty, as explained in Kabbalah. Binah can mean knowledge that comes to a person without an intellectual process. A flash of insight or an uncomfortable feeling about a person or situation can come to us for a variety of reasons. But usually we think of this as intuition.

Technically, binah is a word that grammatically implies making connections between two different things. (Similarly the word “bein” means – between.) Sometimes it refers to the type of analysis that takes an idea and compares and contrasts it to everything else we know to be true. We can do this naturally, or we can do this intentionally. If I say “I’m not really 47 but I’m actually 35,” you will automatically, not necessarily intentionally, start matching that statement with internal knowledge in a split second. Does he look 47 or 35? Why would he have said he was 47 if he isn’t? Does he have an expression on his face that shows he’s joking?

On the other hand, a process of comparing a statement with everything else you know to be true can also be done intentionally. The Torah states God said to love your fellow man. Here are some analytical questions: Can I choose to love? What if my fellow man is a moron and a jerk that leaves his garbage cans in front of my driveway every week? Why isn’t it enough for me to merely like my fellow man? Can I just love my fellow man in my heart or is God asking me to try to stop famine and war in the world also?

You can develop, with practice, an analytical intellect that naturally breaks information down, clarifies, defines, and then compares and contrasts. The ancient Talmud trains people to do this, and learning this process is a large portion or any “traditional” scholar’s training.

Premonition

Have you ever had a premonition? Have you ever felt like something was going to happen before it did? The heart knows when something is about to happen. We all have intuitive feelings all the time, but we ignore them because they are distractions. We have no idea, usually, what information these feelings carry. Is it heartburn? A headache? Or an inkling that something is about to happen. Job, the quintessential sufferer of the Bible, had three friends that sensed something was wrong and all showed up at his door on the same day. Their friendship was so strong that they were able to get in touch with their intuition. Many people have had an experience similar to this. They say “I don’t know why, I just felt I had to call my mother or my brother, etc.” and the phone call was needed at that moment.

There is a spiritual world all around us that is complex. There are thousands of spiritual beings on your left and on your right. And there’s a good reason why we are unaware of the spiritual world. It’s too much for us to handle. But many generations held onto sensitivity to spirituality and didn’t leave it completely. For the past one hundred years people have gone away from the unseen and the mystical. They wanted facts and science, not religion and superstition. But they threw the baby out with the bathwater.

The truth is that you are not required to get in touch with your intuition. But if you do, it can be an extremely powerful tool.

Intuition

Graphology is the study of handwriting and is used by psychologists, criminologists, and job application analysts. A good graphologist can tell you many things about your personality. They can describe your relationship with your parents; they can assess your general level of honesty, tell if you’re happy or depressed. But it takes time to learn this skill, and you have to have an intuitive ability also. They studied children’s ability to assess handwriting based purely on intuition. It turns out the children were extremely accurate until they reached puberty. After that, as pre-teens they began to rely more on intellect or visual factors and less on their intuition. Children are naturally intuitive. If you want to relearn your intuition, you need to get in touch with your “inner child.” You have to choose a time and a place to feel childlike. Not immature, but more like going with the flow, having unstructured fun. Sometimes spending time with a child and letting the child dictate the flow of activities and conversation can help. Sometimes being around other people who are intuitive like artists and musicians can help too. When was the last time you sat on the floor with a child and played?

Feelings

People tend to think of “feelings” as emotions like anger or jealousy, but there are various feelings that aren’t emotions. You can feel tired, hungry or thirsty. You can feel “funny”. You can feel out of sorts, awkward, uncomfortable, upbeat, or “on your game”. You can feel like something isn’t quite right. Feelings can be synonymous with intuition. Feelings come and go all day long. An exercise you can do to get control of the power inside you is to write down on a piece of paper numbers one to ten. Carry the paper with you and every once in a while write down exactly how you are feeling. It may not be easy, but with effort you can articulate what you are feeling. This act puts your internal barometer more in the palm of your hand.

Inside

Kabbalists describe the internal workings of the human being. We all recognize that we are not our body. The physical masks the spiritual. Our body is our “mortal coil” that we are enclothed with while in this physical world. Some of us are also aware that we are not our thoughts and feelings. If you can say, “I can’t control my thoughts.” then you are not your thoughts. If you can say, “I can’t stop feeling this way.” then you are not your feelings.

But the act of getting in touch with your thoughts, feelings, and intuition gets you one giant step closer to understanding your true self. Some people say “ignorance is bliss”, but I believe true happiness comes from understanding yourself, God, and spirituality. The tool described here, of getting in touch with your inner self, is a powerful means to greater happiness.

Revenge, Sweet Revenge

Even though the Bible is the biggest “bestseller” of all time, and continues to affect believers and non-believers more than any other book ever written, many people are wholly unfamiliar with the original language. This causes some confusion and misunderstanding especially if you get your religious philosophy from Time magazine.[1] Some misunderstandings regarding the spiritual messages from the Torah can easily be cleared up without spending years studying the language. There are some key mistakes that are the cause of major glitches that should be corrected.

Here is one of the Top Ten Mistranslations:

עין תחת עין – “Ayin tachas ayin” – An eye for an eye.

(Ex.-21:24, Lev.-24:20, Deut.-19:21)

Ask your average layman if they are familiar with this phrase and what it means and you’ll hear that - of course that is the famous Biblical verse advocating taking revenge on your enemies. Although other peoples all over the world have sanctioned revenge in various forms, even officially in the Code of Hammurabi and Babylonian Law, the Torah is quite clear that revenge is forbidden; it is a transgression stated in Leviticus 19:18 “Thou shalt not take revenge.” People think the Torah advocates revenge when in reality it forbids it.

This misunderstanding is so pervasive, being misquoted in books and magazines, even by spiritual and knowledgeable people like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. that it is almost useless trying to convince people otherwise. But if you want to know the real Torah; the one that has guided spiritual people for 3300 years, you should know the truth.

It is truly unfortunate that not only do people misunderstand the true message of the Torah, but they use this mistranslation to malign the Jewish people, who historically are shown to be extremely non-vengeful compared with other nations.

Two types of revenge

To be clear, there are two types of “revenge” that need to be separated. One is a private type of revenge where a person takes it upon himself to exact retribution when someone did him wrong. This, the Torah says, is clearly immoral. When we do that we are playing God. It’s the Almighty’s job to right wrongs, carry out punitive justice and correct the imbalances in the world. When we are slighted we naturally want to retaliate. We want to make things “even”. But that feeling is disconnected from God and spirituality. We need to channel those feelings inward and ask why the event happened in the first place. Is there a lesson I need to learn? Am I leaving myself unprotected? Is there a message from the Almighty concerning my spiritual growth?

We need to remind ourselves that God still runs the world. If someone stole $100. from me, the Almighty has many ways of returning me the money, and many ways of taking the profit away from the thief. God doesn’t need my help in carrying out His justice. [2] Kabbalistic “karma” has many ways to right a wrong. Which leads us to the second type of “revenge”.

The second type is a formal revenge that a court of law carries out. The courts, being human, are incapable of carrying out true divine justice. But they do have a duty to provide society with a system of justice that is fair, promotes harmony in society, and presents criminals with punishments or consequences that help prevent crimes against other citizens so we can live in harmony. Every society tries to develop a justice system that is objective and wise. Non-Torah systems sometimes included the possibility for the criminal who maims to be himself maimed. This, even when carried out by an objective court, the Torah also says is not right, and provides an alternative through monetary compensation. We are instructed NOT to carry out either of these two types of revenge.

Courts of Law

So what does this phrase an eye for an eye mean in the Torah? It is a poetic phrase in the context of court cases and instructions for judges. If a person injures another to the point of causing that person to lose an eye, there is a monetary fine paid. An eye is priceless and can’t be replaced, but the court is mandated to issue a fine nonetheless. Some say it also means that the aggressor should feel as if they deserves to have his/her eye taken out, but of course the courts are not going to do that.

(On a side note, an interesting commentary by Rabbi Eliahu of Vilna[3] explains that since the word “tachas” literally means “under”, you can look at the Hebrew letters that spell “ayin” which are ayin, yud, nun, and pick out the letters underneath[4] which are pey, chaf, samech, - the letters that spell “kesef”, the Hebrew word for money.)

One eye is taken for an eye

If your neighbor leaves a severed pig’s head on your porch, you will naturally feel like retaliating. As is often the case, human beings seem to be projecting their feelings onto the Torah and finding a phrase that supports their feelings. We would like to carry out revenge or have the court carry out revenge, so we justify it by attaching our feelings to this phrase. In fact, this phrase is so catchy and poetic that books, movies, and popular songs like “Bad Moon Rising”[5] have used it many times.

But our feelings are holy and come from a good place, even our negative feelings. We want revenge because we crave justice and expect the world to work in a fair and honest way. Justice is part of Godliness and something our soul clings to strongly.[6] But when this feeling gets confused with personal hurt, we channel it into the wrong direction. Whenever we feel personal hurt, the spiritual challenge is to try to channel it back to God. Seek His advice how to channel those feelings in the right direction through prayer, introspection, and understanding. Of course if we are legally allowed to seek payment for damages we should do so through an objective third party legal system. But ultimately the Almighty runs the world.

In short, the Torah advocates an official system of justice with courts and judgments that preclude personal vengeance, while clearly stating that personal revenge is a transgression. There is no room for doubt in this matter. Please spread the word.

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[1] E.g. issues from Jan. ’83, Feb. ‘06

[2] The Sefer HaChinuch goes farther and suggests that hard feelings towards the person who wrongs you are misplaced because if God didn’t want it to happen the person would be powerless to harm you.

[3] Outstanding Lithuanian rabbi known as the Genius of Vilna -Vilna Gaon (1720-1797)

[4] If you place the Hebrew alphabet in a vertical row with alef at the top, each succeeding letter is underneath the previous letter.

[5] By Credence Clearwater Revival, written by John Fogerty 1969

[6] Din is the fifth of the ten kabbalistic Sefirot, and encompasses divine justice. We understand intellectually that true justice is not always immediate, and sometimes requires a next world, reincarnation, etc. however, we still desire to see justice now.

A Call to Normalcy

Whenever I bring my family to the East Coast for camp, they pick up little verbal nuances from the New Yorkers. “The counselah said I should take two dollahs and pick myself up a nawmal swim cap,” my six-year-old daughter told me. Somehow in a NY accent, the word “normal” contains subtleties we don’t have in the Midwest. That word in the mouths of many native English speakers means “not unusual”. However to some it means “the way you should be and if you are the least bit different you are are a freak, oddball, or from Mars.” It seems that lots of people place an importance on keeping the status quo and not doing anything unusual. “Just be “normal”.

Even those who want to be hip, cool, and avant guarde still have their limits. I found this out the hard way. While after I graduated art school I hung out with some hip, different, avant garde types. However, when I became an Orthodox Jew most of my friends couldn’t handle the change. I wasn’t “normal” anymore. Because “normal” is not having any strong feelings about God. Normal is being quasi atheistic, sort of agnostic, not professing any particular point of view on religion. As part of the hip crowd, you can grow your hair long, shave your head, quote Sartre or Scoobie-Doo, take drugs, be a bi-sexual prostitute, or meditate in a Buddhist monastery. But traditional religion in the form of Judaism or Christianity is just going too far. Every group has its own status quo or range of behavior and attitude they consider normal.

In the introduction to a book on gossip written by a traditional scholar in Poland, Rabbi Kagan mentions a natural internal voice that tells you that following the laws of gossip in Jewish law carefully will make you abnormal. You won’t be able to have “normal” conversations. We are afraid not to be Normal. Jewish consciousness stresses strict adherence to a code of law that regulates what kind of derogatory things can be said, and what can’t. Just like the movies where a little angel pops up on one shoulder and a little devil pops up on the other, it is our belief that inside of us a moral dilemma causes several internal voices to speak up. Sometimes when we are inspired to be a better quality of person on the planet, a little voice speaks up and says, “But if you do that you won’t be normal.

What is normal?

The question is asked sometimes – What if everyone acts weird? Is that the new normal? What if everyone gossips? Is that normal? What happens when there’s so much corruption around you that you stop noticing it? Does humanity really have the potential to get along at all times? Do we really have the ability to stay married, not be jealous, and figure out what to do about Social Security? When we stop having expectations for the world and think of our problems as normal, we lose the desire to change things for the better.

We live in a time period where evil people in power control others, there’s constant, seemingly unsolvable conflict in the Middle East, much of the world lives in poverty, meanwhile most people seem disconnected from a type of spirituality that is practical and uplifting. This is not normal. None of this is normal. It’s easy to fall into a daily routine and at the same time relate to the world’s problems with indifference. We think divorce is normal. Well it may be common, but it is certainly not normal. What “normal” should mean is the way of life that we believe the Almighty wants and we have the potential to make happen. If there is enough food on the planet to feed everyone, which a research group in Washington said there is, then we have the ability to feed everyone. It’s not impossible, just difficult.

In other words, normal is not necessarily the way things are or look, normal is the way things ought to be. We’ve gotten used to a pretty messed up world.

It’s about time we brought back to being ….normal.