podcast #11 Tazria Metzura

This transcription is a conversation between two individuals discussing the concept of life force and its significance. They touch on the parashot Tazria and Metzora, which deal with purity and impurity, and how life force is connected to these concepts. The conversation also explores the idea of energy and how it is present in the human body and nature. They discuss the importance of life force in the creation of life and its connection to the survival of the Jewish people throughout history. The conversation ends with a visit to a Holocaust museum and a reflection on the resilience and strength of the Jewish people. Shalom everyone, it is a special week, it's a bit of a difficult week this week, it was Yom HaShoah this week, next week is Yom HaZikaron and Yom HaAtzmaut. And the parashot in between those two very special occasions are parashot Tazria and Metzuah, two parashot aligned together, just a reminder they are aligned together only on years that are not leap years. And they are not easy parashot to stomach, it's all about diseases and emissions and blood and gore and leprosy and all kinds of other conditions. So I'm sitting here with Shlomo, Professor Shlomo Meital and myself Elisha Wolfin from Kilat Bar Hasta and we're having a conversation on the parashot and we hope you enjoy this conversation. Hi Shlomo. Shalom Elisha and let me tell you, these are tough parashot. 38 years ago we had our son Ronenz Bar Mitzvah at Kilat Moriah, which is the first kilah, conservative masotik kilah in Israel going back to 1955, that's how much, 68 years? That's a long time. Wow, wow. What in the world can Bar Mitzvah boys say about Tazria and Metzuah especially? I'm sure you encountered this in your Bar Mitzvah ceremony. We found something but we didn't have your wisdom and your stories and what you found which is absolutely beautiful. Absolutely beautiful and we'll talk about it. Okay, yeah. I feel for Ronenz often when we have a lot of Bar Mitzvahs and the Bar Mitzvah kids, whenever they have Tazria and Metzuah, they always see us smirking a little bit and we tell them, don't be fooled by what you read. It's much deeper than you think. It's actually really deep and I actually mean it. In fact, after we sit and we discuss the parasha, often the parents are like, wow, wow, we never realized. You know, they would say, yeah, we kind of read it in advance and thought, oh no, our son is going to have this awful parasha and now we realize it's actually really, really deep. So I've encountered this parasha or parashat for 80 years, got new insights thanks to your parasha and Elisha, please tell the wonderful story in your parasha. The theme that you've discovered in Metzuah is the theme of life force which is buried in there and you've discovered that nugget of gold and encountered it personally from a conversation. Will you tell us the story? Okay, sure, sure. So, just two little backgrounds. One is, the big question is, what is purity and impurity? These two parashas deal with situations of purity and impurity, mostly impurity. And they're all about emissions, all the things that are leaking out, that are coming out. And I was suggesting in the parasha that it's really our life force, the life force, it's not really truly ours, it's God's, you know. The life force is coming from within and when it leaks out and doesn't take a living form, then in a sense it's impure. So, when it takes a living form and then it's full of life, full of that life force, then it's actually pure. The ultimate impurity is death. So, anything that was alive and now it's dead is the ultimate impurity. So, that's background number one to understand the story. The other background is I used to be a tour guide and I guided this group, a lovely group from America and it was a family tour. And on one of our hikes, I was walking, it was in the desert, walking with one of the participants and we were chatting and talking and she said, you know, Alicia, you're really depleting your life force, you're really depleting your energy. And I said, I don't really, I wasn't quite sure if that was a compliment or not. Thank you for working really hard on our behalf and for our, you know, for our sake. But she didn't mean it as a compliment, neither as a criticism. She just said, you know, you better really be careful. And she said, you exert so much effort and so much energy and so much life force and I tried to say, well, of course I have to, you know, I'm a tour guide and I have to explain that. So, she said, no, you don't. No, you don't. You can exert a lot less, a lot less energy. And most importantly, she said, we will all benefit if you exert less energy. Don't think you're doing it for us. You will feel a lot better, but we will also feel better. We'll have a bit more space for our own life force, our own thoughts. And you're smothering us with your insights and you're kind of like what I'm doing right now. So, she gave me a few pointers and ideas and told me to try and practice it. And I did. I took it really seriously. And it was magical. It was just absolutely magical. And as I wrote in the bracha, I don't think anyone really noticed, but I could see. First of all, I felt great. But I saw that people felt good. People were more awake, more alert, more with it, more together than they've been throughout the whole trip. I just gave them more space to be fully themselves instead of being my, you know, hearing my stuff over and over again. So, that's the story. So, I have to ask you this, Elisha. It may be inappropriate. You give a great deal of yourself and your life force to our congregation. If this lady were around today, she might ask you, are you giving away too much of your energy, your life force? Yeah. Yeah. She would ask that. She would say that. And she would be right. But I'm practicing it. I'm really practicing kind of pulling my energy back. I'm practicing being less. I'm practicing what she taught me. But it's a character trait. And it's a totally different, you know, I would need to be a totally different person if I gave it up altogether. But I'm a lot more aware of it, for sure. Be aware. There is a phenomenon called burnout. It's common in people who serve other people in service professions, medicine, nurses, and so on. It's an occupational hazard. It's just something to be aware of. You're right. Your answer is right. Burnout. The idea of life force, which you find in Mitzvah, it turns out to be a very old concept and features in people that I know you're very fond of. First of all, the Greeks talked about it a great deal. A philosopher named Zeno. And two philosophers that you like a lot, I know, based on your classes, Henry Bergson, who talked about Elan Vitao, which is life force, and Baruch Spinoza, who talked about Conatus. We studied Conatus in your class. How do they relate and how do you relate to Bergson and Spinoza and their concepts of life force, life energy? Yeah. Any thinker that uses that word life force gets my attention. And any thinker that helps me understand this notion deeper, I develop an infatuation with. And it's certainly true for both Spinoza and Bergson. And Bergson, you're absolutely right. The term Elan Vitao is a great modern use of that word. And he explained, through Elan Vitao, he explained the whole theory of evolution. He accepts evolution 100%. I think we may have even discussed it at some point. He accepts evolution, but he rejects the Darwinian understanding of evolution. Because Darwin saw the survival of the fittest as a, I have a deja vu if we've talked about as a coincidence. One gene happened to manifest itself. It was a mutation. And the mutation proved to be better. And that species, with that mutation, survived while others didn't. Mutations are accidental events and most don't work out, and a few do, but it's kind of random. Right. And those who do move evolution forward. Bergson came and said, absolutely wrong. Absolutely not. There is a force that's driving evolution forward. And it's an invisible force. It's a powerful force. He didn't call it God, although he did refer to it in a few places where you could understand that it's God. And that kind of drives the whole living experience forward, and humanity forward, and the world forward. And it's the life force. I agree. And Elisha, I was just now reading your beautiful statement on the wall, quoting Einstein, right here to our left, who said that some people see no miracles in the world. I know a lot of those people. Some people see only miracles, and Einstein prefers the latter. He prefers seeing miracles, and life force, Elisha, is a miracle. And let me explain, based on science. The human body has 30 trillion cells, and they're always replacing themselves, dying and renewing themselves. And probably the cells in my body now didn't exist seven or eight years ago. Each little cell has a little motor. It's called a mitochondria, and it generates energy, because in order for cells to do their job, they need to have energy. So there's a chemical process inside every one of these 30 trillion human cells. When you look at life and you understand it more deeply, you really do see something that is miraculous, absolutely miraculous. Yes, yes, I believe. And here's the interesting question. Where is that, where is the cell getting its energy from? Is it producing it, or is it tapping into an existing energy? And it could be a combination of both. It's using, my understanding of it, the way I see it, is that there is the life force, which I call God. And God is a source, a source of life. And we often think about God creating the world in six days, and resting on the seventh day, and then sitting, relaxing on a cloud somewhere, and overseeing God's creation, and et cetera, et cetera. That's not how I understand God. But rather, God has that life force that is always, always present, and always forever nourishing and moving creation forward. So the cells are tapping into a life force. What they are doing is they are transmuting this life force, they're transmuting it into physical energy, physical energy that allows them to live. Absolutely. I must tell you this story about the lack of a life force. My mother, Alea Shalom, lived to the age of 105, completely clear of mind, and in absolute control of everything and everyone. That's good, because we're counting on you, Shalom. She died in 2012. I flew to Toronto to arrange her funeral. She arranged everything. She marched into the funeral home when she was still alive, gave strict orders about her funeral, paid for her funeral, and we simply had to follow her instructions. And I followed them to the letter, except for one detail. She wanted a police escort for the funeral profession. I wasn't able to arrange that with the Toronto police. But the sad part. In the funeral home, Canadian law requires that you view the dead body. You have to see the dead body and confirm as a close relative that this is indeed the person. And it makes a lot of sense. So I went into this room and my mother lay there, the body of my mother, stiff and white and lifeless. And it was my mother, but it wasn't my mother. It was a shell, Elisha. When the life force, the soul, whatever you call it, when it goes out of the body, it's not the person. The person isn't there. It was a traumatic experience when I recall. I learned so much from that. A human body where there is no life force, it's just a shell, dust to dust, earth to earth. And I have to ask you, first of all, thank you for sharing that. It's really beautiful. And your mom had an amazing life force. I never met her, but I heard the story that you told. And she lived to 105. You must be tapping into some serious life force there. While I can imagine it being traumatic to see your mother this way, I would think that maybe there's solace in that, kind of knowing, oh, that life force kind of like indeed continues or maybe you don't see it that way. What was traumatic about it? I guess looking at this physical representation of my mother, which was once full of life, even at 105, and it had gone. And there was such a contradiction there. Looking at my mother, this was my mother, but it was the shell. Something had gone out of it. Disappeared. That's really amazing what you're saying. It's amazing. And Steven, thank you for sharing that with us. You know, Jewishly speaking, we know that ultimate impurity is a dead body. Exactly for that reason. What makes something pure is the life force, not the outer shell. And the outer shell, from dust you came to dust you shall return. Just as you said, that's a really amazing thing is that it in a way strengthens the class we've just started this week, the class. We're doing a 10-week class on the afterlife. And it's all text-based. It's all going to be, you know, well-grounded in Jewish text and nothing too woo-woo about this class. But you were the one who asked at the beginning of the class, you know, I'm a rational person. How can a rational person, you know, you're going to talk here about things that are beyond life, which we don't know. There's no proof of anything. How could we relate to something, as a rational person, how to relate to something that is so irrational and lacks proof? And I think you just touched on the proof of you knew at that moment that the body that's there, that's not your mom. It's just not your mom. It's a body. It's a body she inhabited. And so the only little proof here is that, as you said, this is not my mom. There's another quality that really was my mom. And that was that life force. And then we have to have a leap of faith. Does that life force simply, okay, it's simply extinguished and disappears? But we know that energy doesn't disappear. Energy never disappears. So, I'd already suggest, you know, without talking about reincarnation or anything woo-hoo or weird, you know, which I believe in a lot of that stuff, but keeping it clean from all of that, that life force, that energy, it's somewhere because energy never gets lost. Absolutely. So, Alicia, there is some science to the life force. I have a garbage can of a mind. I collect random facts, but some of them may be relevant about life force because it is so amazing in humanity and in nature as well. So, very quickly, some boring numbers. And I didn't know this until I looked it up. A five-month-old fetus, a female fetus, in the womb after 20 weeks has 7 million eggs over. 7 million. And the number declines and at birth it's 2 million. When young women reach puberty, they have between 300,000 and 500,000 eggs. And at menopause, when fertility ends, they still have 1,000 or 2,000 eggs remaining. Why is this so significant? This is life force, Alicia. This is, in order to create life, God has set up the human race so that we have a lot of spare stuff in there, just in case. This has to be life force. In order to create a life, you have 7 million eggs. And it's not just the women. Men as well have sperm. Men produce 500 billion sperm cells over the course of their lives. And in the sex act, 250 million on average are produced. And one of those wins the lottery. But 250 million, Alicia. Life force. Talk about life force. And nature is the same. We have beautiful oak trees in Israel. Etz Elon. Etz Elon. An oak tree comes from a tiny acorn. Every beautiful huge oak tree you see came from one tiny acorn. But that acorn won the lottery. Like the sperm. Because maybe there were 10,000 acorns and one of them germinated to become a tree. This is life force. In order to continue the race, continue the oak tree genealogy, or the human being. The human race. That's really interesting. I didn't know all these facts. So thank you. Thank you for this resource. And thank you for all these facts. Really interesting. Because it kind of also, at the risk of sounding ignorant, and I guess I am ignorant when it comes to these matters. We have, you know, the whole cell technology, the stem cells. And we have that raw kind of raw material before it's divided yet into an organ. Divided into that. And it could, in potential, it could become any organ. And I'm kind of thinking if in a way those eggs or those sperm cells, if it's on some level a little bit like stem cell, where at the beginning of life, you know, it's five months and we don't want to get into this debate of when does life begin. That's too politically charged and religiously charged. But nevertheless, we come to this world with a huge amount of life force. Or in other words, a huge amount of potential. And that potential could be, could, you know, sky's the limit. How many kids we may choose to have. And how we're going to use that life force to do good in the world, or God forbid, to do evil in the world. And so we come into this world with a lot of life force, whether it's stem cells, whether it's eggs, whether it's sperm cells. And then slowly but surely, it starts getting depleted. And then when we do die at 120, in a way, it is, it's such a blessing. Because there's so much wisdom in it. Saying like, you know, this shell that we inhabited for 120 years did a really good job, a really great job hosting us and providing, and this life force kind of manifested itself in so many beautiful things that we did in our life. And then when this life force is depleted, it ends and it moves on. I personally believe it moves on and will create, and will, you know, start a whole new, a whole new person. But that's really powerful what you just shared. So thank you. So a question, Elisha. We both understand and are amazed by the life force in a single human body. We marked the Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, this week. And looking at the Jewish people, this tiny Jewish people who have survived for thousands of years against all the odds, the Mayans are gone, the Aztecs are gone, the ancient ancient Romans are gone, the ancient Greeks are gone, the ancient Egyptians are gone. How is it that this life force, where is the life force in the Jewish people as a people that has enabled us with difficulty to survive? But we have survived and others did not. Why? Thank you for that question. You know, obviously I don't know the answer. I really don't know the answer. And since we don't prepare for this conversation, so I can't, you know, I haven't thought about it in advance. But what it does bring up is, I can maybe share, we took, Aviva and I took all the Bar Mitzvah kids and their parents this week, sorry, this past Sunday, to a museum nearby, a Holocaust museum nearby called Beit Terezin. It's a museum to commemorate the Terezin, or in the German, Terezinstadt, ghetto. Where we discovered on our way there that, you know, I discovered that Aviva's great-grandfather perished there, my great-grandmother perished there, this I already knew, I didn't realize about Aviva, and my great-grandfather spent time there before he was sent to Auschwitz where he perished. It was a great visit. And in one of those, we focused mostly on the kids in the ghetto. It's a really special museum. I won't talk too much about it because we only have half an hour, and we'll talk about the life force. But that was a ghetto where the Jews really worked on their life force. For example, every kid who had a Bar Mitzvah, Bar Mitzvahs had to be clandestine, they were not legal, so they were done in cellars and places like that. The kids lived separate from their parents. Men and women were separated, the kids were separated from their parents, and they kind of ran their own life. It was really quite amazing. And the Jewish ghetto authorities enabled the kids to have Bar Mitzvahs, and they have a piece of paper ripped out of a sidur that survived the piece of paper from a Bar Mitzvah of a kid, a sidur that was given to this kid for his Bar Mitzvah. Now, why would you have a Bar Mitzvah if you're about to die anyway? Why would you give someone a sidur to pray from if they're about to die? But in it, there was a dedication, and it was from the head of the Jewish council of the ghetto. And what it says there? Uvacharta v'chaim. And, signature, Uvacharta, choose life. It's in the book of Deuteronomy, of Devarim. And the woman who kind of guided us, she knew it was a Bar Mitzvah group, so she kind of went through it pretty fast. For me, this was like a, wait, wait, wait, wait, this is everything that we're actually talking about. Now, here we are, people who know their death is imminent, and it's going to be tomorrow or next month, or if they're lucky, a year from now. I don't know if they're lucky, I don't know. And the head of the ghetto is telling them, choose life, at all costs, whatever happens, choose life. Or in other words, choose life force. Be connected to that life force. And I think, you know, it's not a coincidence we say v'chaim, you know, we raise a glass, we say l'chaim, to life. We cherish life, we see life. Life is the vessel through which the life force appears in the world. And I think that's kind of the rationale for our Masorti tradition, movement, between Orthodox and Reform. Because we believe in halacha, in history, in our traditions, in our Bar Mitzvah, in the rituals. We believe in that, strongly. And we also believe in modernity, agility, adapting, and throughout history, one reason the Jewish people have survived is this ability to absorb everything that's outside, and we mold it and adapt it, and make it part of our own tradition. I've been working with my grandson on his paper on philosophy, and we've been talking about Philo, Philo the Greek. Philo was a Hellenist Jew. On Hanukkah we reviled the Hellenists, but Elisa, the Hellenists were Jews, and they adapted that powerful Hellenist Greek culture and integrated it into the Jewish religion, and they remained Jewish. Absolutely, absolutely. It's a good opportunity to debunk this fallacy. Hellenist Jews were not assimilated Jews. It's just like, at the time you had Aramaic Jews, which were the Eastern Jews, and you had the Hellenistic Jews, which were the Western Jews, those who lived in Alexandria and Rome and Greece, etc. Philo was a religious man, a devout man, a Hellenist. Yes, that's very, very correct. That's a very good point that you're raising here, that if you choose life, then whatever you see around you which emanates life, you say, oh, that's beautiful. I'll cherish that, and I'll take it in. If it's full of life, there must be wisdom in it. And I'm going to find the Jewish basis for that. So it's a really good point. Did your grandson, was he convinced? Oh, yes, absolutely. I'm encouraging him because he wants to do graduate work in philosophy, and I told him, we have enough computer programmers. We need some philosophers here, and nobody's studying philosophy these days, and he's good at it. He has a passion about it. But you know, this idea, I mentioned the mitochondria in the cell. You asked where it gets its energy. It gets its energy from outside the cell, because we bring oxygen and sugar and all kinds of good stuff to the mitochondria, and this has to be true of the Jewish people as well. Part of our life force comes from all of these ideas that come from outside, and they go into the Jewish cell, and we adapt it and purify it and homogenize it and make it part of our religion without in any way changing our values. And we've always done this, and I hope we continue to do it. Yeah, that's beautiful. That's really good. It's actually a good place to end. Just remain open to the nutrients that life offers us, and tap into this life force, and be conscious of this life force within us, and to do good with it, to bring goodness to the world, and as God said to Abraham, be a blessing. Amen. Amen, amen. So thank you, everyone, for listening. We hope you enjoyed it, and your comments are always highly appreciated, and feel free to share this podcast. L'hi tov, Shabbat Shalom. Shabbat Shalom.