Ladder (a tiny Hasidic teaching on this week's Torah portion)
November 16, 2015
In this week's Torah portion, Jacob goes forth from Beersheva. He lies down with his head on the stones of a particular place, and he dreams of a ladder planted in earth with its head in the heavens and angels flowing up and down.
(When he wakes, he says "God was in this place, and I -- I did not know!" That's one of my favorite verses of Torah. I love that sense of wonder.)
The Degel Machaneh Efraim -- grandson of the Baal Shem Tov -- teaches that this is a passage about expansive mind and contracted consciousness. The angels moving up and down the ladder are a representation of the natural ebb and flow of our lives as we move from big mind to small mind, from a God's-eye view of the world to a limited human view and back again.
The thing is, our ascent and our descent are inevitably interconnected. Ascent leads to descent which leads to ascent again. When a tzaddik, a righteous person, falls from a high level (perhaps through losing sight of the big picture and getting mired in "small mind"), the experience of having-fallen gives rise to yearning which pulls him back up. Our low places spur us to climb.
I love this teaching about gadlut (expansive consciousness) and katnut (contracted consciousness) -- that they are interrelated; that falling is precisely the first step in rising again. And I love the idea that it's our distance from God, or our distance from expansive consciousness, which makes us yearn to erase that distance and be our best selves once again.