Global Crisis, Global Neshama Moment

How the world has changed in the last ten days. Many of you have reached out to me expressing frustration, anger, and fear. Above all, “what can we do, and why is this happening?”

The one question I didn’t get is “why is this happening now?” I’m neither a political analyst, nor am I prophetic. But I am a Rabbi, and not without tools that equip me to attempt to frame things with a Torah-based Jewish perspective.

As it is, I didn’t have to reach very deeply. I have been studying a daily portion of Tanya, a spiritual treatise written by the first Chabad Rebbe, Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi. The first in a long line of Chabad Rebbes and their Chasidim (followers) who risked their lives to keep the flame of Judaism burning in the former Soviet Union even before the Bolshevik Revolution.

One of the most well-known of the fifty-three chapters is chapter thirty-two. The beginning of the war coincided with the study of this chapter. It is affectionately known as “Perek Lamed Bais.” In Hebrew, the alphabet doubles as a numeric system and the letters Lamed and Bet that are numerically 32 also spell the Hebrew word for heart: LEV.

The chapter is indeed a treatise on love. The basic premise, in a nutshell, is that hatred and discord exist between people only when they are viewing one another from the limited prism of human consciousness. That narrow space sees only the body and ignores the soul. From that vantage point, there is ONLY separation. The relationships that are formed from this myopic view are entirely ego-driven and transactional. “You do for me, I do for you, I make you feel good, you love me, you make me feel good, I love you, but when the mutual benefit is no longer mutually beneficial, poof, bye-bye love!”

The Alter Rebbe taught that real love is soul-based. The byproducts of adhering to the principles of soul-based living and the commitment to the rigorous training required to hone a life steeped in strong spiritual practice is the way that spills over into the interpersonal realm. The more soul-conditioned a person is, the higher the likelihood that they conduct relationships that are both soul powered and soul directed. When souls collide, the spiritual sparks that begin to fly tend to be longer lasting.

This doesn’t really do justice to the concept. But there it is in a nutshell.

So back to where we started. The world changed. In many ways for the worse. But something else happened. Even more stunning than the surfacing of the Axis of evil of our time, and its unleashing a new and unprecedented international threat, was the global re-action!

The speed and depth of the galvanizing of international support was even more surprising than the myriad ways the international intelligence communities were surprised by Putin himself.

A stunning global instance of soulfulness. An entire civilization has come together on the basis of finding its moral footings. A world that has drifted apart has found its heart and come back together. The world has found its LEV just in time. Though the actions that ensued from there have not been nearly enough, without them I believe we would have already seen the worst. I pray that our global heart opens ever wider, translating into more concrete actions, hopefully, before it's too late. I hope to expand on this theme next week and the way this soulfulness has impacted and transformed the people of Ukraine itself. They are without a doubt modern-day paragons of heroism and bravery and that cannot be overstated.

Again, timing is everything. We are heading into Purim and EVERYONE who writes Purim is getting autocorrected as Putin, and vice versa!

Is Putin our Haman? Hell yeah!

But wait a second, what about the GOOD news that has been overshadowed by the unfolding of these cataclysmic events, news that we have all hoped and prayed for. That’s right! The masks of Covid are coming OFF just in time for Putin, I mean Purim.

Is it just a coincidence that our nearly global unmasking from Covid has also peeled back the layers of our ego and our tendency to lean toward soullessness, and revealed a new face of humanity, like the bandages that come off to reveal a new look after plastic surgery? Was Covid our plastic surgery that peeled away the layers that concealed our ability to be more soulful, just when our moment in history needs it the most?

You decide.

Meanwhile, let me correct myself; we are in a watershed moment in history that will forever be remembered as a global moment, one that is indeed characterized by a historic instance of reaching deeply.

So you ask, “What can we do?” My answer to you is my answer to me. For starters, do your best to do your part in tending to the newly kindled sense of global compassion by consciously nurturing and sustaining the practices that foster spiritual inwardness and support a more soul-centered way of living. This in turn will sustain the ability of our hearts to remain open for business 24/7. If we can do that in the aggregate, then we can hope for the global collective heart to remain open as well, wide enough to save the lives that cry out so desperately to be saved. We, more than anyone, know what it's like for that call to go unheeded.