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Insights
The Soiled Face
by
Yanki Tauber |
Perhaps we expend less physical
effort to earn our livelihood today than we did two hundred and
two thousand years ago, but our mental, emotional and spiritual
investment has never been greater
And G-d spoke to Moses, saying:
"Make a basin of copper, and its stand of copper, for washing,
and place it between the Tent of Meeting and the altar.... And Aaron
and his sons should wash their hands and feet from it, when they enter
the Tent of Meeting... or when they approach the altar to serve..."
—Exodus 30:17-20
Every morning, a person should wash his face, hands and feet before
praying —Mishneh Torah, Laws of Prayer, 4:1
Since the destruction of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem more than nineteen
hundred years ago, G-d does not commune with man in a "Tent of
Meeting," nor do kohanim offer sacrifices to Him upon the altar.
Yet the Holy Temple and the service performed therein remain, to this
very day, the vehicle for our relationship with G-d; it is only that
today they exist in a more spiritual form.
In the words of our sages: "The daily prayers were instituted
in place of the daily offerings"[1]; "A person's table is comparable
to the altar"[2];
"From the day that the Holy Temple was destroyed, G-d has only
the four cubits of Halachah (i.e., the places where Torah law is studied)
in His world."[3]
Thus, many of the laws which govern our lives today derive from the
laws of the Temple and its service: the designated times for prayer
are the times in which the daily offerings were brought in the Temple;
at the table, we dip our bread in salt because the salt was part of
every offering placed upon the altar; and so on.
Before a kohen could perform a service in the Holy Temple or enter
the Sanctuary, he first had to purify and sanctify himself by washing
his hands and feet from a washstand especially constructed for that
purpose.
Although the Torah instructs to "know G-d in all your ways"[4]
and that "all your deeds should be for the sake of Heaven,"[5]
one must still distinguish between the world outside the Temple walls
and that which is the exclusive domain of the Divine.
When entering the sanctuary of G-d , one must cleanse himself of the
materiality of everyday life, "washing his hands" of all
that carries the taint of self-interest and mundanity. This is the
deeper
significance of the law that obligates the kohen to wash his hands
and feet before approaching the service of G-d.
In its post-Temple incarnation, this law instructs the Jew to "wash
his face, hands and feet" prior to the morning prayers, to cleanse
and purify himself before making the transition from a material being
in a material world to a soul communing with her Creator.[6]
Manual Labor
"If you eat of the toil of your hands," proclaims the
Psalmist, "fortunate are you, and good is to you."[7]
Chassidic teaching explains that the verse is telling us to invest
only the most external of our faculties in the pursuit of material
livelihood, leaving our higher talents free to devote themselves
exclusively to our spiritual goals.
Our ancestors sustained themselves exclusively with the toil of
their hands. The Patriarchs were shepherds, and the Jews who settled
in the Holy Land were tillers of the soil. Many of the greatest
Talmudic sages, whose teachings are a source of guidance and wisdom
to us to this very day, were manual laborers: Rabbi Yochanan HaSandlar
was a cobbler, Rabbi Joshua a blacksmith, Shammai a bricklayer.
There were also merchants and shopkeepers, but business was free
of the
craftiness and obsessive pre occupation that characterize it today.
Scholarship and teaching were not professions but sacred callings,
not to be sullied by the remuneration of material reward. Earning
one's daily bread was a matter for the hands and feet and the most
rudimentary of mental exercises, not something upon which to expend
the mind's ingenuity or the heart's devotion, which were reserved
only for life's higher aims.
That world is no longer.
Today, we not only invest time and energy in the endeavor to procure
our material needs; we give it our "all" - our keenest
mental capacities, our strongest passions, our most forceful will.[8] Our "careers"
consume our days and nights, our minds and hearts, indeed, our very
identities (we don't ask each other, "What do you do to make
money?" - we say, "What do you do?").
This explains the difference between the two laws quoted at the
beginning of this essay.
The law that one should wash before praying is a derivative of the
law that the kohanim must wash before entering the Sanctuary or
performing a service in the Holy Temple. But while the Torah commands
Aaron and his sons to wash their hands and feet, Maimonides rules
that before the morning prayers one must wash his hands, feet and
face.
In the time of the Temple, only the "hands and feet" -
externalities of human life - were involved in material pursuits;
so only they required purification and sanctification before being
devoted to the service of G-d. The "face" of man - his
higher prowess and inner self[9]
- required no such cleansing, for it was not sullied in the first
place.
But in later generations, the mundanity of life began its encroachment
on our inner selves. Today, the effort to commune with G-d also
requires the cleansing of our "faces" of the taint of
the material.
Our minds and hearts must be purged of the prejudices and affinities
that adhere to it in the course of their involvement in earthly
affairs, so that we can truly relate to the essence and purpose
of life.
Based on the Rebbe's talks on various occasions[10]
[1] Talmud, Berachot 26a and b.
[5] Ethics of the Fathers 2:12.
[6] Talmud, Shabbat 50a; Mishneh Torah, Laws
of Prayer, 4:1.
[8] The story is told of a Chassid who opened
a factory for the manufacture of galoshes, and was soon completely
consumed by his flourishing business. Said Rabbi Sholom DovBer
of Lubavitch to him: "I have heard of people who insert their
feet in galoshes; but to put one's head in galoshes?!"
[9] In the English language, the word "face"
often refers to the external aspect of things (as in "surface,"
"superficial,"
"facade," "on the face of it," "put a
face on things," etc.). But the Hebrew word for "face,"
panim, actually means "innerness," expressing the idea
that the face is that part of a person's body in which his higher
faculties reside and which most reflects his essential nature
and personality.
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