Parashat Shoftim: On Becoming Whole

We come into this world with a faint memory of having once been part of something much larger than ourselves.    We have a vague sense of incompleteness, that we are missing something essential.  We are hungry, but not for food, never quite satisfied, always yearning.  We are deeply and relentlessly lonely, even when we are connected to others in meaningful ways.

“All things are lacking [haserim],” says the Sefat Emet -- everything has this emptiness at its core --  “and”, he continues, “they can only come to completeness [hashlemut] by becoming close to Him, may He be Blessed.”  This is what the verse Tamim tehiyeh im Hashem Elokekha (Devarim 18:13) means.   Tamim means whole, perfect or complete so that the verse, according to the Sefat Emet, comes to read: “You will (only) become whole WITH Hashem your God.” You will always have a certain hole, but if you are WITH God, then you will be complete, the hole will be filled; you will finally relax into some sense of wholeness.

We normally cover over this hole, this sense of “missing something,” with many clever tricks, so that there are times we don’t even feel the ache.  We are busy.   We are anxious.   We arrange and manipulate and control things to make it all just right, always trying to reach for some hoped-for sense of peace and wholeness inside. If I just do this, then I will feel better.   This is our witchcraft and our magic, our attempt to fix with human means what can only be fixed by connection to God.  The Torah calls this way the way of the nations -- witchcraft and sorcery and divination -- and contrasts it to what God has offered us --  the option to be tamim with God and feel true completeness.  

But before we can feel that wholeness, we have to feel the hole.  This is very important.   The hole is actually the doorway to the wholeness and there is no other way in.  It is precisely the yearning and the loneliness that remind us there is more; they want something; we feel the whisper of their wanting tugging at the edge of our consciousness.  And their wanting is itself the key.    Tzama likha nafshi.  My soul is thirsty for You.   When we say that, when we sing those words, when we articulate the thirst, we already begin to feel the connection.  In the hole is the whole.   

We have to feel the hole, and that is necessarily painful, a kind of heartbreak, a tearing inside, like how we feel when our children leave us (my son went off to Israel for his second gap year this week) -- there is a giant terrible hole of missing them, and this hole, what it tells us, is not just how much we miss them, but also how much we love them. The pain has truth and connection and wholeness built into it.  

When we go deep enough into the pain of incompleteness, we find out that it knows something about completeness, and somehow has the power to bring us there.  Lefum tzara, agra. According to the suffering is the reward. Usually this refers to Torah work -- the harder you work, the more you get out of it, which is surely true.  But there is another meaning, an emotional meaning --- the more we suffer, the more we allow the feelings that hurt -- the pain of loneliness and yearning and incompleteness -- the greater the reward on the flip side -- the greater the connection and the love that come right back at us. It is like a mirror; the greater the pain, the greater the love that is called forth into the universe.   

There is a part of us that knows about this love, that knows of its infinite and eternal quality and of its ability to hold all things; this part suffers and thirsts as a way to remind us to bring that love into ourselves, to live by its light, and through that love to become truly tamim, whole and pure and perfect, already perfect.