I grew up in the San Fernando Valley during the 1980s, a place and an era that some characterize as one that focused on the self to an extreme. During my middle school years, there was such fixation on what people wore, how they did their hair, who they spent time with and who they should not spend time with. Who was cool and who was not. For four years, I was the regular victim of bullies in my school who targeted me because I was the new kid, who did not dress like them, act like them or look like them.
And as far as I knew, no one did anything about it. I did not know how to fight back, or did not have the courage to fight back. I never told any teachers about them, and never knew if the teachers were even aware of the harassment I endured day after day for almost four years. I had a small group of friends back then, which brought some measure of comfort, but it did not stop the bullying. It was a lonely four years.
I know now that I was not alone. Others in my school were isolated, cut off from others because they were different. I also recognize know that, even though I was bullied, I was also a kid who kept others isolated because they were different from me as well. I was not a simple victim of social isolation, but I was also part of the problem.
Looking back with hindsight, I wish that I had taken my pain and, instead of causing more pain in others, that I had taken that pain and used it to become more compassionate towards those kids in my class and in my grade who were also in looking for friends, looking to fit in with other people.
In the Mishnah Pirkei Avot, there is a teaching by Rabbi Meir about how a person can spiritually adhere themselves to Torah in 48 different ways. I want to focus on one of them:
Greater is learning Torah than the priesthood and than royalty, for royalty is acquired by thirty stages, and the priesthood by twenty-four, but the Torah by forty-eight things.
....Who shares in the bearing of a burden with his colleague...
CHESED - KINDLINESS: The second subdivision of the first division, namely, piety in deed between someone and their fellow, its matter is great beneficence, namely, that one always does good to others and never harms them. This applies to the body, possessions, and spirit of one's fellow.
Body: that one strives to help all human beings however they can, and lighten the burden that is upon them. As we learned: "bearing the yoke with one's fellow" (Avot 6:6). If their fellow is about to be struck by some bodily harm and they can prevent it or remove it, he should exert himself to do so.
The thirty-eighth is carrying a burden with one's friend: The explanation is if something happens to one's friend, and that thing is a burden such that the friend must toil until they are saved from the burden; then they should carry that burden with their friend. And this thing indicates that they are a good person - when they carry the burden with their friend to save them from that distress.
Rabbi Akiva says: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18) – that verse represents the central tenet of the Torah, [as it teaches] that you should not say: Since I have been disparaged, let someone else be disparaged along with me; since I was cursed, let someone else be cursed along with me. Rabbi Tanḥuma said: If you do act like that, know who it is that you are disgracing: “in the likeness of God He made him” (Genesis 5:1).
For those of us who were harassed in someway, it was not our fault, not our choice. Even if we felt that we deserved it. And the pain that we may have felt afterwards was also not our choice, even if we felt that we deserved it. The pain is a natural response to an attack, to that abuse.
But what is our choice is what we do with that pain; we decide how we use that pain.
We are responsible for it.
Do we use that pain as an excuse to hurt others?
Or do we use that pain as a reminder of what we felt and to remind us not to cause more pain?
At the conclusions of the sets of laws, there is a ceremony that takes places on top of Mount Sinai, that includes God and Israel's leadership, Moses, Aaron, Nadal and Avidu (the two eldest sons), and the seventy elders of Israel, who are unnamed. Here is the passage:
(9) Then Moses and Aaron, Nadav and Avihu, and seventy elders of Israel ascended; (10) and they saw the God of Israel—under whose feet was the likeness of a pavement of sapphire, like the very sky for purity. (11) Yet [God] did not raise a hand against the leaders of the Israelites; they beheld God, and they ate and drank.
What questions does this passage raise for us?
- Why were these specific people up there?
- Why are the elders unnamed?
- What does it mean to see the God of Israel?
- What is the pavement/brickworks of sapphire?
- Why do they eat and drink?
כמעשה לבנת הספיר As it were the brickwork of sapphire - This [brickwork] had been before God during the period of Egyptian slavery, to remember Israel's pain and suffering — for they were enslaved to do brick-work (Jerusalem Talmud Sukkah 6:3; Vayikra Rabbah 23:8).
A Midrashic approach (based on Jerusalem Talmud Sukkah 4,3) to the words: “like the structure of a brick made of sapphire.”
This image recalled to them the fact that the Israelites’ heavy slave labour in Egypt consisted of their making mud bricks. Seeing such an image in the heavens proved to the people viewing it that when the Israelites suffer persecution by the nations of the world in the terrestrial world, the Shechinah shares their suffering in the celestial spheres.
This reflects the statement by Sifra Parshat Behar 9:4 that whenever the Israelites are being enslaved in our world it is as if the oppressor does the same to the Shechinah in the heavenly regions. This explains Exodus 3,3 where G’d said to Moses כי ידעתי את מכאוביו, “for I am intimately familiar with its (Israel’s) pains.”
דבר אחר לבנת הספיר לשון לבנה. אמר ר׳ עקיבא עבדי פרעה היו דוחקין ומכין את ישראל כדי לעשות להם תוכן לבנים בכפל שנאמר תוכן לבנים תתנו והמצרים לא היו נותנים להם תבן והיו צריכים לקושש קש במדבר ואותו קש היה מלא קוצים וברקנים והיה הקש נוקב את עקביהם והיה הדם מתבוסס ומתערב בטיט, ורחל בת בנו של מתושלח היתה הרה ללדת ורומסת בטיט עם בעלה עד שיצא הולד ממעיה ונתערב עם המלבן והיתה צועקת על בנה ועלתה צעקתה לפני כסא הכבוד וירד מיכאל ונטלהו והעלהו לפני כסא הכבוד ועשה אותו מלבן ונתנו למטה מרגליו של הקב״ה, הוא שנאמר ותחת רגליו כמעשה לבנת הספיר. פירוש לבנה שנעשית משפיר היולדת.
Rabbi Akiva is quoted as referring to when Pharaoh forced the Israelites to deliver twice the normal amount of bricks, by thus interpreting the word תוכן in Exodus 5:18.
They had refused to continue to supply the Israelites with the straw that served as reinforcement for mud bricks, so that the Israelites had to forage for them in the fields.
They gathered straw full of thorns and thistles and the skins of their feet were pierced by that straw, blood streaming from their wounds, and was mixed with the loam. (The raw material of the bricks.)
According to this Midrash, the source of which is not known, a descendant of Metushelach, called Rachel in that Midrash, experienced extreme difficulty and pain while about to give birth, her birthstool, מלבן, a rectangular mouldlike contraption, becoming mired in loam and thistles and she being bloodied all over.
When the archangel Michael became aware of this result of the barbaric treatment of the Israelites by the decree of Pharaoh, he took a brick, לבנה, same root in Hebrew, and deposited this brick made of sapphire beneath the throne of God to remind God of how God's people were being treated.
It remained there until the destruction of the Temple due to the people’s sins when God or one of God's angels flung it back down to earth, as God had no further use for such reminders.
Rabbi 'Aḳiba said: The taskmasters of Pharaoh were beating the Israelites in order that they should make the tale of bricks, and it is said, "And the tale of the bricks, which they did make heretofore, ye shall lay upon them" (Ex. 5:8).
The Israelites were gathering the straw of the wilderness, and they were carrying it on their asses and (also on) their wives, and their sons.
The straw of the wilderness pierced their heels, and the blood was mingled with the mortar.
Rachel, the granddaughter || of Shuthelach, was near childbirth, and with her husband she was treading the mortar, and the child was born (there) and became entangled in the brick mould. Her cry ascended before the Throne of Glory. The angel Michael descended and took the brick mould with its clay, and brought it up before the Throne of Glory. That night the Holy Bountiful One, descended, and smote the firstborn of the Egyptians, as it is said, "And it came to pass at midnight that the Lord smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt" (Ex. 12:29).
[Rabbi Simchah Zissel Ziv:]We find in the Zohar, Parshat Mishpatim, "And they saw...a paved work of sapphire, and it was as the very heaven for clearness." We've already written about this, that it requires a great deal of inner wisdom to speak on this. About that which we cannot speak, we can only write. The biblical text must be explained. "A paved work of sapphire" - Rashi explained that this means the memory of Israel's pain.
Thus we see how great is the power of doing the commandments in this world - so much that when the Holy One, so to speak, uses the world of deeds for Israel, God forms an imaginative projection as if God made of the deeds a work of sapphire to remember the pain of Israel...
...We cannot leave this paragraph without commenting on the biblical context for this incredible vision that Rav Simchah is explicating – that is, the climatic point which, following tried-and-true, rabbinic technique, Rav Simchah does not mention explicitly, but assumes that we are aware of. The crucial point is that this "seeing "of the world, through the bearing of the burden of the other - a "seeing "that is definitive of both human and divine being – is followed by the act of eating and drinking. The spiritual vision is anchored in what we might call the miracle of materiality. This vision of human and divine compassion is not thought to be at the expense of flesh and blood obligations. Rather, the God who can bear the burden of creation must allow humans to eat and drink, in fact, must provide the food and drink for them.
"The physical needs of my fellow human being are my spiritual needs."
What would the world look like is we all looked at the world this way - the physical needs of my fellow human being are my spiritual needs?
What would the world be like If we all saw every other human being, made in God's image, as someone that we help - physically, materially, and spiritually?
Imagine a world where every human being took their pain and suffering and was able to transform that into love and compassion for another, so that their fellow human being not have to know that same pain, or at least would have someone to walk next to them, alleviating the suffering, if not the pain.
What would the world look like if everyone thought in terms of We, and not I?
This my challenge to all of us today. It's not a call to action. It's a call to inspiration. It's a call to begin to look at the world not as a Me Vs. You battle field. It's a call to begin to look at the world as a community, where everyone is responsible for everyone else. A world where the primary concern is not the self, but the connection between one self, one human being and another.
And we have a technology that can help us remember this on a regular basis. The brickwork beneath God's proverbial throne is make of sapphire bricks, a stunning sky blue shade. This is the same shade as the blue thread on the fringes of a tallit.
It is taught in a baraita that Rabbi Meir would say: What is different about tekhelet from all other types of colors such that it was chosen for the mitzva of ritual fringes? It is because tekhelet is similar in its color to the sea, and the sea is similar to the sky, and the sky is similar to the Throne of Glory, as it is stated: “And they saw the God of Israel; and there was under His feet the like of a paved work of sapphire stone, and the like of the very heaven for clearness” (Exodus 24:10), indicating that the sky is like a sapphire brickwork. And it is written: “The likeness of a throne, as the appearance of a sapphire stone” (Ezekiel 1:26).