Kavanot: שבועות תשפ״ד--Version One

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I always say that’s why we read this haftorah today: everyone has been up all night, and by the time we get to the haftorah, we’re all asleep. So no problem with reading it in public; no one is paying attention.

So what do I do with this image of G-d on a throne of sapphire, surrounded by a rainbow glow?

I could just ignore it and drift off to sleep. Or I could do the Jewish thing and answer a question with another question: What does this have to do with שבועות?

It’s more than “both were a revelation”. This very image appears in the story of מעמד הר סיני.

Same “seeing” G-d, same sapphire, but a little different—here the sapphire is a brick, לבנת הספיר, rather than a stone, אבן ספיר. And here they don’t see the כסא, but תחת רגליו.

I don’t pretend to understand the prophetic experience but I imagine that it is a synesthetic phenomenon; it doesn’t involve the senses but our primate brains have to interpret it somehow, so it gets experienced as though it were being sensed.

So the prophets “see” “something”. And what they see is remarkably consistent:

The Malbim tries to understand this sapphire (note that sapphires can be any color (technically not red, because then it’s called a ruby) or transparent. It is כעצם השמים לטהר, ”pure as the sky“, and a הנגה that is כמראה הקשת אשר יהיה בענן ביום הגשם. Malbim says it is a prism:

He’s getting very kabbalistic here. The idea is that ה׳ is infinite and unknowable but manifests in the world in perceptible ways. We can see the created world, we experience joy and tragedy and understand them all as gifts of G-d. These various ways that we experience the presence of G-d are called the ספירות, which I will leave untranslated, but we know what they are: חסד,‎ גבורה,‎ תפארת,‎ נצח,‎ הוד,‎ יסוד,‎ מלכות. These categories help us think about theological concepts; ה׳ doesn’t have “parts”—ה׳ אחד. This is “word picture, for making understanding”. The image is of ה׳'s manifestation in the world as a Divine “light”, or שפע, that comes from where ה׳ ”sits“:

This is Malbim’s עולם הכסא, or אצילות (”next-to-ness“, adjacency). But we can’t experience that; the light is refracted into a spectrum of colors. Malbim says the ספיר is named for the ספירות; I think the etymology is backward; ספירות in later kabbalah is taken from the ספיר here.

I like that image; it helps me think about some very deep things. But really, why do I care? It’s all far too “woo woo” for me.

The Malbim says there are two parts of this prism: כסא and תחת רגליו.

G-d manifests in the world in two ways, in the created universe, and in the social world that we create by our actions. Human beings create the ספיר by which the Divine light is refracted in the world. That’s what it means when Yeshaya says that the earth is G-d’s footstool:

But at the same time, it is the בית המקדש that is G-d’s footstool:

We just completed the ספירת העומר, and we all know how that ספירה is connected to the ספירות we mentioned above. Every week represents a different ספירה, and every day is a different aspect of that ספירה. But those ספירות aren’t about seeing G-d in the world. They are about improving ourselves and our relationship with others, as we approach the anniversary of the giving of the Torah.

That is how the Malbim sees this image of מעשה מרכבה. G-d’s presence in the world depends on our actions. As Rav Soloveitchik puts it,

בני ישראל were given an unimaginable vision of ה׳'s glory. But the take-home message was תחת רגליו כמעשה לבנת הספיר. You have to take that vision, that inspiration, and build it, one metaphoric brick at a time, into the metaphoric בית המקדש that brings that glory into the world.

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