Year: 5773 - Bo - audio 2

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Episode Synopsis

Nous - From last week’s loneliness of “speaking to the table” to the recognition of the meaning of penetration, of בא redefining the nature of consciousness and information, introducing the elements of זכירה and its narrative (here understood at last together with the elements of Va’era) into identity and the fullness of freedom.
Any item of intellectual understanding that has not been incorporated into the fullness of one's consciousness is in essence meaningless and externalized. If that is the case then it would mean that the presence of human mind in terms of awareness is not really served by the abstractions alone but only in their integration into the human experience, and that experience itself is part of what the nature of Creation's information consists. This would be the meaning of all of the particular mitzvot in Bo in which it is demanded of us that we be mindful of, not simply record memories somewhere. This is the reason that thought itself is insufficient in any of these mitzvahs regarding memory and what is demanded is particularly articulation, which is not what one would have thought at all. Yet consistently whether one refers to teshuva, or to זכירת עמלק, or to הגדה, always when this involves זכירה it is articulation that is of the essence.
This is actually quite amazing because it gives us a completely different insight into what went wrong with Sinai. We always used to think that the problem was a feeling of being overwhelmed by an agenda that was not our own but in reality anything at all would by definition be not our own so long as it was not incorporated into what it meant to be me. This is why we can accept that there is wisdom among the goyim, but not that there would be Torah within the goyim.
The reason that we would insist upon articulation is indeed not for communication but rather for that magic of language in which there is an integration of thought/information with the actuality of the physical universe. It is the articulation per se that was demanded of אדם הראשון and it was the articulation per se that defined the very רוח ממללא which is the essence of נשמת חיים that defines the אדם and his רוח הקודש. This is Rambam’s concept of שכל which fills the world and is a part of the essence of השגחה and which, in its ordering and reality, does not have a causal effect per se, and thus השגחה is a meaningless concept to anything not connected with this cosmic שכל. This is very similar to the ideas of νόησις [(noēsis, “concept”, “idea”, “intelligence”, “understanding”), from νοεῖν (noein, “to intend”, “to perceive”, “to see”, “to understand”) (from νοῦς (nous, “mind”, “thought”), from νόος (noos)) + -σις (-sis), suffix forming nouns of action] that appear in Anaxagoras and mentioned by Aristotle as originating in the earlier Hermotimus.
Astoundingly, it is historical awareness that is the Torah’s paradigm for this necessary prerequisite to freedom and קבלת התורה, in every element of זכור את היום הזה, in החודש הזה לכם, in the לילה המשומר ובא מששת ימי בראשית, in the conjoining of flesh, intelligence and action later through תפילין, and in all experiences that are זכר, linked to history. But with the introduction here, this becomes obvious, for the only element of experience that relates directly to identity as opposed to what is subsequently incorporated into the consciousness of that identity, is the history that exists within those experiences, and consciousness/identity is enhanced with each expansion into past and future of that awareness. This is why the הגדה takes us into the deep past and the distant future, and why the incorporation of awareness of the history of biological development and indeed of the history of the universe is so much a part of self. Subconsciously, the drive to understand the universe is obviously the need to know oneself, and this is all the more true of the deepest shared space of all, Torah, and of the articulate space called נפש חיה that is the place of תפילה, so shared a space that the word is only a reflexive.
Language, per se, is of course the most profound carrier of human history together with DNA and the entire issue here is self-referential. Obviously אדם could only name based on the history that he perceived in himself and in doing so created history as part of his identity such that the past suddenly came to exist within history. The deepest connection to physical constructs is therefor in the purview of language, down to the power of בצלאל וצירוף אותיות שנבראו בהן שמים וארץ and the relationship of the משכן אם to the information which is Torah and to the act of creation which is preserved in the מלאכות שבת – בראשית – משכן connection.
Identity as discovered in Bo actually is freedom, not just required for freedom, and this is why it is based on the profound stress on history, memory and awareness, far more than what we suspected in the surface level of significance and awareness for moral choice.