Intuition
Thoughts on Parashat VaYesse 2019
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And
Yaakov left Be’er Sheva and set out for Haran. And he came upon a certain place
and stopped there for the night…and he lay down in that place, and dreamed…And
Yaakov awoke from his sleep and said, “Indeed, God is in this place, and I did
not know.”
(Bereshit 28:10-16)
Rashi commented upon the apparent uniqueness of
Yaakov’s sleep at that time, writing: “In that place (Be El) he lay down, but
during the (prior) fourteen years that he served in the House of Ever he did
not lay down at night, because he was occupied with the study of Torah.”[1]
Indeed, it is reasonable to imagine Yaakov as an individual who abhorred sleep.
He would, in fact, remark twenty years later to Lavan that “Scorching heat
ravaged me by day and frost by night; and sleep fled from my eyes”
(31:40). The mission-driven Yaakov employed a cunning mind and deceptive spirit
to control his destiny. We all know people like that. They never have time for sleep!
But God had another plan for Yaakov. Rashi cited the Hakhamim’s
reading of the text: “The sun set for him suddenly, not in its normal time, so
that he should spend the night there.”[2]
Seeking a prophetic dialogue with Yaakov as He had with Avraham and Yisshak,
God laid Yaakov to sleep. This must have felt unnatural for Yaakov. He was
unaccustomed to the diminished state of consciousness and loss of cognitive
control inherent to sleep. Yaakov’s reaction upon waking best reveal his
feelings of vulnerability at that time – “Indeed, God is in this place, and
I did not know.” Yaakov was uncomfortable with “not knowing.”
Whereas in the past it was he who
“knew” what Esav and Yisshak did not, Yaakov now experienced himself
what it meant to “not know.”
I believe that Yaakov’s dream on the mountaintop at Bet El instilled
him with more than just a feeling of humility. It exposed him to a dimension of
thought that he had until then left unexplored. “There is a profound intimation
here about the dynamics of sleep,” Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg wrote, “about the
loss of consciousness and the possible gifts of unconsciousness, about knowing
and dreaming.”[3] What is the difference
between wakeful “knowing” and restful “dreaming”? Oliver Sacks explained that
the electrophysiological properties of the brain in waking and dreaming are
quite similar. There is a single mechanism for both – the constant
inner-talking between the cerebral cortex and the thalamus, a continuous
interplay of image and
feeling.
Waking and dreaming, then, are fundamentally the same, distinguished only by
the sensory input of wakefulness. Whereas a “waking consciousness” derives from
sensory input, dreams are the product of their absence. Dr. Sacks summarized:
“Waking consciousness is dreaming – but dreaming constrained by external
reality.”[4]
Yaakov’s state of dreaming, then, opened him to the mental world of
“unconstrained thought.”
The Kabbalists distinguish between two distinct modes of thought – hokhmah
and binah. Hokhmah
derives from the words “koah mah,”
or “the potential of what.” It refers to the question of what something really
is – its essence. Binah, on
the other hand, relates to the word “bein,”
or “between.” It implies separation, as you look at something logically and put
yourself at distance from it. While
deciding to build a home, for example, hokhmah is
the initial flash that enters into the mind about what the house will look like
(its essence as a home), while binah is
the deliberate blueprint of structure and rooms (its intricate details).[5]
Arriving at the top of the mountain at Bet El, Yaakov must have taken
in the landscape and its environs. Employing his cognitive faculty of binah,
which he was adept at doing, he immediately noticed the mountain’s many
externalities – the grass, the rocks, the trees, etc. Laying him to sleep,
however, God encouraged Yaakov’s entrance into the realm of hokhmah.
He urged him to see beyond the “logical” and “apparent,” and into the
“essence” of that mountain. And so, he did:
And Yaakov awoke from his sleep…And he was afraid
and he said, “How fearsome is this place! This can be but the house of God, and
this is the gate of the heavens.” (28:16-17)
As the trappings of wakefulness faded away, Yaakov’s mind now extended
beyond the sensory input of consciousness. He tapped into the pristine
perception of hokhmah,
and beheld the unfathomable reality that lay before his eyes.
But it is possible to experience hokhmah
even while awake. Albert Einstein remarked: “At times I feel certain that I am
right without knowing the reason.”[6] And
R. Moshe Sofer z”l,
the great 19th Century Hungarian authority and author of Hatam
Sofer, more than once told his students that his method to
answering halakhic questions was based upon intuition, immediately stating
answer that first came to his mind. Upon making that initial determination, R.
Sofer would search “backwards” grounding the answer in its appropriate sources.[7]
“The major decisions of man’s life are made spontaneously and
suddenly,” R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik z"l once said, “in response to an aboriginal
command from within.” He pointed to decisions of faith, marriage, solutions to
financial problems, acts of military genius and a variety of other pivotal
resolutions in life that are often reached intuitively.[8]
The chaotic nature of life, however, has a way of distracting us. We
are often led astray from our intuition in directions that we ourselves choose,
based on a variety of logical factors and determinations. Awakened to a similar
reality of “self-blindness,” Yaakov expressed surprise that he had failed to
intuit the sanctity of his sleeping place. Although it took a dream to “open Yaakov’s
inner eyes,” we can “open our
eyes” even while awake – by following our intuition.
[1] Commentary of Rashi to
Bereshit 28:12 s.v va-yishkav.
[2] Commentary of Rashi to
Bereshit 28:12 s.v. ki ba.
[3] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The
Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis (New York, NY, 1995), pg. 190.
[4] Oliver Sacks, An
Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales (New York, NY, 1995), pg.
57.
[5] See, e.g., R. Aryeh Kaplan, Inner
Space (Jerusalem, IS, 1991), pg. 57-8 and R. Yechiel Bar-Lev, Song of
the Soul: Introduction to Kaballa (Petah Tikvah, IS, 1994), pg. 83-4.
[6] Albert Einstein, Einstein
on Cosmic Religion and Other Opinions and Aphorisms (Mineola, NY, 2009),
pg. 97.
[7] See Maoz Kahana’s “Yesh
lanu av zaken,” in Hagedolim: Leaders Who Shaped the Israeli Haredi
Jewry (Jerusalem, IS, 2017), pg. 99-100.
[8] R. Abraham R. Besdin, Reflections
of the Rav vol. 1: Lessons in Jewish Thought Adapted from Lectures of Rabbi
Joseph B. Soloveitchik (Hoboken, NJ, 1993), pg. 91.