The Amphibian Soul

INSIGHTS: Agricultural Man
Life as a precarious investment, where one’s capital erodes significantly before returning a profit

A TELLING STORY: Reading Right
It’s not enough to know which book to consult; one must also know from which side it should be opened

Land and sea mirror each other, yet they are vastly different worlds. Both are life-supporting environments, providing sustenance and protection to a myriad of creatures. Both are complex ecosystems, complete with the great variety of minerals, vegetation and animals which form a “food chain” and multi-runged ladder of life. But despite their similarities, land and sea are different in many ways, particularly in the manner in which the creatures who populate them relate to their environment.

Our sages have said that “man is a miniature universe,”[1] a microcosm of the entire created existence. The human being thus includes both these worlds—man has both a terrestrial and an aquatic aspect to his life.

Creatures of the land are to be found upon the land. Some species burrow under for a certain part of the day or year, and there are even species which rarely, if ever, show themselves above ground; but on the whole, land creatures live their lives on the surface of the earth. In fact, there is nothing to prevent them from severing all direct contact with the land for extended periods of time (20th-century man has all but done so).

Not so the creatures of the sea: they live submerged within their environment. And for most sea-dwelling animals, this submersion is a matter of life and death—a fish out of water is not only a creature out of its element, but a creature who cannot survive more than a short while.

Of course, the creatures of the land are no less dependent upon the land than their sister creatures of the sea are dependent upon the sea—without the land and its resources a land animal could not live. The difference lies in how this truth is reflected in their day-to-day, hour-to-hour, and minute-to-minute existence. With the sea creature, this dependence is constant and obvious. The sea animal cannot separate itself from its sustaining environment; its life and its life-source are inexorably bound together.[2] The land creature, on the other hand, can receive its nourishment from the earth and then forget about it, even deny it. Conceivably, a land creature can live an entire lifetime without acknowledging, or in any way demonstrating, from where its sustenance is derived.

This is the significance of the “land” and “sea” personalities within man. There is a part of man that is disconnected from his purpose and source: a “land” self that is oblivious to the fact that his soul is a “spark of G-d above,”[3] that he is granted life anew, each and every moment of time, by his Creator, that his existence has meaning only in the context of its role in the divine purpose. A “land” self that defines its existence in the narrow terms of personal ego and its individual desires and aspirations.

But man also possesses a “sea” persona—a spiritual self which transcends ego and individuality to attune its every deed and thought to the higher goals for which he was created. When this self is manifest, nothing about the person is distinct from his connection to his source; like a fish in water, his every living moment is an attestation to his utter dependence upon, and devotion to, his source of nourishment and life.

The Kabbalistic masters tell us that there are tzaddikim (righteous individuals) who live their entire lives as “fishes of the sea,” wholly submerged within a perpetual awareness of and subjugation to the divine reality. Such an individual was Moses, whose name expresses the “aquatic” nature of his soul (“And she called his name Moses and said: Because I drew him from the water”[4]). Thus the Torah attests that “Moses was the most humble man on the face of the earth.”[5] Moses was certainly aware of his own greatness; certainly he knew that he was the single human being chosen by G-d to serve as the conveyor of His wisdom and will to man. Yet Moses did not view his qualities as his “own” attainments, for he had utterly nullified and submerged his self within the sea of the divine reality. His own life was merely the divine plan being realized through an egoless vehicle; his teachings, the “Divine presence speaking from his throat.”[6]

This is not to say that our “terrestrial” self—our sense of identity and individuality—is to be uprooted or suppressed. Selfhood is not, in and of itself, a negative trait; it is only that, left to its own devices, it is prone to develop some very negative attributes. If a person fails to develop an “aquatic” consciousness and behavior—if he loses sight of the source and goal of life—his self is sure to turn selfish, identity translating into self-centeredness and individuality becoming disconnectedness and rootlessness.

Only when we have submerged ourselves within the sea of the divine reality can we exploit our ego as the positive force it inherently is. Only then can we properly harness our unique worth as an individual to optimally realize our mission in life.

This is the ideal expressed in Jacob’s blessing to his grandchildren, Manasseh and Ephraim—“They shall swarm as fish[7] in the midst of the land.”[8] The ultimate challenge for man is not only to be a “fish,” but to be a fish “in the midst of the land.”

Therein lies the deeper significance of the splitting of the Red Sea seven days after our Exodus from Egypt. In recounting the miracle, the Torah describes the children of Israel as “walking on dry land within the sea.” Following our redemption—in both the physical and spiritual sense—from Egypt and its pagan culture, we were empowered to “walk on dry land” as distinct and unique beings, and at the same time walk “within the sea”—immerse ourselves within the sea of the all-embracing, all-pervading, universal truth of truths.

Our sages tell us that the splitting of the Red Sea was but the first step of a process that spans the whole of our history; that the song which Moses and Israel sang upon traversing the sea is but the first stanza of a song that culminates in the era of Moshiach, the end-goal of creation.[9] The splitting of the sea was the precedent that enables and directs our centuries-long quest for that perfect synthesis of land and sea which will be fully realized in the messianic age, when “The land shall be filled with the knowledge of G-d as the waters cover the sea.”[10]

Based on the Rebbe’s talks on Sukkot 5721 (1960), Shabbat Yitro 5725 (1965), and on other occasions[11]

The Jewish calendar is closely attuned to the agricultural seasons. The Torah instructs that Passover must coincide with the season of aviv,[12] which is broadly defined as “spring” but specifically means the season of the ripening of barley.[13] Shavuot is called “the reaping festival”[14] and coincides with the reaping of the staple crop, wheat. Sukkot is the “harvest festival,” celebrated when the grain, which has been drying in the field all summer, is brought into storage.[15] And then there is the “New Year for Trees” on the 15th of the month of Shevat (Tu BeShevat), observed as the first tree blossoms emerge from their winter slumber. Indeed, our calendar goes to great lengths to reconcile its lunar-based months with the solar-based seasons.[16]

Our forefathers, observing these festivals in the Holy Land three thousand years ago, were primarily an agrarian people. Still, even then there was Levi, the tribe of priests; Shimon, a tribe of schoolteachers; Issachar, a tribe of scholars; and the seafaring merchants of Zebulun. Today, a very small percentage of us work the land. But the Torah, G-d’s blueprint for creation, transcends differences of time and cultural circumstance and is deeply relevant to all generations and all societies of history. So what does all this mean to those of us who never planted a seed or gathered a harvest?

But the very experience of life is agrarian. The soul’s descent into physical life, like the planting of a seed, is an investment—a precarious investment at that, given the fact that one’s capital erodes significantly before returning a profit. The farmer who sows his field knows that he is taking perfectly good grain—grain with which he could feed his family—and casting it into the soil, where it will soon decompose and rot. But he also knows that the disintegrating seed will stimulate the earth to yield many times the quantity he has “squandered.”

The soul, too, is buried in earth—cast into a body of clay with material drives and desires. It is worse for the wear: its spiritual senses are dulled, its moral rectitude compromised. But the soul’s investment within earth and earthiness stimulates it—and the body and the physical environment in which it has been placed—to a far greater “harvest” than the soul alone could yield.

The human “farm” includes many and varied crops. On Passover we celebrate the ripening of barley—a grain that serves primarily as animal feed. This represents the development of the animalistic nature with which the soul has been saddled upon its descent into the physical state, but whose passion and intensity surpass anything the spiritual soul can muster for its own spiritual ideals. Properly cultivated and directed, the beast in man thus proves a priceless resource in the soul’s quest to deepen and intensify its bond with its Creator.

On Shavuot, wheat, the staple of the human diet, is harvested. This represents the development of the “human” element in man, the soul’s own spiritual potential, made more potent and bountiful by the challenge of material life. And so it is with the other agricultural festivals on our calendar, such as the “internalization” of the harvest on Sukkot[17] or the element of “delight” in life represented by Tu BeShevat’s fruit blossoms[18]: each embodies another aspect of the soul’s saga as buried seed, sprouting shoot and gainful harvest.

Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn (the previous Lubavitcher Rebbe, 1880-1950), who was famed for his undiscriminating love and concern for all Jews, was once challenged: “Does not the Torah command one to ‘Rebuke your fellow’[20] when he is guilty of wrongdoing? Does not the Shulchan Aruch (Code of Jewish Law) classify certain types of sinners who are to be rejected outright? So why are you so tolerant of so many sinful people?”

Replied the Rebbe: “The Shulchan Aruch consists of four sections, each containing hundreds of chapters. The laws of which you speak of are contained in chapter 425 of Choshen Mishpat—one of the last chapters of the fourth section. The truth is that were you to set the Shulchan Aruch before an illiterate boor, he would soon come upon these laws. He would open it as he would any other book—from left to right. But as you surely know, in Hebrew we read from right to left.

“What I suggest to you,” concluded Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak, “is that you open the Shulchan Aruch at the beginning. After you have studied the first three sections and the first 424 chapters of the fourth, and you have fully implemented them in your daily life, you may then take it upon yourself to sit in judgment of your fellow. Then you may decide if he is indeed to be counted among the utterly wicked defined in chapter 425.”

[2]. A sea-creature’s utter identification with its environment is also reflected in a ruling of Torah law. When a person immerses in a mikvah to attain ritual purity, nothing must interpose between him and the mikvah’s waters; if the slightest particle of any substance adheres to his body, the immersion is invalid. Yet this rule does not apply to anything which grows in water; the body of a fish, for example, or any product thereof, is not considered an “interposition” (chatzitzah) but an integral part of the waters themselves.

[11]. Likkutei Sichot, vol. XX, p. 172; vol. XI, p. 76. See Likkutei Torah, Tzav 14b ff.