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Shabat Chol HaMoed Pesach 5767

On Pesach we read the first of the five megillot, Shir HaShirim, a work drenched in the nature and its abundance, its fecundity. On three occasions the narrator abjures the daughters of Jerusalem "by the gazelles or by the does of the field" - do not arouse or awaken love until it please. Like many verses in Shir HaShirim, this verse, with its symbolism, is subject to many explanatory attempts by the various commentators over the generations. What, precisely, are those gazelle and those does (a deer, a female deer) supposed to represent?

Well, I have the inside track on this one, since I have a doe myself. I'm speaking of my daughter, Ayelet, whose name means "doe". G-d willing, Ayelet will be bat-mitzvah in a couple of months. She's a wonderful and challenging neshamah, and one of her outstanding characteristics is a love for animals that knows no bounds. Naturally, she has special affection for her pets, but her concern extends to any animal of any size with the possible exception of lice and scorpions. Just the other day, she asked me if it were permitted to violate Shabbat to save a wounded animal that wandered into the house, and, when I answered (with plenty of gentle explanation) "no", she responded incredulously, "you mean you could just watch while the animal suffered"?

So imagine how it must have felt for her (and for me, the father) to walk in to her room and discover that one of her hamsters was clearly and inexorably dying. No, it wasn't Shabbat, but there's nothing you can do for a dying hamster except, if you're Ayelet, hold it ever so gently and cry and cry and cry....

The next day we went out and buried "Cloud" (that was the name of the hamster - "Anan" in Hebrew") next to Ayelet's nectarine tree. There had to be something said or read, otherwise it would have felt to Ayelet that we were throwing the poor thing out, so I chose Mizmor 104 from Tehillim. Look it over again, and you'll see how appropriate it indeed felt to Ayelet. I stressed to her that we were saying this mizmor to Hashem, and Hashem would know what to do with the spark of living energy that had departed with the hamster's death.

Later that day, after minchah, I picked up a volume of Rav Kook's notebooks and opened it at random and let my eyes fall where they will. They fell on paragraph 89, represented by the Hebrew letter " peh-tet". Vocalize those letters with a segol and think of the English word. Now, here's what Rav Kook says in that teaching:

"In that elemental soul of Noach there were revealed all the creatures of the world, the entirety of life. They came to him to the ark, drawn by his inner nature, as a branch is drawn to its source. His supernal inner thirst to walk alongside the divine matched his inclinations to extended human living culture over the whole world. The righteous man ('ish tzaddik") and the man of the earth ("ish ha'adamah") in perfect union. The joining of these two perfections of soul is indeed a wonderous thing, that in better times would have sparkled with much greater effulgence. But the earthy element ultimately weighed things down..."



Emboldened by my find, I looked at the preceding teaching, and here is what Rav Kook says in paragraph 88:

"The soul of man in its expansiveness incorporates within it all the particular souls of all living creatures. Every living soul is a spark of a huge, inclusive, torchlike light, the soul of man. It only appears on the surface that each species and each individual exists independantly. The penetrating eye, however, sees a gigantic bonfire of life, holding fast in all its divisions to universal man as a flame holds fast to its wick. Amidst all those divisions many different levels and intensities of the light and the warmth are revealed, and each ready-for-forming creature is predisposed for only a very small portion of that light which illuminates within the soul of universal man. Every creature yearns and strives to return to the supernal light in its fullness, to reunite with the soul of man...."

A day and a half latter, the other hamster, "Star", died too, mercifully it was without any suffering that Ayelet noticed. The tears poured again, a bit less this time as she must have on some level prepared herself for such a possibility. We decided that we would learn for her Bat Mitzvah the details on the mitzvah of tza'ar ba'alei chayim.

Tremendous torrents of yearning and love does that girl have coursing through her, right now the main beneficiaries are the animals. She is young, though, so I'll abjure her by the gazelles and by the does, do not arouse or waken that love until it please.

As for the rest of us, bemused by the story but oh so distant from that immediacy of connection, that intensity of feeling - - - -awaken, arouse already!! The time has come!!

Atah Takum terachem tzion ki et l'chenena, KI VA MOED!!

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