Freema Gottlieb - Rules of Warfare Invite a Pursuit of Transcendence

Rules of Warfare Invite a Pursuit of Transcendence

Parshat Ki Teitzei begins with instructions for "when you go out to war . . . and you see among the captives a physically beautiful woman and you desire her . . ."
Says the Maggid of Mezeritch, the Chasidic master and successor to the Baal Shem Tov: "When you go out[means] when you go away from inwardness, from your normal state of cleaving to God," the inevitable consequence is war: conflict between warring elements in the world of fragmentation is precisely the battlefield where the fight against one's evil inclination is fought.

In Kabbalah and Chasidism, the metaphoric leap is taken immediately, the war a purely spiritual battle.

But in the simple meaning of the biblical text, "out" is a war situation where ordinary civilized norms do not apply and it is permissible that women be "taken." To permit such behavior, but to stipulate the conditions in which it may occur, seemed a necessary concession to human frailty. Where there is a mechanism for getting what one wants, the man might put his desire within limits. The enemy eshet yifat toar, or woman of consummate physical beauty, is neither completely forbidden nor completely permissible but a stage in between. Though it is in the world of the "outside" that the desire and the opportunity to "take" her arises—in the heat of passion, the battle of instinctual drives—the soldier must postpone gratification until that same "object" can be translated into "interior space." After falling in love with her exoticism, with externals, he must strip her of all her exotic weaponry of seduction. She must "shave her head and pare her nails" (Deuteronomy 21:12) and become domesticated. Finally, he must give her the chance, for an entire month, to mourn her father and mother. Then, if he still feels any desire for her, in that denuded state, he must marry her (Deuteronomy 21:13) and treat her with equal respect accorded a Jewish woman.

But who is this "eshet yifat toar," this woman of consummate physical beauty? Our mother Rachel, with whom Jacob fell in love immediately when he "went out" from the Holy Land to foreign parts, is described in the portion Vayetze in Genesis as "yifat toar, yifat mareh," "beautiful of shape, beautiful to look at." The description matches that of the "eshet yifat toar" in our portion, and of no one else in the Bible is this expression used. In both cases what we are talking about is an extreme of external beauty.

What qualities does Rachel personify when Jacob first sees her that make him love her so? Beauty of external appearance. Her beauty radiates toward him as she approaches. But the Zohar asks the question: "Since Jacob had to find his wife by the well, why did he not meet there Leah, who was to be the mother of so many tribes?" The answer given is, "so that eye and heart should be riveted by Rachel's beauty, and he should want to set up his permanent home together with her."

Says the Maggid of Mezeritch: The true meaning of the encounter with the lovely shepherdess at the well alludes to the Higher Rachel whom Jacob was drawn to embrace only after receiving an impetus from the Rachel of flesh and blood. For all the beauty of this lower Rachel streams from the One Above. Indeed, it is permitted to embrace earthly beauty only if it leads to heavenly attachment. And one is not permitted to cleave to this lower beauty unless it takes him off his guard, and if it does, as in this case when Rachel came to meet Jacob, he took his encounter with this lower beauty as a ladder and an impetus to reach even higher.

So finally, who is this eshet yifat toar, this great beauty after whom the Jewish soldier lusts? No longer is she just an enemy captive, she is the Divine Beauty of God, taken into captivity in the material world.

And this is the meaning of the verse "and you see among the captives a physically beautiful woman and you desire her . . .": Held captive is the Shekhinah Herself, God's feminine aspect, incarnated in the material. As the Lurianic Kabbalah teaches, one stage of Creation is the Breaking of the Vessels, during which the purity of the Divine Light was shattered and made captive in these earthly fragments.

"And you desire her . . . and you take her for yourself" means that you should not "take" her "for yourself," that is, you should not take her for selfish motives, for your pleasure; rather, if, like Jacob, you are surprised by beauty, you should offer all your desire as a burnt offering to God, all the intent being to raise the sparks to cleave to the root of the higher emotion.

In this metaphorical case, to "go out to battle against your enemies" is an invitation to seek transcendence.

Selected Works

“A masterful work, and so timely; there is a spiritual yearning in the country, which The Lamp of God will help to satisfy.”
—Bill Moyers, Public Affairs Television, Inc.

“Freema Gottlieb’s beautiful book The Lamp of God is written in black fire on white fire; it is the kind of book that had to be written, that comes from the deep sources of both the author and the Jewish tradition, and whose brilliance blazes off its rough edges.”
“Both a very conservative book, in love with roots, with nuances of orthodox tradition, immersed in sources, and an entirely radical, free-thinking one, that gives one a sense of understanding stories in the Bible, and mitzvoth, in a way that they have never been understood before.
—Francis Landy, professor of Religious Studies, University of Alberta, Midstream,.

“Of deep interest to all who want to know more about the extraordinary achievements of those who, through so many ages, have given their poetic and imaginative power to the enrichment of an ancient tradition. A dedicated performance and an admirable book.”
—Frank Kermode, Fellow of the British Academy, professor emeritus of English Literature at Cambridge, member of the working party on interpretation, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, coauthor The Literary Guide to the Bible, and author of The Oxford Anthology of English Literature and many other works

“Freema Gottlieb weighs into history, the history of our beginnings, like a true poet. Light in her hands is tangible; it can be felt, it can be held. Her art is truly transformational in the best sense: it treats its subject as though for the first time, and will certainly cause a stir.”
—James Ellison, former executive editor, Book-of-the-Month Club, and book editor of Psychology Today

“Freema Gottlieb is a truly talented storyteller gifted with a luminous and original imagination.”
—Judith Rossner, novelist, author August, Looking for Mr. Goodbar and other novels.

“The writing is not linear and expository, but associative and reflective. Some passages appear to have been written in a meditative consciousness and might serve as the objects of spiritual contemplation.”
—Nehemia Polen, associate assistant professor of Jewish Thought, Boston Hebrew College ,and author of Esh Kodesh, the Warsaw Ghetto writings of Rabbi Kalonymos Shapiro.

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The Lamp of God: A Jewish Book of Light

A meditation on 3,000 years of Jewish sources to which the light metaphor is key.

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"A Love Made out of Nothing"

Jewish Week, March 13, 2017

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Gut Renovation

Gut Renovation is a memoir-in-progress about the transformation of an apartment that originally was a Jerusalem water well.

Quick Links

INTERVIEWS

“Emmanuel Levinas Face to Face.” Forward, (August 1991). “From Mao to Moses: An Interview with Benny Levy, Leading Maoist and Sartre’s Secretary.” Partisan Review (Fall 1994). “West Bank Women: A Double Defiance,” in Jewish Press Features, reprinted in Genesis 11, 1979, and other newspapers. “A Talk with Aharon Appelfeld.” New York Times Book Review, November 23. 1980 “A Talk with Nathan Rappaport, Sculptor of the Warsaw Memorial.” Hadassah, December 1981.

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For Jews of Vichy's "Free Zone" in the early 1940s, the idyllic scenery of the remote village of Aulus-les-bains, nestled amid the intense greens of the Garbet valley at an altitude of about 2,500 feet, on the Pyrenean mountains of the Franco-Spanish border, presented nothing but a deathtrap.