Our Gemara on Amud Beis discusses various halachic scenarios where a prohibited action is a repetition of an identical prohibited action. In modern vernacular, if you park your car on the wrong side of the street, and you get a ticket, can you get a ticket two hours later or are you penalized only once?
In our Gemara, the discussion is stimulated by the question of if one causes a blemish in an already blemished firstborn animal, is there a second punishment? And it continues to other cases such as making the same meal offering (Mincha) chametz, for the second time. (This practically is done by mixing it with a leavening agent and then also baking it to cause it to leaven. Same prohibition, but violated twice. Is he liable for two separate punishments?) Likewise, if one performs an additional act of sterilizing an animal that was already sterile, such as by damaging an additional reproductive part, is that person liable for a second punishment?
The concept of a repeated act that has no material significance also comes up in an interesting way in Eichah Rabbah (1:41):
“The prophet rebukes Babylon and says to it: ‘Take a millstone and grind flour’ (Isaiah 47:2). Everyone grinds wheat, yet it says ‘grind flour’? Rather, Jerusalem said to the daughter of Babylon: Had war not been waged against me from on high, could you have waged war against me? Had fire not been sent against me from on high, could you have overcome me? Rather, you killed a dead lion. You ground already ground flour. You set fire to a burned city.”
The import of this Midrash is that God is saying, “The enemies of Israel should not gloat, as they could only have conquered Israel because I already doomed it.” I think on a deeper level, it is saying the Temple was spiritually destroyed from within, hollowed out of its soterial power due to the people’s sins. The enemy could only destroy it because it was already destroyed in the “real” world of consequence, the spiritual world. To a person and nation of God, success or failure, victory or defeat, is not about externalities but rather the connection or disconnection to God. That is a different formula than the secular world of materialism and cause and effect.
Nothing is what it seems, and when we see so-called reality, we merely see the tip of the iceberg. The best explanation of this comes via Plato’s famous allegory of the cave (Republic Book VII, 514a–520a):
Imagine prisoners chained from childhood in a dark cave, facing a blank wall so they cannot turn their heads. Behind them burns a fire; between the fire and the prisoners is a low wall, along which people walk carrying objects (statues, figures of animals, etc.). These cast shadows on the wall the prisoners see. The prisoners hear echoes and take the shadows and sounds for the whole of reality—they have never seen anything else.
One prisoner is freed and compelled to stand, turn around, and look toward the fire and the objects. At first the light pains his eyes and he prefers the familiar shadows. Gradually he realizes the objects are more real than the shadows. He is then dragged up the steep, rough passage out of the cave into the sunlight. The glare is overwhelming; he cannot look directly at things at first and must begin with shadows, reflections in water, then the objects themselves, the moon and stars, and finally the sun.
The freed man, now understanding that the sun is the source of light and life in the upper world, returns to the cave. His eyes, adapted to daylight, are temporarily useless in the darkness; he is ridiculed by the other prisoners, who insist the shadows are the only reality. They even call him a heretic and see him as dangerous for questioning their basic assumptions of life and undermining order in society.
Many of the prophets who “saw” the true reality were ridiculed or persecuted because the rest of the world, and some tyrannical governments, depended on maintaining the ignorant illusion. Avraham was thrown in the furnace for that “sin”, Yirmiyahu thrown into a pit (38:6) and Zechariah was murdered (Divrei Hayamim II:24:20-21). And yet, for every true prophet, there may be dozens of false prophets.
To sum it up, reality is not all it’s cracked up to be, and to a spiritual person and nation, what happens in the physical world is of less consequence than our standing in relation to God and morality. Yet, we live mostly in a practical world and those who challenge the structures and constructs of consensus reality are treated as threats and dangers because they disrupt the order of things. Often they are delusional false messiahs, or to be more fair, they may have a glimpse of the truth but fail to offer a vision of how to integrate that vision without destroying function and reality and also personally distort it due to their own biases and flaws.
To be civilized and be a civilization we must respect that there is more to reality than cause and effect; our moral standing does matter as much as our tanks and missiles. The war is not only won on the battlefield, but in the hearts of men and in the spiritual world. As Mishna Rosh Hashana (3:8) comments on the battle with Amalek that seemed to be dependent on whether or not Moshe kept his hands raised (Shemos 17:11): “Did the hands of Moses make war when he raised them or break war when he lowered them? Rather, the verse comes to tell you that as long as the Jewish people turned their eyes upward and subjected their hearts to their Father in Heaven, they prevailed, but if not, they fell.”
We must consider the extraordinary visions of those who may have the insight to perceive what is beyond those shadows projected on the wall. Yet, the show must go on and the bills must be paid. In the end, while it was “only” a symbolic act, Moshe still did need to keep his hands raised. The physical act was necessary and the soldiers needed to fight. Dreamers and visionaries ought to be cautiously considered but not at the expense of functioning. Rav Soloveitchik famously stated, “There is nothing so physically and spiritually destructive as diverting one’s attention from this world.” (Halachic Man, p. 41.)
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Translations Courtesy of Sefaria, except when, sometimes, I disagree with the translation
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Rabbi Simcha Feuerman, Rabbi Simcha Feuerman, LCSW-R, LMFT, DHL is a psychotherapist who works with high conflict couples and families. He can be reached via email at simchafeuerman@gmail.com