P: How is the call of Isaiah, “Wake up”, embodied in religious practice?

AS: There is a point-you might call it a theological point – as follows:

Every child is born with a soul. The time of bar mitzvah is not just an occasion for celebration; celebrating is completely irrelevant. It is the time of the awakening of the soul. A sage in Jewish tradition has written that there are periods of life when an awakening occurs, and one such is the bar mitzvah age, basically the onset of puberty. Awakening at that time is both physical and spiritual. That special time can be misused and misspent because there are other, distracting forces moving within a person. It may then be another seven years or more until another opportunity to awaken – there is no rule, but it goes in jumps.

So, there are periods of life when there can be an awakening. Everybody is called, as another author puts it, but most people don’t hear. And among those who hear, only a part act. From time to time there is a knock on the door, but sometimes just the Lord will know it. And then it passes. It’s an awakening, not a conversion, not a change of mind or sensibility. But another echo, an opening, comes to a person.  At that point one has a choice to make.

I would: say something about another Biblical text, but I suppose that the Bible is terra incognita for you.

P: It’s terra demi-cognita.

 

AS: I see. The Song of Songs has always been understood in Jewish literature as a mystical song. It tells a story, up to a point, but it has always been understood that the Song serves mostly as a metaphor on two, three, or even four levels. Many years ago, I gave a speech on a very special occasion, the day of my wedding. Unfortunately, I didn’t write down what I said, and I remember just pieces. One of the main points was that the Song is multidimensional, like a chain with many rings interconnected with each other. I quoted this passage (5:2-6):

I sleep, but my heart is awake. I hear my Beloved knocking.

“Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my perfect one …”

And she responds:

“I have taken off my tunic, am I to put it on again?

I have washed my feet,

Am I to dirty them again?”

She resists. But then …

My Beloved thrust his hand through the hole in the door. …

At last, trembling to the core of her being, she opens the door:

I opened to my Beloved,

but he had turned his back and gone!

My soul failed at his flight.

I sought him but I did not find him,

I called to him but he did not answer.

 

This is quite a good description, I’m asleep, but my heart is some­ how awake and there’s a knock on the door. The Beloved is slipping in through the cracks, from the window and from the cracks. Knocking on the door. And sometimes I say that everything’s all right and I’m just too snug in bed. Then it disappears and I have a total feeling of void. After that, I may try to chase it for a long time, but I don’t find it.

This suggests something of the whole compass of awakening. When you are thirteen years old, it is one thing; at twenty, or twenty-one, it is another. These are not exact times, but people sometimes experience a reawakening, hear another call. I hear the knock, and I know it-but I may not be ready. Later on, I feel the void. What is it that I’m doing ”in bed”? Writing a Ph.D. thesis? Creating a career for myself? Whatever it may be, after ignoring the call there will be a feeling of the void. Some people then set out on a long search, but it doesn’t provide an answer. The call, the opportunity to awaken, doesn’t happen every day. If I miss it, I can go on a quest… But I missed it, whatever it is, I missed it.

Certain things may happen only to a very particular, very small group of people. Such things are not a part of the common human experience and common knowledge. But some things are universal. What I’m speaking of is universal-yet I may not hear the call. All the teachers say that sometimes a person hears only the last call.

 

P: I wanted to ask you about that.

AS: The last call, the last awakening is sacred. For those who can hear it, it lays to rest any notion of death as a horrible experience. It becomes just a completion. The notion is that whatever you couldn’t achieve in your lifetime you now encounter.

 

P: When you meet what you couldn’t achieve in your lifetime at the last call, why isn’t that a bitter disappointment rather than an awakening?

 

AS: In a -way it’s -a fulfillment, a reward. Through all these awakenings, you are not just kicked awake. You are awakened for a kind of meeting. Some people come to this at an early age, others at a more advanced age. Still others, at the time of the last meeting when they are dying, may encounter something they had sought throughout their lives but couldn’t find, owing to external or internal problems. The body is in itself a confinement, because it is limited. It is limited not only physically, but also mentally. As a human being, there are certain things I can’t do because I’m dependent on the machine, on the brain. The brain can do a certain amount and no more. So when I am leaving the body, the approach can become much fuller than it was in a lifetime in which I was confined by my abilities to do things. The last awakening is a meeting that you might call  a  unification -or an approach  toward unification.

**From an interview by Roger Lipsey, Parabola Magazine, (P) with Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz (AS). Cited by kind permissions from Roger Lipsey.  Parabola, Volume 30.1, “I sleep but my Heart is Awake”