This Shabbat is Shabbat Shekalim, the first of four special parshiot and five special Shabbatot before Pesach. The Ohev Yisrael identifies Nissan with the culmination of the creation of the universe because everything was created for the sake of Israel and Israel becomes a nation capable of fulfilling its destiny in Nissan.
R’ Avraham Yehoshua Heschel, known as the Apatower, was the second of three notable figures in Jewish history to bear that name. The first Avraham Yehoshua Heschel was a leading figure in the halachic community of Lithuanian Jewry, the second was the Ohev Yisrael, an early and important Chassidic master, and the third was one of the most important contemporary figures in American Judaism who is not remembered for his fidelity to any stream of traditional normative Judaism.
The Apatower Rebbe’s book, Ohev Yisrael, by which name he became known, is a relatively short work of profound depth and insight into the weekly Torah portions and key holidays. His introduction to the four parshiot is considered a classic work that has influenced future generations of commentators, notable among them R’ Yaakov Abuchatzera, the grandfather of the Baba Sali. The Ohev Yisrael explains that each of the four parshiot plays a role in preparing the world to fulfill its purpose for which it was created so that Hashem, the Creator, can be enthroned the Master of all things by His nation, Israel.
The Rebbe stresses that part of the nature of tzimtzum – the expression of Divine Will whereby Hashem makes it possible for some aspect of Himself to be present in every one of His creations – is that in recognizing and acknowledging the G-dliness in our material world, we give strength to these Divine aspects in the world as well as in ourselves. Thus, for the Ohev Yisrael, even the most mundane aspects of nature and history can be read as allegories for the Divine design imprinted on Creation.
The mystical tradition, traced chiefly from the Zohar in the Middle Ages, identifies the highest emanation of physical reality with the “balance” of a scale by means of which all things come to be known in their opposition: dark and light, or day and night in the account of Bereishit; male and female; sacred and profane; permitted and prohibited; and so on and so forth. In the beginning there was only the possibility of this distinction because everything was unity in the infinity of the Divine Will. The process of Creation begins in the Torah with the separation of darkness from light, subsequent to Hashem’s creation of heaven and earth which had already occurred.
Thus, our special parshiot begin with Shekalim, a word that means pieces of silver but etymologically derives from their weight, i.e., something that is weighed. From this weighing emerges the being of all things, but with the newly created distinction between good and evil, the corruption and the dross tends to attach itself to the good and the pure. So, the first and most important task that emerges for humans to do, in service of the Divine plan for Creation, is to identify and eliminate the corruption that insinuates itself into human events and throughout history. This corruption is personified by “the First Nation,” Amalek (Bamidbar 24:20), who must be eliminated by Israel, spurred on by the Divine decree that we read every year on the Shabbat before Purim in Parshat Zachor – two weeks from this Shabbat.
Once the enemies of Israel and of Hashem have been obliterated and their memory erased, it is still necessary for our own selves to be purified – especially after waging such long and bloody warfare. The only way to remove the impurity of death that has attached itself to our bodies and souls through the long exile is by sprinkling the ash of the red heifer, the parah adumah. This is the topic of Parshat Parah, the third of the four parshiot.
Finally, once Israel has been purified and prepared to assume our proper position as agents of Hashem and His emissaries in the lower worlds that He created, it is necessary for all the nations of the world to acknowledge this and to embrace the Beit HaMikdash which we will build to atone for them, on their behalf. Parshat HaChodesh signifies the election of Israel, but it does so by emphasizing the power of the moon and of the lunar calendar that Israel consults to organize the months of the year and our holidays. Parshat HaChodesh is not only about the impending redemption of Israel – from Egypt and from the exile of Edom – but about the inseparability of this process from the order of nature. The celestial bodies, the seasons, the orbits, and cycles of the force of gravity itself all testify to the Divine purpose in Creation which achieves its consummation in Nissan.
Every year, as we approach these auspicious dates in our own experience, we read these four special parshiot to prepare ourselves and to prepare the world for redemption that is imperceptibly, yet inexorably, preparing to emerge. G-d-willing in the weeks to come, we will explore this process and these texts in the light of the writings of the Ohev Yisrael, of Rabbi Yaakov Abuchatzera, and of others from this tradition they shared despite being separated by a continent and an ocean.
