A season is set for everything, a time for every experience under heaven.
A young man named Yosef, the son of Rabbi Yehoshua, fell ill and lost consciousness. When he recovered, his father asked him what he had seen while he lay unconscious, and the Talmud keeps the answer: “I saw an inverted world. Those above, i.e., those who are considered important in this world, were below, insignificant, while those below, i.e., those who are insignificant in this world, were above.” His father did not correct him. “You have seen a clear world,” he said (Bava Batra 10b). The world Yosef woke into had not changed while he lay there. The same people sat in the same places, honored and overlooked in the same proportions. What had changed was the one looking at it. The Talmud records what he saw and moves on. It does not say what became of the seeing a season later, once he was back among people who had never been anywhere and still saw the world right side up.
The Threshold
Not everyone goes as far as Yosef. A body can fail and recover and carry a person to the edge of the world and back, but the threshold can be reached by smaller roads too. An idea that has organized a life gives way. A reading of oneself, held for years, turns out to be wrong. Something that was certain stops being certain in a single moment, and something else arrives in its place. That moment of sudden seeing is a small death. Sometimes what dies is an old idea; sometimes what happens is closer to a birth. Either way, what comes out the other side is not the same as what went in.
The tradition sets the largest version of this at Sinai, and it does not soften it:
And Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said: From each and every utterance that emerged from the mouth of the Holy One, Blessed be He, the souls of the Jewish people left their bodies, as it is stated: “My soul departed when he spoke” (Song of Songs 5:6). And since their souls left their bodies from the first utterance, how did they receive the second utterance? Rather, G-d rained the dew upon them that, in the future, will revive the dead, and He revived them.
Revelation, in this telling, is not information delivered to people who stay as they were. It kills them, and the second word can only be received by those brought back from the first. Each utterance is a threshold, and each crossing is a return.
The same page adds a detail that is easy to read past. With each utterance, it says, “the Jewish people retreated in fear twelve mil, and the ministering angels walked them back toward the mountain.” They ran, and they were returned. When the utterances were over, the people asked for distance:
They said to Moses, “You speak to us, and we will listen. But let G-d not speak with us any more, for we will die if He does.”
Moses does not rebuke them. He tells them not to be afraid, because “G-d only came to raise you up” (20:17). The request is granted. What was received at the mountain did not have to be lived at the mountain, and for them it could not have been. The people who stood at Sinai could not make the peak a place to dwell.
Run and Return
The prophet who saw the divine chariot saw the same motion in the creatures who carry it:
And the living creatures ran and returned as the appearance of a flash of lightning.
Ratzo va-shov, running and returning. Chassidic teaching made the phrase a description of the soul’s whole life: a surge toward its source and a return to the body, the world, the work. The return is not the failure of the run. The creatures that bear the throne are never still; their nearness is in the motion itself. And the verse sets a word beside them that Maimonides would take up. The motion is “as the appearance of a flash of lightning,” ke-mar’eh ha-bazak.
In the introduction to the Guide for the Perplexed, Rambam describes what it is like to know anything true about G-d at all:
At times the truth shines so brilliantly that we perceive it as clear as day. Our nature and habit then draw a veil over our perception, and we return to a darkness almost as dense as before. We are like those who, though beholding frequent flashes of lightning, still find themselves in the thickest darkness of the night.
—Guide for the Perplexed, Introduction
He does not exempt himself, and he does not exempt anyone but one. “On some the lightning flashes in rapid succession, and they seem to be in continuous light, and their night is as clear as the day.” That was Moses. Most prophets saw the flash at long intervals. Some saw it “only once during the whole night,” like the elders of whom it is written that “they prophesied, and did not prophesy again” (Numbers 11:25). Others never see lightning at all, only something like the glow of a crystal in the dark, and “to them even this small amount of light is not continuous, but now it shines and now it vanishes.”
The darkness that follows the flash is not a sin in Rambam’s account. It is nature and habit doing what nature and habit do. But he does not leave it there either. “The degrees in the perfection of men vary according to these distinctions.” The dark returns for everyone; how often the light returns is a measure of the person. The night that follows every morning is promised and blameless (On to Tomorrow). The night that follows the flash is blameless too, but Rambam will not call it nothing.
The River
Rambam names what draws the veil: nature and habit. The Talmud has an older image of the same veil, and it places it at the very first threshold a person crosses.
Before birth, it says, “a candle is lit for it above its head, and it gazes from one end of the world to the other, as it is stated: ‘When His lamp shined above my head, and by His light I walked through darkness’ (Job 29:3).” In that light the child is taught the whole of Torah. Then it crosses:
And once the fetus emerges into the airspace of the world, an angel comes and slaps it on its mouth, causing it to forget the entire Torah.
The forgetting is not a punishment for anything the child has done. It is the price of entering the world. A lamp was lit, everything was seen, and none of it survives the crossing intact. If that is so, then nothing learned afterward is entirely new. Every true thing a person comes to know is, in some measure, found again.
Plato tells the same story from the far side of death. In the last book of the Republic, a soldier named Er “was slain in battle, and ten days afterwards, when the bodies of the dead were taken up already in a state of corruption, his body was found unaffected by decay … And on the twelfth day, as he was lying on the funeral pile, he returned to life and told them what he had seen in the other world.” The part of his account that matters here ends at a river. The souls bound for new lives cross the plain of Lethe and stop at the river the Greeks called Ameles:
… they marched on in a scorching heat to the plain of Forgetfulness, which was a barren waste destitute of trees and verdure; and then towards evening they encamped by the river of Unmindfulness, whose water no vessel can hold; of this they were all obliged to drink a certain quantity, and those who were not saved by wisdom drank more than was necessary; and each one as he drank forgot all things.
Then one line, about Er alone: “He himself was hindered from drinking the water.” That is why there is a story at all. The one who comes back remembering is the one who did not drink, and he is the exception. Everyone else drinks some. No one is spared the river entirely. What differs is how much, and Plato says what decides it: those not saved by wisdom drink more than they need.
The Talmud and Plato agree on the shape. Crossing into the world costs memory, and the cost is built into the crossing rather than charged to the one who crosses. For the soul that drinks, Plato’s forgetting is complete: “each one as he drank forgot all things.” What survives is the story, and only because one man did not drink. Plato ends the Republic on it: “the tale has been saved and has not perished, and will save us if we are obedient to the word spoken; and we shall pass safely over the river of Forgetfulness.” The Talmud leaves the Torah to be learned again. Plato leaves what the others forgot to the one who came back to tell it. A person who has come back from the threshold is not exempt from the river because of where he has been. What he saw there fades, and not because it was false.
Contraction and Expansion
Forgetting of this kind does not announce itself. From the inside, it feels less like losing something than like a narrowing, a heart that was open finding itself closed without having decided to close. The Sufis have a name for that, and for its opposite. The eleventh-century master al-Hujwiri gives the definition:
Qabḍ (contraction) and basṭ (expansion) are two involuntary states which cannot be induced by any human act or banished by any human exertion. G-d hath said: “G-d contracts and expands” (Kor. ii, 246). Qabḍ denotes the contraction of the heart in the state of being veiled (ḥijáb), and basṭ denotes the expansion of the heart in the state of revelation (kashf). Both states proceed from G-d without effort on the part of Man.
—Kashf al-Maḥjūb
Qabḍ is the veil Rambam described; basṭ is the lightning. And Hujwiri’s first claim is the one that matters most to anyone caught in the first: neither state can be produced or dismissed by effort. Contraction is not proof of failure, and expansion is not a reward.
What follows is more unsettling, because the masters could not agree on which state was higher. Some ranked contraction above expansion, since it “involves dissolution and oppression” of the lower self, which is the greatest veil between a person and G-d. Others ranked expansion higher, since in it there is joy, and rest in union is better than rest in separation. Hujwiri’s own teacher held that the two are a single influence descending from G-d, which opens the heart and subdues the lower self, or does the reverse, and that “he who interprets this matter otherwise is wasting his breath.” Hujwiri closes with a story. John wept from the day he was born and Jesus smiled from the day he was born, because John was in contraction and Jesus in expansion. When they met, John asked whether Jesus had no fear of being cut off from G-d, and Jesus asked whether John had no hope of G-d’s mercy. “Neither thy tears nor my smiles will change the eternal decree of G-d.”
The tradition that named the two states declined to rank them. A person in contraction cannot know, from inside it, whether he has fallen out of expansion or been brought into the state some of the masters ranked above it.
Make No Change
If the states come and go on their own, the question that remains is what to do while they are present. Ignatius of Loyola answered it with unusual precision, and his answer begins with a definition that does not flatter the season of return. Desolation, he writes, is
darkness of soul, disturbance in it, movement to things low and earthly, the unquiet of different agitations and temptations, moving to want of confidence, without hope, without love, when one finds oneself all lazy, tepid, sad, and as if separated from his Creator and Lord.
—Spiritual Exercises, Rules for Discernment, Fourth Rule
“Movement to things low and earthly.” By that measure, attention turning back from the things of the spirit to the business of the world is not a neutral change of season. It is a mark of desolation itself. Ignatius is not wrong to say so. Nearly every tradition that speaks of spirit and matter ranks the earthly below the divine, and the pull back toward the world is a pull downward.
His next rule is the one he is remembered for:
In time of desolation never to make a change; but to be firm and constant in the resolutions and determination in which one was the day preceding such desolation, or in the determination in which he was in the preceding consolation.
—Fifth Rule
He gives the reason plainly: in consolation the good spirit guides, “so in desolation it is the bad, with whose counsels we cannot take a course to decide rightly.” The rules that follow do not leave the person idle. Though the resolutions must not change, “it is very helpful intensely to change ourselves against the same desolation,” the Sixth Rule says, by more prayer, more meditation, more examination. The Eighth asks for patience: “let him think that he will soon be consoled.” And the Ninth names three reasons a person finds himself desolate. The first is negligence, by which “through our faults, spiritual consolation withdraws from us.” The second is a trial, to see how far one will serve “without such great pay of consolation and great graces.” The third is instruction, so “that we may interiorly feel that it is not ours to get or keep great devotion, intense love, tears, or any other spiritual consolation … and that we may not build a nest in a thing not ours.”
Three causes, and nothing in the desolation itself says which one is at work. A fault, a test and a lesson feel the same from inside. That is why the rule does not ask the one in desolation to determine whether the dark is a fall or a season. It asks only that the dark not be given the vote. What was resolved in the light stands through the dark.
Holding the resolution answers what to do in the descent. It does not answer whether anything is received there, or whether the descent is only loss endured until the light returns. An older teaching about above and below takes up exactly that question. The Emerald Tablet, attributed to Hermes Trismegistus and translated by Isaac Newton, begins: “That which is below is like that which is above & that which is above is like that which is below to do the miracles of one only thing.” The below is still below. But it is not only a fall from the above; it corresponds to it. The Tablet goes on to describe the work it teaches in the same motion Ezekiel saw: “It ascends from the earth to the heaven & again it descends to the earth & receives the force of things superior & inferior.” The descent is part of the work, and something is received in it that the ascent alone does not give.
Ignatius and the Tablet do not cancel each other. The earthly is low, and the movement toward it is a movement down. The earthly is also where the descent receives its force. And behind both stands what Yosef reported when he came back: a world in which what passes for above is below and what passes for below is above. The ranking is real, and the one doing the ranking is standing in the inverted world while he does it.
Flour and Torah
Maimonides would not let the question rest on rank alone. He agreed that the earthly is lower; he did not agree that the answer is to leave it. In the Mishneh Torah he imagines someone who has seen through the world’s appetites and resolves to escape them entirely. “A person might say, ‘Since envy, desire, [the pursuit] of honor, and the like, are a wrong path and drive a person from the world, I shall separate from them to a very great degree and move away from them to the opposite extreme.’” No meat, no wine, no pleasant home, sackcloth in place of fine clothing. Rambam’s verdict is short: “This, too, is a bad path and it is forbidden to walk upon it.” He closes the passage with Kohelet: “Do not be overly righteous and do not be overly clever; why make yourself desolate?” (Hilchot De’ot 3:1). The one who flees the low for the sake of the high has not found the high. He has found another kind of desolation.
What Rambam asks for instead is harder than either withdrawal or surrender. A person who works for a wage “should not think solely of gathering money. Rather, he should do these things, so that he will be able to obtain that which the body needs”: food, drink, a home (Hilchot De’ot 3:2). And the body’s needs are not the end either:
Rather, he should have the intent that his body be whole and strong, in order for his inner soul to be upright so that [it will be able] to know G-d. For it is impossible to understand and become knowledgeable in the wisdoms when one is starving or sick, or when one of his limbs pains him.
Whoever lives this way, he says, “will be serving G-d constantly; even in the midst of his business dealings.” He carries it as far as it will go: “Even when he sleeps, if he retires with the intention that his mind and body rest, lest he take ill and be unable to serve G-d because he is sick, then his sleep is service to the Omnipresent, blessed be He.”
The Mishnah had already said it in fewer words. “If there is no Torah, there is no worldly occupation; if there is no worldly occupation, there is no Torah,” taught Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah, and then, more plainly still: “If there is no flour, there is no Torah; if there is no Torah, there is no flour” (Pirkei Avot 3:17). The bread and the roof are not a detour from the path. Without them there is no one left to walk it. And without Torah, the flour is only flour.
None of this makes the earthly high. Rambam does not say the marketplace is holy; he says the intention can be. The descent into bread and wages remains a descent, and what keeps it from being only a fall is the “so that,” held in the mind while the hands do the work. The tradition has a name for a descent that turns out to serve an ascent, yeridah tzorech aliyah, and it is easy to reach for that name too soon. The descent is not chosen, and its purpose is not visible from inside it (What the Descent Is For). The “for the sake of” can be kept as an intention. It can only be confirmed from the far side. And the intention fades the way the lightning does. Rambam set the measure at every act, even sleep, and the measure does not lower itself because the body is tired or the rent is due.
A Time for Losing
Kohelet, who set a season for everything, set them in pairs: “A time for being born and a time for dying,” and further on, “A time for seeking and a time for losing, A time for keeping and a time for discarding” (Ecclesiastes 3:2, 6). He does not say which time it is. A few verses later he says why no one can:
He brings everything to pass precisely at its time; He also puts eternity in their mind, but without man ever guessing, from first to last, all the things that G-d brings to pass.
Eternity is in the mind, the way the Torah was in the child before the angel’s hand. It is there, and it cannot be read off. Kohelet’s next words are the plainest thing he says: the only worthwhile thing, he concludes, is “to enjoy themselves and do what is good in their lifetime” (3:12). He does not say whether that is the return or the drift. He says it is what there is to do.
Yosef came back from a clear world into an inverted one, and his father told him which was which. Most who come back are not told. They return to the earth with something received above and watch it narrow, a flash at a time, into the ordinary dark. Some of them, the ones who did not drink as deeply, know what is happening while it happens. They can name the direction: down, toward the bread and the roof and the work. What they cannot name is the purpose. Whether this is the season of keeping or the season of losing, whether the descent is for the sake of an ascent, is written only on the far side of it.
What fades is the flash, not what it showed. The one who has seen it no longer has to wonder whether there is something more; that question was answered in the light, not taken on faith. It answers that one question and opens a great many more. Clutching the flash builds the nest Ignatius warned against, and so does stopping to mourn it, or stopping to wait for it. What is left is to keep walking, down into the work that puts bread on the table, carrying what was shown and curious about when the lightning will come again. Kohelet allows eternity in the mind, and no calendar to read it by.
Source note: Translations draw on Aryeh Kaplan’s The Living Torah, the JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh, the JPS Tanakh (1917), the William Davidson Talmud, the Sefaria Community Translation of Pirkei Avot, Eliyahu Touger’s translation of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, M. Friedländer’s translation of Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed, Benjamin Jowett’s translation of Plato’s Republic, R. A. Nicholson’s translation of al-Hujwiri’s Kashf al-Maḥjūb, Elder Mullan’s translation of Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, and Isaac Newton’s translation of the Emerald Tablet (Keynes MS 28, King’s College, Cambridge). Online links are provided for reference; their translations may differ from those quoted here.
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