Vayigash: Taking the Child along by Chaim Gershon

 

 

 

44:34 For how shall I go up to my father, if the lad be not with me?

44:34 כי איך אעלה אל אבי והנער איננו אתי

 

Coming right after Channukah, the holiday the very name of which has connotations of Chinuch, comes the verse that also speaks about chinuch. The anguished declaration that Yehuda delivers to to Yosef about his younger brother Binyamin has been elucidated in two different ways. The first one is: How can a person strive to advance in one's own Avodah's HaShem, how can one come to his Father when his children are not taken care of: it is a  criticism of those who let their children be range "free" while they sit and learn and daven.

The second, the deeper meaning is how can a person work on improving himself in his Divine service while ignoring his own experience of youth. The past cannot be ignored. First, there is a need to perform a tikkun and /or teshuva on and for the sins of one's youth. More importantly, there is also a special quality that a child can teach the adult, a freshness that can be harnessed to invigorate one's avodah, even after one has grown older. Once a person settles into  the comfort of adulthood,  progress is stalled by inertia. The ability to tap into the enthusiasm that energized the idealistic youth, before this youth evolved into a cynical adult is invaluable toward maximizing growth.

 I first heard this concept here

(Rabbi Mangel: The Mitzvah of Chanukah: Chinuch - Tape 3 (3a 20:37 - end especially after 29:00 and into side b) 

The ideas are in print in Mayana Shel Torah in Vayigash

Other classical chassidic texts such as Tiferes Shlomo, Shem MiShmuel and Panim Meirim mention this concept but it is more developed in Sefer Siach Sarfei Kodesh (Vayigash) as well as in Ger Chassidus such as Imrei Emes 5699 and Beis Yisroel 5710/11. The concept also appears in Rabbi Daniel Frissch's Divrei Chamudot. The Gerer sources allude to the Shechinah being affected with tzaros while striving for attaining higher Divine levels. Kabbalistic sources such as the Recanati and Megale Amukos do not frame this in the terms of avodah but mention the negative effects of excluding the Shechinah, a name by which Malchus is often called, as well as the Malach Metat (metatron, another name for the sefira of Malchus) who is referred to as a youth. In Chassidic sources this is sometimes expressed to refer to avodah in the language of katnus/small and gadlus/great which are analogous to naar/youth and old age but not with the same connotations. More on it, here and here: 

So we have two explanations, one that one must atone for and repair the childnood before entering adulthood, and the other that one must utilize the “child within” to vivify one’s adult Avodas Hashem. The latter explanation of the passuk is more psychologically relevant today than the former and there are many on-line explications of this idea. 

http://www.soulpancake.com/view_post/1543837/how-do-you-retain-a-sense-of-childlike-wonder-in-your-art.html

http://jurvetson.blogspot.com/2007/05/geekdad.html

http://www.kqed.org/w/youdecide/no_child_left_behind/01.html

 

Avakesh comments:

The idea that one must retain the freshness and enthusiasm of youth to be able to properly grow, is also found in misnagdic sources. Thus, famously, R. Y.D.Soloveitchik explained the apellation, Shmuel Hakatan in this manner that Shmuel Hakkaton was like a child, which enabled him to see situations in a new way, for example, to create the blessing of the heretics. R. Yisroel Salanter is said to point out that the Keruvim had the faces of children( k'ravya) in Sukkah 5a, teaching that over the Ark of the Torah must spread childlike freshness and enthisiasm.

 

Comments

[steve mcqueen]

Funnily enough, Paul McCartney has said the same thing in an interview this week!

If you take the view that kabbalistic insights are very revealing psychologically, this is an interesting insight into the creative process:

QUOTE FROM THE INTERVIEW at http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article6944197.ece

"Is it harder to write songs now than way back when, 45 years ago, when he and John Lennon seemed to be able — were able, pretty much — to knock out an all-time classic melody in their tea break? “It actually doesn’t feel any harder, but it’s different. I’m not the same guy.”
He once said he couldn’t write Paperback Writer now because back then, in 1965, he was (sort of) the young guy in the song. “Yeah, you can’t. You try, you think, ‘Oh, it’d be nice to do another Eleanor Rigby, that was a good idea, taking a character, getting into a mini-play’. But you can’t really.”
A lot of artists, I say, and intellectuals, too, seem to have this burst of creativity very young . . ? “I can believe it. Because I do the [Beatles] songs now, so many of them, I look back and think ‘clever kid!’ Writing songs like a 90-year-old would sing, at what age? 24.” McCartney breaks into Yesterday in a parody of a shaky old man’s voice. He giggles. “Yes, it was quite a mature perspective.”
Now, he says, he likes writing songs so much that “it’s like an addiction. And occasionally I’ll come up with something and I’ll think, ‘Oh, that’s good’. It’s not harder, it’s maybe more difficult to come up with something as original when you’ve done loads and loads of stuff.”
Does he think his Beatles songs were better than his current output, or just different? I fully expect him to say different. But no. “Oh, some of the songs from then were better. As you say, there’s this spurt, you don’t even know that you’re doing it until you look back later and think, ‘Bloody hell’.”
Every last scrap from his early life in Liverpool, you would have thought, has been picked over so often, in his own lyrics, in other people’s books and films and PhD theses no doubt, that he’d have no energy for or interest in going back over it again. Yet he does, voluntarily, as if he’s talking about it for the first time.
“I was always wandering around Liverpool, looking at old buildings, seeing people at bus stops, drinking it all in. There was this old lady lived near us, and I would go round, not as a goody-goody thing, but because it was interesting, and I’d say: ‘I’m going to the shops, do you want anything?’ And she was a fascinating old lady, I remember seeing a crystal radio set she had, and then I’d get her a pound of potatoes or whatever. All those little visits, the lonely old lady thing, that found its way into Eleanor Rigby. That’s hard to re-create. I haven’t helped any little old ladies with their shopping recently. Maybe I should.”