FAITH: IS IT TRUE OR AM I TRUE?

by Marc Gafni

This essay was written in different forms over many years. I first taught this Torah some 13 years ago in 1995 in Jerusalem at talks I gave in the Yamim Moshe neighborhood of Jerusalem at the Zionist confederation. This was the seed of material that I would later contribute to a co-authored book by myself and Ohad Ezrahi on Lilith. Ohad had been struck by Tishbi’s comment identifying Lilith and Leah and shared it with me. I shared with him my understanding of Leah. The pieces fit together, and we both inhabited a broader and fuller view of Leah and Lilith. The material was then published in a Hebrew book called Vadai, in English A Certain Spirit.

Later, the material evolved again as sacred text met sacred autobiography, in meeting Brother David Steindl-Rast and talking with him of gratitude and God, and in reading and receiving some of the Torah of a work called The Dawn Horse Testament by Da Free John recommended by Treya Wilber in the book Grace and Grit.

The material and my understanding have evolved again significantly since this writing, particularly in the wake of my growing nondual realization. At some point, I was guided to an obscure Torah of the Seventh Rebbe of Lubavitch, in which he wrote that the practice of the Modeh Ani prayer with which the Hebrew initiate begins his day is the practice of realization of Yechida She-Be-Nefesh, the Yechida quality of the soul.

The Yechida dimension of the soul is the radical and full realization of the already and every present nondual ground of Reality from which we spring, of which we are a part, and from which we never separate. It is the realization of ultimate grandeur and ultimate humility. It is having nothing, knowing nothing, and being no one. It is having everything, knowing everything, and being everyone.

The Biblical Certainty Moment

A Declaration of Gratitude

Every morning begins with a proclamation of certainty and gratitude. Before the start of each day, I say the prayer Modeh Ani Lefanecha and in so doing make the ultimate statement of certainty. Modeh ani lefanecha – I give thanks before You, I give thanks in Your presence – is a clear and strong statement of divine relationship. In it one speaks directly to the divine, acknowledging the daily presence of the Spirit in our lives, the divine role in creation, and the divine dimension of ourselves created in the image of God. Emerging from the nightmares of “maybe,” the darkness of “so what,” I begin the day with the certainty of “Before you, I give thanks.” Thanks or gratitude is the ability to pierce the veil of experiential uncertainty and experience oneself as held in the fullness of the divine embrace. Every act of gratitude is both an expression of that clear moment of perception as well as a heart-opening movement, which makes that perception available.

This certainty and gratitude is not intellectual; it is instinctive and primal. It is not a schematic knowledge of the way of the world; it is a deep internal understanding of the way of the divine within. Gone are the medieval days when we could employ Aristotelian physics to offer rational proofs for the existence of God. In a post-Kantian world, the easy certainties of the medieval schoolmen are simply not available to us. In the discarded image of the old world, faith meant, “it is true.” Today faith means, “I am true.” I am true because I am in the presence of God and because the presence of God is in me. I believe not in set of dogmas that seek to explain the nature of all that is; rather I believe in the divinity of my humanity and I know that all that is courses through my Self.

It is this core certainty of being and the primal experience of gratitude that, according to the esoteric teachings of the Kabbalists, the Modeh Ani prayer seeks to access every morning as we engage the waking world. One way this is expressed in the code of the Kabbalists is in the simple reading of the closing words of the Modeh Ani prayer. The words Rabah Emunatecha are addressed to God and literally mean, “Great is your faith.”

The postmodern Kabbalists teach that this is the faith of God in Man, the divine affirmation that man is “enough.” In the nomenclature of the Kabbalists, the Modeh Ani prayer affirms to man his ‘Yechida She-Benefesh,’ the baby-faced divine that is the essence of every man. How grateful am I to be part of God.

Careful investigation will show that this expression of certainty and gratitude does not emerge from a moment of easy faith, of happy embrace. It is not the religion of the happy-minded. On the contrary, this prayer is the liturgical encapsulation of a fragile moment of certainty and gratitude that is hard-won, emerging from confusion and distortion: a moment whose power is far-reaching, tragically fleeting, and yet ultimately transforming. Rather than being a quiet statement of the obvious, this core certainty prayer reverberates with the pain and struggle necessary for transcendence.

The classic commentaries on the Liturgy record no source for the Modeh Ani prayer. It has found its way into the consciousness of a people without leaving behind any trace of its origin. Here we seek to unpack its source and to begin our quest for the certainty of being and the joy of gratitude that is our birthright.

Modeh ani emerges from the words of Leah, wife of Jacob, on the occasion of the birth of her fourth son, Judah:

She conceived again and gave birth to a son, and she said: “This time I thank God – ha pa’am odeh et Hashem. And therefore she called his name Judah…”

Notice how, on the birth of her fourth son Judah, Leah says “hapaam odeh et Hashem” — “this time, I thank God.” Odeh from the biblical text and Modeh Ani from the liturgy mean the same thing: I acknowledge, I thank. When I wake up in the morning and say Modeh ani, I am conceptually, linguistically, and experientially reformulating Leah’s acknowledgment of and thanks to God upon the birth of Judah.

Why about this moment is so transformative that in re-engaging it every morning human beings access their own sense of divine enough-ness?
Leah is popularly seen as the lesser of two sisters, the matriarch that most of us find difficult to remember; so why do we find ourselves repeating her words every morning? Modeh Ani is one of the first prayers a parent teaches a child. What is the secret of this chant? Words in Jewish meditative text always have a story. To understand the psycho-spiritual moment of faith that the Modeh Ani words invite us into, we need to unpack the story of the words. We must explore the story of Leah: a heroic journey from confusion and alienation to core certainty and gratitude that we repeat daily in the course of our lives.

Who is Leah?

Jacob arrives at Laban’s home and, in the only biblical story of love at first sight, falls immediately in love with Rachel, Leah’s younger sister. He agrees to work for seven years in return for Rachel’s hand in marriage. This handsome romantic stranger appears out of nowhere exhibiting superhuman powers of strength, not to mention charm, and falls in love–not with Leah–but with her younger sister. Leah is painfully peripheral. The text even tells us that Rachel is deemed the beauty of the family, while Leah is very much the inelegant ugly duckling archetype. Leah is on the outside.

However, when the seven years are over and Jacob has completed his labor of love, Laban deceives Jacob and marries him to the seemingly inelegant Leah. In the gloom of a night wedding, Leah stands heavily veiled next to the unsuspecting Jacob under the wedding canopy. It is not until the following morning that Jacob realizes he has been duped: he has married Leah instead of Rachel. When Jacob protests, Laban gives him Rachel as well, on the condition that Jacob will work an additional seven years.

Although Leah is usually viewed as but a pawn in the manipulations of her father Laban, a close textual reading paints a more complex picture of the event. The simple fact is that Laban could not have deceived Jacob on his wedding night without the full complicity and cooperation of Leah. Indeed according to the implied assumptions of one Midrash (biblical exegesis), it is clear that Leah is fully complicit in defrauding not only Jacob but her sister, Rachel, as well.

Another Midrash suggests that, after a few years in Laban’s service, Jacob began to understand the way his uncle’s mind worked. He suspected that Laban would attempt to trick him into marrying Leah instead of Rachel. In order to pre-empt Laban, Jacob taught Rachel a set of signs so she would be able to signal to him that it was indeed her under the wedding canopy, thus preventing Laban from exchanging her with Leah. A wise move; but Jacob had not taken into account the possibility that Rachel would give the signs to Leah. That evening Leah stands under the wedding canopy facing Jacob in the darkness. Jacob tries to make out her face but the veil does its job too well. He does not panic but smoothly signals to the woman opposite him, and she fluently responds. All has gone according to Jacob’s plan; the marriage proceeds. But the veil must at some point lift. The Midrash offers a dramatic description of how Jacob confronts Leah the following morning. The early rays of sunlight begin to filter through the tent walls, and Jacob gradually begins to make out the face of his beloved. The veil of darkness lifted, he sees…the…eyes of…Leah! Jacob, outraged, cries out: “All night I called out ‘Rachel, Rachel,’ and you answered!” Indeed, Leah did not remain the silent pawn. She was fully complicit and answered to the name of her sister in the passion of first sex, playing an active role in the deception. After the wedding ceremony, Leah took care to make sure the deception was not revealed until too late.

Leah Is Us

It is not for naught that we asked earlier: “Who is Leah?” The ultimate question in every person’s life is, “Who am I?” It is this core uncertainty about identity that Leah is desperately attempting to resolve by marrying Jacob. When Laban substitutes Leah for Rachel, Leah still has ways of letting Jacob know that he is being deceived. But she chooses instead to participate fully in the deception. She shows no reluctance, because her father’s actions suit her own designs. She wants to marry Jacob. Moreover she feels she must marry Jacob. It is through Jacob that she thinks she will finally touch a sense of inner certainty and gratitude. For the first Leah can say with certainty, I am grateful to be me.

It is through Jacob that Leah accesses the truth of her own being. If Jacob were to divorce her, she would need to destroy Jacob in order to retain the integrity of her own self. Of course she would develop elaborate sets of psychological, moral, and spiritual explanations to explain her need to destroy Jacob. She might say that she bears Jacob no ill will, that she is merely protecting other women from Jacob. Even the simplest among us often manifest genius when it comes to self-deception. If Jacob does not love me, cries Leah, then clearly he loves no one. Moreover he has never loved anyone.

Jacob will be demonized by Leah even as Leah refuses to integrate her shadow, which she has projected onto him. That is not to say that Jacob might not bear genuine responsibility; but between responsibility and demonization runs a long and treacherous road. Whenever we demonize another we merely show that we lack core faith in our own essential truth.

In Kabbalah radical personal insight which realizes the ontic identity of the human being and God is called Shekina. In the stunning non dual language of the Zohar,

“Shekhinta De’Ikra Ani.”

“The Shekhinah which is called Self.”

When one has not realized his already and ever present Shekhinah nature then, according to Lurianic Kabbalah, the energy of the demonic lurks ever ready to subvert the energy of the Shekhinah to the pathologies of evil. Kabbalah refers to this as the dance of the demonic. In the language of Kabbalah the demonic “erotically sucks from the back of the Shekhinah.” The back of the Shekhna refers to the unconscious Shekihnah. The human being who is disconnected, wholly unconscious of her radical nature as Shekhinah.

Demonic in this context refers not to red devils with pitchforks but to the far more ominous and destructive energy field of the demonic. The demonic are the People of the lie. They violate the signet ring of God which is truth. And yet people of the lie are often not easily discernible. They hide between the sheets of noble ideals, in the vacuity of righteous jargon, and most insidiously in the self-righteous murder of other always in the name of ethical and spiritual idealism.

The demonic however is recognizable by three demarcating characteristics.

First, the tendency of the demonic is to demonize. The demonization of other virtually always stems from a deep discomfort with the lie deep inside of us. That discomfort is so unbearable that we externalize it and then project it onto other. More often than not, onto one whom we once loved and we feel has somehow rejected us.

We all experience the rituals of rejection. The question is only; Does our suffering evolve into compassion or devolve into malice? Do we suffer the slings and arrows of love’s inevitable misfortune as insults that close our hearts and move us respond with UnLove? Or do we muster the discipline to maintain our internal rigor and remain Open as Love even in the face of the rituals of rejection? If we are able to remain in divine communion, to stay open even in the face of apparent rejection, then we begin to experience the legitimate hurts of love not as insults but as wounds. We begin to practice the wounds of love. When we finally learn how to suffer the wounds of love with open body and heart we touch the certainty of our own divinity and are filled with an awesome gratitude.

It is when we experience the hurts of life as insults that we close as UnLove ,which is the soil of the demonic. The basic movement of the demonic is to demonize.

The second characteristic by which the demonic may be recognized is its utterly destructive nature. The good with all of its flaws and imperfections builds. The demonic behind all its righteous rigor and joyous jargon is still discernible by the destruction which is its true intention. Love spends years building worlds that malice sometimes destroys in a day.

The third characteristic by which the demonic can be recognized is its utter lack of gratitude. To be grateful requires the ability to perceive the innate goodness in the action of an other towards myself. The demonic type always ascribes base motives even to all the good turns that are done him. She perceives the demonic even in the good, not understanding that it is but a projection of her own interior. The defining quality of the divine person is infinite gratitude, which wells up from the full experience of one’s own divine person. And to be truly grateful, we must be grateful even to those who demonize us. Even demonizers, that is even the demonic, in nondual understanding, are but angels of God’s love.

The human being can never achieve any sense of fulfillment until the essential uncertainty of identity is satisfactorily resolved. The magic of the Hebrew language is such that the etymologies for the words uncertainty – safek – and satisfaction – sippuk – are identical. The resolution of personal safek is difficult. We often avoid the necessary effort and pain required to answer the question of identity by consciously or subconsciously forging a pseudo-identity. One form of pseudo-identity is the demonization of the other. I exist only if you do not exist. I am good because I have made you bad, is the most common refrain.

A second form of pseudo-identity is the attempt to live a story that is not my own. It was Jung who said that all neurosis stems from the refusal to bear legitimate suffering. He refers to the effort and investment that are indispensable tools in knowing our true selves. This is the subtext of our drama.

The safek of “Who is Leah?” will now be answered, “Jacob’s wife.” Jacob becomes the resolution of her safek and the exclusive source of her sippuk. To gain this certainty of pseudo-identity, this opportunity to fill the void within her, she is willing to betray even her own sister. When we feel essentially unloved, uncertain about our core value, we are willing to do almost anything to touch the sippuk, the satisfaction of feeling loved – anything to resolve the core safek of our identity.

Leah feels ugly, while the text describes Rachel as beautiful. The best the text can say about Leah is that “she has ‘soft eyes.’” She feels as if she is not enough. She feels that she needs to find fulfillment or completion outside of herself, and that the person who can provide this for her is Jacob. Leah refuses her true destiny of marrying Esau, Jacob’s twin brother, who is, according to the Midrash, “fit to her,” because she is fundamentally disconnected from her identity. She is desperately trying to fit into a form, a face, a destiny that is not hers.

T. S. Eliot captures the feeling of living without a personal center of gravity or gravitas:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpieces filled with straw. Alas
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, Shade without color
Paralyzes force, Gesture without motion

When we try to fit into a form or destiny not our own, we are paradoxically left hollow… shape without form. We have each at one time or another tried to attain things or people by pretending to be someone other than our true self. The motivation is always a hunger, a neediness that moves us to sate our hunger with nourishment foreign to our souls. We all recognize the hollow men and the stuffed men. We have all of us, on some level, married Jacob in the darkness.

The Downward Spiral

Of course, the painful truth is that when we look to “have” somebody to fill a hole in our own identity, we never really “have him”…even if we’re married to him. Jacob is Leah’s husband, but Leah feels unloved and cries out, “The Lord has heard that I am hated.” Jacob is her husband, but he does not take walks with her at night. “This time my husband will accompany me,” says Leah in a pathos-filled cry of longing for Jacob. Jacob is Leah’s husband and the father of her three children, but there is no intimacy, no love. Jacob has not chosen her, and so Leah has nobody. She has him yet she has nothing.

But she needs Jacob! She is convinced that only Jacob will make her complete, that only Jacob can establish the certainty of her identity. If the marriage ceremony was not enough, then Leah needs to seek other ways to get Jacob. The downward spiral begins: “If only I could do this…then I would have him.” Manipulation always creates the need for the next manipulation; using someone always creates the need to use someone else. And so she uses her children. From the moment her children are born, she begins to treat them not as people that need to be loved unconditionally, but as vehicles to attain the attention she so desperately craves from her husband. With each child, the spiral plunges deeper into unrealistic fixation.

Repeating patterns of her own childhood, Leah uses her children as objects to fulfill her unrealized dreams. In the process, the children are short-changed because they are denied the unconditional love that they need to develop as full human beings with inner certainty about their worth.

Yet patterns can be broken, because the human being is free. Leah can still find inner peace and satisfaction in her self; love in the presence of God. This finally is what Leah understands when it is time for Judah to be born–Judah, the fourth child.

The Judah Moment

When her first two children are born, Leah speaks of her pain, her hurt, her feelings of rejection by her husband: At the birth of Reuben, “God has seen my suffering.” At the birth of Simeon, “God has heard that I am hated.” When her third child, Levi is born, once again she hopes that his birth will precipitate genuine intimacy and love in her relationship with her husband: “This time my husband will accompany me,” she plaintively cries out. But at the birth of Judah we hear a different song entirely: “ha paam odeh et hashem“–“this time I thank God.”

We hear nothing of pain, no mention of loneliness. Jacob is not even mentioned for good or for bad: only gratitude rings out. When Leah gives birth to her fourth child she says, “ha paam odeh et hashem.” And so she calls her son Judah; in Hebrew, Yehudah–“gratitude, acknowledgment.” Gratitude is not obeisance. I am grateful for your gift for it teaches me that I am worthy of receiving. Leah has been able to move beyond her dependency on Jacob, and to stand up in God’s presence as a dignified human being. The fundamental safek Leah had about herself has been resolved.

No longer dependent upon anyone, perhaps for the first time Leah feels her own adequacy, her “enoughness” – her sippuk. She says, “ha paam – this time.” She does not deny her past, she does not pretend it did not exist, but she celebrates that “this time” she has moved on. “This time” I value myself. “This time” I know who I am. “This time” I don’t feel I need another to fulfill myself. “This time, I thank God.” She has gained a core certainty of her identity, of her value, of her dignity.

Unlike Leah’s first three children, Judah is born with no conditions attached. Leah is able to accept and love Judah unconditionally, and it is this love that imparts to Judah a sense of certainty about himself and his place in the world.

Faith in the Nursing Mother

A friend of mine, a prominent scholar in medieval philosophy and mystical thought, once traveled from New York to visit Reb Menashe, a Jerusalem mystic. I accompanied him.

“What does emunah–faith–mean to you?” Reb Menashe asked the scholar.

The scholar reviewed various positions on the matter of faith, from medieval to Chassidic. Reb Menashe listened patiently and then responded:

“It is so much simpler than that,” he said, “Emunah is the feeling that the baby has that its mother will not drop him.”

A child wrapped in the cradling arms of his or her mother conveys the most powerful yet gentle image of certainty. The mother, merely by being present, confers unconditional love to the child. The nursing mother, in Hebrew called the omen, gives the child a sense of safety and clarity.

As Reb Menashe was aware, the word emunah – faith – plays on the word omen – nursing mother. Listening carefully to the nuance in the Hebrew language, we can thus appreciate that “faith” is infused with connotations of the babe in its mother’s arms. Conversely, we can also see how the act of nursing a newborn child contains within it echoes of God’s relationship with humankind. This is the experience of Leah nursing her baby Judah.

With this perspective on faith and on a mother’s love, we can begin to approach an understanding of how Leah’s praise to God became the matrix of our morning prayer of core certainty. I believe that Leah is able to experience herself in God’s reassuring loving presence because for the first time in her life she gives that very same experience to someone else. In experiencing for the first time her desire and ability to be unconditionally present for her son, she understands this experience to be a reflection of God’s unconditional presence for her. Just as she is the omen, the nursing mother, to Judah, God is the omen to her. So it is with all of our highest moments of faith, when we touch the God in ourselves, we feel about ourselves the way God feels about us.
There is a secret wound lurking inside all of us. It is the fear that we are somehow not enough. We secretly feel that if people really knew all of our imperfections they would not love us. Much of Western religion, in a distortion of the tradition, has reinforced this feeling: Indeed you are not enough; so aren’t you lucky that God is so wonderful that he loves you anyway…even though you are not enough? This is a love that creates radical dependency and emasculates a human being. Biblical consciousness begins with the statement, “You are enough. You could be more. God is the force within that invites you to be more, as well as the cosmological embrace that loves you as you are.” Even as we strive to grow we need to realize in the depths of our souls that we are enough.

I am grateful. Therefore I AM.