Kapitel 48Vollendung
Der offenbarte Mensch
Moschiach zeigt nicht, was geschieht, wenn der Mensch G-tt wird. Er zeigt, was geschieht, wenn der Mensch endlich durchlässig für G-tt wird.
Zurück zur Person. Ganz Mensch, zutiefst einzeln, ungespalten — und warum Persönlichkeit und Bittul nicht konkurrieren.
The site began with a person and has spent fifty chapters on structure. It should end where it started, because the structure was always about someone.
Personality is not the enemy of bittul
There is an assumption worth dismantling, because it is widespread and it is wrong: that a person entirely oriented to Hashem would be generic. That bittul sands away particularity, and the perfectly transparent person would have no character left.
The sources point the other way, and so does ordinary observation. The people described as having achieved the most bittul in Jewish history are conspicuously, sometimes inconveniently, themselves. They are not interchangeable. Their students could tell them apart from across a room.
This follows from the chapter on bittul. Bittul is not the removal of the self; it is the removal of a false theory about the self’s origin. What remains after an error is corrected is not less. It is the same person, no longer spending energy on maintenance.
Self-mythology is expensive. Bittul is what a person looks like when they stop paying for it.
Unfragmented
The chapter on yechidah supplies the other half. Most people are an assembly: intellect wanting one thing, emotions another, body a third, speech committed to a fourth. This is not a moral failure; it is the ordinary condition, and the chapter on personal geulah described it as exile.
What the sources describe in Moshiach is the absence of that dispersion. Not more force, not more intensity — coherence. A person in whom the faculties are visibly expressions of one point rather than competitors for one body.
נֵר ה׳ נִשְׁמַת אָדָםDie Seele des Menschen ist eine Leuchte Haschems.
Eine Leuchte ist kein Teil der Flamme. Sie ist das, worin die Flamme gegenwärtig ist.
Die Seele des Menschen ist eine Leuchte Haschems.
Eine Leuchte ist kein Teil der Flamme. Sie ist das, worin die Flamme gegenwärtig ist.
Fully human
מָה־אֱנוֹשׁ כִּי־תִזְכְּרֶנּוּ וּבֶן־אָדָם כִּי תִפְקְדֶנּוּWas ist der Mensch, dass Du seiner gedenkst, und der Menschensohn, dass Du auf ihn achtest?
Das Staunen gilt nicht der Größe des Menschen, sondern dass Größe sich der Kleinheit zuwendet.
Was ist der Mensch, dass Du seiner gedenkst, und der Menschensohn, dass Du auf ihn achtest?
Das Staunen gilt nicht der Größe des Menschen, sondern dass Größe sich der Kleinheit zuwendet.
He learns. He eats. He is tired at the end of a long day. He has a family, a manner of speaking, things he finds funny. None of this is in tension with anything this site has argued; all of it is the argument.
He is holy not because he stops being human, but because human existence, in him, becomes transparent to the purpose for which Adam was made.