Continuing the discussion he began on Chai Elul of what true reformation in Judaism is like, HaRav Ginsburgh presents a new approach to charting Jewish history, dividing it into 10 eras and corresponding them to the sefirot. This comprehensive analysis of our almost 4000 year long history, leads up to the third part of this topic, focusing on the interplay between theology, monarchy, and anarchy in Jewish history, which will better help us understand what the necessary, coming reformation of our mindset as Jews will be like.
See additional chapters of this discussion here.
This is a translation of the article that appeared in the Rosh HaShanah 5787 issue of Niflaot.
Ten Periods from the Patriarchs to Mashiach
From the era of the Patriarchs until our own era, we can identify ten historical periods in Jewish life. If there are ten periods in the history of our people, then according to the Torah’s inner dimension, according to Kabbalah, they surely correspond to the ten sefirot with which God created the world. Let’s give a summary first, and then go into detail:
Everything begins with Avraham Avinu, the first of the Patriarchs, “Avraham was one.”[1] He is the head of all believers.[2] He believed in God, as the Torah states, “and he believed in Havayah, and He reckoned it to him as a kindness.”[3] He is also the first man of loving-kindness.[4] Avraham initiates Judaism, but the first period of the Jewish people is called, in general, the era of the Patriarchs—this is the general theme of the Book of Genesis, the first of the Five Books of the Torah. It is called “the Book of the Upright,”[5] “the book of the upright ones”[6]—they walk uprightly, just as God created man upright, before man schemed and made many machinations—“God made man upright, but they have sought out many machinations.”[7] The era of the Patriarchs is called “before [Divine] speech,”[8] and it is also before our first exile.
The second period is the Egyptian exile, which contains within it all of our subsequent exiles.[9]
The third period, which chronologically is a relatively short period—just one generation of forty years—is the generation of the desert. It is a short but jam-packed period: they leave Egypt, receive the Torah, build the Tabernacle. This period ends immediately with the death of Moses; a different leadership, a new world order, already begins. Every period in the Jewish people is a new world order.
Joshua brings us into the Land. He does not complete the conquest,[10] but he certainly starts it and leads into the fourth period: the era of the Judges, which lasts from Joshua to Samuel. In each period, the entire leadership, the entire world order—one might say the entire culture—shares a common them that we will discuss later. But the people are not satisfied with that world order. At the end of the era of the Judges, the people demand a king like all the nations.[11] The demand runs contrary to God’s will, but the Holy blessed One, as it were, yields to the people’s demand. With this, a new period begins in the history of our people—the era of kings, though the common mindset developed during this period was of Judaism centered on the Holy Temple. Saul, the first king, is still relatively chaotic (tohu)[12]; his kingship does not endure, and after him comes King David, to whom the Holy blessed One promises “the Eternity of Israel.” David’s purpose is not his wars—he devotes his life to building a house for God: he prepares all the material for the building[13] and draws the plans for the building.[14] God tells him, through Natan the prophet, that not he but his son Solomon will build it, since his hands are full of blood[15], but the house will be called by his name (“behold your house, David”[16]). Therefore, if one wants to give this period a name, it is the era of the First Temple, until the destruction of the First Temple. This is already the fifth period of the Jewish people.
Afterward, “because of our sins we were exiled from our land”[17]—a relatively short exile, seventy years in Babylonia. All exiles are included within the Egyptian exile, so we don’t count the Babylonian exile as a separate period or a change in leadership. The final exile, which we are still in, is indeed something different, but we will not refer to it as an exile, as we shall see. Here we are speaking about a change in worldview, in the world order, and what comes after the First Temple is the Second Temple, which is fundamentally different from the First Temple. This is the sixth period, which lasts until the destruction of the Second Temple, and has a “tail” extending until Rabbi Judah the Nassi who compiled the Mishnah. Until then, the crown of Torah was in the Land of Israel.
Then comes the seventh period. We don’t call it exile, but something else. The center of gravity of the Jewish people shifts from the Land of Israel to Babylonia, and flourishes there—there are yeshivot, and even a limited Jewish authority in the role of the Exilarch (the Reish Galuta). The spiritual center in Babylonia flourishes and remains there for eight hundred years (though there was ultimately a decline at the end). Eight hundred years is a tremendous period—like the First and Second Temples together. Rav Yehudah, one of the first sages of the Babylonian period, said that it is forbidden to leave Babylonia for the Land of Israel.[18] It is as if he said that now the Shechinah (the Divine Presence) is here, in Babylonia[19]—the Jewish people are now a Babylonian people. This is an entirely different mindset, which persisted for eight hundred years, until the end of the era of the Ge’onim. When Rav Hai Gaon passed away, our story in Babylonia came to an end.
We call the next period, after the years in Babylonia, the era of the Dispersion. We left Babylonia, and the story of the Jewish people began in Spain, France, Ashkenaz (Germany), North Africa, and so on—we were scattered among the nations. It is written that the purpose of the dispersion is to add converts to the Jewish people.[20] The leadership during the dispersion also changed entirely. In this period, the great halachic decisors are no longer in Babylonia. The Rif (Rabbi Yitzchak Alfasi) is in North Africa, followed by Maimonides, Rashi, Tosafot, the Rosh—the pillars of Jewish law as it exists today, all of whom are outside Babylonia. Rabbi Yosef Caro, the author of the Beit Yosef, rules according to three, like a court—the Rif, Maimonides, and the Rosh.[21] This is already the eighth period.
Two hundred fifty years ago, something new began—Chasidut, the Ba’al Shem Tov. Again, this is a new Jewish outlook—in thought, in philosophy, and in the structure of society. Who is at the head, who leads the community here—the rabbi (rav) or the rebbe? This has enormous implications, and one who probes deeply understands that this is already a different reality, as it were, a renewed Judaism. Chasidut does not, God forbid, abandon anything from the past practice (halachah or customs) but, “a new face has appeared.”[22] We now say that every time in history there is a stage that must involve “divesting of form” and “donning of form”, in other words, “a new face has come here.” In all the generations of Judaism, the ninth period is Chasidut.
What is the tenth period? We anticipate and believe every day that Mashiach will come, and also we see a change—there is aliyah to the Land of Israel. Something that has not yet fully happened, but is in process, is very much felt in the air—a totally different mindset of Judaism. This is the tenth stage that corresponds with the sefirah of kingdom (malchut): the Messianic era. Many things will change internally, as the Sages teach, and all the more so according to Chasidut.
So, in brief, we have now gone over ten periods in the history of the Jewish people. Let us now see how they correspond to the ten sefirot. This will help provide us with the necessary background to perform our next analysis that will guide us in understanding the direction we are moving in.
In principle the most straightforward correspondence is to follow the order of the eras and correspond them to the sefirot in order. Nonetheless, we would like to better understand the depth of the correspondence.
Intellect: The Patriarchs, the Egyptian Exile, and the Generation of the Wilderness
The first three eras correspond to the intellectual sefirot: wisdom, understanding, and knowledge. This gains credence because the Sages describe the third era, the generation of the wilderness as a generation of knowledge (da’at),[23] the third of the intellectual sefirot. In the same vein, the leader of that era, Moses, is considered the knowledge of all the souls of the Jewish people,[24] and when Moses passes, the leadership that takes over has a completely different mindset. The Sages describe this with the metaphor, “the face of Moses was like the face of the sun, the face of Joshua was like the face of the moon.”[25]
Incidentally, it is important to know that according to the holy Ari[26] our present generation—the generation of “the footsteps of Mashiach” (ikveta deMeshicha), the generation waiting for the next reform, the tenth era—is a reincarnation of the generation of the wilderness, the generation of knowledge. This means that even when we come to the tenth and final era that corresponds with kingdom, the primary innovation will be in our sefirah of knowledge.
In any case, we said that this already reveals the secret, for if the third era is the generation of knowledge, one can understand what the previous stages are. The era of the Patriarchs are wisdom. That is why the word av itself is the beginning of “Avraham,” the first of the Patriarchs, followed by Yitzchak-Yaakov. All three Patriarchs are called “av,” and “av” in Kabbalah—the partzuf of Abba, the father principle—is wisdom.
The era of the Egyptian exile is like a mother’s womb. Only here the womb is an impure womb—Egypt. In any case, the Jewish people are born out of the exile, which corresponds to understanding (binah), as explained explicitly in Kabbalah.[27]
We have already spoken about the era of the generation of the Exodus that was in the wilderness for 40 years. They experienced Redemption, signs, and wonders, as well as the giving of the Torah and the making of the Tabernacle, “Let them make Me a sanctuary, that I may dwell among them.”[28] It is written that “there will never again be a giving of the Torah.”[29] There will never be such an experience again. Even the fact that knowledge will be instrumental in the era of Mashiach is something else. It is important to know that the era of the wilderness also experienced the shattering of knowledge, as it did in the World of Chaos (tohu); the generation of the wilderness was full of sins. They are described as, “a stiff-necked people”—the nape is the place of the sefirah of knowledge.[30] In this generation there is knowledge of God but on the other hand, the knowledge also breaks—there are signs and wonders that cannot be described, and yet the people keep falling and failing, again and again.
Three Natures: Anarchy, Monarchy, and Theocracy
To understand how the next three eras—Judges–First Temple–Second Temple—correspond to the emotive sefirot, loving-kindness, might, and beauty (chesed, gevurah, and tiferet), we need to pivot to the central idea behind this analysis.
Chasidut[31] speaks of a first nature and second nature. The idea is that everyone is born with a first nature, but it is not rectified, and so one must do the work of rectifying character traits and arrive at a second nature, which is more rectified. To be more rectified means to be more aligned with one’s true nature. There is a beautiful allusion to this[32]: the phrase “second nature” (טֶבַע שֵׁנִי) has the same value as “truth” (אֱמֶת). The nature you were born with does not reflect your true self—you must work hard to arrive at your truth. As we have discussed elsewhere, there is also a third nature that follows the second nature. Here we want to add that after one despairs of his third nature, one ends up returning to one’s first nature.
When analyzing the eras of Jewish history, the three natures are anarchy, monarchy, and theocracy. The first nature of the Jew is to be an anarchist.[33] It presents a question of whether this is good or bad—but this is our first nature. A Jew by nature does not like someone lording over him. But what? Anarchism does not always succeed, especially when there are other people around. If I were alone in the world, that would be best, but there are a few other people, and if everyone can do whatever they feel like, society does not always hold together. Therefore, people come and shout that a king is needed—they seek monarchy. But monarchy does not work for them either, so what in the end? Theocracy is needed, rule by the religious establishment. But then you end up with religious coercion?! So maybe it’s best to go back to the beginning.
With this in mind, let us examine the next three eras.
Judges: Anarchy and Loving-kindness
From the generation of the wilderness we come to “a good and spacious land,”[34] and the era of the Judges begins. How do I know that the era of the Judges is anarchy? It is written explicitly in the Book of Judges. There are two entirely identical verses, “In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes”—so it is written at the end of the Book of Judges, in the episode of Michah’s Idol[35], and afterward in the affair of the Concubine at Givah[36]—the two catastrophes that befell the Jewish people in the era of the Judges. In each of the stories there is another similar phrase, that “there is no king in Israel.”[37] According to most commentators, the verse is stating this negatively.[38] But when I just read it plainly, like a simple child, what impression does this ending verse of the Book of Judges tell me? Before I know the context, I think, how wonderful—in those days there was no king in Israel, no king is needed at all, every man did what was right in his own eyes, everyone does whatever he feels like, the best it could possibly be. Is there a commentator who says that the condition of the era of the Judges is positive? Yes, the Abarbanel says that this is a positive state.[39] In light of his words, one can interpret the phrase “in those days there was no king”—no king is needed, no government is needed—in a positive sense. Amazingly, the value of this entire verse, which repeats twice letter-for-letter, “In those days there was no king in Israel, every man did what was right in his own eyes” (בַּיָּמִים הָהֵם אֵין מֶלֶךְ בְּיִשְׂרָאֵל אִישׁ הַיָּשָׁר בְּעֵינָיו יַעֲשֶׂה) is 5 times “truth” (אֱמֶת), where the multiplication by 5 suggests that this truth truly reflected all 5 levels of the soul.
Emotive Sefirot: The Era of the Judges, the First Temple, and the Second Temple
The First Temple era was not a theocracy. The Sages who did live in a theocratic era, try to portray[40] the First Temple as also a kind of theocracy, but according to the plain sense, that is not the case at all—we do not see in Tanach that there is a Sanhedrin that deliberates on everything. The Sages simply assumed that this is how things ran, but it seems that the king rules absolutely, doing exactly what he feels like, with no power above him.[41] He does foolish things, sins and is punished. All the power is in the king’s hand—it was a state of full-on monarchy.
What is the difference between the era of the First Temple and the era of the Second Temple? The Second Temple is already theocracy. There is a king, but he is not the main power; that is the Sanhedrin. The Oral Torah begins to develop—this is the main innovation of this period.[42] There is certainly some government, but it isn’t even so critical that it be Jewish—the main thing is that there are “new faces” among the Jewish people. The Jewish people move into an entirely renewed period, of the development of the Oral Torah, or at least of its spiritual rule. Who is the leader of the generation? The head of the Sanhedrin. There is also a “deputy to the king,” the head of the court—theocracy in every respect.
Anarchy is thus a state of unlimited loving-kindness. Monarchy, the First Temple era, is about might, as we know that, “Kingship is constructed from might (severities).”[43] Finally, theocracy, the Second Temple era corresponds to Torah, the middle axis and the sefirah of beauty.[44]
Habitual Sefirot: Babylonian Exile, the Dispersion, and Chasidut
What follows is no longer the same order. Instead, we see the third nature, theocracy, returning to the first nature of the people, anarchy, its foundational instincts. First comes the Babylonian era, the going out “outside the body,”[45] a departure from life in the Land of Israel. In Babylon, the Torah establishment rules even more than it did in the Second Temple era. The Jewish people have no king of Israel there—there is, of course, the king of Persia, but the authority within the Jewish community, which has powers and even the authority to put people to death on behalf of the crown[46], is the Torah. This era corresponds to victory, about which it is written, “He [Ze’er Anpin, the pillar of Torah] is in victory.”[47]
Then comes the era of the Dispersion (diaspora)—we are already scattered. This is the period of the shaping of halachah as we know it today, but Torah is already far less regal—there is no Exilarch and no central authorities. From generation to generation there are fewer powers for the Jewish community to govern itself and to a certain degree, we move in the direction of anarchy. This period corresponds to the sefirah of acknowledgment or splendor (hod), which is described by the verse, “my splendor [hod] has turned to corrupt me.”[48]
The next era of Chasidut clearly corresponds to the sefirah of foundation and the tzaddik, “the tzaddik is the foundation of the world.”[49] We said in the first class on this topic (from Chai Elul) that Chasidut is a positive and holy reformation. Its main point is that everyone can serve and find God. It is not the halachic authority who is central, but the rebbe, who gives inspiration to the individual. In anarchy there can be a rebbe, but specifically a rebbe according to the Chabad approach, who does not rule over you at all—he can show a living example, he can recommend what to do. He will not force upon you what to do, but will give you inspiration so that you work on God by your own strength[50] so that you reach the correct conclusion, so that you come to know yourself—as per the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s directive to me personally, “let him consider what he truly wants”[51], this is an expression of Chasidut, that everyone should consider what he wants, and do it. This already sounds like a form of anarchy.
Finally, the era of Mashiach, the tenth era, corresponds to kingdom and will be discussed separately.
See additional chapters of this discussion here.
[1] Ezekiel 33:24.
[2] Shemot Rabbah 23:5.
[3] Genesis 15:6.
[4] See Micah 7:20 (“loving-kindness to Avraham”) and Isaiah 41:8 (“Avraham who loved Me”); Pardes Rimonim 23:1.
[5] Joshua 10:13; 2 Samuel 1:18.
[6] Avodah Zarah 25a.
[7] Ecclesiastes 7:29.
[8] Chagigah 6a; Sanhedrin 56b. And elsewhere.
[9] Bereishit Rabbah 16:4.
[10] See Joshua 13:1; Judges 1. And elsewhere.
[11] 1 Samuel 8:5.
[12] Etz Chaim 8:4. Emek HaMelech 5:46.
[13] 1 Chronicles 22:14.
[14] Ibid. 28:11–19.
[15] 2 Samuel 7:12–13; 1 Chronicles 22:8–10; 28:3–6.
[16] 1 Kings 12:16.
[17] The text of the Mussaf prayer for the festivals.
[18] Berachot 24b. Ketubot 110b.
[19] Bamidbar Rabbah 7:10. Mechilta Bo, 14; Sifrei, Beha’alotcha, 26.
[20] Pesachim 87b.
[21] See the introduction of the Beit Yosef to Tur, Orach Chaim.
[22] Shabbat 112b, Eiruvin 24a, and elsewhere.
[23] Vayikra Rabbah 9:1; Pesikta Rabbati, ch. 14; Pesikta DeRav Kahana, piska 4, letter gimel (based on I Kings 5:11).
[24] Tanya, ch. 42.
[25] Bava Batra 75a.
[26] Sha’ar HaKavanot, the first discourse of the Pesach discourses.
[27] See the Pesach discourses in Sha’ar HaKavanot and Pri Etz Chaim; Kehillat Yaakov, entry “Eretz Mitzrayim.”
[28] Exodus 25:8.
[29] Likkutei Sichot, vol. 4, p. 1166; see the discourse “Shuvah Yisrael” 5666, and elsewhere.
[30] See Etz Chaim, gate 25, ch. 1. And elsewhere.
[31] For example, Tanya, ch. 14. And in numerous places.
[32] See HaTeva HaYehudi [The Jewish Nature], p. 140. And elsewhere.
[33] See also the classes of 14 Adar 5773; 1 Adar II 5776. And elsewhere.
[34] Exodus 3:8.
[35] Judges 17:6.
[36] Ibid. 24:21 (the end of the book).
[37] Ibid. 18:1 and 19:1.
[38] See Radak, Rabbi Yosef Kara, and others on Judges 21:25. And elsewhere there.
[39] See Abarbanel on Deuteronomy 17:14 at length (see also Ha’amek Davar there).
[40] See for example Berachot 3b–4a; Mo’ed Katan 16b. And elsewhere.
[41] See Horayot 3:3 (that the definition of a king is “that there is none above him but Havayah his God”). And although a king has advisors, deputy ministers ultimately, he is not bound by them, and he chooses, according to his own will, which advisor’s voice to heed.
[42] Torah Or 120c. And elsewhere.
[43] Etz Chaim, gate 25, discourse 2; gate 34; Ta’amei HaMitzvot, Parshat Beha’alotcha; Siddur Im Dach, the discourse “Baruch Merachem Al HaAretz.”
[44] Megaleh Amukot, Parshat Vayeitzei, the discourse “Vayeitzei—Combinations of Letters”; Parshat Vayigash, the discourse “Vayigash Eilav,” the fourth [aspect].
[45] Based on Zohar 1:21b.
[46] See also Bava Metzia 84a and the Ritva (cited in the Shitah Mekubetzet) there; Chiddushei HaRan, Sanhedrin 46a; the responsum of the Rashba cited in the Beit Yosef, Choshen Mishpat, 388 (see also there section 2). And elsewhere.
[47] Based on Tikkunei Zohar, 13 (28b–29a).
[48] Daniel 10:8.
[49] Proverbs 10:25.
[50] See the “HaYom Yom” calendar, 29 Menachem-Av. And elsewhere in Chassidus.
[51] The Rebbe’s language in a reply (see the Bloch-Shmulevitz teshurah, Tammuz 5783).
