The beginning of a person's life, from the onset of pregnancy through full maturity, is a manifest process of development, from smallness, or immaturity, to greatness, or maturity. The human being is referred to by the prophet as “one who progresses” (literally, “one who walks”) and is forbidden to stop moving forward. We must always strive to reach a new goal—a greater maturity relative to our current state of immaturity. In Kabbalah this process is divided into four stages, which are especially important during the 49 days of Counting the Omer.
The article before you and the next one are excerpts from the Seu’dah of Mashiach from 5785. The original Hebrew appeared in the Nifla’ot issue of Acharei-Kedoshim 5785.
From Egypt to Sinai
We are now in the time of year known as Sefirat HaOmer, the Counting of the Omer, beginning with the second day of Passover and ending with the festival of Shavu’ot. It is the time of year when the Jewish people come of age. On Passover, we were redeemed from Egypt, escaping its bondage in a state of relative immaturity. Unable to yet process all that had happened from Moses’ appearance until Pharaoh chased us out of Egypt, our 49 day journey to Mt. Sinai to receive the Torah represents a journey from an initial, raw attitude toward God to a state of ripened maturity able to receive His laws and commandments. On the eve of Passover, God appeared to us by His own initiative. On Shavu’ot it was we who prompted Him to appear to us by vowing to live a life dedicated to following His Torah.
In Kabbalah and Chasidic thought, the journey from immaturity to maturity is divided into 4 stages. In practice, every day of Sefirat HaOmer, the teachings of the Torah’s inner dimension describe the necessity of applying these four stages to each of the 49 or seven times seven inter-included character traits of the psyche. In Kabbalah these four stages are known simply as first-immaturity, first-maturity, second-immaturity, and second-maturity.[1] From the names of these stages alone, we understand that the movement from immaturity to maturity is recursive and requires a revisiting of the process (albeit, on a higher level) to complete.
Faith versus Confidence in God
Chasidic thought provides many different applications of this four-stage process, applications that help us understand the deep meaning behind each stage. The most well-known is that the first two stages represent the steps needed to reach an awareness of the omnipresence of the Divine (יְדִיעַת הַמְּצִיאוּת), while the last two represent the steps needed to reach a comprehension or understanding of the essence of the Divine (הַשָּׂגַת הַמַּהוּת). In other words, at first, we can only come to believe that God is everywhere and everything, but ultimately our goal is to learn to rely and confidently conduct ourselves based on this belief that “God is everything and everything is God.” This can be likened to the difference between living life with the assumption that God is good and that all is for the best and living our lives with trust in God that, as it were, guides that inherent goodness to change reality for the better.[2]
To better understand these four stages, let us explore a parable that we are all familiar with to a degree—the stages of education, from entering school as a pupil to having our own children and educating them. This process is captured in the liturgical idiom we repeat daily, “To learn and to teach” (לִלְמֹד וּלְלַמֵּד).
When a child first enters school, he is in the first-immaturity stage. Someone must provide him with instruction and teach him. Everything he learns at this stage represents an initial experience and his mind is constantly bound to the present moment, because of these new and (hopefully) positive experiences and revelations. But notice that this can be just as true for an adult. It is not age that determines whether we are in the first-immaturity stage, but rather our experience. Every time we engage in some aspect of reality that is new to us, we are entering a state of first immaturity, and our being is invested in the present moment, for that is where the initial contact with an experience takes place. Because the Hebrew term for first-immaturity (קַטְנוּת א) is based on the word that also means “little” as in “little [or young] child,” it is meant to invoke the feeling that when we are in this stage, we are in a sense returning to our childhood. It is well-known that people who are constantly expanding their intellectual and experiential horizons renew their youthfulness, whether it be physically, mentally, or spiritually.
When what we are being taught is Torah, there is a tremendously important aspect of learning known as “returning” (חֲזָרָה), which refers to the act of repeatedly reviewing what one has already learnt. In the rabbinic era it was common for pupils (at age 5 or 50) to review what they had been taught one hundred times. Most rabbis would review the entire corpus of the Oral teachings every thirty days. In our times, it is uncommon to find people reviewing what they have learnt many times, but the importance of repeated reviews is still recognized. Reviewing until one has mastered one’s past learning represents the first-maturity stage in this process.
The spiritual reason for the difficulty felt in reviewing the Torah we have already learnt is that every review is like a “return to God.” We normally think that return to God, or teshuvah, is necessary only after we have sinned. But there is an equally important requirement to return to God every day of our lives. This return is not meant to act as penitence for the past in the strict sense, but rather to revitalize our relationship with the Almighty; to see how our current circumstances, our search from within our present, changes the nature of our connection with the Divine.
The sages describe the importance of review with the following statement,[3]
One who forgets any amount of what he has learnt, Scripture describes him as endangering himself, as it says, “Beware and protect yourself immensely from forgetting what your eyes have seen.” And what if one’s memory fails? Scripture states, “Lest they are removed from your heart all the days of your life.” One is not liable [for forgetting] until one has actively removed the teachings from his heart.
Clearly, first-maturity requires us to focus on the past—be it the sum total of what we have learnt in the past or be it our past relationship with God—striving to integrate it completely and prepare ourselves for the next stage.
First-immaturity and first-maturity require us to see ourselves as students, at first as novices and subsequently as masters, but still students who are not yet able to instruct others. Second-immaturity and second-maturity mark a shift from being instructed to instructing others, from playing the student—who has relatively little responsibility—to being the teacher on whom the future of what has been passed on to us by others, will now depend.
Second-immaturity also involves studying, but this time it is done as part of the preparation needed to teach others. When engaging with the material I have already learned in the past, I am now facing the future, thinking about how I should present it to my students, what their reactions, reservations, or questions might be, and how to reply to those. Why do we refer to this as a stage of immaturity? When I was engaged in learning the material as a student, I took in a great deal of information. The material I studied was part of a wealth of knowledge that poured in over time. This time around, as I prepare to teach it to others, I have to choose the salient points of the topic at hand and condense it into ideas and language that inexperienced minds will be able to integrate. Selecting and condensing the material is similar to the contraction (the tzimtzum) of God’s infinite presence required to create reality. If everything would be revealed, there would be no room left for Creation. If I pour out all that I know, I will overwhelm my students’ minds and defeat the purpose of instruction. Therefore, I am in a sense identifying with their immaturity.[4]
After all the required preparation and contraction of the material so that it fits the recipients, I go on to actually teach it. To teach well, it is not enough to simply regurgitate what was prepared. In fact, that would ensure that I remain in a state of second-immaturity. To reach a state of second-maturity, the state required for the teaching to have an impact on those listening to it, in essence I must attain a state of dveikut, a word that is usually translated as “cleaving,” as in the verse, “After Havayah your God you shall walk… and to Him you shall cleave”[5] (אַחֲרֵי הוי' אֱ־לֹהֵיכֶם תֵּלֵכוּ… וּבוֹ תִדְבָּקוּן). Cleaving is a state of being in which the individual is subsumed within what they are teaching. When the subject is Torah, the cleaving goes beyond the subject matter and involves cleaving to God. To better comprehend what cleaving is, we can bring a few examples from Chasidic lore. When Rebbe Elimelech of Lizhensk’s teachings were committed to writing and brought for him to peruse and approve, he could not believe that he had said them.[6] Likewise, before sending the transcripts of his teachings to print, Rebbe Menachem Nachum of Chernobyl, the author of Ma’or Einayim, removed those teachings that were not said with the proper cleaving.[7]
As we have explained in the past, when giving a class, one should set aside all the preparations one has made for the class. Second-maturity is akin to a state of being inspired by the Divine Spirit (Ru’ach HaKodesh). Even one who does not merit such an elevated state of cleaving to God knows that when giving the class to students, one is continually inspired with new insights and ideas that one did not know before. The Rebbe Rashab, the fifth Lubavitcher Rebbe, connects this phenomenon with the sages’ statement that, “Extra understanding was placed in the woman—referring to speech—more than in the man—referring to thought.” When one speaks, one merits to cling to the eternal aspect of the teaching. This phenomenon reached its epitome when Moses addressed the Israelites in the last few weeks of his life and what he spoke is described as, “the Divine Presence speaks from his throat.”[8] The eternal Torah itself was coming out of Moses’ mouth.
To sum up, the four stages of first and second immaturity and maturity correspond to the past, the present, the future, and the eternal.
Click here for part 2 of this article
[1]. The original Hebrew terms are: קַטְנוּת א, גַּדְלוּת א, קַטְנוּת ב, גַּדְלוּת ב and are discussed in the Arizal’s kavanot for Pesach and Sefirat HaOmer in Sha’ar HaKavanot and Pri Etz Chaim.
[2]. These two facets are known in Chasidic literature as “Faith and Confidence,” a topic that has been a staple of the Chasidic way of life since the Ba’al Shem Tov and was brought to a crescendo in our generation in the reality-altering conduct and inspiration of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. See in length in our Hebrew volume, Lev LaDa’at, “Emunah VeBitachon.”
[3]. Chagigah 9b.
[4]. In fact, when it comes to Torah, one should prepare the material four times: “A person must take an example, that when coming to teach a chapter, or an allegory, or a homily, he should not say, ‘Since I know these well, I will just get up and teach.’ Rather said Rav Acha, from God he should learn, because when God wished to teach the Torah to Israel He repeated it four times to Himself, before addressing them, as it says (Job 28:28), ‘Then [God] saw it and counted it and prepared it and studied it,’ and only then, ‘And said to mankind….’” (Shemot Rabbah 40:1). These four repetitions of the material should be done with the recipients and their abilities in focus.
[5]. Deuteronomy 13:5.
[6]. Devarim Areivim (Arman), vol. 1, Rebbe Elimelech & Rebbe Zusha, ch. 17.
[7]. Zichronam Livrachah, Cheshvan, p. 352.
[8]. Zohar 3:7a.
