“If there are two people and one of them honors you and the other disparages you, are they the same in your eyes or not?”
This is the question that the kabbalist Rabbi Yitzhak of Acco reports in the name of Rabbi Avner as being the essential question of equanimity, a state necessary in order to continue to higher levels of mystical contemplation. (Meirat Eynayim Dt. 11:22, text translated by Rabbi Meir Sendor, from whom I learned this text in a Jewish Meditation class through Tal Orot).
Do you worry about what other people think of you — whether they praise or blame you, honor or judge you? Does it affect you in a deep way, disturb you or thrill you?
For most of us, of course, the answer is yes. It is very difficult to get to this state of peace, of really not caring what others think. How do we even approach it? The first step toward equanimity is learning to adhere or attach oneself more completely to God (dveikut), says Rabbi Yitzhak.. He teaches a divine name meditation as a way to cultivate this attachment to God in daily life, a meditation on the four letters of God’s sacred name, imagining them visually and seeing them expand endlessly to encompass the entire world.
Our sense of the letters of God’s name as being embedded in the universe and in ourselves is what will gradually lead us away from this worry about what other people think of us and toward the equanimity of knowing what really matters, of being attached to our own ultimate Source.
I learned this teaching this week, and amazingly, the parsha has a very similar message hidden in its letters. A new census is taken and the count is reported in a strange fashion — each progenitor is named and then his name is turned into a family name. So, for the first one, Reuven’s son Hanokh, for instance, the Torah says Hanokh, mishpahat hahanokhi (Num.26:5). Rashi points out that in each case the letters that are added to the person’s name are the two letters of God’s (short) name, yud and heh, one before and one after. החנוכי .
Why are these letters of God added to each person’s name? This is God’s way of testifying to the nations of the world, Rashi explains, concerning the purity of these descendants. The nations of the world were judging us and saying — the Egyptians had control over their bodies; surely they had control over their wives! Their children were not really their own! But no, here, God, by placing His name on either side of their names, puts this nasty rumor to rest. He embraces them with His name, thereby protecting them from external judgment and criticism.
That is also what Rabbi Yitzhak of Acco was pointing to — the sense that our connection to God, our ability to feel that God’s name really surrounds us and is inside us and all around us, that His Presence is right here, — our ability to do that is what will ultimately shield us from the winds of external reputation and judgment and honor that tend to carry us away from our true selves, from God, and from any feeling of peace or equanimity. The more we can feel God in us and all around us, the more we don’t care what people say. We are holding on for dear life to those divine letters, because it is they, and they alone, that sustain us. All the rest — what this person said or how that person perceives me — all of that fades. What stands tall are the two letters of God that, like angels, stand guard on either side of us. May we feel their presence.
