When you see your brother’s donkey or ox falling down, the Torah says, help him lift it up (Deuteronomy 22:5).
I read this as talking not just about donkeys falling down, but about us falling down, about how to help someone get back on their feet when their donkey – i.e. their ability to travel forward in life – has fallen and cannot get up. Maybe from excessive burdens or stress or despair. Whatever the reason, we find them or ourselves in a state of collapse and helplessness.
How do we help ourselves and each other get up from that place? Hakem takim imo, the Torah says. You shall surely lift up together with him. Hakem takim imo. Three words. The first two are more or less the same, hakem takim, repeating – you shall raise up, you shall raise up. And then imo – with him, together with him.
Together With Him
That word imo, with him, Rashi explains as meaning – it has to be with his participation. The one who has fallen, he can’t just sit on the side of the road and say: hey, it’s a mitzvah for you to do it for me, so I’ll just watch. You are only obligated to help him if he participates in his own healing. Imo – together with him. Not on your own, being the knight in shining armor, coming to someone’s rescue and taking over. It’s not all on you. He has to be involved.
Healing Requires Participation
There is a deep truth here about healing. Rashi phrases it as an issue of obligation, hayav and patur, that you are no longer obligated to help him if he doesn’t participate. But it’s more than that. You actually can’t help him if he doesn’t participate. When the goal is to get someone back on their feet, to help them stand up on their own, to empower them, providing too much help only serves to reinforce their disempowerment, giving them the message that they can’t actually stand on their own, that they are entirely dependent on you. How does that raise them up? (Maybe God feels the same way about us – we want to just be healed, and God desperately wants to help us, but we have to participate. Otherwise, how is that empowerment?)
God’s Power of Arising
Pausing here to consider the root of hakem takim, kum, to get up, to arise, or in our case, to help someone else get up or arise. Elsewhere we hear – Kumah Hashem veyafutzu oyvekha – Arise, O God, and your enemies will be scattered (Numbers 10:35). To arise is to be in one’s full might and power so strongly that all else scatters before you, standing taller, striding forward with confidence so that all your obstacles and challenges dissolve before you, to participate in God’s kumah power of arising.
Reflecting Back the Light
Hakem takim asks you to help someone else arise and regain their divine power. How does one do that? By mirroring it back to them. Kumi ori, Isaiah says,– kumi, that same root, “arise,” arise and shine. How? By seeing your light reflected back to you – ki va orekh, for your light has come; God shines upon you (Isaiah 60:1). We are God’s shining face for one another, continually reflecting back each other’s light, believing in it, holding it and reminding each other when we are low and have forgotten who we really are.
Hakem Takim Mirroring
There is this same sense of mirroring in the doubled words hakem takim. The words are the same yet also slightly different, hakem, takim, like different shades of the same color, as if there are two people sitting on the floor opposite one another reflecting back one another’s kumah power and light. It shines slightly differently in each of us. I am hakem, and you are takim. Feel yourself with that other person across from you — or it can even be God across from you — sense how you and they reflect power and light back and forth, a cord of energy, kumi ori, arise and shine, ori, orekh, my light, your light, hakem, takim, hakem, takim, a whirling storm which gathers strength and speed until you both stand up tall and magnificent in your brilliance.
Equality of “With”
Maybe sensing in that exchange of energies the sense of imo, the quality of being with, being with another person in an equal way, neither towering above nor crouching beneath, but with, on the same level, walking side by side. We are all of us broken and all of us whole, truly all just walking each other home. When we fall down, we are not made of a lesser substance. We do not then become permanent victims or creatures of a lower order. We have simply forgotten who we are and we need another to remind us. If that other comes and stands above us and says – here, I’ll carry you around from now on on my back because you can’t walk on your own anymore, that doesn’t help us. That only adds to our sense of lowness, to our disempowerment, to our false belief in our own limitations and inferiority. And when we are in the position of helper, we do that, too. We rush to take over and carry them on our backs. Now we’re the bigger ones. The Torah doesn’t say carry them. It says hakem, establish them, put them back on their feet, raise them back up so they can walk on their own again.
Our Urge To Rescue and Be Rescued
Maybe feeling into this in your own life on both sides of the helping dynamic. On the one hand, on the helping side, feeling the great urge to rescue, how maybe it comes from a place of care and is even necessary sometimes, but also how it creates this inequality, how it perpetuates the other’s disempowerment, how it belittles them even as you are very earnestly trying to help them grow, how it puts you in the higher position, the one with the power.
And on the other side, when we are the fallen broken one in search of aid, noticing the urge to be rescued, how in our collapse, sometimes that is the help we seek, to be rescued, to be carried, just to finally be taken care of. That’s not terrible. It’s important. It’s a young one inside us that longs for care, and is actually asking for us to re-empower so that we can provide it. But fundamentally, the work of hakem takim is not the unequal work of having someone else rescue us– they can’t actually help us stand up that way. Hakem takim is the joint work of collaboratively raising ourselves up im, together with someone else, recognizing and reflecting one another’s light and empowering each other to arise and shine.
Helping Others and Ourselves At The Same Time
The truth is that the helper/helpee dynamic is by its nature not uni-directional. We receive and give in the very same interaction. We imagine that we are going off to help those poor needy folks only to find that we get more out of “the help” than anyone, that it fills our own hearts and heals us. Perhaps this is another reading of the double wording of hakem takim, one for you and one for the other person. Hakem (lift) him and you will takim (lift) yourself, lifting both with one motion. It is a win, win situation.
Divine Source of Healing
What is happening here is that we are tapping into a divine source of healing which knows no bounds or limitations. Once we tap into it, either for our own sake or for the sake of someone else, the streams of divine healing are activated, and they don’t limit themselves to any one being, but spread and expand and offer healing in all directions. We in our limited notions think in the categories of us vs them, me or you, but when we enter the divine healing space, those distinctions are dissolved and we are all bathed in the divine flow of grace. Hakem takim – for you, for me, for everyone. The same energy that raises you, raises me.
Hakem takim in its doubleness even has an exponential feel, as if the lifting is multiplied by the exchange, the more I am raised, the more you are, the more, the more, going up and up. This is not a seesaw where either you’re up or I’m up and the other one is down. We rise up together, higher and stronger together. Hakem, takim. The more, the more. Can you feel the spaciousness and generosity of this healing perspective, the abundance of it, how it taps into divine overflow. We don’t have to compete for scarce resources. Take a lot of space for yourself, honor yourself, honor another, celebrate them and you, it’s all the same, and only increases as we share it. Hakem, takim, all of us.
The Three Partners
Perhaps the three words in this phrase – hakem takim imo – speak to the three parties, or partners, in this healing scenario. There are me and you, two equals in relationship, one named Hakem and the other Takim – the twins Hakem and Takim – and when these two are in right relationship, then we activate the presence of a third: Imo, the One whose very nature is to be im, to be with us always. What we have then is a triangle with three points, Hakem and Takim on the flat bottom opposite one another and Imo above them at the point midway between them, hovering over them and offering support and love and strength, the divine capacity to Kumah, to arise out of our fallen places and step into our light. That energy infuses the space between us when we turn towards one another as partners, working together to raise ourselves and each other up, on the same team of empowerment and healing.
I invite you to imagine yourself seated across from a person that you feel some connection to, sensing yourself as a Hakem to their Takim. Maybe you are the one needing help right now or maybe they are. It matters not. Maybe you are just sitting across from one another and feeling deeply supportive of each other, wanting yourself to be able to rise up to your full potential and in the same instant also wanting them to be able to rise up to their full potential. I am made of light and you are made of light – really sensing that divine spirit in both of us and reflecting that light back and forth between us. Feeling the cord of energy and support and love between you, and sensing how, in being this way with one another, you activate a third presence, Imo, the divine source of all of this light and power and love. Letting yourself take in the healing streams of that Imo divine energy. God is with you, God is with us, as we support each other in rising up to reclaim our power and light.
Photo by Josh Hild at Pexels
