"Every single thing one sees or hears...
...is an instruction for his conduct in the service of G‑d. This is the idea of avoda, service, to comprehend and discern in all things a way in which to serve G‑d."
Our teacher the Baal Shem Tov said:
So this is Chassidus, then.
Every single thing
One must approach life not from the outside but from the inside. If one grasps “things” as mere beings among other beings—if one encounters something as if one is merely another something—there is never room to make claims about “every single thing.” We know from our own experience that much of our lives are lived within our private inner worlds, our solitudinous subjectivity. No one, meeting you from the outside, can tell you about you. If we knew you, we’d be you. And it seems pretty plausible that you don’t know about us in the same way.
Even if, in our adventures beyond our solitudinous subjectivity, we encounter G-d, and G-d says, “Every single thing,” the statement is questionable. For G-d, too, has been approached as a (great, omnipotent, omniscient, first) being among beings. Even as “being itself,” He can be met from the outside. This means that He is only as real as my willingness to depart from my personal solitude.1 And so, no matter how certain I am of His Truth, that certainly only goes as deep in me as I let it. Even if I see that creates every single thing, I may not know it. I am still free to withhold from that external vision a place within myself, and no one (except the notional G-d over whom I rule) will ever know.
No, to speak of every single thing, one cannot be a being or an externally encounterable truth. The medium must be a vessel for the message and so cannot be external. When G-d speaks of every single thing to the Holy Baal Shem Tov, He must say it from those things’ mouths, like the giving of the Torah, every level of every reality His tuning fork. He must speak in their voices. He must speak not as an outsider contemplating His works but from the most profound inner subjectivity. He must speak in immediacy from, to, and within all things, which means He must be everything in the most straightforward and most literal sense, without exception.
So if a Torah teaching speaks of every single thing, it must mean it. For it to mean it, “inner wisdom” or “inner knowledge” must exist. And thus, the Holy Baal Shem Tov’s teaching implies the chain of inner wisdom. In speaking of everything, the Holy Baal Shem Tov introduces himself.
one sees or hears
The immediacy of G-d to all, from every direction and in every single way, means He can speak of every single thing. A person does not see or hear everything, and so, despite that Divine immediacy, is not themselves G-d. The person is only a person in distinction from every single thing, a set with which they have a limited intersection and then only through sees or hears.
There is thus tension in being a person. One might know from one’s inside that there is all-embracing knowledge from the inside (the Mind of G-d). There exists One who knows every single thing Who is deeper in my person and in each level observing my person than I am. On the other hand, were I to actually be that knowledge of every single thing I would not be myself. Indeed, I primarily have access, mainly from the outside, to what one sees or hears.
From one side, I am in faith accepting the statement of the Baal Shem Tov that every single thing I see and hear is known by G-d from the inside and therefore (and only thereby) under His absolute control. I accept that my inner world is nothing but G-d’s world. From the other side, were I naught but that faith, how could there be a distinction between everything and everything one sees or hears?
Of course, if one person cannot be every single thing, two people are even worse, with divergent sees and hears. “One” inherently leaves room for “another.” There is not a single irreconcilable truth between everything and the person but innumerable irreconcilable sees and hears that differ from every single thing. This, however,
is an instruction
not an accident. It is the Will of the One who knows every single thing from the inside that a person only sees and hears an infinitesimal fraction of the totality from an indelibly removed perspective. This makes education possible.
It does not help to ask, how is education of value if the nonexistence of ignorance is the Divine default. Instead, consider that there is some Third Thing that somehow embraces and reconciles the One Who Knows Everything with one who sees and hears. Whatever the reason for our separation, it is not an end unto itself or a given but rather something to be reconciled, in the form of “instruction.”
The world says that the existence of one who sees and hears is a given; the Holy BeSh”T says it derives from “instruction.” The difference extends beyond origin to the very quality of the finite self. A self that has been created as a scintilla of the total perspective to receive instruction is ordered, and oriented toward the instructor.
To ignore this instruction is not only a moral failure or wasted potential. It rejects all things and one’s own existence per se. To embrace one’s own finite perspective as an incomplete student of the Divine is to embrace life. To seek escape from the ignominy of being a student is to seek death.
All finite life in its myriad ones who see and hear derives from the Third Thing that reconciles it with the Infinite. Call this “Torah.”
for his
There is no finite perspective or sum of limited perspectives that can on its own see the truth of every single thing. Their perspectives will always color truths according to their vantage point; they are always localized; they are rarely immediate.
The assumption that G-d works with broad collective realities shows we have not yet parsed “every single thing.” It is to assume that G-d addresses only “existence” writ broad. That is, any perspective, including His, is an innovation. In truth, perspective is deeper than external reality, and every single perspective is accounted for and reconciled with every single thing. Therefore, the instruction, which is the stuff of life, is not a univocal process addressing some great collective before which the individual is irrelevant.
Thus, the Subjectivity of G-d is sufficiently infinite to speak to your single finite subjectivity directly. What’s more, since what one sees or hears is consequent to the goal of instruction, no facet of reality that meets our eye and ear is by chance. We are not cogs in some vast plan running for some foreign and mysterious purpose who meet or fail to meet because something must. In truth, nothing must, except that He wants instruction. And since we are meeting, it must be to further the goal of education. There are no accidents.
Our perspective apart from G-d is a consistent work against the original state of things. Our ignorance is maintained in existence that we may learn not as a group but as individuals. Thus, the occurrence of an event as an objective fact is G-d’s business alone. The event as we see or hear it is our business. This isn’t to value distortions brought about by our isolation. We must always seek the truth. But the very fact that we’re even aware of something at all is only a function of G-d’s instructive process for us and the cosmos.
What is the goal of this instruction?
conduct
If some small slice of every single thing enters our awareness, it is then able to affect what we do. This is the ultimate culmination of the Divine instruction. The private individual learns with the goal of departing his privacy for the objective world.
Having affirmed the infinite and primary worth of the private individual, we then establish a mission for that individual beyond his private self. One is not an end unto oneself, not even as a student. One is a student in order to teach, in order to instantiate the perspective of every single thing in every single thing. It is only by becoming a teacher that the private self can possibly reflect the totality and perfection of the one who knows every single thing. Even objective reality must be transformed, and to transform it, one needs not only the inner world but action, and conduct.
in the service of G‑d.
Human purpose, service, is the act of an individual soul returning through conduct everything it sees and hears to G-d by finding within each thing its return label. Everything is thus meaningful in the way it is returned to G-d by the immediate perspective of every single thing. Everything is “meaningful,” but not in the usual sense of this word.
The entire process is not one that exists as a given but constitutes the personal relationship between G-d and the one who sees and hears. Everything we see and hear is personally meaningful. From G-d’s end, everything is “immediate.” This does not mean everything is explicable or purposive in the ordinary sense of the terms. Gas whirling on Jupiter, never observed by a finite mind, is meaningful only since it fulfills and contributes to the fulfillment of the non-rational desire of G-d for creation. Everything is “objectively” meaningful only in the sense that the objective itself is a mode of Divine relation. From our end, we have been given the thing we observe in order to take instruction. Everything we see and hear is meaningful because our knowledge of it is not a given but existentially dependent on G-d’s apportioning of experience. This apportionment is accomplished by G-d from the inside, without the need for any rational causation. Thus, everything is meaningful only at the place where that word has lost its meaning. Everything has a reason if we are willing to learn from the non-reason that brought it to us.
This is the idea of avoda, service, to comprehend and discern
We can’t just have proper conduct because conduct alone only immanentizes G-d’s Will rather than His awareness of every single thing. Behavior is technical, and its ends are achieved through the tyranny of technicality. Technicality denies the immediacy of G-d. Comprehension and discernment are inverted, intentional, and empty on the inside. They are what we call a thing’s ability to derive life from a truth accepted as its inner vitality. Our mind is the first and highest thing we see or hear. Everything else we see or hear comes through our comprehension and discernment. Mind matters even if the ultimate goal of the instruction is to act externally.
in all things
Thus, only by the total Divine awareness of every single thing do we find a way to make everything we see or hear meaningful. Rationally, taking the facts of life as a given, they are meaningless, nasty, brutish, and short. It is only by dint of receiving the immanentized instruction of G-d, by receiving His teaching on each thing as it relates to its source in nothingness and non-being, that we can then see each thing (and act accordingly) as meaningful. The ultimate human purpose is to see and treat each other finite thing, each other soul that sees or hears, as ourselves.
True love of one’s fellow is thus a direct outcome of the Divine Unity. If it isn’t G-d who “manages” with His exacting Individual Divine Providence everything we see and hear, then the colliding of my world with yours, the way I see you from the outside and you see me from the outside, can be a mere accident, a collision of somethings. But no knowledge of you comes to me except that I may be instructed in the service of G-d and the return to my own source, which is your own source. There is no interaction between us, two among billions, that cannot lead us toward our original source where we are one.
The solitude of incarnation as “one who sees and hears” is solved, not as the world assumes, by turning outward to build in objectivity, a fool’s game of Zeno’s bridges in which each raft we float into the river must itself be somehow reached by another raft. The solitude of incarnation is alleviated at the level of perception itself. That I can even perceive what you’re floating indicates an intersection deep in the Providential architecture. Our external meeting is secondary to the comprehension and discernment of a soul seeing in all things the path to becoming one with all things. Our fellowship is not the collision of two unrelated things but the knot in a single rope seeking to untie itself.
a way in which to serve G‑d.
The ultimate result of all our instruction is thus the triumph of love, peace, and togetherness over the myriad ones who see and hear. It is teaching separation that it itself is not separate. It is to align the single thing with that which speaks to every single thing. And it can only be accomplished by the initial recognition of G-d as He truly is, and of the fact that we are not G-d. Then we can work to achieve their non-contradiction.
-HaYom Yom for the 9th of Iyar, 24th day of the Omer
The Holy Baal Shem Tov teaching about everything does not even reach us from the outside, except through the spreading of the wellsprings. In our generation, every single thing may actually encounter as a common objective belief the Baal Shem Tov’s teaching about every single thing. In our time, that we are learning Chassidus, the perfunctory behavior of a twice-orphaned generation, reflects what Chassidus we are learning.
The every single thing of the Holy Baal Shem Tov that was never meant to be conceptual but rather total finally finds the lowest place. Thus, because our generation cannot learn anything, the teaching will ultimately be understood. It is the instruction that can directly become action, even in the lowest mind, that is most deeply instruction. Every single thing one sees or hears is an instruction for one’s conduct in the service of G‑d. This is the idea of avoda, service, to comprehend and discern in all things a way in which to serve G‑d.
Even if He is the Creator of all from nothing (without process) and so must perforce know all that is, this is often still described as a contingent external relationship with each thing, as if the existence of each party is a given.
You win. I had *expected* that you would have put something else out by now.
Fabulous piece.
Let me reiterate..
You’ve mastered your preferred form. QED