So Curly and Baldy are hanging out, 'round Shavous time, by ye olde threshing floor. For those of you not-yet-steeped in the antediluvian terminology of pre-industrial times, a threshing floor is where wheat was brought after the harvest to be chaffed and winnowed, a process done these days by an automatic tiller at the moment of harvest. In this "threshing floor," an animal or group of animals would stomp the wheat into the ground, loosening the wheat kernels (from which flour would later be milled) from the stalks and surrounding chaff. Then, a person or group of people would rake the resulting kernel/chaff combo, causing the light, fluttery chaff to become airborne, while the desired kernels would stay on the ground. With the kind help of a benevolent wind, the chaff would be blown clear from the threshing floor, leaving only the kernels to collect.
So anyway, Curly and Baldy are takin' a siesta from the field, and they stop in to see how the day's threshing is going. Unfortunately, they happen to approach just as a huge gust of wind picks up a large amount of chaff and seizes it toward them. Curly, with his long beard and tangled, knotty frizz of hair, spends the next 7 days of the harvest picking flecks of chaff from various places on and around his head. Clean-shaven Baldy, on the other hand, whose hair disappeared mysteriously at the age of 13, needs only to swipe the random flecks from his brow with a deft flick of the wrist, and he walks away clean.
Chaff is externality, shell-hood; it initially protects the wheat kernel, but ultimately flies away into the wind, utterly useless (in fact, the Torah prohibits building a threshing floor near a residential area, because the uselessness of the chaff, which does not decompose quickly and cannot be used to fertilize or decorate, causes a nuisance to residents). When we get wrapped-up in the externalities of the world and fail to acknowledge its essences, we descend from our highest human potential. One of our most sublime human sensibilities involves our capacity to sense the world's transcendent nature, to feel that this world's phenomena spring forth from an intangible, inexplicable root-source, and to seek knowledge-of, proximity-to and correspondence-with that source, that "kernel," if you will. Perhaps this is why there are so few bald animals in the world.
Jacob told his mother, "Behold - my brother Esav is hairy, and I am smooth-skinned." With "smooth skin," the random flecks of the world's "chaff" can only temporarily settle on our brows, and we can consciously choose to swipe them away and to focus on the essential "kernel." However, if we are "hairy," the externality of the world finds a much more negotiable settling ground in us, and our ability to perceive essences can become unequivocally animalized, compromised.
So how do we become "smooth-skinned?" How do we live up to our highest human potential? Rebbe Akiva just happens to ask the same question in the Talmud Yoma: "Before whom do you become purified, and who purifies you?" "Smooth-skin" and "purity," I believe, go hand-in-hand; only through the former can the latter truly be achieved. The Netivot Shalom comments that R. Akiva is actually asking two questions, the first of which deals with self-purification, the second of which deals with our resulting purification that comes from beyond us. "Before whom do you become purified?" involves YOU -- on the one hand, you must be the responsible agent in your own purification process, in the smoothing of your own skin, in the conscious choice to swipe away the flecks of externality that have settled upon you. One the other hand, "Who purifies you?" implies that an outside source will ultimately cause you to become smooth-skinned and will allow you to perceive essences. In other words, in order to truly become purified, we must realize and accept that our spiritual "threshing" process involves two equally important steps: first, we ourselves must separate the kernel from the chaff (through utilizing the physical means at our disposal to distinguish between essence and externality), and only afterwards can the wind, over which we have no control whatsoever, whisk the chaff away.
Jerry Silverman
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Jerry Silverman is a former student of Yeshivat Bat Ayin. He is working in new media, designing and managing media projects. He lives in Riverdale, NY with his wife Sarah and their two children. |