AURA GLASER

EXPLORATIONS in LIGHT, LIFE, and CONSCIOUSNESS

He was a young man from a small village in the Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania, where emerald forests beckoned, and an enchanting blend of magic and mystery hovered like evening mist. But then war came and the Holocaust was raging, and my father was no longer a poor Jewish villager with holes in his shoes, studying religious texts, removed from the ways of the world. He was now an Initiate into the horror realms of human cruelty. Stripped of personhood, he had become an object of contempt; prey to be hunted, exterminated, erased; a rejected, reviled one, who in the center of a cyclone of hatred and derangement still trusted Life.

I was completely astonished, and almost disbelieving, when he told me as a young teen that he was never overtaken by despair. Fully aware of his dire circumstances, despair would visit and circle at times but it never put down roots. HIs mind he said was “very stable.” I asked how this was possible and he credited his spiritual life and deep faith—a radical trust in Life and an All Pervading Source of Goodness, not dependent on conditions or outcomes.

This quality of radical trust was something I often heard him refer to over the years. The word he used in Hebrew is בטחון/Bitachon.  Bitachondoesn’t create the Good, and it isn’t strategy to manipulate the universe to get what we want. Goodness is the underlying reality that is always, already there. Bitachon in its highest expression trusts this Ground of Goodness.

During the last year of his life, when he was 93, we brought in caregivers to provide needed support for my father. One day when I came to visit, his caregiver Tisa recalled an event from earlier that day that deeply moved her. Walking slowly across the room, using his walker, my father had started ahead of her and she said “Menachem wait, you shouldn’t walk alone.” To this he replied “I never walk alone; I walk with the Almighty.”

According to an ancient Jewish mystical legend the world will continue to exist as long as there are a minimum of thirty-six people who recognize the Divine Presence (Shekinah) in all things, and respond unconditionally with compassion to the suffering of others. They are called Lamed Vavs because the numerology for the Hebrew letters Lamed and Vav equals 36.

These Lamed Vavs are wellsprings of lovingkindness, pouring goodness and compassion upon the world. It is said that if at any time there are fewer than thirty-six such people, the world would implode under the weight of human greed, ignorance, selfishness, and anger.

The intriguing twist is that nobody knows who they are. They themselves don't even know. They are called "hidden saints"—hidden to themselves and to others. Some say they need not be the same thirty-six people at all times. You, me, any one of us, at any moment, might be one of these thirty-six upon whom the world depends. And so it calls us to act as though we are.

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