The last part of the treatise: on the deep meaning of the wedding dances, and on Rav Nachman’s tale of the Ba’al Tfila.
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Wedding Dances
In an especially beautiful teaching that stirs up a kind of longing, Rav Nachman describes a wedding as a happening of oneness and partnership, a union between the crowd of dancers and the bride and groom:
‘G-d, open my lips’ (Psalms 55:17) – this is the element of dancing at a wedding. For the rest of the time when [the bride] is not part of a partnership, she is called נער [lit. ‘a young man’] with no ה …and when the partnership is made, she is called נערה with a ה.[Translation of the Aramaic passage in the Zohar, Parashat Bo, page 38].
This is done through dancing, because the legs are the elements of netzach (eternity) and hod (glory), and they are borne by the heart, upon the happiness of the heart. Apparently, this is the sensation of the heart’s happiness from dancing…therefore one must direct oneself, while dancing, to continue the alephs [5 letter א’s are considered to equal a ה] in the heart through one’s legs, towards the bride…and this is the element of ‘G-d, open my lips’, for through the lips (which are netzach and hod), the bride becomes open and sweet in the element of partnership, and she becomes the element of Adonai – which is the נערה who befits a union.
What’s bothering Rav Nachman? What is this ‘sweetening’ of the bride’s laws? Why is the power to sweeten the laws of the bride in the hands of the crowd, the legs of the dancers?
The answer is clear: the happiness of a wedding stimulates the physical tension of which Rav Nachman was so wary. Everyone knows why the bride steps under the chuppah; the dances in front of the bride – who has just come from bathing – evokes a longing and desire in the dancers. Rav Nachman here offers a characteristic solution: through dancing, the laws are sweetened. The way to ‘sweeten’ the tension is to turn to the bride from a place of joy and encounter.
The source of this tension is an alienation, a separation, that can ignite violent passion. The way to cope with this alienation is not to seek distraction, flee or absent oneself from the present. On the contrary, by showering the bride with love and abundance, the dancers elevate the laws of physicality to the level of favour, loving, human closeness. This is a moderate, contained turn towards the bride, and through this encounter the bride, too, changes. In Torah 282 (רפ”ב), Rav Nachman teaches that by giving another person the benefit of the doubt (l’chaf zchut), one also changes his own awareness of the other. So too here, with the relationship between the dancers and the bride: the dancers’ joy transforms the bride. The single woman turns into a wife – a revolutionary move from a place of being single (where marital union is perceived as laws, passions) to a place of family, intimacy, grace and enjoyment. The bride prior to her wedding – called a ‘נער’ (a term signifying an absence of femininity) according to the Zohar – becomes a נערה, a wife, ready to give and receive. The dancers’ joy-making lies at the heart of the process that rectifies and sweetens the laws of the bride. The source of happiness is not in the bride and groom, but in those who are making them happy. The crowd comes to bless the pair do not add to the joy; they create a place for it. The blessing of grooms is in [a quorum of] ten…bless G-d in a chorus (Psalms 68:27)… (Ketubot 7b)
Epilogue
In “The Story of a Ba’al Tfila,” Rav Nachman describes a vision of a kind of settlement of “beautiful ones” where an authentic prayer takes place, in a forest far from the capital. This is a place where singular individuals seek honesty, a broken heart, avodat Hashem in its truest form. But even Rav Nachman, late in his life, suggested – in the end of “The Story of a Prince and Pauper Who Switched Places” – that the true tikkun (rectification) is in the city, not the forest. In Rav Nachman’s world, the true tzaddik can ‘fix’ wisdom, the modern society which has placed autonomy and personal freedom at its center (and in doing so, lost G-d and fell into heresy). The tikkun, in philosophical language, is “a second naivete”: raising consciousness itself to its own mystical source, above cause and reason, and into a reality with self-knowledge and self-awareness which draw energy from the spirit of G-d, from the absolute.
Are we on the threshold of (or perhaps already within) a mental revolution in which human discourse is transformed, and society turns into one in which man is no not a wolf, but a lamb? Where an individual is not an unimportant obstacle but a vehicle for good, and his empowerment is his society’s saving grace?
“Torah will come from me…Torah’s chiddush (renewal) will come from me.”
