Understanding The Kabbalistic Chassidic Ying Yang, Rotzu Vshuv
By zevi770 · January 31, 2012
When we look at the book of Tanya, fundamentally a book of meditations on how to achieve a reverence and love for God, we find the principle of Kabbalah that every Ying must have a Yang, every forward, beyond the realm of reality into the realm of God, must have a Shuv, a return within the very world we seek to escape, to fulfill the purpose of our soul’s creation.
This is a complex process, for if I desire something outside of my reality, my desire is not to return into my reality.
So why this process?
Born into darkness our soul seeks light.
But is light the answer to darkness?
No; as the Rebbe teaches us in the Basi Ligani Maamer in honor of Yud Shvat this Shabbos, that as God himself created light, we cannot say that light is the purpose of creation, rather darkness i.e. this world is.
God like any person would not build a home that is worse than the home they are currently living in, to move to.
So, in other words, the purpose of this creation cannot be for man to leave the darkness for that would be saying that the whole reason God created darkness is for light, which would be saying that ‘I smash down my beautiful mansion in order to create a hovel on the same land.’
There must be something much deeper involved in the hiding of God’s presence.
And this is the secret of creation and why the Rotzu Vshuv process was created.
The secret of creation is something grander than God himself (I know, quite a statement, but the only thing that makes sense; because if I am living in a mansion, the next mansion must be even nicer than the one I am living in, otherwise why change the situation?!)
What can possibly be greater than the singular perfect omnipotent omnipresent God?
Well, marriage!
The best perfect individual, seeks a spouse, for unity is greater than perfection.
Who does God desire to unite with?
Why, you of course!
Where does God desire to unite with you?
Ah, now this is the question?!
The Rotzu process is that we desire to unite with God.
But is God in the lofty light? the answer again, is no!
This is one of the most fundamental mistakes man and all other religions besides Judaism make when seeking the divine union, for the assumption is, that God is not in the physical, rather in the spiritual world.
Chassidus Kabbalah teach us Hamashpili lirois bashamayim uvaretz.
“I have descended” – in other words, the distance from the world beyond us to the world in which we are in, is EQUIDISTANT from an infinite God; for both light and darkness are two sides of the same infinitesimally insignificant domain relative to an infinite God who is neither light nor darkness, but the creator of both.
In this, we suddenly realize the process of Ying Yang, Rotzu Vshuv.
True, we must acknowledge the darkness we live in, for to not acknowledge darkness is to live in a fools paradise – and to remain in a delusional reality and as any thinking person realizes, this world of materialism and vanity is stupidity at best, evil at worst.
So we seek light, only to realize that the ultimate source of light needs not to be beyond the world he created, rather seeks not for us to leave our material world, but to change it, to transform it.
In this simple paradoxical shift of perception, we see the beauty of God’s desire to unify within the darkness.
To say that to meditate on a mountaintop while people are staving is spiritual, is nothing short of a crime.
To say that I will study Torah and forget about the millions of Jews who don’t even know what an Alef Beis is, is nothing short of scandalous spiritual asceticism and forgetting about the cry of their soul.
Rather the true paradigm to emulate, example of how a Jew should live, of course, is the Rebbe; (as the Rebbe states, the reason God gave us Rebbes – referring to previous ones, but we can apply it to him as well – is to give us a role model of Jewish perfection;) the Rebbe combined both the theoretical heights of personal development without sacrificing the spiritual simplicity of human interaction.
And it all boils down to the simple understanding that God need not be separate from the material world he created.
Though we cannot see it, every good deed we do – every positive Mitzvah, particularly in giving charity and helping, loving, kissing, hugging, uplifting, teaching another – imbues the infinity of God within the finite of Creation.
To say that God cannot come into our physical domain would be like saying a computer programmer cannot change the program he created.
As I am both a web-designer (see my awesome website www.kinformtion.org and studied computer programming though never practiced it) the easiest thing in the world, is for me to change anything on my website or any program I made.