by Ruchi
Which is the blueprint, and which is the project?
This past summer, a dedicated board member worked with me in crafting the JFX calendar.
We sat down with: last year's JFX calendar, this year's secular (Gregorian) calendar, and this year's Jewish calendar (which existed online only at the time). We plugged in events and activities in domino-like precision. Events couldn't be too close to one another, or too similar to one another; neither exactly the same as last year nor too different; in conflict with Jewish or secular holidays; collision with legal holidays were either a boon or a disaster, depending on which and when.
I also had to find out who in the Koval family was planning b'nei mitzvah and the like so as not to conflict with family affairs. Likewise, I had to consult with three different school calendars belonging to my various kids (last year our family Shabbaton mistakenly coincided with my high-schoolers winter break which meant none of their friends were in town to volunteer: bad move).
Finally, we didn't but should have consulted with the Cleveland sports schedules, because an afternoon event that conflicts with a Browns' game is a sure dud.
Our entire calendar of events, including Sunday school schedule, is now up at our website. This is very exciting, and we now find ourselves in a fascinating reverse planning process: we consult our calendar to see what we planned to find out what's coming up and what to market, publicize, and implement. We can't change or move around events. Everything has a reason and is interconnected with everything else in way that may not be at all obvious.
So first, we use our free will to plot the calendar, and then the calendar becomes our master.
Cool, huh?
This is exactly the model we are looking at with the Torah. The Zohar, which is an ancient cryptic book of Jewish mysticism and kabbalah, and which I have never and will never study in depth, makes the following assertion:
"He [God] looked into the Torah and created the world."
That seems odd. If He made the world, couldn't He just make it without the Torah? Didn't the Torah come afterwards? The explanation is that the Torah is the blueprint of the world. It contains the code of everything that will ever be. It is, as Rabbi Akiva Tatz describes so movingly in Letters to a Buddhist Jew, exactly like the first cell of what will become a human being. The code for everything that will ever be in that human is encoded in that single, microscopic cell. That is the blueprint. So God created the blueprint that was Torah, consulted it to arrange His world, then brought that Torah forth in physical form.
The analogy just kinda struck me. Oh, and... thanks Audrey :)
