Bagels, Lox & Reincarnation
Going out on a limb beyond the normal JFX Ramble comfort zone here to talk about reincarnation.
I was in the car driving with my 12-year old son Nosson on Monday night this week and I was listening quietly to an online Torah class. Nosson had his headphones in and I didn't think he was paying attention to my class. Suddenly he piped up: "Do animals have a neshamah (soul)?"
"No,” I answered, “they only have a nefesh, a divinely imbued life force, but not a neshamah, which is a spark of G-d."
He challenged me: "But what about the stories of people whose souls came back reincarnated into animals? Don't those animals have a neshamah?"
"Great point," I told him. "I guess those animals have both a nefesh and a neshamah within them!"
Nosson was referring a well-known kabbalistic tradition that often a person's soul will be given a chance to come back to this world, sometimes as a human soul and sometimes as an animal, or even a lower form of existence, such as a food or even an inanimate object. The soul returns to planet earth with an opportunity to achieve a tikkun, to rectify or fix something that it neglected or wasn’t unable to do in a previous life time. Often, it is through a final mitzvah opportunity that the reincarnated soul needs as its ticket into Heaven.
Case in point. There is a story that appears in an old book of Jewish wisdom, written in 1824 by Rabbi Eliezer Pappa, by the title Pele Yoetz. The subject of the book is mussar and mysticism. In this book the author tells the following story that he personally was witness to:
The local shochet (ritual slaughterer) in his community passed away suddenly and prematurely from an eye ailment. After he died, he appeared in a dream to a local community leader and said that his soul in heaven was taken to task for forgetting to perform the mitzvah of kisuy hadam one time. This mitzvah is an act of respect to the slaughtered animal. It is simply to make sure that the animal’s blood is not left exposed on the ground but rather is respectfully covered with dirt or sand. The particular chicken that he neglected to fulfill this mitzvah for, was actually a reincarnation of a soul that needed one more final mitzvah performed through it in order to achieve its rectification and fulfillment for its soul to ascend into the higher world. But since this rabbi forgot, the soul lost its final chance to ascend peacefully into the higher world.
Where did I hear this wild chicken story? It was this week, the very next morning, on Tuesday morning while I was enjoying a breakfast of the leftover bagels from our Tuesday morning JFX morning minyan program.
Here’s the backstory of how it happened: I’m a big guy, and one bagel doesn’t typically fill me up. Two bagels is good, but I find that it’s a bit much. I occasionally indulge, but I find that one-and-a-half bagels is my sweet spot: delicious and filling! As I was eating breakfast, I was listening to an online Torah talk and I heard the aforementioned story being told. So, here I am, finishing my one-and-a-half bagels, and hearing the story about how this soul was reincarnated into a chicken and was awaiting tikkun (rectification) through the performance of a mitzvah.
At that point, I had almost finished consuming my bagel, and I arrived at a little moment of truth. You know how sometimes the bagel filling has a tendency to ooze out of the edges, almost begging for a tongue sweep? Well that’s where I was at. A glob of cream cheese coated lox was hanging precariously over the edge of the bagel, tantalizing my taste buds, and waiting for me to go in for the win. But then I heard the part about how food can be a vehicle for a soul achieving a tikkun. It inspired me, and I thought, how can I elevate my breakfast? Is there room for me to create a tikkun through this food? Could it be that in that little hanging, delicious glob of lox and cream cheese there awaits a potential tikkun? So I decided to exercise a bit of self-control and discipline, and did not consume what clearly might have been the best part of the bagel. Instead I said to myself: “Self, let it go. You can manage just fine without it.”
At that moment, and I kid you not, the speaker in the online Torah class, Rabbi MM Weiss, mentioned casually that it is well known in mystical writings that most often, reincarnated tikkun happens most frequently in fish (and that this is a mystical source for how the custom of eating fish on Shabbat evolved). I gave that little piece of lox another look and thought, “You never know, you just never know!”
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Koval
