One of the first questions I ask someone who comes to me struggling to fall asleep is “What thoughts are keeping you awake?”. Because more often than not, insomnia is not a sleep issue per se, it’s a symptom that reveals that there is a greater imbalance occurring in the body or mind.
And for some people, they are dealing with thoughts that create such a tension in their mind that it won’t let them fall asleep. Usually these people are very bright, analytical, and strong willed. If a question in life bothers them, they perceive injustice or they cannot make sense of something, these thoughts will literally keep them up at night.
But how do we deal with this? At the end of the day, there are tough questions, many which our mind cannot fully comprehend. How do we make peace with the situation and allow ourselves to surrender to a seemingly imperfect world?
I believe Lag B’Omer, Rebbi Shimon and the famous story of the cave gives us a powerful insight that can help answer this question and allow us to create an inner Meunchas Hanefesh. Because Rebbi Shimon struggled with this as well.
After spending 12 years in the cave with his son Elazar, learning all of the secrets of the Torah and gaining deep spiritual insight, his integration into the imperfect world outside of the cave was too hard to make peace with.
How could it be that people were farming and working, ignoring the eternal life of Torah and the spiritual perfection that it contained? Didn’t people know that if they would only engage fully in Torah all of their work could be done by others and they could achieve infinite bliss in the Next World? That contradiction was intolerable and he and his son were literally burning people with their eyes.
But that level of intensity was not what Hashem wanted in His world. He sent Rebbi Shimon and his son back to the cave for another year and afterwards Rebbi Shimon was able to make peace with the fact that Jews are on different levels, have different paths to Avodas Hashem and he could appreciate the good even amidst the imperfection.
What was it that he learned in that 13th year that enabled him to have this radical shift to be able to be more open, expansive and tolerant? I think the hint to this idea comes from the text of the Talmud itself in Shabbos 33b. Because the Talmud says that his first stay in the cave was for 12 years, the second stay was for 12 months. Why not just compare apples to apples and say that he stayed there for another year?
Furthermore, we see these numbers referred to later on when the Talmud says that before the cave, when Rebbi Shimon would learn with his son in law, Rabbi Pinchas ben Yair, Rebbi Shimon would ask a question and Rabbi Pinchas would bring 12 answers, but after the cave, Rabbi Pinchas would ask a question and Rebbi Shimon would bring 24 (12+12) answers. What is the depth behind this?
We understand that both 12 and 13 represent deep ideas. In Kabbalah, 12 are the number of permutations of the 4 letter name of Hashem. Each one of these permutations manifests in 12 months of the year and the 12 tribes of Israel. 12 is a complete system, Divinity with all of its details. But something else is missing.
Because 13 is the Achdus bridging all of these parts together. 13 is the Gematria of the word Echad as well as the word Ahava. Only through true love, a state of emotion that goes beyond the intellect, is one able to bridge all of Hashem’s facets and tap into His ultimate mercy, hence the 13 Middos Harachamim.
This was the Torah that Rebbi Shimon was learning in the cave in that final year. It was the Torah of Achdus, the Torah of Geula. It was that deep spiritual insight that allowed contradictions to exist and enabled him to make peace with a layered, nuanced, subtle world. Only through that could he unite his elevated soul with the entire Jewish people, and ultimately back with Hashem as well.
And this was no small feat. This was exactly the mistake that had happened in the previous generation of the first round of students of Rabbi Akiva. Because if you recall, there weren’t 24,000 students, there were 12,000 pairs of students. Their minor breach in interpersonal honor prevented them from achieving the level of the 13th, the element that would create true Achdus and Ahava that would integrate their Torah with the entire Klal Yisrael.
Rebbi Shimon in the cave for that final 12 months was achieving the Tikkun for what the world would need moving forward. And this enabled his Torah to be on a categorically different level, no longer being able to bring 12 answers like Pinchas ben Yair, but was the complete 24 that could secure the Torah transmissions to all generations.
And this is the answer to our insomniac as well. We can’t always answer all of life’s questions. There are contradictions, imperfections and inconsistencies. But we can train our mind to go deeper, past the place of intellectual analytics and into a place of true love, unity and acceptance of what is, while at the same time yearning for what could be.
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