The nature of ole malchus shamayim:
Man’s development into a rational being begins with a conflict between man’s mind and the immature animal psyche through which that mind operates. We are not born wise, with fully formed minds ready and able to fulfill our potential to apprehend God's design - to see Malchus Shamayim in all His Creation. On the contrary the mind starts off with only the vaguest intuition that the grand design of God exists and must, therefore, spend a lifetime in research if this intuition is to be realized. We must gather data and general principles through long and careful observation and classification. To do this research we must use our psyche, our animal ability to observe with our eyes, remember and describe the world we see. The problem is that the animal psyche of man is moved by a survival instinct that gives it a constant sense of the supreme value of man's personal existence. This situation leads to conflict, a constant competition between two principles of sovereignty by which to govern the powers of the psyche:
1) The mind yearns to fit in to malchus shamayim the light of G’s supreme design. In line with this it seeks to cultivate its psyche and physical environment to be instruments utilized for this research. The Rambam calls this “cultivation” yishuv daat and yishuv aretz.
2)The animal instincts, which seek to be an independent sovereign. Our instinctual makeup pushes man to the belief that as the supreme being in the animal kingdom, he has the right and the power to impose his own design upon the raw materials of Earth, transforming them into a independent new creation, a Malchus Adam. The human animal justifies this fantasy vision by ignoring Malchus Shamayim, the supreme design from which the laws of the universe emerge, focusing instead exclusively on his own preeminence as a mind within the animal kingdom.
It is the very force of this animal need for absolute sovereignty that precludes the mind from focusing upon man as an object of studyand that made it so difficult for the Jews to understand the lesson of yetzias mitzraim. The Jewish psyche then, as ours still does today, wanted Pharoah to win. In large measure Pharoah's victory is our psyche's victory! The psyche drives us to seek out Pharoah's vision as a lifeline to its own fantasy of greatness, for if Pharoah's fantasy vision can be maintained about his great dominion of the empire, then our fantasy vision can be maintained about our small part of that dominion. It is this mechanism that shields the fantasy of sovereignty from our theoretical mind.
Man’s theoretical mind perceives the world through the principle of a universal law manifest in all parts of the universe. This principle is implicit in our expectation that every part of the universe, from the most small in physics and chemistry to the most large in astronomy and cosmology, be subject to lawfulness. Yet the same rational man who expects law in every aspect of the universe, balks when it comes to his own sovereignty. Intellectually, the mind recognizes that man’s interaction with his environment must be a special case of this very same universal law. Man's exemption of his own dominion from the principle of universal law manifest in all parts of the universe cannot be understood in terms of intellect; but rather, in the animal psyche's instinctive aversion to loss of sovereignty. The human animal refuses to allow the framework of universal laws to the topic of sovereignty over the material world, instinctively resisting this kabbalas ole as a wild mustang resists the harness and as the mule resists the yoke. The challenge of civilization is to summon the courage to recognize the resistance to Malchus Shamayim for what it is - an animal aversion to yielding any sovereignty. The civilizational recognition of human sovereignty as a topic fully subject to higher cause, is the essence of kabbalas ole malchus shamayim. So how exactly did the Mitzraim enable this civilizational revolution? How does understanding this revolution show a resolution to the problem of understanding the Torah's introductory themes?
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