Blog

By: Senior Rabbi Steven Schwartz 

Just as the beautiful back shore curves around to the west there is an ancient looking gate. It has a small wooden tile roof, covered with moss. The wooden door is often open, unlatched, in some way beckoning the passers-by to a mythic inner sanctum. A low stucco house can be glimpsed, a stone path, flowers English garden style running alongside. The gate posts are large, even imposing, made of great stones cemented together long ago by an old world stonemason, his practiced eye picking and choosing for shape and size as he worked.

What is astonishing about any gate is that it can suddenly bring you from one world to another.  Remember the back of the closet in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Lucy fumbling through old coats and scarves and suddenly walking along a snowy lane. Or in Tolkien's work the various gates that lead into the Mines of Moria or the Old Forest or the halls of the Elven King in Mirkwood. The gate is an interstitial space, a kind of tunnel between two distinct areas, or even better a mystic link between one world and another. On one side is what we know, where we dwell and walk and go about our day to day life. But just beyond the gate is another world; of magic and adventure, of mystery and the unknown, of gorgeous gardens and storm-tossed seas, where otherworldly creatures might dwell, or time works differently, or the rain falls in a certain kind of way that we've never seen before.

There are gates in nature and gates in time as well. When dawn comes or night falls, when the year turns, when the clouds of a great storm move swiftly through the sky as the weather clears, when we peer into the darkness as we stand on the edge of a wood, these are all gates of time and place and mind. Death and birth are gates, perhaps of an altogether different kind, but gates nonetheless.

And there are gates in Judaism. The three volumes of Talmud are called the First, Middle, and Last Gates. The chuppah in the wedding ceremony is a kind of gate, the bride and groom entering that space as single and emerging from it as a married couple. We speak on Yom Kippur of the Gates of Prayer and how they close at the end of that sacred day, a moment marked by the Ne'ilah service. There is a traditional Shabbat song, Hasidic in feel, with the following lyrics:  ‘the entire world is a narrow bridge, and the main thing is not to fear.'

Every gate is a narrow bridge, linking one world to another. Every gate is an opportunity to walk into a never before seen space. Every gate leads from what is known to what is unknown.  Every gate opens before us a series of new possibilities. Gates can be entered, and bridges crossed. The main thing is not to fear.