There is a deep secret that expresses itself in the depth of the soul. It is not a secret that is revealed for all to see, rather it is hidden away underneath the folds of darkness and concealment. In truth, it is not just a secret amongst others, rather it is the secret that enables us to survive and thrive in the long night of exile.
Without this secret, we wouldn’t be able to overcome the difficulties that we face. We wouldn’t be able to survive the constant onslaught of preventions and struggles. It is this secret that gives us the strength to move beyond our own limitations, to reveal a hidden moreness within ourselves that we never knew existed.
While this secret goes by many names, reflecting its ever-extending form, the one we will be focusing on is the Luz bone, the small hidden bone at the nape of the neck that connects the head with the spine. (While numerous sources point to the site of this bone at the top of the spine, there are other sources that locate the Luz bone at the midpoint, as well as at the end point, of the spine. Like any apparent argument in pnimius, these do not represent three different opinions but rather three different aspects of the same thing.)
The Luz bone is significant because it is the irreducible part of the body that is said to survive death; the part of our body that survives its own destruction. As souls dressed within bodies, being alive is the wondrous unity between two polar opposites: the soul that is formed above and the body that is formed below. As long as the soul is tethered to the body through our lifeforce, the body draws its sustenance from the soul and it continues to function as the miracle that it is. When the soul ascends away from the body however, there is nothing left to give life and vitality to the body and as such it disintegrates and falls into destruction. The wondrous secret of the Luz bone is that even when the body appears to fall into destruction and eventual absence, there is something that remains alive and well. In spite of the apparent destruction, there is a hidden point of life that continues to pulsate within the darkness.
The concept of death is not restricted to the physical life of the body, it applies to any descent or fall that we experience, as the Zohar HaKadosh teaches us, “anything that goes down from its level to the one beneath it is considered as if it has died.” The Gra explains that the destruction of the Beis HaMikdash was like the death of the Jewish people, while our exile out of Eretz Yisrael is like the burial. The vicious struggles of antisemitism are the pains of the body in the kever, and in the end it seems that there is nothing left.
The secret of the Luz is that we continue to survive. Even after the struggle, we come out the other side with newfound strengths. There is something that survives every exile, a hidden strength that persists even when everything else seems to have fallen away. Shabbos Nachamu is the Luz bone of the year, the fact that we stand up again after every single fall.
Yes, we may have experienced the personal and collective falls, but hidden within the darkness is a new light waiting to be revealed. A light of techiyas ha’meisim, a ray of hope that shines forth from within the darkness…
This article was found in Nekuda Tova Issue 47.
