Vaeschanan: Mezuzah – Caffeine for the Soul

If you're in the mood for a weird, homiletical, practical, scientific, quasi-Maimonidean explanation of how a mezuzah is supposed to work, then have I got a dvar Torah for you!

Jul 28, 2023

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Artwork: DALL-E responding to the prompt “mezuzah on a doorpost shaped like a cup of coffee“

Vaeschanan: Mezuzah – Caffeine for the Soul

At the end of his laws of mezuzah (Hilchos Tefillin, u’Mezuzah, v’Sefer Torah 6:13), Rambam offers a beautiful description of how the mitzvah of mezuzah is supposed to work:

Every person is obligated to be careful with mezuzah, for it is a continual obligation for everyone. Every time a person enters and exits, he will encounter [the idea of] the Oneness of Ha’Kadosh Baruch Hu’s Name, and he will remember the love of Him and he will wake up from his slumber and his immersion in vain temporal pursuits and he will know that nothing lasts forever except for knowledge of the Eternal Rock; immediately, he will return to his mind and walk in the ways of uprightness. The Sages say: Anyone who has tefillin on his head and arm, tzitzis on his garment, and a mezuzah on his door – it is presumed he will not sin, for he has many reminders, and these reminders are the “angels” that save him from sinning, as it is said: “The angel of Hashem encamps around His reverent ones and releases them” (Tehilim 34:8).

It is reasonable to assume that the Rambam intended this halacha to be read in light of the earlier instance of the “waking up from sleep” mashal (analogy) in Hilchos Teshuvah 3:4:

Even though the sounding of the shofar on Rosh ha'Shanah is a Scriptural decree, it contains a remez (allusion): it is as if it is saying, "Wake up, wake up you sleepers from your sleep, and you slumberers from your deep slumber! Analyze your actions, return in teshuvah, and remember your Creator" – these are the people who forget reality, due to the vain temporal pursuits, and whose entire year is steeped in vain temporal pursuits and emptiness which neither benefit nor save – "Look into your souls and improve your ways and your deeds. Each and every one of you: abandon your evil way and your scheming that is not good!"

I wrote above “this is how the mitzvah of mezuzah is supposed to work” because, if we’re being honest, most of us do not have this experience when we walk past a mezuzah. The questions are: (1) Why don’t we experience mezuzah this way? (2) What can we do to make mezuzah function as it was designed to function?

I would like to answer both questions by suggesting the following quirky augmentation of the Rambam’s mashal: unlike shofar, which wakes us up like an alarm clock, mezuzah wakes us up like caffeine. To appreciate this weird analogy, we’ll need a basic understanding of how caffeine works. Sleep specialist Dr. Matthew Walker explains in his informative (but not entirely reliable) book, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams:

Your 24-hour circadian rhythm is the first of the two factors determining wake and sleep. The second is sleep pressure. At this very moment, a chemical called adenosine is building up in your brain. It will continue to increase in concentration with every waking minute that elapses. The longer you are awake, the more adenosine will accumulate. Think of adenosine as a chemical barometer that continuously registers the amount of elapsed time since you woke up this morning.
One consequence of increasing adenosine in the brain is an increasing desire to sleep. This is known as sleep pressure, and it is the second force that will determine when you feel sleepy, and thus should go to bed. Using a clever dual-action effect, high concentrations of adenosine simultaneously turn down the "volume" of wake-promoting regions in the brain and turn up the dial on sleep-inducing regions. As a result of that chemical sleep pressure, when adenosine concentrations peak, an irresistible urge for slumber will take hold. It happens to most people after 12 to 16 hours of being awake.
You can, however, artificially mute the sleep signal of adenosine by using a chemical that makes you feel more alert and awake: caffeine … Caffeine works by successfully battling with adenosine for the privilege of latching on to adenosine welcome sites or receptors in the brain. Once caffeine occupies these receptors, however, it does not stimulate them like adenosine, making you sleepy. Rather, caffeine blocks and effectively inactivates the receptors, acting as a masking agent. It's the equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears to shut out a sound. By hijacking and occupying these receptors, caffeine blocks the sleepiness signal normally communicated to the brain by adenosine. The upshot: caffeine tricks you into feeling alert and awake, despite the high levels of adenosine that would otherwise seduce you into sleep.

In other words, contrary to popular belief, caffeine doesn’t actually wake us up. Rather, once we are awake, caffeine prevents our brain from receiving the signals (via adenosine) that tell it to feel sleepy.

Now that we have a basic understanding of how caffeine works, here is my proposed extension of the Rambam’s mashal. Just as our body naturally generates adenosine, which gradually builds up sleep pressure, makes us feel sleepy, and eventually causes us to fall asleep, so too, our physical body naturally generates yetzer ha’ra (a collective term for our instinctual and psychological drives), which gradually builds up over time and lulls us into a state of metaphysical “sleep” (i.e. “forgetting reality due to … vain temporal pursuits and emptiness which neither benefit nor save”). Shofar is designed to wake us up, but mezuzah is not. Rather, mezuzah is designed to keep us awake in an analogous manner to caffeine. Just as caffeine keeps us awake by acting as an adenosine antagonist which blocks the brain from the signals that make us feel sleepy, so too, the ideas in the mezuzah intercede – like a protective angel – and block our tzelem Elokim (truth-seeking intellect) from the psychological signals that threaten to “seduce us into sleep.”

There is an important nafkah minah (practical difference which emerges from this distinction) in how we engage with mezuzah. If we expect a mezuzah to wake us up like an alarm clock, we will surely be disappointed. The mezuzah cannot wake up a sleeping Jew any more than a cup of coffee can wake up a sleeping person. Rather, must wake ourselves up through our own efforts: by investing the time and energy outside of our daily mezuzah-encounters to learn and internalize the contents of the mezuzah to the point where we are naturally awake. Once we are awake, mezuzah can help us maintain that wakefulness by reminding us of the eternal values that our lives ought to revolve around – the true goods, such as “Hashem’s Oneness, love of Him, and His Torah study” (Hilchos Krias Shema 1:2), as opposed to the illusory “goods” that lure us into temporal vanity.

The Rambam might not have said this in explicit terms, but I believe my explanation is consistent with his view:

Every time a person enters and exits, he will encounter [the idea of] the Oneness of Ha’Kadosh Baruch Hu’s Name, and he will remember the love of Him and he will wake up from his slumber and his immersion in vain temporal pursuits and he will know that nothing lasts forever except for knowledge of the Eternal Rock; immediately, he will return to his mind and walk in the ways of uprightness.

Mezuzah reminds us of ideas which we have already learned and internalized but are in a latent state waiting to be reactivated. This is why the Rambam codifies the halachos of mezuzah in Sefer Ahavah, as he states in his intro:

In the second book [of the Mishneh Torah] I will include the mitzvos which are frequent, in which we were commanded in order to love the True Existence and to remember Him constantly – such as the reading of the Shema, tefilah, tefillin, and berachos. And circumcision is included in them because it is a sign in our flesh to remind us continually at a time when there is neither tefillin nor tzitzis nor things like them. I have called this book "The Book of Love [of God]."

What is true for “reminder mitzvos” like mezuzah is, to an extent, true for all mitzvos: they don’t work automatically; rather, you only get out of them what you put into them. Mezuzah does protect us from real harm, but not by itself. Mezuzah protects those who protect themselves by investing the time to cultivate the right kind of relationship with its ideational contents, as the Rambam concludes:

The Sages say: Anyone who has tefillin on his head and arm, tzitzis on his garment, and a mezuzah on his door – it is presumed he will not sin, for he has many reminders, and these reminders are the “angels” that save him from sinning.

What do you think? Is this idea too weird or cheesy for your taste, or did you find it to be useful?

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