This week’s Torah portion is Vayishlach, which means and he sent. Jacob, with his wives and children is very relieved to have left his father-in-Law Laban, and is on his way back to Canaan, only to have to confront his twin brother Esau. Jacob sent malachim, angels or messengers, ahead of him to try to gauge what kind of reception he might encounter from the brother who wanted to kill him 20 years before. Jacob finds out that Esau is on his way to meet him with 400 men. It does not sound good. This is one of my very favorite Torah portions, containing so many vital teachings. Tonight I’d like to focus on the beginning of this portion, which reads, “Then Jacob sent angels ahead of him to Esau his brother.” After finding out about the 400 men, Jacob takes several further actions. He divided his family and possessions into two camps, for safety. He prayed to God, reminding God of the promise that Jacob would be protected. He prepared a large gift of tribute from his flock and herds and sent it to Esau, perhaps in admission of guilt over his actions of so many years before. He instructed his servants to be very polite and gracious to Esau, and he also, when the opportunity was given to him, engaged himself, wrestling, perhaps with an angel, or also with his own integrity, his fears, and his past actions. This is what I’d like to call active repair. The Apter Rebbe, Abraham Joshua Heschl of Apt, wrote, “His actions, he knew, would leave an impression on the physical world.”
When I see someone who is otherwise healthy, but has hurt their arm and it’s in a sling, or broken their foot and it’s in a soft cast, I say to myself, being very careful not to judge anyone, “just because we are human.” The Torah portion, Noah, teaches us that our sins have to be expiated and mopped up, so to speak, in the course of our lives; or the world would get worse and worse, not better and better. Just because we are human, we make mistakes. We do the wrong thing. Or we are unkind, doing the right thing but not with enough love and patience. We let opportunities slip past us. Sometimes we are tired or hungry, and we are just not up to the task. So our sins, omissions, and mistakes pile up for a time. But then the slate has to be wiped clean and we have to pay for our mistakes and be cleansed. So perhaps we have a small accident or other tiny, we hope, misfortune. But Jacob shows us another possibility: Active Repair. It’s not as good as not making mistakes in the first place, but it helps. Rabbi Elimelech wrote that “Our prayers and holy words ascend upward and these are called Angels.” Martin Buber has also written about the Chassidic tradition, which teaches that our actions produce energies or angels. As Rabbi Nachman of Breslov also taught, If we can damage, we can also repair. We can atone for an offense and try to do as much good as we can, to make it better. And it does, as the Apter Rebbe teaches, make a difference in the physical world. We can apologize. We can find a way to give. And since we are all connected to each other and God, and all existence is One, giving to anyone helps. We can give love, we can help another person, we can make a donation; we can be there for someone. We can also pray: admit to God that we know we did something wrong, and then make a decision to do better next time. We can face ourselves and wrestle down our less than worthy impulses; and by falling down emerge better than we were before the mistakes. As the Chassidic masters and our teacher Rabbi Gelberman taught, we are God’s partners. We are meant to be co-creators of a peaceful world and God wants us to continue to improve creation. This goes as well for our own lives. By our free will we are given the ability to fix what we have broken. We don’t have to passively wait for the next difficulty to arise, for the next small disaster. We can make changes in the Universe, just like the Tzaddikim, the holy, righteous teachers of old. We ourselves have great power to create wonderful angels: angels of beauty and goodness, energies of healing and repair for ourselves and those who we touch. Not only can we fall down, but we can rise up, and take a small part of the world with us.
Friday, December 16, 2011
Friday, December 9, 2011
Being Ready to Receive
This week’s Torah portion, Vayetze, means and he left. Jacob leaves his parents and brother Esau, to escape Esau’s rage after Jacob tricked his Father and stole the blessing from Esau. He travels to find a wife from his mother’s family in Haran. On his journey, he dreams of a ladder with angels going up and down on it. God speaks to him in his dream and promises to be with him, to guard him, and to return him to Canaan where he will have many offspring and inherit the land. On his arrival he falls in love with Rachel, the younger daughter of his Uncle Laban, and works for Laban 7 years, for Rachel. Laban makes a wedding feast and tricks him, by giving him Leah instead of Rachel. Jacob is outraged and Laban promises Rachel to him after one week of marriage to Leah, on condition that he work another 7 years. Over 20 years he has 12 children, and at the end of the portion, he leaves with them to return to Canaan.
Right after Jacob’s dream about the ladder, the text says, “And Jacob awoke from his sleep, and he said, Surely God is in this place; and I did not know. And he became frightened and said, How awesome is this place! This is none other but the abode of God, and this is the gate of heavens.” (Gen. 28:16-17) We might ask why Jacob was afraid. He had just had this wonderful dream about angels; and God’s reassurance that he would be protected. God has just repeated the promises made to Abraham and Isaac: that Jacob’s offspring would be as numerous as the dust of the earth, that they would be a great blessing, and that he would inherit the land. We never hear about Abraham or Isaac being afraid when they received reassurance or prophecy from God. So why is Jacob afraid? It could be that he had a guilty conscience from tricking his Father and stealing the blessing from his brother, for forcibly taking what did not belong to him. His actions showed that he was not ready for such communications from God. He was not spiritually prepared for such blessings. This is borne out by what God caused him to experience over the next 20 years. First, what he did to others, was done to him: the trickster was tricked. Since he had not learned enough about inner goodness from living with his parents, from mostly good models, he was put into a household where he had to learn from Laban: to do the opposite of what he saw. He, like Moses who came later, was afforded the opportunity to learn patience, and integrity, and compassion by long days alone, pasturing sheep and goats. Then he experienced another six years in the school of life, before God felt Jacob was ready to take possession of the gifts he had been promised.
This same situation can be seen in the different lives of Leah and Rachel. Leah, the compassionate one, whose eyes were tender, was the unloved sister. She was ready to receive the blessings of having many children (she had six); and to appreciate and enjoy those blessings properly. But Rachel, the beautiful sister, was barren. She needed to experience deprivation in order to grow in kindness. She could not be trusted to use great blessings the way God expected her to use them. She was just not yet ready. The Zohar speaks bout this: “ if one wishes to set in motion the powers above, whether through action or words, a person produces no effect if that action or word is not as it should be. All people go to synagogue to influence the powers above, but few know how to do it. God is near to all who know how to call upon The Eternal and to set powers in motion in the proper manner, but if they do not know how to call, God is not near… those who do know draw forth blessings from the place which is called Thought until upper and lower beings are blessed and the Holy Name is blessed through them. Happy are they in that God is near them and ready to answer them when they call..”(ZoharIII, 183b-184a).
The issue of preparation and readiness applies to our lives as well. Being ready was a quality that was well known among the ancient kabbalists. Rabbi Gelberman also wrote about it in his book, Nine lessons in Kabbalah: that one must be ready in body, mind, and soul, to receive: kabel, the word on which kabbalah is based. We can purify our bodies. The ancients did it by going to a mikveh. We can eat pure food, get exercise, turn away from negative influences and bad habits. Then to purify the mind, he suggests, just like the psychologist Carl Jung, that we must harmonize and accept our total selves, the yetzer hatov, the good impulse, and the yetzer hara, the negative impulse. We can speak words of kindness, patience and peace. We can perform acts of loving kindness. And for the soul we can sing, meditate, and open our hearts to live in joy, love, and goodness.
We desire so many things: most of us desire good health, some desire wealth or achievement, power, or fame. But God teaches us patience. What we wish for may not be good for us. God waits until we are capable of being a blessing. And then the things we have waited for just may appear. We can participate in our growth by intentionally engaging in the process of perfecting our inner natures: of setting about becoming more compassionate and caring, more deliberate and less automatic in our human interactions; less irritable, and less likely to be selfish and abrupt. It is a process of preparing ourselves to be ready for the blessings that we would be happy to receive. This preparation can be compared to any spiritual practice: of meditating for years, of studying an art form, like the Japanese Tea Ceremony, or like singing; or the discipline of regular Torah study or study of the Talmud. Any practice which opens us up to our own inner goodness and our connection with God and others makes a huge difference in our readiness to receive the goodness that is being sent to us. May we dedicate ourselves to participating in our spiritual growth, so that we, like Leah, may be ready to receive every blessing that God would like to send to us.
Right after Jacob’s dream about the ladder, the text says, “And Jacob awoke from his sleep, and he said, Surely God is in this place; and I did not know. And he became frightened and said, How awesome is this place! This is none other but the abode of God, and this is the gate of heavens.” (Gen. 28:16-17) We might ask why Jacob was afraid. He had just had this wonderful dream about angels; and God’s reassurance that he would be protected. God has just repeated the promises made to Abraham and Isaac: that Jacob’s offspring would be as numerous as the dust of the earth, that they would be a great blessing, and that he would inherit the land. We never hear about Abraham or Isaac being afraid when they received reassurance or prophecy from God. So why is Jacob afraid? It could be that he had a guilty conscience from tricking his Father and stealing the blessing from his brother, for forcibly taking what did not belong to him. His actions showed that he was not ready for such communications from God. He was not spiritually prepared for such blessings. This is borne out by what God caused him to experience over the next 20 years. First, what he did to others, was done to him: the trickster was tricked. Since he had not learned enough about inner goodness from living with his parents, from mostly good models, he was put into a household where he had to learn from Laban: to do the opposite of what he saw. He, like Moses who came later, was afforded the opportunity to learn patience, and integrity, and compassion by long days alone, pasturing sheep and goats. Then he experienced another six years in the school of life, before God felt Jacob was ready to take possession of the gifts he had been promised.
This same situation can be seen in the different lives of Leah and Rachel. Leah, the compassionate one, whose eyes were tender, was the unloved sister. She was ready to receive the blessings of having many children (she had six); and to appreciate and enjoy those blessings properly. But Rachel, the beautiful sister, was barren. She needed to experience deprivation in order to grow in kindness. She could not be trusted to use great blessings the way God expected her to use them. She was just not yet ready. The Zohar speaks bout this: “ if one wishes to set in motion the powers above, whether through action or words, a person produces no effect if that action or word is not as it should be. All people go to synagogue to influence the powers above, but few know how to do it. God is near to all who know how to call upon The Eternal and to set powers in motion in the proper manner, but if they do not know how to call, God is not near… those who do know draw forth blessings from the place which is called Thought until upper and lower beings are blessed and the Holy Name is blessed through them. Happy are they in that God is near them and ready to answer them when they call..”(ZoharIII, 183b-184a).
The issue of preparation and readiness applies to our lives as well. Being ready was a quality that was well known among the ancient kabbalists. Rabbi Gelberman also wrote about it in his book, Nine lessons in Kabbalah: that one must be ready in body, mind, and soul, to receive: kabel, the word on which kabbalah is based. We can purify our bodies. The ancients did it by going to a mikveh. We can eat pure food, get exercise, turn away from negative influences and bad habits. Then to purify the mind, he suggests, just like the psychologist Carl Jung, that we must harmonize and accept our total selves, the yetzer hatov, the good impulse, and the yetzer hara, the negative impulse. We can speak words of kindness, patience and peace. We can perform acts of loving kindness. And for the soul we can sing, meditate, and open our hearts to live in joy, love, and goodness.
We desire so many things: most of us desire good health, some desire wealth or achievement, power, or fame. But God teaches us patience. What we wish for may not be good for us. God waits until we are capable of being a blessing. And then the things we have waited for just may appear. We can participate in our growth by intentionally engaging in the process of perfecting our inner natures: of setting about becoming more compassionate and caring, more deliberate and less automatic in our human interactions; less irritable, and less likely to be selfish and abrupt. It is a process of preparing ourselves to be ready for the blessings that we would be happy to receive. This preparation can be compared to any spiritual practice: of meditating for years, of studying an art form, like the Japanese Tea Ceremony, or like singing; or the discipline of regular Torah study or study of the Talmud. Any practice which opens us up to our own inner goodness and our connection with God and others makes a huge difference in our readiness to receive the goodness that is being sent to us. May we dedicate ourselves to participating in our spiritual growth, so that we, like Leah, may be ready to receive every blessing that God would like to send to us.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
