This week’s Torah portion is Bo, which means, Come. God commands Moses to go to Pharaoh to warn him of the last three plagues. Later in the portion, the Israelites are given instructions about the Pesach offering to God, in preparation for departure; and the protection of marking the doors with the blood from the pesach offering; and also staying inside, away from danger. We are given our own calendar and the commandments concerning Passover, to celebrate it with matzah and bitter herbs as an eternal decree; the first borns are consecrated to God. Then Moses leads the Israelites out of Egypt.
In the previous portion there had been seven plagues. Toward the beginning of this portion, Moses and Aaron approach Pharaoh. Now they warn him of the 8th plague, the swarm of locusts, yet Pharaoh still refuses to send the people out. Then Pharaoh’s servants say to him, “Send out the men that they may serve God, their God. Do you not yet know that Egypt is lost?” (Ex. 10:7). There is a hidden reality that Pharaoh needs to know. This verse seems to extend the theme of knowing that I spoke about last week. Pharaoh thinks he is resisting Moses. In fact, just before the 10th Plague, Pharaoh says to Moses: “Go from me, Beware! Do not see my face anymore for on the day you see my fact you shall die!” (10:28). Pharaoh actually thinks that by getting rid of Moses, he is eliminating his problems. Pharaoh holds the mistaken notion that he is resisting Moses and also the Jewish people. He doesn’t realize that he is resisting truth itself. Whatever shows up in one’s life repeatedly is an attempt by God to manifest a higher truth. God tries to attune Pharaoh’s consciousness to this by showing him that everything Moses or Aaron did or predicted was true or came true. But Pharaoh is just like us. We want to hold onto the present conditions and our present reality, our assumptions and frames of reference. We resist learning the lessons that God and life is trying to teach us.
A large part of gracefully making the transition from youth to maturity, to advanced age is to learn the correct lessons from our experiences. And we resist this, because we do not yet understand that cosmic truths are trying to become manifest in our lives. My favorite sage, the S’fat Emet said, “Always one must first set right the physical and the natural and only afterwards can we come to new insights.” In other words, we have to do certain work: the work of purification: of setting things right emotionally, intellectually, morally, and also physically. And then we will be able to apprehend the truth that is manifesting before us. There are those of us who have been hurt or disappointed by those we cared about. The wounds we suffered caused us to make decisions, which may or may not serve us later on in life. When we shut down certain parts of ourselves, we shut ourselves off from seeing certain truths. We only allow ourselves a kind of partial sight. We have chosen, like Pharaoh, to limit ourselves. In Pharaoh’s case, he transgressed the reality that the Moses and the Hebrews were connected to him and to the Egyptians. He couldn’t have fathomed this, but God was attempting to teach him. And because he kept resisting truth, resisting reality, the results that manifested in his life got worse and worse. When we make decisions that go against the truth of our connection to others, we not only learn the wrong lessons from our life experiences, but we lose opportunity for love, and friendship, and happiness. Things that happen to us occur in order to uncover a deeper truth. Isaiah said: For since the beginning of the world we have not heard, nor have we perceived by the ear, nor has the eye seen a God besides you, who should do such a thing for him who waits for him. In the Talmud (Berachot 34b), R. Joshua b. Levi commented: This is the wine which has been preserved in its grapes from the six days of Creation. R. Samuel b. Nahmani said: This is Eden, which has never been seen by the eye of any creature. ( Isa. 64, 3.)
These quotations attest to the hiddeness of truth that gradually makes itself known. The S’fat Emet expresses it differently: “All choice, all human actions and undertakings, come about in accord with God’s will.” In effect, this seems to be about negating choice. If there is only one right decision, then perhaps we may conclude that we are not really free. But it is through a full understanding of truth and hidden reality that we can become fully free. We are most free when we understand that we have only one choice: to choose happiness or to choose suffering. Pharaoh chose suffering. Thank God, we know better or perhaps we are constantly coming to know better. May we each choose openness to each other: connection, giving up the me for the us, and forming friendships that nourish us and bring us joy. May we understand how much truth has been given to us, is being sent to us, and may we learn all that which the God of love and goodness is teaching us.
Friday, May 25, 2012
Thursday, May 10, 2012
Noticing God
This week’s Torah portion is Va’eira, which means, and He appeared. God speaks to Moses about the Divine Name and promises to redeem the Israelites and take them out of Egypt, leading them to the Land. Moses has doubts about the success of his mission and voices his frustration to God, who instructs Moses and Aaron to go to Pharaoh and demand that the people be freed. Pharaoh repeatedly refuses, bringing upon himself and his people the plagues of blood, frogs, lice, swarms of beasts, and fiery hail. Each plague brings Pharaoh to consider freeing the people, only to go back on his word and reconsider, once the plagues have been removed.
In this Torah portion, the theme of knowing is introduced in the very beginning, the 3rd verse, which reads: “through my name God I did not become known to them.” Then, as the portion proceeds, this theme is restated eight more times. The Torah says, “so that you will know that I am God.” It’s repeated a few different ways to include Moses, the Israelites, Pharaoh, and the Egyptians. Anything repeated in the Torah has significance and something that appears eight times bears further investigation. So we might ask, what does God want us to know and why does God want us to know it?
The “what” is fairly easy: there was no monotheism at that time, except among us, the Hebrews. God wanted a universal truth to come into the stream of human knowledge, that there is one God and that all other “gods” are not real. This God did through what we now call plagues. The Women’s Torah Commentary points out that the phrase, 10 Plagues, eser makkot, does not appear anywhere in the Torah. God calls these events signs, otot, or wonders, moftim, and not plagues. One would think that the seven years of plenty and seven years of famine in Joseph’s time would have ushered in a period of monotheism. It’s possible that it did, but 200-400 years later, Egypt was again a polytheistic society. The Ten Wonders were designed then, to get our attention, get Pharaoh’s attention, and get the Egyptians’ attention, which they certainly did. We should remember that the first few wonders were merely annoying and not life threatening: the Nile turning to blood so that the Egyptians had to dig to find fresh water, frogs, lice, and insects; later boils, hail, and darkness. Only cattle disease, and the final plague, killing of the firstborn destroyed animal and then also human life.
When God first appeared to Moses, the Torah says: “God saw that Moses turned aside to see and God called out to him from amid the bush.” Moses’ capacity to notice something unusual, to be aware of the inconsistencies of life, was what recommended him for a special spiritual relationship with God. The painter Eugene Delacroix once said, “The eyes of many people are dull or false; they see objects literally; of the exquisite, they see nothing.” And a writer, the Reverend Erie Chapman, who contributed to an online site for caregivers commented: “The decision to see with "dull eyes" or to open to "the exquisite" is very personal. It takes work to learn the appreciation of the sacred.” This is what God wants us to do: to be able to notice and see beyond the obvious. Everything that we encounter has the potential, like the wonders, to educate us: to allow us to see and understand more of the underlying truth of God’s existence and our place within it. The Apter Rebbe, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel of Apt once asked, “Why do we need such a strong reminder from God?” I might also ask, Why isn’t truth evident to us and why can’t we automatically notice God’s presence in the everyday occurrences of out lives? If everyone could realize truth innately, there might be no need for a Torah to tell us what is real and what is only an illusion. But also, there would be no progress for us: no learning, no spiritual attainment. We would already be living in the messianic era, called the end of days.
That we have the capability, like Moses to notice and learn from the marvels of our everyday lives is a great gift that we are asked to develop and use: to become aware of more than just the physical and receive the knowledge that is being sent to us. This was said ever so much more elegantly in the Reform movement’s siddur, Gates of Prayer: “Days pass and the years vanish, and we walk sightless among miracles. Eternal One, fill our eyes with seeing and our minds with knowing; let there be moments when Your Presence, like lightning, illumines the darkness in which we walk. Help us to see, wherever we gaze, that the bush burns unconsumed. And we, clay touched by God, will reach out for holiness, and exclaim in wonder: How filled with awe is this place, and we did not know it! Blessed is the Eternal One, the holy God!” May we become more and more aware of the Divine Presence, who now as then, wants to be known and to bless us with knowledge and wisdom.
In this Torah portion, the theme of knowing is introduced in the very beginning, the 3rd verse, which reads: “through my name God I did not become known to them.” Then, as the portion proceeds, this theme is restated eight more times. The Torah says, “so that you will know that I am God.” It’s repeated a few different ways to include Moses, the Israelites, Pharaoh, and the Egyptians. Anything repeated in the Torah has significance and something that appears eight times bears further investigation. So we might ask, what does God want us to know and why does God want us to know it?
The “what” is fairly easy: there was no monotheism at that time, except among us, the Hebrews. God wanted a universal truth to come into the stream of human knowledge, that there is one God and that all other “gods” are not real. This God did through what we now call plagues. The Women’s Torah Commentary points out that the phrase, 10 Plagues, eser makkot, does not appear anywhere in the Torah. God calls these events signs, otot, or wonders, moftim, and not plagues. One would think that the seven years of plenty and seven years of famine in Joseph’s time would have ushered in a period of monotheism. It’s possible that it did, but 200-400 years later, Egypt was again a polytheistic society. The Ten Wonders were designed then, to get our attention, get Pharaoh’s attention, and get the Egyptians’ attention, which they certainly did. We should remember that the first few wonders were merely annoying and not life threatening: the Nile turning to blood so that the Egyptians had to dig to find fresh water, frogs, lice, and insects; later boils, hail, and darkness. Only cattle disease, and the final plague, killing of the firstborn destroyed animal and then also human life.
When God first appeared to Moses, the Torah says: “God saw that Moses turned aside to see and God called out to him from amid the bush.” Moses’ capacity to notice something unusual, to be aware of the inconsistencies of life, was what recommended him for a special spiritual relationship with God. The painter Eugene Delacroix once said, “The eyes of many people are dull or false; they see objects literally; of the exquisite, they see nothing.” And a writer, the Reverend Erie Chapman, who contributed to an online site for caregivers commented: “The decision to see with "dull eyes" or to open to "the exquisite" is very personal. It takes work to learn the appreciation of the sacred.” This is what God wants us to do: to be able to notice and see beyond the obvious. Everything that we encounter has the potential, like the wonders, to educate us: to allow us to see and understand more of the underlying truth of God’s existence and our place within it. The Apter Rebbe, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel of Apt once asked, “Why do we need such a strong reminder from God?” I might also ask, Why isn’t truth evident to us and why can’t we automatically notice God’s presence in the everyday occurrences of out lives? If everyone could realize truth innately, there might be no need for a Torah to tell us what is real and what is only an illusion. But also, there would be no progress for us: no learning, no spiritual attainment. We would already be living in the messianic era, called the end of days.
That we have the capability, like Moses to notice and learn from the marvels of our everyday lives is a great gift that we are asked to develop and use: to become aware of more than just the physical and receive the knowledge that is being sent to us. This was said ever so much more elegantly in the Reform movement’s siddur, Gates of Prayer: “Days pass and the years vanish, and we walk sightless among miracles. Eternal One, fill our eyes with seeing and our minds with knowing; let there be moments when Your Presence, like lightning, illumines the darkness in which we walk. Help us to see, wherever we gaze, that the bush burns unconsumed. And we, clay touched by God, will reach out for holiness, and exclaim in wonder: How filled with awe is this place, and we did not know it! Blessed is the Eternal One, the holy God!” May we become more and more aware of the Divine Presence, who now as then, wants to be known and to bless us with knowledge and wisdom.
Friday, May 4, 2012
We Were There
This week’s Torah portion is Ki Tissa, which means.” when you take.” It begins with the taking of a census, goes on to appoint two people to oversee the work of the Tabernacle and holy vestments, and reiterates that Shabbat observance supersedes work on the tabernacle for God. Later in the portion, while Moses is gone, the people make and worship a golden calf. Moses wins forgiveness for them and has an intimate encounter with God, in which he hears a description of God’s attributes: that God is compassionate and gracious; slow to anger, forgiving, and great in kindness and truth.
I’d like to tell you about something I saw while in Peru. My husband and I traveled to Cuzco, which used to be the capital of the Inca Empire. It is over 11,000 feel above sea level, where the oxygen is pretty thin. It has been called the bellybutton of the world. On one of the hills, overlooking the city of Cuzco, there is a major archeological site, whose name is Sacsayhuamán. This site dates from the middle ages, and in Inca times, probably during the 1400’s & 1500’s it was a religious site associated with the worship of the Condor. The Incas had many gods who represented what they called the 3 worlds: the sky, the earth, and the underworld, the world of death. So this site was part of the worship of the forces of the sky. It is a vast site, a very grand plateau probably the size of several football fields, capable of holding thousands of people, with three levels of undulating walls on one side. The guide for our group told us that in 1536, Francisco Pizzaro and his troops began the siege of Cuzco. It took almost a year. At the end of the siege, the Spanish came up to Sacsayhuamán. There was a religious ritual being enacted there, in which the Inca placed grain on the ground for the condors to descend and eat. The Spanish soldiers massacred every person there: many, many people, and managed to capture a number of condors. They brought the condors down into the city and massacred them too. Thus the Spanish destroyed the religious site, the people, and the Inca religion all in one day. Later they removed stones from the walls there to build churches and cathedrals in Cuzco.
Standing there, I could feel that I was standing on holy ground. It was sanctified by the blood: the deaths of the hundreds and perhaps thousands who were killed there. And I realized that we were the ones who died and we were also the ones doing the killing. God and life are all one. We are one soul, past present, and future. Our Jewish sages have said that to God, there is no past, present, and future. This is also what Einstein believed. Einstein wrote a letter to the family of his friend, Besso, after Besso passed away. He indicated that although Besso had died before him, it was of no consequence, since "...for us physicists believe the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one."
In Ki Tissa we read about the making and worship of the Golden Calf. We may fault the Israelites for their abandonment of the sole worship of one God, but we were there too: not always being able to live up to the level of our knowledge and experience; not always able to live up to our own values and ideals. We are they, but we are also Moses, who knew with a deep, natural knowing, that he must plead for the people, since they were a part of him and he of them. When Moses asked God to give him more information and let him know why Moses found favor “in God’s eyes,” God gave him what we call the 13 attributes: a description of God’s personality: They are: Being, Existence, God; compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abundant in kindness and truth, forgiving willful sins and errors, and who cleanses, but who does not cleanse completely, allowing us to take responsibility for our decisions (the last especially, being an interpretation).
We have made progress since the worship of the Golden Calf. We have made progress since the massacre of the Inca and their sacred birds. But in our world, killing still goes on: in Sudan, in Syria, in the Congo, and elsewhere. Part of us has come so far, but not all of us. The closer we come to being gracious and kind and forgiving to each other; the closer we come to compassion, and truth; to being slower to anger, more patient and more accepting, the closer we will come to what God said to Moses: my Presence shall provide you rest. God’s Presence, that Divine Rest is what we will experience eventually; but also what we can experience occasionally, right now, out of our choosing to live from our knowledge of what we should be striving for. We have been given the goal and the answers. They are right here in Ki Tissa. We can sanctify life not only through death, but through goodness and holy action. May we choose the path of life, of beauty, and of God’s Presence, experiencing the flashes of inner peace and holiness that are truly ours to possess.
I’d like to tell you about something I saw while in Peru. My husband and I traveled to Cuzco, which used to be the capital of the Inca Empire. It is over 11,000 feel above sea level, where the oxygen is pretty thin. It has been called the bellybutton of the world. On one of the hills, overlooking the city of Cuzco, there is a major archeological site, whose name is Sacsayhuamán. This site dates from the middle ages, and in Inca times, probably during the 1400’s & 1500’s it was a religious site associated with the worship of the Condor. The Incas had many gods who represented what they called the 3 worlds: the sky, the earth, and the underworld, the world of death. So this site was part of the worship of the forces of the sky. It is a vast site, a very grand plateau probably the size of several football fields, capable of holding thousands of people, with three levels of undulating walls on one side. The guide for our group told us that in 1536, Francisco Pizzaro and his troops began the siege of Cuzco. It took almost a year. At the end of the siege, the Spanish came up to Sacsayhuamán. There was a religious ritual being enacted there, in which the Inca placed grain on the ground for the condors to descend and eat. The Spanish soldiers massacred every person there: many, many people, and managed to capture a number of condors. They brought the condors down into the city and massacred them too. Thus the Spanish destroyed the religious site, the people, and the Inca religion all in one day. Later they removed stones from the walls there to build churches and cathedrals in Cuzco.
Standing there, I could feel that I was standing on holy ground. It was sanctified by the blood: the deaths of the hundreds and perhaps thousands who were killed there. And I realized that we were the ones who died and we were also the ones doing the killing. God and life are all one. We are one soul, past present, and future. Our Jewish sages have said that to God, there is no past, present, and future. This is also what Einstein believed. Einstein wrote a letter to the family of his friend, Besso, after Besso passed away. He indicated that although Besso had died before him, it was of no consequence, since "...for us physicists believe the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one."
In Ki Tissa we read about the making and worship of the Golden Calf. We may fault the Israelites for their abandonment of the sole worship of one God, but we were there too: not always being able to live up to the level of our knowledge and experience; not always able to live up to our own values and ideals. We are they, but we are also Moses, who knew with a deep, natural knowing, that he must plead for the people, since they were a part of him and he of them. When Moses asked God to give him more information and let him know why Moses found favor “in God’s eyes,” God gave him what we call the 13 attributes: a description of God’s personality: They are: Being, Existence, God; compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abundant in kindness and truth, forgiving willful sins and errors, and who cleanses, but who does not cleanse completely, allowing us to take responsibility for our decisions (the last especially, being an interpretation).
We have made progress since the worship of the Golden Calf. We have made progress since the massacre of the Inca and their sacred birds. But in our world, killing still goes on: in Sudan, in Syria, in the Congo, and elsewhere. Part of us has come so far, but not all of us. The closer we come to being gracious and kind and forgiving to each other; the closer we come to compassion, and truth; to being slower to anger, more patient and more accepting, the closer we will come to what God said to Moses: my Presence shall provide you rest. God’s Presence, that Divine Rest is what we will experience eventually; but also what we can experience occasionally, right now, out of our choosing to live from our knowledge of what we should be striving for. We have been given the goal and the answers. They are right here in Ki Tissa. We can sanctify life not only through death, but through goodness and holy action. May we choose the path of life, of beauty, and of God’s Presence, experiencing the flashes of inner peace and holiness that are truly ours to possess.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
