We are the Light

There is darkness all around the flame of a candle,
But the darkness cannot put out the light. — Poet Harry Ellison

At this time of year when we are often with friends and family, occasionally people will not live up to our expectations. Our task is to be the light, even when there is darkness around us, and to spread light wherever we are and to whomever we are with, not allowing the darkness to put out our Divine light within.

The Place

This week’s Torah portion is Vayetze, which means, and he departed. It tells of Jacob’s leaving home and of his vision of a ladder set on the earth with its top reaching to the heavens. Angels were ascending and descending on it. Jacob then sees God in his dream, who tells him that the land will be his, that he will be protected, will have many descendants, and that he will eventually return. When he awakens, Jacob is shaken to have had such an experience. He devises a ritual to commemorate his vision and declares a vow: if God will be with me and guard me on this way; give me bread to eat and clothes to wear and I will return in peace and God will be a God to me, then the stone I have set up as a pillar shall become a house of God and whatever you give me I shall tithe to you.
Jacob is an everyman: the person, like us, in the midst of real life. He got himself into a bad situation and had to leave his home. He leaves without money, unsure of himself. He is alone and on his own. And then he has an encounter: a dream that is more than a dream, that changes his life and leads him to an awareness that this place is holy and God is present.
In the Rabbinic literature and in the writings of Kabbalah, God is known as The Place. The Torah Commentator Rashi speaks about a person’s place, and the Chassidic mystic known as the S’fat Emet writes that each person must find the place belonging to him. This “finding” is initiated by God through an experience. So too, we are contacted by God through our experiences. How we respond to those experiences, those contacts with God, those opportunities for closeness, leads us-- B’Makom-- to The Place, to finding our own place. Each of us must find that place that is more than just identity. Like identity, our place is potential. Jacob, in this portion, was all potential; and Jacob’s relationship to God was potential. Jacob says, if you, God, will provide for me, then I will repay the kindness. At this point, Jacob did not yet trust his own vision. His own experience was not enough for him to believe it. The Chassidic teacher Rebbe Baruch Mezbitzer taught, when one is confident that he is fully secure on earth, eventually he will gear his thoughts heavenward. Jacob is in The Place, but he cannot yet believe it. The Place is within and without, as God is within and without. As identity is always developing and becoming, our place is always developing, continually being realized within and without. Jacob was like us, a flawed human being and also like us, he had great potential to find his Place. Like us he had great potential for becoming the Place of wisdom. That wisdom, that knowledge is available to each of us. It is our Place.

Acting and Allowing

This week’s Torah Portion is Toldot, which means generations or offspring. It tells a famous story: Rebecca’s asking God why she feels such action in her womb and God’s prophecy: two nations are inside you and the elder will serve the younger; then Esau selling his birthright to Jacob; later an interlude about relocation and digging of wells during a famine, and last, Rebecca’s subterfuge to trick her husband Isaac into giving the blessing of the first born to Jacob instead of Esau. Each of the people in this family shows interesting personality traits. Rebecca is independent minded: a person of action. When the twins are struggling within her she doesn’t suffer in silence but inquires of God to find out why. Rebecca takes matters into her own hands and forces the final outcome. Esau is, like his Mother, a person of action but is also impulsive like his Mother. Perhaps that is why they do not admire each other so much: we subconsciously see our weaknesses in each other and reject what we identify with, our less than totally worthy attributes. Jacob is more of an introvert, like his Father Isaac. Isaac is a person who allowed the drama of the akeda, the binding and his almost sacrifice, to unfold because of his attribute of compliancy. And it is this attribute that I would like to highlight tonight: Compliancy versus action, the difference between acting and allowing. When Rebecca’s twins were jostling inside her and she asked God why, she received a prophecy that guided her actions all the rest of her life. In light of the prophecy and her closeness to Jacob one wonders if Jacob knew of it and sought to buy Esau’s birthright because of it. The prophecy may have caused her to prefer Jacob, but it definitely was a factor in her decision to persuade Jacob to trick his father. Torah commentators have pointed out that Rebecca’s action is a stratagem of the weak: a plan by someone without power who sought to influence events in the only way she thought she could. But was it really the only way? The Torah does not tell us directly but suggests from the progression of subsequent events that Rebecca’s forcing of the events was a great sin. She is separated from the son she loves and never sees Jacob again. Jacob too is exiled for 20 years, is tricked by his uncle Laban into marrying the wrong wife and is unable to return for many years, having earned his brother Esau’s hatred. There is Divine justice in the consequences of these actions. Those who lie will be separated from those they love. Those who deceive will themselves be deceived. Forcing the events shows a lack of faith. Had Rebecca trusted in God, the prophecy would undoubtedly have unfolded, but in a different way. Isaac takes an alternate path, allowing events to guide him, He learned from his almost-sacrifice the lesson his father, Abraham taught him: God will see to the sacrifice, my son. In other words, we don’t have to force events. We are asked to participate and to choose, but not to create a bottleneck; not to resist the events, but to flow with them and trust that God will see that our lives work out. Abraham is the perfect model: he is a man of action when his nephew Lot is in danger. He a person of faith and trust when asked to be a player in events he does not understand: Leaving his native land, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the ritual of circumcision, and the call to sacrifice his son. After Isaac had blessed Jacob, and Rebecca wanted to send Jacob away for his protection, Isaac complies, sending Jacob away with another blessing and not with angry or blaming words. It reminds me of one of the aphorisms from Werner Erhard’s EST training: It is easier to ride a horse in the direction it is going. We must act in our lives, with courage and conviction, but also knowing that Divine Wisdom is there to guide us. It always amazes me that the problems in my life work out, or really, are worked out for me. Schedules fall into place. Difficulties eventually evaporate. Thoughtful waiting for Divine guidance yields spiritual fruit, allowing us to feel that we are not alone, that we are never abandoned. If one way is blocked, another way will surely appear. Understanding comes after the fact. The sages of the Talmud expressed this paradox as well: Everything is forseen, yet freedom of choice is given. We must act in accordance with our highest values, knowing that we are in divine partnership with God, who cares for us and cares about us. Rabbi Diane Sharon, writing in the newly published Women’s Torah Commentary puts it this way: “The outcome of Rebecca’s story may teach us to allow the Divine process to unfold for a while before we decide to take action on God’s behalf. Perhaps the gift from our biblical mother is her prompting us to….let Divine intention blossom in its own time. May each of us have the wisdom to act when action is needed, and the faith to trust that God is always working on our behalf.

Honor and Holiness

This week’s torah portion is Chaye Sara, the life of Sarah. It begins with Sarah’s death. Abraham mourns her and then he purchases a piece of land as a burial plot for her. He then arranges for their son Isaac to have a suitable wife, marries a concubine and has more children. Finally he sends them away with gifts. Abraham dies, old and content, and is buried by his two sons, Ishmael and Isaac. It is fitting that this portion, which has so much to do with death, is called the life of Sarah. Abraham honors Sarah in death, as he did in life. He begins by instituting the Jewish custom of the eulogy: a formal speech presenting the life and attributes of a person. He then honors her by mourning for her and by purchasing his first piece of land in Canaan, the cave of Machpeleh in Hebron, where he and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah will be buried, and which is a holy site to this day. He honors her further by making sure that Sarah’s line will continue: sending his steward Eliezer to his and Sarah’s family in Mesopotamia, to select a wife of whom Sarah would approve. He honors her again by sending his concubine and her children away, in accordance with Sarah’s wishes that Isaac be Abraham’s sole heir. His example is taken up by Isaac and Ishmael, who honor Abraham by coming together to bury their father, and again by Isaac who honors Sarah by bringing his wife Rebecca into Sarah’s tent, remembering his mother, and keeping her memory and influence alive and present in his heart and his actions. There is a wonderful midrash in the Zohar that says that if the parent of a bride or groom has passed away, God personally brings the soul of that person under the chuppah, the wedding canopy. This is what Isaac symbolically did by marrying Rebecca in his mother’s tent. What and who we honor shows our ability to create the holy. Holiness, Kadosh in Hebrew, means to set apart, to separate. What we separate are actions but also feelings. We separate acts, the sacred from the profane: objects, the holy from the mundane. But we also separate feelings to do honor to someone else. The S’fat Emet wrote that by showing honor, we attach ourselves to the Root, by which he means God’s holiness or Presence. And this is the way we feel and maintain a connection with the Divine. It is the way we refine ourselves and promote fineness of feeling: allowing that which is greater than ourselves to come to the fore and allowing our ego to bear witness to its proper place, using it to promote our will to create holiness. We honor values by living them. We honor people and God by loving them. By showing honor to others, we demonstrate our best qualities, the innate holiness we have been given by the Eternal. It is this ability to attach ourselves to God’s infinite Oneness that we experience as love.

The World and How It Works

This week’s Torah Portion is Noach, or Noah, and the Flood. Because of the corruption of humankind, God brings a flood to destroy all life except Noah, the righteous man, his family, and the animals in the ark. This quasi history, mostly parable teaches us about the principles of life and how our world works. It gives us answers to some of our most heart wrenching questions: why is the world so imperfect? Why are there disasters, disease, tragedy. Why do we have good days and bad days? We may not like the answers, but this portion does at least seek to give us some insight into these questions.
Originally there was no disease and few natural disasters. The parable says that we lived to unimaginably advanced ages. Methuseleh we are told, lived 969 years. Noah lived 950 years. There were no checks on human corruption. The world became worse and worse. Like a financial system with inadequate regulation, the system, which is all of a unity, could not sustain that amount of greed, selfishness, untruth, rapaciousness, impurity, and crime. So God put in place a new system: a system of automatic regulation. God would sweep away the old system. In this new system the maximum life span was 120 years. Under the new system human imperfection that led to selfish or sinful acts, would be worked out and expiated little by little, constantly, in small and large ways. No one person would be allowed to accumulate too much of a burden of negativity. Less worthy acts would be taken care of in the course of a life. God would constantly communicate with us through the circumstances in our lives, letting us know how we are doing. We would not have to ask, as former Mayor Ed Koch did, “How am I doing?” We would be able to take an honest look at our lives and know how we are doing because of, what is called by Rabbi Noson Weisz, the feedback loop: we do something good and are blessed; we miss the mark and do something less worthy and are sent a correction. But it’s not always so clear when and why the negative things occur, or why terrible things happen to people who seem to be virtuous. We may ask: why in the story of the flood did so many have to perish? Why the animals, why the plants? The story teaches us that what we do affects everything else. We are all connected to all existence, all being, and to God. When we choose only for ourselves, God is hurt, and the world cannot continue in that pattern. Rashi comments on the first verse of the portion: These are the generations of Noah; Noah was a righteous man; perfect in his generations; Noah walked with God. Rashi says the offspring of the righteous are good deeds. Our sages agreed that the more righteous deeds a person does, the clearer is the correspondence between what happens to that person and their deeds. The sages knew this because they each experienced it in their lives.
But this story teaches us not only how our world is constituted but also about our power to promote goodness. When we do our part we need not be overwhelmed by destructive forces. We participate in our own salvation by choosing that which helps the world to be a better place. As our sages taught, the evil impulse and the good impulse, the yetzer hara and the yetzer hatov, are both within us. It is up to us to broaden the good impulse for our own good and the good of the world. A prophet of God reported God’s words: “The world at times is like an open wound that needs to be mended with the thread of Love. The needle is intention and the thread is kept alive with prayer.” It is up to us to pour the balm of love upon that which is wounded and to be of those who repair what is rent; to be menders and not destroyers. It is also up to us to communicate with God when we are in need. The Eternal God hears us and knows our intention, sending us blessings and allowing us to live even when we fall down, judging us in mercy and helping us to improve. May we be worthy of the power for good given to us and the faith and respect for us that has been accorded to us by, in the words of God through the prophet, “God of the Pure Light.” Our world is beautiful, and we can have an enormous effect on our lives and also on the world. The system works in our favor. God wants to bless us. May each of us broaden the goodness within us, the Godliness within us, and experience how much blessing we may create.

Eve, Adam, Serpent: Intuition for Consciousness

As we begin the Torah again: at B’reisheet – at the beginning, we have the treat of delving into the riches of this first Torah portion. Because it is written as a story, that is, in symbolic language, it is open to every possible interpretation, and all are valid. Someone once quoted to me from an unknown source, the wonderful line, if you love anything enough, it will give up its secrets. In reading this first portion over and over again with each Bat and Bar mitzvah student, I have had the great opportunity to encounter B’reisheet many times in a year and think about what it may mean. Tonight I would like to consider the expulsion from the Garden of Eden that we know so well. What is it really about? Is it about crime and punishment? Perhaps. Is it about the dawn of civilization? I personally think so (and those who attend the Wednesday night Torah study will hear more about this). Is it about receiving consciousness? Certainly. At one time we were like the animals, living in a metaphoric Garden of Eden. All our food was provided by God; and then we ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad. We became conscious. We had choices. We had to work for a living. A punitive interpretation calls this Original Sin. It says that eating from the Tree of Good and Bad was the wrong thing to do. But wait! God made us and God, in the story, made the metaphoric tree and put us in the very same place. In B’reisheet it says, God placed the tree “in the midst of the garden,” in the center, where we were meant to find it. We found it before we knew right from wrong, before we were conscious, perhaps in some fog of semi- consciousness, before we received the blessing, or the burden, of moral choice. In the story, the man had been told about the tree but it was the serpent who really knew about it. The serpent represents an additional source of knowledge outside our five senses. It is notable that the serpent spoke to the woman. This validates our own experience of reality; it is what we call a woman’s intuition. We know that men and women think differently, and that women’s special talent is an access to a feeling side that helps us and that is a potential source of knowledge and wisdom. Listening to the serpent is a tricky business, we are told in this story. We receive messages from our intuitive feelings. They may be only the urgings of our physical cravings, or they may be legitimate sources of information from the soul. The Torah says, in Rashi’s translation, “and the woman saw that the tree was good for eating and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable for comprehension.” This tells us that reason must be added to feelings to produce a correct result, which we know to be true. It also tells us that women are often the agents who bring intuitive wisdom to their husbands, which is also often validated by experience. But not always. We each, male and female, have our masculine and feminine sides that supply us with wisdom and enrich our total personalities.
And then Adam and Eve ate and became conscious. First the snake was punished. It was to go on its belly, eat dust, and be despised. And indeed, our intuition is often discounted. If we can’t see it, touch it, hear it, taste it, or smell it, in our empirically minded society, it doesn’t exist. But the snake is real. It is a legitimate source of wisdom when coupled with reason. The woman’s punishment was the possibility of fear and oppression: the fear of pain in childbirth, of knowing what may lie ahead in the future, and the potential to be unequal: in class, in wealth, in employment. Animals are all equal. Choice creates divisions. The man was sentenced to work for a living, to farm the soil instead of merely gathering food from the trees. The possibility of farming was a consequence of consciousness and was necessary for the efflorescence of civilization, of many people living together in cities. The story tells us that the receiving of consciousness was a great gift from God. In order to receive the gifts of consciousness: free will, self determination, great cognitive development, creativity, humor, spiritual attainment, we had to give up dependency, ignorance as bliss, the world of instant gratification; and the Torah tells us that that world was good. But this world is also good, better I think, or perhaps just different. Rabbi Gelberman says in his book, Spiritual Truths, change is the coin with which to purchase one experience for another. Was God angry with us for eating of the tree? I say no, God was not angry. God was just very smart. God got us to take responsibility for our choice to become conscious: to sign on for all its consequences: to be full partners in the dance of choice that we engage in with God. If God had been angry with us, would the Eternal One have called us over to clothe us? In effect, God said, “My children, you may be cold. Here I made you these beautiful warm clothes, and by the way, have a cookie before you go.”
This Torah portion tells us that life is not set up to be easy: it isn’t supposed to be; that consciousness brings change and challenge that may bring, as Rabbi Gelberman also says, blessings in disguise; that God’s wisdom set up a satisfying, interesting, life of growth for us in which we must go forward out of the Garden in order to have the feeling of being back in, close to the Eternal Presence. Meeting change with optimism, courage, and eagerness we may find our way back to God by freely choosing to leave. That is the legacy of Adam and Eve: they gave to us our ability to choose interesting, satisfying lives for ourselves, with God’s blessing. And the rest of the Torah tells us how to be conscious moral beings who can find our way back to union with God. May this year of Torah plant seeds of holiness in each of us, allowing us to see the beauty of our own spiritual paths and guiding us to choose with love and compassion.

Without Barriers

Tonight we are celebrating Shabbat Sukkot: a sukkah of peace and a sukkah of plenty. As Sukkot is the third of three pilgrimage holidays specified in the Torah, we have an opportunity to encounter the Eternal presence in gratitude a third time. At Pesach we thank God for our existence as a people, for our freedom, and for our liberation. On Shavuot we thank God for giving us the Torah and teaching us how we should live; and on Sukkot we thank God for sustaining us with the plentiful food the earth provides. But on Sukkot there is an important difference. We come to Sukkot after soul searching and repentance. We return to God in a more purified state: cleaner, lighter, and for a brief time, unburdened by our sins. The S’fat Emet distinguishes between two types of teshuvah or return: the first type is the forgiveness of our sins. The second type is a return with the intention to draw closer to God: to remove the barriers between us and God.
Rabbi Arthur Green points out that the Baal Shem Tov taught this too: that the problem with sin is that it is a hindrance. It comes between us and God, preventing us from doing the good that brings us close to holiness. It is a barrier of our own making: perhaps a barrier of guilt, a barrier of anger, a barrier of depression, or a barrier of disappointment that prevents us from serving God in joy. But at Sukkot, all barriers have been removed. The Torah reading on Shabbat Sukkot is the one that describes the attributes of God’s personality. The Eternal God, compassionate and gracious, long suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity, transgression and sin. These are the attributes in our own human personalities that help us to break down our barriers; that help us to keep ourselves from putting up walls in our souls. Dwelling in the sukkah after our repentance, we can come closer to feeling the quiet contentment of our spiritual center. The S’fat Emet tells us that in doing the work of self purification during the days of Awe, we have made ourselves fit vessels to receive the Divine blessings. When we dwell in the sukkah during Sukkot, in the open air, we can just be, as we are meant to just be on Shabbat; and have the opportunity to feel at one with ourselves and with all creation. Our sins have fallen away and with them, the pretenses that keep us away from aligning ourselves with goodness and peace. Sukkot is a precious time: a time to dwell closer to God simply out of our intention to do so; to dwell closer to our source, closer to what is real and valuable in human life. On this Sukkot may we experience the sukkah of peace and the sukkah of plenty: the peace that comes from joyous service to our own divinity and the divinity of others, and the plenty which is the flow of God’s blessing to each one of us.