Two Truths--Or One? (portion Vayikra)

Every person should hold two truths, one in each pocket, and take them out according to the need of the moment.  One should say, “The world was created for my sake” and the other should say, “I am dust and ashes.”

                        -R. Simcha Bunam

I have always loved this teaching but over the years, I have also come to realize that it is, like most Jewish wisdom, more complicated than it first appears.   The challenge is that the “need of the moment” is not always obvious and may, in fact, be paradoxical.  Someone who seems to be acting arrogantly—and therefore in need of the “dust and ashes” truth—may, in fact, be overcompensating for a deeply-rooted insecurity that actually calls for “the world was created for my sake.”  And sometimes when we find ourselves in the throes of depression, an awareness of our mortality—“dust and ashes”—can offer a perspective that is comforting, much like listening to the blues.  Knowing which truth to pull out at any given time is a fine—and essential—art.

This week’s Torah portion, which begins the book of Leviticus, opens with the word that bestows its name, Vayikra—God called. . . .  It starts with the Holy One calling to Moses to teach him the laws that he will transmit to the Jewish people.  But there is an interesting anomaly in the way the word Vayikra is written in the Torah scroll.  The last letter, aleph, is inscribed in a small, undersized script, as if it is a sort of afterthought.

The Rabbis offer an abundance of commentary on this phenomenon but my favorite connects that aleph with the ego, as it is the first letter in the word anochi—“I” or “self.”  Like R. Simcha Bunam’s teaching, this reminds us that our ability to hear and respond to the call of the Divine depends on having our ego in proper proportion.  If we have too much ego, we are so full of ourselves that we leave no room for God (or anyone else).  If we have too little ego, we assume ourselves unworthy of being called in the first place, and shy away from the encounter.  We can only harken if we possess a strong sense of self that is balanced by compassion and genuine curiosity about others.  When we can see that we are, simultaneously, dust and ashes AND the reason the world was created, then God calls to us and we respond, Hineni—Here I am, ready for service.

This week, as we begin the book of Vayikra, consider: How can you better prepare to hear the call of the sacred in your life—and respond to it?

Sanctuaries, Safe Places, and the Work of the World (Portion Pekudey)

According to all that the Eternal had commanded Moses, so the children of Israel did all the work.  Then Moses looked over all the work, and indeed they had done it; as the Eternal had commanded, just so they had done it. And Moses blessed them.

Countless commentators, both ancient and contemporary, have noted the literary links between the completion of the mishkan, the Israelites’ portable sanctuary-tent, described in this week’s portion, Pekudey and the creation narrative in Genesis.  The mishkan is a microcosm, a world in miniature—a modest human echo of God’s grand design.

There is, however, a significant difference between the model and the thing itself.  With the mishkan, everything falls perfectly into place, exactly according to plan.  Later, even in the worst of times, when the Israelites rebel and fall and fail, this space remains a beautiful, safe, and secure shelter for the Divine Presence.   Would that this were true for the wider world!  As Rabbi Shai Held notes: “In reality - and according to the Torah itself - the world as we find it falls far short of God's hopes and expectations. Instead of a world in which human dignity is real, we live in a world in which barbarism and cruelty all too often rule the day, in which unspeakable suffering pervades every corner of the globe. . .”

So what do we make of the mishkan in a world so often gone awry?  Perhaps it is meant as a powerful and essential reminder of the way things were meant to be—and might yet become if we can learn to work together to create justice, compassion, and peace. As Professor Jon Levenson notes, the world is supposed to be just like the mishkan: "A place in which the reign of God is visible and unchallenged, and God’s holiness is palpable, unthreatened, and pervasive."

It is hard work to repair what is broken in the world—and in ourselves as well.  Sometimes we need to take time to renew our vision of what we are working toward.  We seek havens—sanctuaries—that remind us what we are laboring to achieve and why it matters.  Our experience of God and sacredness in brief moments and small spaces can restore our dedication to the larger effort when our strength, faith, and courage might otherwise falter.

This week, consider: where do you find the spiritual resources that fuel your efforts to bring healing in your life?  What are your sanctuaries?  And how do you take the wisdom and security you find in those times and places out into the wider world?

The Waiting (Portion Ki Tisa)

The waiting is the hardest part

Every day you get one more card

You take it on faith, you take it to the heart

The waiting is the hardest part

            -Tom Petty

For the Israelites at the foot of Mt. Sinai, the waiting really is the hardest part.  Forty days after Moses ascended into a dense cloud atop the mountain, he has yet to return.  Tired of waiting and fearing the worst, they panic.  In the mounting fear, terrified of being abandoned by both God and God’s chosen leader, they turn to Aaron and plead with him to build them a golden calf to stand in Moses’ place.  Aaron, deep in the throes of his own anxiety, obliges.  The rest is history.

But we should not be overly critical of the Israelites.  It is, indeed, extraordinarily difficult to wait out our seasons of suffering and discontent.  When we descend into our own dark nights of the soul, we, too, are tempted to push away the pain with forms of instant gratification.  We anaesthetize ourselves with all sorts of numbing agents, or settle for other easy but ultimately inadequate forms of short term relief.  We forget—or cannot bear— the truth of Talmud’s wisdom: “According to the labor, so is the reward.”  As writer Sue Monk Kidd notes in her beautiful book, When the Heart Waits, real spiritual growth demands patience.  If we wish to emerge like butterflies, we must learn to successfully endure the long, uncertain darkness of the cocoon.

This week, consider: where do you find the kind of courage that might sustain you in life’s seasons of darkness and doubt?  How can community help you to grow through such times?

Meanwhile, here’s a relevant section of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poem, “I am Waiting”:

I am waiting

to get some intimations

of immortality

by recollecting my early childhood

and I am waiting

for the green mornings to come again   

youth’s dumb green fields come back again

and I am waiting

for some strains of unpremeditated art

to shake my typewriter

and I am waiting to write

the great indelible poem

and I am waiting

for the last long careless rapture

and I am perpetually waiting

for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn   

to catch each other up at last

and embrace

and I am awaiting   

perpetually and forever

a renaissance of wonder

Letting God In (Portion Tetzaveh)

The Kotzker Rebbe asked his students: “Where does God live?”

Immediately, they all responded: “Everywhere!”

“No,” said the Kotzker, “God only lives wherever we let God in.”

In this week’s portion, Tetzaveh, God tells Moses:  “I will dwell among the Israelites, and I will be their God. And they shall know that I the Lord am their God, who brought them out from the land of Egypt to dwell in their midst, I the Lord their God" (Exodus 29: 45-46). As Rabbi Shai Held notes, this is a startling revelation; these verses, at least, suggest that God's goal in liberating the slaves was not to bring them to the land so much as to dwell in their midst along the way. On this account, intimacy with God, not inheritance of the land, is the goal of Exodus.

This is both helpful and hopeful, especially for those of us who do not live in the land of Israel.  Our challenge is to open ourselves to the possibility of intimacy with the Divine, wherever and whenever we are—to let God dwell among us by letting God in. 

How do we do this?  We might start with mindfulness and gratitude.  When we live consciously, with our eyes and our hearts open, we begin to notice things—sacred things—all around us.  We experience daily kindnesses as little miracles and, in giving thanks for them, create an opening for joy.  This is especially important this month of Adar, when we are commanded to rejoice.

In that spirit, here is a poem by Baron Wormser, “A Quiet Life”:

What a person desires in life

            is a properly boiled egg.

This isn’t as easy as it seems.

There must be gas and a stove,

            the gas requires pipelines, mastodon drills,

            banks that dispense the lozenge of capital.

There must be a pot, the product of mines

            and furnaces and factories,

            of dim early mornings and night-owl shifts,

            of women in kerchiefs and men with

            sweat-soaked hair.

Then water, the stuff of clouds and skies

            and God knows what causes it to happen.

There seems always too much or too little

            of it and more pipelines, meters, pumping

            stations, towers, tanks.

And salt—a miracle of the first order,

the ace in any argument for God.

Only God could have imagined from

            nothingness the pang of salt.

Political peace too.  It should be quiet

            when one eats an egg.  No political hoodlums

            knocking down doors, no lieutenants who are

            ticked off at their scheming girlfriends and

            take it out on you, no dictators

            posing as tribunes.

It should be quiet, so quiet  you can hear

            the chicken, a creature usually mocked as a type

            of fool, a cluck chained to the chore of her body.

Listen, she is there, pecking at a bit of grain

            that came from nowhere.