Go to Yourself (Portion Lech L'chah)

The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out of an inner journey.

                                                      -Thomas Merton

Every serious outward journey begins with an inward exploration, often involving a spiritual and/or emotional leap of faith. 

Thus the opening words of this week’s Torah portion, Lech L’chah, take Abraham—and us—both outward, into the world, and inward, into our selves.  God commands Abraham to leave his home and family, to set out for the unknown land of Canaan.  But as the Ishbitzer Rebbe notes, the divine command “Go forth” can also mean, quite literally, “Go to yourself.”  God is asking Abraham to make both a physical and a spiritual pilgrimage, to look deeply into his own soul and become his best and most authentic self.  It is not enough for the patriarch to leave behind the familiar comfort and confines of home—he must also shed the masks, fears, and defenses that get in the way of realizing his true calling.

For most of us, children of Abraham, this inward journey is terrifying.  It takes enormous trust and faith and courage to look into our own souls, because we know that when we do, we will find a great many things that we would prefer to avoid.  It is much easier—and very tempting—to just keep distracting ourselves with trivialities. 

Father Henri Nouwen writes of this challenge in an extraordinary essay on spirituality and solitude.  I think his words offer a beautiful commentary on the Ishbitzer’s teaching:

As soon as we are alone, without people to talk with, books to read, TV to watch, or phone calls to make, an inner chaos opens up in us.  This chaos can be so disturbing and so confusing that we can hardly wait to get busy again. . . At first, silence might only frighten us.  In silence we start hearing the voices of darkness: our jealousy and anger, our resentment and desire for revenge, our lust and greed, and our pain over losses, abuses, and rejections.  These voices are often noisy and boisterous.  They may even deafen us.  Our most spontaneous reaction is to run away from them and return to our entertainment.

But if we have the discipline to stay put and not let these dark voices intimidate us, they will gradually lose their strength and recede into the background, creating space for the softer, gentler voices of the light.

These voices speak of peace, kindness, gentleness, goodness, joy, hope, forgiveness, and most of all, love.  They night at first seem small and insignificant, and we may have a hard time trusting them.  However, they are very persistent and they will grow stronger if we keep listening. They come from a very deep place and from very far.  They have been speaking to us since before we were born, and they reveal to us that there is no darkness in the One who sent us into the world, only light.

This week, as we re-encounter God’s call to Abraham—and to us—ask yourself: how do I stay the course and get beyond the dark voices of fear, and so begin to hear and heed the voices of hope, forgiveness, and love?

Entering the Ark (portion Noach)

And Noah went in (to the ark) and his wife and his sons and his sons’ wives with him, because of the flood waters.   (Genesis 7:7)

Despite—or perhaps because of—the approaching Deluge, Noah seems reluctant to board the ark.  Not surprisingly, our commentators are divided on the motivation and morality behind his hesitation.

Some, including Rabbi Harold Kushner, maintain that Noah hesitated out of compassion for the rest of humanity.  He waits until the last possible minute out of hope that his fellow men and women might see the rain starting to fall and finally change their ways, rendering the punishment unnecessary. 

Rashi, on the other hand, argues that Noah was only marginally better than the rest of his evil generation.  He writes: “Noah, too, was of those of little faith, believing and not believing that the Flood would come, and he therefore did not enter the ark until the waters forced him to do so.”

These seem like two opposing views.  In the first, Noah is righteous; in the second, not so much.  However, in good Jewish fashion, I would like to suggest that perhaps both sides are right.  When we face challenging—even cataclysmic—changes, our reactions are most often deeply ambivalent.  We may be motivated by a complex blend of positive intentions and denial.  We, too, are both “believing and not believing.”  We vacillate.  We equivocate.  We wrestle inwardly, with ourselves and with others, and as we do, our moods and attitudes can shift radically from one moment to the next.  We resist change even as we embrace it.  Like Noah, we wait until the very last minute—until, compelled by circumstances bigger than ourselves, we enter the ark and set out for God knows where.

Still, we enter, and the Flood changes us.  For all of his reluctance to get on the ark, for both positive and negative reasons, once he is aboard, Noah grows into his righteousness.  Midrash tells us that he cared for the animals constantly, 24/7.  He responds to his ordeal with compassion, and thereby makes real the potential that God saw in him before the rains came.

This week, consider the changes and challenges that lie ahead for you in this new year.  Recognize your hesitation—and even your denial—as you face those challenges, for good and bad alike.  And then consider: how can you ride them toward something better?

Our Place in the World (Bereshit)

For whose sake was the world created?

In the Genesis account, which we read in this week’s portion that opens the Torah, Bereshit, God gives humanity a mandate to “be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master it. . . rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and every living thing that creeps on the earth.” (1:28).  Based on this verse, the medieval Jewish philosopher Rabbi Saadia ben Yosef claimed that God created everything for the sake of humanity.  A thousand years later, Lynn White Jr. referenced the same verse—with an antagonistic twist—in an influential article blaming the biblical tradition for the West’s record of environmental degradation, suggesting that in Judaism and Christianity, “No item in the physical creation had any purpose save to serve man’s purposes.”

But this is not the only reading of the Genesis creation narrative. 

Moses Maimonides famously took issue with Saadia’s claim that creation exists to serve humanity.  He notes that after almost everything God creates, Torah repeatedly declares: “God saw that it was good”—long before the arrival of humankind.  God does not pronounce the abundance of flora and fauna to be good for humanity.  They are, instead, intrinsically good, for their own sake.  As Rabbi Shai Held describes Maimonides’ position in contemporary terms, “The biblical creation story is like a hymn to biodiversity, which is seen as unambiguously good in its own right.” Indeed, it is striking that Torah never describes God looking at human beings in particular and proclaiming us to be good.  When it comes to humanity, apparently, for the Torah, the jury is still out.

Talmud teaches that the schools of Hillel and Shammai held a debate on the question: Would the world have been a better place if humanity had not been created? Hillel argues no—our presence is, on balance, a benefit.  Shammai insists that in fact, the rest of creation would have been better off without us.  Alas, much of the current environmental landscape suggests that Shammai was correct.   But the discussion ends as so many in the Talmud do, with a quirky compromise; the sages conclude: “The world would have been better without us—but now that we are here, let us carefully examine our deeds.”

We—and our technological footprint—are here to stay.  Hopefully, in the coming year, we will make progress on considering the consequences of our culture and strive to be more worthy of our unique place in God’s creation.

A Garden Story--Epilogue: Leaving the Garden (Neilah)

When they left the garden, I closed the gate behind them, even though there was no need.  It was a gesture like the cherubim and flaming sword—for my sake rather than theirs, as I knew before they departed that they would never come back to stay.  They’d cherish it in their memories, and visit from time to time as their busy adult lives allowed.  But never again would it be their home.  They’d chosen to grow up, which is how I’d meant it to be.

Still, when they departed, I wept.  Tears of sorrow, tears of joy—like those of any parent when a beloved child leaves home.  My tears fell as rain, soaking the earth, splashing in the river that Adam and Chava followed downstream out of the garden.  As night fell, a chill set in.  Rain turned to the first snow, as pure and white as the vestments of this sacred season, as the waxing moon rising in the darkening sky.

Adam and Chava took shelter in a cave beside the riverbank.  They held each other closely, for warmth and comfort and love.  When, at last, the snow stopped, they stepped out and spied their reflections dancing over the surface of the stream, mingling with water and moonlight. 

Then, for the very first time in the world, moved by longing and loss and love, they sang to me:

Avinu malkeinu chaneynu v’anaynu ki ayn banu ma’asim. . .

Have mercy on us, they chanted—be gracious, and show us your abiding kindness.

Then, moved to my core by their brave music in the night, I sang, too.   In a still, small voice—the faintest whisper on the wind—I sang with them, asking their mercy and forgiveness as they had pleaded for mine. 

And so we sang.

And so we sing, here, tonight. 

And so we sing our way together—

through the evening’s closing gates and into the beckoning world.

A Garden Story--Part 4: Hiding (Yom Kippur Morning)

After tasting the fruit, we felt strong and proud.  As Chava told you last night, we did not eat until we’d carefully considered the consequences, to the best of our knowledge and ability.  Although we disobeyed, we believed—and still believe—we did what Yah desired of us.

But as it turns out, no matter how well you weigh a decision beforehand, you cannot grasp its full import until after the fact.  As the momentary exhilaration of eating the forbidden fruit wore off, fear and despair seeped in.  With opened eyes, we became aware of things we’d never discerned before: lowering light, lengthening shadows, burnt orange leaves falling from the heretofore verdant trees. We noticed the mushrooms on the forest floor, feeding on decay.  We watched the earthworms transform dead waste into new soil.  And we knew in our hearts and felt in our bones, that one day, we, too, would be food for worms and fungi.  We would return to the clay from whence we came.   Death became palpable, and the pang of leaving the only home we’d ever known grew almost unbearable.  We’d consciously opted for adulthood, but having grown up overnight, with a single bite from the Tree of Knowledge, we found ourselves in way over our heads. 

That’s when we realized that we were naked.  As we watched the creatures swarming around us, we saw they all possessed protective layers to guard against the mortal world: shells and scales, fur and feathers, insects’ exoskeletons and amphibians’ slime.  Whereas we, with our paltry hair and thin skin, stood utterly exposed.  After we tasted from the Tree, our vulnerability overwhelmed us; the least we could do was cover ourselves.  So we girded our loins with fig leaves, then hid beneath the heavy brush lining the riverbanks.

All the while we recognized we were making a very big mistake.  Of course it was foolish to pretend we could hide from Yah, or even wish to do so.  We knew better than to flee from our Creator. But our faith faltered.  Our courage waned.  We lost our nerve. Then, as now, our failures came not from lack of knowledge but from fear, confusion, and want of will. 

Our sin was not the eating but the hiding afterwards.  As in countless cases since, the problem was not so much the original act as the ensuing cover-up—not taking responsibility for our misdeeds.  We failed when we hid.  And then, even more damningly, we failed again when Yah offered us one more chance.  Ayekka, Yah cried out to us—“Where are you?”

Chava and I both heard that call.  Fully aware that Yah knew exactly where we were, we longed to rise to the occasion, to follow our better angels, to be open and honest with Yah.  We yearned to step out from the shadows, and proclaim:

“Hinnenu—Here we are, Yah.  We ate from the Tree.  We acknowledge our choices and stand here, now, accountable for them.  We are sorry for our deception.  Now, Yah, what do you ask of us?  Where do we begin to make amends?  How can we use our new-found knowledge to help you continue creating this world?   How do we heal our brokenness?”

But the words didn’t come.  Chava and I held our breath, in uneasy silence.  Worst of all, when a deeply disheartened Yah finally called us out and confronted us, we dumped our accumulated fear and self-loathing onto one another.  I blamed Chava.  She blamed the snake.  And then we blamed each other.  Because we failed to own up to our deeds, our brave act of eating degraded into something shameful.

We were despondent.  The weight of disappointing Yah and one another—and the isolation it imposed—was the worst punishment imaginable.  Separately, Chava and I lamented how we’d diminished ourselves, in Yah’s eyes and our own.  We grew irritated and impatient with one another.  In the long, awkward, alienated stillness that ensued, we struggled to endure the burden of our failure.  Finally, haltingly, I turned to her and offered an apology:

“It wasn’t your fault.  I’m sorry.  I don’t regret taking the fruit.  I’m glad you gave it to me.  But I deeply regret my cowardice, hiding and then blaming you.”

“Well,” Chava replied, “I blamed, too.  Adam, we have a long, hard road ahead of us.  We’d better figure out how to support one another and learn from our mistakes.”

**********

My children, we did, indeed, have a long, hard road ahead of us—as you do, today.  In the ages that followed, we faltered and failed again and again—as partners and parents and people.  Time after time we sinned against each other, against Yah, against our families and ourselves.  And sometimes after sinning, we still hid, even though we knew better.  But in the end, despite and because of all that failure, we managed to make a good life together.  More often than not, we learned to acknowledge our shortcomings.  Thankfully, Yah never gave up on us—never stopped asking that very first question: Ayekka—Where are you?  And with experience Chava and I both gained the courage to mostly respond, “Hineni—Here I am.”

My children, Yah still asks that question of each and every one of you:  Ayekka?  Where are you?  On this sacred day, I implore you: Be present to that voice.  Listen for the questions.  Live in them.  Make your misdeeds the measure of your growth.

And do not believe the fear-mongers who preach of thorns and thistles and childbirth’s pain as divine retribution.  Those challenges, like our exile from Eden, are a painful but necessary part of the plan.  Yah didn’t really rebuke the serpent either; why would Yah chastise him for doing Yah’s own bidding?  Consider the way that snakes still move with such extraordinary grace—winding over the earth we love—and you will know that serpent did not lament losing his legs.  Everything that unfolded in Eden was about consequences rather than punishment.  Its moral is the price we willingly pay to live as adults.  For as I’ve aged, I have learned that Yah’s will is sustained by order and chaos alike.  And mature knowledge is, by definition, born of both, the fruit of experience and travail.

My children, as I speak to you now, the vivid late morning light still shines bright upon us.  But by the time the sun sank low that first Yom Kippur evening, I assure you, Yah had fully forgiven us.  Our exodus from Eden was an act of grace, without a trace of anger.  We departed with Yah’s blessing at ne’ilah, the Hour of the Closing of the Gates.

At that same hour later tonight, we will take our leave of you for this sacred season.  Our tale will be set aside, as all stories must be—and your work will begin in earnest.  Meanwhile, Chava and I both wish you all a strong and reflective fast that leads you deeper into the adulthood you desire. 

G’mar chatimah tovah—may you be sealed for blessing in Yah’s Book of Life.