אכן יש ה' במקום הזה ואנכי לא ידעתי
Behold, God is in this place and I, I did not know.
Behold God is here, right now, and I am not aware of it. God is in the moment of traffic in the car and God is in the meal I share with my husband and children and God is in the moment of nervousness before I begin a class and in the moments of learning I share with my students and in the moment of sadness as I watch my child cry. And God is here with me now as I write these words. In each moment, in every moment God is present.
The question for us, as for our father Yaakov, is: Do we see Him, do we feel Him, do we remember to be awake to His presence? Yaakov slept and then “awoke” to this realization. We go through life alternately asleep and awake to the knowing of this truth. It is one of those things we once knew well– a déjà vu, perhaps a piece of the Torah we learned and forgot before we were born – it is something we know and forget, know and forget continuously.
When we know it, though, how powerful we are! We feel how strongly our life blood pulses with the divine -- we are capable of anything; we can open closed doors. Yaakov declares after awakening that this here is the “gate to heaven.” Shaar Hashamayim. As the Psalmist says, Pithu li shaarei tzedek. Open for me the gates of righteousness. Yaakov has done so. To feel God’s presence is to feel that this gate to heaven is open; it is to feel the flow.
In the next scene Yaakov manages to remove the heavy rock atop the well, a rock that normally takes a village to remove. The angels of God that went up and down the ladder in his dream symbolize the energy of this divine life force, this awareness and connection to God. Yaakov is capable of the impossible because he keeps himself constantly connected to this energy source. No wonder he has 12 children while his ancestors struggle for 2! Life flows through him.
Yes, when we know God is with us, our outlook is different. We are confident and capable because we are connected to the divine energy flow, connected and centered. Someone who works in a prison once told me that when she prays each morning it is for her as if she has plugged herself into an electric outlet -- she is recharged and energized, fortified with faith and a sense of the divine for whatever lies ahead. Yaakov begins his journey – which won’t be an easy one – with just such a charge.
Behold, God is in this place, and I, I did not know. How often we do not know, do we not see. May we remember to ask in every situation – where is God in this place? Can I feel His presence? Because surely God is in this place, too, here, right now, among us.
Friday, November 24, 2017
Thursday, November 9, 2017
For Parashat Hayei Sarah: On Sarah and Equanimity (Hishtavut)
We all have good days and bad days; some days we are confident and generous and upbeat and other days we are irritable and insecure and unkind. We are inconsistent; our moods shift with the winds and the situations around us.
Not so Sarah, at least according to the Sefat Emet. The Sefat Emet explains the famous Rashi on the first pasuk of our parsha about the years of Sarah’s life. The pasuk strangely says they were “100 years and 20 years and 7 years, the years of Sarah’s life.” Rashi explains the redundancy of the word “years” after each number as a sign that Sarah was the same when she was 100 as 20 and the same at 20 as at 7. On the words “the years of Sarah’s life,” Rashi says, kulan shavin letovah. “They were all equivalent in goodness. “
Sarah was consistent in her goodness. She didn’t have bad days and good days, bad years and good years. The Sefat Emet calls this the quality of hishtavut, “equanimity,” from the same root, shaveh, equal, as the word shavin in the above Rashi. They were all “equal” in goodness, says the Sefat Emet, means that whatever happened to her – whether hunger or barrenness or abduction by a king, and many difficult things did happen to her – whatever happened, she was the same, solid as a rock, steady and consistent in her goodness, imperturbable and unshakable.
This image of Sarah stands in contrast to the image of Avraham as a walker and mover – lekh lekha¬ was not a one time command but a continual injunction to keep moving and growing over the years, as he does both physically and spiritually throughout these parshiyyot. Perhaps Sarah was the stable rock amidst all this change? When the angels ask Avraham where his wife is, he pointedly says Hineh ba’ohel, “Behold in the tent,“ as if to emphasize this contrast; Avraham is running around bringing people in, giving instructions, getting cattle, . . . but Sarah stays put in the tent, a staked rooted place in a life of mobility.
We often celebrate the qualities of growth in Avraham. This Shabbat I invite us to celebrate the qualities of equanimity and stability in Sarah, to learn to be more like a rock or a mountain, to simply watch the weather change, to stand still and steadfast through the difficult moments of life – both moments of external difficulty and moments of internal difficulty when we are overcome by negative feelings – to simply stand fast and bear them all with equanimity and inner peace.
Peace and equanimity come to those with faith. There is the faith of running and changing and believing that you have a role to play, and there is the faith that helps you accept what is happening around you and within you with equanimity -- stable and unchanging, knowing you are not the primary agent of change and that things will happen as they should in their own time.
Up and down, young and old, good and bad. Through it all Sarah stood, unmoving, consistent in her years – kulan shavin letovah. In her memory, may we be blessed with this quality.
Not so Sarah, at least according to the Sefat Emet. The Sefat Emet explains the famous Rashi on the first pasuk of our parsha about the years of Sarah’s life. The pasuk strangely says they were “100 years and 20 years and 7 years, the years of Sarah’s life.” Rashi explains the redundancy of the word “years” after each number as a sign that Sarah was the same when she was 100 as 20 and the same at 20 as at 7. On the words “the years of Sarah’s life,” Rashi says, kulan shavin letovah. “They were all equivalent in goodness. “
Sarah was consistent in her goodness. She didn’t have bad days and good days, bad years and good years. The Sefat Emet calls this the quality of hishtavut, “equanimity,” from the same root, shaveh, equal, as the word shavin in the above Rashi. They were all “equal” in goodness, says the Sefat Emet, means that whatever happened to her – whether hunger or barrenness or abduction by a king, and many difficult things did happen to her – whatever happened, she was the same, solid as a rock, steady and consistent in her goodness, imperturbable and unshakable.
This image of Sarah stands in contrast to the image of Avraham as a walker and mover – lekh lekha¬ was not a one time command but a continual injunction to keep moving and growing over the years, as he does both physically and spiritually throughout these parshiyyot. Perhaps Sarah was the stable rock amidst all this change? When the angels ask Avraham where his wife is, he pointedly says Hineh ba’ohel, “Behold in the tent,“ as if to emphasize this contrast; Avraham is running around bringing people in, giving instructions, getting cattle, . . . but Sarah stays put in the tent, a staked rooted place in a life of mobility.
We often celebrate the qualities of growth in Avraham. This Shabbat I invite us to celebrate the qualities of equanimity and stability in Sarah, to learn to be more like a rock or a mountain, to simply watch the weather change, to stand still and steadfast through the difficult moments of life – both moments of external difficulty and moments of internal difficulty when we are overcome by negative feelings – to simply stand fast and bear them all with equanimity and inner peace.
Peace and equanimity come to those with faith. There is the faith of running and changing and believing that you have a role to play, and there is the faith that helps you accept what is happening around you and within you with equanimity -- stable and unchanging, knowing you are not the primary agent of change and that things will happen as they should in their own time.
Up and down, young and old, good and bad. Through it all Sarah stood, unmoving, consistent in her years – kulan shavin letovah. In her memory, may we be blessed with this quality.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
