Parashat Miketz and Vayigash: On Yosef's Healing

*With thanks to my son Asher for the insight about Yosef’s ambivalence in last week’s parsha, and with thanks to Shoni Mirvis for talking through ideas about trauma and healing in relation to Yosef.  

This week we witness Yosef’s healing from trauma, from the trauma of being thrown into a pit and sold into slavey by his brothers at the age of 17 and never hearing from his family, along with all the subsequent traumas of his life as a slave, and later, a prisoner, in Egypt.  

At this point in his life, Yosef is very successful; he is viceroy of Egypt, in full control of the country and all its citizens, with enormous power and prestige.    But this success does not mean he has recovered from the trauma.   It seems that what he has done in order to survive is push away the memories and erase the past -- he names his first child Menasheh, or “Forgetfulness,”  explaining that “God has made me forget [nashani] completely my hardship and my parental home” (41:51).   

This strategy works well, at least as a temporary band-aid, until his brothers show up, uncovering the old memories and unhealed trauma inside him.  He reacts in the typical fashion of a victim of trauma: he simultaneously tries to push them away and bring them close.   Part of him wants desperately to renew the connection; part of him wants equally desperately to stay estranged and to hurt the brothers and punish them.  What ensues is the push-and-pull dance of last week’s parsha.   One minute he is speaking harshly to them, accusing them of being “spies,” and the next minute he is asking kindly after the welfare of their father; one minute he is locking them up and the next he is honoring them in his home with a special meal.  He sends them away without revealing himself, resolving to remain estranged, but at the same time, he keeps one with him to maintain the connection and ensure they will come back.  Sending their money home with them in their bags is the perfect enactment of both of these parts’ desires; he is simultaneously showing his special care for them -- his own family shouldn’t have to pay for food from him -- and at the same time punishing them, knowing that they will suffer with worry over the false accusation of their thievery.  

As he is doing this dance of approach and avoidance, we see little cracks in his well-groomed exterior, signs of the deep hurt and vulnerability that lies hidden underneath.   At one point, he overhears his brothers’ speaking among themselves, saying that all this difficulty is coming to them now because of their guilt at not listening to their brother when he was crying out to them from the pit and pleading with them (42:21).   This is actually the first that we hear of Yosef’s having cried out in this way; the text had erased these emotions just as Yosef himself erased them inside of him.   Hearing about these desperate cries now -- being reminded of his own childhood pain through their memories -- Yosef’s covering is broken; he can no longer hide from the pain and turns aside and cries (42:24).   Again, upon seeing Binyamin in their second visit, Yosef is so moved by pity and love for his brothers -- a yearning for connection and perhaps some grief at all the lost years of seeing Binyamin, his only full brother, grow up -- that he again turns aside, to another room, and cries (43:30). 

These are little cracks, little glimpses of the intense pain that lies underneath his viceroy veneer.  In order for Yosef to fully heal from the trauma, he needs a full re-enactment, a full remembrance and coming to terms with the traumatic event itself.   It is for this purpose -- whether Yosef consciously understands it or not -- that Binyamin is brought onto the scene.   Binyamin is the stand-in for Yosef as a young boy.  Like Yosef, he is the son of the favored wife, especially beloved to his father in his father’s old age.   Yosef himself tries to add to this sense of favoritism, giving him extra food portions and clothing, as his father had done to him with the special cloak.    Next Yosef manipulates the situation so that Binyamin, too, is in danger of being sold into slavery before all of his brothers’ eyes.  Usually the explanation here is that Yosef is testing his brothers to see whether they have changed.   Perhaps another way of seeing it is through the prism of Yosef’s trauma, seeing that Yosef is actually --  whether consciously or unconsciously -- seeking healing, and he understands that in order for healing to take place, he needs to re-enact the original situation but with a different outcome, both for his own healing and perhaps also for that of his brothers.

The scene is set.   The youngest brother -- favored by father and now viceroy -- has been caught red-handed and in danger of becoming a slave.   In steps older brother Yehudah, in a remarkable speech, feeling his way and managing to say exactly the things that Yosef needs to hear.   First, that this younger brother will not be abandoned here and left to a life of Egyptian slavery, but instead, his brothers will rally around him and save him and stand in his stead.  Imagine how this message hits the hole inside of Yosef caused by the trauma.   He was abandoned, left alone to a terrible fate, no one caring to save him or coming after him to rescue him.   Surely the trauma is not just the terrible life of slavery itself, but the gnawing sense of abandonment by his family, the emptiness of feeling that no one really cared what happened to him.  Now Yehudah’s love and courage and loyalty seep into those hurt places inside Yosef, so that he is reliving the original event but this time with a brother who cares.   He is not alone in the pit, crying out with no one listening.  He is safe and cared for, like Binyamin, surrounded by brothers who will stand up for him and not abandon him.  

Second, Yehudah emphasizes their father Yaakov’s emotional attachment to Binyamin and the unbelievable pain that it would cause him to lose Binyamin after having lost Yosef.   Yehudah also mentions that Yaakov believed that Yosef had been killed by a wild animal.  Many have questioned why Yosef never contacted his father during his time in Egypt.  I wonder whether Yosef didn’t feel abandoned by his father as well as his brothers.  Yosef didn’t know that Yaakov thought he was dead.   He also didn’t know how sad his father was.  Perhaps Yosef imagined that his father gave up on him quickly and moved on with his many other sons, not missing him enough to send out a rescue squad and look for him.  Of course, Yosef was the favored son, so he should have trusted that love, but think back on the scenes immediately preceding the trauma; Yosef had been reporting his dreams and his father had rebuked him (37:10).  Right after that, his father sent him off to see about his brothers’ welfare.  Yosef may have understood these two acts as signs of his father’s increasing disapproval of him and concern for his brothers at his own expense.  So that then, when he is sold into slavery and no one comes to rescue him -- not knowing the story about the wild animal -- Yosef must have felt deeply hurt and abandoned, perhaps beginning to doubt his father’s continued love for him.  .   

Now, in this re-enacted scene, through Yehudah’s speech, Yosef finds out that his father thought he was dead and also the depth of his father’s sadness -- Yehudah speaks of the intensity of the sadness that would ensue from the loss of Binyamin, and surely Yosef can feel that Yehudah knows of this paternal despair from a previous experience, that his father has been decimated by his own absence as well.   Yosef now feels the intensity of that sorrow, of his father’s yearning for him and sense of loss, and in opening himself to that loss, Yosef also opens himself to feeling his father’s love, a love he must have buried deep inside him and not felt for a very long time.    That place inside him that was so hurt -- that felt so abandoned and unloved -- now opens and is nourished by these words of Yehudah, by the image of his loving, mourning father. 

When Yosef hears Yehudah’s speech, he can feel something happening inside him, some transformation, some opening, and he calls out for all the Egyptian officials around him to leave the room.    What he is doing, in essence, is removing the Egyptian viceroy mask he has constructed for himself over the years, the mask that has covered over his pain and his trauma.   Now, opening to it again, to the past and to remembering and to feeling it all, he needs first to ask the parts of him -- both those outside and inside him -- that have done the masking and protecting for so long -- to please step aside, to allow room for the vulnerable traumatized child inside him to emerge.   

What happens next is a cry, a cry so intense and so long-held and so deeply felt, that all of Egypt could hear it; the whole world shook with the emotion that Yosef let out that day.   It was a cry of great pain -- the pain of his childhood self in the pit, the pain of his sense of abandonment and homesickness and suffering in all the years that followed, and of his grief at all the lost time with his father and family, of all the years he suffered alone, without the love and care of anyone around him, the pain, too, of his brothers in all their shame and embarrassment and regret, and the pain of his father in his inconsolable grief and despair and broken heart.     Having remembered and re-enacted the trauma in a new way through Binyamin, Yosef manages to bring up all that pain, and for the first time, in the comforting presence of Yehudah’s words, to allow himself to fully feel it, and, by feeling it, to release it into the wider universe.  The losses -- his own as well as those of his family -- needed to be fully mourned and expressed before moving on.  The cry is one of pain, but it is also one of tremendous release and relief; crying is the last doorway out, the key to letting go and healing.   

Yosef shakes out all the pain he was holding from the past and returns to the present, fully himself, fully alive and feeling for the first time in a long time -- “I am Yosef” (45:3) -- and then, with the pain of lost time still in him, and an eye to the future, to not losing any more precious time with those he loves -- “Is my father still alive?”   Can I still connect to him and love him and feel his love, which I had written off for so long?   

Yosef returns to himself, wanting connection and reintegration, turning next to his brothers -- who are too frightened to respond -- turning now to them, not, as before, in inner conflict, approaching and avoiding,  but with a full and clear heart, simply wanting to pull them close -- Geshu na elay, Come close to me (45:4).  What Yosef says next to his brothers shows the full extent of his healing.   First, he says out loud what needs to be brought into the open -- I am Yosef, your brother, whom you sold down to Egypt.   We are not going to step around it and hide from it.  It’s out there: You sold me.  But what follows is full of compassion and love;  don’t be sad or upset about it, Yosef says; it was all part of God’s plan and all very much for the best; I was sent here to provide food for everyone.    In owning and releasing his pain, Yosef has stepped into his largest possible Self, stepped into the Self that is connected to God, that sees the wholeness in everything, even in the pain, that sees purpose and meaning in every step of his own suffering life, and that can, with great generosity and beneficence, from a well-spring that is beyond normal human capacity, offer his brothers not just forgiveness but compassion and peace.   The trauma -- facing it and releasing the pain around it -- has turned into a doorway to a larger version of himself.   

God’s role here is significant.   It is through his connection to God that Yosef finds the strength to work through his trauma and come out -- not broken and bitter -- but whole and at peace and with a strong sense of his place in the universe.  God serves as his therapist and his refuge and his rock, not just here, but throughout his time in Egypt, holding him through the times of pain, helping him survive at first by forgetting, as he needed to do, and later, bringing him back to wholeness through Yehudah and the brothers.   Yosef emerges here, post trauma, so much stronger and wiser and larger than his 17 year old “everyone will bow down to me” dreaming self, and this growth happens not just through the suffering, but through his awareness of God in the suffering.  

The power of this story is in its optimism and faith in our human capacity -- with God holding us -- to fully face trauma and suffering and to heal from it; to feel the pain and release it; to be able to reimagine and retell the story of our own suffering in meaningful terms, and, at the right time and with a willing counterpart, to reconnect to those who hurt us and also to those who love us.  

A Chanukah Lights Meditation

You can do this meditation either at night while looking at the Chanukah lights or during the day, in preparation.   May you have a Chanukah filled with light!

To play the meditation, click here.  

For Chanukah and Parashat Vayeshev: Becoming a Vessel

The Chanukah menorah is a kli, a vessel, to hold the oil or the candles that bring light into the world.    Light needs a container.  In order for blessing to enter this world, it needs a container.   

In the book of Kings (II Kings 4), when a destitute woman approaches the prophet Elisha, he tells her to go gather from around the neighborhood kelim rekim, empty vessels.  Only after she has these vessels can she receive the miraculous oil that fills them.   Blessing requires a container to hold it.  

The Sefat Emet suggests that the Chanukah menorah is a symbol for us, for our own capacity to be vessels that carry God’s light in the world.  As it says in Proverbs,  Ner Hashem Nishmat Adam -- “the soul of a person is the lamp of the Lord” (Proverbs 20:27).   The soul of a person --  each one of us -- is meant to be a ner, a lamp, a container to hold the light of God.   

If we think about it, physically, we already do function as a container of sorts.   Your body is an open vessel that continually holds and lets go of life-giving air; your lungs and your belly are empty receptacles; they fill up and then let the air out, making room for the next round, becoming a vessel again and again with each breath.    

Indeed, when God created the human, God took earth from the ground and formed a receptacle and then breathed life into it.  Vayipah be’apav nishmat hayim.   “God blew into his nostrils the breath of life.”  We were made to be receptacles for God’s gifts.  

Expanding this notion, what would it mean to become -- like the Chanukah menorah -- a vessel for God’s light?   What does it mean to be a container?  How do we make ourselves into such a vessel to hold God’s light?   There are two aspects to any container, the structure that holds whatever is to be contained, and the empty space inside.  On the one hand, we need to create space, to empty ourselves, to make sure that we are not too full to receive from above.   On the other hand, we need to have the strength to actually hold the light, to contain it so that it does not just diffuse and disappear into the atmosphere.  Space and embrace -- both are needed to become receptive to the light from beyond.

I will examine each aspect in turn.  First, space.  We are so full much of the time, full of thoughts and feelings that have power over us, that take us over so that there is nothing left, no room for anything from above to enter.   We are preoccupied by worries and plans and hurt feelings and jealousy and striving and attempts to control what happens.   We are preoccupied with ourselves, and we take up a lot of room and energy in our internal systems.  So creating space inside means finding some emptiness, some silence, amidst all the noisy swirl of the small self.   Our preoccupations won’t disappear, and we probably don’t want them to, but they can be moved out of center stage, to allow room for something else to emerge, something that will only flow through us if we are empty enough to receive it.    

Turning to the parsha for a moment, before Yosef could become God’s vehicle in history, he had to be stripped of his colorful cloak -- a symbol of his small self with all its arrogance and ego-centric dreams -- and thrown into the pit of emptiness and surrender.  Vehabor reik, eyn bo mayim.   “The pit was empty; there was no water.”   The emptiness of the pit mirrors the emptiness that Yosef needed to cultivate inside himself to make room for God, to become a vessel. “There was no water”  -- no help, no recourse.  Yosef was forced to completely surrender, to acknowledge his lack of control and total reliance on God.  We don’t necessarily need to experience the emptiness and surrender in the same extreme way as Yosef, to hit bottom -- the bottom of a pit -- but this Yosef incident is a good metaphor for the work of emptying ourselves and of letting go of our colorful cloak, our ego’s peacock feathers.  

It is interesting to note that the tradition reads the doubleness of this verse about the pit -- the mention of the empty pit as well as the lack of water -- as implying that there actually was something in the pit (snakes and scorpions); it wasn’t truly empty.  This is precisely the point of emptiness; it turns out that there is indeed something in nothing, that to open oneself to emptiness is to open oneself -- to connect oneself -- to the greatest something in the world.  

But being empty, letting go, is not enough.   Oil can’t be poured into full jugs, but it also can’t be poured into thin air; we need a container, an empty one, but still, a container, a structure, to hold the blessing.   Internally, this container is made of desire, of the positive energy and strength of wanting to serve, wanting to receive, wanting to be close to God, wanting to function as a carrier of divine light and love in the universe.   While the emptiness requires a letting go action, a relinquishing, the containment needs us to embrace, to hold with both hands, to love.   I am thinking of the Piasetzner Rebbe’s notion of the machshavah ahat tehorah, the one pure thought that a person should have at all times -- a desire to be close to God.   Everything else recedes to the background -- we let go of all other desires and create space -- but there is still this one strong yearning, and it is this yearning that creates a container inside us to actually hold the blessing.  

There is strength here as well as energy.  While the emptying  is a release, the holding is an act of power and might   A bag in a grocery store that is weak will not be able to withstand the weight of the groceries it is meant to hold; this act of holding and containing requires building up the strength of our container, the muscle of our faith and our presence.  

Perhaps the best example of such a strong container is Avraham’s hineni -- Here I am -- at the akedah, the binding of Isaac.  God was asking him to let go of his most favored possession, his beloved child -- there was certainly a surrender here, a relinquishing -- but there was also an embrace, a Presence, a sense of rising with energy and strength to meet the divine.  

“Here I am.”   The small self recedes, but something else emerges inside us.  A new/old Self, an “I” that is strong enough to contain the flow from above, that was born to do precisely this job.  Here I am.  Ready to receive.  This larger Self is born in the moment, in the “here” of presence, of being ready and present right now, at this very moment. to receive God’s light    We may feel it as energy -- to get up in the morning like a lion to serve our Creator -- energy that flows through us, making our hands tingle, wanting to do something, wanting to make a container in the world through our actions, to bring the blessing out into the universe.

To become a vessel of light like a Chanukah menorah involves both these motions -- the space and the embrace, the emptiness and the containment, selflessness as well as a strong Self.  Yaakov had two intense divine encounters; in one, the ladder dream, he was lying down, totally open and receptive; in the other, he was standing up, engaged, fighting.  To become a vessel for God’s light, we need both these gestures, both the stillness and surrender of the corpse pose and the strength and power of the warrior pose.   

At this point, becoming a vessel may seem impossibly difficult, requiring a huge amount of effort, both of the letting go and of the holding on varieties.   But Chanukah speaks to us of only expending a small amount of effort, and of doing it daily.   Just light one candle and do it for eight nights in a row.  Gradually you will be able to light more, a little more each night.  Start small, with low expectations.   Can we hold a tiny bit of God’s light inside ourselves for a short period each night?  Just a glimmer of possibility, of the possibility that God’s light -- like our breath --  is in fact flowing through us at all times, but we have not noticed it.  Maybe all it takes to become a container is to open ourselves to this possibility, to be, like a container, strongly but also simply, receptive.  

Parashat Vayishlah: Yaakov's Rebirth

Yaakov’s struggle with a “man” the night before he meets up with his brother Esav can be read as a rebirth.   It is a transformative experience at the end of which he receives a name change, as if born anew with a fresh way of being in the world.   

It is like a rebirth in another way as well: Yaakov’s original birth happened in the context of struggle, too.   He and Esav were wrestling inside their mother, Rivka’s, womb, and when Yaakov emerged, he was still engaged in this struggle, holding on to his brother’s heel, trying desperately to be the first out. 

The confrontation with the angel is a therapeutic replay of Yaakov’s first birth.   Yaakov seems to have emerged from his birth with a sense of inferiority and insecurity.  He is born trying to catch up to his brother, with a sense of being behind and secondary, and later his insecurity manifests as a need to actually dress up and pretend to be his brother in order to receive his brother’s blessing.   It is as if he is not comfortable in his own skin, not confident that who he is, even as a second born, is equally worthwhile and blessed.  

And so the angel helps him to replay that original birth scene in order to begin to heal those wounds.  They wrestle as before, but this time, face to face, as equals, rather than one behind the other in the birth canal.   Whereas before it was Yaakov, as the more desperate one about to lose the battle to be first born, who hangs on to Esav’s heel, here it is the angel who touches Yaakov’s hip; the angel is losing, and knows it, and this is his only way to make a mark on Yaakov, a last ditch effort to be victorious in a losing battle. Yaakov, in this rebirth, as the angel sees and declares, is the stronger one, the one in control.   The angel has to ask permission to leave -- to be “sent out” from their interplay like a baby into the world.  This time, though the other is still the first to leave, to be born back into the dawn, it is Yaakov who has sent him out.  

And so Yaakov leaves this encounter a new man with a new name.  He is not Yaakov, the insecure heel-grabber, but Yisrael, one who “has striven (sarita) with beings divine and human and prevailed.”   As the name Yisrael implies, he is a sar now, a leader, a person in charge, in control, not just of others, but also, primarily, of himself.   He has God in his name, a sense of presence and of his own infinite capacity and worth.   He is eminently capable, as the angel lets him know -- vatukhal, “you prevailed,” or literally, “you were capable” in this fight; you did it; you have the capacity to do anything.  He is a full person, not secondary, but a sar (officer) of God in his own right (much like “Sarah,” his grandmother), a fair match for even an angel.    Soon after, when he travels again, the Torah describes him as shalem, “whole”; he has a new sense of completeness and wholeness, not needing anyone outside him to affirm him, but complete in himself.   

And so Yaakov emerges from this rebirth with the confidence to meet his brother face to face without wanting to supercede or replace him.  Yaakov is generous and gracious, giving him gifts and bowing submissively to honor his brother, with no hint of fight or insecurity or the need to show himself as the superior.  Yaakov has the courage for the first time to show up as himself, and this makes all the difference in his interactions with his brother. In the past, Yaakov’s insecurity had caused strife between them; not being content with himself, Yaakov fought with Esav, extracting first the birth right and then the blessing from him, trying to fill the hole inside himself by taking something from his brother.   Now, in this new encounter, Yaakov’s sense of his own completeness allows him to view his brother more generously.   He can prostrate himself before Esav seven times because he has the confidence and self dignity to know that he is a sar of God.   And out of this confidence comes peace and graciousness, so that, for the first time, the brothers meet and hug and kiss, accepting one another as equals.  

What has happened here is remarkable and inspiring.  Yaakov has managed to do one of the most difficult things in the world -- to let go of his baggage and step into a larger version of self.    The name Yaakov symbolizes all those parts of his small self that have been burdened and constricted by the insecurity he has been carrying around since birth.   Now he is letting go of some of those burdens in a new birth process.  It is interesting to note that, just before this encounter with the angel, Yaakov takes everything he has -- his wives, his children and all of his possessions --  and moves them across to the other side of a river; it is as if he is symbolically letting go of all of his earthly attachments, all of his baggage, for a short time, in order to come into contact with some larger, purer version of himself.  The name Yisrael symbolizes this new (or perhaps, old, original) larger self, one that is connected to the divine and therefore infinitely capable and generous and confident and courageous.    After wrestling all night with a divine being, Yaakov receives from that being a tiny piece of divinity, or, more accurately, Yaakov receives the ability to access the divine part of his own nature that was always there inside him.  The angel functions as a mirror, allowing Yaakov to see his own divine side, his Yisrael-ness.

And so, in a way, the struggle that took place that night was between these two parts of Yaakov himself, his small human wounded self, and his larger divine perfectly whole and confident self.   All night, as they wrestled, these two sides were getting to know each other.   The word for wrestle, vaye’avek is understood by some to mean “embrace” as in the not dissimilar word vaye’havek (the letters alef and haf can sometimes be interchanged).   The angel wrestles with Yaakov, engaging him and connecting to him, and he also embraces him in all his Yaakovness, beginning to heal his young wounded parts.  Interestingly, in the process, the angel creates a new physical wound, hurting Yaakov’s hip, causing him to limp.  Perhaps this wound can be understood as an externalization of the internal wounds that are being healed, a way of bringing them out into the open for healing, to expose them to the sun that is said to shine the next morning for the express purpose of healing Yaakov.  Vayizrah lo hashemesh.    “The sun shone for him.”   Yaakov has emerged from his long night of suffering and insecurity into the dawn’s light of clarity, confidence, and courage.  

Yaakov is reborn here as Yisrael, but note that the Yaakov side of him isn’t eliminated, but embraced; the Torah continues to refer to this patriarch by both names, showing that both personas remain.   What happens here is that Yisrael becomes the sar, the leader, of the internal system, so that the human Yaakov, with all his special talents and capacities, can now act in the world out of a place of confidence and wholeness rather than insecurity.  

What would it be like to undergo such a transformation, to be reborn in this way, to let go of some of our wounds and be whole and free and able to show up for ourselves fully without a gnawing sense of insufficiency?   I think about this sometimes while immersing in the waters of the mikvah. I imagine that the mikvah is like a womb, cleansing me of my old habits and stuck places and insecurities, and allowing me to be reborn afresh --  like Yaakov after his night of wrestling and embrace -- pure and whole and connected to the divine inside me.   The feeling generally doesn’t last, but the glimpse is helpful, as it surely was for Yaakov/Yisrael, the vision of a possibility of becoming one’s own  sar, internally led by the sense of our divinely given wholeness, exuding a confidence that is gracious and generous, always mindful -- without a sense of competition -- of the other’s equal wholeness.   

Meditation for Parashat Vayetze

 Click here to play the meditation.  (9 minutes long)

*special thanks to Lynnie Mirvis for meditation inspiration

A Meditation for Parashat Vayetze (Written Form)

Yaakov dreams of a ladder whose base is firmly planted in the ground and whose top reaches up to heaven.  And on the ladder, angels -- 

Vehineh malakhei Elokim olim veyordim bo.   And behold angels are going up and going down on it. 

We are going to take some time now to try to experience a little of this vision.  Get into a position that is comfortable and relaxed, and a posture that implies for you a sense of surrender.  Yaakov was asleep for this vision so try to mimic the feeling of relaxation just before sleep.  Close your eyes.  Let your thoughts slow down a little, settling, settling, like snowflakes in a snowglobe, coming to a rest after all their swirling.  Settling and slowing down.  Nothing to do but relax.  Let your shoulders fall back and your breathing slow down.  

Now bring your attention to your feet on the ground, or if you are sitting cross legged, to your whole torso and legs.     Bring your attention to whatever is supporting you, whether it is the chair or the floor, and feel how firmly planted you are in the ground.   You are like Yaakov’s ladder --- mutzav artzah  -- firmly planted in the ground.  You have a stable, rooted base in the earth, in this physical world that we live in.  Feel how physical it is, strong and supportive and real.   It holds you with firmness.   You are part of the earth.  

At the same time, your head reaches to the sky, like the top of Yaakov’s ladder, the rosh, the Torah calls it.   Feel how the top half of you  -- your head and your heart -- are reaching upwards, yearning for the heavens.    Feel your heart and your mind opening and the sudden flow upwards, like a whoosh of energy wanting to go up.      Flying upwards.   Reaching, yearning.  Or imagine a string going from the top of your head and reaching up to the sky, up to God above.   You are rooted in the ground below but you are also whooshing upwards, a part of something above, attached there, too.   Feel both of these pulls at once, the sense of groundedness, and the sense of yearning and reaching upwards.  The one is very strong and concrete and the other has a lighter more ethereal pull, like the tug of air.

Now the angels on the ladder.  The angels are the carriers of your life energy, your breath.  Bring your attention to your breath.   The inhale and the exhale are the angels going up and down inside you.   Notice how on the inhale your whole chest lifts up and on the exhale your whole chest goes down.   Imagine that your breath is being carried by angels inside you, filling and lifting you up, up, up and then letting go, down, down, down.   In and then out, filling and then letting go.  

In and then out.  The out part goes out of you and continues, extending way beyond you, out into the world and up into the heavens.  The angels fly on the wings of your breath up to heaven, with each breath returning you back to your source, back to God above, recharging, and coming back down again to you.    Feel the flow of divine energy flowing in and out of you, up to heaven and then back down again.   Divine energy, life force, your source, your origin.  With each breath you are connected and rejuvenated, recharged.   The angels send and receive, bring and take, in a neverending flow of connection to the divine.  

In and out, and up and down.  Olim veyordim.  The flow of charge moves back and forth between heaven and earth in a vibrating pulsing rhythm.   Back and forth, back and forth.  The prophet Yehezkel describes angelic movement as - Ratzo vashov.   Running forward and then back again.  Forward and back.  Forward toward God, reaching, wanting to get close, to disappear into the infinite, yearning for closeness, to become one, to become nothing, and then back down, away again, back down to earth, to this finite life, to this body.   Ratzo vashov.   Forward and back.  Feel how this is the movement of angels and the movement of the life force in everything.   Intimacy and retreat.   Connection and separation.  The waves of the ocean -- up and down, the trees and the grass swaying and breathing in and out as well, the world vibrating and pulsing in a universal life rhythm.   Feel the rhythm inside you -- your breath and your heart beating, pulsing, and then feel how the same rhythm is outside you.  Inside and outside -- the same back and forth of the angels, the same life force everywhere, connecting and letting go, giving and taking, going and coming back.  As you ride the waves of your own breath, you are also riding the waves of energy throughout the universe.  Everywhere the same universal rhythm of connection to the divine.  Inside you and outside you.   You are a part of it all, a part of this large vibrating divine energy flow.

You are connected to everything outside you and also again, to the heavens above.   The angels that carry your breath back and forth, giving you new life at each moment -- they are creating a ladder for you, a direct link to Your source above.   Heaven and earth have become one for you.  Feel the link with each breath, feel how noticing it strengthens the sense of connection.  With each breath, your connection to the Source gets stronger, the energy flow more intense, the light shining down brighter, and the line that connects you from self to God clearer and more visible.  There it is.  You have clarity about this link now.    You can feel the ladder. 

But the flow is not in one direction.   It isn’t just that God sends down energy and love and light to you.   You have something to send to God, too.  Actually you do it first.    Olim veyordim.  The angels go up and then they go down.  Feel the welling up of love and light and energy that you have inside you to send up to heaven.   There is an energy exchange here.  You send and receive, send and receive.   Feel how you are not just open to receiving from heaven but also ready and capable of giving something, of sending back.  Love is a two-directional flow.   You receive and you give and it just keeps increasing, the love keeps getting stronger.    Feel the strength of your own yearning and love, your own desire to connect above.  Let the angels take your yearning up to God and feel how they bring back down God’s yearning for you.     Back and forth goes the flow of love.  

Rest for a moment in the sense of connection and relationship and flow.     With each breath imagine the angels on the ladder going up and down, keeping the energy and love flowing between you and your Source.  

Now let go of attending so closely to the breath.  Allow it to recede into the background, still there, but not in the foreground of your attention.  You can trust that the link to heaven will continue to operate on its own .  It is there for you when you need it and you can return to it at any point.   But for now, allow the sense of connection to give you strength for whatever comes next in your life.   Yaakov awoke from this dream vision energized for the journey ahead.  The Torah says  Vayisa Yaakov raglav vayelakh.  Yaakov lifted his legs and went on his way.   His sense of connection with the divine strengthened, he continued on his journey with a new lilt to his gait.    The rock that covered the well he came to next was so large it normally took a whole group of people to lift, but Yaakov could now lift it on his own.    He had the divine flow of energy pulsing through him.  

You are like Yaakov.  Feel the divine energy flowing through you from above.  You, too, are ready to tackle whatever comes next.  

*special thanks to Lynnie Mirvis for meditation inspiration.

Parashat Toldot: On Divine Spaciousness

I want to focus on one word from our parsha --   Rehovot.   

Rehovot means “wide open spaces.”   It is the name that Yitzhak gives to the well that is not fought over after many of his earlier wells are contested.   He calls it Rehovot because he says -- Atah hirhiv Hashem lanu ufarinu ba’aretz.   “Now God has expanded space for us and we can be fruitful in the land” (26:22).    There is no longer any need to fight over water.  Now we can feel a sense of spaciousness and plenty.  

So much of the parsha deals with the opposite feeling -- a sense of constriction and scarcity and competition.  There are the other two wells -- when the shepherds come and say:  No!  That water is ours! -- one well named “Contention” and the other “Hatred.”  And there is the strife at home, the continuous squabble between Yaakov and Esav over the birthright.  The feeling behind all of these scenes is that there is not enough blessing to go around so that there is a need to fight tooth and nail and heel to get a piece of it.  

The Rehovot moment then is a tiny glimpse of spaciousness amidst general tightness, a hint at a possible answer to all this suffering, a glimmer of light in the pervasive darkness.

The sense of scarcity and tightness that they -- and we -- often feel is very real.  We do live in a world of limitation -- there is a limit to physical resources like water and food, and a limit, too, to our energy and time and emotional capacities as human beings.  

At the same time, on a different plane, the divine plane, we also have access to a world without limitations, a world of great spaciousness and abundance.  Atah hirhiv Hashem lanu.   Yitzhak recognizes that it is God that does the expanding for us.  When we can make contact with this other plane, suddenly it feels like there is plenty of room.  As the tradition goes concerning the crowded Temple on a holiday, even if the people were tightly packed standing up, they would somehow be able to bow down with plenty of room.  To enter God’s sanctuary -- the divine plane --  is to feel the expansion of space and to know that there is ample room for all.  .    

This divine spaciousness is the merhav Yah that we speak of in the phrase from Hallel -- min hametzar karati Yah, anani bamerhav Yah.   “Out of the narrow straits I cried out to you, O God; You answered me with divine expansiveness.”   Merhav (expansiveness) comes from the same root as Rehovot, only here it is in construct with God’s name, meaning that when we cry out in our human constriction, God answers us with divine spaciousness; we enter a different plane.  

I want to consider with you some of the ways that this divine spaciousness can work inside us.  We will go through each character in our story and see how we can help them with some spaciousness, and by helping them, also help ourselves.

Rivka is the first on the scene who needs help.  She is finally pregnant but suffering from some strange violent movements in her belly as the twins begin to fight inside her.   She cries out -- “If so”  -- if this is how pregnancy is going to be-- “why me?”  What am I doing this for?  All this pain is too much for me to bear.   

We know something of this feeling.  It is a loss of perspective.   We become so completely blended with the pain or the uncertainty or the crisis of this moment, that we can’t see past it or around it.  We just want it to be over; we want to quit in despair.  

A similar thing happens to Esav when he comes in from the field, famished.   Yaakov asks him to sell his birthright for the soup he has just made, and Esav says, in language similar to Rivka’s but the teenage boy version -- I’m about to die here, so who cares about the birthright?  Again, there is a loss of perspective.   The current predicament -- hunger -- looms so large that it excludes any other consideration.  He has become blind to anything but the current moment’s intense feeling.  

Rivka knows how to deal with such moments of intensity.  She seeks out God and is given some larger perspective of purpose and time-- in the future these babies will actually be two entire nations.   Set against this larger picture, Rivka can better bear the pregnancy.   

Esav, though, does not know how to do this, so we will do it for him.  Imagine for a moment yourself in such a moment of intense pain, physical or emotional.  The sharpness of it takes over your whole system, narrowing your vision so that you can think of nothing else.   Now imagine that there is, surrounding all this tightness and pain, some larger aura of spaciousness.   The hunger is real but you can see that it is a moment in a larger tapestry; it isn’t all of you.  There is air around it now and you can think clearer, breathe through the hunger..   Atah Hirhiv Hashem lanu.  Now God has expanded space for us.  

Next, Yaakov.  He needs a lot of help, which he will get next week directly from God in his ladder dream.  But for now, we will try to help him.   He comes into the world already worried about his place in it.   He has the sense that only the first born will really be loved and blessed, and so he struggles mightily to be first, reaching out to hold on to the heel of his brother.  Feel the tension in that grip on the heel -- the sense of life and death desperation; I can’t let go or it won’t work out; I won’t get what I need.   Such tightness.   And then, again, with the soup -- feel how tightly wound Yaakov is, always on the lookout to control things and make them go his way, waiting for that moment of his brother’s weakness and pouncing on it.  And again, when he tricks his father, feel here, the sadness of the situation, Yaakov’s belief that he needs to pretend to be someone else in order to be loved and blessed by his father, his sense of not enoughness.   There is an inner emptiness underneath all that tightness.   

So Yaakov, maybe more than all the others, really needs Rehovot, really needs this sense of spaciousness.    Let’s take his tight hold on the heel and see if it can relax a bit if we let him know that there is a love and a blessing that is beyond what either of his parents can give him and this love and blessing will come to him no matter what he does.    It is ok that he is tightly wound and controlling and energetic; we don’t want him to change all that; these are useful parts of him, but they can relax a little --  rest --  in the knowledge of the vastness of the blessing that is already his, in the sense of space that surrounds him -  yama vakedma tzafona vanegba, west and east and north and south, the directions that God shows him next week.   Yaakov’s competitive parts can relax, too, in the knowledge of this spaciousness, in the feeling of divine plenty, and the sense of enoughness and no scarcity.  There is enough to go around, for both him and his brother, and also, he is enough, little Yaakov, enough to deserve the blessing without manipulation.  You don’t have to be the best or the first; you don’t have to be someone else; just be yourself and know that you, as you are, have a place in God’s vast universe.  

Next is Yitzhak.   Yitzhak has seen a glimpse of the Rehovot expansiveness in his interaction over the wells, but he doesn’t always remember to apply it at home.    When Yaakov takes the first blessing and Esav shows up wanting one as well, Yitzhak actually thinks that there are no more blessings to give.  He is in his very human mindframe of limitation and scarcity.   Esav knows this isn’t right, asking habrachah ahat hi likha avi?   “Do you only have one blessing, my father?”  Yes, your father --  as a limited human being -- only has one blessing to give, but if he could get himself connected to that divine Rehovot plane, he would know that there is no limit; he could put some space and perspective around your pain, Esav, your sense of loss, helping you see that this is just one incident in a long span of history, that in fact you, too, will be blessed in many ways, that God has infinite ways of bestowing blessing even if your father does not. 

We don’t blame Yitzhak for not being able to bring Rehovot into every aspect of his life.   That is the way we are as humans.   We get glimpses of the truth; we know it somewhere inside us, but we don’t remember it at all times; in fact, often at the most important times -- in our moments of greatest stress --  we forget it, we are tight and constricted and can’t remember the truth of that spaciousness.  The only thing to do is to put a lot of space around this human frailty, too, to let it be ok for Yitzhak and all of us to forget, to rest even this forgetfulness in a sea of divine forgiveness.  .  

Putting all these examples together, we can see how a sense of divine spaciousness can help us to relax and even begin to heal in many difficult situations.   It is like taking whatever hurts and putting it inside a warm bath; the pain melts into the water that surrounds it.    Space is like that.  That’s why time heals.  Time is a kind of space, temporal space.  Esav wants to kill Yaakov at the end of this week’s parsha, but when they meet 21 years later, they make peace.   The space of time has softened the sharp edges, made each hurtful incident seem less significant, and allowed some healing to take place.   Consciously bringing a sense of divine spaciousness to mind can have that effect in a more immediate way.  The problem can relax into a bed of infinite love and be held; that is most of what we need anyway, simply to be held.  

This sense of spaciousness is actually our national cultural treasure.  Avraham -- who was exceptionally good at beholding vastness and could even see 400 years into the future -- was told repeatedly that his descendants would be like the sand of the sea and the stars of the sky.  Normally we understand these images to mean that his offspring would be numerous, but perhaps, in light of Rehovot, we can also interpret them -- the stars and the sand -- as symbols of spaciousness. The promise to Avraham, then, was not just that his descendants would be many, but also that they  -- we -- would carry this sense of divine expansiveness --  the vastness of the sky and sea -- inside us through life, that we would have the capacity, in moments of constriction, to open and turn toward the spaciousness, Rehovot, that is always dwelling inside us.  

As the parsha shows -- and our experience bears out --  more often than not, in this world of limitation and scarcity, we are not aware of this spaciousness.    Yitzhak gets only a glimpse of this other plane.  And yet that glimpse -- if we all keep adding our own tiny flashes -- may be enough to point us in a direction, a direction of redemption and healing and inner and outer peace.   Yitzhak says: Atah hirhiv Hashem lanu.    Now God has expanded space for us.   Yes, there was constriction and tightness, but now -- the eternal now, in this moment of the present, in this moment of presence, in this very moment, right now -- we can open up to the spaciousness and loosen that tightness.   What happens after this Rehovot experience is that Yitzhak makes a covenant of peace with those around him.    Knowledge of this divine spaciousness is what leads to peace inside us and outside us, and ultimately, to the final messianic peace, may it come speedily and in our day.  

Parashat Hayei Sarah: A Post-humous Celebration of Sarah

 I have never understood the Rashi at the beginning of this week’s parsha.   

Rashi is responding to theTorah’s lengthy way of telling us Sarah’s age at death --  vayeheyu hayei Sarah me’ah shanah ve’esrim shanah . . . .  ”Sarah’s lifetime was 100 years and 20 years and 7 years -- this was the span of Sarah’s life” (23:1). Why the repeated use of the word “years” and the extra phrase at the end?  Rashi explains these superfluities to mean that Sarah was a person who was, in terms of sinlessness and beauty, the same at age 100 and at age 20 and at age 7.  All her years were equal in their goodness -- kulan shavin letovah.  

So what bothers me is that we normally think the best way to be in the world is to grow and improve and always be striving and moving forward, not to remain the same throughout our lives.  In Hasidic terms, we are supposed to be more a mahalakh, a walker with two legs, than a malakh, an angel, who has only one leg and stands still; we are supposed to climb the ladder, rung after rung, to keep reaching and changing. 

Avraham is such a mover.  From the moment God instructs him to “go”  -- lekh lekha, he never stops moving, going up and down the land multiple times.    And this physical movement mirrors an intense time of growth for Avraham, as he moves through ten trials, the first of which -- leaving his home -- was far easier than the last -- sacrificing his son, showing that Avraham had indeed made immense progress in his spiritual journey.  

But Rashi seems to be telling us there is another way to be as well, another way that is equally praiseworthy -- to stay the same, not to try to alter what is already perfect from the start, but simply to remain who you already are at all times, perfect and beautiful and pure as you always have been since childhood.   Sarah represents this truth.  While Avraham is running around welcoming guests, hither and thither, so much to do, no time to do it, where is Sarah?  Inside the tent.   Staked and steadfast and unmoving, in the tent.   Things are already perfect.  She has nowhere to run.  

These two ways of being -- the one of movement and the other of staying put -- are not at odds with each other here, but perfect complements.    Sarah’s steadiness soothes Avraham’s restlessness, and his activity gives energy, actualization and purpose to her calm.   They are a team.   Avraham is the 6 workdays to Sarah’s shabbat.    

To take it one step further, Sarah seems to represent Presence, both human presence and divine Presence   -- the feminine Shekhinah -- in the life of the family.   The tent she is associated with comes up again in this week’s parsha, as Yitzhak brings Rivka, his new bride, into it and is comforted over his mother’s death.  Amidst the flurry of verbose words and activity in the story of the servant’s search for this wife for Yitzhak, this moment in the tent is one of intense presence.  It is as if the world stops for a moment, and it is just the two of them, Yitzhak and Rivka, present to each other in a loving, comforting way, an experience that Yitzhak probably hasn’t had since the loss of his mother.  

Now this tent itself -- Sarah’s tent -- has certain miraculous qualities associated with it; according to tradition, while Sarah was alive, a cloud hovered around it at all times, the Shabbat light lasted the entire week, and the bread dough was always “blessed,” successful and plentiful.   These qualities are reminiscent of another tent of divine presence, the mishkan (tabernacle), with its hovering cloud of glory,  the eternal light of the ner tamid , and the plentiful and everpresent showbread.  Read in this light, when Avraham tells the angels last week that Sarah is “in the tent,” it is a way of saying that she is with God, immersed in divine presence.   

While Avraham heard God’s voice speak to him many times, tradition has it that Sarah was actually the greater of the two in ruach hakadosh, prophetic insight (see Rashi on 21:12).  Indeed, according to one interpretation, Sarah’s other name, Yiskah, is related to sokhah, meaning “seeing,” because she was a “seer” from a young age.   

So Sarah and her tent and her connection to the divine presence must have been an important support for Avraham in his journey of faith.   As Rabbi Shlomo Riskin has pointed out, after Sarah dies, Avraham no longer hears directly from God or experiences any further divine trials; with the loss of Sarah, he has lost some of his access to the divine.  He turns now to more ordinary pursuits, like getting his son married, remarrying himself and having many more children, all born -- not, as with Sarah, through miraculous intervention -- but in the ordinary way. 

Circling back to the first Rashi of the parsha, the idea that Sarah lived a life not of change, but of sameness, seems more appealing now, a piece of the divine.   While it is true that the world we live in and each of us in it is broken and in dire need of healing and growing -- a truth that Avraham carried so well --  it is at the very same moment also true that the world is already perfect just as it is and no change is needed.   We are all already perfect, all born perfect and beautiful just as God wants us and none of that ever leaves us.    No matter how messed up we end up, there is still that perfect stillness inside us that needs no healing or change at all.  And so both the restless seeking and the peace are true, one on the human plane -- where we can see the mess and see the great improvements that are possible -- and the other on some higher plane, a place where we feel the perfection of this divinely created world so clearly that we cry out in praise “halleluyah!” despite the brokenness.   This feeling is the essence of Shabbat; on Shabbat, there are no problems that need solving; nothing needs to be changed at all; all is perfect just as it is and we can stand as still as Sarah did.

So we need this quality of Sarah’s, this sense of not changing.  But of course, Sarah alone would not have done much good in the world either.   She would have remained in her tent and the goodness would not have spread.   The combination is ideal, not just in couples, but also inside ourselves.   We each have both of these aspects.  We have a part of us that yearns to change and fix and improve ourselves, to be constantly moving forward; this part sees that so much is not yet right in our world and in ourselves and cannot rest.   This is a beautiful part, an honored part, an essential part.  But it cannot work alone.  It needs to also know the truth of Sarah; it needs to learn to rest in Sarah’s tent, to rest in the knowledge that in spite of the mess, everything is also already just right.   There is peace here, and from this place of peace, the part that yearns for change can act, not out of desperation and panic, but out of love and peace and presence.