Parashat Pinchas: Getting Beyond Praise or Blame

“If there are two people and one of them honors you and the other disparages you, are they the same in your eyes or not?”   

This is the question that the kabbalist Rabbi Yitzhak of Acco reports in the name of Rabbi Avner as being the essential question of equanimity, a state necessary in order to continue to higher levels of mystical contemplation.   (Meirat Eynayim Dt. 11:22, text translated by Rabbi Meir Sendor, from whom I learned this text in a Jewish Meditation class through Tal Orot).  

Do you worry about what other people think of you -- whether they praise or blame you, honor or judge you?      Does it affect you in a deep way, disturb you or thrill you?

For most of us, of course, the answer is yes.   It is very difficult to get to this state of peace, of really not caring what others think.   How do we even approach it?    The first step toward equanimity is learning to adhere or attach oneself more completely to God (dveikut), says Rabbi Yitzhak..   He teaches a divine name meditation as a way to cultivate this attachment to God in daily life, a meditation on the four letters of God’s sacred name, imagining them visually and seeing them expand endlessly to encompass the entire world. 

Our sense of the letters of God’s name as being embedded in the universe and in ourselves is what will gradually lead us away from this worry about what other people think of us and toward the equanimity of knowing what really matters, of being attached to our own ultimate Source.   

I learned this teaching this week, and amazingly, the parsha has a very similar message hidden in its letters.   A new census is taken and the count is reported in a strange fashion -- each progenitor is named and then his name is turned into a family name.  So, for the first one, Reuven’s son Hanokh, for instance, the Torah says Hanokh, mishpahat hahanokhi (Num.26:5).  Rashi points out that in each case the letters that are added to the person’s name are the two letters of  God’s (short) name, yud and heh, one before and one after.  החנוכי .

Why are these letters of God added to each person’s name?    This is God’s way of testifying to the nations of the world, Rashi explains, concerning the purity of these descendants.    The nations of the world were judging us and saying -- the Egyptians had control over their bodies; surely they had control over their wives!    Their children were not really their own!   But no, here, God, by placing His name on either side of their names, puts this nasty rumor to rest.   He embraces them with His name, thereby protecting them from external judgment and criticism.

That is also what Rabbi Yitzhak of Acco was pointing to -- the sense that our connection to God, our ability to feel that God’s name really surrounds us and is inside us and all around us, that His Presence is right here, -- our ability to do that is what will ultimately shield us from the winds of external reputation and judgment and honor that tend to carry us away from our true selves, from God, and from any feeling of peace or equanimity.    The more we can feel God in us and all around us, the more we don’t care what people say.   We are holding on for dear life to those divine letters, because it is they, and they alone, that sustain us.   All the rest -- what this person said or how that person perceives me -- all of that fades.   What stands tall are the two letters of God that, like angels, stand guard on either side of us.   May we feel their presence. 

Parashat Hukat-Balak: Going with the Flow

Venatan meimav.  The rock will give its waters.   This is how God instructs Moshe to get water for the thirsty people, how He wants things to work in His world: The rock will give its waters. You just have to ask for them, to speak gently to the rock, and the rock will unlock its store and surrender its treasures.  In the process, the people would then see and understand that God’s world has every single thing we need at all times, ready to be delivered to us just for the seeing and the asking and the trusting. 

It is all there, ready to flow, if only we can go with the flow.  

But Moshe, in this instance, is in an angry hard state.  (We know from this.)  His energy is not a go with the flow energy but a fighting energy.  He speaks, but not with gentleness; he speaks harshly and sarcastically, with anger and rebuke and bite, both directed at the people -- Listen up, you rebels -- and also at the rock -- are we really going to get water from this rock? Instead of using his rod as a tool for gathering the people, he uses it as a weapon. He raises up his hand in anger and strength and uses force to open up that rock, hitting it with the rod not once, but twice, with seemingly no pause between, twice in quick succession, getting out his anger and trying to force both rock and people into submission and to establish some control over an unmanageable situation.  The rock doesn’t gently “give” its waters here.  Moshe uses force, and the rock responds in kind -- as if a wound has been opened --  and copious water comes gushing out.  

It works.  The people do receive their water.  And the truth is that force often does get the job done.  The rock is forced to submit.   People can be forced to do certain things, even against their will.  The world can be forced to produce in an unnatural way.  We can fight with ourselves and force ourselves to feel and act in a certain way.  

But at what price?  These are mei merivah  -- “fighting” waters.  We know what those taste like.  We live most of our lives in such waters, always forcing and trying to control the situation -- the outcome or the feeling or the way someone will react.   We desperately want to make sure it all works out well -- or at least “well” as we see it -- and so we take control and force things to go in a certain direction.  The more resistance, the harder we push; if it doesn’t work with one hit, we hit again.  This doesn’t feel great.  We are in constant war, divided against ourselves and each other.  Forcing is a fighting mentality.  We get no peace this way.

What we don’t understand is that there is a natural, divine flow to this world we live in and if we surrendered to it and put our energies into going with the flow and allowing and encouraging the unfolding rather than fighting it, we would achieve the same, maybe better, results, and we would also have a measure of peace, a sense of being at one with God, ourselves and each other.  

The rock really does want to give up its waters.   What is required is for us to really really trust -- that’s why God sees this as a failure in helping the people develop greater faith --  that the universe holds us and that there is Someone in charge and that everything we need is right here, before our eyes, no lack, nothing missing in God’s universe.  To trust is not to stop acting.  Moshe still needs to gather the people and speak to the rock.   We still have to act, but it is a different kind of act, gentler, subtler, more flowing and trusting, an act of allowing and encouraging the unfoldment that is all right here, just waiting for us to let go.  

Guest Blog by Medad Lytton: Parshat Chukat-Balak

Before I begin, I would like to thank my mother for graciously allowing me to write a guest blog on her blog this week and for her Torah which constantly inspires me. I would also like to to thank all my teachers at Yeshivat Maale Gilboa where I studied this year. Particularly, I am grateful to Rav Elisha Anscelovits whose ideas about legal realism in halkha deeply influenced this drasha.

Parshat Chukat begins with the laws of tumat meit, the laws governing contact with death, a powerful and negative experience. In the Torah, such contact would likely occur through the passing of a loved one, on the battlefield, or through the discovery of an abandoned cadaver. The laws of tumat meit provide a framework for navigating this experience. 

After a difficult experience, we often suppress our negative emotions. However, sometimes we simply need to allow ourselves to feel hurt, angry, or sad to begin the process of healing. The Torah classifies the person who touches the corpse as “unclean,” tamei, helping the person name their pain and accept it rather than suppressing it. Emotional cleansing begins with allowing oneself to acknowledge feeling unclean.

The Torah also understands that this reckoning requires time. A person who has become unclean through contact with a corpse undergoes a healing process of seven days in which her status as unclean prevents her from reengaging with normal life. This separation allows the person to confront and process the experience uninhibited by distractions. It is only in a space of uncleanness, that a person can be truly cleansed.

            To be cleansed, the unclean individual must be sprinkled with water that has been mixed with the ashes of a red heifer. This ritual further helps the unclean individual accept and release their uncleanness. Given that the water is filled with ashes, the sprinkling is most likely not a cleansing experience. Rather, being doused in sooty water is dirtying. The cleansing comes only from the physical experience of wiping away the ashes, as is evidenced by the fact that an individual is only pronounced “clean” after she has bathed. Once again, the Torah recognizes that to feel clean, we must first allow ourselves to be and feel dirty, both physically and emotionally.

In the Torah, the “water of cleansing” (mei niddah) is itself unclean. This paradox is mirrored by the language that the Torah uses to describe the process of cleansing. Hu yitchatah bo, “he shall be cleansed in it [the sooty water],” (Numbers 19:12). The word yitchata comes from the root chata which can mean both “sin” or “cleanse.” The Torah understands that allowing ourselves to recognize and engage with a negative experience such as sin rather than suppressing it, is what allows for cleansing.

            This understanding of the process of cleansing via the red heifer sheds light on the classic rabbinic paradox regarding these laws. The water of the red heifer cleanses the unclean individual, but everyone involved in the process of producing the water becomes unclean. This is not a paradox when one understands that the ashy water is not a vehicle for cleaning but a vehicle for feeling unclean in order to become clean. Those involved in making this water are participants in a process of confronting -- not erasing -- the pain of encountering death and are therefore touched by it, becoming unclean as well.

            The laws of the red heifer are often characterized in rabbinic and contemporary writing as examples of unexplainable divine fiats that one must simply follow because God decreed them. This insistence that one must obey these rules even without an understanding of their purpose points to the nature of this process as truly transformative, yet counter to human instinct. We naturally try to free ourselves from painful experiences by trying to escape or hide from them, but in the end, we must drench ourselves in them to wipe them away, to become “clean” again, and to move forward.