Parashat Ki Tetze: Returning Lost Parts

Hashavat Aveidah.  This mitzvah -- to return lost objects to their owners ---appears in this week’s parsha (Deuteronomy 22) as well as in Parashat Mishpatim and is the subject of much detailed halakhic discussion among the rabbis.   While not taking away from the concrete aspect of the mitzvah, I want to offer an additional, more personal, psychological reading.     

Returning is a big deal to us.  Here we are, in the season of return, teshuva, thinking about how to return --  to God, to ourselves, to something prior, already in us.  

There is also the Messianic return that we all pray for, a return of exiles to the Holy Land and a return of God’s presence to dwell among us, an ingathering of people and God, perhaps a return to the perfect harmony of the Garden of Eden, our first place of banishment.  

So returning looms large in our collective consciousness.   Surely the returning of lost objects is connected in some way to this larger context of return.  

Indeed, the Torah describes the lost possessions in our parsha -- a sheep or an ox are the examples -- as nidahim.   This word is usually translated here as “gone astray” as one would imagine a sheep would do, but the word normally bears the meaning of banished, exiled, thrust away, cast out or neglected.   Isaiah 27:13 describes a future day when the exiled will all return from Assyria and Egypt, and it uses the term nidahim, meaning “those who have been cast out.”   

So in the hoped-for future of Isaiah there will ultimately be a return of the nidahim, those who have been cast out, and here, in our parsha, there is a mitzvah of beginning to do that work ourselves, to return the nidahim.     

What is this work?  What is it that has been lost and needs returning?  What needs returning -- and maybe this is also part of the process of teshuva -- are the lost parts of ourselves, the parts that have been cast out and exiled (IFS therapy actually calls them “exiles”) over the years.     

The Torah says here that the first task is to see these lost parts and not hide them from yourself, not ignore them and cover them over (vehitalamta), as we normally do.  The first task is to really see them and acknowledge their existence.   These are parts that are well-hidden and we are adept at ignoring them, so that seeing them is a task in and of itself.    It is also a relief.  Parts that have been ignored and exiled -- when they experience a little bit of light and attention -- there is already a relaxing that takes place.  So it makes sense that the first job in returning them is simply to see them.   

What are these exiled parts of us and how did they get cast out?   The Torah hints here at the back story.   Just before this mitzvah of return is the mitzvah of the ben sorer umoreh, the defiant and rebellious son (Deuteronomy 21: 18-21).   The instruction here, which, according to the rabbis, was never actually carried out, is that parents who are unable to control their adolescent, bring the child to the elders of the town where he is stoned for being rebellious and defiant and for being a glutton and a drunkard.     This is, in a way, a description of the socialization process of all children.   The parts of them that are considered anti-social -- their rebellious, self-centered and needy parts--  get stoned and eliminated in order to allow the children to function in society.  Otherwise, they might end up committing crimes worthy of the death penalty, Rashi explains, pointing to the connection between this mitzvah and the one that follows (about not leaving the corpse of a criminal hanging overnight).  In other words, there is some necessary curbing that happens in child-raising, in order to ensure proper socialization.

But there is a price.  Often, the baby is thrown out with the bath water.  Rebelliousness and defiance of authority are also tied to qualities of strength, courage, independence of thought, assertiveness, and an ability to seek truth and justice.    A large appetite -- being a glutton and a drunkard without limits -- is also related to having joie de vivre, enthusiasm, and a kind of freedom and abandon and ability to live in the moment.   There is also in this large hunger a deep neediness which is the essence of human nature, a kind of vulnerability and openness and even generosity.  So all that socialization, the need to control and discipline and curb these parts, makes us lose essential pieces of ourselves.  Inhibition and worry about discipline and pleasing authority take over so that there is also a loss of innocence and genuineness, the kind of purity of love expressed by a young child without pretense or thought of how it will be received.   

So that is how some of our most precious parts are lost.  A story is told about a child who had a dog that she played with and loved very much.  The dog, however, made a mess of the house and pooped one too many times on the parents’ best carpet so that first the dog was relegated to the outdoors, and eventually was banished altogether from the home.  The child mourned the dog for a long time but after a while forgot about its existence, until one day, walking along the road, the child encounters the dog, dirty and old and uncared for, and recognizes this old friend and begins to clean the dog up and bring the dog back into her life.  It is the same with parts; some of the sweetest, most innocent ones, were just too messy for the world to deal with when we were young, and so they got thrown out and we forgot about them.  But they are still there, like the Torah’s cast out sheep, wondering around, looking for a home inside us.   The mitzvah of returning lost items is the mitzvah of returning these exiled and abandoned aspects of ourselves back into our own homes, our selves.  

The process of return can be slow.  The Torah says that sometimes the distance to the owner will be far and it will take time until he comes to retrieve his lost item.    The rabbis use the term ye’ush, despair, to refer to how a person sometimes feels about a lost item; he gives up hope of ever having it back and so he does not actively seek it.  Returning lost parts is much the same.  There can be despair at the possibility of return.  It may take a long time to even begin to see the part again and believe in the possibility of reintegrating it.  .  

But this process of returning lost parts, though slow, is redemptive, healing work; it is a kind of teshuva.   We are bringing back in that which was exiled and lost, and thereby returning ourselves to our original wholeness.   All parts of ourselves are gifts from God.  We are only whole when they are all restored.  The world is only whole and redeemed when we are all whole.   Kabbalistically there is a notion that God Himself is in exile from certain parts of Himself and that our role in this world is to help God reunite those parts.    As beings with the divine image inside us, we do that -- we contribute to God’s own wholeness -- by returning and bringing home the nidahim, those that have been cast out of our own selves.  

Parashat Shoftim: On Becoming Whole

We come into this world with a faint memory of having once been part of something much larger than ourselves.    We have a vague sense of incompleteness, that we are missing something essential.  We are hungry, but not for food, never quite satisfied, always yearning.  We are deeply and relentlessly lonely, even when we are connected to others in meaningful ways.

“All things are lacking [haserim],” says the Sefat Emet -- everything has this emptiness at its core --  “and”, he continues, “they can only come to completeness [hashlemut] by becoming close to Him, may He be Blessed.”  This is what the verse Tamim tehiyeh im Hashem Elokekha (Devarim 18:13) means.   Tamim means whole, perfect or complete so that the verse, according to the Sefat Emet, comes to read: “You will (only) become whole WITH Hashem your God.” You will always have a certain hole, but if you are WITH God, then you will be complete, the hole will be filled; you will finally relax into some sense of wholeness.

We normally cover over this hole, this sense of “missing something,” with many clever tricks, so that there are times we don’t even feel the ache.  We are busy.   We are anxious.   We arrange and manipulate and control things to make it all just right, always trying to reach for some hoped-for sense of peace and wholeness inside. If I just do this, then I will feel better.   This is our witchcraft and our magic, our attempt to fix with human means what can only be fixed by connection to God.  The Torah calls this way the way of the nations -- witchcraft and sorcery and divination -- and contrasts it to what God has offered us --  the option to be tamim with God and feel true completeness.  

But before we can feel that wholeness, we have to feel the hole.  This is very important.   The hole is actually the doorway to the wholeness and there is no other way in.  It is precisely the yearning and the loneliness that remind us there is more; they want something; we feel the whisper of their wanting tugging at the edge of our consciousness.  And their wanting is itself the key.    Tzama likha nafshi.  My soul is thirsty for You.   When we say that, when we sing those words, when we articulate the thirst, we already begin to feel the connection.  In the hole is the whole.   

We have to feel the hole, and that is necessarily painful, a kind of heartbreak, a tearing inside, like how we feel when our children leave us (my son went off to Israel for his second gap year this week) -- there is a giant terrible hole of missing them, and this hole, what it tells us, is not just how much we miss them, but also how much we love them. The pain has truth and connection and wholeness built into it.  

When we go deep enough into the pain of incompleteness, we find out that it knows something about completeness, and somehow has the power to bring us there.  Lefum tzara, agra. According to the suffering is the reward. Usually this refers to Torah work -- the harder you work, the more you get out of it, which is surely true.  But there is another meaning, an emotional meaning --- the more we suffer, the more we allow the feelings that hurt -- the pain of loneliness and yearning and incompleteness -- the greater the reward on the flip side -- the greater the connection and the love that come right back at us. It is like a mirror; the greater the pain, the greater the love that is called forth into the universe.   

There is a part of us that knows about this love, that knows of its infinite and eternal quality and of its ability to hold all things; this part suffers and thirsts as a way to remind us to bring that love into ourselves, to live by its light, and through that love to become truly tamim, whole and pure and perfect, already perfect.   

Parashat Re'eh: The Poor in Your Midst

 The most vulnerable in society are a primary concern in this week’s parsha -- there is a constant refrain of taking care of the poor, the widow, the orphan, the male and female servant and the Levite, who, because he did not have a land portion, was dependent on others for his survival.

This concern is a common theme in the Torah.    Our history as a nation begins as slaves in part as a way to sensitize us to the most vulnerable among us..  We are a nation charged with care of the vulnerable.

Without taking away from the very practical ramifications of these injunctions and their essential function in society -- how we need to “open our hands” and help those in need, financially and any other way we can, especially in these dire times, when some are suffering more than others -- without taking away from this emphasis, I want to offer a reading of this injunction that is more personal and internal, informed by a type of psychotherapeutic technique called IFS, Internal Family Systems therapy.

The Torah repeatedly refers to the poor and the Levite as being beshe’arekha,  “in your gates,” and bekirbekha, “in your midst” or “inside you.”   It also calls them “yours” -- aniyekha, evyonkha, “your poor,” “your destitute.”     What if we read these terms hyperliterally as referring to “your” own poor inside you, the poor within the gates of your own self?   

These are the parts of yourself that have become impoverished over the years for lack of attention and support and love, the parts that have been rejected and exiled because they are not valued in our personal and communal culture.  They are the neediest parts of ourselves, the insecurities, the hurt places, the old wounds, our particular vulnerabilities.    We don’t like these parts of ourselves and we usually hide them or push them away, thereby starving them and making them even more needy.    

Lo ta’azvenu, don’t abandon him, the Torah says about the Levite.  And, with reference to the poor -- don’t harden your heart or shut your hand.  Don’t keep shutting these parts of yourself away, hardening yourself against them and abandoning them to their exiled places within you.  Rather, what is needed is unequivocal openness -- patoah tiftah et yadekha lo -- open your hand to him.   We normally understand this phrase to mean offering financial assistance, but the language of an open hand allows for a broader interpretation -- open yourself completely to her, to the poor, rejected one inside you; offer her a hand of welcome and greeting and assistance and love; offer her the arms of an embrace, a welcoming back into the self.    

Can you bring up compassion for these parts of yourself and feel how much they need this warmth and openness and embrace?   They are like the real needy on the outside; they cry and they hurt and they need care, but they are not heard; they are told to pull it together; their hurts and needs are minimized and invalidated; others, they are told, have more pressing needs.   

When you offer assistance to these needy inside you, says the Torah, do it dei mahsoro asher yehsar lo, “enough to fill what he is lacking or needing.”    There is a temptation to look from the outside and determine when it is enough, to have an attitude of boundaries and limitations when caring for the needy, either inside or outside you.   Ok.  I’ll hear you now, one might say to this needy part, but only for so long.  You can cry now, but that’s it. Then we get back to work.  Your needs seem endless, like a bottomless pit, so we will just close off the support at some point.  No, the Torah says.  Fill what is haser lo,  what is missing for him.   This is a subjective matter.  It’s not what you on the outside think is enough.  It is a question of his feeling that it is over, that the hole is filled.   That hole may be larger than you think is appropriate.  Don’t stop too soon. Don’t shut down the tears and the pain and say -- enough.  You are done.  No, be open until the very end. Dei mahsoro asher yehsar lo.  As much as he needs.

Rashi explains the phrase asher yehsar lo to mean that even if what the poor person needs is a horse to ride on and a servant to run before him -- even then, you should fulfill this need.    I love this choice of horse and servant because it illustrates for us concretely what the poor really need -- a sense of pride, a sense of mattering in the world.  A horse to ride on like Mordecai in Shushan with all the pomp and fanfare.  Here comes an important person.  That is what our needy parts yearn for, too, a sense of mattering, of respect, of being honored and important in our own inner culture.  They have been dismissed for so long. Now they want a parade; they want to know that the king -- our self, that larger self that is connected to the divine -- considers them worthy.   

And indeed, what one finds when one turns toward such needy parts with openness and gentleness is that they turn out to deserve such a parade.  There is some hidden glory that we have locked away inside us because it has been ridiculed and rejected in the past, but oftentimes, these parts are the very best of us, the gold nuggets, the parts that indeed should ride forth on a horse into the world with pride and confidence. 

This whole shift in attitude towards the vulnerable can only happen in the glow of the divine light, bamakom asher Yivhar Hashem, in the place where God chooses to rest His name.  This week’s parsha emphasizes that one must come to the dwelling place of God to rejoice for the holidays, and that when one comes for such rejoicing, one should do so together with all of one’s most vulnerable -- wife, children, servants,  poor, and Levites.    Before God, all are made welcome; before God, it becomes clear that all are indeed children of the divine; there is room here, a capacity to hold all this brokenness that often feels beyond our human capacities.   And, in this holding of all pieces of ourselves -- and perhaps only in such holding of all parts -- is true simchah, joy.  

In such divine space, there is not a strong distinction between the outer and the inner realms.  The poor inside us need care and the poor outside our door also need care, and the flow of warmth and openness and generosity flows out and in, and in and out, and all are one.    Perhaps the Torah meant to refer to both all along.