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Rachel
O Lord when the wind does blow
Let me remember You
Uvo tidbakun
When arranging threatens to overwhelm, when the phone rings and the notifications ding and the children cry and the soup boils over
Let me stick to You
Uvo tidbakun
When fear strikes and my heart beats wildly and my whole body shakes in terror
Let me remember You
Uvo tidbakun
When I relive an incident and say to myself: you are such an idiot; when I am caught in a cycle of self-aggression and self abandonment,
Let me stick to You
Uvo tidbakun
When I am filled with irritation and rage with no understanding and no outlet, when I suffer the nauseating dissonance of stuffing it all down
Let me remember You
Uvo tidbakun
When my belly sinks with hurt and shame, when I feel that I do not matter,
Let me stick to You.
Uvo tidbakun.
When I feel the ache of loneliness and exclusion, of not belonging anywhere in this universe of Yours
Let me remember You
Uvo tidbakun
When I fall into the pit of despair, when life feels impossible to live
Let me stick with You.
Uvo Tidbakun.
When evil and cruelty are all I can see; when I am faithless and do not believe in Your love,
Let me remember You
Uvo tidbakun.
Let me remember You
And know that
Even in those moments
Precisely in those moments
I have access to You
To the peace and love and space
That are You, to the rest
That is You; I can rest here now
And know You are holding me
It is not that You save me,
But that, remembering You,
Sticking with You,
Staying, returning, staying
I save myself
Again and again
Uvo Tidbakun.
O Lord, please
Give me the strength to
Stay with You through the flood
Of my humanity.
Here’s the thing: we all make mistakes, sometimes with harmful consequences for ourselves and others. Mostly we don’t make these mistakes out of ill will or an evil nature, but simply because we are human beings, inclined to error and imperfection by our very nature. Our relationships are messy; we try; we do our best, but often there is still hurt, still harm, still wrong even. What are we to do with ourselves and each other in light of this pervasive imperfection?
There is a choice. You can take these parts of us that don’t measure up, that sometimes do the “wrong” thing despite meaning well -- so you can take these parts and feed them to the dogs -- allow the harsh climate of our inner critics to hold sway and attack them. Or you can provide them with some shelter, a place of refuge and acceptance and compassion.
The Torah opts for the second alternative in creating the ir miklat, the city of refuge, for the accidental killer. Such a killer is an extreme example of how our fallibility as humans can cause great harm, and the Torah instructs us that we should be careful to take care of people who make such grave mistakes, that we need to create and provide easy access to places where such humans can take shelter from the go’el hadam, the victim’s avenging relative.
We have a similar choice on a daily basis internally. How do we treat the parts of us that mess things up, that make mistakes and don’t do everything “right,” often causing accidental harm? These parts carry a heavy burden of guilt and shame. Our tendency is to allow our internal critics -- our own personal go’el hadam -- to harshly attack them, causing still more pain and shame.
But there is another way -- to cultivate a kind of ir miklat inside us, a place -- perhaps our heart -- where we can send these imperfect parts to go and rest from the perpetual attack of the go’el hadam -- a place of forgiveness, a place where there is permission to be human in all our messiness and still be held in God’s love. Because the cities of refuge, according to the Torah, were Levite cities, and the Levi’im, scattered around the country in their own cities, were a tribe without land, a tribe whose inheritance was God Himself, a people whose lives were fully dedicated to facilitating the connection between heaven and earth in the Temple, and perhaps also in these mini-temple cities of theirs, places of sanctuary for the vulnerable.
And so part of what this ir miklat provides is a reminder of our never severed connection to the divine, of how we are held, even in our worst moments, in the face of our largest mistakes and human imperfections, even then, how we are still held in love in a sheltered container. This is the message of the ir miklat, that God continues to embrace and shelter us in our errors. We can find such refuge at all times inside us, in returning to our heart, returning to our connection to the divine.
Perhaps at this moment you have a part that is shouting loudly, angrily -- but those parts need to improve! They can’t just be sheltered; they have to be judged and criticized in order to stop being so terrible, to learn to be better. They need to face the consequences of their actions, not to be coddled in a compassionate shelter. Let them out of that city so we can have a word with them! These words are from the go’el hadam, your own harsh internal avenger, and the go’el hadam does have his place. He is not evil. Note that his name includes the root for ge’ulah, redemption. What he wants is to save you -- to make you better -- and also to save the world, to bring justice and redemption to the world. That is all good, and we can admire his good intentions and passion.
But harshness is not the way to deal with these vulnerable down-trodden parts; they already know they aren’t perfect and beating them up further does nothing but send them into a cave of shame. Let the go’el hadam take up a chair and sit outside your internal ir miklat. Let him watch what happens to these imperfect parts as they are taken in by the welcoming shelter of this Levite city. And let them see how God is present here, how God is called forth to be with us in our worst moments, how in our very human struggles and mistakes, we somehow create a tunnel to reach another plane, how we surrender and open to the divine in a new way, and how, here, above all, in this city of shelter, here is where the ultimate ge’ulah happens. Here we are redeemed in our very messiness; here we learn that love surpasses such error and still holds us, just exactly as we are. If this is not redemption, what is.
Included in this week’s parsha is the Olat Tamid -- the burnt offering that was sacrificed on the sanctuary altar twice a day, every day. Tamid means “always” -- not just now and then, but all the time, regularly -- reminding us of the importance of constancy and steadfastness in our connection to God.
The verse inexplicably connects this particular offering to Mount Sinai, saying that we should bring the olat tamid “that was done on Mount Sinai” (Numbers 28:6). Commentators have various explanations -- that it refers to the practice days before the erection of the Tabernacle or to a sacrifice that was in fact brought at the time of Mount Sinai -- but perhaps there is also a metaphorical meaning here, a connection between the theme of steadfastness implied by tamid and a mountain such as Mount Sinai, the Israelites’ most recent and prominent experience of mountains. Perhaps the message is -- if you want to understand how to do this tamid, learn from the mountain; be a mountain.
A mountain is nothing if not steadfast. It stands still through all types of weather, stable and constant through rain and wind and sun, simply staying the course. That’s what it means to have this tamid quality in relation to God, as well. To be an olah, to reach up, like the verb alah, “to rise up,” to reach up to connect to God and to keep that connection going, to stay with it through whatever external or internal weather we experience -- through life challenges and sickness and health and emotional ups and downs -- just to stay the course, to keep stable like a mountain in our unwavering connection to heaven.
Shiviti Hashem lenegdi tamid. I place God before me at all times, tamid, says the Psalmist, always. Do we need to place God before us -- isn’t God already there? Yes, and yet we need to continually be placing Him there. Part of this tamid quality involves the constant re-awakening to God’s presence before us, a constant re-remembering the mountain-like stillness that is at our center, a constant rising up again to connect -- with each new in-breath, a new start, a new rising up. Our connection, our home, is always there, and yet we need to continually place it, place God, before us, continually remind ourselves, twice a day bring an olah, twice a day say the Shma, at each moment re-awaken to this eternal stillness. Our minds and hearts swirl with activity and busyness and worry and fear and so much human vulnerability; we are distracted from this truth, from this ner tamid, eternal light, that always flickers in us, is always connected. Only when we are perfectly still, like a mountain, do we remember.
Each moment of remembering is a kind of teshuva, a return to knowing our tamid connection. We are given a thousand opportunities a day to return, to be steadfast, to remember. Life seems so complicated to us, but is really so simple; just to keep returning home, to be constant in our devotion, in our connection, in our knowledge of the divine. It’s ok that we forget; it just gives us more opportunities to remember, to re-ignite the olah flame and burn brighter, more completely, as was the special trait of the olah, to burn up entirely on the altar.
Something happens in these tiny moments of returning, some tiny glimmer of some other realm. It’s as if when we, on our human plane, are tamid, we get a taste, on the divine plane, of le’olam, of eternity. The word tamid, “always,” is used almost exclusively for humans, and the word le’olam, “forever,” almost exclusively for God (think: ki le’olam hasdo, “for His loving kindness is forever”). But the two are similar -- “always” and “eternity.” “Always” is our human approximation of “eternity,” an attempt to enter that space beyond time, to be so still and steadfast that we are still here and still here and still here, so that we are actually so present that we enter some other “here” where time stretches out before us with no end; we are in divine time, no time. Our ability to “stay” opens up eternity for us. This is part of what is meant to happen on Shabbat. We pause; we are still and present in a steadfast, “always,” mountain way; and we get a taste of olam haba, the world to come, the divine world that is “always coming,” the future merging with the present through our simple act of standing still and remembering, zachor.
To be tamid on some level seems impossible to us humans. We can’t promise or even hope to ever be “always” anything; we are notoriously fallible and unpredictable and unreliable. We are not mountains and not meant to be mountains. But the olat tamid was not really an “always” offering. It was brought twice a day. To be tamid, steadfast in this way, is to commit not to something we can’t do -- constant, every moment presence -- but simply to keep returning every day, to know that we will leave, but also to know that we can remember and return, become a mountain, again and again, and that this is enough; this, too, this momentary re-awakening to divine presence, done a thousand times over, this, too, is an entryway to eternity.
Click here to listen to this parsha-themed meditation.
There is a flow
That wants to pour through you
Like a drinking glass
Filling with liquid.
Don’t block the channel
Your arms crossed
Every muscle tensed
In defense against.
Rest.
Unwind the bind.
Align.
Upturn your palms
In a gesture
of perfect surrender
And receive
Like dawn’s early dew
The soft yellow flow
That wants only
For you to know
Your own wholeness.
On the verse:
מה טובו אהליך יעקב משכנותיך ישראל
How good are your tents, O Yaakov, your dwelling places, O Israel!
(Numbers 24:5).
Come relax into the goodness of the divine sanctuary. To listen to the meditation, click here.
The atmosphere in the Israelite camp after Miriam dies is as hard as a rock. The waters dry up and all that is left is a hard rock -- no flow, no connection, just strife. The people fight with Moshe and attack him, and then Moshe responds in kind, speaking in a denigrating, sarcastic way to the people -- listen up, you rebels -- and expressing his frustration and anger by striking the rock repeatedly. Even the waters that then emerge from this rock are not waters of flow and peace, but waters of strife, mei merivah.
This rock symbolizes the hardness that has settled over the camp since Miriam’s death. It is the hardness of having a strong feeling and not allowing it, of hardening one’s heart to not feel the pain. For there is no break after Miriam’s death, no time taken to mourn her, to feel what was surely a devastating loss. Later, when Aharon dies, the people are said to “cry” over him for thirty days. Perhaps the lesson was learned-- if you don’t let the tears flow, if you force them to dry up too quickly, then there is no water, no flow in the camp, then hearts turn to stone and you have to work to get the water back. Grief has to be fully felt and digested.
And so, here they are, after Miriam’s death, with hardness and strife at the center of the camp, some unexpressed emotion stirring up the people. This happens to us all the time. We are suddenly inexplicably irritable or downcast; everything bothers us. Often, underneath that “inexplicable” outburst is a strong emotion that has been blocked, that has not been fully felt, so that we are left with a rock of hardness in our center, all dried up, a hard spot that gnaws at us, constantly irritating our innards, like a kidney stone. Or maybe we feel this hardness as tension, as a holding energy inside us, holding tight and hard against feeling some vulnerability, and so, feeling instead the hard knot of tension -- a little rock -- that arises to block the hurt.
The question is what to do with this rock. Moshe tries the harsh way, the way of the rock itself perhaps, to be angry and aggressive toward that part in an effort to force it to change, to stop being so dry and “hard” or difficult. This, too, is familiar. When we are in a difficult place emotionally, we tend to manhandle the situation, to try to fix the difficulty through sheer force of will, through self aggression, through a critical judgmental stance which is a essentially a way of hitting ourselves, of hitting the rock inside us -- you are a terrible person for acting and feeling this way; this anger you feel is unreasonable; you have no right to be irritable or sad or anxious; you have so much to be grateful for; stop wallowing and just pull it together! What an idiot!
This harsh aggressive stance toward the hard rocks inside us may work for a time or partially, but the hardness remains, and now, in addition to the original hurt, there is an added sense of being invalidated and shamed for the difficulty. Such a rock, when hit, will perhaps yield water, but begrudgingly and inefficiently, through additional pain -- Moshe had to strike the rock twice to get water. There is a certain irony here; we try to hit a rock to soften it when what it needs is a soft touch to help it melt, not harden further.
There is another way, and it is God’s way, a gentler way. God instructs Moshe and Aharon -- vedibartem el hasela -- you should speak to the rock. Not speak about the rock or against the rock, as the people later do against Moshe and God -- veyedaber ha’am be-Elokim uveMoshe (21:5), speaking be someone, “against” them -- but here instead the suggestion is to speak el, directly “to” the rock, as God speaks regularly to Moshe, panim el panim (Ex 33:1!), face to face, intimately, tenderly, with respect and a sense of connectedness, a meeting of minds, a relational stance.
What does speaking to the rock inside of us mean? What words do we use? God doesn’t tell Moshe what to say as the words themselves barely matter. The important thing is the stance of respect and relationship, of opening to the connection itself, of relating, not attacking. The energy is one of calm acceptance, of full partnership, rather than authoritarian force and punishment. The words might be as simple as: I hear you. I see your pain. I am here now with you. What do you need? Or maybe there are no words, just a soft murmuring presence, the burbling sound of a flowing river that whispers a message of love and continuous company, of acceptance and understanding.
Approached in this way, the rock softens of its own accord. While Moshe had to force the rock to let forth water, to break its will, God predicts that when approached in this gentler relational way, the rock will naturally and freely give its waters -- venatan meimav (20:8). The situation is like the story of an argument between the sun and the wind over who can get a man’s jacket off faster. The wind tries with great might to force the jacket off, blowing fiercely and pulling at it, causing the man to wrap the jacket around him even more tightly. The sun, on the other hand, simply shines brightly and the man removes the jacket himself. To speak gently and warmly to the rocks inside us is to melt their ice so that they naturally shift and take off their hard exteriors; no force is necessary; the rock softens on its own, mirroring our softness.
Venatan meimav. And it, the rock, will give its waters. Now, feeling the tender company, now come the tears that needed to be shed -- held back for so long -- nourishing tears that open us up to giving and receiving not mei merivah, “waters of strife,” but ma’ayanei ha’yeshuah, everflowing fountains of redemption, waters of joy and love and healing.
Click here to listen to the meditation. Please let me know if you would like to try our meditation group: anisfeldr@gmail.com
For Korah, being a Levite is not enough -- he wants priesthood as well -- but I want to take a moment to honor the role of the Levite.
To be a Levite is to keep others company. Leah gave her third son the name Levi in hopes of accompaniment by her less than fully loving husband, Yaakov -- maybe now yilaveini ishi, “my husband will accompany me,” she says. The tribe of Levi takes its cues from this name, assigned to accompany (see, in this week’s parsha, Num 18:2-4) the priests as they go about their sacrificial work and to accompany the Tabernacle vessels -- to carry them on the people’s desert sojourn and guard their sanctity -- perhaps also to keep God company in the Tabernacle and, later, dispersed as a tribe in cities dotted throughout the country, to keep the entire people company as well.
What beautiful unsung heroism keeping company is! As Rhondda May pointed out to me, being an accompanist in a musical performance requires extraordinary talent, making an essential contribution to the whole. The work of keeping company is the work of angels, malakhei levaya, like the angels who accompany Yaakov out of the land of Israel and later, back in again, and like the angels that accompany us home from synagogue on Friday night whom we welcome with Shalom Aleikhem. They are angels of protection and care and simple company on our journey through life. We do the work of such angels -- levaya -- when we accompany our guests on their way out of our homes or when we accompany the deceased on their way to their burial place.
This divine service of accompaniment was the special provenance of the tribe of Levi. Perhaps we can all act the Levi for each other and also, just as importantly, for our own internal parts that so desperately need company. Levi was born out of loneliness, Leah’s sense of abandonment by her husband, her desperate longing to be connected. We all have those places inside us. One can imagine that the sacred Tabernacle vessels carried by the Levites through the desert also had some such longing; broken apart from one another for the journey, yearning to return to their connected whole in the Tabernacle.
How do we hold such pieces inside us? They are broken in so many ways -- not just loneliness, but grief, despair, anxiety, the pain of unworthiness and not mattering, the sense of yes, not being enough or whole, all the pieces of us that tear at us in need of repair. What do we do with such parts?
Korah takes an aggressive approach. Surely he was suffering from some such insecurity, from this yearning sense of insufficiency in his reaching for more. He tries to manhandle the situation, to force transformation, to take in something from outside to make it better.
But no, that is not the Levite way. The Levitical stance offers a gentler approach -- to simply keep these parts company, to say to them: “I am here. I will stay with you. I will not abandon you.” Not to restlessly reach out for more -- like Korah -- to cover up the hole, but to stay, to lean in, to trust that this, too, this pain, is also a precious vessel, that this hole is an opening, a channel through which divine energy may flow. To carry these parts on our shoulders or in our arms like small children, gently and tenderly, with love and care and a sense of their value and sanctity as sacred vessels of the sanctuary of God that each of us is. Not to reject or diminish or scramble to fix and add, but just to be present, to keep company -- divine company, to draw down the divine presence -- for the lonely Leah heart inside us.
And maybe, too, to sing -- the Levites kept company by singing in the sanctuary -- to sing a lullaby of eternal company and vastness, to sing a song of faith in our not aloneness, in our essential wholeness, to sing it out so all our parts and the parts of others can hear and take comfort and know they are not alone, never alone, that the voice of the beloved is always right here beside them, very near.
When we each do this work -- each one carrying her precious broken vessels through our desert crossing -- when we each carry our parts of the Tabernacle, then we begin to build something together; we begin to build a sanctuary on earth where God can indeed dwell. When we act the Levi -- play the accompanist role to those inside and outside us who need it -- we draw down divine accompaniment into this world, create a space for it right here. Let the world be filled with God’s presence through our Levi-inspired accompanying hearts.
אל נא רפא נא לה
El na refa na lah (Numbers 12:13) -- These are the words Moshe uses to cry out to God on behalf of his sister Miriam when she is afflicted by a skin disease after gossiping about him and his Cushite wife.
O Lord please heal her. Translated word for word it reads: Lord, please, heal, please, her. The words form a perfect chiastic structure -- A B C B A. Healing stands in the middle as a highlighted apex, with the word na, please, on either side, and the two entities that need joining, God and her, the ailing one, on the outer rim.
Moshe shows us how to pray for healing in the simplest, most direct and sincere way. What is healing, and perhaps also, what is prayer? They are the bridging of God and “her”, the creation of a holy space in the middle, where heaven and earth meet in the care of our very human woundedness.
The way that we reach for this sacred middle -- the road there -- is na, please, a word of existential longing, the most basic word of prayer, a cry for help, an expression of faith that there is something beyond us that can support us -- please, please; the soul reaches up toward heaven in yearning and hope.
We begin on the outside, with God and the wounded one far apart and we work our way, through this na, a reaching up of arms, to that sacred middle place where we meet God -- refa, heal. Only in this place of joining, this place where we are aware of both poles -- of our vulnerability, our pain, our very aching need for healing on the one side and on the other side also the presence of an eternal, whole, vast being that can hold and heal that pain -- only here can we heal. Here, in the middle, after the energetic reaching of na, we come to rest. We are hurt, but we are also connected, and in feeling both, we begin to heal.
Staying in that sacred middle is not easy. We have a tendency to go to either one of the extremes; we are either flooded with pain, completely overtaken by it and identified with it -- no space or perspective at all -- or we have escaped the pain momentarily by lifting ourselves out of this human realm into the divine plane. This second alternative may seem appealing, and indeed it is a helpful tool -- knowing how to let go of the pain and become temporarily part of some other higher realm -- but it does not provide long term relief; the pain comes back, perhaps indirectly or unconsciously, but just as strong if not stronger, because something in us needs tending to, and will keep calling out until it is heard. This way of escaping pain has a name -- “spiritual bypassing” -- indicating our tendency to try, sometimes even through God, to avoid the wounds, to circumnavigate them -- really, abandon them -- by trying to escape our very human vulnerability.
So the call here -- el na refa na lah --- is not to inhabit either the El or the Lah but to make our way to the middle ground of Refa -- where we know of the pain -- we come close enough to touch it and feel it and know it needs something -- but we don’t get swallowed whole by it. Through the simple prayer of na, please, we bring the pain into a space that also knows the divine presence, a middle ground where heaven and earth meet inside us to heal what needs healing. Healing cannot happen without a real holding and knowing of both the reality of the suffering and the spacious presence of the divine.
This place of healing is the mishkan (tabernacle) that we build inside us for God to dwell in. The physical mishkan -- like the word refa -- also stood in the middle -- in the middle of the camp, amidst the people, surrounded on all sides by tribes as they travelled. Inside us, in our own heart center, we have such a place, too, a place where our most vulnerable human parts can meet God and be held and healed.
El na refa na lah. Call out for God and your pain to come together in that sacred place inside you, a place of connection and healing. O Lord, please -- Refa. Rest in that space, and then send some love back out, as Moshe did -- send out that healing to all who need it, physically and emotionally, to all who need to feel that shared space, to know that they are not alone in their pain.
I wrote this poem while trying to feel into the blessing of shalom, inner peace, the end of birkat kohanim from this week's parsha (Parashat Naso) -- veyasem lekha shalom. May God grant peace to each of us and to all of us.
Let Gentle Enter
Let Gentle enter
And swim through your veins
Soothing and dissolving burrs
In a soft murmuring river
That cares not
that you said the wrong thing
Or didn’t accomplish much
But just keeps flowing, unperturbed,
Over the jagged edged rocks and ledges of your soul,
Wrapping you in a slow spreading
Blanket of warmth
And the opening buds of
possibility
This meditation (7 minutes) was the beginning of my Psalms class this morning, and I thought others might also enjoy it. It is based on verses 3-6 of Psalm 24, which are cited below. I have highlighted the phrases that are key to the meditation.
Who may ascend the mountain of the Lord? (mi ya'aleh behar Hashem)
Who may stand in His holy place?
He who has clean hands and a pure heart (bar levav),
who has not taken a false oath by My life or sworn deceitfully.
He shall carry away a blessing (brachah) from the Lord,
a just reward from God, his deliverer.
Such is the circle of those who turn to Him, (zeh dor dorshav)
Jacob, who seek Your presence (mevakshei panekha). Selah.
You, too, in listening to this meditation, become part of the circle of those who seek God's presence. Thank you for taking part and strengthening our circle.
If you are interested in joining a meditation group that is currently forming to do this kind of work, please contact me at: anisfeldr@gmail.com
Kabbalat HaTorah -- to receive the Torah. That is our goal on this holiday. What does it mean to receive? How does one go about receiving?
We tend to worry primarily about giving, about what we are contributing to this world, what we are doing to earn our precious lives. These pursuits often have a restless, endless quality to them; we will never fully earn the gift of life; we will never give enough to be at peace.
But how would it feel to focus for a moment on receiving, on cultivating an open receptive attitude to the divine and human gifts that are always flowing our way? To be receptive involves humility, an admission of our dependence and incompleteness, our holes, our need to receive from outside ourselves. To only give is a kind of arrogance, a stance of superiority; to learn to receive is to admit deficiency, to open to the greatness of others.
The Israelites at Mount Sinai stood betahtit hahar, “at the bottom of the mountain,” at the lowest rung beneath a towering force above them; they understood their humble place in the universe and could therefore open themselves completely to the intensity of this experience of God. It is no accident, either, that Moshe, the humblest man to walk the earth, is the one to have brought the Torah down from heaven for us; his humility was a form of supreme receptivity, with no barriers of arrogance or “already knowing” to get in the way.
To be receptive is to open ourselves up to the flow, to admit something is missing and thereby “admit in” what is standing at the door waiting to come in. This opening, this knowing we are not full, this letting in and receiving -- this process is one of making room inside us, opening space, emptying at least a little the vessel that is us so that we can hold what is offered.
Indeed, the Israelites’ preparations for the Mount Sinai experience seem to be directed at just such a process of gaining greater receptivity. They are told, first, to purify and cleanse themselves, a way of preparing one’s vessel, ensuring that there is nothing extraneous and harmful standing in the way of proper reception. Second, they are told repeatedly to create boundaries around the mountain to prevent anyone from encroaching. This process of hagbalah, border making, for which the three days prior to Shavuot are named, is another way of speaking about the need to make room -- to demarcate open space -- for the reception of the divine flow. The people must stand back from the mountain -- hold themselves back, behind a barrier -- in order to open up a conduit for the divine to enter. We are often told “to take up more space,” but here, the object is to pull back, to bound our selves, to become smaller, all in order to make room for something so much bigger than us to fill us up.
We have this experience in conversations and classes. If you’re talking, you aren’t listening; you’re taking up the space. Sometimes it takes a holding back of self to make room for the other to emerge, to be able to really receive what that person has to offer. While on Pesach the instruction was for us to speak -- to tell the story to our children, vehigadeta levinkha -- now, on Shavu’ot, we hold back our own speech and open ourselves to receiving the divine voice -- the awesome thundering lightning and shofar of Mount Sinai and the voice of God delivering the ten commandments.
In thinking about this holding back, this form of self-contraction we do on Shavu’ot, we can look back to God’s own self-contraction -- called tzimtzum, making Himself smaller -- in the process of creating the world. We only exist because of God’s pulling back of His full Presence to make room for us; self contraction is a form of love, a way of dancing backward into the shadows so that the other can come onto the stage. God did that -- and continues at every moment to do that -- for us, and we, for our part, also have a self contraction to do to make room to receive God’s full presence and Torah. No wonder the Torah repeatedly emphasizes how essential this act of hagbalah -- boundary making -- was for the Israelites as they received the Torah; they needed to step back to create a container in this human world for the divine.
There is something deeply relaxing about this holding back. We normally feel an overwhelming pressure to perform and act and produce and do things in the world that will somehow earn our existence. We are exhausted. Here we are asked for something much simpler -- not to do; not to run around -- but to stand still right here and open ourselves to receiving. The stillness is important. Vayityatzvu is how the Israelites are described at the foot of the mountain -- standing as still as a matzevah, a statue. Nowhere to go; nothing to prove or to say or to make happen; there is surrender here and a receptive openness to what wants to flow into them.
Psalm 23 speaks of the good and the hesed, the loving kindness, as chasing after us -- yirdifuni. As Julie Kaminsky, a member of my Psalms group, pointed out, this language of chasing or pursuing implies that if we stood very still, the goodness and the love would catch up to us. While we are running around the world chasing them, they are right behind us, trying to catch up to us. If we slow down and open up to receive them, they will come flowing in.
