Parashat Beshallah: From Fear to Song

The Israelites are on the cusp of a new life and a new way of being in the world.  They have left Egypt and they need to let go of their slave identity and open up to the larger possibility of self implied by a connection to God.    

Such a transition is enormously scary.   Even if what they are leaving is a life of suffering, it is still a known life, and giving up what is known for an unknown and uncertain desert existence must have been terrifying.   God takes them the long way around on their way out of Egypt precisely because He anticipates this uncertain feeling, that the people are likely to regret having left Egypt and want to go back.   Later, when they are confronted by the pursuing Egyptians, the Isralites remind Moshe that they had in fact been ambivalent way back in Egypt; even then they had wondered whether it wouldn’t be better to stay in slavery rather than risk death in the desert.  

And so part of the task in this week’s parsha is for the Israelites to embrace their new life and move forward despite their ambivalence and fear and uncertainty.   Moshe’s response to the people’s terror at seeing Egypt right behind them is:  Don’t be scared! God will save you!  But God responds differently.  God knows that it doesn’t help to tell people not to be scared or uncertain.  Instead He says:  What are you yelling at Me for?  Tell them to move forward!  The only way around fear is through it, moving forward despite the fear, in the fear, through the fear itself, not letting it stop you, but also not denying it.    Allow the uncertainty and move forward anyway.    

The depiction of the walk through the Red Sea implies this attitude as well.   They walked betokh hayam bayabashah, “within the Sea on dry land,” with the water forming a wall on either side of them.   The very water which frightened them to jump into -- the midrash says that it was only one individual who had the courage to walk in up to his neck -- that was the water that they had to walk through to get to their new selves.   And the way they did it is instructive; the swirling water of their fear did not disappear, but was contained on either side, stilled for the moment instead of raging, so that they could see it and pass through it, but do so while walking on solid ground, with some sense of unshakability to hold them through it, feeling the fear but still putting one foot in front of the other and moving forward.

To walk in this way -- within the fear --  gradually does vanquish the fear; the movement itself teaches courage, a courage that begins on the outside and gradually seeps inside, as if the mind gradually wakes up to what the feet are already doing and knowing, that moving forward is tolerable.   

And so, at the end of this walk, having travelled with and through their fears, the people then turn around for a final letting go of those fears as they open their eyes to see clearly the drowned Egyptians in the Sea.   The Torah spells this out explicitly, this seeing of the dead, a strange detail considering the counter tradition that the angels who wanted to sing that day over the Egyptians’ demise were not allowed to do so since the enemies, too, are God’s creatures.   But for the Israelites this witnessing was essential.    It was a letting go, a ritual unburdening, a sendoff of their attachments and fears surrounding Egypt.    Mitzrayim, the Hebrew name for Egypt, comes from the root tzar, narrowness or straits.   The Israelites needed to finally let go of the forces that were holding them back from this new life, constraining them to a narrow identity and perspective, limiting them through fear and habit to the life they had previously known.    In seeing the dead, the Israelites were saying goodbye to these constraints, relinquishing them to the power of the Sea to carry off.

The process was like a breathing in and a breathing out.  They breathed in the courage of stepping forward amidst the fear, and they breathed out Egypt with all its associated limitations and constraints and fears.  They breathed in the possibility of a sparkling unknown future, and they breathed out -- letting go -- of their attachment to the known past.   

What happens next is a giant leap forward.  This two-sided process of moving forward and letting go invites in a new energy, a quantum surge of power and creativity and life force -- Song,  a rising up and singing of the song they -- we all --  were born to sing.   Released of constraint, letting go of the known, freed from the fears that held them back, the Israelites open up their mouths and their souls and the spirit sings through them a song for the ages.   Singing of God’s glory, the Israelites have released themselves from their small indentured identities and become one with this divine glory.

Perhaps this new shining light of theirs is precisely what they were scared of in the first place, what we are all scared to truly manifest, why we hold on to our habitual constraints -- because this light inside us is unfamiliar (yet also deeply familiar) and so bright that we fear it will blind us and those around us.   We don’t let go of our Mitzrayim limitations because we are scared we can’t handle who we might become.  As Marianne Williamson famously says:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. 

The Israelites at the Sea let go of that fear and opened themselves to a song that continues to sing in our world.   Az Yashir, “Then he will sing,” it begins, in the future tense, as if to imply that yes, when they sang, they gave permission to others -- the birds and the trees and all of us -- to sing, then and now and forever.

Parashat Bo: Through the Doorway of Suffering

The Israelites stand in the portal to freedom on the night of the fourteenth of Nissan, as the first-born plague rages around them.  Their portal is marked by blood, the blood of the sheep they just sacrificed, but also, symbolically, the blood of their years of suffering.  They are poised for redemption.

And on that night, at a very precise moment, exactly midnight (as only God can measure it), at the peak of darkness in the world, they experience a divine revelation; their bloodied history turns into a doorway for them, a doorway to a truth that is beyond this world, a mystical meditative moment of great intensity.

While their neighbors scream in terror, swirling in chaos, there is a moment of utter silence in the Israelite homes; dogs, with their special hearing, can sense the otherworldly presence that has revealed itself, and they become quiet.    The dough that was rising falls flat.  The King of Kings has appeared and all that is extraneous blows away like chaff.    

This is a moment of great clarity for the Israeiltes.  The sense of protective love which is normally only a vague hope, if felt at all, is now manifest and palpable.   We commemorate this experience with the word Pesach, named for God’s action on that night over the Israelite homes.   Normally translated as “pass over,” it is also understood by some to mean “protected” or “had compassion” (see Rashi and Onkelos).   The experience surely was as undefinable as the word itself -- an experience of divine compassionate protection that felt something like a hovering embracing presence, passing over and coming back and forth, like a pulsing energy field of connection or, as Song of Songs has it, like the passionate energy of a lover skipping over hills to reach His beloved.    Intensity, compassion, protection, connection.  Whatever the exact nature of this Pesach motion, for the Israelites it was a moment of clarity and revelation, of knowing in an embodied way that God was with them.

This doorway also opens up for them another kind of knowing -- an understanding of divine time.    Standing at the cusp of change, with the blood of suffering still fresh in their bones, they are opened up to a knowledge of eternity.   The text signals this shift in perspective by suddenly moving from a purely historical narrative about the past to mixing in instructions about the future commemorations of this event for generations to come, a hukat olam, “a law forever.”    It is as if the Israelites, standing at that precise moment in their bloodied portals, can see out into the far distant future, to the generations that will tell this story and continue to relive it.  All of that -- the laws of the matzah and the festival and the future children asking -- it is all contained in that moment of the present for them.    They have so fully entered that present moment of Presence that it has opened up for them all of time in a moment, as if each moment, lived in full presence, is actually a doorway to eternity, containing in its depths all of time by being beyond time.    

This experience, too, is an experience of divine revelation, a moving out of self into something larger.  It is as if their bloodied doorways opened up to a field that stretches out endlessly before them, and this spaciousness is a manifestation of God Himself.   

My sense is that these two elements -- the sense of loving protection and the experience of eternity -- are not really separate.    When we move out of fear into a feeling of loving protection, what we are experiencing is a large expanse of space and time, a knowledge that things may seem difficult at the moment, but that eternity will bear out the triumph of goodness; we are entering this moment fully, yes, but in doing so, we are also entering another zone that puts this moment into an eternal context of divine love, stretching out before us without end, more solid than the temporary fear that preceded it.

How do we access such portals to the divine?   The Israelites were at a pivotal moment.   They were still slaves and had been through much suffering, but the road ahead was looking hopeful and they had enough strength to trust what was unfolding, to trust that they were indeed being redeemed by God.    They did not side-step the suffering, but turned towards it, turning it -- through the blood -- into a doorway to something larger.    That blood became both a sign of their past suffering and also a sign of their current trust and hope in God, as they flagrantly disregarded Egyptian norms in the slaughtering of a sheep.    The midnight darkness of the night and the emphasis on eating the festive meal al merorim, “with bitter herbs,” are reminders that part of the experience involved fully embracing the suffering, even as they anticipated and believed in the possibility of an imminent redemption.

This combination -- entering the darkness, not avoiding, but actually going through the doorway of suffering, and at the same time doing so with some hope and trust -- this combination seems to be the key to accessing such an experience of the divine, of knowing with clarity God’s eternal loving protection.   To stand at such a portal, entering the suffering but also believing in redemption -- is to enter into a vast spacious field of compassion, to suddenly find that this field was always waiting for us, wanting to heal us and care for us, waiting only for us to have the courage to pass through the doorway with faith.   

Parashat Va'era: On the Process of Redemption

In this week’s parsha, God promises to save us from Egypt; He says it in 4 different ways, the daled leshonot ge’ulah, “the four terms of redemption”  -- 

(vehotzeiti) I will take you out from under the burdens of Egypt;

(vehitzalti) I will you save you from their work; 

(vega’alti) I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and mighty acts of judgment;

(velakakhti) I will take you to be My people and I will be your God.

There is also an additional post-redemption promise -- 

(veheveti) “I will bring you to the land that I promised to give to Avraham . . .  “  (Exodus 6:6-8)

Redemption is understood here to be a process of multiple steps, a process that encompasses not just physical removal from the difficult situation -- the initial yetziah itself -- but also a gradual psycho-spiritual recovery and transformation.    There is movement here, from a foreign land to home, from enslavement to a relationship with God.   Note the gradual disappearance of Egypt as a subject in these phrases -- the first one speaks explicitly of “the burdens of Egypt;” the second one obliquely refers to Egypt without mentioning its name, “their [the Egyptians’] work;” the third does not mention Egypt at all, but focuses on God’s might, with the implication, of course, that Egypt is the object of these divine chastisements.   Finally, in the fourth phrase, Egypt has entirely disappeared from the picture, leaving only God and Israel, alone and together.  It is no longer a question of moving away “from” something -- the preposition “from” is only in the first two phrases -- but instead, of completing the recovery by moving toward something else, toward a relationship with God and, in the fifth phrase, toward a sense of at-homeness.

It seems important in this process that ge’ulah, “redemption,” for which the whole process is named, actually only occurs at the third (and, counting all five, middle) stage.  Before the ge’ulah there is “removal” from the situation and a kind of physical “saving.”   Ge’ulah, though,  has a more holistic transformative connotation.  It implies a returning of full value to something that has lost its value -- to re-deem -- to deem worthy and whole once again, to return something to its original worth and mattering in the world, as in redeeming land that was lost to its original owners, to redeem a murder victim -- to return the value of that human being by requiring justice of the perpetrator -- or to redeem a woman whose husband died without heirs, as in Ruth.   In all these situations, the re-valuing, the returning of value, is done through relationship, by a close of kin, by someone who cares and is connected and therefore has the power to bring back the lost worth to its owner.  In a similar way here, the Israelites did not just need to be “saved” from slavery; they needed to be re-deemed -- to be brought back to their former sense of self worth in the world after a long period of denigration; to be reminded of their value, brought back into their own glory.  And this step only God could do for them; only God, as the closest of kin in a caring relationship, only God could -- through His own show of glory on their behalf -- bring them back to their former value and status.  

For the Israelites, true redemption from slavery was not just a removal from danger and suffering, but a movement into relationship with God.   In order to fully heal from any trauma, we need not only to let go, but to let go into something larger than ourselves.   The Torah beautifully refers to what the Israelites needed to let go of as sivlot, from the word sevel, which in the Torah literally means “heavy load” or “burden,” something very hard to carry.   This term helps to enlarge the sense of what the Israelites needed rescuing from.  It wasn’t just slavery, but the emotional “baggage” of slavery, the “legacy burden” (an IFS therapy term) of having been through hundreds of years of enslavement.    The Israelites would need to unburden such a heavy cultural load, but to do so on their own would be impossible.    When you let go of such a burden, you need to let go of into some larger force or container that can hold it.  In IFS therapy, the suggestion is that the burden be unloaded into air or water or fire or into a spiritual holder of the client’s choice, a divine or spiritual being of some sort.   Here, in the Torah, God offers Himself as the receptor of these sivlot, the legacy burdens of our slavery.    We don’t remove them alone; He is there -- with His outstretched arm -- to help unload them from our backs and to be there for us to let go into.  

In the process of IFS unburdening, one of the essential steps is mentally to remove the trauma victim from the site of the trauma and bring her into a safe place.   Here, God is doing just that -- beginning the process with vehotzeiti, taking us out of the scene of trauma, and ending the process with veheveti, bringing us into a safe home environment to rest and recover and renew our lives.   There is a homecoming here in many senses -- coming home to the land, coming home to our redeemed selves, and coming home to our only true refuge -- God Himself, who stretches out His arms to welcome us home from our trauma, from our journey away from ourselves in a hostile foreign environment.   In the end, having removed and released the heavy burden that took us away from ourselves, we return to our home in God.   Ashrei kol hosei bo.  Happy are those who take refuge in Him. (Ps 2: 12).

This process of redemption and homecoming is not over.  I believe that we are still suffering under the sivlot, the communal legacy burdens, not just of Egypt, but of the many persecutions throughout our history, and especially, of the Holocaust.   (We may also each have our own personal or familial burdens.)  We are obligated to remember the suffering, but the burden is not the remembering.  The burden is the terror and the dread, the hopelessness and the powerlessness, the constant gnawing sense of insecurity and the excessive worry and anxiety and the misaligned and devalued sense of ourselves that result from such a history of persecution.   These are burdens that have been placed on us from the outside world, foreign substances that can make us indeed feel like foreigners inside, not quite at home with ourselves.

There is work to do, the work of redemption, of each of us and of all of us, Jew and non-Jew alike, each group with its own legacy burdens, each individual with his own personal burden.  To make each life matter, to re-deem the value of every member of society, to release each of those burdens into the waiting arms of God, to bring each of us from the oppressive view of the outsider to the home of the divine spark inside us is to do God’s work of redemption, to bring us all home to God.    Tradition understands the first four phrases of redemption as having taken place during the exodus and the fifth to be a reference to a messianic time -- Elijah’s cup at the Passover table; we are not all home yet.  With the help of God, we can release the burdens, become re-deemed, and come home together.  

Parashat Shmot: To Not be Consumed by the Blaze

Vayar vehineh hasneh bo’er ba’esh, vehasneh eynenu ukal.

“And he [Moshe] looked and behold the bush was ablaze with fire, but the bush was not consumed.” (Exodus 3:2)

This vision is Moshe’s first encounter with God, a prelude to being asked to be God’s messenger in redeeming the people from Egypt.   

The vision lends itself to many possible interpretations.   At this moment it speaks to me of a place of invulnerability inside each of us that can withstand any blaze.     

Moshe -- having fled Egypt as a wanted man --  is now poised to re-enter the fire; indeed, from here on, his whole life will be one fire after another -- the many plagues and continued obstinacy of Pharaoh as well as the neverending battle for the hearts and trust of the people through the redemption and the long sojourn in the desert.   The fire won’t go out; there will always be another task, another problem, another “fire” to put out, endless suffering and dissent and difficulty.    

But what God is showing Moshe here is that through all that fire, he, little humble Moshe, who probably thinks of himself as about as big and strong as a thorn bush (a sneh is a thorn bush) -- that this little guy will be able to withstand it all, not just all the blazing suffering and difficulty around him, but also the full blaze of the Presence of God inside him, itself a powerful and frightening force.   Yes, you, Moshe, the little thorn bush, you can handle it.  You can handle the anger of Pharaoh and the people, and you can even handle My -- God’s -- own fiery anger, as we will see time and again through the people’s desert sins.  And not just the anger of God, but also God’s intimacy, God’s full presence, God’s love and gifts and teaching on Sinai and beyond.   You, Moshe, can withstand all that fire.   You are the thorn bush -- you will blaze brightly with all that energy and difficulty -- but you will not be consumed by it; it will not eat you up; you will still stand steady amidst it all.   Feel your strength and find that place of invulnerability inside you; know that it is real, for “I am with you” (3:12) -- this place inside you is a divine place; it is a piece of heaven on earth; it does not succumb to the rules of nature -- by those rules the thorn bush should indeed have been consumed -- but exists on a plane beyond this world, a plane where the flow never ceases and no harm can come to you.   

Moshe will need to remember this strength.  What courage it must have taken to appear before the all-powerful Pharaoh first, out of the blue, and then, antagonistically, again and again, with the divine message of deliverance.  Yes, after a while, the tides seemed to turn, but in the beginning, as this parsha ends, things only seem to be getting worse for the Israelites -- the fire of Israelite suffering is only blazing hotter -- and yet, Moshe has to continue to hold steady, to not be consumed by the flames of external suffering and of internal discouragement and despair, to hold steady amidst the flames and continue the fight.  

This vision was not meant for Moshe alone.  As God makes clear right away, the sign of the mission’s success will be that the people will return to this very same mountain and worship.   The sign of success will be that the whole mountaintop -- Mount Sinai, sounding a lot like sneh -- will turn into a kind of burning bush, what Deuteronomy describes as vehahar bo’er ba’esh,  “and the mountain was ablaze with fire” (Deuteronomy 4:11).  (These are the only two events in the Torah where this phrase is used.) The whole mountaintop will be a burning bush to be witnessed by a whole nation, a nation that is to carry the message of divinity into the world through the Torah.

So I want to take a minute to spell out how this burning bush image might speak to us personally, as well as to Moshe.   First, note that you don’t have to be on a great spiritual plane to be able to carry and contain the blaze in this way; the vision is of a lowly thorn bush.  The only requirement is that you know that you are a thorn bush, difficult and full of thorns and resistance, and lowly enough to actually feel the need for divine assistance.  It turns out that God chooses precisely such thorny types to dwell among -- He is called shokhni sneh (Devarim 33:16) - the One who dwells in a thorn bush.    Tradition famously speaks of a similar lowliness ascribed to Mount Sinai; it is here that God dwells, among the not-greats, the difficult thorny ones, among us in all our weakness and prickliness.   

And so, letting go of any perception of yourself as not good enough, imagine what it might be like to be such a thorn bush -- to be able to carry the burning fire and yet not be consumed by it, to find inside yourself that divine place that holds steady through it all and can never be touched.   The fire we carry comes in many forms -- external difficulties and suffering, internal blazes of anxiety, anger, fear, and the intense pain of hurt and loneliness, as well as the energy of creativity and desire and love and even yearning for and connection to God.   All of those fires blaze inside us; we are often thrown about by the intensity of their flames, by our changing situations and moods, by the breaking news and the crying child, by the work stress and the pang of some old sadness.   We are thrown about by all of these flames like a leaf in a windstorm, this way and that, often, yes, completely “consumed” by the moment’s mood, blended with the flame itself, with no sense of space at all, but completely caught up in the intensity of the heat, losing ourselves in the process, eaten up by the fire.  

The image of the burning bush that is not consumed suggests there is an alternative to this way of being; we can allow the blaze inside us in all its intensity, while at the same time not being consumed by it.    We do have the God-given capacity to remain whole and steady amidst the raging fire, to maintain some place inside us that is untouched and always still, a place that is not subject to the weather or the news or our successes or failures, but always secure and at peace in its connection to the divine.    The world may rage -- inside us and outside us -- and we can carry that flame, but we don’t have to be taken over by it; we can always keep some sacred space that is untouched.    Even when we think we can’t handle it anymore -- we have reached the end of our rope; we are exhausted and spent -- still, there is somewhere inside us a divinely implanted point that is tireless and unperturbed.   

To know that there is such a place inside us -- a place that is always whole and at peace -- actually allows us to carry the flames more fully; we no longer need to fear the outbursts inside or outside us; we know we can handle them and survive.  Let them come -- let the panic and anxiety and despair come; we know we can live through it and not be consumed, and so the flames are free to rage, but a little more calmly now, with the relief that comes from knowing that they are contained, that they are held by a container that itself will never give way.  

The burning bush represents a meeting of the divine and the human in a paradoxical relationship.  On the one hand, the raging fire represents divine energy, and the thorn bush, the human vessel for that flow.  On the other hand, the flames represent the very human suffering in this world, with all its intensity and heat and pain, while the thorn bush, with its ability to withstand consumption, represents the divine element inside us that can hold all of that this-worldly pain in a sea of otherworldly invulnerability.    Mount Sinai is the place where the divine and the human will meet in a few parshas time in the grandest of all revelations.   In this mini-Sinai-sneh revelation, we have a taste of what such a partnership might look like, with vulnerable and invulnerable, raging and still, human and divine, all wrapped up together in one image and one heart.