Parashat Emor: Sefirat HaOmer and the Soul's Journey Home

The journey of the Omer -- the 49 days traversed from the holiday of Passover to the holiday of Shavuot, from the exodus to Mount Sinai -- is an apt metaphor for the journey taken by each of our souls in this world from birth to death.    

We begin our journey mimaharat haShabbat, “on the day after Shabbat,” on the day after the intense divine revelation of leaving Egypt.   Each of us begins our life in this way, in the shadow -- or perhaps, the light -- of a subconscious memory of intense divine connection, the perfect Shabbat peace of having once been part of the Source.    This memory and the continual yearning for return drive our steps forward into the world and shape our path.   We want that Shabbat again.

And we see it in the distance, too.   Our path is flanked by two poles, two shabbatot -- a memory of a past connection, and a beckoning vision of a future one -- the mountain of Sinai looming against the horizon as our destination point (Shavuot), the word shalom, peace, at the end of our prayers, and our messianic dreams of ultimate redemption and peace for ourselves and the world    There is something in us that feels the divine pull of both poles -- both our past and our future divine connection -- as we walk through this in-between desert world on our own.   

This desert journey of ours is fraught with danger, probably the most significant being the danger of forgetting both where we came from and where we are going (see Pirke Avot 3:1), forgetting what that perfect peace feels like, losing sight of our true home and destination, losing our way.  

This is a basic human problem.  On some level, we know the solution to our troubles; we know where our true home is.  But we forget.   We remember and move forward, and then, in the very long in-between time between glimpses, we forget again.   How do we survive and keep ourselves connected to home while on this journey?

A therapist friend shared her concern for how her clients manage their emotional lives between sessions.   Yes, during the session she and the client can work together to build a sense of presence and love and Self Energy (an IFS term), and the client does experience some relief, a peace, a homecoming.  But what happens between sessions?  How does the client tap into this centeredness during the many days they are not together?   The solution she found is to have the client -- in a moment of distress or activation -- place a hand on her heart as a reminder to her nervous system of where home is, a kind of honing mechanism that brings her back to center, to a memory of the feeling of peace, a way to find home again. 

Perhaps Sefirat ha’omer  can be seen in a similar way.  The injunction is to count the days between the two poles, to construct a bridge that links them, piece by piece, day by counted day, like Hansel and Gretel, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs so that they can find their way home again.   When we count each day in relation to both poles, where we came from and where we are going, we infuse the journey with a sense of rootedness, homecoming and clarity of purpose.  Each day becomes a reminder -- like the hand on the heart -- of where home is.    

We do this work on our own.    While the exodus from Egypt and the giving of the Torah were both gifts from above -- we passively received them without much effort -- this counting and remembering work we do without divine assistance.   Usefartem lakhem, “count for yourselves,” the Torah says.   By yourself and for your own sake, in order to help yourself.   It’s as if a teenager is setting off on an independent trip and the parent offers some tips and tools for survival.   Here are the tools, but you are going to have to use them for yourself.    And in so doing, you will come to know your own strength; you will build your own pathways to home and learn to have faith in your ability to get there on your own.   

Each time we return is a true homecoming.   We may be tempted to think of the two poles as the only home, Mount Sinai as the ultimate destination, that the goal is to get “there,” to be where God is, only at that endpoint.  But every time we put our hand to our heart, each day we count -- remembering that we are on a journey home -- we are suddenly already “there,” already home.  The flip happens in a moment.  One minute we are distracted and distraught, faithless and alone in the desert, and the next we are at home, centered, connected to the divine, resting deeply in the eternal Shabbat peace we have always known.   

The Torah understands the exquisiteness of these self-made moments of revelation and return and it sanctifies them with the term sheva shabbatot temimot , seven perfect weeks, referring to these days between the two holidays.    To count each day in this way, to remember to stop in the desert of our lives and connect to the home of our heart -- this is purity, perfection, wholeness, completion.   We don’t need to already be at the destination point to be whole and perfect; right here and now, in all our unredeemed human imperfection, when we reach for the return, right here becomes “there,” becomes already tamim, perfect.    

Sheva shabbatot temimot.   Note that the Torah uses the word shabbat here to mean “week,” something it does only in this context, as if to reinforce our sense of the Shabbat nature of this in-between desert journey.   We are flanked by Shabbatot as we traverse this path alone -- the shabbat of Passover and the shabbat of Shavuot, the shabbat of our pre-birth connection and the shabbat of our after death return -- but we should not think that the journey itself has no peace.  Even in this desert life, we can have moments of peace, moments of connecting to our home in the divine, moments of the perfect rest of Shabbat.  

"Come See the Eggs!" -- A Poem

Shabbat afternoon on our raised wooden deck

I am connecting to a friend 

Across the social distance of a metallic round table

Some sound from beyond

We both turn to look

Down the long sloping lawn

(our backyard is a cut through) --

Two urging mothers and their parade of youngsters

Who are wheeled and heeled and beautifully dealed

A little girl with a bright satin sash around her middle

Calls to her friend -- or maybe her sister --

With an air of excited mystery

As if she is about to reveal a diamond, 

No, not a diamond so much as

A circus oddity

(It seems to me there is derision mixed in to her amazement)--

“Come see the eggs!”

I know what she will show her

We have a compost heap

On the side of the lawn

Marked off by fencing --

Grapefruit rinds, carrot peels, 

The hefty stalk of a cauliflower that takes up all the room in the small tin compost bin we keep in the house -- making it so full it has to be taken out -- even when it’s raining and muddy and dark  -- me in splotchy navy Wellies up to my knees, like a farm girl with a pail of slop -- 

And yes, egg shells -- 

Their shining white brightness 

Calling out to be noticed 

Like the sash on the girl’s dress.

“Come see the eggs!”

Amusement turns my face into a grin, 

And then a full-hearted laugh

My friend laughs with me

Though she doesn’t share the shame

Which is strangely also present

As if someone had seen me naked

Or examined my dirty bathroom

From the stance of their own perfect cleanliness

As if my true lowliness 

Had been uncovered by an aristocratic child.

I could argue with this shame --

“You should be proud -- you care for the earth!”

Or I could point out --

It’s my house, my backyard

They were passing through by my gracious benevolence.

Indeed, the mothers seem to have understood this --

They look embarrassedly up at us 

As they hush and rush the girls on.

I could argue with this shame

But I have not found that shame responds well to lectures.

It feels better to laugh again

At this incomprehensible world of ours

To laugh and join the little girl --

To become again a little girl 

With all her innocent enthusiasm

And ask the mothers, too, to drop their shame

As we all call out -- 

 

“Come see the eggs!”

Two Thoughts on Parashat Acharei-Mot/Kedoshim

#1: On Kedushah (Holiness)

According to some Hasidic commentators, kedushah refers not to the content of what you are permitted to do or to eat, but to the way that you go about doing or eating it. What is required by kedushah, they say, is to take every action b’yishuv hada’at , with a settled or centered mind, and not bebehalah, in a harried or rushed manner. 

What would it mean not to rush through our meals and our lives, but to lend each moment a sense of sanctity by inhabiting it fully without worry about the next moment?   To take each bite and each action with a feeling of calm, settling into this action right now with our full presence?   

The Hasidic commentator Mei HaShiloah defines the word kedoshim as mezumanim, ready, prepared or invited.  He explains that kedushah involves a mindset of understanding that at any moment God can and will light up your eyes, that at any moment God is ready to receive you and you should be ready to receive God.   To live with kedushah is to live with a constant feeling of expectancy.  Every moment has the potential for enlightenment -- for redemption --  if you are mezuman, called and ready for it, present to this moment’s fullness and richness in time. 

Indeed the word mezuman has the word zeman, time, in it, as if one aspect of holiness is having the right attitude toward time, having a sense of the preciousness and sanctity of the present moment in all its potential for connection and for the experience of true divine presence, always only felt in the present. 

Looking back at the first of our two parshiyyot, Acharei Mot, that parsha begins with a reference to time, too.  Aharon is instructed not to come into the Holy of Holies bekhol et, at every moment.  Literally what this means is that he is not to come all the time, but only once a year, on Yom Kippur; however, the Torah drags its feet in giving us this date, revealing it only 28 verses later.   What stands immediately opposite the term bekhol et, “at every moment,” is the term bezot , “with this.”  Don’t come bekhol et; only come bezot.   Here, too, the word zot has a literal referent -- this, meaning this sacrifice which is named later in the verse.  But taken as the parallel to bekhol et, the word bezot -- with all its deictic “this” strength -- feels like its own commentary on time and kedushah.   Here is my read:  Don’t come into kedushah, into the holiness of connecting to God, with kol et, with all of time on your mind, with a sense of the past and the future clouding your perception of the present; let go of the weight of all that time and just bring yourself into zot, into a sense of “this,” just this moment, just this action. Let go of worry about the larger whole, about what will happen next or what came before; those things will take you away from zot and therefore take you away from kedushah and from a true encounter with the divine.   

I can feel the great applicability of this idea for us, the great need we have to release ourselves from kol et, from the whole of time -- both the burdens we carry from the past, our own and our ancestors’, and the worries we have for the future.   Imagine putting those down when you sit down to eat and just engaging with the food in front of you and the dear people surrounding you, nowhere to go, nothing to do but dwell in the great kedushah of this moment.     

#2: On Love:

Ve’ahavta lere’akha kamokha      Love your neighbor as yourself.

What if I don’t love myself?  That is the question that inevitably comes up for us in any discussion of this commandment.   What does it mean to love someone else as I love myself if I don’t love myself properly?

It is the question of our age and of our culture, a question that comes out of a strong tendency among us to really not love ourselves, and very often, on the contrary, to stand in some position in relation to ourselves that borders on hatred or loathing.   What do we do with this verse in such an emotional context?

I think the verse speaks to this reality quite strongly, and offers us an important perspective:  love of self and love of other are intimately connected.  Read this way, the verse becomes less prescriptive than descriptive; the reality is that the two loves are intertwined; they mirror each other and grow in sync with each other.  We can learn one from the other and the other from the one.  They walk hand in hand through our lives and help us grow in love together.  

What do I mean?  One way of reading this verse is as follows:  Ve’ahavta le’reakha, love your neighbor -- this part comes first because we often do this more naturally, so begin here -- notice your love for your friend and through that love -- kamokha, “like you” -- apply it to yourself; learn to love yourself from the way you love your neighbor.    This process is an explicit practice of some forms of therapy like Mindful Self-Compassion, which suggest that when you are in a difficult position, you should ask yourself what you might say to a friend in such a situation -- maybe even write a letter articulating it -- and then try saying exactly those words back to yourself.   You might naturally be inclined to be critical of yourself in such a situation, but imagining the friend gives you some space and allows you to develop some love and compassion in your approach.  Be your own best friend, is the mantra, not as an alternative to being someone else’s friend, but as a way of learning how to love yourself from how you treat others.   Move from the beginning of the phrase -- re’akha, friend-- to the end of the phrase -- kamokha, yourself.

Or as IFS therapy suggests, sometimes it also helps to conceive of our own most difficult parts as separate little people inside us, very much in need of our love.  The part that is insecure and the part that is afraid, the part that is angry, the part that is hurt -- all those parts of ourselves -- if we imagine them as really just little beings inside us, little angel friends come to live with us -- then there is suddenly more room inside us to befriend them.  We wouldn’t offer them love if they were us -- for some reason that isn’t allowed in our internal systems -- but if we think of them as friends, we can shower love on them more easily.   Ve’ahavta lere’akha kamokha --  learn from the love of friends how to treat yourself and your own little inner friends.  

The self-other love cycle works in the other direction as well of course, the more natural meaning of the verse.  As we grow in self-love and especially in love of these parts of ourselves, there is more love flowing through our system that naturally overflows and makes its way outward to others.   The movement is both outward to inward and inward to outward at the same time, in a kind of spiral effect.  We learn to love ourselves from how we love others and as we grow in love of ourselves, we spiral back to sending it outward, but this time on a higher, deeper level; knowing how to love our own vulnerabilities helps us see and love and befriend those unwanted parts of those around us.   

The Torah understands that love is not a zero sum game but like light, can spread without further cost, and like fire, grows exponentially the more we kindle it.    Ve’ahavta le’reakha kamokha.   Learn from how you love others to love yourself, and then let that love of self burst back out into a world thirsty for it.     

Parashat Tazria-Metzora: The Hidden Treasure Inside Us

In describing the eruption of a plague upon a house, the Torah strangely uses the word  venatati, “I will give you,” a word implying a matanah, a gift, a blessing bestowed upon us from God.    

As it turns out, this affliction is indeed a gift.  

The midrash explains that there were treasures inside the walls of these homes, hidden there by the Canaanites years earlier.  By causing leprosy to erupt on their homes, God was forcing the Isarelites to break down the walls and discover the treasure.

What looks like a revolting eruption turns out to be the key to treasure; the way to gold is paved by plague, by the process it precipitates of uncovering and discovering what lies hidden deep inside.     

This image is resonant for inner work; parts of us that on the surface sicken and disgust us and cause us pain may turn out to be a “gift”; they either are the treasure themselves or they lead us to the work of uncovering the treasure deeper inside us.   

The haftarah (2 Kings 7), too, echoes this theme.   We hear of a time when four individuals with leprosy are sitting outside the borders of the town, as lepers are required to.  It is a time of famine and siege by the Arameans, and the starving lepers decide to risk venturing into the Aramean camp in search of food.  When they enter the camp, they discover that the Arameans have fled -- it turns out God had caused the Arameans to hear the din of a huge army approaching -- and left all their possessions intact in the camp.  The Israelite lepers enter and feast and begin to hide away some treasures for themselves, but soon decide that they want to share the good news with their fellow Israelites, who, upon hearing, come with great joy to join them.  

Here again we see leprosy associated with the discovery of treasure.   The lepers, who are outsiders, have a special avenue to revelation, and also, it turns out, to redemption.   It is they, with their outsider vision, who can see the road to redemption that no one else is able to see. 

Again, the application to inner work is apt; the lepers inside us, the parts of us that for whatever reason have been banished to the outskirts of our consciousness, that sit starving and lonely and unwanted, these parts have an important contribution to make to our system; they know things -- they can see things-- precisely because of their outsider status.  We need to listen to them, to open to them, to allow them to lead us to the places of treasure only they know.

The Hasidic commentator Mei Hashiloah begins his discourse on parashat Metzora by citing a verse from Jeremiah:  ואם תוציא יקר מזולל כפי תהיה  -- “If you bring out what is precious from that which is worthless, You will be like My mouth” (15:19).  God explains to Jeremiah here that his job is to turn the zolel, the worthless, into the yakar, the precious -- and if he does so, he will become “like God’s mouth,” a true vessel for divine words, for words that have the ability -- by knowing the good in all creation -- to turn lead into gold, to see the gems in the garbage and thereby enact the transformation.    

Mei HaShiloah applies this verse to a person’s negative character traits, to the hisronot, the perceived deficiencies and imperfections inside each of us.  He suggests that there is some process by which we can, in turning towards these negative traits, draw out of them something precious, something that is divine, something that is in fact Torah.  He rereads the first phrase of our parsha, zot tehiyeh torat hametzora -- “this is the torah (the law) of the leper” -- to mean: This, this very thing that you consider leprous, that you cast out -- this one -- zot -- this one itself will become Torah.   

We all have leprous parts of ourselves -- parts that we have rejected and banished, parts we consider unworthy of sitting inside the city with the rest of us, parts we find difficult to feel and shameful to acknowledge.    Our natural tendency is to reject and deny and despise these parts of ourselves.  But the message here, in these, probably the most leprous -- least loved and wanted -- parshiyyot of our Torah -- the message here is the opposite: precisely here, precisely this -- zot -- this most hated piece of us -- precisely here is the road to redemption, to gold, to the true treasure of our essence.  

The key is to turn towards these leprous parts as a venatati , as an “I will give you,” as a gift from God.  Faced with an unwanted appearance of some difficult emotion or part -- anger, jealousy, despair, anxiety -- suddenly faced with an eruption of such a plague -- not to turn away from it and distract, but to turn toward it and say -- this, too, this, especially, this is a gift from God; this itself is gold, this is the key to the door of discovery; I will follow where this one leads; it knows something; it wants to show me something i need to know, something that will free me and redeem me.  

In my own experience, this way of interacting with difficult emotions -- though not easy -- is powerful and transformative.   It is similar to the process psychologist Tara Brach suggests -- saying “yes” or “I consent” to what is difficult.   There is immediately more space in the system.   Instead of fighting the plague, you are welcoming it as a gift, and this allows it to relax and untangle and reveal its true nature either as itself a treasure or as the doorway to a deeper hidden gem inside you.   When you really open to the neediness inside, it turns into a baby’s mouth crying and that mouth becomes a portal to God’s continuous love that is also hidden inside you.   Or what seems like shakiness and anxiety, once welcomed, is transformed into the energy of excitement and creativity, a sense of readiness for new ventures.   Loneliness turns out to have inside it eternal divine accompaniment, and despair can serve as a doorway to compassion.    

Left alone to fester, the plagues become extreme and painful inside us.  But when we turn and look at them deeply -- as the priest is enjoined here to do many, many times -- when we turn towards them and welcome them as divine gifts, they break down walls for us and reveal the hidden jewels buried inside us.  

A Poem About My Relationship to the Shoah

Written in loving memory of my father, Moshe Shmuel ben Shimon Tuvia haLevi, z"l, and for the sake of the healing of all those who suffered and of all those who continue to suffer. 

I don’t want to write this poem

Because I don’t want to call up the images

And feel the feelings

Because I don’t want to read the poem myself.

And yet i am compelled

By loyalty to the past, to my people and her pains

By duty, heavy and unshakable

And also by some slim hope

That in the expression there will be relief

For me and maybe for you

Maybe there will be some recognition

Of the pain that continues inside us unabated.

When I walk up Arborvista

A street bursting with life and trees

Playing children and chirping birds

My feet sometimes remember other walks

A march in the frozen Poland countryside

Kicked along by the harshest of guns and soldiers

Near starving in thin prisoner uniforms

And misfit boots with holes if there are any at all

Death all around and in my heart

And worse than death -- dread and hopelessness

And empty horizons with no escape.

Or at dinner in our lovely comfortable home

No real worries at this sturdy chestnut table

My children healthy, laughing, singing, teasing

Easy and confident in their life flow

Around us plentiful bright colored bounty 

Me imagining the meager bread of the ghetto

Saving up a little sugar for a cake

The little ones on the corners with hollow eyes

Anne Frank’s family dividing up potatoes 

Lying in bed hungry

The dreams of the camp inmates 

Who remember, too, at night, the bounty that was

From amidst the terror of today

A reminder for me that today

Could also become a terror

Past and present and future combine

In my stomach to sinking dreading

Knowing only sorrow and hopelessness.

I could go on because it does go on

Endlessly inside me

Some days more, some days less

Sometimes triggered by the mention of

Germany, Poland, prison, even camp or train --

My mind goes easily to the cattle cars

The people starving and stuffed together

And mostly the feeling inside of no hope

Piles of shoes or showers or bars of soap

Can sicken me

Barking dogs outside send panic through my veins

I am suddenly not here but in danger

A trip to the mikvah I heard once a story

I can’t remember the details

But the feeling is left

Vulnerable and attacked

Bloodied in the ritual bath.

Or sometimes there is no trigger

Just the story comes unbidden

Like an alarm awaking me to know and remember

And not forget

My uncle’s brother going up a second time

For slop in Auschwitz

On his first day

And the punishment that came

For all to witness 

I won’t write it it hurts too much

Or the story of his father being danced upon

I have my own image of firing rifles on the ground

A prisoner of only bones being made to dance

Through the bullets as they laugh.

Or my cousin Lala standing for hours

In the heat at attention by some cruel 

Ghetto despot inspecting rows of Jews.

When I was six they showed us images

In school.  My teacher said

Know that this can happen here

I understood I was not safe

Never safe anywhere

Never again, they said, 

But i heard only never forget.

Zachor Remember Stay with it

Words forged into childhood minds

With the picture of a boy, hands raised.

At home I breathed 

The pain inside my father

Knew though he spoke of it little

The suffering child in him

Lost in a world with no ground

I used to believe with all my might

That if I put my toothpaste on just right

Arranging the brush and paste just so to align

Then this would never come again

The weight so heavy and as I grew

It turned to avenues that seem more logical

On the surface 

Care about other refugees 

Which I don’t do enough

Learn Torah

Do some redeeming work 

Earn this life and its continuing 

If not -- and it is always not

Enough -- then yes, the world will head

Again toward destruction 

It already is for others whom you have not saved.

My therapist says it is a part

A part of me that imagines and knows

And despairs and that this part

Is very very young and cannot hold

These truths.   We work with her, 

This little girl 

And find her deep in the dark dungeon 

Of my being.  She is sitting cross legged

On the floor, head down

Surrounded by a circle of guarding Nazis.

My therapist says to get her out of there

But she won’t come.  

She needs no guards.  

She stays of her own volition:

Someone has to carry the weight.

We stay with her in that circle

And find out more.

She starts to cry 

And I can feel very clearly now

As clear as the light that shines not in this circle

That there is only one force that can help her

Only one force that has the power

To remove her from these torments

Trite it seems but I, my whole soul screams it

LOVE.  Only love can bring her out.

Even now I feel the shaking truth of it

She comes out into the sun

And sits trembling in an open field

Recovering and healing.

The memories and images are still there

And they return as they must

My ancestors weigh on my shoulders

And they, too, need love and sunshine

Some days I imagine taking them by the hand

Into that wide open field and dancing in a circle with them

But they --

They are not ready.   

I pray and pray and sometimes I get

A small inkling of a presence,

An angel just above my head

A swirling circle of light that can hold the evil

I see the terrifying images trying to kick out at the edges

Of the circle, but they make no dent

The light, the love holds firm.   

I hesitate to end here 

As if all is resolved

When it is not. 

Please God helps us to hold the pain