Parashat Beha'alotekha: The Healing Middle

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.   

Let Gentle Enter: A Poem

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  

Ledavid Mizmor: Meditation on first half of Ps 24

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

For Shavu'ot: On Kabbalat HaTorah and Learning to Receive

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.  

Meditation for Shavu'ot: Receptivity at Sinai

Shavu'ot is a time of receptivity -- the people stood at Sinai and received the Torah as well as a direct experience of divine revelation.  In this meditation, we work to cultivate an open, receptive presence like that of Sinai through the words Vayityatzvu betahtit hahar -- "They stood still at the bottom of the mountain" (Exodus 19:17).

Check it out here (10 minutes)

  

Parashat Behar-Bekhukotai: Returning to our Holding

The Torah wants to ensure that, no matter how far we wander, we always know our way home.   

And so, every fifty years we are called home by the shofar of the yovel (jubilee) year.  The Torah describes the return in physical terms -- each inhabitant is called to return to his ancestral land holdings, to the place he originally called home -- but I think the concern here for homecoming also has a deeply relevant spiritual meaning.  Indeed, the use of the shofar as well as the timing of the call --  Yom Kippur -- naturally link us to another form of return, teshuva, the spiritual return of the High Holiday season.   

What exactly are we returning to here?   Veshavtem ish el achuzato.  Each person should return to his achuzah, his “holding” (Lev 25:10). Literally, the sense is -- the piece of land that he holds or owns -- but we can add another layer -- not just the place he holds, but the place that holds him.   This is the definition of home -- a place that holds us, a place where we relax into trust and safety and support, a place where we are held -- embraced really --  in all our suffering and imperfection.  

Being able to return to such a place of holding is essential emotionally.   Many forms of therapy and meditation include such a holding vessel as part of the healing process.  As we come into contact with suffering parts of ourselves, the instruction is to surround them with love, to place them inside a container of compassion rather than our usual harsh internal climate -- and in that compassionate holding space, the suffering parts shift on their own; they feel accompanied and relax; they are warmed and begin to transform as they need to.  Just touching the suffering is not enough; the work involves creating a place inside us that can actually hold the hurt.  

And so when the Torah tells us that every fiftieth year we should return to our holding, perhaps it is speaking about the human need for a continual return to such an emotional holding place.   The Torah of course is referring to physical land, and, interestingly enough, in many meditation and therapeutic practices, it is precisely the physical ground which helps us to establish this sense of emotional holding inside ourselves.  The place we start is the ground, feeling the ground beneath our feet, feeling how it supports us and knowing that we don’t have to do anything to deserve that holding; the ground is always there, right under us, “holding” us up.   Similarly, no matter how much a person may have strayed from their ancestral home, how poor they may have become, how many lands lost, on the yovel year, we declare a return, no questions asked.  Return now to the land, return now to the ground; it is here to hold you no matter what.   Know that you can never lose that holding.

Ultimately, to be held in this way is to feel the holding of God.   In the Torah, part of the return to your own holding is a return to the knowledge that none of the land is really owned by humans at all, but always only by God.  As you return to the land, you return to the knowledge of God, to the sense that you are not in charge and can relax into the holding of the One who is.   To feel the holding power of the ground under us is thus a way of feeling the divine embrace at all times, a way of knowing that universal holding and bringing it inside us as the true holding  -- and healing  -- vessel.   

Perhaps this understanding of God as the ultimate “holder” explains why this section of the Torah is explicitly connected to Mount Sinai, a classic conundrum (see the first Rashi of our parsha).   Perhaps the implication is that when we return on the fiftieth year, we are returning to “base,” and base or home for us is also always that experience at Mount Sinai -- the intense divine revelation and presence that we experienced there, along with the very groundedness and steadfastness of the mountain itself.   We are returning to that stability, that knowledge of ground under us, that clarity of an eternal divine presence as our achuza, our holding or inheritance.

The return to one’s holding implies groundedness, but it also, strangely, leads to its opposite -- a sense of freedom and upward motion.   The call on the yovel year is a call to liberty, to dror, a word that also means “bird.”    There is both a return to the ground and a sense of flying in the air, free as a bird.  How do these two motions go together?  Here, too, there is a parallel in the world of meditation and also in the world of yoga  -- we ground down with our lower body and reach up with our upper body, coming into awareness of two opposing forces happening at the same moment.

Emotionally, it can be understood this way -- when we do relax into the ground and trust that we are held, we become incredibly light; it is as if all those burdens we have been carrying on our shoulders for decades -- our sense of overwhelming responsibility and the anxious need to do things right and control outcomes -- all those burdens are suddenly not just ours to carry, but shared with the universe, with the ground, with God Himself.  We let down our burdens as we sink into trust, into the knowledge of being held, and as we let down our burdens, we begin to fly, to be light as a bird, to feel a kind of freedom we have never known before, the freedom of one who knows she is always held.