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.
