Akedah, Take II

One thing bothers me about the story of the Akedah -- its end.  

In the story, Avraham endures an unimaginable trial of faith, successfully demonstrating his willingness to sacrifice even his beloved, long-awaited son to God.    

But how does the story conclude?  Avraham is rewarded for his faith.    His son is not sacrificed and he is told that “since you did this” you will receive great blessings and your children will be numerous and greatly successful.   

The problem with this ending is that it implies to us, the readers, that when a person has faith and trusts in God, the end is always good; we are saved from death or sickness or whatever predicament we were worried about in the first place.  Just trust and all will turn out well.  We all know this is not the case.  Trouble and difficulty come even to persons of great faith.  In the world we live in, faith does not guarantee results.   

Indeed, the High Holiday liturgy itself underscores this truth.  On Yom Kippur we read of the 10 martyrs of the Roman period, rabbis of great piety and learning who were tortured and killed in horrifying ways precisely because of their great faith.   Here there is no pretense of reward for faith.   

As a counterpoint to the Akedah story, consider another tale, told thousands of years later, a Hasidic story about Rabbi Yisrael of Rizhin:

Our Rebbe, may his merit protect us, once gave a talk about idle talk before prayer, and told about an incident concerning a certain Hasid who earned an abundant livelihood this way: once a year he set out to the market fair to buy merchandise. His merchandise included clothing for warmth, to protect against cold and chills. One year he travelled as usual to the fair and brought back a large amount of merchandise, but when winter came people were not gripped by cold and he was left with all the merchandise in store. He didn’t have a penny in his pocket, his family cried out for bread, but there was no bread.  One morning before prayer the landlord of the area came to buy all the merchandise. The Hasid answered that he does not do business before prayer.  With this the Rebbe, may his merit protect us, concluded.  

Everyone asked what was the end of the story. I say this is the end of the story, that is, the power of faith of a simple Hasid – how far it goes.  (Ner Yisrael 3:175-6, translation by R. Meir Sendor of Tal Orot).

This story avoids the problem of the Akedah by simply dropping the expected conclusion -- that the Hasid who, like Avraham, sacrificed everything for the sake of God, would, in the end, be rewarded richly for that faith.    We expect that end but we don’t receive it, as if to highlight for us that this good end is neither guaranteed nor the point.  

Indeed, the narrator of this tale suggests what the purpose of such non-happy endings is -- to demonstrate  “the power of faith of a simple Hasid -- how far it goes.”    The story explodes our conception of what a human being is capable of -- even a “simple” one, not the rebbe, just an ordinary Hasid -- to give up on desperately needed material goods for the sake of something more lofty, for the sake of an attachment to God that is so strong it overrides everything else.   Such strength!  Such conviction!  Such power in a simple human.  

Looking back now at the Akedah, it seems clear that this type of inspiration by example is the point of that story as well; the rewards come after, almost as an aside, but the main point here is Avraham himself, a paragon of faith against all odds, a human being who is able to know -- even while in this world -- that what really matters is God alone, and that all else can and must be sacrificed and surrendered, even when it feels like to do so works against everything we thought we wanted most.   

Perhaps we need to reinterpret what the reward is in this story.  Perhaps the reward is the faith itself.   To live a life of conviction and meaning, to know that each step we take up the mountain is what God wants from us, no matter how hard, to live with calm and trust in the face of all types of harrowing moments -- his son may die; he is in a war with kings; people fight with him over wells; a king wants his wife --  to live in the face of all that life throws at us with a sense of purpose and trust -- that is the reward itself, a life of peace and harmony, aligned with the divine will.  

I am reminded of the line from Psalms --   “As for me, I trust in Your loving-kindness; My heart rejoices in Your salvation (13:6).”    Hold on -- salvation?   How is he rejoicing in God’s salvation in the second phrase if in the first phrase, he is just trusting?   Has he been saved already or not?  Ahh.  This verse is indeed all about trust.  The salvation is the trust itself.   To trust in God’s goodness is already to be saved, no matter what the situation.

Indeed, God promises Avraham, at the end of the Akedah, that “because he did this” he will be blessed.   Yes!  He already is blessed through this act, through the faith itself.   

God also promises Avraham here again that his children will be numerous and blessed.   Throughout Avraham’s life, God and Avraham have been involved in a joint project -- the project of creating a future progeny that will continue Avraham’s legacy of faith.   Here, God promises Avraham that this project will succeed precisely because Avraham was able to be so strong in his faith.   This makes sense.    If the purpose of the progeny is to carry on Avraham’s legacy of faith, the best way to ensure that this legacy is strong is to strengthen that value in Avraham himself, so that it can be passed on in its strongest form.    

Take a minute to consider the power of this legacy, to feel its truth, and to feel how having faith is already to be saved, already to be blessed, already the reward itself.     

Life continually throws difficulties our way and we get absorbed in the content of them, thinking that if we could just solve each one -- if we just knew that our children would be safe or this project would work out  -- then we would finally have peace.     But if you watch your own anxiety, you will observe that, once one problem is resolved, the anxiety simply attaches itself to the next problem, so that there is never any peace.    

Attitude and situation can be separated.  As Avraham and the simple Hasid and the 10 martyrs show, a person could, on the other hand, remain calm in the face of any situation, be the mountain of faith no matter whether the sun is out or there is a raging storm.     The ability to be that mountain is the ultimate blessing that Avraham has passed on to us.   

In our High Holiday prayers, we say:  uteshuva utefillah utzedaka ma’avirin et ro’a ha-gezeirah.    Repentance, prayer and charity avert the evil of the decree.    The phrase ro’a ha-gezeirah literally means “the evilness of the decree,” and not simply “the evil decree” as we normally think.     I once heard the following interpretation of that distinction:  What is going on here is not that by praying and repenting and doing good deeds, we actually change our fate, the content of the decree itself.  No, what we are doing through these acts is changing our own mindset and ability to understand and withstand the decree as it is; we are averting the evilness of the decree -- whatever it is -- by changing how we perceive it and react to it and interact with it so that it no longer feels evil to us; we are becoming more like Avraham, who, through his faith, banished any sense of evilness from a decree that on the face of it would certainly have seemed evil to us.   We are learning that to walk with faith is to carry peace inside us, whatever the decree.  

I do not want to pretend any of this is easy.   The stories that we tell -- of Avraham, the simple Hasid and the 10 martyrs -- are aspirational; they remind us of what is possible for a human being so that we have something to hold on to and work towards and believe in.  Without such stories, without such faith, when we confront tragedy and really take it in, there is only despair and meaninglessness.    These are the days of the year that we assert with clarity to ourselves that there is something beyond this world that is worth dying and also living for. 

The Process of Teshuva: Turning a Misdeed into a Merit

The gemara (Yoma 86a-b) reports two different statements about teshuva in Resh Lakish’s name -- one, that teshuva is so great that it turns misdeeds from intentional into unintentional acts, and the other, that teshuva is so great that it turns intentional misdeeds into merits!      Which one is it?  The gemera explains that the first statement concerns teshuva done out of fear (yirah) and the second concerns teshuva done out of love (ahavah).  

This tradition strikes me as a deep statement about inner work.  Resh Lakish’s words here are ne’eseit lo -- “they become for him” -- the sins “become for him” like merits.   In other words, through the inner work of teshuva, some shift happens inside oneself with respect to these sins -- “they become for him” something different, something better; they start out seeming like sins but they end up, in an atmosphere of love, seeming like merits.  

This process has been my experience of parts work in the IFS therapy system.   Admittedly, the work is concerned less with actions and more with the aspects of the person that produced the actions, but I think the same could be said about true, deep teshuva, that it, too, is concerned with inner attributes.   

One of the fundamental tenets of IFS is that all parts have good intentions.  They may carry false beliefs and unnecessary burdens and have been through traumas that forced them into extreme roles, so that at the present moment, they are causing us, and maybe others, a lot of suffering.   But underneath it all, if we can hear their stories with friendliness and compassion -- in the gemara’s terms, with ahavah, love --   they inevitably turn out to be well-intentioned and to desire only good things for us and others.   Even a part that seems evil, like a tyrannical inner critic or a self-destructive or aggressive part, even such a part is actually aiming for the best given the circumstances, often trying to protect us through these extreme mechanisms from feeling something very painful.  

These parts, it turns out, don’t particularly like their extreme roles; they are suffering and exhausted, too.    When allowed to tell their stories and to unburden their burdens, and when there is also healing of whatever pain they are protecting, they gladly shift roles.  There is this idea in IFS that these parts -- after going through such a process -- will return to their naturally valuable states.  All parts are valuable.    We don’t so much get rid of the part as allow it to shift into a more positive role.  

As the gemara intuited, these shifts can only happen --  in their most complete form -- in an atmosphere of love.   We often think of teshuva as a harsh process of self-judgment, but things inside us tend to close up in such an atmosphere; they get stuck and intransigent.  On the other hand, when there is a sense of love and acceptance, an open embrace, then our parts feel safe enough to open up to the light of understanding and transformation.   Nothing can really move without love.

There is something else that happens that is a bit more subtle.   There are parts of us that have -- in our own internal climate -- been demonized or shamed for years.  These are not parts that are objectively “evil” -- they haven’t actually hurt anyone -- but parts that we, inside us, deem “evil” because they have been the source of humiliation and shame in the past, a loud part or an overeager part or a sensitive, intense part or a socially awkward part.    The work here might not involve getting these parts to shift.  It might instead involve getting us to shift our view of them, to see that they are not the “bad” parts we thought they were, but are actually, in a way, our strengths, or in the gemara’s language -- our merits.      Being loud and overeager is great energy; it is needed to start any project with enthusiasm.   Being sensitive and intense is painful but it means we are living at a deep level.    Being socially awkward -- in the light of love -- begins to appear as a kind of asset, too, a way of being genuine in any situation, without pretense.   Suddenly, what appeared to be a fault is an asset.   It is all gold inside us.  

It is all gold inside us because it all comes from God, who is wholly good.   What appears to be evil either needs a little shifting or shifting of our point of view; the essence is always good.  To do teshuva, then, is to return all parts to their original goodness, to their original divine origin.  Once we see them in the light of love -- of a divine love that brought them into being and that holds them no matter how far they stray or how burdened they become -- once we see them in that light, they can return to their goodness; they are truly turned into merits, into assets that are only stronger for their journey.  

Yonah and the Resistance to Love

Yonah resists being God’s messenger.   There is something about the message that Yonah can’t handle, and he tells us what it is at the end of the story:  

“O Lord!  Isn’t this just what I said when I was still in my own country?  That is why I fled beforehand to Tarshish.  For I know that You are a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in kindness, renouncing punishment (4.2).”   

What Yonah resists is God’s compassion and love, His tendency to love people, even the evil Ninevites, so much that He changes His mind about destroying them.  Yonah knows that this attribute is the essence of God, and Yonah wants no part of this love.

So Yonah runs away.  He gets on a ship to a faraway country, hides out in the bowels of the ship and goes to sleep.  He has other ways of escaping, too, like the suicidal urge that comes up throughout the tale: He is down in the ship, not caring about a storm that could kill him, and then he happily advises the sailors to toss him to the raging sea.  And later, in conversation with God, he explicitly says twice that he would rather die than live.  He would rather die than live with the knowledge of God’s love.    Dying is the ultimate escape, the ultimate protection against feeling something we really don’t want to feel.   

And for some reason, Yonah does not want to feel God’s compassion in the world.  

But whatever you resist inside you -- it becomes stronger, more extreme, destructive.    The message of God’s love -- through Yonah’s resistance to it -- turns into an angry storm on the sea, demanding to be listened to.    We want to sleep, but life keeps waking us up.  There is something here we need to see.

What is so poignant here is that Yonah is running away from the message of God’s care even as God is caring for him.   The story is ostensibly about God’s compassion for Nineveh, but it turns out to also be about how God cares for this single person, sticking with him at each turn, always there to catch him in his missteps and help him grow.    The ship that Yonah hires to escape from God turns out to be full of kind and God-fearing sailors who are at first loath to throw Yonah to the Sea.  And then, out on the Sea, God provides a fish to save him, and later, in the heat, He provides first, a gourd for shade, and then, because God sees that Yonah needs a different kind of experience, He provides a worm to attack the plant.     Sometimes the care God gives Yonah seems -- as in life -- like suffering, but it is all loving care, all provided for Yonah’s sake, with incredible patience and steadfastness.  There is a sense here that God simply does not give up on people, not on the people of Nineveh, and not on Yonah, who resists him, and not on each one of us.   

Can you feel the strength of this kind of care?  Staying with you through all your ups and downs, patiently waiting for you to wake up to the fact that you are cared for and to stop resisting.  

Yonah, in his antics of resistance, reminds me of a young tantruming child, flailing about, going this way and that, needing, above all, to be held in a firm loving embrace, to know that there is something holding him, even if he tries to run away and hit and scream.    The love will still be there.

Why does Yonah resist this message of love?  Why does he fight so hard against the idea that God’s essence is to be compassionate and caring?   

It is subtle and counterintuitive, but I think we all have a tendency at times to resist love, both human and divine, to want it but to fight against it or hide from it at the same time.  In some ways, I think the real thing we run away from, the thing that we are most asleep about and need to be awakened to, is not God’s judgment but God’s love.   

Like Yonah, we are scared of God’s love.  We want it -- we want it probably more than anything in the world -- but, precisely because we want it so much, we are also terrified of it, also constantly fighting it and running away from it, not able to stand still to receive it.   

We are scared of it partly because we are scared of feeling the pain of not having had it for so long, the hole inside us that is so large and gaping.  We are scared of it because it makes us feel vulnerable, open and exposed.  We are scared of its intensity, that it will overwhelm us.     We are also used to living in a harsh world of human judgment and criticism -- at least there we know how things work; we are scared of the unfamiliarity and seeming unpredictability of divine compassion.     

So we run away. We travel.  We get busy.  We go to sleep.  We wish for death.  Anything but feel the love -- and the intensity of the pain we associate with it.

We desire this love, but we run away from it.  

And yet, like Yonah, this divine compassion is actually our essence.  We were born into the world to deliver this message.  ( It may, at first glance, appear to be a harsh message, like Yonah’s about destruction, but that is not its essence.)      We were born to be vessels of divine love.  We may resist this task, but God will steer us again and again towards it.    It is our essence, just like the name Yonah.  Yonah is the dove that Noah sent out after the flood; it returned first with an olive branch, and, upon being sent out again, did not return at all, a sign that the world was once again habitable and whole.    So the name Yonah symbolizes the knowledge of God’s ultimate kindness.    Suffering will happen in the world, but not forever.   The world will always return to kindness.     

This is the knowledge that we carry somewhere inside us.  Yonah knew it, too.   The problem is not so much knowing it, but allowing it, not resisting it, relaxing into it, and carrying it into the world.  We are all unwilling prophets of divine love.  

Parashat Ki Tavo: The Energy Flow

 Et Hashem He’emarta Hayom . . .   

VeHashem He’emerikha Hayom . . . . (Devarim 26: 17-18).

You have affirmed this day that the Lord is your God. . .

And the Lord has affirmed this day that you are His treasured people . . . 

The words translated here as “affirmed,” he’emarta and he’emirkha -- there is much debate over their meaning since they do not appear in that form anywhere else in the Torah.  They could mean “affirmed,” “raised up,” “separated,” “beautified,” or “caused to say.”   

Whatever their meaning, what is so beautiful here is that this unusual word is used here twice -- once for our action toward God and once for God’s action toward us.   It is as if we have a secret language between us that no one else knows, and we use it only for each other, to remind each other of that special place of connection.   Indeed, the word he’emarta plays with the root amar, to speak, as if implying a new form of communication unique to this relationship.       

The shofar blow is a similar form of private communication.   It is a language beyond words, beyond reason, a language of the heart.   And, like he’emarta, the shofar also has reciprocality to it; we blow it and ask God to hear us, on the one hand.  And, on the other hand, as we remind ourselves in the Mussaf tefillah, God also blows a shofar, at Mount Sinai, and again, to herald the Messianic era.  The shofar, like the word he’emarta, symbolizes both sides, our voice and God’s voice joined together, both trying to move beyond words to a place of deep connection.  

Feel the back and forth flow in all this reciprocality.   We are he’emarta God.   God is he’emir us.    We blow the shofar -- sending air up to heaven -- and God blows back down to us -- sending us air in our lungs, renewed life for the year,  little inklings of revelation, and the hope of a future blowing of the shofar.    There is flow between us.   Back and forth and back and forth.  Ani Ledodi vedodi li.  I am for my beloved and my beloved is for me.  Reciprocality and flow, like a current moving back and forth between us, alive with energy.      

In next week’s parsha, teshuva is also pictured this way.   In one verse it says, veshavta ad Hashem Elokekha, “you will return to the Lord your God,” and in the next verse, veshav Hashem Elokekha et shevutekha, “then the Lord your God will return you” (Devarim 30:2-3).  Rashi notes that this second verb is in the wrong form; to mean “return” in the transitive form (He returned the people), it should have said veheshiv.    But, defying the meaning, the verbs are the same, as if to emphasize the parallel aspect here.  We return and God returns.  We are both doing the same thing, mirroring each other in a back and forth exchange.      

This is the essence of returning.  Returning is always to a place we have already been.  We have already been with God; we are in a constant back and forth flow with Him.    Like the ministering angels who are said to go ratzo veshov, running forward and then back again, and like the angels on Yaakov’s ladder, up and down and up and down,  we are in this dance of intimacy with God, back and forth and back and forth, closer and farther, closer and farther.        We can never stray too far.  We are always somewhere on the ladder that connects us and can feel the connection, like an umbilical cord with its own flow of energy.     So when we do teshuva, it is always a return; it is movement to a previous place, part of the flow of connection.

If you pay attention, you can feel the back and forth rhythm of all life forces in this world.  The primary one is our breath -- in and out, and in and out; we give and we receive; our insides are connected with the outer world through a neverending exchange of energies, through an intimate divine flow that runs in and out of us.   This rhythm is also in the sea and in the earth and the animals and plants, even in your freshly baked bread, the pulse of life.   

To return is to feel yourself a part of this universal rhythm, to feel how the breath links you to the world and to the Source behind it all, to live with awareness of this connection, to feel how it sustains you and nourishes you and how you also have something to give back in the energy flow, a part to play in both giving and receiving.  

Emotionally, this experience of flow can sometimes feel like an “answering.”   It can be as simple as waving at a stranger and receiving a wave and a smile back.  Some energy has been exchanged; we have participated in the divine flow, brought it down between us, and we can feel how the back and forth of it feeds us.  Or it may be more intense; we cry out in sorrow and there is something in the universe that answers the cry, like a ping inside us, exactly the response we needed at that moment.   We can also feel that flow between us at moments of great intimacy; someone’s heart mirrors ours in joy or in pain or just in love; there is energy flow between us, life-sustaining energy that partakes of the divine.  

Et Hashem he’emarta hayom.   VeHashem He’emikha hayom.   You affirm God and God affirms you.   When does this flow happen?  The Torah is explicit that it can only happen at one time, and that time is hayom, today.      When can you feel this connection, this back and forth exchange of energies?  Always right here at the present moment.   Just now.   Hayom.  We are so often not here in the now.    To do teshuva is perhaps above all to return to presence; to keep returning, again and again, to the divine energy flow of right now.  

Parashat Ki Tetze: Returning Lost Parts

Hashavat Aveidah.  This mitzvah -- to return lost objects to their owners ---appears in this week’s parsha (Deuteronomy 22) as well as in Parashat Mishpatim and is the subject of much detailed halakhic discussion among the rabbis.   While not taking away from the concrete aspect of the mitzvah, I want to offer an additional, more personal, psychological reading.     

Returning is a big deal to us.  Here we are, in the season of return, teshuva, thinking about how to return --  to God, to ourselves, to something prior, already in us.  

There is also the Messianic return that we all pray for, a return of exiles to the Holy Land and a return of God’s presence to dwell among us, an ingathering of people and God, perhaps a return to the perfect harmony of the Garden of Eden, our first place of banishment.  

So returning looms large in our collective consciousness.   Surely the returning of lost objects is connected in some way to this larger context of return.  

Indeed, the Torah describes the lost possessions in our parsha -- a sheep or an ox are the examples -- as nidahim.   This word is usually translated here as “gone astray” as one would imagine a sheep would do, but the word normally bears the meaning of banished, exiled, thrust away, cast out or neglected.   Isaiah 27:13 describes a future day when the exiled will all return from Assyria and Egypt, and it uses the term nidahim, meaning “those who have been cast out.”   

So in the hoped-for future of Isaiah there will ultimately be a return of the nidahim, those who have been cast out, and here, in our parsha, there is a mitzvah of beginning to do that work ourselves, to return the nidahim.     

What is this work?  What is it that has been lost and needs returning?  What needs returning -- and maybe this is also part of the process of teshuva -- are the lost parts of ourselves, the parts that have been cast out and exiled (IFS therapy actually calls them “exiles”) over the years.     

The Torah says here that the first task is to see these lost parts and not hide them from yourself, not ignore them and cover them over (vehitalamta), as we normally do.  The first task is to really see them and acknowledge their existence.   These are parts that are well-hidden and we are adept at ignoring them, so that seeing them is a task in and of itself.    It is also a relief.  Parts that have been ignored and exiled -- when they experience a little bit of light and attention -- there is already a relaxing that takes place.  So it makes sense that the first job in returning them is simply to see them.   

What are these exiled parts of us and how did they get cast out?   The Torah hints here at the back story.   Just before this mitzvah of return is the mitzvah of the ben sorer umoreh, the defiant and rebellious son (Deuteronomy 21: 18-21).   The instruction here, which, according to the rabbis, was never actually carried out, is that parents who are unable to control their adolescent, bring the child to the elders of the town where he is stoned for being rebellious and defiant and for being a glutton and a drunkard.     This is, in a way, a description of the socialization process of all children.   The parts of them that are considered anti-social -- their rebellious, self-centered and needy parts--  get stoned and eliminated in order to allow the children to function in society.  Otherwise, they might end up committing crimes worthy of the death penalty, Rashi explains, pointing to the connection between this mitzvah and the one that follows (about not leaving the corpse of a criminal hanging overnight).  In other words, there is some necessary curbing that happens in child-raising, in order to ensure proper socialization.

But there is a price.  Often, the baby is thrown out with the bath water.  Rebelliousness and defiance of authority are also tied to qualities of strength, courage, independence of thought, assertiveness, and an ability to seek truth and justice.    A large appetite -- being a glutton and a drunkard without limits -- is also related to having joie de vivre, enthusiasm, and a kind of freedom and abandon and ability to live in the moment.   There is also in this large hunger a deep neediness which is the essence of human nature, a kind of vulnerability and openness and even generosity.  So all that socialization, the need to control and discipline and curb these parts, makes us lose essential pieces of ourselves.  Inhibition and worry about discipline and pleasing authority take over so that there is also a loss of innocence and genuineness, the kind of purity of love expressed by a young child without pretense or thought of how it will be received.   

So that is how some of our most precious parts are lost.  A story is told about a child who had a dog that she played with and loved very much.  The dog, however, made a mess of the house and pooped one too many times on the parents’ best carpet so that first the dog was relegated to the outdoors, and eventually was banished altogether from the home.  The child mourned the dog for a long time but after a while forgot about its existence, until one day, walking along the road, the child encounters the dog, dirty and old and uncared for, and recognizes this old friend and begins to clean the dog up and bring the dog back into her life.  It is the same with parts; some of the sweetest, most innocent ones, were just too messy for the world to deal with when we were young, and so they got thrown out and we forgot about them.  But they are still there, like the Torah’s cast out sheep, wondering around, looking for a home inside us.   The mitzvah of returning lost items is the mitzvah of returning these exiled and abandoned aspects of ourselves back into our own homes, our selves.  

The process of return can be slow.  The Torah says that sometimes the distance to the owner will be far and it will take time until he comes to retrieve his lost item.    The rabbis use the term ye’ush, despair, to refer to how a person sometimes feels about a lost item; he gives up hope of ever having it back and so he does not actively seek it.  Returning lost parts is much the same.  There can be despair at the possibility of return.  It may take a long time to even begin to see the part again and believe in the possibility of reintegrating it.  .  

But this process of returning lost parts, though slow, is redemptive, healing work; it is a kind of teshuva.   We are bringing back in that which was exiled and lost, and thereby returning ourselves to our original wholeness.   All parts of ourselves are gifts from God.  We are only whole when they are all restored.  The world is only whole and redeemed when we are all whole.   Kabbalistically there is a notion that God Himself is in exile from certain parts of Himself and that our role in this world is to help God reunite those parts.    As beings with the divine image inside us, we do that -- we contribute to God’s own wholeness -- by returning and bringing home the nidahim, those that have been cast out of our own selves.  

Parashat Shoftim: On Becoming Whole

We come into this world with a faint memory of having once been part of something much larger than ourselves.    We have a vague sense of incompleteness, that we are missing something essential.  We are hungry, but not for food, never quite satisfied, always yearning.  We are deeply and relentlessly lonely, even when we are connected to others in meaningful ways.

“All things are lacking [haserim],” says the Sefat Emet -- everything has this emptiness at its core --  “and”, he continues, “they can only come to completeness [hashlemut] by becoming close to Him, may He be Blessed.”  This is what the verse Tamim tehiyeh im Hashem Elokekha (Devarim 18:13) means.   Tamim means whole, perfect or complete so that the verse, according to the Sefat Emet, comes to read: “You will (only) become whole WITH Hashem your God.” You will always have a certain hole, but if you are WITH God, then you will be complete, the hole will be filled; you will finally relax into some sense of wholeness.

We normally cover over this hole, this sense of “missing something,” with many clever tricks, so that there are times we don’t even feel the ache.  We are busy.   We are anxious.   We arrange and manipulate and control things to make it all just right, always trying to reach for some hoped-for sense of peace and wholeness inside. If I just do this, then I will feel better.   This is our witchcraft and our magic, our attempt to fix with human means what can only be fixed by connection to God.  The Torah calls this way the way of the nations -- witchcraft and sorcery and divination -- and contrasts it to what God has offered us --  the option to be tamim with God and feel true completeness.  

But before we can feel that wholeness, we have to feel the hole.  This is very important.   The hole is actually the doorway to the wholeness and there is no other way in.  It is precisely the yearning and the loneliness that remind us there is more; they want something; we feel the whisper of their wanting tugging at the edge of our consciousness.  And their wanting is itself the key.    Tzama likha nafshi.  My soul is thirsty for You.   When we say that, when we sing those words, when we articulate the thirst, we already begin to feel the connection.  In the hole is the whole.   

We have to feel the hole, and that is necessarily painful, a kind of heartbreak, a tearing inside, like how we feel when our children leave us (my son went off to Israel for his second gap year this week) -- there is a giant terrible hole of missing them, and this hole, what it tells us, is not just how much we miss them, but also how much we love them. The pain has truth and connection and wholeness built into it.  

When we go deep enough into the pain of incompleteness, we find out that it knows something about completeness, and somehow has the power to bring us there.  Lefum tzara, agra. According to the suffering is the reward. Usually this refers to Torah work -- the harder you work, the more you get out of it, which is surely true.  But there is another meaning, an emotional meaning --- the more we suffer, the more we allow the feelings that hurt -- the pain of loneliness and yearning and incompleteness -- the greater the reward on the flip side -- the greater the connection and the love that come right back at us. It is like a mirror; the greater the pain, the greater the love that is called forth into the universe.   

There is a part of us that knows about this love, that knows of its infinite and eternal quality and of its ability to hold all things; this part suffers and thirsts as a way to remind us to bring that love into ourselves, to live by its light, and through that love to become truly tamim, whole and pure and perfect, already perfect.   

Parashat Re'eh: The Poor in Your Midst

 The most vulnerable in society are a primary concern in this week’s parsha -- there is a constant refrain of taking care of the poor, the widow, the orphan, the male and female servant and the Levite, who, because he did not have a land portion, was dependent on others for his survival.

This concern is a common theme in the Torah.    Our history as a nation begins as slaves in part as a way to sensitize us to the most vulnerable among us..  We are a nation charged with care of the vulnerable.

Without taking away from the very practical ramifications of these injunctions and their essential function in society -- how we need to “open our hands” and help those in need, financially and any other way we can, especially in these dire times, when some are suffering more than others -- without taking away from this emphasis, I want to offer a reading of this injunction that is more personal and internal, informed by a type of psychotherapeutic technique called IFS, Internal Family Systems therapy.

The Torah repeatedly refers to the poor and the Levite as being beshe’arekha,  “in your gates,” and bekirbekha, “in your midst” or “inside you.”   It also calls them “yours” -- aniyekha, evyonkha, “your poor,” “your destitute.”     What if we read these terms hyperliterally as referring to “your” own poor inside you, the poor within the gates of your own self?   

These are the parts of yourself that have become impoverished over the years for lack of attention and support and love, the parts that have been rejected and exiled because they are not valued in our personal and communal culture.  They are the neediest parts of ourselves, the insecurities, the hurt places, the old wounds, our particular vulnerabilities.    We don’t like these parts of ourselves and we usually hide them or push them away, thereby starving them and making them even more needy.    

Lo ta’azvenu, don’t abandon him, the Torah says about the Levite.  And, with reference to the poor -- don’t harden your heart or shut your hand.  Don’t keep shutting these parts of yourself away, hardening yourself against them and abandoning them to their exiled places within you.  Rather, what is needed is unequivocal openness -- patoah tiftah et yadekha lo -- open your hand to him.   We normally understand this phrase to mean offering financial assistance, but the language of an open hand allows for a broader interpretation -- open yourself completely to her, to the poor, rejected one inside you; offer her a hand of welcome and greeting and assistance and love; offer her the arms of an embrace, a welcoming back into the self.    

Can you bring up compassion for these parts of yourself and feel how much they need this warmth and openness and embrace?   They are like the real needy on the outside; they cry and they hurt and they need care, but they are not heard; they are told to pull it together; their hurts and needs are minimized and invalidated; others, they are told, have more pressing needs.   

When you offer assistance to these needy inside you, says the Torah, do it dei mahsoro asher yehsar lo, “enough to fill what he is lacking or needing.”    There is a temptation to look from the outside and determine when it is enough, to have an attitude of boundaries and limitations when caring for the needy, either inside or outside you.   Ok.  I’ll hear you now, one might say to this needy part, but only for so long.  You can cry now, but that’s it. Then we get back to work.  Your needs seem endless, like a bottomless pit, so we will just close off the support at some point.  No, the Torah says.  Fill what is haser lo,  what is missing for him.   This is a subjective matter.  It’s not what you on the outside think is enough.  It is a question of his feeling that it is over, that the hole is filled.   That hole may be larger than you think is appropriate.  Don’t stop too soon. Don’t shut down the tears and the pain and say -- enough.  You are done.  No, be open until the very end. Dei mahsoro asher yehsar lo.  As much as he needs.

Rashi explains the phrase asher yehsar lo to mean that even if what the poor person needs is a horse to ride on and a servant to run before him -- even then, you should fulfill this need.    I love this choice of horse and servant because it illustrates for us concretely what the poor really need -- a sense of pride, a sense of mattering in the world.  A horse to ride on like Mordecai in Shushan with all the pomp and fanfare.  Here comes an important person.  That is what our needy parts yearn for, too, a sense of mattering, of respect, of being honored and important in our own inner culture.  They have been dismissed for so long. Now they want a parade; they want to know that the king -- our self, that larger self that is connected to the divine -- considers them worthy.   

And indeed, what one finds when one turns toward such needy parts with openness and gentleness is that they turn out to deserve such a parade.  There is some hidden glory that we have locked away inside us because it has been ridiculed and rejected in the past, but oftentimes, these parts are the very best of us, the gold nuggets, the parts that indeed should ride forth on a horse into the world with pride and confidence. 

This whole shift in attitude towards the vulnerable can only happen in the glow of the divine light, bamakom asher Yivhar Hashem, in the place where God chooses to rest His name.  This week’s parsha emphasizes that one must come to the dwelling place of God to rejoice for the holidays, and that when one comes for such rejoicing, one should do so together with all of one’s most vulnerable -- wife, children, servants,  poor, and Levites.    Before God, all are made welcome; before God, it becomes clear that all are indeed children of the divine; there is room here, a capacity to hold all this brokenness that often feels beyond our human capacities.   And, in this holding of all pieces of ourselves -- and perhaps only in such holding of all parts -- is true simchah, joy.  

In such divine space, there is not a strong distinction between the outer and the inner realms.  The poor inside us need care and the poor outside our door also need care, and the flow of warmth and openness and generosity flows out and in, and in and out, and all are one.    Perhaps the Torah meant to refer to both all along.