A Poem for Parashat Terumah: Raise it Up!

O Lord

To You

I raise it all 

Up

Terum - ah 

Ah Ah Up

I lift it all up in Your name

The joys and the laughter

And the lilting songs

And most of all the

Sorrows

The aching pit in my belly

Long and narrow

Throbbing with 

Some Inexplicable rawness

The tender heart of loneliness

Grief, a hole

Someone 

Something always 

Missing

And the dancing whirling dervish

The one that hides the pain

In restlessness

To You, O Lord

I raise these all up

I take them in for you 

Veyikhu li

For Your sake

I welcome them

Shelter them

And do not 

Dismiss

Deny

Diminish

Though sometimes I 

Do

But today For You

I take them in

Say: I consent

Recieve them as gifts

And in so receiving

I give them 

Back 

Still in me

But Elevated

Terumah

A gift from you, for you.

I lift them 

Along with my eyes

To the mountains

Whence my help comes

And 

Now

See some joy comes out of this sorrow:

From the mountaintop

The pit and the dervish are

Flying, Soaring

 -- Teroooomaaaaah -- 

On the wings of the two cherubs

That cover the Ark.

The space between those angelic creatures

Where You said You would meet me

Forms a heart 

My heart

Broken and Open

To You.

I meet You there.

From the peak i see colors.

I see now

Through Your eyes

That my pit of pain 

is filled with

Gold,

Silver and

Copper.

Blue,

Purple and

Crimson yarns.

Fine linen

Goats’ hair

Dolphin skins

Acacia wood and

Aromatic incense.

Lapis lazuli

Sapphire

Amethyst

Emerald

Jacinth 

And agate.

Precious stones all.

Gifts from You and for You.

And also

Oil for lighting and for 

Anointing

My own head

Dishanta bashemen roshi.

I feel it dripping down me

Through me

I am made of Your

Glory

Your bright 

Shining

Beautiful 

Sparkling

Light.  

Out of these materials --

The sorrows

(and also the joys but they know they can do it) --

We build a home for 

You to

Dwell

Inside us.

Ve’asu li mikdash veShakhanti 

Betokham.

This song is the house

I built for You

Out of Your gifts.

Thank you for dwelling

In it

In me.

There is nothing missing now.  

Some Notes of Explanation:

1. Terumah is the word used for the gifts given by the Israelites for the Tabernacle construction.   It is related to the word rum, meaning “to raise or lift up.”

2. Veyikhu li -- “They should take for Me” the Terumah, the gifts for the Tabernacle (Ex 25:2).  Note the strangeness of the word “take” with reference to a gift; “give” would have made more sense.  The “take” verb  implies that we are both taking/accepting gifts from God and giving to Him at the same time. 

3. Mountains -- a reference to Ps 121: “I lift up my eyes to the mountains whence my help comes.” 

4. Cherubs -- this week’s parsha gives instructions for constructing the Tabernacle, beginning with its heart -- the aron, the ark, which housed the Tablets.  Above this ark was a cover with two keruvim, angelic creatures, leaning toward each other with their wings outstretched.  The Torah tells us that it was in the space between those two figures that God’s voice could be heard.  God says of this space: veno’aditi likha sham, “I will meet you there” (Exod 25:22).

5.  Gold, silver, . . .   -- these are the materials the Torah lists as being brought as gifts for the Tabernacle.  See Exod 25:3-7 and 28: 17-20).  

6. Oil for anointing - one of the gifts listed.   Dishanta bashemen roshi, “You have anointed my head with oil” from Mizmor Ledavid, Psalm 23. 

7. Ve’asu li mikdash veshakhanti betokham, “Let them make Me a sanctuary and I will dwell inside them” (Exod 25:8).   Traditional commentaries note the shift in number from the singular “sanctuary” to the plural betokham, “in them.”  It should have said “in it,” meaning “in the sanctuary that you build.”  One interpretation is that God intends to dwell not so much inside the physical building as inside all of us, that we each are to construct a sanctuary in our own hearts for God to dwell in.  

Parashat Mishpatim: The Stranger Inside Us

The Torah understands the intimate connection between our internal and our external facings, between how we feel towards ourselves and how we feel towards others.  The principle of loving your neighbor as yourself presumes such a connection between relation to self and relation to other.  In this week’s parsha, amidst all the legal and social injunctions about how to treat others and create a just society, the principle of not hurting the ger, the stranger, refers us explicitly back to our own internal experience.   We are not to harm the stranger because we have experienced similar pain; we have been strangers in Egypt.  This rationale is repeated in many of the 36 times that the ger is mentioned in the Torah, as if to emphasize that this external facing -- the way we treat others -- is very much dependent on the quality of our internal facing -- the way we treat ourselves and our own suffering, the way we treat the stranger inside us.  

But what does it mean to say that we have experienced being strangers?  Obviously, none of us today were in Egypt and most of us have not actually experienced living as a foreigner in a hostile environment.   Nonetheless, we do all know the nefesh hager, “soul of the stranger” (Exodus 23:9).  Every single one of us has experienced at some point the sense of being a stranger in a place of mitzrayim, a place of narrow boundaries of who is in and who is out, a place where we, for whatever reason, did not quite fit those boundaries, a place where we felt the sting of not being fully on the inside, of not being exactly like everyone else, perhaps even a sense of mattering less than others, of exclusion, of standing on the outside of a window looking in to a party.  This “outsider” experience is basic to being human in a social world.  And the part or parts of us that suffered that exclusion, the parts that did not seem acceptable in those situations -- maybe they were deemed too wild or awkward or incompetent or just wierd and different in some way -- those parts gradually came under fire inside our own system in order to escape that sense of outsiderness, in order to feel the essential feeling of belonging; those parts got criticized and shamed and banished, so that gradually they became strangers -- on the outside looking in -- even inside us.   These are our own internal gerim, our own internal strangers, living within our systems as second class citizens. 

Getting to know your inner stranger:

You may not know them very well -- since they are mostly exiled inside us -- but the Torah actually says to get to know them intimately -- atem yedatem et nefesh hager (23:9)  You know -- you must know, if you are ever to treat others properly -- what it feels like to be excluded; you must know in a deep, intimate way this piece of your own self.  The verb yada, to know, implies not just knowledge, but intimate, often sexual knowledge.  That’s how close you need to be to your own nefesh hager, “soul of the stranger” -- to know it from the inside in a penetrating, connecting way.  We usually try to escape our own vulnerabilities, to brush them under the carpet and move on, but in doing so, we are giving up a part of ourselves, and we are giving up also, a way of connecting to others; when you understand your own vulnerability, you are invited in to the intimacy of others’ vulnerability.  Your own nefesh hager is the portal to the nefesh hager of every other human.  

Not shaming your inner stranger:

We don’t just need to know these outsider parts inside us.   When the Torah tells us how we should treat the outsider on the outside, it is also teaching us how to treat our own internal outsider.   VeGer lo toneh velo tilhatzenu (22:20) -- You shall not mistreat or oppress the stranger.   Rashi explains the term toneh as referring to ona’at devarim, verbal abuse.   The classic rabbinic example of such verbal abuse is shame -- reminding a convert (the other, related, meaning of ger) of her previous life or a penitent of his previous sins, essentially reminding someone on the fringes of the group of her incomplete belonging, shaming her in some way, degrading her, making her feel badly about herself.   We do this all the time to the strangers inside us, if anything probably more often than to the external stranger.   Most of us have a voice inside our heads that attacks mercilessly these parts of us, the parts that are vulnerable to exclusion by the world for whatever reason, perhaps out of weakness or incompetence or just difference.  This voice shames those parts, reminding them of their exclusion and incomplete belonging, keeping them in exile with verbal abuse.  The Torah’s prohibition against doing such shaming to others should surely apply to the outsiders inside of us as well.   Do not shame your own ger!

Loving your inner stranger:

It’s bigger than that.  How do you get out of the habit of ona’at devarim, of shame and criticism, inside?   How do you shift the internal climate away from judgment and condemnation?   The only answer is love.   Devarim says it this way: “[God] . . . loves the stranger [ohev ger], . . ..  You, too, must love the stranger [ve’ahavtem et ha’ger], for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (10:18-19).   It’s not just about not shaming the stranger inside you.  You actually have to love and embrace those parts of you, to “know” them in the biblical sense, intimately and with great love, to welcome them into your heart as full members of yourself in all their vulnerability and inadequacy and with all the qualities that make them unacceptable in the wider world.   In your own heart, they need to be welcomed and loved.   The world may have excluded or devalued them, but for you they are precious. 

The hidden value of rejected parts:

As it turns out, it is often precisely these rejected parts and traits of us that are most valuable.   Moshe stuttered; he was a terribly awkward speaker.   And yet precisely in this area of speaking, he achieved greatness, becoming the greatest orator of all time, funneling through him the word of God for all ages.   In normal society, surely his awkwardness would have been scorned and reviled, but somehow, in God’s estimation, this part of him was an asset.   Perhaps it was precisely because of his speech impediment that God chose him; he would be a true vessel, not adding his own flourishes, but genuine and true.   As we say in Hallel, even ma’asu habonim hayeta lerosh pinah.  The rock that was rejected by the builders becomes the cornerstone.   Precisely what is rejected and shunned by the builders -- by normal society -- turns out to be the key, the foundation for everything else, our most valuable asset.  

These, too, are from God:

What is shunned and pushed outside turns out to have value because in God’s eyes there is nothing in or out of the circle; it is all from God; it is all of God -- both the stranger and the insider; both the parts that are socially acceptable and successful and praiseworthy as well as those that are shamed and ostracized.  Eyn od milvado.   There is nothing in the world other than God.  Nothing.  We can’t welcome one group and not another in God’s world.  They all have a place.  They all belong.  

This understanding of the divine underpinning of including the stranger is implied by the peculiar juxtaposition of two seemingly unrelated commandments in our parsha -- the prohibition against worship of foreign gods and the injunction against mistreating the foreigner.   22:19 reads: “Whoever sacrifices to a god other than the Lord alone shall be proscribed.”. That verse ends with: Bilti lashem levado, “only for the Lord alone,” and the following one (22:20) begins with the connector letter vav, “and”,  “And you shall not mistreat or oppress the stranger.”    Of course you shouldn’t mistreat a stranger; this is just another aspect of believing in only one God and sacrificing only to this God.     If you believe in only this God, then no one is outside of God’s circle, not even the stranger.  All are welcome and included, and the society that we create, whether inside us or outside us, must reflect this understanding, this inclusiveness, this open-hearted divine embrace of all. 

Vulnerability as a portal to the divine:

It may even be the case, as is implied by the rejected rock verse and the Moshe example, that God actually feels in some way closer to the stranger, to the vulnerable, to the rejected and exiled ones.   If the disadvantaged cry out, the Torah says, then God hears it right away and responds.   The door for these cries is always open above.   Or to think of it another way, God finds such people and such parts within us to be particularly suitable and open instruments for the divine flow.   They are holes, like the wide open mouth of the cry,  holes of vulnerability inside us, and these holes open us -- if we are brave enough to be with them and love them and not reject them -- to the divine; they are portals of sacredness.   Because of their sense of inadequacy and exclusion, they are always reaching, wanting something, yearning for God.  When we welcome them in, when we welcome the holes, they shift from being outsiders in this world to insiders in another world; if we welcome and love them, they lead us to God; they help us see the pathway to redemption, to a world of inclusion, a great big circle with no one outside.

The Mirror in Our Bathroom: A Poem

I am not good at

Cleaning the mirror in our bathroom.

It ends up with an all-over smudge

Foggy

A film covering over

Where the dots of toothpaste

Used to be.

The first time it happened

I was annoyed:

Here I had scrubbed and rubbed

And made it worse!

Injustice reigns!

The second time 

I asked for help:

My law professor husband Tim

Knows how to clean things.

Windex, a new cloth

Multiple times

Get rid of the soap.

The third time

Trying to remember

The trick

Maybe it’s better?

The next day the sun shines in 

And I see the fog

My face in the mirror 

Is grayer than 

My almost 50 years warrant.

This time it is funny.

Funny like the arguments

Between Tim and me

He carries the kitchen towel

Around on his shoulder while cooking

I like it hung up for all to use

He trips over my shoes

Which I forget again and leave in his way

The first few times

We are irritated

Heat rising

After that it is funny.  

People are so ridiculous

In their ways 

And so difficult to change.

The mirror laughs with me

Through its fog.

I’d rather have the blotches

Of old toothpaste

Than the fog.  

At least then

I can see my 

Reflection

And know who I am

No need to clean

Or to fix,

Only

To laugh and to celebrate

This imperfect

Self 

And all its blotches.

Parashat Yitro: 10 Steps to Revelation

Below are 10 principles about accessing revelation culled from this week's parsha.

#1 Accept wisdom from wherever it appears, even “outsiders.”

Our parsha, the parsha of the 10 commandments, doesn’t begin with those commandments, but instead begins with the visit of Moshe’s father-in-law, Yitro, for whom the parsha is named.    The story centers around Yitro’s advice to Moshe -- seeing Moshe overburdened by judging, Yitro suggests that Moshe set up a system of lower judges.   By placing this story in juxtaposition to the 10 commandments, the Torah makes it clear that wisdom and truth can come from many places -- from God on a mountain as well as from human beings on earth, and even from those who are officially outside the fold, as Yitro, the priest of Midian, surely was.   Wisdom is strewn about the world, carried in many forms, and it is our job to have an open mind and an open heart, to listen to it all and to take it in, as Moshe does.  The giving of the Torah does not close the doors to outside wisdom.  On the contrary, in including this story, the Torah manages to become a container for all truth, so that Yitro’s executive intuitions -- and all the wisdom carried by the many humans who walk this earth -- also become a part of its fabric.  

#2: You can’t always do it alone.  

Sometimes we get overwhelmed by the tasks before us, and we feel beaten down by the daily strain of responsibility.    We may even at times have an urge to give up.   Instead of giving up, though, we can learn to “give it over,” to hand some of it over to others, to let go of full control and responsibility and make use of the many talented people around us who are often happy to share the burden.  The result is always better and richer than when we do it alone.  Moshe learns this lesson from Yitro, who looks at Moshe’s one-man show and says -- as God first said to the lonely Adam -- lo tov, not good (Genesis 2:18 and Exodus 18:17).  Yitro suggests a model which involves many people sharing the work, and this model also applies beautifully to the Torah the people are about to receive, called tov, as in lekah tov, “a good teaching.”  This is a Torah that is received not by an individual, but by a nation, a collective, and this is a Torah that is layered and rich with generations and multitudes of voices, a truly joint -- and therefore tov  -- project.    We need each other for this Torah project.  We humans each can only carry a fraction of the wisdom.  

#3: Don’t be too busy to witness the divine.  

Maybe they could have gotten the Torah earlier, but Moshe was too busy to receive it.  Maybe what made that moment ripe for revelation was precisely the enactment of Yitro’s advice, the setting up of a system that freed Moshe of enough time to do higher level work, to be open to the divine revelation that was wanting to manifest through him.    There has to be room to receive the divine -- time in our day and space in our hearts and minds that is not already filled by a thousand details and to-do lists.  We lose sight so easily of what matters, even when we are engaged in religious activities.  To pause and look up and remember is to witness the divine.  

#4: Take the initiative in your relationship with God.

The people encamped at Mount Sinai, and then God called to Moshe to come up and receive the Torah, right?  That is how we think the story goes, but if you look carefully, you will find that Moshe actually makes the first move.  Moshe starts up the mountain, and only then does God call to him (19:3).   It is as if God has been waiting there for days, months, generations even, for someone to come searching for Him in this way.  As soon as Moshe begins the climb, God responds.  Karov Hashem lekhol korav.  God is close to all those who call to Him (Ps 145).  But you do have to call.  You have to open the door a crack, or at least turn the knob.  When you do, you find that God has been right there, waiting for you all along.

#5: Before you have access to revelation, you need to feel protected and safe. 

Meditations often begin with the instruction to feel how you are supported by the ground beneath your feet or the chair you are sitting on.   Before you can move further in contemplation and access something deeper, you need to relax into some sense of safety, some sense that you are being held and embraced.    Perhaps this is why God tells Moshe to remind the people, when they are considering whether to enter into this covenant, that He carried them on eagle’s wings (19:4).   As Rashi notes, the image is one of perfect protection; unlike other birds who carry their young beneath them, the eagle places its young above her wings, opening herself to arrows from below as a protective shelter.   The feeling is one of safety and trust and letting go of any control, as the mama eagle takes full responsibility for the ride.   The Israelites have had this experience with God, learning to trust the ride and to feel some sense of security.  They are ready for the next level of connection, for an intense revelation and a more active partnership.   But they -- and we all -- have to feel that we are safe and held first; we can only be open to receiving from above if we are in a place of deep relaxation and trust. 

#6: Embrace uncertainty; don’t run away from it.   

In the midst of thunder, lightning, shofar blasts, and a trembling, smoking mountain, the people fell back and stood at a distance, but “Moshe approached the thick dark cloud where God was,” Moshe nigash el ha’arafel asher sham Ha’Elokim  (Ex 20:18).   Moshe understood that it was in the arafel, in the fog, in this thick cloud of not seeing, that God resides.    The Israeli singer Shuli Rand sings a song called “Arafel” based on this verse.  Its refrain is -- ki shama, ki shama Elokim.    For there, for there [in the fog] is where God is.     We think God is only in the bright sunshine, but He is also, perhaps primarily, in this thick cloud of darkness   

A famous medieval Christian mystical work called “The Cloud of Unknowing” suggests that in order to be close to God, one needs to surrender the human need to know things with certainty and to allow oneself to enter the mystical realm of not knowing.   Moshe was doing just such a practice; he was not frightened by the fog as the people were, but allowed himself to enter a place where things were not clear in the human realm in order to receive the wisdom and knowing of another realm.   

We struggle with uncertainty.  We want to know with clarity the way things are and what will happen tomorrow, and we are restless when we don’t.   But maybe the ability to sit in the not knowing, to trust and allow life to unfold without our holding on to understanding it too clearly is to enter the divine realm, to allow God, to allow mystery, to enter our lives.   By letting go of having to know we allow something we cannot know to be part of us.   There is a leaning in quality to this attitude.  Instead of running away, we lean in, we embrace what seems hard to tolerate, and in doing so, we approach God; we open ourselves to the unexpected possibility of revelation.

#7: Stand still to receive revelation right now; don’t keep moving somewhere else.

The journey through the desert involved moving and encamping, moving and encamping.  Both are ways to connect to the divine.   We tend to value the movement more, to worry about progress, about getting somewhere.  Crossing the Sea last week was an experience of the divine through motion.   But here on Mount Sinai, with the intense revelation of the giving of the Torah, the people stand totally still -- vayetyatzvu, like a matzevah, a statue.  Their standing is emphasized by the use of the term ma’amad Har Sinai, “the standing at Har Sinai,” and also by the physical immobility of a mountain (as opposed to a sea).   There is something that we can only receive when we stand totally still, firmly planted where we are, like a mountain, not rushing around to get somewhere or to get something done, not striving to improve or fix, but just totally still and receptive to what already is, the revelation that is waiting for us to stand still enough to take it in.  The rabbis say that the Mount Sinai revelation happened on Shabbat; this makes sense; every Shabbat we have this opportunity, to stop our striving and movement, to stand still, to act as if we are already perfect -- nowhere to go, nothing to fix -- and when we do so, we realize that indeed we are already perfect, already ready for revelation right at this moment.  We don’t have to take any further steps or wait till tomorrow.  This moment itself is one of revelation.  

#8: Make yourself into a vessel for God to work through you..

God wants human partnership and participation in revelation.  Consider the introduction to the ten commandments:  “Moshe went down to the people and said to them” (19:25), and then, with no break at all, “God spoke all these words saying: I am the Lord Your God . . . “ (20:1-2).    Who spoke these words --, Moshe or God?  Tradition answers this question by dividing up the commandments; some were spoken directly by God and some by Moshe.  But the point here seems to be that in some way God wanted a human mouthpiece, that Moshe’s role in carrying the word of God was essential to the process.    Moshe speaks and out of his mouth come God’s words.  

 In an earlier description of the scene, the partnership is described this way:  Moshe yedaber veHaElokim ya’anenu bekol.  “Moshe spoke and God answered him loudly/with thunder” (19:19).  Read literally, this seems to imply a call and response between a human and God, a back and forth energy of partnership.  Rashi suggests that God’s “answering with kol (loudness or thunder)” means that when Moshe spoke, God gave him the divine power to speak loudly and be heard.   It is as if the human frame became a vessel for God’s energy; Moshe’s human words were married with God’s outsized thunder to create a revelation on earth.   

Sense the possibility inside yourself of God’s powerful energy force flowing through you to help you do God’s work in this world.  God reveals himself through the mechanism of human beings.   He is looking to partner with us, to act through us, to flow through us, if we can become vessels for His Presence, if we can consent to the divine that wants to manifest itself through us.  

#9: Trembling is good; let yourself feel it in your body.

“There was thunder and lightning and a dense cloud upon the mountain, and a very loud blast of the horn; and all the people who were in the camp trembled” (19:16).   The people trembled at Mount Sinai.  They didn’t just hear and see the words and the sounds and the intense sights; they didn’t just think about and understand what was happening; they had a somatic reaction to the experience.  They felt the revelation in their whole bodies, trembling with awe and relief and a sense of their own transformation at this moment.  There are various therapeutic techniques that make use of shaking or trembling as a way of relieving and letting go of stuck patterns of tension in the body, and making room for new energy to enter.  The Israelites at this moment of intensity seem to have had a spontaneous whole body shaking reaction, as if to show bodily the transformative nature of this event.   We tend to brace instead of shake; we don’t really allow a full bodily expression of what is going on for us.   Part of the path to revelation is to be embodied in this way, to fully feel the divine flow that wants to enter not just the mind and the heart, but also the body that God created for us.  

#10:  Let your small “I” get to know the “I” of God.  

The first word of the 10 commandments is Anokhi, “I.”  “I am the Lord your God who took you out of Egypt [Mitzrayim].”  Maybe we need nothing more.  Maybe it is all contained in this one word.   Anokhi.  “I”.  There is an I that is greater than our own little I, an I that wants us to know it and to feel our connection to it.   This I is capable of freeing us and redeeming us from our mitzrayim, our narrow places, from the constraints and suffering of our small selves, our sense of aloneness and separation, of insecurity and neediness.  This I extends beyond time and place and has limitless love and compassion; our small, mortal I can rest in its vastness and feel a sense of belonging. When we know of this I, when we remember it and remember that we belong to it, we are free; we are one; we are at home; we want nothing.  We certainly do not “covet” our neighbor’s wife or donkey, as the last commandment, on the other end of the envelope, instructs; we belong to something larger and are at peace.  There is nothing else to know.  

Parashat Beshallah: From Fear to Song

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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