Monthly Archives: November 2013

Not Quite Yet: TorahCycle Mikeitz

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Mikeitz 2013Forgiveness doesn’t come fast or easy Sometimes it doesn’t come at all. That’s true whether the offender is another or ourselves. Careless, or even intentional, words and deeds hurt and wound us. We feel them deeply. Sometimes even allow them to define us. We identify as the aggrieved or victimized on the one hand, and the ashamed or guilty on the other.

Getting from hurt to forgiveness takes many steps. The deeper and more important the hurt, the more we need to process the healing. Sometimes it doesn’t happen. Sometimes we don’t think it should even be a goal.

Bad drivers in your path may annoy or rankle; they earn a quick  hand flip. Here and gone.

Family dysfunction can last decades, even lifetimes. Emotional scarring, physical and sexual abuse becomes woven into us. We may feel forgiveness is impossible or unwarranted.

Folks tend towards either: Someone hurt me!, or I must have deserved it. And the converse: I screwed up! Now what? Each has its own burdens.

A great photo from 1900s New York: an old Jewish immigrant woman, bent over double, with an enormous shipping crate on her back. That’s what carrying around anger or shame can feel like. A very large and weighty burden. One you cannot put down until you reach  sanctuary. Even if that’s a fifth-floor walk up with noisy neighbors and no running water.

Releasing even some of your anger and pain will make you lighter, clearer, healthier, and happier.

This week finds Joseph in high office in Egypt, after interpreting Pharoah’s dreams of impending famine. Who walks in hungry and needy but the very crew of brothers who sold him into slavery. They don’t recognize him; but he knows them.

The Jewish High Holidays have a very active process around forgiveness. Often we erase the simpler, more recent, happenstances of life, rather than old deep ones. The option is there, but you’ve gotta be ready. Even wanting to be ready can be a journey of a thousand steps. And it’s unlikely to be a linear or level path.

We spend lots of energy carrying around our inner crates of hurt and shame. We’re angry at others and ourselves. IThose feelings have become a filter and a reflex for how we live and how we interact with others. Not just those who caused the hurt, but almost everyone.

Joseph’s not ready to forgive his brothers. Like him we play tricks, set up tests. Challenge ourselves, others, and the universe. We’re looking for some key to unlock our stuck feelings. Permission to set the crate down.

A great new novel, Visitation Street, highlights the surviving friend of a missing and presumed drowned teen-ager. Everything that happens is a test: If the next song on the radio is X, June will come back. If Jonathan kisses me, June will come back. If I can …., June will come back.

Our hurts are like that. Bubbling beneath the daily surface of our lives, waiting for us to release them. Waiting for us to shed our burdens of anger, shame, hurt, regret, and sadness. We need to forgive ourselves so we can get closer to forgiving others.

What would it be good for you to let go of?

Karma Ride: TorahCycle Vayeishev

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KarmaRide 2013We’re all here for different reasons, working out our unique and evolving karma. But yours, mine, theirs are at core pretty much the same stuff even if the nouns, verbs, locations, and languages seem very different. My cosmology says we’re all learning the lessons of understanding and compassion. I may get hung up on one piece of it and you on another. So we get different stories to live and tell along the way.

Those stories are our lives. If you think of each incarnation as a going to sleep and waking up in a different dream, then we’re each here dreaming, trying to make sense of the imagery and lessons of those stories. Dreaming is the metaphor of this and next week’s readings: what we’re being told and how to make sense of it in ways that are useful.

Joseph, our new protagonist, has a wild ride. Like the spinning cups at the amusement park, knocked and jolted from every side, turning all the while in crazy loops.

His story this week: he’s daddy’s favorite son; full of himself; wears a distinctive “coat of many colors”; is gifted with prophetic dreams (in which he’s the boss and the hero); gets tossed into a pit by his jealous brothers, then sold into slavery; becomes the target of his owner’s wife’s affections; resists her would-be seduction; lands in jail; interprets more prophetic dreams; gets a reputation for being insightful and special.

It’s clear early that he’s not going to become a simple herder. There’s a star on his head (even if he painted it there himself) that says, Look at me. Big things coming.

Most of our journeys are less dramatic. We take longer to find our gifts. Sure, there’s the occasional Mozart, a prodigy at age six. But most of us come into our own more slowly, in stages, over time. Or even blossom late, like Grandma Moses. Our gifts are learned from all our stories, the joyous and the painful, the easy and the hard. The living dream of our journey.

Using Torah as an allegory for personal growth helps you see its archetypes as both for and about you. Instructive if not directly prophetic. A tool to help you get more from your process.

There was a recent radio story about people with the chance to choose one super power. The most popular were the ability to fly or to become invisible (with gazillion caveats, like How fast? or Do my clothes go invisible too?). Joseph’s super power is dream interpretation. What to others is a complex jumble of images or strange situations is for him a vivid and prophetic story.

Insight about what’s coming, or at least what energies are turning the gears, creates perspective. And as much as most of us wouldn’t choose slavery and prison, each piece of the journey helps him to where he’s doing. Ditto for you.

Even if you can’t fly, become invisible, or prophesize, think about what makes you special. How did you acquire and deepen those skills? How they can help you get closer to your goals? How can they help you make better choices on your journey?

All Night Long: TorahCycle Vayishlach

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Vayishlach2013Let’s get clear. I’m not an advocate of no-pain no-gain. If anything, I honor the high arts of bargaining, denial, procrastination, half-measures, and prayer as sincere, even fervent, alternatives to doing what needs to be done. That’s especially true if the focus isn’t my creative jones du jour, or involves self-discipline in any but brief or minor forms.

Enough about my failings. What about yours? Do you step up and do what’s needed, without avoidance? When you’re given dictums like Eat less, move more; or, Save more, spend less, do you hop to or look the other direction?

This week finds Jacob travelling to reconcile with the brother he wronged. He’s laden with gifts and an army, hedging his bets, as most of us do. We offer our adversary (self or other) both carrot and stick, hoping one will work if the other doesn’t. [Note: What’s a strategy to us might seem foolish or random to an observer. Without consistency, insights are harder to discern. Sigh.]

Jacob wrestles until dawn with a stranger, an angel. A silent and important emissary of the divine. Part of the message: step up, and don’t give up. If you do, you risk staying stuck wherever you are in your process, like when someone yells “Freeze!” in a childhood game.

Continuing until dawn doesn’t ensure a decisive victory. Jacob ends up with a permanent limp. But his name is changed to reflect his commitment and a big chunk of his old bad karma drops away. The message: If you actually work your program, something will change. Not exactly as you might predict or wish for, but for the better.

I’m fascinated by the wrestling metaphor. Not the bombastic faux battles of cable TV. But with the premise that no matter where we go, we’re always gonna come face-to-face with our stuff.

If you ask me to summarize the personal growth story, soul-wrestling would be its verb. It takes place in many domains, from deep dreamland to cold light of day. We are invited and frequent visitors.

Your adversary may wear the face of a mysterious stranger or someone you know. May come at you in a red satin cape or a clown costume, with flowers or with a chain saw. May sound like your internalized parent, a disappointed partner, or an angry boss. But your real nemesis is always your own stuff.

The good news: When our procrastinating and half measures fail, when we’re on the run from our failings, our higher selves show up to change the channel. To give us a real wrestling match. To help us find what we’re made of. And to send us on our way with a deeper knowledge of our own strength and possibilities.

We don’t always hang in. We’re scarred and scared and we sometimes give up, say Uncle. It’s okay.

We still have lots of wrestling ahead of us. But this reading reminds us that it’s time again to go deeper. To embrace your resolve and your endurance. To work your program. Wear your scars proudly; give yourself credit for what you’ve accomplished. Then move forward not weakened by the struggle, but strengthened and renewed.

Here and Now: TorahCycle Vayetze

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vayetze 2013

We all have sacred places. Places that make us feel completely safe, held. Places that expand our consciousness. That connect us with the world of the unseen, either by their majestic grandeur or their simple peace. As we go through life, those places and their talismans shift. Your crib and blanket give way to a special park or beach, or a magnificent vista. Any places that come with a special knowing and a healing resonance we respond to as sacred, and accord them reverence and appreciation.

This week’s reading finds Jacob on the road. He’s left his father’s house and his brother’s anger; he’s off to find a wife. The image of a stone shows up several times, early as a pillow and later as the memorial of a peace treaty. Both times, the sites are declared holy places.

Stones sometimes say Notice me! when I’m out walking. I especially like it when they appear as I’m wrestling with a problem, trying to gain insight and clarity. They come home to sit with others that said hello in the past.

Altars everywhere. That’s a lot of what Torah is about. Journeying from sacred place to sacred place. Finding them, recognizing them, naming them. Acknowledging both the divine presence and the reciprocity of that relationship.

This reading brings us the phrase Jacob’s Ladder, a stairway he dreams of, angels coming down and angels going up. Last week for Halloween folks had faux cobwebs everywhere, obscuring things. This is the opposite, a route of direct transmission. He calls it HaMakom, literally “the place,” as in God was in this place and I did not know.

HaMakom is a place to ask questions as much as to hear answers. There’s a quality about the asking, getting to the bedrock of your sincerity, that clears away all the extras.

The Hebrew word for angel is generally translated as messenger. And that’s ultimately what angels are. Bringing you what you need when you need to hear, see, or receive it. These messengers can be the person who stops to help you with your flat tire or the stone on your path.

We are those messengers too. Appearing in hamakom for one another as and when we are meant to be. Angels in our human skins.

In Nicole Krauss’s History of Love she says: Angels sleep unsoundly. They toss and turn, trying to understand the mystery of the living. They know so little about what it’s like to fill a new prescription for glasses and suddenly see the world again, with a mixture of disappointment and gratitude. Because being human is more complicated, more raucous, and more painful. But the more we engage with what we’re here to do, the more vital it feels to do it well and right. The more clearly we see.

Hamakom is not just your own little bubble. It’s all of our bubbles interacting at the same time. So it’s important to be here now. In hamakom. For you and for the rest of us.

Whenever stones or angels talk to you, listen up. Hamakom is wherever you go, wherever you are invited. It’s where you are right now. We’re always in hamakom.