We’ve all had chapters in our life that started out crappy. Not necessarily as badly as being sold into slavery, but bad choices of partner or job, health diagnoses we could not dodge, empty bank accounts with too many bills in the queue. These are contemporary problems and the Torah is an old manuscript. But the principles hold true: no matter how badly something begins, there’s a reason for it that, in the immediacy of our response, we don’t always discern, and possible good to follow. The proverbial lemonade from lemons.

The trick, as life has likely taught you, is not getting stuck in whining and self-blame. As a friend recently blogged, the best path to healing is genuine vulnerability and a good-sized helping of self-compassion.

This week’s reading includes reconciliation between Joseph and the brothers who sold him into slavery; then the migration of the whole clan to Egypt. In the short run, things look rosy. Everyone enjoys harmony as their fortunes shift. Joseph’s father Jacob is told HaShem will go down into Egypt with them, and will take them out again. Good now but lots and long bad to come before things will get good again: everyone will become enslaved.

The story of both slavery and leaving Egypt is among the most powerful organizing stories of Judaism. In Torah, the phrase I am the Lord your God who took you out of the land of Egypt is more than so you owe me. It’s a reminder that any difficult situation is a cauldron, and that we’ll be changed in and by it, however bad things seem in the moment.

As good as something may look in the beginning, we’re incarnated to do our holy work: the work of soul growth. That means owning up to our past actions and choices, including some suffering (or at least discomfort) to harvest lessons from them, before we get liberated into the next phase of our beingness. It’s the darkness before the return of the light. No surprise these readings happen now.

The word in Hebrew for Egypt is mitzrayim. It means the narrow place. The place of constriction. The place we each find ourselves, and generally stay in far too long, before we’re ready for change. Most of us repeat the cycle over and over: the flush of joy and excitement when good happens; gradual disillusionment; growing awareness of the need for release; struggles for freedom; starting over.

You can count those cycles as lifetimes, or as multiple phases within this lifetime. But if you’re not learning by tromping over and over some of the same ground in your personal mitzrayim, you’re pretty unusual.

Exercise for the week: Think about what in your life has most excited you and then most disappointed you. It may be people, situations, ideas; the list is long and unique to you. Remember what your hopes were in the beginning, and what most frustrated, angered, or saddened you at the end. Hang onto the list. This story’s gonna get deeper.

Dreams of prophecy can portend great positives or seem ominous. There’s a theory that every one or thing in a dream is an aspect of self. That we’re playing out a tableau with the parts of our selves that don’t use linear logic or simple subject-verb-object sentences. Dreams are run by our higher selves, our guides, and also by trickster energies. Their styles vary but their goals are similar: get us out of our comfort zones and our habituated ways of perceiving. It’s the ambiguous, silly, or scary stuff that’s especially designed to get our attention.

There’s certainly times you’ll wake and wonder, where did that or who come from? Others when a dream’s meaning seems like a neon arrow in a dark sky. A favorite movie image comes from a Steve Martin film. He’s in a ruined old castle on a dark and stormy night. Lightning’s flashing, thunder pounding. The pictures and the fireplace are spinning, and he’s standing there shaking his fist at the sky, saying over and over, Give me a sign! Give me a sign!

Would that dreams were so clear.

This week Joseph is rescued from prison to interpret Pharaoh’s dream of seven fat cows swallowed by seven lean ones. He predicts seven years of famine after seven years of plenty, and is then put in charge of resource planning. As famine spreads, the brothers who sold him into slavery come looking for food; he has to deal with his feelings about them and what they’ve done to him. Topics for another day.

Themes of food security run through the Bible. People move often because of famine. When the Jews wander in the desert they’re told to gather only the manna they need for the day, or it’ll rot, and that more will be provided. Later instructions about leaving fields fallow for a year also require planning and eeek, trust. One name for HaShem is El Shaddai, the Source of Sufficiency.

In personal growth and development it’s hard to tackle deep tough core material without a nurturing, strong, and loving sense of self-esteem as a base. If you spent seven years really making yourself happy, self-aware, and able to cope with surface stresses, you’d be much readier to wrestle with deep and intractable issues. When your crap comes to the surface, as it will, in dreams and/or reality, you’ll need storehouses of inner good-will to cope well, and to decipher the healing messages you’re being offered.

But that means doing your emotional and spiritual homework all along. Saving some of your seed corn and not devouring it as popcorn in front of a DVD, munching away blindly ignorant of your future. If you want to make it through the hard times, you’ll need the insights and foresight that dreaming can point you towards.

Exercise: If your now self could tell your younger self something that might’ve seemed like prophecy if it were fulfilled, what would it be? Can you put that same process in motion now, moving forward?

This week’s reading is about reconciliation and enmity. About brothers reunited in one story and tribes launched into perpetual warfare in another: the seemingly endless cycle of killing in Israel/Palestine that we’ve lived with so long. It’s difficult to understand, but also important to hope for what seems most needed, fragile, and painfully elusive: shalom, peace.

For a fictionalized version of the Biblical story, read Anita Diamant’s excellent novel The Red Tent. Even knowing the outcome I found myself screaming at the pages, No don’t send them to negotiate! Send folks who understand love as well as war. For a more modern, non-fictionalized version of contemporary Middle East history, try The Lemon Tree. It’s by no means a perfect picture, but does try to show the tangled roots of the conflict.

We, in our smaller mirror, are also often locked in conflict, inside our psyches. You and you, wrestling with your core issues. But embracing the belief that if you could just do that one thing right, or at least better, your life would move forward much more as you want.

I believe in change. That we humans can improve, make progress: both for ourselves and in the outer world. Even if that’s just at the margins of a problem, or intermittently, change is possible. It takes the right mix of kavannah (deep intention), right action, and faith. We’ve certainly seen huge makeover successes. The no-longer smokers or alcoholics, or someone who’s challenged another addiction, whether it’s chocolate or heroin.

What does it take to put your inner enemy to rest? To both say and do This new me is how I will be, now and forward. To release all your muttering and preoccupation with what’s gone wrong, and refocus your energy on how things should be.

We’re too often afraid of change. We try to bribe the future, or whatever powers we pray to: Make it easy. Make it fast. Make it not hurt. Make me successful. Am I done yet? I call it the “wake up thin” fantasy.

Sadly it’s never that easy.

The twelve brothers in this story each represent aspects of self. Allies and mischief makers. The strong, sure, and committed. The stubborn, restless, and impulsive. The angry and entrenched. Some willing to come to the table, communicate, and accept the blessings and burdens of what must follow. Others experts at perpetual self-sabotage.

To really create change, you’ll need to harness this messy and complicated collection of voices.

Exercise for the week: Think about an issue in your life that feels intractable. Something you’ve been griping about for a long time. Shine the light of your knowing into the darkest corners of this problem. Name all your internal brothers, especially the ones you’re least happy about or proud of. Figure out which voices need to be better heard and understood and which are just old noise that’re preventing you from making progress.

Get that far, and listen for the good insights that will follow.

Where do you find complete peace? Emotional and spiritual sanctuary?  Feel fully open and receptive, without the distractions of fears, fretting, or lists of the mundane. A sense of expansive graciousness and serenity. A place of creative vitality. Experiencing wholeness at a visceral level. This is a great week to remember when you’ve had that feeling, to invite it into your life more often, and to use that energy to recharge your soul.

This week’s reading’s one of my favorites. Jacob, traveling, lays his head on a rock to sleep, and dreams of a ladder to the heavens, with angels ascending and descending. Upon awakening, he exclaims, HaShem was in this place and I did not know!

The Hebrew word hamakom literally means “the place.” It connotes the physical place where events occur. But in a deeper sense, hamakom means exactly that place of stillness when you’re completely connected with the universe: no ego/I running the show. No busy-ness, no questions, and no need to be anywhere but present. A holy silence you’d happily visit, and are nourished simply by knowing it exists. The real insight: hamakom is available any time you can open to it.

In her wonderful book My Stroke of Insight, Jill Bolte Taylor describes the first few weeks of a stroke that oriented her into her right brain as floating in a place of divine calm. Peaceful euphoria. Surrendering. No longer needing to be in charge. Focused, but content just being.

This feeling is very similar to what athletes describe when they are in the zone, time and opponents standing still. Or what the mother of an infant feels when her child is asleep and she has three minutes of uninterrupted bliss in a hot shower. Traditional methods of access include meditation, chant, and prayer. They all lead to a similar hamakom: a place where the self, the I/ego/me that we spend lots of time feeding and providing for, that tends to run our lives into complex urgency, takes backseat to a greater sense of universal meaning and calm. Instead of frenzy we feel peace.

You can get to hamakom simply, by offering yourself more chances to go there. Whether you have more formal practice or access hamakom through a walk in the woods, music, or some other gate, I hope you allow yourself that beautiful sense of complete beingness. Honoring you need for hamakom more regularly will make you happier.

Try a simple experiment to open the doors of your heart and psyche. A couple times a day this week, just close your eyes for twenty seconds. Focus on your breathing. In, out. In, out. Nothing more complicated or even longer. No mantras or prayers. Just breath. Slowing down. Being present. Being in hamakom.

Try it. See if it changes anything.

This week’s a good time to think about how we make the world better, or worse, by how we act. Judaism has a concept called tikkun olam, repairing the world. It derives from the idea that harmony has been shattered and that it’s our job to put all the pieces together again. Think Humpty Dumpty in more grandiose spiritual terms, with day-to-day implications for your choices and decisions.

The reading’s a story of twin brothers Jacob and Esau; the smart one and the hunter. Hungry Esau sells his birthright as firstborn to Jacob for a pot of lentils. Jacob disguises himself as Esau to get his father’s blessing. No heroes here.

Each character reflects back our flawed humanity, so hungry for something they act badly to get it. Note: greed, ambition, fear, and lust often wear the cloak of urgent necessity.

Their moral elasticity reflects our own. The Buddhists have it right: life’s often about desire and what we’ll do to satisfy it. Me me me, now now now too oftentrumps goodness or wisdom.

My favorite chant in the Day of Atonement services is We have kept ourselves from change. Year after year, the specifics of bad behaviors vary. But too obstinately and consistently we feed our desires ahead of our souls.

Every moment is an active choice, a missed opportunity or chance to create holiness. If you work on self-betterment, the whole place improves. If you screw up, things stay stuck, broken. In any given moment, how do we create a lineage that reflects our better selves?

It’s not linear or easy. But every choice matters. They form patterns and the patterns form new realities.

Scientists recently discovered a gigantic new galaxy they’re calling the Phoenix Galaxy. It’s 2.5 quadrillion times bigger than our sun, and creates 750 stars the size of our sun every year. It’s setting inter-galactic records for new possible lineages.

We’re phoenixes too. Rising from the ashes of our mistakes and misdeeds, last year’s and yesterday’s. Creating new universes every day with our choices. The bad and the good. The seemingly random and utterly calculated. Driven by ambition or lentils on the one hand, and by the hope on the other that HaShem’s wind is at our back, blowing our holy spark into a holy fire.

Everything we do, acts of goodness and compassion or acts of selfishness and stupidity, becomes part of our collective lineage. Forged by whatever makes or breaks our best and holiest selves.

This week, take the extra moment to hit the pause button, to ask your hungry belly, Can I make it just a little longer without feeding that desire? Not your first instinct, but your higher one. When you hear the resonance of Yes, you’ll be well fed by the deep knowing that you’ve chosen goodness, a healing lineage for us all.

What do you look for and need in a partner? Why?

I’m assuming, btw, that you choose for yourself, as opposed to having one of your father’s employees find you a wife, as in this week’s story.

In our part of the world arranged marriages are rare. But we often meet potential mates through friends, internet dating, or dumb luck. Anytime you’re single, it helps to know what you’re looking for. That means learning from your history as well as hoping for your future.

What brings Rebecca to the foreground is her compassion. Her concern for strangers and their thirsty animals. Not her beautiful face, possible dowry, or anything else on the material plane.

So what gets folks interested in one another? And what keeps relationships vital and growing? Combustible lift-offs are fun, but rarely a solid basis for a life-long partnership. On the other hand, relationships without intimacy lose a magical and healing connection.

If you’re single, do you have a list of “must haves” and deal breakers? If your best friends wrote the list, how would it be different? What matters to you: Spirituality? Sensuality? Lifestyle? Finances? Communications? Social/political values? My personal summary: I want someone who loves my best qualities and tolerates my worst ones with patience and humor. Yours may be different; but get clear what it is.

Relationships respond to the energy people invest in them. Good partners can make life much better; bad ones make it feel a lot worse. Most of us have histories that would be instructive, if we’d examine them honestly.

Have you learned the lessons of your emotional past? If not, how often will you repeat them before getting things better or right? This is a great week to take notes on what you do well and poorly. On what you want and need. On how to make your current or next relationship better for you and your honey.

Here’s some questions to get things flowing: (Good tip: working in “I” sentences isn’t selfish; it’ll push you to be more honest.)

• What makes you happy?
• What do you offer a partner? What do you need to be satisfied?
• How do you invite people closer? Push them away?
• When do you really show up? What makes you more elusive or run for the door?
• Are you co-dependent, a narcissist, too much either a giver or a taker? How and why?
• When are you a drama queen? When too reluctant to speak your heart?
• Do you risk true vulnerability? How do you protect yourself?
• What do you show others?  What do you hide?
• Do you love yourself? Do you feel you deserve to be loved?

If you work to create relationships that nurture others, you’ll also get better at nurturing yourself. If enough of us live this way, we’ll all enjoy being around one another more.

The imagery of this week’s reading is an indelible part of the Western tradition’s iconography: Abraham’s son Isaac bound on an altar; Abraham with sacrificial knife raised; the hovering angel staying his hand; the substitute offering, a ram, caught in a nearby thicket.

A test of faith by a demanding god? A story demonstrating Jewish opposition to child sacrifice? A metaphor about faith?

The reading is given twice in the Jewish calendar: in the annual cycle, and as part of the new year services. For me, the core of the story is about surrender: Abraham to HaShem, and Isaac to Abraham.

We usually think about the story through Abraham’s eyes. Here’s some questions to think about this week:

To whom or what do you surrender? Why?
Which voices do you listen to, inner and outer? Which influence your actions?
Is your devotion to the divine the standard you most value and act by? Is there some requirement of belief so great you would never obey?
Can you truly know your faith without having it tested?
Is sacrifice necessary to validate it?

What if you turn the story on its head, and look through Isaac’s eyes?

Who do you obey?
What binds you or limits your options in life?
Are these constraints imposed by others, or by you?

Life offers many opportunities to wrestle with these issues. They’re rarely this dramatic or potentially lethal. But every day we make choices, big ones and little. Concepts like surrender and trust can be teachers. They can help us to approach every choice we make as a holy act. Thinking about each Yes or each No in a holy way helps cultivate awareness. Not just intellectually but viscerally.

This process is more than taking your spiritual cod liver oil. It’ll strengthen your core values and also help you make better choices. Choices that’ll influence your long-run consciousness and beingness as well as your shorter-run clarity.

As long as we’re here in human form, it all comes back to how we live. Each time we act with deeper awareness and intention can be a holy moment.