See What’s Coming: TorahCycle Re’eh

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Re'eh 2014The weather here has been crazy lately. Only the occasional Just f-ing too hot! But more than toasty far too often. What’s been strangest has been the mugginess. A thickness of air that makes your lungs work harder. And now, after some cleansing rain, the crisp scent of autumn.

We’re responding ambivalently. Not wanting to let go of a summer that always seems to begin too late and be too short. But also noticing that some mornings it’s just a little cool. Apples and pears are winking at us from the farmer’s market stalls. Strawberries saying good bye. And while we’re crying Too soon, too soon, there’s also an inner part that recognizes that the time for change has arrived right on schedule.

I feel this way when I drive to the coast. That moment when you smell how the air has changed. That salty under taste and shift in the wind. The edge of transition, imminent and welcoming. We’ve been preparing so long. It’s almost time.

This week’s reading talks about life in the Promised Land, the building of the Temple, and three annual pilgrimages to it. The holidays commemorate the exit from slavery, the giving of the 10 Commandments at Sinai, and the harvest festival. These correspond to a conscious re-birthing, defining the rules of daily life, and gratitude for the bounty that we’ve earned.

We’re still six weeks from the Jewish new year. There’s big potential for processing this time of the year, and a very conscious process of doing so that starts in about ten days. Yeah, yeah we’re supposed to be conscious each moment of each day. But identifying these special times, the holidays and their pilgrimages, real or metaphorical, helps keep us honest. They set us up to experience the shift as more than just a turn of the calendar page and the naming of dates.

Most of us are hard-wired for autumn and January 1 as transition times. Like students and teachers readying their school supplies, we’re subliminally getting ready for a shift of season. We don’t know how its gonna be when we get there and then. But we’re curious. And so very very close. We can see, smell, and taste it in the air, our food, and our daily attire, as well as on the calendar.

We’re not just curious about what it be like there. But how will we, I, me will be like there and then. What new parts are going to emerge, perhaps parts I’ve been nurturing and cheering on to step up and do better, take more responsibility. And also curious how older parts of my nature will shift around, find new ways of relating to one another, maybe even take a back seat.

The weekly readings get their names from their first word. This week’s Re’eh, means “see.” It comes from the choice between blessing and curses, and the designation of two mountains in the promised land to represent them. This is a great time to “see” how you’re doing as you prepare for the coming transition. To prepare yourself to choose the life of blessings that you so deserve.

What We’re Good At: TorahCycle Eikev

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KedoshimWe all have things we’re good at. Sometimes they’re thing to be proud about, like prowess with money, math, or words. Others are less admirable and useful, like being great at driving under the influence. We want admiration for the first set of traits, and hope the others won’t end up getting us in too much trouble.

This week Moses gives the Israelites a detailed litany of their failures and transgressions. It’s delivered the way an ex (or soon-to-be ex) might recite them: The time when you blah blah blah. And the time when you didn’t…. It’s not endearing, but it does raise rather interesting questions of why we’re so good at disobedience. Why we’re so good at rebelling, acting out of fear and lack of trust, impatience and desire trumping faith and the higher moral high ground. And also whether we’re happy repeating that pattern over and over or are ready for a change.

Eons ago, at the dawn of my deeper metaphysical work, I was studying higher math. This came after decades of flipping past charts and tables whenever they appeared. It was only intro calculus, but it was enough to show me two of the principles of the cosmic dynamic.

Stay with me because they’re not that hard. Principle One: the universe stretches from one infinitely far away place to its opposite infinitely far away place. Principle Two: the difference in space/time between any one thing and its neighbor can be teeny tiny small, just a nano-breath greater than zero, but any two things that are different are by definition not the same.

I use these principles to illustrate what I call the calculus of the soul. No matter what issue or action you’re thinking about taking, you have a huge range of possible behaviors available to you. Plus an infinite amount of equivocation and rationalization to help you decide where on the spectrum you’re going to land today, this time. That’s an intellectual approach. You may function on gut or emotion, but the outcome is still somewhere on the range between pure obedience and pure screwing up.

In my world, obedience means not eating sugar anymore. Perhaps not to the zero tolerance, not even if it’s ingredient number twelve on a package, level. But between the raw white stuff, honey, agave, date or coconut sugar, stevia, and zero none, I’m sticking to fruit, and whatever’s in a glass of wine, or the occasional slice of bread. It’s a health thing, but it’s also retraining my taste buds. I don’t ever expect to lust for sour, but it would be nice to be satisfied with savory. I’m in day seven, and it’s easier than it’s been the last zillion times I’ve tried.

We trek the same territory year after year. Cycle through Torah striving to become better and better, or at least get it right more often than we did the last time around. You may be trying to become the you that you feel you are in your soul, even if her disobedient clones cause you to stumble on your path.

Eventually though, you will improve. We all do. And you’ll get one step closer to where you wanna go.

What Comes Next: TorahCycle V’etchanan

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Vetchanan 2014Do you ever look to the end of a book or sneak a peek to the bottom of the page because the suspense is killing you? Most of us think we want to know what happens next, but sometimes our interest, or at least our belief, wanes quickly when we learn. Like any experienced prognosticator will tell you, people prefer good news.

Prophets generally foretell gloom and doom, unless of course folks commit to changing their evil ways. They’re likely to get ignored or run out of town bedecked with tar and feather.

This week, Moses (who’s not going into the promised land) reminds everyone about the 10 Commandments and unambiguously informs the crowd: You’re gonna screw up. No matter how clear these rules are, you will disobey, and as a consequence you’ll get thrown out and scattered for a long bad time until you get to come back. [On the question of biblical mandates, click This Land Is Mine cartoon for some timely brilliance.]

What about your life?. Could you have predicted what’s actually happened? If you’d been told ahead of time what to do or don’t, would you have obeyed? Most of us not only wouldn’t have, but even if we’d tried we’d likely have gotten distracted by life’s daily blessings and mishaps. By bad drivers, falling in love, cranky bosses, newborn babies, fabulous sales, broken appliances, and meeting new friends. For good or ill, it’s all in the mix. While we’re busy with daily life, lots of twists on our path no matter how well we planned for the journey.

Having a road map is no guarantee you’re going to follow it.

Truth is, you can think you’re making a right decision that turns out very wrong. You get married and are visualizing decades of harmony and grandkids, not a freak car accident or undiagnosed aneurysm that could take your beloved in an instant. We truly have no idea what life holds even if for brief moment we think we’re in charge. Or we make a decision for one reason that helps in an unforeseen way. Example: I didn’t die in a fire because I’d installed an alarm system after a scary neighbor moved in. I’d have never thought to thank him then, but we’re all part of more complex plots we can’t always see the breadth of.

Even forewarned we mostly learn our lessons the hard way. We fall in love with the wrong person and get our heart broken. Rinse and repeat. Ditto for choices with money, health, career, addiction, etc. But your life can also change in a heartbeat. There are good stretches and bad ones. If you’re committed to your journey you will keep searching for a way to your promised land no matter how often they do.

A friend gave me a great scene from a Russian novel. A philosopher takes a child to the zoo: Life is like the zebra, my child. The black times are followed by white ones, but the black times come again. When you are in the black ones, you must run very fast, and in the white ones you must cherish every moment. Yeah, what he said.

What You Say: TorahCycle D’varim

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Dvarim 2014There’s a Chinese proverb that says the symbol for crisis also is the symbol for opportunity. In the midst of the current Middle East violence, I’ve been thinking about how we use language and how that influences how we perceive and act.

We’re at the very beginning of the last book of Torah. This week’s reading, D’varim is a Hebrew word that means both words and things. In the beginning the world is spoken into being. This whole universe we inhabit and share with one another begins with speech: energy and intention taking physical form. At each step, creation is given a cosmic seal of approval, And it was good.

Things were simpler without people to get greedy or angry, to start sparring with their kin and other tribes. Though even within the first family story there’s strife and murder: Cain killing Abel, a battle between brothers that continues with Isaac/Ishmael, and Jacob/Esau.

As Torah progresses, the stories become less personal, but peace is always shattered and blood spilled. Those people/they/them are defined as other. As fair game for our tribal rage. As acceptable collateral damage in modern parlance.

What would happen if instead of saying enemy people said neighbor? If instead of The man who killed my brother, we said The man whose son I killed?

I confess to the sadness/fatalism about Middle East politics that Israeli novelist David Grossman bemoaned in a recent speech: a loss of hope, especially ironic given that Israel’s national song is Hatikvah (Hope). For the record, I believe in Israel’s right of self-defense, but also in its responsibility for different, better, socio-politics.

As long as the people of the region identify as warring tribes rather than neighbors caught in a complicated situation, we’re all doomed to cycles of violence and retribution.

It is a sad, sad waste, given what we humans are capable of in our best and most creative times. But like Jacob wrestling an angel who could represent his most crippling aspects of self, we seem to be trapped in an endless struggle of killing and revenge. Time heals some wounds but seems to deepen others. There’s such a long legacy of anger and pain; forgiveness and healing feel far away.

Writers try to wrap their arms around it: In The Jewish Lover, Topol uses a contemporary murder mystery to dramatize the 1,000-year ambivalence between Russians and Jews, from the tenth-century Jewish Khazar kingdom in southern Russian until now. The Lemon Tree, by Sandy Tolan, is about a house built in 1930’s Palestine by an Arab patriarch, taken in 1948 by Israelis, and settled by immigrants from Holocaust Europe. It’s a microcosm of regional conflict that recounts good and evil on both sides, with all the tangled roots and acidic fruit.

I believe in the power of words, be they fiction, essay, or self-talk. My writing focuses on personal growth because it feels like a necessary precursor to larger shifts. Also, because it’s what we can wrap our heads around.

So the only thing I know for sure is that while people are using words of war they are unlikely to create peace. If we can change our words maybe we can change the world.

 

What A Long Strange Trip It’s Been: TorahCycle Massei

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MasseiLast week the sister-in-law of a good friend woke up, did her morning rituals, went to work, and while seated at her desk in the shop she and her husband owned, was struck by a truck doing 90 miles an hour that plowed into their new building, seriously injuring her and three others. She ended the day in ICU, in an induced coma after brain surgery, with many stunned and horrified loved ones praying for a non-tragic outcome, one that seemed painfully remote.

The world is a scary and unpredictable place.

When she awoke that morning, she had no idea it was the last day of the life she had known. When you’re told, Sarah’s brain has been badly wounded. Even if she pulls through, she won’t really seem like Sarah any more, and she’ll need lots and lots and lots of love and support., what do you pray for?

This week’s reading recounts the trail and encampments between leaving slavery and perching on the banks of the River Jordan. So close to The Promised Land. The end of book four and the gateway to the last section of Torah.

If today were the last day of your life, what would you do?

Would you want to know that it was or not?

And what happens in a coma anyhow? It’s the other side of a veil. Not Game of Thrones Vale. More like valley of the shadow of death. A place where our normal processes don’t work the way they do in our usual dimensions. Maybe it’s quiet and floaty; no worries. The kind of harmony that Jill Bolte Taylor describes in My Stroke of Insight, after her left-brain stroke catapulted her into a full-on right brain, no rules of logic needed, nirvana experience. Or perhaps it’s the opposite, some hyper-aware inner state, where you’re in there knowing what’s happened and unable to scream or cry.

Most of us have much more accessible and nuanced ways of thinking about our lives. We cherish the best of our past and hope the best for our future. Staying in each present moment is still a goal for most of us, but not one we’d likely grab for if the cost were trauma and coma. We yearn for simple sweet stillness, not chaos and tragedy.

I pray she wakes up Sarah. That the rehab is manageable and that she’s glad to come back. But I wouldn’t judge her if she said, You know what? I’ve come a long way to get here. Many encampments on this journey. I like what I’ve done and been. I like myself. I’ve loved and been loved. Yes there’s things I’d hoped to see and do. But there’s also pain and losses that I’m being spared. I’m ready to cross that river now.

It helps to believe in eternal souls. And in reincarnation, even if circumstances, looks, and personalities will different, and your karma travels with you. Mostly, it helps to be at peace with yourself. I’m not saying not to have hopes and goals. And certainly not to fret about when lightning’s gonna strike.

But if today were your last day, would you go out happy?

Fingers Crossed: TorahCycle Mattot

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Mattot 2014Sometimes we cross our fingers for good luck. We’re wishing and hoping. Other times we cross them while rationalizing a “white” lie (to protect someone’s feelings, though as often it’s our own self-interest). And sometimes when we promise something we cross them because we want a great big loophole to vault through later.

This week’s reading deals with the rules for breaking vows: commitments made with sacred intention and obligation. A kind of spiritual promissory note. Often made in times of great stress, and abandoned later when what caused that stress abates. Think hospitals, wars, night terrors, and other forms of acute fear.

More optimistically, individuals make pledges to everything from diets to fund drives. Countries make promises too, as treaties and alliances. But when conditions change, we break our vows. It’s no more honorable in a country than a person, though there’s usually  spin-doctors to wrap the betrayal in flags and slogans.

Making a vow you’re not going to keep reinforces the idea that your word is worthless. Why would anyone else believe your promise to them if you don’t keep your promises to yourself? Why would you make a commitment if you didn’t really plan to keep it? Mostly, because we’re human. Fallible. Filled with good intentions and lousy habits.

Ironically, more often than not we do better at meeting commitments we make to others. That’s part of why behavior modification programs like diet plans, AA, and the like have public meetings. External accountability is often more effective than putting patches on your arm and hoping that you’ll be able to quit inhaling.

I believe in few absolute vows. Thou shalt not kill, is an example of a good one. But as I age I’m becoming more of a relativist. Not just to go easier on myself when I stray from my program du jour. But because I don’t think they work well for really effective change.

I’m finding vows more of a guilt trip than a benefit. Thou shalt not eat gluten, for example, in the absence of actual ciliac disease, is more a chance to screw up than to stare down temptation. The sense of failure that comes with a bagel is worse for me than the actual gluten.

Better to build up our sense of progress and pride by honoring intentions more gradually, more naturally, and more authentically. By making the right choices in each moment, time after time. Not saying something once and hoping I’m done. Because “done” is more often the path to backsliding and recrimination, looking for the loopholes, rather than taking the next step on the right road.

What vows do you make and which do you keep? What would happen if you allowed your deep intention to guide you rather than struggle with a one-time promise?

Too often vow-making and vow-breaking go hand in hand. Far better to choose good in the moment than out of fear or obligation. Regular reinforcement of your intention by making good choices more often is far more effective, llong lasting, and gentler on the soul.

Better to count the times you get it right, not the ones you blow it.

Too Much: TorahCycle Pinchas

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shemot 2013Most of us are passionate about something, whether it’s our soccer team, favorite candidate, or religion. I’m pretty anti-evangelical about religious passion, although I make an exception for Rumi, who refers to The Divine as The Beloved, with such open-hearted yearning that you hope he made it to nirvana.

Virtually of us have been passionate about passion at least once in our lives. That glorious cosmic zap when nothing exists but your new love. The Gotta have you now! kind of passion. One of my favorite Rumi quotes: At the sound of love’s flute, even the dead shall rise and rend their shrouds with desire.

The problem for me in this week’s reading, is that the lovers in question are killed by a guy named Pinchas, who enforces his personal morality with the sharp end of a spear, and is rewarded for doing so.

I’m from the “make love, not war” generation, a sentiment good for all time. Many rabbis don’t condemn Pinchas, who seems to have skipped his “use your words” training and gone immediately for the self-righteous knockout blow.

I think this reading is about excess. Not just acting out our super-sized moral values as though we’re the only ones who have it right., or lust’s temporary blindness. But the smaller, seemingly more trivial decisions that cause big problems over time. The eat-the-whole-chocolate-bar instead of a one or two pieces kind of excess. Whipping out our visas instead of saying I can live without that.

My teaching: excess at any end of the spectrum is wrong. And it’s  a great time to cut it out.

In more personal terms, it might mean setting up (and then-gulp –living on) a monthly budget. Ditto for calories, TV, frittered time, etc. Whatever you’re doing too much of, this is a great week to think about reining yourself in.

Because if you don’t, the universe will do it for you. Not in a death and damnation way. But in the actions have consequences way.

If I don’t limit sugar/carbs, my body’s gonna rebel. I suspect you know which of your passions has been running on overdrive. You might not be on borrowed time yet, but Act III could be here or near.

I always prefer a carrot to a sharp stick. (Actually I prefer chocolate, but without it carrots taste much sweeter.)

Metaphor aside, payoffs often help motivate us. To make a change, chooose a different source than the one you usually gravitate to. If food’s your downfall, use kissing for nourishment. Spending too much? Appreciate what you already own: use the good china, or put on your dress-up duds on a weekday.

Whatever’s on your bucket list, pick a payoff that’ll help you choose change. And then, as the ad, says, Just do it.

But whatever you do, don’t be a zealot. Take the process a little slower and gentler than you might in your most self-righteous, first-to-fifth in six seconds mode.

It’s okay to be excited. But more kindness and less self-judgment will keep you on the right path far longer and better than a pointed stick or flaming out in a burst of short-lived glory.

Do The Right Thing: TorahCycle Balak

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Balak 2014There’s a great Spike Lee movie in which a young black man has a choice between defending the white pizza-shop owner who hired him or siding with his rioting neighbors. The movie smolders relentlessly to a tight climax: heat and tension inexorably rising.

The guy in the moral cross hairs of this week’s story is named Balaam, hired by King Balak to curse the Israelites, whom he fears may settle in his land. In our times, uninvited neighbors might get a rock through the window or a burning cross on the lawn.

Balaam sets out, happy to have a gig. On the road, his donkey stops and says No further. No cursing. Do the right thing instead. PS, If you don’t believe me, can you see the angel blocking our way? Even with that, Balaam tries to curse, but blessings flow from his mouth instead.

We can’t pick our lessons. But we can pay attention when they show up. Unless they’re catastrophic we might not even notice them, usually for far too long. We get used to ignoring those nagging whispers or strange feelings every time we think about a certain person, place, or thing.

Because they’re almost always inconvenient, we rarely embrace our lessons with joy. For most of us, karmic reprimands aren’t pretty or fun. They’re annoying distractions from what we’d rather be doing. Gratitude, or even bemused irony, is hard to come by. We’re so involved in the immediacy of our lives that we forget this whole experience is just a small blip in the larger cosmic drama.

The Hindus have a great word, leela. It means cosmic play, which you can interpret as anything from hopscotching quarks to the fates rolling dice with our lives. We can learn our lessons the easy way or the hard way, depending on everything from attitude to karma. A lot depends on how well we heed the messengers who deliver them.

It helps to learn how your particular guides like to talk to you. Many cultures have trickster legends, guides who smile, beguile, and riddle. Judaism sends angels, malachim, often translated as messengers. Ignore them at your own peril. Much better to pay attention to what’s being said and asked of you.

Angels and talking critters are hard to come by. Spirit guides invisible. And their stand-ins, family and friends, so easy to ignore. But like in the old cartoon of a tiny angel and devil whispering into opposite ears, we usually know when we’re facing an important choice.

Wouldn’t it be grand if we knew what the right choice was? If we didn’t need a cosmic 2×4 to get our attention, like ultimatums from doctors, judges, or divorce papers. If we did the right thing willingly and easily.

We get greedy, forgetful, and lazy. But mostly we know what’s good, right, and true. My optimistic self believes we’re hard-wired for goodness. That mostly we want to get it right. It’d be a bleak world to think otherwise.

What if we did the right thing more often? If we created more joy and more caring, more blessings than curses, because we’re more light than dark, more good than afraid, more loving than angry.

Can you image the beautiful world we’d create?

Because I Said So!: TorahCycle Chukat

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JoshWhat pisses you off? Bad drivers when you’re late? Annoying colleagues, stubborn friends, or forgetful partners? Poorly designed tools, new software? What makes you lose it? Grit or gnash your teeth. Shriek, smash pottery, or just plain lose your cool.

I recently lost a beloved pet. Death’s high on my things-that-piss-me off list. Not so much my own death; if that was gonna happen now it probably woulda. But the damn finality of it. The can’t pick up the phone and find you now finality. Or in this case, shake the bag of tuna treats and see my kitty come running.

Even though I believe in reincarnation, the transmigration of souls, and high-falutin’ stuff like talking to unseen guides and all the wonderful things my generation helped scatter about, connecting with spirits that are energetic rather than manifested is harder and less reliable. It requires a certain sense of intention, kavannah. A committed, more focused way of doing things. Slower than my instincts generally motivate. Not to mention careful listening and a whole lotta faith.

So I can empathize with Moses, who’s spent 40 years shepherding the whiny masses. They’re hungry and thirsty, and when HaShem says water will flow from a rock, Moses gets impatient and angry and wonks it with his staff to hurry things along. I’m amazed he didn’t snap sooner.

Anger is such a murky emotion. So seemingly transparent, but usually the tip of a deep pool of other, older, feelings. Flailing at what doesn’t obey us, what doesn’t confirm to our desire to reshape the universe as we think it should be, can be momentarily cathartic.

I’m empathetic. I’m often moving too fast. Not always paying enough attention to fine details or sharp edges. My recent construction project helped. Enforced an ability to be more at peace with, or at least more tolerant of, what I could not control. It was a good and needed teaching.

But like most folks I’m not very good with a profound sense of helplessness. We like to say, Let go and let God. But really! Sometimes it’s hard to keep the faith. And then we blow it.

Usually there are consequences (rarely good ones), to us or worse, to others. They tend to make us rueful and sad, angry at ourselves for not paying better attention all along. This reinforces the helplessness, because we can’t change the past any more than we can avoid the deaths of those we love.

The day after, one of my wise friends quoted me a great line of lyrics: Everyone wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die. It helped.

If we’re paying attention, we’ll learn from our lessons. Get a little smarter. Do better or at least maybe different the next time. No guarantee we won’t blow it again. And again and again. That’s why we’re here, doing this work. To keep blowing it until some day we don’t, and get to wherever it is we go next.

We get wiser. A little more healed. Find enough solace and blessings in what we have and can hold, love and be loved by, that even though we don’t get to enter the promised land right now, we get to see it is indeed there, waiting for us when we are ready.

Lucky us.

 

Wake Up!!! TorahCycle Korach

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KorachI recently had a brush with death. Sadly I’m not exaggerating. Another 5-10 minutes faster by the fire or slower by the alarm company and poof: gone or burn ward. I’m still processing it. But when I realized the next parshah was Korach, I laughed.

On the surface, it’s about a rebellion to displace Moses as leader. A full bore, get outta here you’re fired attempt to take charge. It’s really about our persistent ability to be unconscious. What looks like a story about rising up and being cast into a fiery pit is really about our unconsciousness’s nasty habit of using complacency, forgetfulness, and mindless acts of stupidity to create confusion and chaos.

Raise your hand if you’ve never blurted the wrong word to exactly the wrong person or missed a critical deadline. Give yourself a gold star if you’ve never sliced your thumb instead of the bagel, hit another car, or tweaked your knee trying to do too much too fast.

When you’re so close to manifestation–making it to your personal promised land–along comes your inner saboteur. Your unconscious. Your stubborn ability to take a good situation and make it bad.

This reading is about screwing up in a serious way. The kind where you really blow it. Get very close to the edge of that deep pit. Maybe even get charred and smokey from the billowing sparks.

Disaster can happen in an instant, even if you build up to it slowly. Unconsciousness can take many creative forms, even seemingly passive ones like laziness, procrastination, and failure to see the big impacts of small choices. Mostly it’s about not being present in the given moment, whether that’s by distraction or entrenched patterns of behavior.

Staying alive means being fully present, not sorta kinda half-assed being here.

Korach has a simple plot. A lot of Torah does. That’s part of why the phrase “Bible stories” conjures simple picture-book imagery. Like us, it’s a collection of stories that describe and define us. Each family has stories that any relative could tell in virtually the same words and with the same timing, pausing for the laugh lines and moans. They’ve become myth, iconic, and archetypal: The time when……

We also carry personal stories. Deeper ones, sometimes never even told, about people and passages long closed or others longed for but never manifested, the places we’re longing to get to. We tell stories of our promised land, even if we haven’t seen it yet.

Torah cycles around every year so we can keep peeling back the layers of its stories. Keep learning from them. Maybe not make the same mistakes over and over.

Unconsciousness keeps us stuck in an old story. It’s a lifestyle that hobbles you, keeps you walking around the same old same old until you either totally check out or something happens so big and dramatic that you have to change. Because being unconscious for too long can propel you into a %^#^&%%#ing mess of a story like a car wreck or a fire that forces you to pay attention. Really pay attention.

Better to wake up now and tell better stories. If you really wanna get to where you’re going, it helps to be alive.