We all get our instructions in different ways. I’m not talking about literal voices, but the certainty of trusting your gut about people, places, things; life decisions big and small. Listening to the messages from your inner guides about everything from meditating or exercising more to proposing marriage.

This reading details the building of the mishkan, the core of the Tent of Meeting, the site of assembly for prayer. It’s a lightening rod for holy energy, a conduit to the ineffable. We’re told HaShem will speak from the space between two cherubim on its top. Their faces look both across and down. So the voice of HaShem comes from simultaneously confronting faces of Self and Other.

Someone once asked what I believed in. I answered “synchronicity.” That’s still true. Now I’d say, I believe we’re in an active conversation with the unseen. And if we’re not, we should be.

There’s great cartoon where a mother’s circling the teenaged boy sprawled on the couch, giving him advice. His thought balloon reads, Someday I’m going to have to ask her what she’s been saying all these years.

That’s the opposite of what the Mishkan is for. It’s a mandate for us to actively listen through our ears, eyes, hearts, laughter, and tears. And through the deep knowing we get from the wisps of divine presence inside our inner Mishkan, whether that comes through creativity or comfort in times of trouble.

My name for that knowing is among my favorite names for HaShem: HaMakom, The Place. After Jacob dreams of the angels ascending and descending a ladder to the heavens, he says God was in this place and I did not know.

HaShem is always here. Inside each of us. Now and always. Our job is to remember that we are always in HaMakom. That’s truly living in gratitude .

We’re all on a quest for an inner sense of rightness. For a world in harmony and balance at the deepest, most profound, and purest level of being: how prayer feels when it is answered. That’s part of what these readings tell us: Keep coming; keep asking; keep listening.

The road that we travel carrying the Mishkan leads through many difficult lands. Like the ferocious tribe of Amalek that attacked the Israelites, killing stragglers and becoming an iconic name for all future evils–from the Inquisition to the Holocaust–we are beset by various forms of nemesis. Confusion, fear, doubt, ennui, pain, loneliness, illness. All the inner Amaleks we create for ourselves, and all those we encounter and must learn from because we’re here being human, living and trying to make some spiritual progress.

I’d never have prayed for some of the issues in my own private wilderness, like the end of a relationship or a bad back. But they’ve helped me to grow. Helped lead me to where I’ve deeply wanted to be, and helped me hear HaShem more clearly.

So for all the detailed assembly instructions, my simplest interpretation of this reading echoes Judaism’s holiest prayer: Listen. Listen. Listen. HaShem is answering.

There’s a moment in a new bestseller when if the protagonist drives west he’ll be safe and can begin a new life, and if he returns east, he’ll face life-threatening escapades. East he goes, despite its known dangers. We all do a lot of that.

Many times, we make cosmic u-turns when facing the unknown,. That’s everything from regaining lost weight to felons returning to jail.  Why? What’s the need for what I call YoYo lessons?

This week’s reading is the Golden Calf story. Moses atop Sinai for forty days, getting the ten commandment tablets. Everyone else down below, getting restive, and just a day before he returns, smelting their gold to make the idol they’ve been told never to worship. Moses descends, sees it, and smashes the tablets.

We’re being asked to do what we don’t have a strong legacy of doing: trusting. Our leader seems to be on break. Don’t we get one too? Just one day off or coupla brownies, a chance to cut ourselves some slack. Permission to slide into the old ways. Permission, permission, permission. Danger, danger, danger.

There’s a great passage in The Genizah at the House of Sepher: The Hebrew language is like my father: elegant, logical, concise. A word begins from a root, a mere three letters, and grows like a plant through seven constructs: I break; I smash; I am broken; I am smashed; I make shatter; I am caused to break down; I devastate myself.

That’s the contradiction and mandate of our lives. The tablets smashed because of our impatience. Now it’s our job to collect the holy motes of dust still swirling. That we breathe in and out every day. To build the mishkan from them and from within ourselves. To do tikkum olam: To rebuild our broken, shattered world. To heal it and ourselves.

Like the holy sparks in each of us, remnants of those tablets, the Big Bang, or echoes of whatever cosmology you choose to embrace, to do our job on earth. In sage Joni Mitchell’s great words: We are stardust. We are golden. And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.

Along the way we screw up, we fall down, we fall apart, we smash, and we are smashed. We eat the chocolate, build the calf, or find some new way to screw up. And in the thirteen attributes of the divine, also in this reading, we are forgiven. We get another chance to try again. To get it right. To build a miskan (holy altar) this time.

Rabbi Shefa Gold (Torah Journeys, a great book) says: Sometimes, when I think I’m building a mishkan, it’s really a golden calf. I’d like to think the converse is also true, that even a Golden Calf could transform into a mishkan with the right remorse and intention. Though I’ve  been accused of wishful thinking and denial, I’d think we get credit for showing up, for sincere intention, for trying, and for trying again. What else would we do with our time here?

Exercise: Spend some time this week thinking about your biggest mistakes, what you’ve learned about how to avoid repeating them, healing, and about how this informs your life now.

Part of most people’s emotional paradigm is a desire to feel special. That may be a yen to excel in something obvious, like sports or a musical instrument. Or to be deeply loved and witnessed. There’s also the spiritual ego. The part of us that wants to feel like we’re making a little progress while we’re here. Getting wiser, or at least smarter. Better at navigating the challenges life throws us, and learning our lessons a little better each round so we don’t have to repeat them quite as often.

This week’s reading is all about the making of the high priest. The one who’ll enter the holy of holies on the most sacred of days, wearing beautiful, white ceremonial garb, exquisitely designed and bejeweled. Part of the regalia is a long white rope for a belt, so that if he’s gone into the core of holiness less pure than he outta be, they can pull his stricken body out without peril.

Confession. I’ve earned all the spots and mottles on my robes. Being foolish in love. Stepping too far up or down at the wrong times. Words spoken or not. Shoulda woulda coulda is how most of us rationalize our mistakes. But even the wisdom of retrospection can’t erase their wounds, their scars, and their legacy.

So no white belt for me, not yet this round, at least not without lots more bleach and scrubbing. You can decide if you’re ready, or if there’s some a cleansing process that would serve you well before you put all your chips on the line.

Many of us embrace the idea that we’re trying to get clearer and cleaner. Moving closer to the virtues of compassion, goodness, and service, even if we’re petty, distracted, or insonsistent too much of the time.

This reading talks about initiation. About a specific path that an aspiring priest must walk. In part to prove to others that it’s been done, and in part to, gulp, actually have to pay attention to specific criteria about how you should live and what you should do. It’s all about choosing actions that’ll require a couple big giant steps towards holiness, and a whole lotta consistency in daily living.

Exercise: Think about times you have committed, in a deep way, to becoming your higher self. Not talking reaching full-bore enlightenment here. But saying a serious Yes to the universe that included some accountability and doings. For real. Stepping up to being more priestly in your dealings with yourself and others.

This is a good week to look into that mirror. It’s one of those fork-in-the-road moments that seem to clear in hindsight but you have no idea in the world that you’re standing at until it’s time for a big eeek or hooray. You may not make active choices now. But let the questions rumble around in you and listen for when they come knocking again.

Do you have altars? Places where you collect sacred objects: piles of rocks that have called to you on a walk, inspirational pictures, or spiritually meaningful talismans? We’re used to thinking of places of worship as sacred space. Ditto meditation places in our homes or gardens. Even the inspirational images and messages we share in cyber-space, like the cloud that hovered over Sinai, can create an intangible zone of revelation. When our hearts open with love or compassion, that’s sacred space too.

The next section of Torah gives very precise instructions about the building of the mishkan, the portable ark that the Israelites will carry in the desert. In the reading it says literally, They shall make for Me a Sanctuary, and I shall dwell among them. Always good to have a place to talk to and with HaShem on the journey, longer than anyone’s yet imagining. For mishkan imagery, remember what Indiana Jones was searching for: the ark at the center of the Holy of Holies. The making of this ark is conveyed in astonishing detail, almost a do-it-yourself kit, though without the holy contents.

When you consider your own journey, there are probably times you’d long for such a step-by-step construction manual. Times it would be grand to have a detailed guide for your process. But no matter how specific the instructions, there’s moments in any unfolding when things feel hopeless. That achingly big gap between vision and actualization. Like when you buy something without noticing three nasty letters: RTA, as in, ready to assemble. As seen in the mind’s eye, your mishkan of a desk or dresser is perfect. A symmetrical, completed thing of beauty. But when there’s a jumble of pieces spread all over the floor, and you’re holding some impossibly wrapped screws, and one tiny, little Allen wrench, it’s easy to feel exhausted and depleted.

Our spiritual and emotional journeys are like that. We’re all works in progress, gloriously beautiful one day, full of anger or tears another. Nothing’s linear and we’re all vulnerable to the unpredictable, things that happen when we move with lots of enthusiasm but without the right information, energy, and support. Creating or being in sacred space regularly won’t ensure success, but it can help you know you are not alone during the journey. That isn’t enough to solve all problems, but it might help you keep moving forward.

The good news is that the sacred is all around us, in every blade of grass and every breath of air. Watching and breathing alone won’t get the mishkan built. But it can reinforce your kavannah, your intention, to stay dedicated to your goals. Because without intention you’re just building a beautiful box. You can put all the sacred things you want into and around it. But you have to make sure it and your heart are truly holy for HaShem to enter.

Exercise: This is a great week to focus on what makes space sacred to you. Is it the people you are with, the activities you share? Holy silence or shared prayer? Sacred music, chanting, or breath? What helps you most when you’re feeling afraid or alone?

There’s a paradigm  that’s got spontaneity on one end and discipline on the other. Sometimes I interpret this range as gratification and joy on the one hand, and rules and responsibilities on the other. Unfair, I know, and betrays a predilection towards self-indulgence that undervalues the benefits of regular habits and practices. Work in progress, this lifetime and others.

We’ve got a whole lot of Torah to trek through yet. Lots of times the mirror’s gonna get held up and we’ll get a chance to say, Eek, me !?! You want me to try harder? Do more? Be more obedient, disciplined, and consistent? I’ll get back to you on that. That’s how many folks respond when asked to do things they’re not ready to embrace, whether those’re spiritual practices or going to the gym.

Torah is full of instructions. They’re framed as everything from the Ten Commandments to directives about care of family, servants, clients, and neighbors to rules about food choice, preparation, and hand-washing and prayers before eating. So now’s a good time to look at your relationship to both self-determination and obedience. And to see how your point of view changes if the upcoming rules conflict with your values or regular practices.

It turns out practice isn’t nearly as easy or tidy as theory.

Because there’s times when submission to structure and form is one of the most important actions you can take. And others when the best thing you can do is dump all the rules and run as fast as you can towards adventure. The trick is knowing which to do when. And recognizing that each affords a different level of surrender that’ll help you grow.

The real question to ask: What’re your goals and what’s the right path for you to get to them? These can be spiritual, physical, or emotional. Healing your body, your heart, or your soul. Whatever’s on your plate.

Recently, a friend and I talked about awareness vs. action. She cited a Buddhist point-of-view: Self-awareness is the only requirement; all else follows naturally from that. I asked: Is noticing enough? Or do you also need to decide what you’re responsible for, like actively striving for change?

Exercise: Pose the question to yourself. Your answer implies the amount of discipline or spontaneity that’ll follow. Think about your habits. (I’ll focus on spirituality, but you can go through the same drill with food and exercise, entrepreneurial pursuits, even goals for pleasure.) Do you have a regular practice? Are you enthusiastic or reluctant? Do you think in daily, weekly, monthly, or annual frames? Are you internally motivated or influenced by social or familial reasons? Compared to other aspects of your life that require discipline (for example diet or exercise), how do your commitments to ritual, meditation, study, or prayer stack up? Do you want your self-awareness to guide you or do you believe in reinforcing insight with action? No right answers, but questions worth giving some attention.

As imagery goes, it’s hard to beat Sinai. Thunder and lightening, the Ten Commandments boomed out so fiercely it’s said the assembled folks heard color and saw sound. A synesthesia that gives insight into how we sometimes respond to powerful instructions or situations: with confusion, fear, and a desire to close our eyes, cover our ears, and run like hell.

Kabbalah’s literal meaning is “to receive.” Sinai’s in part a story about how our normal ways of taking in information were scrambled. A moment when listening meant being fully receptive, as individuals and a collective. Every fibre straining to take in holiness, because the impact of direct revelation is a full-body ride. Physical as well as mental. Emotional as well as intellectual. Spiritual and material at the same time, through the filter of our very human forms.

This doesn’t happen often, or often enough for some folks, especially those who’re focused on transformation. Mystics long for moments like Sinai. Some folks find glimpses though meditation, in nature, or flashes of deep personal insight. New love evokes a similar feeling, though we usually listen more attentively with other chakras.

I don’t know how you feel in those moments. For me it happens with a certain sense of knowing. There’s a completeness of attention when head, heart, body, and soul are in alignment. Times slows. Like a tuning fork aligned to a specific pitch that I recognize as a sense memory. I feel it and I am whole with it. I don’t reason or argue or bargain or try to weasel out of what I’m being told.

It doesn’t necessarily come as often or last as long as I’d like. But when it does, I feel much more willing to change the who and how of my everyday life. To live what I have been commanded, not just think about the possibility of change.

It’s all about being open. About allowing yourself to be changed by what comes in. And by what you do next.

Sinai opened people up by shattering the familiar. It took them out of their comfort zone, demanded their full attention, and ultimately their full surrender. It’s hard to do that for yourself, but you can create opportunities to listen more deeply.

Find the paths that make you feel this way. Walk them regularly and pay close attention.

Exercise: Some quiet evening write the original 10C one by one. Think about your relationship with each one. Literal murder’s probably not a problem. But as you work from the literal to the personal, think out of the box. Consider how you’ve constricted parts of yourself to accommodate a job or intimate relationship; it’s killing in a different form. This is a fascinating way to get perspective on your life and values. Witness what you feel. Pay special attention to the parts of you they touch fiercely. To what energizes you or frightens you. Listen carefully for the hints, whispers, and sparks that’ll follow. Take good notes.

PS for those in Eugene: Please come to TBI Friday Feb 1 where I’ll be giving a longer version of this dvar.

The paradigm I use for the personal growth process is meandering versus leaping. Meandering is how most of us do it most of the time. Thinking about change, hoping for change, wanting to be on the other side of whatever’s between us and change. Walking the shore of our own Red Sea but not sure how to cross and (secretly or not) waiting for it to part.

Hint: For things to actually change, we need to act. Need to do something more than pace, mutter, and whine about the scary yikes behind and in front of us. We need to leap in.

This week’s story, the fleeing Israelites standing at the edge of the sea, is also about faith. The commentary says that the waters did not part until one guy went in and the water reached his nostrils. That’s how much you have to want change.

Because our lives rarely include literal whips, it’s easy to take our time. We accommodate, and when faced with a scary unknown don’t always feel eager or ready to leap. Too often we let ourselves off the hook, finding important things that need to be done first. We forget one of the biggest lessons of this process: how good it will feel once when we’ve let go of fear.

Sometimes I tell people who don’t think they’re ready to google “countdown clock” and pick a future date. Simply watching the seconds tick away, and imagining another day, week, month, or year without change is all it takes to move you.

The good news and bad news is the same: the known will indeed become your past. And your future will be less predictable. But now’s your chance to risk that and to welcome liberation. Because it really is time.

Your own Red Sea is no more dangerous than your wilingness to risk whatever will happen next.

Lawrence Kushner tells a great story about when he and his wife vacationed in a wilderness park. The tourists were abuzz about bears. Before hiking, they ask a ranger if there were bears where they were headed. He answered: If there were no bears, it wouldn’t be a wilderness, would it?

If you always knew you’d be safe, you’d never have to learn about confronting fear. You’d never get to experience the intense, profound, and wonderful sense of liberation that leaping brings. The satisfaction from challenging yourself to stop pacing and jump in, from risking a new life, from embracing both faith and the unknown.

If you trust yourself enough to risk change, you will find that freedom. You’ll be inspired to face whatever next comes next. Yes, there will be new challenges and new lessons. The cycle will begin again, though the nouns and verbs will change. But you’ll have earned the knowing that comes from what you’ve done. And you’ll be stronger and braver the next time.

Exercise: Do one thing this week that feels bold.

PS The longer version of this dvar was my first Torah talk. Click to hear or read it.

Life isn’t always easy. Each of us has been hurt in various ways. In the early history of your incarnation lie the first woundings. Likely they preceded language, but made deep and complex impacts on your beingness and sense of self. This week is a powerful time to release their hold, so you can grow beyond how they’ve influenced your psyche and behavior.

The story is powerful: the Angel of Death smiting Egyptian firstborn; Israelites anointing their doorposts praying to be passed over; the commandment to tell the story each spring to commemorate liberation from slavery.

The Angel of Change is also at your door. You can answer the challenge to grow, or accept the slow, ongoing death of mitzrayim (the narrow place).

Now’s a great time to look at parts of you that’re long past their pull date, but that you still allow to influence you, negatively and disproportionately. Ways that you still reinforce an old identity you say you want to shift. Entrenched ideas, behaviors, or situations that aren’t good for you and keep you stuck.

What does it take to say, I will no longer be the person I have been? To end an unhealthy habit, leave a dead-end job, or change an intimate relationship? What does it mean to actively choose change? Do you even believe it is possible? Because this is the moment to make that choice. To choose growth over your history of wounding.

So if there’s any part of you that is hesitant, questioning, or unsure, now’s the time to look at it very closely and decide if you’re going or staying.

A necessary step is to acknowledge, witness, and name your earliest woundings. To look them in the eye and then to relinquish their power over you. If you look at your patterns carefully, you can trace the lines back to their source. It might be overt abuse or something far more subtle. But no matter how important something has been to your history, or how intrinsically it’s embedded in your identity, if it no longer serves you, now’s the time to let it go, to move it firmly into your past.

The visit or passing of the Angel of Death is the time to say: This is who I’ve been and how I got here. I’m ready to release myself from old hurts, and choose to create a new me. If you’re moving into change, whether you are framing it as new year’s resolutions or a deeper molting, you cannot skip this step. It’s the time to choose change over any other part of who you’ve been. To become You 2.0, 3.0, or whatever upgrade you are ready for.

Exercise: Answer these questions: Can I identify old hurts and see how they’ve shaped me? What would it mean to let go of them? How would I talk differently to and about myself? Who do I want to become? Am I ready to choose that me? What path leads me there?

This is the no holds barred, let it all hang out honesty week. Not some public confessional. Just you and you. Time to look yourself in the eyeballs and admit that you’re going to have to do something powerfully different than you’ve been doing to get out of the slavery of mitzrayim.

The plagues (seven this week, three more next) represent the various ways we try to get our own attention. Whether it’s self-sabotage or external pressures, many of us–consciously or subliminally–buy into the idea that suffering is a pre-condition for change. Too often we embrace concepts like “no pain, no gain” or “needing to hit bottom” as a necessary part of self-liberation.

But the real opportunity of the plagues is the chance to face your psychological shadow and the daily habits that keep you tied in place, not yet able to make whatever shifts you’re working on and longing for. Soon you’ll get a chance to make the leap, to cross the Red Sea, leaving bondage behind. Now’s the time to get ready.

Each plague represents a chance for our inner pharaoh to lighten its grip. To move us closer to the shift. To help us rebel, and grow into who, what, or how we most want to become next. Each one also offers an opening, however briefly, of the heart. When this parshah says that in the face of the plagues, Pharaoh repeatedly hardened his heart, it means that the door to compassion has stayed closed. And you stay stuck.

Like any muscle, the heart can toughen up. But exactly the force that keeps it closed can also be used to open it. It’s time for your inner pharaoh to let go and let you grow. The key: you have to want change badly enough.

To be more precise, you have to want change more than you want safety. More than you fear it, or don’t think you deserve it, or maybe aren’t quite ready, can’t afford the risk, are afraid of what others will think, or whatever creative and persuasive reasons you’ve used to construct the bonds of your own mitzrayim.

Exercise: Make two lists. First, anything you want to change: body, job, partner, finances, home, don’t be shy. (Only your height and age are out of range☺ Remember, it’s truth time and you’re the only one who’ll see this. Don’t worry. You don’t have to tackle more than one issue at a time, though there’s sometimes great synergy to progress. Then list everything you think keeps you from moving forward. Dig deep and really push for the whys and hows as well as the whats. If you write, for example, not enough money, think about how and when you do spend for what. Ditto down the line on how you live. Plagues aren’t fun, so this exercise will likely push your buttons. That’s okay. It’s time to pull the masks off your inner pharaoh and find your own true face.