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.

The flood. Virtually every tradition has a mythology about the world begun, destroyed, and begun again. Whether it’s an environmental catastrophe or an act of divine wrath, the plot is pretty consistent: something’s gone terribly wrong since creation and it’s time to hit the reset button. There’s a link, sometimes tenuous and sometimes explicit, between the old world and the new; and a new covenant between a creator/destroyer/re-creator and the next incarnation of humans.

That’s an anthropomorphic view of the Noah story and a great time to address how this blog will deal with “the G word” which will almost always be HaShem, the Name. I’m more concerned with the metaphor of self and how Torah speaks to self-exploration and development, both spiritual and emotional.

This parshah gives us great advice. Bring all the seeds you can find into your future. You’ll need them to energize your new life. And like Noah counting up the species, inventory every aspect of self that you value, that you want to preserve.

No matter how you try, you’re only human. You’re gonna bring along the cockroaches as well as the deer. But perhaps we need them in our psychic ecosystems. Maybe we need those darker edges to push against. Taoist Judaism 101: there’s no yetzer tov (the good inclination) without a yetzer hara (the evil one). There’s always duality in the land, old or new.

My favorite interpretation of the Shema, Judaism’s essential prayer, goes roughly like this: Listen up God-wrestler, it’s all the same. The world of spirit and the world of matter are all part of the same truth, and you’re responsible for seeing and keeping it all together. For holding everything in the ark of your being, keeping the ship afloat until you reach dry land and then making it better the next round. For doing tikkun olam (healing and repair) in a shattered world. Or in this case in this flooded one.

So what’s this week all about? Taking your commitment to change, to living with greater awareness and intention, to a deeper level. Harvesting your best qualities and letting your worst ones be washed away. Cleansed in the literal sense, even if it takes many applications of hot water and the occasional emotional thrashing to clear them from your psyche and daily behaviors.

We’re the ones who’re responsible for re-creating our worlds. We have friends and partners and teachers great and small in all the wonderful and painful aspects of our lives to help us learn and grow. But in the most existential of ways, we’re each a single speck in the cosmic consciousness. We’re each responsible for making the whole story a better story. How can you do that, for yourself and the rest of us?

Follow the hyperlinks if you want to read or listen to a longer dvar on Noach.

The first few words of Genesis are usually translated as In the beginning or, as I prefer, With beginningness. And that’s the core of this week’s parshah (Torah reading).

This is a week when you should look at yourself and your life with new eyes, artist’s eyes. As though you had the ability to start from scratch. To create and re-create any and all parts of yourself with a sense of complete and open possibility.

There’s a lot of imagery in this reading about separation – a theme that’ll show up often in the Torah. Form from void. Light from dark. Water from land. But you can make it personal: Who am I; who am I not? Who have I been; who am I becoming?

It’s a time to think about your life with what spiritual teachers often call beginner’s mind, unhindered by old habits, assumptions, and fears. Not one oblivious to the constraints of reality, like mortgages or calories. But rather one that says, Yeah, I have to deal with that, and I can choose how I do it. Now and in every conscious moment going forward. The kind of thinking that gives you the freedom to believe you can create your world closer to how you want it to be and feel.

There’s a great Hebrew word, kavannah, that means intention. One of my cornerstone values is the importance of living with awareness and intention. This reading invites and encourages that consciousness.

Another highlight of this parshah is what happens when we don’t stay conscious. When we jump for instant gratification or make other wrong choices. When we don’t listen to our inner/higher voice. The voice that instructs and offers: Here’s a great life. Just don’t do that one act of self-sabotage. In Genesis it’s the story of a man, a woman, a snake, and an apple. The metaphorical journey from paradise to a very different kind of beginningness. The kind that’s sometimes thrust upon us and imposes different lessons.

Most of us haven’t been homeless refuges. But we’ve all faced unwanted crises of our own: The death of a partner or parent. The loss of a job or home. A tough diagnosis. It takes a different kind of visioning to cope with that kind of reality. Deep resilience and an ability to redefine oneself that doesn’t always include the luxury of time, or too many chances to screw up, apologize, and screw up again. The habituated, recidivist way that I, and many of us, often learn. This second kind of beginningness says: You gotta change now!! It’s the wake-up call with no more snooze buttons.

No one’s expecting you to recreate your world in six days. But there’s some great teachings here. This week, ask yourself: How can I look at my life with artist’s eyes and a beginner’s mind? How can I make my world a more joyful and nurturing place, for myself and those I love?

If we all ask, listen, and respond, we’ll become part of what Judaism calls tikkum olam, the healing of the world. That’s a story we’re all still working on. Stay tuned.