Category Archives: TorahCycles: Midrash for self-exploration and growth

In the Beginning (Again): TorahCycle Bereishit

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Bereishit 2013Someone asked me recently what this blog is about.  My answer: to help you answer the question Who are you in the process of becoming?

Torah readings offer a vehicle for self-transformation. They help us to look through the window of the aspirational self. To listen to what the words are saying about how to live. Me. You. Now.

Almost all of us wrestle with something, for that long night we call life, the way we’ll soon remember Jacob wrestling with the angel.

We each have our own issues and process. Some are unhappy in a relationship or a job, while others long for one. There’s body stuff, and money stuff, and friend/family stuff. All the aspects of our daily reality that our minds chatter and fret about so much and often. There’s soul stuff too, whether that translates into becoming a meditator or simply kinder, deepening a spiritual practice or searching for a resonant path.

We’ve cycled back to Genesis. Creation. The edge of another new beginning.

You may believe in the Big Bang, The Voice/Hand of God, or a different creation story. But anyone who’s ever had a brainstorm knows how quickly something can appear out of apparent nothing. An idea bursts through, alive with energy. The synergy and synchronicity of all of you. Your history and your becoming. Your holy spark glittering to show you the next next. Suddenly a vision, where a moment before there was not. A new world of possibilities, multiplying quickly.

That’s the way to start this year.

Shed last year’s battles and disappointments. Bring with you what you’ve learned, what you earned, and what you aspire to. Leave behind the old struggles, fears, and sorrows. Start over cleansed and optimistic.

Poof! What an idea!

Here’s my invitation: To celebrate creation, give yourself time this week to invite new ideas about how you want to feel this time next year. With hopes you’ll feel like you’d just won the lottery of your life and soul. Like you can create the world you want to live in.

It’s another chance to reinvent you. To edit and to refine. To take everything you’ve learned and have it become your ally. A mini-reincarnation without having to start over again with diapers.

A lot of the “in the beginning” story is about separation and discernment between opposites: heaven and earth, day and night, land and sea, and so on. It’s also about free will: following instructions or risking the consequences of your actions. We all face those kinds of choices every day.

As you make them — consistent, impulsive, risky, wise, or not — some of the glittering possibilities of your great new ideas will fade. And some will grow brighter. The array of bright lights will narrow and cluster. As they do, your life options will become clearer. If you’re lucky or blessed, and can hear the hints and instructions coming from your inner voice, they’ll even show you the paths for your evolving journey.

I’m suggesting folks journal this time around. Whatever strikes you as worth remembering along the way.  If you’re so moved, write yourself or the rest of us a note below.

Harvest Time: Succot 2013

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Succot 2013Anyone who’s visited a farmer’s market lately knows it’s a gorgeous time of year. Abundant in virtually every fruit and veggie we could conjure: bright, fresh, full of nutrients and flavor.  As we give thanks for nature’s blessings, we’re filled gratitude and delight. Wouldn’t it be grand to feel so enthusiastic about your own progress?

We’ve also reached almost full Torah circle. The perfect moment to look at how far you’ve come with what you started “in the beginning.”

You know the questions I care about in this blog: How can we create greater awareness and intention? How we can elevate our recalcitrance? How can we better connect to our holy spark? How we can become lighter beings, kinder and more compassionate? How can we heal our core stuff? How can we live with greater goodness and joy? How can we be fully present in the moments of our lives?

This week’s about looking your crap in the eye and saying both Good job! and I can do better.

Acknowledge where you’ve fallen short of the mark you’d hoped to reach. But also remember to give yourself credit. What you failed to score in reality points you may have reached in insight. Getting holier and wiser, or even healthier, more successful, or better partnered is a process that takes time. What’s more important than paying good attention, stepping up and trying to do better?

Judaism has a holiday for this season that involves setting up a small booth. The kind you might see at a craft show. A place to go, eat, and pray regularly for a week. To sit in the field of your being and say: This is what I have sown, and this is what I have reaped.

Poet Marge Piercy, speaking of the High Holidays, observes: I will find there both ripeness and rot./ What I have done and undone/ what I must let go with the waning days and what I must take in./ With the last tomatoes, we harvest the fruit of our lives.

That’s what this week is about. About making good salad, good  blessings, and enough time to contemplate the fields of your soul and your life.

It’s a time to breathe a little deeper and move a little slower. Be more contemplative as your lungs fill with both late summer and incipient autumn. Feel your heart nostalgic for the seasons ended as you remember the bright daffodils in your future.

That’s one of the beauties of Torah. The cycle repeats, and we get to appreciate it before we start again.

Jewish days begin at sundown, and Jewish years in autumn. We go inward into the darker time, getting ready to listen. Now’s the time to prepare to do better, while you can still taste the fresh tomatoes. A time to get ready to change I did into I will. To say good-bye and thank you, before we say Hello again. I’ll do better.

This week take some time to be silent, truly silent, and sit outside. Then listen to what you are being told about what has been and what comes next.

That’s your homework for now, and for the next round.

Forgiveness, and then…: Yom Kippur 2013

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Foregiveness-YKThere are so many ways we’ve been hurt and inflicted hurt on others. Numerous categories of harm, from unconscious and unintentional to malicious and planned, even savored.

Yom Kippur, aka The Day of Atonement, is the most sacred of holy days. A time when we, as individuals and a community, ask for forgiveness. A time we atone for our own bad actions committed, contemplated, and witnessed, and good ones not chosen, and forgive others the same. It begins the year with as clear a conscience and heart as we will grant ourselves and those around us.

It’s a fasting day. A time to go inward. A day spent looking into the mirror of our inadequacies, with the hope that we will come away cleansed and renewed. Not a bad bargain for a little hunger.

There’s also literal chest pounding to accompany our moral inventory. The guilty and the rest of us, reciting the oh-so-many ways to short-change goodness. We witness, anonymously, the failings of others as we acknowledge our own.

Sometime this week (Saturday the 14th if you wanna be in the synchronistic groove) reflect on the list below. Look deeply into your memory and your heart. What if you actually honored this set of behaviors as a template for daily life?

An illustrative excerpt (imagine the syncopated thumping and chanting, and each action starting with “We have…”): We have acted wrongly; been untrue; gained unlawfully; defamed; harmed others; been unjust; hurt; told lies; given bad advice; neglected others; laughed in scorn; stirred enmity; treated others with disdain; thrown ourselves off course; and, my personal favorite, we have kept ourselves from change.

Yikes! for most of us. But what if you felt forgiven for your past. And if you set an intention to be more conscious? Start with a clean slate, and promise (perhaps not for the first time) to do better?

You can up the ante with face-to-face or written apologies. But start by looking yourself in the mirror and seeing where you’ve blown it. Pay attention to how you feel as you consider the how’s and why’s of your misdeeds, your persistent shortcomings, even your moments of casual indifference.

Most of us don’t really want to cause harm. We act too quickly, from self-interest, even by trying too hard to help. We think about our own feelings more than others’. Around our core issues we lapse into bad behavior out of unconsciousness, habit, resistance, and fear.

The atonement process helps get your attention. Helps you think about becoming a better person. About paying closer attention to how you act towards others and yourself. About trying to live with more goodness..

It sounds so simple. But we all backslide. Even if your most sincere “I’ll try harder this time” turns out to be a colossal failure, the saying and the trying both matter. Self-forgiveness is the beginning of greater awareness.

Perhaps journal when you go through the list. (Feel free to add your own sore spots.) Try to identify an intervention. Some consciousness-sparking cue that might trigger better attention the next time something snags you. Anything that’ll cue an interrupt and a moment of heightened consciousness. You don’t have to keep score of hits and misses, just remember to remember, and see what that changes in you.

Living Your Dream: TorahCycle Ha’azinu

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HaazinuUnless you’ve been under a rock, you know last week was the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. Synchronistically, this week’s reading is Moses on a mountaintop overlooking his own promised land, the precursor to Martin Luther King’s I have a dream speech. It’s presented as a song, with the same powerful rhetoric.

Poetry and song get into our bloodstream in ways that rules and regs cannot. They’re inspiring and emotional. They open our eyes as well as our ears. Help us to dream a new world for ourselves. To visualize, even feel, what we have not yet experienced. They create hope.

That kind of dreaming, which I call visioning, unlocks the process of change, both personal and societal.

It’s a process of setting goals. The more tangible ones, like I wanna earn $xx,000 or marry so-and-so. But more importantly of saying: This is who I am in the process of becoming. This is the world I want to create. I’m willing to ante up my time and energy to make it so.

Visioning is a necessary first step to creating change. You can’t ask for what you want until you know what that is. Turning your vision into reality also requires action harnessed to your desires. That’s kavannah, intention, coming from the deepest parts of your head, heart, and soul.

You can manifest vision with intention by surviving occasional thumps on the head, tests of your patience, determination, and willingness to persevere, even without short-term gains. Without a clear vision you won’t have the courage or stamina to last through the process.

If you haven’t yet seen The Butler, go and bring hankies. It’s about the courage of those who stood up and said: I say No. I’m putting my life on the line because I envision a different world.

Only you can know what causes enough discomfort to motivate you to act. But until you say, I’m ready for change now, you’ll feel and stay stuck.

It’s never too late. You might whine, or enable yourself, or grab for the chips and remote because denial is easier than action. But once you’re deeply ready for change, all the energy you’ve used to keep yourself held in place will come roaring to your aide. You’ll be amazed at how invigorated you feel when you start to turn your visions into reality.

There’s a great quote from Rabbi Abraham Heschel, who said: When I marched in Selma, I felt my legs were praying.

Vision plus action plus prayer is the fullest meaning of intention. It acknowledges that you’re asking for help from every realm, and channeling that energy into your own life. Sometimes step by weary step can feel like an endless march. But only with true intention can you create the lasting change that you’re yearning for. That’s what the whole arc of Torah, what this blog, is about. And soon we’ll start a new cycle, another chance to get it right, or at least better.

Exercise: Envision yourself on a mountaintop looking into your future. What do you see if nothing changes? How would you prefer your life to look? What are you willing to do now?

Choose Life: TorahCycle Nitzavim-Vayelach

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NitzavimThis week’s reading is chock full of prophecy. Also familiar threats, instructions, and foreboding about future trials and tribulations. But the key to it all, perhaps the key to everything the whole process of searching and self-betterment is about, is the declaration that you have a choice between life/goodness and death/evil. You might quibble with those pairings, but would you do so with the command that you are to choose life?

So much to unpack. And life offers so many chances to use your free will to do exactly the opposite. To run for the door and say, Thanks, I’m outta here. Done.

Terrifying challenges in individual lives and in history. Choosing death to escape the horrors of Auschwitz, or of systematic abuse. To end a terminal illness before the pain is too great. To assist a loved one who chooses that. Or simply to say, I’ve done what I wanted to do this time around. Next….

That’s literal death. There’s also metaphoric, emotional, and spiritual killings: the more subtle ways that we shut down, live safely, forget to stay open to the new and the now, avoid embracing whatever might threaten our tidy realities.

Sometimes we do set the bar higher, like when we make changes in partners, jobs, locations, even belief systems or daily practices. But often those choices simply reinforce what we’ve decided we want our lives to be like in context and form. So many assumptions made over time, or encouraged by family and institutions, about whom we’ll become, how we’ll live.

So much time devoted to manifesting personal goals, that we sometimes forget we’re also part of an ethos, a zeitgeist.

Often we identify as part of groups based on our age, region, religion, or sports team. We may live like that’s who we are. But it’s important to remember that this life we’ve been given, this gift, is about very much more than our affiliations, or comfort, or who dies with the most toys. It’s about making some difference while you’re here, to your own soul and the lives of those around you.

Choose life is literally that: Don’t kill yourself. It also means, don’t forsake your responsibility for being part of both your chosen tribes and also our collective humanity.

Live as both witness and actor. Don’t shut your eyes to difficult things in the world because they’re painful, or might inconvenience you. Engage with the world, taking responsibility for what you see. Make choices that’ll help clean up this planet, your neighborhood, and your soul. That can mean recycling, volunteering, or planting a garden. Teaching reading or donating money. Even prayer.

Choosing life means an active awareness of your free will in each moment. It means choosing kindness and compassion instead of pique or anger. Choosing generosity instead of self-interest. Choosing love, social justice, environmental responsibility, and love. It means choosing goodness: seeing, creating, and affirming your highest values in as many times and places as you can.

You get to choose. Each time you choose life, we all win.

Exercise: Answer this one question: What does “Choose life!” mean I should do differently?

Giving Gratitude: TorahCycle Ki Tavo

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KiTavoWhat a lovely bit of instruction we are given: Give thanks. Offer up the first fruits in gratitude and appreciation for the gifts of the universe. For the cycles of nature, for evolution both physical and spiritual, and for the sheer joy of being able to.

We should all do it more often.

Also, Moses says that only now, forty years after leaving Egypt, have the people attained “a heart to know, eyes to see and ears to hear.”

It takes a long time to develop healthy relationships with our senses. Newborns are one big mouth in a noisy, busy world. As we grow, our other organs become informative, fun, useful, grounding, energizing, distracting. Windows and doors.

Sometimes we castigate ourselves for our senses’ seemingly endless desires: feed me, touch me, show me. Bless my ears, eyes, nose with lovely sounds, and sights, and smells.

They are sources of great joy and great pain. We love, and make love; we hurt and grieve when great loves wither or die. We see great beauty; we witness great suffering. We smell roses; we smell death and decay. We hear symphonies; we hear cries of pain.

One of the teachings of this time is that we’re supposed to give gratitude for all of these. Not just for what looks, sounds, tastes, feels, or smells pleasing. But for the opportunity discern what’s good and righteous, and what is not. And for the chance to learn how everything affects us, whether we’re lusting after the wrong partner or more chocolate mousse, or trying to better our souls.

With luck or spiritual evolution we’re moved to take action against what feels wrong and discordant. To do tikkun olam, helping heal the world, and ourselves along the way. Giving thanks for the opportunity to become better people. Even if the menu is more bitter than we’d design on our own.

Part of this teaching is about being kinder to others as well as yourself. A reminder that every time you receive a gift you should to set some aside in gratitude. Not on some altar, but for the homeless guy on the corner, or the non-profit that helps manifest your values.

This is a time to open the cocoon of your life. As part of doing t’shuvah (reconnecting with your holiness), take a fresh look at how you live. Not just in your little world, the home, garden, and friends that bring you flowers, birdsong, and fresh tomatoes. But the more complicated world you share with the rest of us, with those who are hungry for the fruits of your compassion.

Give gratitude for your life in new ways. In ways that matter. To give back, give thanks. Plant seeds that will feed you and yours and also others and theirs. Offer up not only your extra zucchini but also your time, your caring, your willingness to see, hear, and help. Use all your senses to know what needs to be done. Let your heart open, and respond with action.

Exercise: Think of one thing you can do this week to give gratitude in a new way, especially one that’ll connect you with someone you do not yet know.

Remember, Forget, Remember: TorahCycle Ki Tzeitzei

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KiTzeitzeiWe’re instructed to obliterate the memory of those who have harmed us. And also never to forget what’s been done. A mental yoga pose at the high end and an anatomically impossible curse at the lower.

Nursing a memory of pain can keep you stuck in a place where it’s hard to get far past the hurting. Life can get calcified, organized around pain past and fear of pain future.

Virtually all of us have been hurt in ways that’ve left emotional scars. Often these impact our behavior in ways that disproportionately magnify their original impact. Like a plant growing towards the sun we lean unevenly to one side, trying to avoid the darkness and hurt, or, worse, repeating the cycle.

We’re left off balance, a stance which might be okay in good times, but leaves us vulnerable when life goes askew, especially when something gets tangled in the roots of our history.

We may look like we’re here. But too often we’re measuring our lives by the past, instead of being present, being in the now, in ways that might make us happier. Like alcoholics cradling a bottle: knowing it’s causing damage, but craving the familiar oblivion we hope will keep the demons at bay.

No wonder this reading comes early in our time of t’shuvah, what Rabbi Simon Jacobsen calls “A time of regret, forgiveness, and reconciliation. A time to return to pristine beginnings. To discover our true self, and the divine spark at the core of our soul.”

T’shuvah is coming home to your true self, from wherever you’ve been and whatever you’ve been hiding from. Hiding, btw, can take various forms: from depression to Type A success. From substance addiction to fierce piety.

T’shuvah is about acknowledging everything that’s happened on your path, and about opening the door to forgiveness as well. Eyeball to eyeball with capital T Truth, as best as you can, without judgment, anger, self-pity, or fear.

It can be hard both to forgive and to ask for forgiveness. We may be haunted by victimization or by having hurt others, each conjoined with guilt and/or shame. Hard enough to forgive self for hurting other, let alone forgiving those who have hurt us.

It’s tough juggling. Never forgetting what happened but obliterating the memory of the ones who hurt us. Re-opening wounds to clean them out. Trying to recreate trust in the universe. Believing it will offer us blessings as well as trauma.

This period is the gateway to the High Holidays, a time when we start a new year, and a month later reach the end of the Torah. We’ll reroll it, and begin the cycle again with Genesis. A new beginning. The next you, trying to live better and happier, without repeating the mistakes of the past.

None of us gets it right in any one try. Our lives are an ongoing process of cleansing and healing. We do the best we can, hoping for progress. During this time of return. And in every moment of now.

Exercise: Identify the patterns you’ve generated in response to a core hurt. Ask yourself and your guides how you can lighten and change its hold on you.

Who’s To Judge?: TorahCycle Shoftim

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shoftimThis week¹s reading discusses judges and the law, seen, like people, as open to interpretation and evolution. Both strict and loose constructionists, those old Jews: literal about some things, yet completely comfortable with the idea that every situation is unique. That we need to consider our actions and their consequences as we go along.

The reading also identifies men exempted from battle: if you’ve just built a home, planted a vineyard, or gotten married. And my favorite, if you’re “afraid and soft-hearted.” It¹s a lovely acknowledgement that some of us are, and some of us are not, suited for certain things.

Most of us spend a lot of time judging ourselves and others. There’s often a profound relationship between the things we judge flawed in others and the things that piss us off about ourselves. It’s called projection, and if you’re not raising your hand guilty-as-charged you’re either enlightened or in denial.

We spend time fretting, usually about why we are or aren’t everything from kinder or more generous to tougher and more assertive. The list of desired qualities changes, of course, as we evolve and our lives take different forms.  But most of us judge ourselves about our inadequate and inconsistent progress too often and too harshly.

Until something happens. Until we find some grace. Because all that judging actually had some purpose, other than annoying ourselves and those who love and listen to us.

At some point in your life you choose to be or not to be certain things. You say I am or I am not. A parent. A poet. A painter. A philanderer. A priest. The infinite list of beings and doings.

Maybe we just get lucky. Maybe we learn something. Or maybe we finally exhaust ourselves. Like a toddler up past nap time, we get so cranky that we finally conk out. Give in. Say I surrender. This is who I am and this is who I am not.

In self-acceptance, you can embrace your true self, your form in this lifetime. Not in the ego exalting ways of movie stardom or CEO capitalism. But in the loving and less self-judgmental knowing that is the basis of acceptance and self-love.

This acceptance includes becoming more of a soft-hearted person. A wonderful side benefit: as you become more compassionate towards yourself, you also become more compassionate towards others. It’s win-win for all of us. Less angst, less struggle, and maybe someday even less war.

If only we could shorten that nasty middle phase of harping on our failings. The best I can say is that all that judging, all that refinement of your inner laws, helps you learn and understand your values. That in Situation A it’s okay to act or be such and such. But not in Situation B. I accept that there are lines I will not cross. I know them; I forgive myself for when I have and will be kinder to myself in the future.

Not because I am soft-headed, but because as my heart softens I choose peace.

Exercise:  Which parts of yourself are you still judging and fighting?

Hit the Road, Jack: TorahCycle Re’eh

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Re'ehThis week’s story is about pilgrimages. Literal pilgrimages. The kind we’re told to take three times a year. To Jerusalem, a word that today I’ll use to mean a special center of the spiritual universe: a moment and place in space-time where you can hook up to energies of insight and peace. You can substitute any special place of your own, but think of a pilgrimage as the journey you’re instructed to take regularly to commune with the divine.

It’s an action that supersizes whatever’s your daily practice, whether that’s sitting in quiet meditation or walking in the woods. Three times a year to carve out a chunk of time to remember that we’re here to do some holy work, to heal this planet and ourselves, to learn compassion, to practice good and free will. Three conscious opportunities to exercise them, and to enhance the likelihood that all of us can live a life of abundance and joy, however you translate those concepts.

They’re times to remember where we’ve been and where we still want to go. Where and why our spiritual energy is focused. So why wouldn’t we aim there in a fast straight line? Hit the road running and not stop till we get to go. Build our temple; live on milk and honey.

Because we’re human. And we blow it regularly. We get distracted by paying our bills or broken water heaters, by dark chocolate and summer berries, by falling in or out of love. We forget and we need help to remember.

Every time I wrestle with something, whether it’s a deep spiritual lesson or some silly life blunder, I always come back to the question: How do I live with greater awareness and greater intention? How can I wake up, and live more consciously?

The problem’s chronic, probably eternal at least while we incarnate as humans.

No matter how much good advice we get, human or divine. No matter how clear the instructions on the roadmap, we take wrong turns. Pull into dark canyons. Fall over cliffs and have to start again, sometimes after healing a broken leg or heart.

Life’s journey isn’t simply from a here to a there. We make pilgrimages to remind ourselves how we want to feel whenever we get there for real. We hope the glimpses will help us stay awake between them. Sacred art, music, prayer, and nature reinforce those glimpses.

What matters is your intention. A sincere and humble visit to wherever you find that sense of grace. An opening. Your heart open to the heart of the divine. A deep meeting of like energies. No buffers. A willingness to listen. A willingness to be witnessed and to be open to what you need to receive.

Some days you may go unconscious, or get lost. But every step on your pilgrimages will bring you a little closer to the temple of your holy spark, a little closer to your inner Jerusalem.

This week: Think about where you feel peaceful, inspired, and holy. Go there. And resolve to return and return and return.

Put A Carrot on That Stick: TorahCycle Eikev

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EikevHow to live so your choices don’t lead to remorse? How to stay conscious enough to live by your values, keep your vows, and move towards your goal?

Too often we get blind-sided by immediate gratification. Fall for the distraction of cheap bait, no matter how lofty our aims. Our vision blurs, or we blink, because our destination seems far off. A blessing perhaps out of reach.

How can you get where you wanna go without compromising too often along the way?

It’s a fine line between goal orientation and incentives for progress. Not just a mythical reward, but something to see in the short run, while you walk your road. The carrot on your stick, just out of reach but always in sight.

I understand that the journey matters. That the process itself is powerful, transformative, transformational. Etc, etc, etc. Your Jewish Fairy Godmother’s Commandment 9 is Enjoy the ride as much as the win.

But as much fun as anticipation can be, it’s hard to keep striving for something you’ve never experienced. Most of us need a taste of success, pleasure, or both along the way. It makes the road a little easier and our step a little lighter and faster.

Because we don’t know what’s on the other side of all our striving. Even if reaching goal, whatever it is, would more satisfying than anything you’ve ever experienced, how could you know? You haven’t been there yet. We act on faith. On hope. On trust. And try to stay motivated along the way.

Most of us also choose interim rewards. As in, If I make it to point X, then I get Y. X can be anything from finishing a project or a degree, to losing weight or lasting a week or month without gluten or sugar. The carrot might be new duds, a concert ticket, or a vacation.

If it keeps you moving towards your goal, your carrot is dong its work. And treats feel so much better than beating oneself with that stick, to the familiar drumbeat of remorse that failure engenders.

The trick is the right carrot. Not too many brownies now when you really want weight loss later. Instant gratification is the bane of many a seeker. And we all blow it far too often, out of impatience, frustration, or in response to other unfilled longings.

So how can you use your imagination to harness your spiritual, emotional, and physical energies? To keep your goal in front of you in a way that motivates but doesn’t distract or derail you?

Moses describes the Promised Land as flowing with milk and honey, and abundant with “seven kinds” of growing things that represent divine blessings (wheat, barley, grapevines, figs, pomegranates, dates, and olives for oil).

Things to think about this week: What would make you feel your world overflowed with whatever’s your version of milk and honey? What’re your seven kinds, the elements that sustain you and make you appreciate life’s sweet and savory? How can you use them in a healthy way on your journey? To motivate and inspire you? To treat yourself? To help fuel your practice with awareness and intention?