Tag Archives: death

Getting Clean: TorahCycle Tzav

Posted on by
Reply

VayechiIn the psychological thriller Descent, author Tim Johnston sets up several interlocking pairs of troubled relationships, mostly father /son, but there’s just enough pervasive misanthropy and sense of imminent threat, that you’re just never quite sure when everything’s gonna erupt. And then, hope against hope, with not a shed of evidence to even hint you should imagine, you find yourself rooting for one of the meanest ones to become a hero, to be moved by sense of humanity you’ve had no reason to believe is there.

That’s the holy spark. The essence of being that on a soul level each of us recognizes in the other. No matter how unlikely it may seem on any given day.

That’s what this getting holy is all about. Seeing and being those people.

All the rest, in the words of the great sages, all the rest is commentary.

What Comes Next: TorahCycle V’etchanan

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Because I Said So!: TorahCycle Chukat

Posted on by
1

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

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Choose Life: TorahCycle Nitzavim-Vayelach

Posted on by

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?