Tag Archives: shame

Brick By Brick: TorahCycle Metzora

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SheminiThe protagonist of Stephen King’s novel Dr. Sleep has a deep, guilty, secret. He builds his life around it, hiding it in the foundation of his identity, always believing that no matter how much good he does, he’s still the guy who did That! When he finally spills in an AA meeting, something miraculous happens. He realizes everyone around him has heard and possibly done worse.

We don’t need to build our lives on a dark foundation. Better to build them with our best actions, and clean out old dry rot as we grow.

This week’s reading’s about ritual purification of a house with patches of red and green on its walls. The high priest assesses if it’s possible to cleanse or if it should be demolished. A house can mean a dwelling but it’s also a symbol for self.

For decades I thought in eastern metaphors. I would have said I was a Buddhist or Bu-Jew. A fundamental goal of many eastern religions is transcendence of the self. Goodbye to the idea of I/me. I’ve come to believe that there’s great benefit in elevation through self. Not in a chest-thumping ego way, but in a we’re-here-to-do-good way. So when I hear house, I think of self as our home base in each incarnation.

We’re here wearing earthly clothes exactly because we’re supposed to be working on earthly things. Cleaning up the place, energetically as well as ecologically, while we move our personal karma along. Helping out day by day, in both random and conscious acts of goodness.

You don’t need a scorecard to measure the good you do. It shouldn’t matter if you’re an activist or just in the right place and time to help. Whether you do a big deed or are a willing ear or shoulder to cry on, or a pair of helping hands for someone in need. However you make our collective self happier, sweeter, and more harmonious elevates your self and the rest of us. Your actions reflect the higher and better good, and raise the bar for all of us.

You and I and everyone we know have a unique and necessary constellation of talents and skills. Yes, plus all our foibles and habits and annoyances. But in the toolkit of us, we’ve got everything we need to cleanse this house of ours.

When you arc too far into greed, gluttony, or any form of darkness or sin, your ego attracts mold and dry rot. It doesn’t take a priest to see the changes in your personality, vocabulary, and day-to-day choices. The rest of us observe and feel it all too easily.

We build the houses of our lives brick by brick. By acts of kindness or acts of selfishness. By our caring or our indifference. Now’s a great time, right before Passover, to clean out the dirt before it does damage. Spring cleaning your character as well as your cupboards.

Start by looking for your old splotches. Then get out the bleach and begin paying better attention in each moment. If we can stay more conscious, live with greater awareness and intention, we might be able to prevent what we’d otherwise hide and then need to heal.

Mercy, Mercy: TorahCycle Ki Tisa

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Vayeira 2013Have you ever done something so bad you thought you’d never be forgiven? Not a small thing, but something you thought, maybe even swore, you’d never do?

That’s what the Israelites do this week, while waiting for Moses to descend Sinai. They get impatient, worry he might not come back. They violate the No other gods commandment, and smelt their gold into a golden calf. It’s not as small as Don’t think about X and then doing so obsessively. But it’s a helluva lot more than We were restless. Hard to stay calm when your mind keeps chewing over  the insufficient calming of Don’t worry. Be patient..

I just finished two books about guilt and shame. About actions taken which dominate the lives of the people who did them. Both Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowlands are good reads, though it’s tough living inside the heads and hearts of people in chronic emotional pain. Each needs to find a road to redemption. A way to start over is lots harder and more important than dialing up a pizza or a Netflixx movie.

It means finding and accepting forgiveness. In this story it’s gonna take a coupla generations and forty years of schlepping. A road, a long one, to the promised land. Moses, pleading for them, gets HaShem to say yes to coming along as witness, guide, protector.

Interestingly this same reading includes the thirteen attributes of mercy  (rachamim in Hebrew, a lovely sounding word), including compassion, mercy, graciousness, truth, forgiveness, and pardon.

Imagine if those qualities organized your life, your head, and your heart. Imagine a world slow to anger. Imagine yourself slow to anger.

When Moses returns, his face is so touched with holy light that the people, albeit guilty and ashamed, cannot look directly at him. His face also gets red with wrath as he breaks the tablets.

There was a great NPR riff the other day (though it may have been on Bluff the Listener) about an app that lets you see what someone else sees when they’re watching you. How you look when flushed with joy, red with anger, or blushing in shame. A chance to witness yourself as others see you.

My family didn’t do anger with sound. Instead people retreated to their corner with a book. No eye contact. The app would not have shown their inner turmoil, that churning of anxiety, guilt, and fear of future consequences, even if apologies were said and officially accepted.

External forgiveness is great. But it doesn’t really take hold until you forgive yourself. Imagine extending the thirteen qualities of mercy towards yourself. Imagine being able to bathe in them, wash clean your bad choices and your mistakes. Whatever you said or did not undone but cleared of its power to influence your next forty years. Imagine mercy that releases their hold on your heart.

It takes time for a new equilibrium to settle in. We’ve all learned from our personal shlepping that the road is rarely smooth and level. There are always more tests, reality checks large and small, to test our resolve. But if we let mercy in, and our commitment to change is strong, we can move from this now to a better next.

Not Quite Yet: TorahCycle Mikeitz

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Mikeitz 2013Forgiveness doesn’t come fast or easy Sometimes it doesn’t come at all. That’s true whether the offender is another or ourselves. Careless, or even intentional, words and deeds hurt and wound us. We feel them deeply. Sometimes even allow them to define us. We identify as the aggrieved or victimized on the one hand, and the ashamed or guilty on the other.

Getting from hurt to forgiveness takes many steps. The deeper and more important the hurt, the more we need to process the healing. Sometimes it doesn’t happen. Sometimes we don’t think it should even be a goal.

Bad drivers in your path may annoy or rankle; they earn a quick  hand flip. Here and gone.

Family dysfunction can last decades, even lifetimes. Emotional scarring, physical and sexual abuse becomes woven into us. We may feel forgiveness is impossible or unwarranted.

Folks tend towards either: Someone hurt me!, or I must have deserved it. And the converse: I screwed up! Now what? Each has its own burdens.

A great photo from 1900s New York: an old Jewish immigrant woman, bent over double, with an enormous shipping crate on her back. That’s what carrying around anger or shame can feel like. A very large and weighty burden. One you cannot put down until you reach  sanctuary. Even if that’s a fifth-floor walk up with noisy neighbors and no running water.

Releasing even some of your anger and pain will make you lighter, clearer, healthier, and happier.

This week finds Joseph in high office in Egypt, after interpreting Pharoah’s dreams of impending famine. Who walks in hungry and needy but the very crew of brothers who sold him into slavery. They don’t recognize him; but he knows them.

The Jewish High Holidays have a very active process around forgiveness. Often we erase the simpler, more recent, happenstances of life, rather than old deep ones. The option is there, but you’ve gotta be ready. Even wanting to be ready can be a journey of a thousand steps. And it’s unlikely to be a linear or level path.

We spend lots of energy carrying around our inner crates of hurt and shame. We’re angry at others and ourselves. IThose feelings have become a filter and a reflex for how we live and how we interact with others. Not just those who caused the hurt, but almost everyone.

Joseph’s not ready to forgive his brothers. Like him we play tricks, set up tests. Challenge ourselves, others, and the universe. We’re looking for some key to unlock our stuck feelings. Permission to set the crate down.

A great new novel, Visitation Street, highlights the surviving friend of a missing and presumed drowned teen-ager. Everything that happens is a test: If the next song on the radio is X, June will come back. If Jonathan kisses me, June will come back. If I can …., June will come back.

Our hurts are like that. Bubbling beneath the daily surface of our lives, waiting for us to release them. Waiting for us to shed our burdens of anger, shame, hurt, regret, and sadness. We need to forgive ourselves so we can get closer to forgiving others.

What would it be good for you to let go of?