From Breishit to Devarim: From our beginnings to the Promised Land
I remember back in September when the year was just starting out. I was on a Jewish chant retreat with Rabbi Shefa Gold. It was Breishit, the first parsha of the Book of Genesis. The question was, what were we committing to for the year? What were we each making a choice to do differently? I committed out loud to a small group of people that I would begin leading my own services. Voila! I’m doing it! And much much more than I ever imagined. Yay!
Looking back, none of us had any idea that this year was going to be SO much different from anything imaginable. It’s become cliche to say that. The pandemic has caused many of us to change the direction of our lives…to see things differently…to open our eyes to things we didn’t see before. It certainly did for me.
Now we come to the part of the Torah where the Israelites finally get to enter the Promised Land, after forty years of wandering in the desert. Moses retells the whole story, detail by detail, place by place, again, as if telling the story of a trauma.
We too, are in the middle of a trauma, and we too, need to keep telling our stories. I find that I need to tell my personal story of Covid 19 less and less, which is a good sign, but the trauma has not passed and is not passing yet.
Black Lives Matter, murders by police, abductions by the military in our own country—and the weather is tied in, of course. It’s been unseasonably hot and humid in the northeast as in many parts (remember when they stopped saying “unseasonably” on the radio? I guess they realized there was no point anymore). It’s impossible to stay fit and also stay hydrated when I go out in this weather, and migraines often accompany this weather for me.
Last night there were huge booms of lightning hit the ground right outside my window—more “severe weather”—shaking the city ground and my building. And with those booms, my migraine raged. It felt like a biblical level of God’s rage, even though I don’t believe in an anthropomorphic God.
The question I was left with from the week’s Torah reading was, are we like the Israelites, finally entering the Promised Land, or are we like Moses, who never gets to?
When I think of all the work we humans still have to do before we get the “reward” of the “Promised Land,” it makes me think of the flow of the year, from our beginnings to the “end” of the story.
Are we living in the flow? How do we make sure we are? We flow in and out constantly, losing touch with what’s most important, and then remembering again, or being rudely awakened to it if we don’t remind ourselves. We are definitely in a rude awakening right now.
Our work is to keep trying. Just keep trying. Do our spiritual work of reconnecting when we lose the connection--with each other, the earth, and all living creatures. Constantly. Every day. In some way. We keep practicing.
If we can learn to live in the flow more often than not, maybe we’ll make it to the Promised Land.
Let’s keep trying.
