Deuteronomy - Cycle One - 3101-3130 - VaYelekh

In VaYelekh we witness the birth of Torah from the white space, the growth and evolution of Torah, the passing of Torah, the love and fear of Torah. The Torah, we see, is alive. The scroll is like one wing folded around the letters in an act of protection, allowing them to rise in great flashes to the divine.

And then, we witness the witnessing of Torah. We read… take this Torah scroll and place it to the side of the arc of God your Lord’s covenant, leaving it there as a witness. In short, at this moment, Torah goes forward as us. We go forward as Torah. But let’s take this ride slowly, feel each detail.

At first, we are in pre‐Torah mode. Torah is not written even though we are studying it. I think the meaning of this is obvious: Torah doesn’t need to be written to be studied. We don’t need our lives on parchment to live them or to bring our essence into our hearts. We don’t need to study parchment to know ourselves as one, to have compassion for Abraham and Jacob, to embrace our fears and weaknesses. Torah is eternal in our minds, on our tongue, on each divine spark within our bodies.

To continue, we are told to be strong and brave. We are assured that God your Lord is the one who is going with you and he will not fail you or forsake you. So, with strength and bravery we can feel the breath and being of God before letters are created, the fine threads of light that make up the kingdom of divine consciousness. We can feel love between our toes as we step forward, love the vision of each other in the hand of the unknowable, the un‐nameable, the force without definition. We can hear the tap on the gates of our hearts, utter sounds that we may have forgotten, deep or wild, small or rough, all of them chiming from our lips. We can be raw, feet, hands, lips, ears, heart, nose and skin. We can drink the light from the mountains, leave the shell of the known behind and be hushed, in awe, our cells waiting to breathe, the leaves and sky as still as stone. And this is how we receive Torah. When God gave Torah, no bird sang and no fowl flew…the whole world stood hushed into breathless silence and the voice went forth and proclaimed I am the Lord your God. (Exodus Rabbah)

Then, we read… Moses wrote down the Torah. Well, I can’t help but think; that was fast. This could mean that he wrote it all now, like it was a grocery list or a phone number. But the literal meaning is not all there is. Time here is not the question. It could have taken a year or forty. Now let’s take this farther. It is my guess that the short precise sentence (above) reflects the beauty of the basic structure of Torah as well as the circularity. It feels like a center seed or core, two nouns on the outside, the verb within. It feels like a sphere reaching out in multi‐dimensional waves. The writing of Torah therefore takes one moment or thousands of years. It is etched into our minds in a split second, studied and swallowed bit by bit over the millennium. It shoots forward into the future in ways we can’t imagine. The Torah is written at each reading, at each thought of each human being. And in the writing, we all perform alchemy. We create the tangible from the intangible, from that one small voice (Kings), from God’s spirit moving on the water’s surface (Bereshit), from the spiral of light (the Zohar). The letters come from all of this, the mass of light, the waters of heaven, the inhale of God. They come from our hearts, shifting into the form of love. We all open our arms and eyes and let these letters flow into us. They are random flying happy and painful letters and soon they begin to merge. They merge like man and woman or like the living with the dead; like heaven to earth or like the finest light with the worldly. They merge like the Promised Land with our eyes wide open. They merge to express the idea of merging. If this is what they do and know, this is all they can express. If this is their action, this is their meaning. So Moses found the letters and (with God’s will) placed them on parchment. And today, the letters help us connect as a community, as nations, as friends, as lovers, as parents with children, as enemies, as teachers, as students, as husband and wife, heart to mind, past to present, sefirot to sefirot, eye to eye, cell to cell. The action is reciprocal. In allowing the letters into our hearts, we are receiving and bestowing the breath of life into every living thing. As the son of Bag Bag says…turn it and turn it for everything is in it and through it you will perceive clearly; grow old and gray and from it do not depart, for there is no better pursuit for you than it.

Once the Torah goes from the place beyond letters, to the letters, to the parchment, it then goes to the Levis and to the elders of Israel. Then it goes to the people. We watch this progression with awe. We go with Torah. We listen to Moses speaking of his doubt before the Israelites, his fear. We accept that often, we too lack trust. We fear that our work will not be honored, that God will not be loved, that our struggles will be futile. We love Moses for his fear, for his humanity. We do not blame him or agree with or deny his claims. We witness with compassion.

But there’s more. As a witness, the Torah becomes all people living and dead, the angels, the prophets, the kings and slaves. It becomes the one who watches us, who remembers the arc of the covenant, the reality of the divine in our day to day lives. The Torah reminds us of the truth that we are made in God’s image and of the beauty, mistakes and yearning that result from our faith, of the spiral of letters and light that wrap God’s love around us, of our hearts that interconnect like the letters themselves. As we witness Torah and Torah witnesses us, we create a reflection like mirrors so we not only find distance and watch the light with equanimity, we can be that light for an eternity. One thing we know. There are millions of flashes of the divine that play between these mirrors. We can choose our joy and our tears.

So, may we all feel our birth from divine consciousness every moment of every day. May we know and speak letters of love, embrace our weaknesses and help others do the same. May we watch Torah, be Torah and watch ourselves being Torah. May we pass through darkness to choose joy. May we pass Torah. May we be the one word of Torah and at the same time, one letter in that word. And as Yehuda,
the son of Tema says…(May we) be strong as a leopard, light as an eagle, swift as a gazelle and mighty as a lion to do the will of your Father in Heaven.