Numbers - 1301-1541 - Sh'lach - Cycle 2

I have a friend. Today, I hiked up to this remote beach by Emigrant Lake and there he was.

“I’ve been exploring,” he said. He handed me some redwood from his pocket. “Big trees,” he smiled, “you can even drive through them. SUVs. Sixteen wheelers. If one fell we would die for a five hundred mile radius. We would hear the thud a thousand years in the future. They can’t stand forever. We’re all about to be flattened by giant sequoias.”

I laughed then said : “My boyfriend just broke up with me.”

“Why?”

“He said what he wanted. I said what I wanted. It was the same to me but different to him.”

“We forget the reasons.”

“I’m going to Jerusalem in August.” I said. We talked about that for a bit. Then, he told me he was with his girlfriend again. She had cut him off about a year before.

“I can’t take her seriously anymore,” he said.

It started to rain and we hugged goodbye. I watched him hike down the path and figured I’d see him in a few months or lifetimes and smiled. Then I stared at the mist in the distance.

There’s great beauty in this world. You can know and explore it but the thought of marching towards it stops us short. We start to pretend it isn’t beauty at all, to ourselves, to others. I don’t know why this happens, what causes one explorer to say there are giants in the land of Canaan, no milk and honey, that the paths don’t connect. Reasons ride piggyback on reasons and soon we believe them. We live by them. We get disillusioned and start moaning and groaning let’s go back to Egypt. That’s easier than handing over our hearts all pulsing and raw.

Maybe I should write about why we all turn paradise into fallen giants, sew amazing self‐myths to fit with our identity, our religion, our souls, our concepts or non‐concepts, our teachers, our compassion, our altruism; giants that suck our oxygen and would horrify us if we knew, would make us believe them even more adamantly. But while a self‐myth blocks the heart‐light we don’t always know when we own one. Finally what we know is the slamming of the gates to the Promised Land. Or hear them. And then we wake up. We go racing into Canaan (14:45) but for the wrong reasons. We can’t be taken seriously anymore, not by God, Moses or Aaron. We have suicided ourselves, found death through fear or confusion, our own brilliant creations.

You might ask why the explorer in all of us might do this, might turn. The question that I find the most interesting though is how to return.

It is possible. Look at Sh’lach. First (in line 14:32) God says that the corpses of the people have been falling (yiflu) and that only your children (b’naichem) will arrive in the Promised Land. Then, (in line 15:2) God says….Ki tavou el eretz moshvotachem asher ani natan lechem….you will come to the land that I am giving you…..That’s about as quick a return as I’ve ever seen.

First, what is the Promised Land? In Devarim (34:4) it is the land that God promises to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, that Moses can see but not enter. In 11:32 it is the place where we must sh’mor (guard) carefully all the rules that anochi (I) am giving to you today. And since God is our Lord and God is One (6:4) then the Promised Land becomes simply the place of consciousness where you love God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your might (6:5).

Who gets to enter? Not those of us who can’t love each other (you would think), who cling to the nephalim (the fallen angel giants), who find any excuse to shut their hearts, who can’t see that all is another step, that even our own corpses on the desert are pushing the march forward. You would think that none of us could enter simply because we can’t look at the most frightening details with equanimity and know they are the very knots that tie the finest tzitzit.

But the Promised Land includes the suffering in our minds, the reasons upon reasons and the words upon words. It includes the forty years of wandering and the idols we destroy to forgive ourselves for praying to them. It includes our showers of divine sparks, and our gift of the tzitzit; the cord to the heart of the divine. It includes the pleas of Moses and the large yud before the word yigadol (14:17) showing that God is great enough to raise us fast and immediate beyond our preconceptions. We are in God’s image, all of us (we realize again) and through form we love as we are loved; unconditionally. As our breath goes in and out and our vision becomes new and more new and creates manifestations of love…we can enter.

And then, having entered, it is one Shabbat of pain and joy, the tears beyond the myth, the journey beyond the journey, the one love, the one truth, and Moses is in the Promised Land and we are together, heart upon heart, here and now, for eternity. Man with woman. Mother with child. Father with son. Prophet with myth. One people.

So as we transform from soul to soul and body to body…as we embrace all levels of consciousness…may we be in the Promised Land. And as we accept each other….may we be in the Promised Land. And as we annoy each other…may we be in the Promised Land. May we bless and keep marching forward with compassion whatever the reasons to turn away. And as we march …may we have a sense of humor…and may we be in the Promised Land.

And may we take each other seriously but not too seriously. And may we smile under the tallis. And may we see the giant sequoias and know they aren’t falling: nor are we as long as we offer the divine sparks in them and in us, as long as we love them (and our fear of their beauty) and each other unconditionally with laughter, pain, acceptance, open arms and joy.