Genesis Cycle Five Miketz

Miketz

Living on the Edge

I was at the cemetery yesterday. My late husband is buried there. This is what happened: Six (not seven) deer came charging up the hill. Full of life.  Healthy and young but past the doe stage. The bucks were on the edge of maturity.

Adam, my son, jumped back.  These deer were running seemingly straight for us.  They seemed innocent enough. It was just the rush that was the shock, the sudden animal approach in the silence, the hoofs hitting the earth.  As soon as they saw us they slowed down and turned towards the center of the Jewish section while my husband’s grave is really on the edge. They slowed to a stop, comfortably stepped on the graves, looked for food, stared out at the trees, stared at us. 

I had just been reporting to my husband a series of events and making a few requests from his side of the veil. He was there of course, observing with us the whole event, considering my requests, his energy merged with mine.

 Immediately before coming to the grave I’d been at the schul studying from the sefer Torah. A friend of mine, a rabbi, had approached with all kinds of teachings on the number seven. In Miketz, the Pharoah has dreams of seven healthy cows, seven unhealthy cows, seven ears of grain that are strong, seven that are weak.  In both dreams the weak eats the strong. 

Joseph’s interpretation aligns the healthy cows with the healthy ears of grain and the weak cows with the weak. In other words, he analyzes through use of the cross section of the whole event of both dreams, not one dream at a time. This is important. 

The rabbi and I talked about the dynamic wave of events in Miketz. After all, there’s hardly any white space. We are really in a rush of animal-soul quotidian events.  In Miketz, Joseph interprets the Pharoah’s dreams and because the Pharoah is sure that he is correct (?) Joseph becomes his second-in-command and brilliantly handles the coming famine and the approach of his brothers.

Here, we touch the edge of reality, the edge of our very physicality, the many cross sections concealed in Miketz.  The word Miketz very much resembles the word Yaketz…to wake up. The edge of consciousness therefore seems to be the place where we wake up from our coma of material-obsession. It’s that edge where the supernal reality meets the every day, that mind-state that is, in itself, a cross-section of worlds.

Then, in my personal world, the six deer arrived. 

Six is a number that represents the mundane, earthly things.  I also have to say that I’ve had six conceptions though only four children. The six could represent my living children and myself and my husband... when we were a healthy whole family, all of us still alive.

 The fact that the deer were running to us and that it was such a breathtaking moment…awesome…a bit frightening as my son can attest…made it like a dream… caused me to grasp onto the synchronicity. It was as if  I had closed the Torah scroll, gone home, picked up my son, driven the half hour to the grave site, but all of those actions, as important as they were, had merely been earthly positions (like yoga positions) between and within the overpowering Sacred. The real lasting moment was Torah before, during and after. It was as if I hadn’t done anything or gone anywhere.  I was still in Torah and Torah was still in me. 

I couldn’t help but ask myself: Could this be one more dream I personally need to fold into all of the dreams recorded, the trillions? If I see the dreams of Torah as a representation of those of humanity then what if I add my reality…so dream-like…to it? What would be the cross section at the most heightened place? What is God saying?

How many of us have astounding moments in our day to day lives that we ignore, let go of, place aside?  How many of us obsess so much with the linear material path of our lives that to protect it we downgrade the Torah cross- section, stay away from it, fear it, run from it,  belittle it?  It’s so easy to focus on coincidence rather than the God-moment.

 Does the interpretation of the cross section create the result? Or do we merely follow and try to understand? In Torah, Joseph’s interpretation is taken as fact when the Pharoah could have easily had him hung. Joseph ended up being right because he could fold his soul into the universe, stand on the edge, feel both worlds in his gut.

One can say that dream-interpretation is the same as cutting a cross-section. This is why the rabbis (Berakhot 55b) say that a dream that is not interpreted is like a letter that is not read.  The letters are the closest we can get to creation and radiance.  Taking everything at face value, not exploring it for shape and for various meanings, not looking for its most heightened meaning…this creates distance. Like Joseph, we can turn our mourning into dancing when we find the sacred cross-section of our lives as they merge with Torah.

All of the wizards and sooth-sayers of the Egyptian kingdom couldn’t do it. That’s because it isn’t magic. Feeling the edge of the supernal world is an everyday event.  Seeing and acting on it is our responsibility. Cows, deer, sheaths, abundance, famine, gold, family…they move through our dreams and visions, our every step. We can grasp the moment and move with it to be closer to God. We can be blind to it.  Or we can step around it.

May we all choose the holy vision. May our loved ones, wherever they are in terms of the veil, be seen. As Rumi says: As you live deeper in the heart, the mirror gets cleaner and cleaner.