Genesis Cycle 6 Vayetze

 Vayetze

I teach writing at a community college in southern Oregon, a place where you will find everything from meth addicts to future cops and nurses. This evening a woman (divorced after twenty years) said to me in full conviction that she didn’t need to learn basic writing because she lives in a small town. There, it seems, her friends can correct her essays. Her attitude was this: Who needs to learn punctuation when others can do it for you? 

Her feeling reflects the archaic dependency of uneducated women. It also reflects a reliance on community. No doubt community is important. We don’t (all of us) grow our own fruit and vegetables for example. We rely on the merchants. We don’t know all dental and medical techniques. We rely on specialists. We aren’t hermits. We rely on community for social inter action.  The question though is where does community stop and self-reliance step in? What is the place of balance?

Jacob is infused with balance in his dream. As a reminder he goes to God in God’s place. There’s a ladder with angels going up and down. Jacob wakes up and knows that the dream is real. This happens. I mean, it happens to many of us. This sacred dream is not a reserved experience for characters of Torah. We do go to God and God does come to us.

What we learn though in Vayetze is that the value of the dream is gauged by how we can then behaviorally apply it in reality…i.e. the larger community. This is difficult to do. I think it’s difficult though not because the holy-place of balance is so much….well…easier…when alone in the woods or on a mountain. No, the difficulty is there because once we try to live the God-reality in the real-world what happens is this: We can easily make the mistake of twisting the creation process in our minds. We can easily think that our God is simply a result of our needs, our vision, our money, our successes or failures, our great sermons, our weak words, our work, our wives, our babies,  that our God is about us alone, that our God is a reflection of us. We create a God in our minds rather than allowing God to continually create us. 

The years pass and life happens and that God-dream we had can easily end up being plugged-up as just a thought or a tiny memory, or maybe an idol or two.

This is called losing balance.  We lose track of time, of life, of ourselves as vessels of a greater power. The over-emphasis on community starts to eat us alive as fast as an over-emphasis on self. The self righteousness around either or both becomes intellectualized or backed up with sources, prayers read out of context, moments captured from the whole. A dependency on either begins to kill us spiritually. There’s inner fighting, competition, a ping pong effect in our mind as we swing back and forth from self to community yearning and yearning more. All along we measure ourselves on a scale of the mundane, not on the scale of the heavens. 

Maybe we all need to experience this misconception to some extent to then see clearly. One thing is true though: Once we give up God on earth  it takes genius to catapult ourselves back into true God-action, one that brings us back to the God-place with balance and self-respect.

How do we maintain consciousness while on earth? I don’t know. Just like you I work at it every day. I attempt to create a balance of God place and earth-space. Then, I try to act on it. If we can all imprint this holy process on our memory, make this our sacrifice and covenant, then maybe the world will be a more peaceful place.

In Genesis Rabbah 68:9 Rav Huna explains that the world is contained in God and not God in the world. Rabbi Isaac says that God is the dwelling place of this world but God’s world is not God’s dwelling place. Rabbi Abba ben Judan teaches that it’s as if God is riding a horse. The horse is not riding God.

It takes a huge amount of equanimity to see this and act accordingly. 

Meanwhile though as we struggle and learn and grow we need to trust.  There is an angel that comes to us to show us the way. If we let our light shine even here on earth the angel will come and we will be free to return to the place of God. That’s when we will know the importance of our individual unique divine message and learn how to craft it for the greater community, a community of all time and levels, of all creeds and wars, of all types of punctuation and all notes on the scale, of all stripes and spots and of all colors, names and wombs.