Genesis Cycle Six Vayishlach

Vayishlach

The Perfect Point of Meeting

Vayishlach is about finding the perfect point-of-meeting to connect, receive and transmit.  There are infinite possible cross sections of space and time and a whole texture of human inventions,  emotions, reactions, goals, needs and capabilities, some which we can’t possibly know today in 2013. The specifics of connection ( the all important who, where, when and why) will determine the depth and reach of our dialogue or non-dialogue, our touch, our penetration, our communication.

Of course in life we are moving through all kinds of human inter-actions all the time. There’s our children, our mate, the mailman, the cashier, the person driving the car in the next lane. Each necessitate various levels of input, whether skin deep or painfully guttural. Some people we bounce against, some we dance with, some we enter, some enter us. 

One thing is clear: We don’t go for the lowest common denominator of transmission. We don’t settle for the easiest and most surface vision. We don’t do this in bed (hopefully). Therefore we don’t do this (settle) in heart mind or soul.

No, clearly in Vayishlach we see that it is our responsibility to come-to-meet with whoever is in our path in the most whole way possible for that specific meeting. If we are lecturing many people at once we don’t speak to the least receptive and expect others to slow down. We speak to a merge of the whole so that the whole will approach. We take the message to the very edge of reception.

Why? Because it’s at this point, this edge of pain and glory, of intellectual spiritual and physical collapse, of the constriction and the explosive flow of  information, that we can breathe the most power and kindness into the finest messages and transmit them. It’s at this strength and flow that the message is most fully received.

The Baal Shem Tov (for example) spoke with whole focus to the common man. He didn’t move beyond their reach. But he moved to challenge their reach, an important show of respect and love. We can simply look at some of the metaphors he used to see that he didn’t water down his message. If anything he propelled it fast and strong.

Transmission and reception are the dichotomy that create the sexual act. We want to go about it with focus, deliberation, discernment, strength, distance, patience, speed and attention to detail. And for God and man and ourselves, we want to take it to the absolute, even if it’s really frightening, even if afterwards we end up sacrificing a slight piece of our human comfort…if we end up walking with a limp…or if we end up alone once more.  For one thing we know, after such meetings there isn’t an absolute alone, there is only holy Oneness.

Finally. Maimonides, Saadya Gaon and Yehuda Halevi (according to Jonathon Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of Great Britain) all stated that if scripture and science contradict you don’t read the scripture in the p’shat.  In this day and age, when science is so infused into our culture, it is a logical deduction that these same luminaries would agree that very little of the Torah (in fact) should be read in the p’shat at all.

Therefore let me say that the most crucial, dangerous, evocative, powerful, frightening, loving, holy, humbling, victorious, and revealing meeting possible (shown in Vayishlach) is man with his own faith, his soul, his engine, his God. This is the meeting that can open the funnels of transmission and reception the widest, that can catapult us and even kill us if we aren’t careful. If there’s one meting therefore that we want to be present for, truly present, present beyond doubt or hesitation, it’s the one that takes place within the unrelenting honesty and grip of self. This means climbing beyond all expectations, constructs, demands, quotations, denominations, religions, conventions and even convictions. It means climbing beyond faith to knowledge and love even if we walk away a completely new man/woman/human, no questions asked.