Exodus Cycle Six Beshelach

Beshelach

As We Move Along

Sometimes we are in the middle of something, in the middle of life, of a conversation, in the middle of love or great pain or a long drive on I-5.

Then we need to stop.

We need to rest or explain or pause the intensity for just a day or an hour.  If we are driving we need to get off the fast track. We must see the view, walk the dog, grab a bite to eat, make note of the structure of the moment-to-moment, figure the best way to get to where we are going, sing our song of joy that we downloaded especially for the trip.  And we ask ourselves: How  can we charge ahead while showing the most love possible for our fellow human beings? For our God? 

Yes, if we are being catapulted out of darkness  by the engine of our vehicle, our minds, our hearts, our aching need for more, our ache for intimacy, for release, for freedom, for sex, for success, for meaning , for connection, for satisfaction, for gratification, for food, for health, for that clutch and clinch within our beings, even for God, we need to stop at a certain point in the momentum. We need to stop to really embrace our voyage, understand it, make sense of it, celebrate it, recognize it, honor it, see the miracle of it. We need to stop to comprehend the structure of it, the boundaries, the composition of the boundaries. 

Then we can move on.

Until once again we must stop. 

So it is with Beshelach.

We are already in the process of leaving Egypt. God gives us the rules of the first born and then it’s as if that tangent is finished and syntactically we are now back to where we left-off.

We read: When Pharaoh pushed out the people….V’yahi beshelach Pharaoh et ha’am. 

It’s so obvious that it’s the Israelites that the Israelites aren’t even mentioned. We are returning to the story after the tangent. 

Said again, we are in mid-story, full swing and we receive an important commandment. We  pay attention to the details. Close attention.  And then it’s as if the narrator is saying…so where were we? Ah yes…

And so it goes. Life would be much easier if these mitzvoth came up when life was calm but it just doesn’t happen that way. The time to focus-in on the boundaries of behavior is during our heightened yearning and our most intense transformations. 

As for myself, recently I was experiencing a growth of soul. I wrote to a beloved teacher and related to him the pain and isolation involved in this growth. I was a bit pointed as to his influence on my impossible and (seemingly) untimely inner struggle.

He wrote me back: Chava how lovely to hear from you after all this time.

I stared at the beautiful  message for quite a while. I stopped.

In manifesting it himself, my teacher was showing me the most important commandment of all, loving kindness.

What an important lesson.

We can even say that our myth of freedom is simply infused into the mitzvoth, each one a radiant road sign shining impossible light on the bends in our path,  each a revelation, each a rest-stop, a breath, a support, a holy  behavior, a  clean and clear aha moment (metaphorically or literally) gifted by God to connect us to Him and to each other. Even the boundaries of the mitzvoth are delicately and brilliantly sculpted, hammered and molded with love.

The best thing we can do (therefore) as we continually catapult ourselves out of darkness is to yearn, yes, and to emulate the mitzvoth as a whole for each other. 

As we read in Shabbat 31a and Nedarim 9:4 ahavat yisrael (the love of all) is the foundation of Torah.