Leviticus Cycle 7 Bechukotai

 Bechukotai

To Balance

A while ago when I was going through a very hard time, a friend of mine gave me some advice.

She said this:

Write down the very worst things that can happen to you.

 I did as she asked.

You can imagine my list. It looked a bit like this week’s parasha.  Starvation. Devastation. Disaster. No enemies in my sweet state of Oregon but certainly terrorism while traveling abroad and maybe a few vandals and car problems on the blanched pavement of I-5 on my way to Portland and down to LA.    I wrote about the crises facing so many American young adults these days….no income, questionable sanity whether they are ADD, bi-polar, depressed,  demanding, spoiled and/or suicidal. I wrote about my own children and their fears that sometimes eat them up.

  

None of it seemed like it was going to happen. But I knew it could.

We read on the internet about car crashes, people running in vein from floods and mudslides,  prejudice and  manipulation. We hear about sudden outbreaks of strange diseases, cancer (not so strange), and the slavery-quotient in successful market economies.  We read about the dichotomy   between rich and poor.  We know that less than one per cent of the people in this world hold the  goods and the rest of us are chained to them and their resounding decisions.   We know the status quo, this earth (our home) as a planet filled with rancid leftovers of  environmental-apathy and land mines and machine guns and archaic power plants and  hatred from by-gone wars. We know the scoop. 

And we live it, exiled from what we know it can be and what we simultaneously work towards.  It isn’t even about the separate peoples, cultures,  nations, or aliens that pose as our enemy. We are our own enemy and we exile ourselves.  It’s an exile that we all…the many billion of us…embrace. Why? Because the real beauty of existence so often seems so close to it. And we know we can get there…to a place of walking in God’s ways. But it’s not a sometimes thing and so this is what we are left with: A highly unstable and explosive reality in which we are always almost…yes almost…simultaneously at the  place of absolute destruction and the place of absolute consciousness. 

And as we know from this week’s parashah…it’s only when things get that bad, when we are so horribly exiled from our land or our soul…this is when things can turn. For example, when we are exiled from our land it is forced into shemittah. Then the earth can live again, renew. The same goes for our whole perspective. It takes a complete shock, a stripping, a  cry to God unlike any cry we have ever uttered to re-vision our connection with the Eternal One.

 The eternal horrific reality though is not the cry. It’s that pre-cry moment, that pre-epiphany moment, that pre-accidant moment when your fingers are wrapped on the steering wheel. 

 So the worst is not the worst. The worst is the almost-worst. The worst is the waiting...the death-wait, the hate-wait, the illness and divorce-wait, the grief-wait, the news-wait, the skidding-on-ice wait....for things to hit bottom.

This is why (for example) the shedding of blood (so often in Tanach) is not always killing but almost-killing.  Given the above theory, almost-killing is a far greater expression of human suffering and confusion. Ezekiel (for example) describes the shedding of blood as almost-killing:

In you are men who carry tales. In you are men who shed blood. In you they eat on the mountains. In you they commit lewdness. (22-9)

Ezekiel is not saying that these men are our neighbors or the other guys or even our friends. These beings are in us. And these beings shed blood but they are still here and suffering and eating (sacrifices) on the mountains and we are still here. These men (within us) bring us just to that place of trepidation and horror as we wait and die and wait and die.

Now…if you’re thinking wow, it can’t get any worse…well you’re wrong. It can. That’s the point.  That's the reality we face day in and day out as many of us stumble through lives with all kinds of hurdles and shocks, all of which crash into us despite the money we make or the Torah we learn.

But wait. Maybe learning Torah can help us navigate and move-through. For after all, if we study Torah a lot…and that knife’s edge day-in and day-out…then we can really feel it can’t we? If we can really feel that knife’s edge can’t we also really feel that border of the dream, the last step before olam habah? If we are trained in almost-knowing and setting and stamping that in-between  frightening esoteric strange almost-reality of hell then can’t we do it with the same solid almost-realization of Hashem’s divine grasp? 

Just a question.

The whole if/then concept is not about circumstance but about the gap between the adverbs.  It’s not about being bad boys and girls. It’s about making an almost-world solid enough so we can balance on it….in order to then move above and beyond the  almost-devastation and the almost-enlightenment. 

In any case, to this day I thank my friend for her advice. In setting down the fears I had a stronger foundation from which to move through them.  I was gifted with a tool to balance on the edge.

And maybe that’s what Torah really is….The greatest tool to help us all to balance on the edge of both amazement and terror.

In the end,  if we can learn to balance we can learn to walk. And if we can learn to balance on the abstract (a much more difficult feat)  we can begin to walk within the abstraction itself. We can learn to walk in God's ways.