Numbers Bemidbar Cycle 7

Bemidbar Cycle 7

Where are you?

Are you there?

Are you really there?  Do you feel the God of life breathing into you now this moment?

When you are faced with a moment of absolute understanding and consciousness do you embrace it and count yourself- in or do you race to the nearest and most convenient escape-from-self?

Do you race to the rabbi who will tell you to subjugate it, to the rabbi who will tell you to be careful, to the rabbi who will tell you to pray, to the rabbi who will tell you to follow the mitzvoth, to the rabbi who will tell you not to follow certain mitzvoth, to the rabbi who will pray for you, calm you, talk to you, listen to you, praise you, advise you, to the rabbi despite his best efforts who will lie to you and who must (by the very definition of advice no matter how brilliant) be exterior to your deepest intuition? 

   

Do you race to music? To sports? To yoga? To the hills? To meditation? To your old version of God?

Do you race to the mall?

Do you race to anything that will hypnotize you until you can drop that blip of understanding that frightens the hell out of you?

Or do you build around your vision already created by the magnificent force Who has come to be with you? 

    

When shock happens, a shock of freedom or of captivity, a shock of perception and situation, an opening of love or (even) physical devastation  do you call out your name? Out loud?  Do you call out your many names, your many reflections?  Do you re-perceive your fit in the community, your merge with God, your city or town and even your family and friends? Do you allow for a new paradigm, a new organization, one that can protect and defend the new core self and catapult you beyond (or maybe right to) your very dreams?  Do you allow your world to revolve around your new perception?  Do you set up a new camp with defense and marching plans? Do you manifest the amazing gift you have been given of an ultimate knowledge with appropriate boundaries and plans for growth?  Do you accept new ways of nurturing, of feeding, of loving, of seeing? 

Do you really listen to the message (and stop fooling yourself)?

When the ancient structures and rules have eroded enough that they have broken down before your eyes and you see the Kotel and men praying with women…do you seal it in your mind? Do you see it as a  slight avoidable tangent… or the seeds of a whole new (yes Jewish) world? 

When the bombs fall  (like in Germany like in Israel like in Palestinian settlements like in companies going bankrupt and your town is devastated and you wander calling the names of loved ones in your heart do you cry with fury….and why not?) Do you see it as temporary insanity and reject it or blame others for it? Or do you see it as the foundation for change?

 Do You call out Your name?

Do you shout it, sing it, stutter it, shoot it, love it whether you are lit up or not? Do you embrace it even when you are in a shadow? Do you have the courage to hold it still now? Still after the fact of the passing vision? 

When God comes to you and lets you know the facts…yes the facts…and they seem outrageous and impossible…do you push the voice away out of habit? Do you accept…yes accept that we all have the humanity to hear God? To speak God-sounds? To walk the God-walk?

As  Heschel  writes:

The world is not the all to the Bible, and so the all could never come to denote the world. Biblical man is not enchanted by the given. He realizes the alternative, namely the annihilation of the given. He is not enchanted by the order, because he has a vision of the new order….He is taught that “the mountains may depart, the hills be removed, but my kindness shall not depart from thee” (Isaiah 54:10).

May we all know that God is with us as we envision and enact the new order.  And as we call our names and make ourselves known, sculpted and shining within the newness.

It is time.