Numbers Cycle 7 Behalotecha

 Behalotecha

There’s a Big Hoax out there. It’s something we take part in with every breath, with every step forward, every step on the gas, every step on the breaks,  every brush of the teeth and glance in the eyes of the other who stands before us.  It’s something we pick up and party with whether it’s inside our computer, our I-Phone, our Smart-phone, our new phone or our old phone. It‘s something that gets reinforced with every add we hear and every gold-filled bracelet or fourteen carrot diamond that rubs against our wrist. It’s something that can mistakenly seem glorified in our play productions and our published novels. It’s something that is based on such radiance we want to be the star  center stage in its astonishing eternal  spot-light. It’s a validated hoax, foundational for many of us.

  There’s a major almost-comical but benign deception out there, one that we buy into with every swipe of our credit card, with every down payment, every up-swing of our investments, every laugh. It isn’t evil by any means. I wouldn’t call it evil.  Rather, it’s  a vast misunderstanding of our state of being and our responsibility as Jews.

We’re not to blame. That’s the absolute irony. We really are not to blame. 

That’s because in the throes of every holy action, we as human beings don’t have the power of control and therefore blame.  In the throes of holy action (I repeat holy) we have the humility to   allow ourselves to take part in and to be moved by an action caused by God.  Once we start trying to take control in some cognitive rational way we end up with the grit of meat between our teeth or even leprosy.  As we figure things out we also may end up ignoring our family for ambitions at work, getting a divorce, crafting revenge,   misusing Torah story as an excuse for violent actions, misusing Torah story as an excuse for loving actions, confusing the mitzvot, raising human importance (through the prism of story) way above the soul-piece for which we are constantly yearning. In fact we become so stuck on our self- involvement we see things upside down and inside out. We place the ego where the soul should go and the soul where the ego should go. When we look towards the soul therefore what we are really seeing is mundane humanity.  We reach in the direction of the mundane with a desperation that attempts to defy not only death but God. This is the way it is here and now on earth, in our communities, in many prayer services, and it needs to be seen and recognized. It might be bad. It might be good.  But God knows,  it both is and isn’t Jewish.

God makes it so amazingly clear.  We see it in Torah (Numbers 9:15-23). We journey on when the cloud is lifted. We camp when the cloud settles on the mishkan once again. We don't decide when the cloud is going to arrive. We listen and watch.

And it doesn’t take pools of white space and a great mystic to hear and see. Within the story of the journeys…very clearly within this movement…there is the clean idea that we are  transforming  the place we call home as per the directions of a greater force.  Call it intuition. Call it knowledge. Call it being hooked-in. Call it what you will. There’s nothing to figure out. There’s nothing to decide. Of course there are the details of our human focus, what clothes we may wear, and yes when we may eat but honestly, even these seemingly so-mundane decisions are also  infused within us, caused to us, caused around us, caused by a greater force through the story/name we call God Who by the way is being caused by an even more astounding God and so on.  

In fact deep within the story there’s a special piece,   there before our eyes, an indentation, a mark, a stamp, a few lines that don’t need to be more because the story is not the main idea. The main idea is that the Ark of Testimony leads the way and the prophet (Moses) announces the way to both God and the people who might love and/or hate Him.

  

 Of course, for the above to happen, it is our responsibility to be open and aware of that movement, that transformation of place (whether inner or outer) brought about by our act of following.  In fact, this responsibility is intrinsic to our Jewish identity (Levinas) . As we read in Talmud:

(R Hisda said) If a scroll of the law is decayed (meaning Torah and the Ark of Testimony), if 85  letters can be gathered therein, such as the section "and it came to pass when the ark set forward" (10:35-36)…we must save it. If not, we may not save it.

          

Clearly, so important is this responsibility of transformation that we have to obliterate the vision pointing the way if previously destroyed (by fire for example).  And how do we know if it has been? If there are less than 85 letters that remain.  The emphasis here is on the detail. The rabbis not only give us a general ruling…they expound upon the number of words, the percentage of the saved or destroyed vision. This specificity emphasizes the absolute and primary importance of this transformation.

Like I have said, this is not rocket science. This is simply the fact (proven here in Torah) that our identity as Jews is based on personal spiritual transformation. Story comes in second, not first.

Speaking of rocket science, I now think of the brilliance of  Ptolemy whose scientific findings dominated thought for 1400  years. Yes, his equations were logical and rational (influenced by Aristotle) and the finest that  he could offer given the society and tools of his time.

 The fact that he thought in all of his brilliance that the sun revolved around the earth is not surprising, nor can he be blamed. As a society though, after a while, we did intrinsically know when it was time to move on.