Numbers Cycle 7 Sh'lach

Sh'lach

Fake it until you make it. We all know that expression. Often, it’s said with a certain glib satisfaction, as if there’s an enlightened secret within the travesty of pretense,   a mystique that is God-approved. It’s as   if the flow of faking soon runs into the ocean of making and merges in the Promised blue of timeless sky and ocean. 

 Yes, it’s an expression used by all of us, whether we are seekers of youth, of age, of sales, of promotions, of more sales or of (yes) congregants.  It’s said with (often) an LA or New York edge, a slight smirk, an-off-the-cuff glance sideways, a giggle, a laugh.  In my personal experience,   it was a regular run-of-the-mill comment I had heard from artists and investment brokers until one day I heard it from a rabbi.

He was talking about God. At first my reaction was nothing short of disgust. Fake God? I don’t think so.  

Then in time, I learned that this way of being is in some instances a Jewish way of thinking. But we need to be very specific here.  It has to do with the mitzvoth. We are to practice the mitzvoth if they seem holy or not. In other words, we do it and then we listen. We fake our intention in the hopes that one day the divine might kick-in.  In so doing, the holy-action begins to ingrain within us the God-code, the God-essence. It might happen slowly, like water on rock, but it happens.

 However…and let us all be aware of this… acting on the chukot or the mitzvoth (whether we get them or not) is different than faking that wholesome purity usually only found in the Moses-moment (that blip of consciousness we all experience at some point on our life-path).  Even Moses doesn’t have that purity all the time (as we find out in this parsha).  It’ wise therefore to know when we are in it, to know how to hold it, and to know how to expand outward with it as foundation.  It’s equally wise  to know how much we are in it and to allow ourselves to expand in proportion.  In other words, perfection is not required here…simply awareness of the inner place at which we have arrived.  Not many of us have that kind of discernment though…so enter the facade, the facade of complete consciousness.

In short, if we can’t determine our place on the path we simply pretend to have walked it in full.  This is a mistake. It just turns the trick. It doesn’t clinch the covenant.  In the end, faking God only infuriates God and gets us all in trouble. 

 And the trouble has a trickle-down effect.  We also follow some members of the clergy even if we know they are also faking it because (honestly) they fake it better than the rest of us.

The only problem is that we all then become empowered in our pretense, in following greater pretenses and in honoring them. The cycle is never ending.

Imagine one rabbi who compares himself to Jesus Christ.  Imagine one who has sexually abused congregants. In the first case, the rabbi keeps getting his contract renewed despite slight conflict.  In the second, the rabbi is let off the hook.  Their pretenses are accepted because the congregants have little else to grasp but those same pretenses. I say this with compassion. It’s so sad.

Therefore, despite the teachings I’ve translated, the services I’ve led, the atheists I’ve met, the wars I’ve studied, the horrors I’ve learned about, the degradation, the cynicism, the academic snobbery, the self-righteousness, the poverty and the pain…despite the need to fake it and the harm that comes about when we don’t…I still feel wary of the God-lie.  I’ve seen more hypocrisy and harm caused by the God-lie or by self-protection from it than people saved by it.

If it doesn’t come from the heart (even a tiny ventricle or a drop of heart-blood or a solitary beat when we are breathing) than our action is bound to hurt more than heal. We simply won’t be able to sustain the falsified intention. We’ll end up trading it for our self-glorification and/or we’ll  leak out some twist of emotion or fear that haunts us night and day.

Therefore, when we are sending out our tentacles of intelligence to know our surroundings (especially those surroundings described to us by God) and those tentacles do not come  from a  place of authenticity…whether we are rabbis, full time congregants or part time people of prayer… we’re not going to be able to sustain the authenticity of the information received.

 Once again, why not?   Because our reach isn’t real to begin with.  The rabbis of Talmud certainly expound on this in their description of the sh’lach, the messenger. 

So while in Behalotecha  we need to learn  the humility to give all control  over to God, we learn in Sh’lach how then to take responsibility for our actions and to apply them in our world.

How? We fully hand ourselves over to that force beyond our personal myth…to God. We get real. We dig in to the truth we have become.  We see with awe the vivid blue and green and white as the blue herons fly and the wild flowers bloom. We feel the living breathing radiating sustenance of the light-center of all things, animate and inanimate. We take ourselves out of the picture with specific detail and completely so we can again and again fit ourselves back into an increasingly astounding and magnificent earthly realm. We see where we are within our soul-work and allow ourselves to expand outwards proportionately. We don't judge ourselves by our subjective enlightenment (our movement inward) but by how exactly we apply an equal movement outward.

If we do anything else…well we are faking it. And this kind of faking it oozes so much fear it becomes nothing more than a pollutant infested puddle on a city street. This kind of faking it does not ever flow into making it.  No waves. No happy merge (at least not for 40 years). No ocean…or Promised Land… within our personal physical human sight.