Deuteronomy Cycle 7 Ki Thetze

Ki Thetze

Ki Thetze is about what we want to watch-for when we go out. When we leave our comfort zone, our paradigm, our known community, our friends, our family,  our home, our ethical boundaries, our unknown community, our lover, our husband, our children, our language, our social contract, our expected weather patterns,  our unrecognized engrained way of being, our era…when we leave any or all of that…well we need to be a bit careful about that which we reach to embrace. That’s because when we go out we aren’t ourselves anymore, to say the least.  We're off balance.

Imagine a mother talking to a son. He’s on his way to explore and capture his inner Promise, his new Land, his future Eden, his subconscious Inheritance. He’s standing at the doorway. The mother will give a list of do’s and don’ts. Finally (can’t we all just see it) she’ll realize that some of this is going into his head... and some isn’t. So she’ll give a general rule: Remember this: Don’t forget to abolish Amalek.

Of course, in this day and age she won’t say Amalek. She’ll say meth or drinking and driving or greed or just giving up in an economy that seems to slam our post-college children wherever they live. She might mention false leaders, manipulators, bigots.

We all don't fit into those archetypes of mother and son this moment though. So let's continue. 

As for myself, I can relate two recent experiences to the above teaching. First, I was just hiking on Icehouse Canyon on Mt Baldy. Going up the path I saw a sign: Beware the New Zealand Mudsnail.

 I stared.  How did they get to California from New Zealand (I wondered)?  It seems (I learned) they’re miniscule: They can travel on a human and multiply rapidly wherever they fall, destroying the natural habitat.

 But Ki Thetze is about much more than the New Zealand Mudsnail. It’s about the mudsnails on our soul, our heart, our mind,  our hair, our nails,  in our throat, in our blood, in our words.  And I admit I’ve met many with an abundance of same mudsnails.  We  can’t help it. We don’t know it. They are there though, as real as the smirk we might make at our neighbor (who won’t give us legal easement) as he or she carries a baby, five grocery bags and a packed diaper bag up twenty steps to the front door of a mountain house.

Let’s move beyond mudsnails now.  This next experience I want to share doesn’t need a metaphor.  There was a flood where I now live on Mt Baldy. I wasn’t here yet. This is what happened: The land couldn’t soak the torrential rains after the drought and the creek in front of my (present) home became a raging river with propane tanks, poles, tree branches, you name it flying downhill.

  

There was a hiker who parked in the space for the house two doors down. Parking on this street is only for locals.  It’s a thin rough excuse of a street with gullies and sharp turns. Well, the owner of the house pulled up and wanted to park in her space. It was pouring by then and the water had started bulging high.  Disturbed, she told the hiker to move his car. So he listened, got in his car, tried to drive up the street to turn around and just as he was crossing one of the gullies the flood took him and he drowned. 

What does this have to do with Ki Theze? If there’s a shift and things have changed, whether it’s the wild rain during a drought or the first flood in fifty years… before we tell the asshole who parks in our space to get the hell out, we may want to stop and breathe. We want to make sure we are remembering to banish the inner Amalek.

 I don’t blame her. She’s a nice person. She has to live with it for the rest of her life though.

We all have to live with similar stuff for the rest of our lives, stuff that extends to cultures and religions and world concerns and wars that are building with shocking speed. Knowingly or not, we have all gone out from one era into a new one, one of economic globalization, one of lightning fast communication. It's causing cultures to merge in love or to get crushed within the dull misinterpretations of self-proclaimed soldiers of sacred writings. Unfortunately they are also dynamic leaders.

  

 In the shock of change …and change is everywhere right now… as we go out from our normal schedules and lives and world expectations….let’s all try to (at least) remember to banish Amalek wherever Amalek may live. Let’s remember God.  Let’s make that transformation as we go out together.

As Rabbi Heshel says in God in Search of Man (page 140)…The essence of Jewish religious thinking does not lie in entertaining a (distant) concept of God but in the ability to articulate a memory of moments of illumination by His Presence.