VaEtchanon 2015

VaEtchanon 2015

 

Prayer defies time. Let's delve into this a bit.

 In Torah, Moses is left behind. He is not allowed to continue to the Promised Land. To many, this is seen as a punishment because of his "rebellion" at the waters of Meribah. We see it in Numbers 20:11 as well as Exodus 17:6. My question though is if this is really a punishment.

Let's review the situation. At the waters of Meribah Moses hits the rock for water. The people are thirsty. God has led Moses here. However the way that Moses gets the water out of the rock does not please God...in fact it makes Him quite angry.  God says y’an lo he’ematem l’hakdisheni l’aynai b’nei yisrael.

God doesn’t say…you can't go into the land I promised because you didn’t pray to me.

He says…because you did not believe in me to make me holy before your people.  This  (literal translation)is why Moses cannot continue with his people.  In short, God wanted Moses to do something and Moses did not quite understand. God wanted Moses to act in a way of prayer before the action was even defined.

Only later (in VaEtchanon) when the moment to enter the land is drawing near is it written that Moses prays. The verb form is in the future tense with the revolving vuv. This means it is understood in the past tense. Simple message here: We need the future to create the past.

The same is true with prayer.  The fact of the ability of Moses to pray at that moment (when the Israelites are about to cross to Canaan and he is left behind)  brings out his inability to  understand the action of making God holy through yearning and belief… at the rocks of Meribah.

Prayer therefore can be defined as that yearning and belief that connects us to ourselves and our God beyond the boundaries of time. If understood therefore, it also connects us to the dead. It heals the past through its grip on the present. It propels us into the future. And by us, I mean everyone, even those no longer in physical form.

By staying behind, Moses is now in eternal prayer connecting us to him to God and to those passed.   There in spirals and vibrations, in every leaf on the trees, in the rushing rivers and the kind words spoken, there in every touch, every smell, every taste, our prayers..those of Moses included... settle and reach to the sparks of light in all beings throughout time, beyond even love, beyond the necessary boundaries that serve our definition of God.  Every step we take is a prayer, every letter placed on the screen, every second we drive, every second we dream. Shakespeare himself infuses prayer after prayer in his plays. We only need to research the influence of The Book of Common Prayer (1549) on his dialogue and characters. Prayer is in all moments, great or small, Shakespearean or  rudimentary. And they all are branches from this word VaEtchanon (and he prayed).

Here's more: The fact that Moses prays and then we have the Ten Commandments, revelation and the  prayer of the Sh’ma means that there is a frame of prayer.  Revelation occurs within the prayer: It is the playing field on which all miracles, signs and covenants happen.  

How do we know this? In Berakhot 7a  R. Johannon mentions  that God says,  “Even them I will bring to my Holy Mountain and make them holy in My house of prayer.” (Isaiah 3a) There isn’t a doubt in the mind of R Johannon that prayer is a cyclical phenomenon in which God is in both reaction and action. To repeat,  the playing field on which is dramatized revelation and the b'rit is that of prayer and is the manifestation of God.

In the end, the tragedy at the waters of Meribah is the catapult for our divine connection today. I don’t see any punishment here. I see Blessing.