So one of my new year's resolutions was to make time again for my d'vrei torah. All fall I've been avoiding my poor abandoned torah blog. Things are like that, though, aren't they? The longer you ignore them the harder it is to pay attention to them again, because then when you turn and face the thing you've ignored, at the same time you are facing the fact that you ignored it. Oh, I feel like I should jump right into an ad for Facing History, Facing Ourselves, which was not my point. I am just trying to psych myself up for re-starting something that I meant to make a habit and then abandoned, frustrated and embarrassed by my failure to do so.
Of course I can provide a long list of extenuating circumstances: the meds debacle, the new job, the grapefruit interaction, the confusion and turmoil and busy-ness of the life of a working mother of two children under 8. And it is not that those circumstances are not extenuating, because they are. Nobody but me expected me to be able to maintain any kind of regular writing this fall, but then, who besides ourselves ever expects us to do the things WE want to do. Self-imposed goals are always dispensable, according to everyone else.
Happily there is repentance. Yes, yes, I know that repentance is not really meant to refer to my turning again to the writing of a blog that no one in particular reads. The failure of the blog is not a moral failure. And yet it feels as though it is, because it is a betrayal of something I want and that I think I need in my life, and a betrayal of what had always felt for me like a calling without a caller.
You would think, having found the caller, that the calling would be easier to practice. It is not. It is no easier to write regularly about God than it is to write regularly about politics, or computer programming, or fashion, or history. In fact, it is harder. All those other things are the things of this world and they have secular value, and you can both write about them and not write about them without having to examine yourself.
Anyway, I'm on vacation right now. Along with the piña coladas and french cheese and the pool and the beaches there is still a feeling of unease. That is because I would like to write this blog post, about this week's parsha, and it is much easier and less unsettling to read a trashy novel or have a nap. Why should I have to be uneasy on my vacation? What in the world leads me to make myself sit here, feeling anxious and inadequate and undisciplined and incoherent, thinking of something to say about Yitro? You can lead a horse to life-giving water, but can you make her drink?
I want to drink that water, and unless I must write about it, I will not. In the end I'm hoping this blog can serve as spiritual practice for me. I want to hear God better. I want to listen more. But the things of this world make it hard to hear God. There is hustle and bustle, and I'd rather think of myself as a basically good, perhaps even better than average person. I'd rather not face my failures.
Perhaps in the Torah there's not a lot of facing my failures to be done anyway. Maybe there's nothing much there to be scared of. Just a bunch of strange, cobbled-together stories, the mythology of a long-dead people, made sacred by the fact of its survival down all the long years.
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That's a very long introduction to the first d'var torah i'm writing in months. The Hebrews have just left Egypt. They travel through the land of the Midianites, and Jethro, who was not a Hebrew, came out to meet Moses, with Moses' wife and his two sons. Jethro is Moses' father-in-law. One of his sons is named Gershom, which means "I have been a stranger in a strange land," and if that's not a phrase pregnant with meaning through all our ages of exile, right down to Robert Heinlein, I don't know what is.
Jethro notices that Moses is wearing himself out serving as the judge for all the people, and advises Moses to delegate, delegate, delegate, which Moses does. If you are looking for "Easy Life Lessons In The Torah", this is one of them. "What you are doing is not right; you will surely wear yourself out, and these people as well. For the task is too heavy for you, you cannot do it alone." (Ex 18.17). Moses takes his father-in-law's advice ("Easy Life Lessons from the Torah, #283: Sometimes your in-laws actually have something useful to say.") and delegates some of his power to judge to some other elders. All is well. Off go the hebrews, with, one presumes, Moses' family in tow. They go to Sinai, and there's a big mountain, and they camp there, and God gives Moses one of two versions of the not-really-ten commandments that are received in the Torah. This particular version gives the fact that God rested on the seventh day the reason for the commandment to observe and to guard the shabbat, whereas other places we are told it is because we were slaves in Egypt and now are free that we must be shomer shabbos.
The whole scene looks an awful lot like a grumbling active volcano, what with the mountain "all in smoke, for the Lord had come down upon it in fire; the smoke rose like the smoke of a kiln, and the whole mountain trembled violently. The blare of the horn grew louder. As Moses spoke, God answered him in thunder." (Ex 19.18 -19). Charlton Heston didn't make all that up, there really is all that drama.
"All the people witnessed the thunder and lightening, the blare of the horn and the mountain smoking; and when the people saw it, they fell back and stood at a distance." (ex. 20.15) They were afraid, and they said to Moses that he should speak to God for them, because they did not want to get too close, and they did not want to hear God's voice.
The commandments themselves are sandwiched in there, not clearly ten, and a motley bunch. I'm your God, and don't forget I liberated you from slavery in Egypt. Don't worship anyone else. Don't make a sculptured image of me or anything else and worship it (the 'sculptured' here would turn out to be very important to the Eastern Church as it developed its complex tradition of iconography, because it doesn't say 'painted', does it?). Don't swear falsely by my name. A long paragraph about the importance of Shabbat. "Remember the Sabbath Day and keep it holy." Honor your father and your mother. Don't murder. Don't commit adultery. Don't steal. Don't bear false witness. Don't covet anything your neighbor has, wife, slave or ass. (Here we can at least be grateful that wife comes before slave and ass.)
I'm struck by this odd thing about purity, and about fear. It says that God tells Moses to tell the Israelites to make themselves pure, and then to stay away from the boundaries of the mountain. Whoever touches the mountain will die, says God, and it won't be safe to go up on the mountain until the ram's horn sounds a long blast. So there we have God telling everyone to stay away from the mountain. (oh, and be pure, don't touch a woman, so we're using everyone rather loosely..)
On the third day the people (or, at least, the men-people) stand at the foot of the mountain, as instructed, and the smoke and thunder and everything come, and the ram's horn blows, but they don't go up the mountain, even though the instructions were "go onto the mountain when the ram's horn sounds a long blast." Only Moses goes up the mountain, and God says "Tell everyone not to come up here, if they look at me up here they'll die." Moses says "you told us to set bounds around the mountain, to sanctify it, so why would anyone come up here when I already said to them don't?" And God says "okay, never mind, go down and get Aaron and you can bring him up here with you, but everyone else must stay below or else I'll kill everyone." So Moses goes down, but actually he never does seem to bring Aaron back up with him, at least not in this version of the story. He tells the people the not-10 commandments, and they say "don't make us all go up there with you, and Moses goes up again to be instructed that God prefers monuments of natural stone, like Andy Goldworthy, rather than of hewn stone, like Rodin. And there's Yitro, as strange and alien as the Torah always seems, excepting those little nuggets of Easy Life Lessons.
I'm torn between writing posts that focus on these Easy Life Lessons, of which you can almost always find at least one per parsha, and writing posts that are much less coherent and much more difficult but that are actually attempting to look at the whole of the parsha. Or, if I were actually someone with any experience in torah study, I'd probably go deep into the meanings of two or three words, relate them to Lurianic Kabbalah and the Baal Shem Tov, and wind up with a seven-heavens theory of spiritual growth with some insight meditation thrown in for good measure.
What I'm doing is messy and confused. It's probably not very easy to read, and you could argue that if I'm going to do it this way I shouldn't do it. But I feel as though I have to get through the torah this way before I can or should get through it any other way. I don't want it pre-masticated for me, even though I know that naively reading the Torah without the benefits of scholarship and tradition is as likely to lead you astray into polygamy and stoning as it is to lead you to fresh insight and profound understanding.
Back to Yitro, where I try to find a less-easy but still manageable life lesson to wind everything up with, to make it worth the while of you and me. Something about sanctity and boundaries. Something about Yirah: the fear and awe of God. Or of the Universe itself, of Reality, if the word God makes you all squeamish, like endometriosis or placentas. So does God tell Moses to keep the people away, or do the people tell Moses to keep God away? We are scared of God, we are scared of reality, and if we're not careful, our faces will melt off like those of the Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
You wouldn't think I could relate to the storm und drang of Mt. Sinai, to the feelings of fear and awe the Hebrews had, with that long blast of the ram's horn sounding but all of them too paralyzed to move, and God, seeing that, changing his mind and letting them stay put. Ordering them, in fact, to stay put, so that they are not overcome by their fear, so that their faces don't melt off. We're so broken, down here, in this world, that we can't face God. We can hardly face ourselves, and our own small failures, and our own grand triumphs. To the extent that we are made in God's image, we hide from ourselves as we hide from God, fearful and overwhelmed by our own inexplicable existence. God would like us to come up the mountain when the ram's horn sounds, but when we don't, he grants dignity to our fear. Oh, says God, that's what I meant all along: so that you will be afraid and you will do as I say, because of your fear. I meant stay away, so you will not be destroyed. God says that, God is polite that way, but God still wishes we would seek God's face, still hopes we will all someday climb that mountain, and look upon him, and that our own faces will shine with all that glory, and that everything will turn out all right in the end. God believes in God's own fairy tale, God keeps faith with us, all of us, terrified and tortured down here. God is looking forward to the big party up on the mountain, and hopes we all come, even late, even without the right clothes, even bearing no gifts at all but our own strange and curious selves.
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