Return to Sermons Home

 

March 4, 2005

Parshat VaYakhel

 

In this week's parashah the people's gifts for the mishkan pour in, overflowing the coffers of what is needed. Kol nediv libo, Everyone whose spirit was moved, gave from the generosity of their heart. Gold brooches and scarlet wool, goat skins and copper earrings.

If you remember, the people are empty and contrite from their earlier misgivings to create the calf, so now they are giving all. Enough! they are finally told. Stop giving!

         There is a beauty in this sort of giving but we are reminded that over-giving, like its twin, stinginess, is equally out of balance. Both are extremes to be avoided.

 

The Torah gives us a healthier model, about fullness and emptiness. And that is what I want to speak about tonight. Fullness and emptiness: two rhythms that go together. Being full to overflowing with passion and compassion, and its complementary rhythm, the necessary emptiness that must occur within us in order to be filled. Betzalel ben Uri,  the great artisan of the Mishkan, and his apprentice, Ohaliav, The Torah tells us, were filled with Chochmat Lev, the wisdom of the heart.

But to be filled, you must be empty.

And how do we become empty?

The Kabbalists have a beautiful way of talking about the magic of fullness to emptiness to fullness in our relationship with the Divine.

God, they say, gifted us with the world and all the fullness of life. Creating Somethingness out of Nothingness. Yesh May'Ayin.

We on the other hand must reverse the gift. We must take all the Yesh of life, and turn it back into Nothingness. Ayin may'Yesh. How? By relaxing. When? On Shabbat. And in a mystical sense, this is the purpose of Shabbat, returning life to the world's primal nature, you could say, the Tao.

 

So if you are following me you are probably saying: Hold on! One of us is confused here.

What kind of gift is emptiness?  And why would we want to convert the rich multifarious complexity of life into nothingness?

No, the rabbis insist, this is not confusion: on Shabbat, our gift back to God is Ayin mayYesh. We take the Yesh, the stuff of our lives, all of our bravado and our brazenness, our mental machinations  and our physical activity, our plans and our zooming, our worries and our shopping lists and we hang them up, suspend them like sheets in the wind, letting them blow, letting them go. All that we think we are, or aren't, must be surrendered at the week's end. All of the dramas of our lives, whom we have solidified as, convinced ourselves we are: Oy, what a loser I am! Oy, I'm losing my looks, Oy, at this rate, I'll never make it to the Nobel Prize, to the Oscars, to the chuppah. It could also go: Gee, l'm doing great, look how enlightened I am becoming!  All of our stories about ourselves, positive and negative, our images, our efforts, our strivings, fruitful or null, we give them back.  To God.

Radical surrender.

This surrender, in the absence of the temple, is a kind of trumah, existential trumah, a gift from the self to the Self.

So now I'm not being silly. Everyone here, even you, did something this week that was beautiful, or kind. Think back to the week for a moment, and remember one act of pure giving. One act you did for yourself or another for pure goodness. The simpler the better. Don't negate it before it's even out. One positive and generous act.

Now imagine taking it in your hands and offering it.

Give it to the source of Goodness, give it back, return it to the Source of Life, your free gift, trumah.

Tonight I bring you notes from the field. I want to share some things that have impacted me so together we can keep our finger on the pulse of our world and some great people who are leading the way for many of us.

Two weeks ago I made Shabbat with 1300 women in Washington DC and the interplay of fullness and emptiness was powerful. Incredible richness and then sitting together in silence. 

Washington DC is, of course, our capital, and you might say, the center of our country's nervous system. The National Cathedral of Washington might be seen as the spiritual center of our country. For although it is Episcopalian, it models itself upon Isaiah's words, to be a house of prayer for all peoples. It is here that every two years, women from every culture and religion are invited in, in a conference called Sacred Circles. This year we examined the idea of compassion, to understand how as women, to increase this priceless commodity in our world.

The cathedral is built in scale and style of the great sacred cathedrals of Europe. The resonance inside is powerful, the sound system world class, the  stained glass windows flood the stone warmed stone floors with rivers of rich color, changing beauty that grips one to my core.

And how does a Jew, a woman no less, stand in such a place without chuckling at the irony of being there. In the light of our history, to be alive at a time when rabbis are invited to the nations' cathedral to begin conferences for women, by filling the nave with Hebrew blessings invoking the Shabbat! And to be alive at a time when women from around the world sit side by side to study compassion in all its forms.

The stories of pain and beauty emptied and filled us for 24 hours.

Zainab Salbi, a 34 year old Iraqi who made it out of her war-torn country years ago during the Iraq-Iran War, seeing the atrocities committed against women, pledged to never forget her sisters. At the age of 23, she decided to dedicate her life to providing support to women worldwide   who are victims of war, gang-rape, slavery, and social injustice. Her organization, Women for Women International, sends tools, resources, and education directly to women so that they can rebuild their lives, families and communities.

Along with raising money, one of her most powerful projects is a letter writing campaign. Women from the West, sign up to be partnered with a woman in a war torn country in Afghanistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Columbia, Kosovo, Nigeria, Rwanda, the Congo and Iraq. Each month, the Western woman sends a small amount of money to one woman, always with a personal letter telling of life, penetrating the life of the war victim.

 Look past the pathetic images, Zanaib says, Look beyond the scarf, the burka, the bad teeth, their sullen exterior. Otherwise we will not see that this woman had a past, she was a lawyer, a teacher, a mother. She had and still has hopes and dreams. Through our letters, we can penetrate the exterior, and find the woman whose soul has been erased.

Dressed in designer clothes and stylish hairdo herself, Zainab spends much of her life traveling around the world, often to refugee camps to be with women. She appealed to us: Lift up your bourka! Yes, we are the ones with burkas on! We are the ones with blinders on! WE are the ones condemned to see a world in black and white, fortunate and unfortunate, oppressed and the oppressors. Women can reach across the world, rebuilding the souls of their sisters, building back their strength by calling their name. By saying: I am here. I care. Tell me your story.

Earlier that evening I had spoken about the meaning of the Hebrew word for Compassion: Rachamim and how it is the same root as Rechem, womb. The compassion of the womb whether in both men and in women, is the ability to nurture and protect life, to give everything to ensure that life will continue. It has everything to do with our most cherished value: CHAYIM.

The next morning,

Marianne Williamson picked up on this theme and spoke of the God given right and responsibility women have to preserve life. Think about a woman carrying life, she said. When someone enters the room where there is a pregnant woman, and they are smoking, drugging, being out of control, that woman and the people around her, for that matter, have a moral, biological, god-given right to say: Not in here you don't! 

Look at the animal kingdom and how utterly ferocious the females are in protecting their young. Marianne told us her studies from the animal kingdom: Mother hyenas make a circle around their cubs when their young are eating. Circling and watching and guarding. If the males even venture close to this circle looking like they will disturb that food, the females go for blood. This is another side of compassion.

 Try telling one of those female hyenas she may need some anger management. Or describe her as having a negativity issue to work out. These mothers are fierce and they were meant to be fierce. This is how life was designed to protect itself. This protection of life is part of the Rachamim, built into us, the compassionate  force that keeps life alive. Now what about human females? she asked. How is it that females of the human species fail to take this permission to fiercely protect their young? And perhaps you and I are ferocious about protecting our own children; Can we not extend this caring to the other side of the world? Not only to look after our own children but after all the children of the world? Where is the circle of protection and where is our ferocity?

Although she is of Mystical Christian fame, Marianne is Jewish. And she railed with the voice of one of our ancient prophets. But what was especially powerful was to hear a prophet speaking unabashedly as a woman.

Whether you are for or against the war in Iraq,  it is essential that we recognize and not rationalize the losses, the heartbreak, the agony that is created by the war. To stay aware that over 1,000 American families mourning their sons and daughters and over 100,000 Iraqis mourning theirs. And to keep in our minds and hearts the millions of needy and vulnerable people whose resources have been cut, lives and health have been curtailed by the war.    To be conscious today means to feel this grief. To be in pain. To be alive today and not to feel immense pain over what is going on means there is something very wrong.

Marianne told a story about a study that was made in a chimp village in Africa. The scientists observed that there were app. 10% of the chimps who looked decidedly depressed. They sat outside the community of chimps, they ate alone, looking despondent. So they tried something. They decided to take away these depressed chimps for 6 months. What do you think they found?

In six months time, they came back and found all the chimps in the village had died. The depressed chimps were the warning system. They were picking up something coming, something wrong. This was their "depression. " Simply removing them removed the information they were picking up.

Studies now show that one quarter of American women are clinically depressed. Is this a coincidence? Could all these women be depressed for a reason? Whatever it is, downing pills to alleviate our symptoms may not address the information and feelings that are coming to us. Just like when you have a broken arm or leg, just taking morphine to kill the pain is not the way to go. "We are depressed for a reason." Marianne Williamson said. "Women can smell something wrong. There is a threat out there, and like the chimps in the village, removing the depression, or suppressing it is not the wise way to go.

For us to be true to the spirit of God within us, we must feel our feelings about the world, allow our compassion to move us beyond our protected borders to feel what is happening in the world. Marianne's call to stop overriding the pain, but to take action, express our truth, whenever, wherever, however we can, felt like the voice of our great prophets. 

And quoting her beloved mentor, Martin Luther King Jr. she said:

"The day you stop talking about things that matter is the day that your life begins to end." 

The Sacred circles conference honed for me the idea that compassion and love are the highest values, not only of our particular religion, but of our species. It is clear that we are living in very sad times. And dangerous times. If we are to survive on this precious planet, it will be because each of us is listening and serving in our own particular way, the deepest Torah we can hear that guides us how to break open our hearts more and more so that we can help.

 

All of this was and is very full. The Yesh. But there must also be Ayin, the stilling and calming and emptying — especially on Shabbat — the clear and spaciousness in which to hear God's voice/feel the truth within our beings.

So just as we have been listening to the pulse on the world and its shifting sands, so we return to put our finger on our own pulse. How are we each moving toward more freedom, more joy, more compassion?  This is the undulation of consciousness, from our large body to our small body, from this world to the heavenly world. The pulse moves through us all.

 

Shabbat is the tool by which to divest ourselves of our troubles and our immediate self-absorption, to open ourselves to the voice of God, the voice of truth that comes to us in AYIN, that fills us when we are restful, empty, and at peace.

         We started by giving our gift. To close, would you take a moment with me, to let go. Of all these words, to come back inside to the silent power and holiness of Shabbat. Now let us breathe in, receive and listen to the Source of life, the Chochmat haLev, the wisdom of the heart that lives and thrives deep within each one of us. 

                                    ****

As a third amazing woman, Jane Goodall, has said, there is reason for hope. As we welcome in the new moon, we have cause for delicate celebration around the world. The demonstration of people power around in Iraq who defied the "you vote, you die" threat and turned up 8 million voters trying to build a democracy. The willingness of citizens in Lebanon to break the silence, Christians, Muslims and Druze, to stand up and effectively send  the Syrian ruling power home, in the face of the assassination of their leader Rafik Hariri. And in our beloved Israel, where Palestinians held real elections for the first time and elected by a solid majority, a decent, forward thinking individual, Mahmoud Abbas. 

The new moon of Adar II the month of Purim will appear on Thursday evening and Friday of the coming week.

Ribono Shel Olam, may this new moon bring us great joy and laughter, and more good tidings, of peace and compassion, sensitivity to others and  healing to our loved ones.

 

 

return to previous page back to top home