The Jewish Story: Interlude - Making Every Day Count

when one has finished building their house says Nietzsche they suddenly realized that in the process they've learned something that they really needed to know in the worst way before they began well I'm looking to put things together brick by brick and I certainly know this is a learning process because I'm Rob my choir and this is the Jewish story interview making each day chemically now does anybody else feel like we're sitting at the side of time right now like we're in some sacred dimension where time is a unity and the world outside flows on without us if you're a Tolkien geek like me think of it it's kind of like the time they spent in Lothlorien the seven days a Pesa that space between Seder night and the crossing the Red Sea are kind of like a stay in the enchanted wood and for those of you who are wandering I will indeed return to history to our normal flow of time I'm working away at the events of 1967 right now and it's so big I don't want to get it wrong and everything goes after the beginning of course but I feel like there are times in life where the insights of the past or what we need and there's a time to try and access the wisdom of the present and that's just where I'm at right now we're just finished with Pesa and they've lifted the curfew and I can actually go outside and so I've never felt a more real sense of leaving the narrow spaces but of course our journey out of Egypt is far from over never forget that freedom is just the first step on the way to redemption and redemption is a tough word over hog my ten year old son actually asked me what Gulla what redemption was going to look like and despite the fact that I probably spent more time than most thinking about it I found it extremely hard to communicate all my imaginings now there is a more concrete way to conceive of Redemption which might be helpful for the average person and that's to think of it as true freedom freedom of because passive of course doesn't stand alone not only is it the beginning of the sacred cycle of our calendar but it's specifically the link to the coming vessel of Shavuot the celebration of the giving of Torah at Sinai and that is really the time where we cease to be focused on freedom from Egypt and we became acculturated or introduced into the covenant of the mode of being free - or having the freedom of divine service and pass on her she wrote this freedom from and the freedom of are connected by a count that count is called spirit that Omar the counting at oh man and that's the one I want to explore with you for just a few minutes right now oh but before I do I want to say that anything that I say today any Torah which we learn any merit that comes into the world is dedicated to the illu Anish mot the sole elevation of Miriam shamone Miriam Rivka but more kind of Hakone it's the 31st yard sight of her leaving the world and I'm sure that she is loved and missed so meanwhile back in the flow so what we attained it Seder was a liberation from slavery and not to mention freeing ourselves from false notions of divinity not a small task but breaking the chains is always only the first step liberation from must lead to freedom of its is going to last on another angle you should know that the Kabbalists the mystics among us teach that on Leila Seder on Saturday night a great light comes into the world and not just into the world but into the life of each and every one of us they call it molting the gut Lutz right the most expansive consciousness which we can ever receive more in fact than we can receive or at least more than we can hold which I imagine was exactly what happened way back when on that first Seder night thousands of years ago in Egypt I mean the Israelis have been steeped in Egyptian slavery and idolatry for hundreds of years they're very conception of both freedom and the divine was bound to be limited by the reality that had shaped them and so as we say twice daily at the end of creates mother eunice ma which is of course the daily equivalent to the Seder it says I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt in order to be your God what strange it says I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt to be or Lord your God wasn't he our God before the answer is yes but we had to break the bounds of the possible free ourselves from both slavery and idolatry in order for the real capacity of the divine to emerge among us the breaking of Egypt was a necessary precursor to the revelation at Sinai otherwise our ability to receive what God wanted to give us would have been far more limited and I'll just throw it in there now maybe we'll come back to it at the end that the breaking of the world that we new around us is very similar never forget that when the old collapses it paves the way for something which we could have never otherwise received so we get a glimpse actually an interesting glimpse of the relationship between liberation and the unbounded capacity for revelation that comes in its wake at the crossing of the Red Sea first of all the song the Israel sang song of a sea in there rejoicing is one of those powerful pieces of biblical poetry it's packed according to our sages with prophetic visions of the future but on a more simple level comes the statement of those very same sages who say that a maidservant beheld at the Red Sea that which was not seen by by Ezekiel and all the other prophets it's a strange thing I mean Ezekiel was the one who saw the mystic vision of the chariot the very presence of God on earth how could such a thing be well tell you because the splitting of a sleeve was the last straw it was the final collapse of a world banded by what on Israel thought they knew and therefore its results were by definition revelatory but there's a problem all these great lights whether it's the motion to God loot that expansive consciousness glimpsed unsay tonight or the power of the original Exodus that set us free from Egypt or the song at the sea all of them are too big to hold we lack the vessels and that's why we're counting the Oh mer right now in order to get us from the shattering light of the Exodus the lasting illumination of Sinai now a little bit of definition the Oh mer that word refers to a new grain offering was the first new grain offering made in the Holy Temple let it be built speedily in our day it's a sheaf of barley but they would cut in the morning after a hog passed I can bring to the altar now remember the mots of PASOK is all about simplicity stripping down to essential self memory it's nothing but flour water and sweat but life is much richer than that and so on Shavuot will offer to lows of leavened bread it's the biblical staff of life which comes as no surprise now what lies between my essential self and the one which has the capacity to express all the richness which life has to offer between stripped down existence of Exile and the fullness of redemption in the land is these 49 days they also in addition to the agricultural cycle lie between Egypt and Society of course between the breaking of what was and the revelation of what could be and last but certainly not least they're marking days on our calendar heal in real time and that's what's brought me to wanted D into the opportunity which these coming days offer particularly on a personal scale let's move from exile to Redemption from that Exodus to revelation and it all begins with making each day tempt I hope your Seder was revelatory I hope you caught a glimpse of the possible you of some broader horizon and imagined redemption but if you truly tasted those mulling the godly with that expansive consciousness then I can tell you I know that it's already gone because like I said it was too big to hold and if it didn't happen for you on say tonight don't worry I know it's never simple this year was harder for some actually interestingly enough and speaking to people easier for others nevertheless weather happened on Seder night or not I hope that everyone listening has had some moment of truth in their life flash of a vision of something so real that was actually bigger than life itself now the problem with these flashes of deeper reality is like I said they're impossible to hold the light feeds almost at once and we're left with vague impressions kind of like the spots that float on your eyes when the old flash bulbs get used and sometimes as it fades we come to doubt whether we ever even glimpsed such a horizon of truth which would make sense of course because real truth being bigger than we are lies beyond our imagination Redemption lies beyond the imagination and I for one am actually grateful for that I would hate to think that what we have come up with so far is all the world has to offer in general by the way be very wary of anyone who tells you that redemption will happen when everyone in the world is just like them so I'd say in general it's downright idolatrous to claim that we know what God has in store nevertheless we have the capacity to build our lives into a vessel which can hold the truth that is larger and the question is how now the first step of the simple answer is emunah not just the belief that's something larger than I can conceive indeed exists which itself is no small matter although physicists at this point are giving us a tremendous assist and recognizing the world is bigger and stranger than we ever thought but that's not the sum total of moona in fact what I'm focused on here with Emunah is that element of Emunah which is a steady path faithfulness to bringing that vision into being step by step because if it's too big to hold all at once there's no other way which brings us to the counting of the Omer you know in my counseling practice and frankly in my own life I often see that one of the greatest barriers to success is fear of the process and in particular even getting started and I think it's because some dreams some goals are so sacred so big in our eyes that we'd rather leave them unreal eyes than fail in our attempt and often we lack a belief in ourselves that we could ever really achieve them and therefore leaving them in that sort of hazy notion of what might be is much more company than trying to engage the reality and our failure to start down the road of realizing our dream usually has a few elements one of course is fear of the very process itself I mean who wouldn't risk everything to get that job had that relationship build the holy temple bring mushiya whatever it is whatever the size or dreams we wouldn't risk it all if all they had to do was just take one gamble snap your fingers toss a coin win or lose but either way there'll be no process let me know slogging through the steps losing sight of the vision amongst the weeds no peeking details that can suck the excitement out of even the wildest dreams but of course that's not the reality of life there is no snapping the fingers to win or lose in life every day counts now if you look at the text of the original Exodus you can see quite clearly the danger that any process offers only one month after the slaying of the firstborn less than a month after the splitting of the Red Sea the final blow that shattered the illusion of Egypt's power one of the children is real saying if only we died by the hand of the Lord in Egypt when we sat by the flesh possible we ate our fill of bread notice their fill of bread what happened to matzah here you brought us out the wilderness to starve and die they lost sight of the goal even lost sight of the miraculous origins of their journey because of the process and on one level probably the most basic level counting the Omer is about learning to make each day count if you look closely at the special prayers which accompany the counting the Omer you'll find that this is the season when the Kabbalah officially comes out of the closet so to speak we're in a process of seven times seven seven weeks each of seven days of course and I'll touch a little bit on the significance of that number by-and-by if you look at these prayers though you'll see that the mystical architecture which underlies creation that corresponds to these seven weeks is actually spoken about explicitly boundless loving-kindness the might of drawing boundaries the integrative process Nets a code you sewed mile hood we could go through it all each day is not only belonging to one of the seven weeks but has its own permutation within them I'm sorry if this disappoints you but I'm not about to unfold all these qualities for you now I will say however as a public service announcement it's something that I do do in my spiritual counseling practice if you're interested in trying a little bit of personal work during the Omer shoot me an email Robin like foyer at gmail.com or you can send me a personal message on Facebook and Rob my for a at Facebook we can set up a little bit of time but I'll say this nonetheless I've been taught to relate to these sphere out these holy methode as modes of relationship fundamentally they're modes of relationship between creator and creation but there's a beautiful almost fractal way in which these modes of relationships scale from creator to creation from self to group from one individual to another between my present self and the one I longed to be all of these qualities negotiate those two sides and as with all relationships half the battle is showing up because every parent knows hopefully every lover and every friend and every educator that every day is a new invitation there never was no will be another moment just like this one and therefore what can happen now can never happen any other time and if you're committed to the process of building a relationship then you have to make every day count or at least you have to have the intent to each one in its own particular way the permutations of the divine qualities that you may see if you look closely at those prayers tested Shiva Guevara and all that are a guide to this on an advanced level but the simple truth is that like I said every day offers unique opportunity and the first step in moving from liberation to revelation is receiving each day each moment as an invitation to build just a little bit more of your dream now in order to do this we need a clear vision of where we're headed and a deep emunah a faith in ourselves that we can realize our dreams and a steadfast commitment to the step-by-step process but it is important to remember in addition to this notion of making every day count that the count doesn't last forever you know I had a student once who told me a story that when he was in college he had a non-jewish roommate who fell in love with the idea of counting the oh man when my student would come back and he was asked what he was doing on counting he liked the idea of bringing a deliberate awareness to what each and every day offered it is after all the original streak for all you social media junkies out there and for a while apparently they actually counted together until Shavuot of course or so my student thought because imagine his surprise when sometime in the summer his roommate proudly declared to him I made it to a hundred are you there yeah this is not a never-ending linear process it's a cyclical one which culminates in seven times seven and that brings us this secret of the number seven I am fascinated by emergent properties if you've spoken to me friend like the time or you've been listening to the Jewish story for a while you're probably familiar with it but it's come time to give a working definition and so I turn to the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy which defines emergent properties as properties which arise out of more fundamental entities and yet our novel or irreducible with respect to them meaning there's something more than just the pieces or even the whole there's something that emerges if I was going to try to reach for an example of emergent property the first one that comes to mind is life itself anybody who's ever used the tool of dissection to try to understand life realizes there's a difference between the mechanisms that generate life and the reality of it if you dissect the cat you've basically destroyed what you're looking for in the first stroke consciousness is another one I had a professor in college you sell to say there is no mind only brain and yet where does your conscience as reside in between all those neurons I could add to this love and really all relationship after all there's you there's me but our relationship emerges between us if you want something a little bit less abstract and you happen to be slightly scientifically minded try sodium chloride you know if you study pure sodium in the lab you'll find it to be a malleable metal that explodes on contact with water always a great experiment in high school and then if you turn our attention to chlorine you'll encounter a poisonous gas in looking at the two of them separately could you ever imagine that the cut by combining them you'll end up with table salt a crystalline solid that dissolves meekly in water and is actually essential for life the number which represents emergent properties this idea that there's more which can come from the world than we can actually see by looking at its pieces is the number seven you know the Mahalo Great Sage of frog of the turn of the 17th century teaches that there are six experiential directions in front of you behind you right of you left you above you and below you and those six directions actually define themselves a point of reference that emerges from within them that's the you think about it front back right left up down bingo now you have a point in the middle and if you're familiar with the Jewish tradition at all then you know that the six plus one equals seven brings us into Shabbat there's really no understanding the quality the deep quality of resting from creative work of what it means to be created in the divine image as a creature which can really shape creation in our own image unless you actually cease all those activities at least once a week and so it should come as no surprise that the count which links Egypt in silent which puts together liberation and revelation is a seven times seven process because the number seven here comes once again to lead us into a world which is bigger than we can conceive listen making each day count that steadfast commitment to process is certainly critical to building your life into a vessel that can hold higher vision but this by seven cycle tells us that in order to really get from the liberation to revelation you can't actually know where you're going when you set out to get there I mean think about it do you think that after hundreds years of slavery and idolatry the Israel is who left Egypt could have ever imagined what lay in wait for met Sinai and if they could have it wouldn't have been the transformative event which is always the hallmark of true demson you know when I used to work with at-risk youth in the woods one of my favorite activities was something we called a serendipity hike basically what we would do is head out in the woods without any planned destination and I love that because eventually one of the kids would always ask where are we going chief and the only answer I ever gave was I guess we'll know when we get there and aside from the fun of it I think we've probably most of us I hope have had the experience that true adventure the best thing about true adventure is not so much what we do true adventures are more about who we become through having them the new me that emerges not through the specific steps of the process but through the wholeness at its end now this might be the moment to note that there's more which lies between Egypt and Sinai than simply complaining about the process let's recall that this is the first appearance of Amalek the anti-israel the other way the world can go and there's a specific question which triggers their experience and it's only really a chapter away from the complaints that we mentioned before what it is is if the people are complaining once again because they lack water they're having a hard time holding the process and they say hi yeah Hashem became a no II mean literally is God within us or not I mean it's usually translated as is God with us and that seems like a quite childish question for people who are following a pillar of cloud by day and fire by night they're eating mana and soon we'll be drinking from Miriam's well not to mention ten plagues in the Red Sea about a month ago but if I replace the word childish with like then we can get a little bit of actual insight on what was happening for them remember small children lack object permanence that's why if you're not familiar with the term a toddler will laugh when I hide my face and reveal it with a peekaboo and my teenager would just roll her eyes and think I was crazy see this was the state of ah miss rel at this point we were still children we'd been liberated from we had not yet stepped into the freedom of which is the hallmark of maturity and therefore so long as we saw God's hand God was real but as soon as we didn't see it ie a sham became banal mine is God with us or not and the key misunderstanding was they actually didn't realize that God doesn't exist somewhere outside see because you can read that ie a Shamburger bearing a Mayan is as a do we have God within us or not they had been taken out of slavery but they've been so lowered through hundreds of years of suffering and subjugation something which really resonates I think with the state of our people today that they didn't appreciate that God didn't bring them out of Egypt as a favor he brought them out because he saw their potential in fact it's the human potential that God saw we're all created in the divine image after all so therefore God is indeed within but remember that process of building your life into a vessel which can express the divine is not linear you have to have faith that you are indeed a piece of the infinite you have to do the work of making each day count and you have to walk forward knowing that sometimes something wholly unexpected will emerge I admit it sometimes I find it hard to hold back you know my wife loves to tell the story she works as in the office where I teach if you're not familiar she loved to tell the story that once as she was working there at partes a student came out of my classroom and sought her out karen says that the young woman was positively glowing and looked at her with excitement in her eyes and said that was the most amazing class I've ever heard I have no idea what he said you know it's good for a laugh but that's not education part of our capacity to give to actually help others build the vessels in their lives that they desire is the ability to meet people where they're at you have to give people what they can receive after I'll imagine I delivered the most important most brilliant lecture of my life in Swahili to a crowd of English speakers that's not education at the same time every educator parent lover and friend needs to know that high expectations are one of the most important if not the most important tools we can have for bringing about growth I mean the whole world of our education where I was a really trained is built on the simple inner posture the every guide has to hold and you can do it too when you relate to people you need to hold a deep belief that they're capable of even more than they believe and by believing it never seeing it cause it sounds condescending but just by believing it and pushing people to do more than they think they can while you hold the deep belief that you know they can you can bring about tremendous growth most of the time because sometimes what happens when your expectations are too high is a shattering experience and then we're forced to pick up the pieces so the last piece I think we need to hold in mind as we make our way along this journey from liberation to revelation is that God doesn't hold back you have to make each day count you have to know that the process is nonlinear and that that 7x7 cycle is there to teach you that real Redemption is an emergent quality and you have to know that God doesn't hold back and therefore you can always build bigger vessels and the key to doing it is through the breaking the beautiful central sacred myth that lies at the heart of our Torah cosmology begins with God's desire for relationship and because of course our relationship is premise on separation you only have relationship with other and if you can't relationship with yourself but think about how you conceptualize it since all relationship is built on separation so God who in the beginning was all withdrew and created nothingness and into that nothingness that separateness God shine one ray of divine light there to be received by the vessels prepared that were God's will to allow for a relationship except what happened that did one ray of light was so pure so powerful that it shattered the vessels meant to receive it and that as they are ease all the great mystic master tells us the rest of divine and then human history is us picking up the pieces putting those vessels back together liberating the little sparks of divine light that are trapped in the broken places it goes a long way to explain why the world that we look around at is so broken except everybody who spends enough time thinking about it at least in my experience event so he comes to the same question about that myth why would God create a vessel that couldn't hold the light well truth is that question used to really bother me until I found a beautiful teaching from our master and teacher album Yaakov Cohen Cooke and I have to admit you that when I first read this I'm Amish danced around the Beit Midrash cuz Roth kook actually answers the question he says Lama bas Mira why does this breaking of the vessels occur this is Letitia ello who'd know tenant ela picot ha that God gives according to God's own infinite strength knowing that our capacity to receive is limited and why because if God had given according to our capacity to receive then God's goodness would have been limited by us and therefore God doesn't hold back God gives goodness without limit according to the divine measure and that's what happens that's what causes the shattering because we can't possibly be responsibly receive everything which God wants to give us except rough cook says when we're totally broken because when we're totally broken we rebuild our cells out of a desire to actually return to relationship with God and through that he's the created being the Nivea makes itself and we achieve a level of wholeness a touch of what it is to actually be a creator and that wasn't possible he says without the abundant outpouring of goodness on a level beyond our ability to receive it God doesn't hold back in order that we can cease to be a passive recipient of our life and we can be an active participant in creating it now this is a whole nother element of the Emunah which underlies our journey from Egypt to Sinai and look closely at the narrative there's a lot of breakdowns along the way you might think that this is a sign of a failed process you might think in fact looking at the whole biblical narrative destruction of the temples and all the suffering of our people for the last 2000 years of Exile you might think looking at the mess of the world is in today that this isn't going anywhere I've got news for you so long as you have faith that when things fall apart we can put them back together and in fact the act of putting them back together is not just a fixing of what was but actually increases our capacity to receive then you'll know that the process is building vessels out of our life actually is bound up with accepting the fact that things will break and that that's what makes us just a little bit more godly so here we are after Egypt or if you're looking out the window after the collapse of whatever the precone or world that we knew really was and we're deep in process looking to move from exodus to redemption from liberation to revelation let's just review first step don't just count the days make the days count make those small commitments to yourself follow through on them build that muscle which is your ability to achieve by remembering that each day is an invitation to come into a new mode of relationship you and God you and your loved ones you and yourself and by the way like I'm a simple simple level set some goals people I promise you that those who emerge from this current crisis with bigger Kaling with bigger vessels will be those who have clear daily objectives and remember that the fear of following through on long process toward high goals is counteracted by that training in commitment so next you have to know that redemption is never a linear process yes move forward step by step don't forget though the secret of the number seven in other words the answer the question is God within me or not is absolutely whether you see it or not and last but certainly not least remember that God doesn't hold back when things break down when you look at a broken world when you feel broken yourself it's an invitation to put the pieces back together and you have to have the faith that that very act is what can make you into someone who can receive more than they ever knew which is certainly a little taste of redemption before the thank yous I just want to remind everyone that anything I've said here in any goodness it may have possible in the world this dedicated the Aluna shmatte of Miriam Rivka about mortified Dava Cohen emiram shimonita our 31st see our site and she and those who dedicated this show should just be blessed by all their efforts so I want to thank everybody I want to thank first of all the people give their hard-earned money to help make this show happen to keep it free and widely available I want invite you to join them you can go right now to my website Jewish story dot CEO in the upper right hand corner you'll see a box there it says be a patron you can click on it make a little bit of per pod cast support or if that's too much of a commitment at this stage I'm happy to take dedications be in touch with me at Rob Mike or its gmail.com or Rob Mike Feuer on Facebook and I'll send you the details of how you can be it they're gonna show in honor of someone here today or someone who's no longer with us I want to thank the Land of Israel Network press the Land of Israel calm for creating a platform that allows me to reach so many fantastic people I want to thank the partes Institute p AR d es or KL we're building an educational institution that gives me the privilege of teaching so many wonderful jews and i want to thank you for listening I'm Rob Mike