On the Seventh night of Passover the escaping slaves crossed through the parted sea. This night is called shvii shel Pesach — the seventh night of intimate communication. In Torah, as in many traditions, seven signifies a cycle of our lives, ever-spiraling with evolutionary momentum.
Since the second night of Passover, after the last full moon reenactment of a movement from enslavement to liberation, we've been counting through the aspect of life called chesed by the Jewish mystics, translated as compassion.
The parting of the sea is a supreme act of chesed. It signals that there is hope and support for any of us who want freedom from what enslaves us. As our great prophet and leader Martin Luther King said, the arc of the universe bends slowly toward justice.
The Hasidic tradition teaches that the parting of the sea after seven days of wandering signifies entry into the inner stage of liberation.
The parting of the sea is the heart breaking open, making space for everyone and everything who has been left out. It is an evolutionary act, the arising of compassion out of the place where we have been constricted. The earth opens up to care for the safety, well being and justice of those who have been left out and othered.
And then...
And then the sea swallows those still stuck in constriction, just as the seas of hatred, fear and violence rise up and consume everything affected by constricted hearts. So the journey is not over.
In our world today, as in the time of the ancient ones, we are called upon to rediscover new ways of living within our broken hearts.
A core practice is to learn to work with fear. Buddhist teacher Tara Brach shares that fear is life loving life. Fear arises because something precious of life is threatened. Evolution calls us to embrace the fear, let it speak, let it tell us how precious life is, how precious is whatever aspect of life is sounding the alarm.
This practice of allowing the sea to break open, allowing our hearts to break open, is the opposite of pharaoh consciousness. It is the birth of a new narrative, a narrative that tells us that the way forward is into and through the broken hearts.
On the first night of Passover we broke the middle matzoh, the matzoh that represents the middle way between overwhelm and apathy, between ignoring my own needs and ignoring the needs of others. The children are sent on a search to find and restore the brokenness. Now on this last day of Passover, we celebrate the matzoh as the bread of liberation. We are filled with hope that everywhere in the world people are coming together to regenerate human connection, the health and aliveness of earth and a path that will lead us to unitary consciousness.
Opening to Fear
A Practice From Nonviolent Communication and Buddhism
Begin by sitting in a quiet place. Bring to mind something that is generating fear in you. Feel the strong sensations in the body that tell us that fear is present. Allow the sensations as fully as you can. If it becomes too much for you, do the practice taught by Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh:
Hold the fear in your arms and rock it as you would a newborn baby. Just bringing loving compassionate presence to the body feeling fear.
Once you have established or reestablished yourself in an energy that can hold the fear, make space for the fear to speak to you. What is so loved by life that is being threatened? Is it love or safety or comfort? Health or intimacy? What is it that life is reaching for and not finding in this moment. What is the fear about? [Here is a list from Nonviolent Communication that may help you connect to the energy behind the fear.]
Once you have received the message from the fear of what is so precious, hold it in your arms the way you would hold and soothe a newborn baby. Let yourself be held by the energy of love or safety or respect. Let yourself be surrounded by that energy.
Find this beauty inside fear and in your broken heart.
Rest there, or if you want to continue, turn yourself with curiosity toward another person, perhaps someone with whom you have had difficulty. Enter their broken heart of fear. Imagine what it is that is so precious for them that they too are caught in fear.
Hold their fear and the life energy locked up in it as you would hold a newborn baby.
I Wasn’t One of the Six Million: And What Is My Life Span? Open Closed Open
By Yehuda Amichai, translated by Chana Bloch
I
My life is the gardener of my body. The brain—a hothouse closed tight
with its flowers and plants, alien and odd
in their sensitivity, their terror of becoming extinct.
The face—a formal French garden of symmetrical contours
and circular paths of marble with statues and places to rest,
places to touch and smell, to look out from, to lose yourself
in a green maze, and Keep Off and Don’t Pick the Flowers.
The upper body above the navel—an English park
pretending to be free, no angles, no paving stones, naturelike,
humanlike, in our image, after our likeness,
its arms linking up with the big night all around.
And my lower body, beneath the navel—sometimes a nature preserve,
wild, frightening, amazing, an unpreserved preserve,
and sometimes a Japanese garden, concentrated, full of
forethought. And the penis and testes are smooth
polished stones with dark vegetation between them,
precise paths fraught with meaning
and calm reflection. And the teachings of my father
and the commandments of my mother
are birds of chirp and song. And the woman I love
is seasons and changing weather, and the children at play
are my children. And the life my life.
2
I’ve never been in those places where I’ve never been
and never will be, I have no share in the infinity of light-years and dark-years,
but the darkness is mine, and the light, and my time
is my own. The sand on the seashore—those infinite grains
are the same sand where I made love in Achziv and Caesarea.
The years of my life I have broken into hours, and the hours into minutes
and seconds and fractions of seconds. These, only these,
are the stars above me
that cannot be numbered.
3
And what is my life span? I’m like a man gone out of Egypt:
the Red Sea parts, I cross on dry land,
two walls of water, on my right hand and on my left.
Pharaoh’s army and his horsemen behind me. Before me the desert,
perhaps the Promised Land, too. That is my life span.
4
Open closed open. Before we are born, everything is open
in the universe without us. For as long as we live, everything is closed
within us. And when we die, everything is open again.
Open closed open. That’s all we are.
5
What then is my life span? Like shooting a self-portrait.
I set up the camera a few feet away on something stable
(the one thing that’s stable in this world),
I decide on a good place to stand, near a tree,
run back to the camera, press the timer,
run back again to that place near the tree,
and I hear the ticking of time, the whirring
like a distant prayer, the click of the shutter like an execution.
That is my life span. God develops the picture
in His big darkroom. And here is the picture:
white hair on my head, eyes tired and heavy,
eyebrows black, like the charred lintels
above the windows in a house that burned down.
My life span is over.
6
I wasn’t one of the six million who died in the Shoah,
I wasn’t even among the survivors.
And I wasn’t one of the six hundred thousand who went out of Egypt.
I came to the Promised Land by sea.
No, I was not in that number, though I still have the fire and the smoke
within me, pillars of fire and pillars of smoke that guide me
by night and by day. I still have inside me the mad search
for emergency exits, for soft places, for the nakedness
of the land, for the escape into weakness and hope,
I still have within me the lust to search for living water
with quiet talk to the rock or with frenzied blows.
Afterwards, silence: no questions, no answers.
Jewish history and world history
grind me between them like two grindstones, sometimes
to a powder. And the solar year and the lunar year
get ahead of each other or fall behind,
leaping, they set my life in perpetual motion.
Sometimes I fall into the gap between them to hide,
or to sink all the way down.
7
I believe with perfect faith that at this very moment
millions of human beings are standing at crossroads
and intersections, in jungles and deserts,
showing each other where to turn, what the right way is,
which direction. They explain exactly where to go,
what is the quickest way to get there, when to stop
and ask again. There, over there. The second
turnoff, not the first, and from there left or right,
near the white house, by the oak tree.
They explain with excited voices, with a wave of the hand
and a nod of the head: There, over there, not that there, the other there,
as in some ancient rite. This too is a new religion.
I believe with perfect faith that at this very moment.
— Yehuda Amichai, “I Wasn’t One of the Six Million: And What is My Life Span? Open Closed Open” from Open Closed Open, trans. by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld, published by Harcourt, Inc. Copyright © 2000 by Yehuda Amichai. Reprinted by permission of Hana Amichai.
Source: Open Closed Open: Poems (Harcourt Inc., 2000)