Ki Tisa | What Illusion Do You Worship?

 

וַיַּ֣רְא הָעָ֔ם כִּֽי־בֹשֵׁ֥שׁ מֹשֶׁ֖ה לָרֶ֣דֶת מִן־הָהָ֑ר וַיִּקָּהֵ֨ל הָעָ֜ם עַֽל־אַהֲרֹ֗ן וַיֹּאמְר֤וּ אֵלָיו֙ ק֣וּם ׀ עֲשֵׂה־לָ֣נוּ אֱלֹהִ֗ים אֲשֶׁ֤ר יֵֽלְכוּ֙ לְפָנֵ֔ינו

When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, the people gathered against Aaron and said to him, “Come, make us a god who shall go before us..."

Exodus 32:1

This week's Torah portion, Ki Tisa, includes the story of the Golden Calf, Moses coming down from the mountain with the tablets of the ten words and much more. When I told my daughter this morning that it's also about God's anger that leads to the slaughter of the people who built the golden calf, she asked, why do people read it then?

What came to me in that moment was, it helps me understand the covid pandemic and accept that there are so many different responses to it.

Torah is clearly not a fairy tale of how the world should be. It is the story of how it is. How it has been since the beginning of human occupation of the planet. Torah could be a journey inside the mind of God, if you relate to that. It can be a clear and powerful revelation of how karma and trauma unfold; how our choices and actions have consequences and impact that go far beyond what we can see or know. Torah can be a door to helping us understand who we are, where we came from and why we respond the way we do to everything.

And, in all this, the invitation is to find guidance for how to live the life we have been given, just once, this life. So too, with covid, the invitation is to find guidance for how to live the life we have been given, just once, this life. What do I do with the statistic that over 500,000 people have died from covid in the US?

Despite my own personal mistrust of corporate pharmaceutical companies and allopathic medicine in general, I have chosen to go the vaccine route. Lots of people I respect are choosing to not believe the statistics, saying deaths from many other causes are being attributed to covid. Some people see defying the statistics as an opportunity to recommit to their own freedom and/or their own lifestyle choices. Some people blame other peoples and nations and use this as an opportunity to close doors.

There are responses that flow directly from chosen spiritual paths. Some people bolster themselves from the fear by saying, "When it's my time, it's my time," embracing something that is Eternally Present and unseen, defying rules and requests from public health systems that have not inspired trust and confidence. Others see its message as clear evidence that science is the savior of our time.

And then, there are the responses to the responses. How do the Israelites in the desert so easily follow Moses' instructions to slaughter those who build the golden calf?

Here, Torah reveals the tragic cycle of fear, anger and violence. The Israelites are caught in fear. The fear travels up the mountain to where God and Moses are blissfully visioning  and chiseling a human society that eschews violence and hatred. The fear erupts as anger in Eternally Present. On the mountain of bliss, Moses finds the words to tame the eternal fires of anger. In that powerful moment of transforming anger back to love, Moses becomes an enlightened prophet. He carries the vibration of love, embodied in the ten vibrations of enlightened living.  But, sure enough, when he sees the people's maniacal dance of fear, the vibrations of anger and violence return to dominate his actions.

The Israelites' fear was triggered when Moses disappeared into the cloud over Mt. Sinai with what was unseen and Eternally Present. What is triggered in you in the face of the unseen eternally present coronavirus(es)? Looking deeply at our responses to covid, what can we see and understand about ourselves?

According to some of the 2,000 year old Rabbinic interpretations, the Israelites built the Golden Calf because Moses was six hours late coming down from Mt  Sinai, and they feared that he had deserted them.

When do you build and worship a Golden Calf?

It's not unusual for me to feel a whole range of disturbance when someone shows up even one hour later than I did for an appointment. Something very deep in me can get stimulated, depending on my relationship to the person, my state of mind, the ideas and judgments I already hold about them, so many factors.

What if I am in a crowd and we all are scared and hungry? And it's been six hours? What do you imagine would go on in your mind during those six hours? Anger, fear, anxiety, self judgment?  Both Nonviolent Communication and Buddhism work together to offer principles and practices that could have helped the people not jump to making a golden calf.

Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh often taught that "all perceptions are wrong." Perceptions, he taught, are how we make meaning of what we experience, and are, by their very nature, conditioned by the limitations of our sense organs, our history and our concepts. Today we add, by our trauma, our culture, and by our ancestral history.

Thay (as students of Thich Nhat Hanh call him) gave us a simple practice to use. Whenever we attach to one fixed way of evaluating something, we stop and ask ourselves, are you sure? And we keep asking, are you sure, until we are no longer sure.  So, in the case of the Golden Calf, we would stop and say, do we know Moses isn't coming back? Are you sure? Do we know Moses has left us here in the desert to die? Are we sure? Isn't there another possible explanation, is there another possible response we can choose?'

So where was Moses and why wasn't he back with the people?

Moses was up on Mt Sinai, communing with Eternal Presence, receiving the Ten Vibrations of Universal Law. In Hasidic teachings, Moses was in such yichud, unification, with Eternal Presence, that power differentials between them, and separation, were transcended. The Chernobyl Rebbe looks at the text and sees that Moses and Eternal Presence are reciting the Torah together. Their voices are one.

Moses reached the realization that this moment is the only moment. This is the consciousness that can bring a yihud between Eternally Present and a human. Moses had to forget the people below, had to forget his "role" as leader, as holder of power over the people, to experience this yichud. He was dwelling in the present moment, freed even from the concept of moment. When he left the mountain, his face was aglow, he was enlightened.

Torah is showing us how full presence is a necessary ingredient for connection. We can enter into "power with" relationships; relationships that are freed from notions of being "better than," "less than" or "separate from." Thich Nhat Hanh calls this being free from the three complexes: the complex of superiority, the complex of inferiority, and the complex of equality. In Nonviolent Communication, we aim for relationships where the flow of mutuality, each person's needs being seen and valued, is freely offered.

Moses stepped into this consciousness, a consciousness in which he fully entered into the experience of the moment, into yichud. Here are some practices that can set us in the direction!

Discerning Observation from Meaning

“The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence”, said Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti. Marshall Rosenberg was inspired by this when he taught "observing without evaluating "as the first step in the Nonviolent Communication process.

Here is how distinguishing between observing and evaluating unfolds:

We recognize how we are making meaning of something that is said or done. We don't judge ourselves; we step into awareness that we are making our own meaning because of our value system and history. Something happens, we have an experience, and we make a meaning of it. Humans are meaning-makers.

Without clarity, without the capacity to discern the meaning we made of something from what actually happened, we lose connection with the other person or the part of ourselves that chose an action. We lose connection to the present moment. We are lost in our own story. This is similar to what happens when someone is re-traumatized or their trauma is activated. We see this happening to the Israelites and the resulting frenzy of fear produces a Golden Calf, a false idol.

Here is a step-by-step practice to try when you get caught in judgments and stories that arise in fear, separation and despair.

Corralling the Gold Calf: 
A Nonviolent Communication Practice

• Step 1. Think of a time when someone was late or made a choice that you told yourself was a variation of " they let me down." Write down what happened.
• Step 2.  List all the stories/thoughts you told yourself about what it meant. E.g.," they don't value me, they don't value our friendship, they are inconsiderate. I should have known. Are they in trouble? I can't rely on them. They are inconsiderate. I am too fussy. " Note the difference between what happened and the stories you have about what happened.
• Step 3.  Don't judge yourself! Welcome the information flow. You are learning what's important to you. Give yourself empathy by looking at your thoughts and for each one, ask yourself, what am I feeling? What does that tell me about what's so important to me (what are my needs)? EG, I'm scared because I want to count on this person for safety and friendship.
• Step 4.  Sit with all the needs that you discovered are important to you. E.g., I want to trust I am valued; I want to understand if this relationship is important to them. Relationships and connection are so important to me.
• Step 5.  Revisit what happened. Do you see anything differently? E.g., I'm curious why I felt so upset. Or I'm curious what was going on for them. (No golden calf when curiosity leads!)
• Step 6.  Understanding what is important to you, do you have a request to make to yourself or to them?  E.g., to the other person, "I felt upset when you didn't arrive for an hour after I thought we agreed. Can you help me understand what happened?" To yourself, what was soooo triggering for me? Is this something that happened to me before?
• Step 7. Optional Vulnerability Practice: (ask the other person):  "Are you in a space to help me process what came up for me when I was waiting for you?" If you hear a strong yes from them, say: "Please stop me if you hear any blame because I want to understand myself, not blame you."While I was waiting, I made a meaning of what happened. I was constructing my own golden calves. I want to check with you if any of this is true for you: I felt so upset that I told myself you don't care about our friendship; or I feel so hopeless about our different ways of keeping time that I'm telling myself I don't know if we can be friends. Is any of this close to the meaning you have of what happened?Now listen!

A Poem for Ki Tisa

Ki Tisa also tells the story of Moses' enlightenment in a safe space in the cleft of a rock where he beheld the Eternally Present.

TOBAR PHADRAIC

Turn sideways into the light as they say
the old ones did and disappear into the originality
of it all.  Be impatient with explanations
and discipline the mind not to begin
questions it cannot answer.  Walk the green road
above the bay and the low glinting fields
toward the evening sun.  Let that Atlantic
gleam be ahead of you and the gray light
of the bay below you,
until you catch, down on your left,
the break in the wall,
for just above in the shadow
you’ll find it hidden, a curved arm
of rock holding the water close to the mountain,
a just-lit surface smoothing a scattering of coins,
and in the niche above, notes to the dead
and supplications for those who still live.

Now you are alone with the transfiguration
and ask no healing for your own
but look down as if looking through time,
as if through a rent veil from the other
side of the question you’ve refused to ask,
and remember how as a child
your arms could rise and your palms
turn out to bless the world.

— David Whyte