Matot and Masei | Transformation from Possession to Connection

 

וַיִּֽחַר־אַ֤ף יְהֹוָה֙ בְּיִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל וַיְנִעֵם֙ בַּמִּדְבָּ֔ר אַרְבָּעִ֖ים שָׁנָ֑ה עַד־תֹּם֙ כׇּל־הַדּ֔וֹר הָעֹשֶׂ֥ה הָרַ֖ע בְּעֵינֵ֥י יְהֹוָֽה׃

Eternally Present was incensed at Israel, and for forty years made them wander in the wilderness, until the whole generation that had provoked Eternal displeasure was gone.

Numbers 32:13

 

Matot and Masei are the names the ancient Rabbis gave the last two chapters (parshas) of the book of Numbers/ BaMidbar. As this fourth book of Torah closes, after forty more years of wandering in the midbar (a wilderness),  the people still have not developed the capacity to see or enter the Promised Land. The book ends abruptly, without resolution.

What is the clear seeing that continues to elude them?

The promised occupation of the land will be another human disaster unless the people experience a transformation to a completely new paradigm of possession.  Over and over the desert wanderers have struggled unsuccessfully to connect into holy relationship with Oneness, land, water, animals, food, each other, other peoples and themselves. They have feared and resisted connection to their own destiny and to other peoples. Out of harmony with Eternal Presence, they wandered forty more years through the wilderness of fear and separation.

They have not learned to listen or to connect to the Oneness at the heart of the world of form in which we live. Experiencing ourselves as a facet of the Oneness frees us from possession into interconnection.

In Torah, Moses alone, the most enlightened human in the Book, can see into what is promised. He has seen and realized the promise of "Israel" - an intimate connection to Oneness,  revealed in the name "Israel/god-wrestler," given to his ancestor Jacob. But neither Moses nor Jacob, nor anyone by the end of the Torah story, transforms into an Ivri (Hebrew)  a boundary crosser, ready to enter into the Promised Land.

In Matot, Eternally Present invites Moses to ascend Mount Abarim, the Mountain of Boundary Crossing, from where he sees into the Promised Land. But he is not at the level to enter or possess it. Abarim, related to Ivri, Hebrew, is the Mountain of Transformation. Moses, like his brother Aaron, sister Miriam, and the entire generation that came out of enslavement, never realized the transformation needed to "come into possession" of the land that is promised:

וַיֹּ֤אמֶר יְהֹוָה֙ אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֔ה עֲלֵ֛ה אֶל־הַ֥ר הָעֲבָרִ֖ים הַזֶּ֑ה וּרְאֵה֙ אֶת־הָאָ֔רֶץ אֲשֶׁ֥ר נָתַ֖תִּי לִבְנֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵֽל׃

וְרָאִ֣יתָה אֹתָ֔הּ וְנֶאֱסַפְתָּ֥ אֶל־עַמֶּ֖יךָ גַּם־אָ֑תָּה כַּאֲשֶׁ֥ר נֶאֱסַ֖ף אַהֲרֹ֥ן אָחִֽיךָ׃

Eternally present said to Moses
Go up these mountains of Abirim/the Mountain of Transformation/ Boundary Crossing and see the land that I am giving to the children of Israel.
When you have seen it,
You will be gathered to your kinspeople, even you, as Aharon your brother was gathered;
Since you rebuild against my order in the wilderness of Zin
When the community quarreled
To treat me as holy through water before their eyes

Numbers 27:12-14 (Tr. Everett Fox and RW)

And here we sit thousands of years later, still in the wilderness. We witness in horror and despair the destruction of our planet, divisions and violence in the name of religion, caste and beliefs. Like the spiritual ancestors of Torah, we are stuck behind boundaries we have inherited and perpetuate from the trauma of our ancestors and the limitations of our biology.

What does Torah offer to us to free ourselves and our thinking from the boundaries between where we are and the promise of transformation to a land where milk and honey are abundant and shared?

Transforming from Possession to Connection

What is often referred to as the central prayer in Torah, the sh'ma (listen) , is our call to come into right relationship with connection and possession:

Sh'ma – Listen
Yisroel – God-wrestlers
*Adonai – Connection
Eloheinu – Our ancestor's god
Adonai – Our connection
Echad – Oneness

Listen earthlings, all of you who wrestle with what to worship or not worship, listen into connection, connection to the ancestors, to the land, to each other to ourselves. Cover your eyes and listen so deeply that every fibre of your being connects with every fiber of all other beings. In Oneness there is no possession, only connection.

Create lifestyles and rituals that remind you as you go in and out, and sit, stand, walk and lay down, remind you of Oneness.

This is a core Jewish prayer from Torah herself, repeated every day, over and over.

*In the sh'ma prayer, the unpronounceable name יְהֹוָה֙  that-to-which-we-listen, has been pronounced as Adonai, and conceptualized as "Lord," at least since the Middle Ages. In Torah, though, the adonim are the connectors, the sockets, at the foundation of the mishkan, the encapsulation and dwelling of Oneness in the world of form. The people moved forward through the wilderness only when they carried the mishkan, the vessel of inner knowing of Oneness.

Every spiritual path offers us stories, beliefs, rituals and daily practices to connect us to our true nature of Interdependence and Interbeing. When we slow down and listen, as individuals and as collective bodies, we can touch our own interconnectedness to our blood, spiritutal and human ancestors.

Connection to Ancestors

Last week I visited the Chinese exhibit in the Brooklyn Museum. The bronze (Nao) ritual bell pictured here is from the early Western Zhou dynasty, circa 1050 to 771 BCE.

Ancient ritual bronzes:

"In China, ancestors were believed to exert continuing influence on the fate of the living and required appropriate offerings of food and wine. Bronze ritual vessels, often produced in sets, were used from the Shang (circa 1600 to 1050 BCE) through the Han (206 BCE to 220 CE) dynasties in ceremonies held in temples of elite families. It was thought that these ritual performances would continue in the afterlife, so bronze vessels were also placed in tombs."

Today we know from the study of world history and from the fields of trauma how our ancestors continue to speak to us through our bodies,  emotions, cultures and systems. Religion is one of the core transmissions from the ancestors. This Chinese bell ritual is one example of how humans have built listening to the voices of the ancestors into our daily lives. The Jewish sh'ma prayer is another. The practices in Buddhism, of visualizing holding your parents in your arms, visualizing them as children and newborns, is another.

Through these practices we can deepen our own connection to where we come from and heal unseen and unspoken trauma that we have inherited and unwittingly carry forth in destructive ways. We can shift from our heads to our hearts, to a new way of listening to and expressing what is important.

Connection to Hearts

This week's Torah story, Matot, begins with Moses speaking to the heads not the hearts of the tribal power centers:

וַיְדַבֵּ֤ר מֹשֶׁה֙ אֶל־רָאשֵׁ֣י הַמַּטּ֔וֹת לִבְנֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵ֖ל לֵאמֹ֑ר זֶ֣ה הַדָּבָ֔ר אֲשֶׁ֖ר צִוָּ֥ה יְהֹוָֽה׃

Moses spoke to the heads of the children of Israel, saying: This is what the Great Connector * has transmitted:

Numbers 30:2 (Tr. RW)

*As mentioned above, we are translating יְהֹוָֽה, the four letter word for Eternally Present, as The Great Connector, from the word Adon.

Moses goes on to tell the heads that fathers can nullify the vows of daughters, husbands the vows of their wives'. Torah never tells us or Moses anything about the vows. There is no connection to the intention or needs of the vowing hearts or the insight and intelligence carried in the vows. Thus continues the encoding of possession over other's vision, imagination and will.

As talking heads, the patriarchs of the tribes completely miss and exclude the voices and insights of women and girls.  Violence and warfare follow in a rampage of possession and domination over other peoples.

When we don't know how to connect to other's hearts, to the intentions in the heart that  generate our actions, the result is separation and often, as here, harmful possessiveness.

Moses is still caught in dualistic separation thinking. He is not yet an ivri, a boundary-crosser who transcends duality and separation. He gives fathers and husbands agency over daughters and wives. His vision so far is a "Promised Land" that is out of harmony with the promise of freedom. The system he advocates for is perhaps the most fundamental human caste system, the paternalism and patriarchy that strips girls and women of their power. This is the result when we cut ourselves off from the nature of our shared humanity with others.

Marshall Rosenberg created Nonviolent Communication (NVC) as a way for us to learn and live listening in, leaning in, so deeply, that no matter what we hear, no matter how different from what we think or even value, we can hear and connect to the cry of the heart, to the  sh' ma, to the heart song behind people's choices.

With NVC, we come out of the duality of "agree" or "disagree", "approve" or "disapprove," "accept" or "reject." Our aim is to hear and connect to the stirrings of the heart. Vows are invitations into the heart. They don't need to be "broken" or "kept." We can use them to understand, “What is important to someone?” “What is important to us in our reaction to them?” They can be used to generate understanding and closeness.

To Marshall, and to Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, the intention behind vows and actions is ALWAYS to relieve suffering. We do what we do as an attempt to protect or heal us from suffering. We make attempts to meet the needs that cry out to us through our body, our feelings and thoughts. Our actions and reactions are generated by our needs.

The story ends in Masei, the companion story to Matot, and the ending of the Wilderness Book. Masei takes us through confusion, violence, learning, not learning, finally arriving at the place where the voices of the daughters are heard, the sister-daughters of Zelophehad.  Through their voices,  to which Torah returns to conclude the journey of the Israelites, we too can see the Mountain of Transformation. We glimpse a post patriarchal world with a new relationship to possession. This is a Promised Land where no one wins or possesses at the expense of another.

The final message of the example of the sisters/daughters of Zelophehad, women and children, is for us to listen to those who have been excluded from power, denied access and possession. Perhaps they speak a different language than the one we understand, making it hard for us to hear and embrace their empowerment. It falls on us, then from our own inner empowerment, to listen in deeply to their hearts, to what is behind oaths and vows. We listen for the wisdom and aliveness beyond the words. We find shared vision and partnership, so we can move down the other side of the Mountain of Transformation, into a land of abundance.

NVC Vow Practice

• What vows did you make as a child? To be like your parents? To not be like your parents? To marry? To never marry? To be loyal to your people? To go far away from your people?
• What needs were your vows meeting then? What needs were you attempting to meet then (these may be different or the same)?
• How have you continued to live these vows today?
• What needs are met by continuing to live these vows today?
• What needs are not met by continuing to live these vows today?
• What universal values, values that you embrace, do you hear underneath other people's vows?
• What can you do to transform your fear and aversion into curiosity and partnership? Can we partner, as the Sister-Daughters of Zelophehad did, so that our inheritance of wealth and power supports rather than threatens others ' access to wealth and power?
• Can you find ways to speak your truth and values that can be heard as uplifting the whole, rather than trying to possess others?

 

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I'm dreaming of a city
It was my own invention
I put the wheels in motion
A time for big decisions

And on the first day we had everything we could stand
Oh and then we let it fall
And on a second day there was nothing else left at all
Oh what a day that was

Stop Making Sense, David Byrne
http://davidbyrne.com/explore/stop-making-sense/explore

 

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First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

Martin Niemöller