בְּהַעֲלֹתְךָ אֶת־הַנֵּרֹת אֶל־מוּל פְּנֵי הַמְּנוֹרָה יָאִירוּ שִׁבְעַת הַנֵּרוֹת׃
When you kindle, let the seven lamps give light at the front of the m’norah, the lampstand.
Numbers 8:2
Eternally Present gives these instructions for lighting the m'norah at the beginning of this week's Torah portion. Where do we find illumination as we wander through our lives? What life energies and experiences will light the way to a life of fulfilled promise? M'norah in Hebrew signifies that which comes from the awe and reverence we feel when we see ourselves as part of the vast, interconnected web of life. It frees us from being led by fear and anxiety in the encounter with immense suffering and the sense of powerlessness and uncertainty. In the wilderness of life, how can we draw on the sources of clarity and experience of wholeness that are available to us?
The menorah is a seven-stemmed candelabra. I learned this week from Torah teacher Emuna Witt that the seven stems represent the seven days of the week, the totality of our lives. The stem in the center is Shabbat, the day when we step deeply into peace from a sense of enoughness. We don't need to take anything from anyone else. We have been given enough. We invite all beings to our table and participate in nourishing all life. The three stems to the left are the three days that lead up to Shabbat, the years of our lives, week by week, where we work and produce and nurture. These times draw their energy and sustenance from the work and preparation and engagement with all that has been created. On the other side of the center stem, the last three days of the week, of our lives, draw from the nourishment of Shabbat. These days are illuminated by our collective dwelling in peace and valuing of all life.
This is the vision and the promise that can sustain us. In the Torah story this week, the mixed multitudes continue to wander and encamp in the liminal space between where people enslave other people and an unknown land which promises bounty for everyone. This is as true for us today as it was in Torah. There are places in our hearts and in the lands where we dwell where domination over others is justified and enforced. From moments of illumination we tumble to places where even killing of innocent children is accepted.
This week, Torah instructs us to illuminate the place from where we lead. Thousands of years later, we still struggle to leave the places that are plagued with ignorance, aversion and craving. To look toward and lead from the illuminated places in our hearts and societies.
In the story, the ancient people wander through the desert at the whim of a cloud. Eternally Present is in the cloud and they are instructed to move only when the cloud moves. Their anxiety is unrelenting. This is a powerful and disturbing metaphor for the impermanence and ephemeralness of anything we cling to. It's no wonder we are filled with doubt and turn to violence toward self and other.
Spiritual paths suggest that the way out involves knowing and trusting our own insights, letting them illuminate our path. Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh spoke to us often about clouds. One time, in the monk's meditation hall at Plum Village center in France, he looked at us and said, “I don’t have to have belief because I have insight. I have had the insight that I am a cloud.” This is the insight of interbeing, of how interconnected we all are. This insight brings us to an inner peace that leads to trust in nonviolence and communication to resolve even the most intractable differences.
When my father died I was living at the Elat Chayyim Jewish renewal retreat center in New York State. After the mourning period, I drove to Green Mountain Dharma Center, Thich Nhat Hanh's monastery in Vermont, to find where my father had gone. I sat and meditated for a few days, yearning, and even grasping, for my father to appear in the beautiful clouds over the Vermont retreat center. When it didn’t happen, I told one of the elder nuns, sister Susan, “I am looking for my father in the clouds and I can’t find him there.”
She said to me, “Don’t look for him in the clouds, look for him inside yourself.”
In this decade after the passing of both my parents, I recognize them more and more in me, as me. I found my father in myself. When I sit and tie my shoes in a certain way on a certain chair it is me as my mother. When I look at certain paintings and landscapes, I am looking with my mother's eyes. When I respond with super unskillful anger laden words, I know I am touching my mother’s pain as my own. This is a realization of interbeing.
I realized that my own healing is completely bound to healing any part of me that rejects any other part of me. Embracing my parents and ancestors in me, learning to look at them with the eyes of compassion, helps me understand how their joy and pain are my joys and pain. This is part of healing the ancestral trauma that I inherited, the unhealed wounding that causes me to lead from fear.
The practice from Thich Nhat Hanh that helps me bring compassion to all parts of myself and beyond.:
- I imagine my father as a five-year-old child. I hold my father in my arms as a five-year-old child.
- I imagine my mother as a five-year-old child. I hold my mother in my arms as a five-year-old child.
- Try this with parts of yourself you feel alienated from, and with other people!
The Buddha’s Last Instruction
“Make of yourself a light”
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal-a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire-
clearly I’m not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.
— Mary Oliver – The Buddha’s Last Instruction.