Bemidbar | Beginning Again in the Space Between Chaos and Order

oוַיְדַבֵּר יְהוָה אֶל־מֹשֶׁה בְּמִדְבַּר סִינַי בְּאֹהֶל מוֹעֵד בְּאֶחָד לַחֹדֶשׁ הַשֵּׁנִי בַּשָּׁנָה הַשֵּׁנִית לְצֵאתָם מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרַיִם לֵאמֹר׃

And the Eternal spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai IN THE SECOND YEAR AFTER THEIR COMING OUT OF THE LAND OF EGYPT, IN THE FIRST MONTH

Numbers 1:1 (In caps, Tr. Rashi, 10th century, France)

This is the beginning of the fourth book of the five books that comprise the written Torah. A year and one month has gone by since the going-out (exodus) from the-place-where-people-are-enslaved (the mitzrayim of the mythic Egypt) and ruled by life-alienated (pharaoh). The people have gone out, but to and from where? What is this "midbar" where they now wander, and about which this book of Torah is named in the Jewish tradition?

Is this midbar a state or place of exile or of opportunity? Today the meaning of b'midbar that speaks to me is "in the place where words and things originate. " So much of the Jewish narrative is built around this uncomfortable place of not-knowing being a state of  "exile." We humans are meaning-makers. We want to make meaning of our suffering and our wandering. We want to make meaning of the beauty and gifts we are given. It is unbearable, as Hannah Arendt said, to live without any sense that there is meaning to our lives.

“...we, and I mean humans, are meaning makers. We do not discover the meanings of mysterious things, we invent them. We make meanings because meaninglessness terrifies us above all things. More than snakes, even. More than falling, or the dark. We trick ourselves into seeing meanings in things, when in fact all we are doing is grafting our meanings onto the universe to comfort ourselves. We gild the chaos of the universe with our symbols. To admit that something is meaningless is just like falling backward into darkness."

― Benjamin Hale, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, (p.184)

Judaism, like Buddhism, calls upon us to face scary truths, like the stark truth of danger and vulnerability when we don't know if we are free or enslaved, safe or in danger. And we don't know. Not just in this place in Torah; but in the continuing Torah, story, of our lives. We are always in the place where word, thought, thing, all formation, originate. We are born into already-created narratives, and create new ones moment to moment,  for meaning, belonging, safety and comfort.

Where has this led us to, in the world today?

"Say their names," is the rallying cry in the wilderness of Torah and in the wilderness of America. I speak of the racial wilderness that is America, the false narrative that refuses to see what we truly must see if we are to ever progress toward the promise of full humanity. The reality of white police killing foster children and young fathers in my own home state of North Carolina.

And I say the same for Israel, the home of the Jewish people. What we must see, what we must stop turning away from, the reality of young Jewish boys marching in the streets of our beloved City of Peace, shouting, death to the Arabs.

We are in a time globally where human society has lost its way. Destruction of the natural world, violence between people and individual suicides are out of control. We are in the midbar, wandering in the place between shedding old destructive ways and finding a new clear path forward. Can we look to our traditions for wisdom and guidance?

שְׂאוּ אֶת־רֹאשׁ כָּל־עֲדַת בְּנֵי־יִשְׂרָאֵל לְמִשְׁפְּחֹתָם לְבֵית אֲבֹתָם בְּמִסְפַּר שֵׁמוֹת כָּל־זָכָר לְגֻלְגְּלֹתָם׃

Lift up the head of the whole Israelite community by the clans of its ancestral houses, listing the names, head by head.

Numbers 1:2 (Tr. Maimonides, the Rambam, 12th century, Egypt)

Torah instructs us here to re imagine the entire organizing principle of the collective so we truly leave behind the life-alienated places of enslavement.  Count every name, create a system where everyone belongs and everyone's contribution has meaning. Return to the midbar as a place of Beginning Anew.   This place of not knowing is really our place of discovery.  The formless Godding energy that created us, freed us and led us, has led us here. The way forward to the Promised Land is to surrender old narratives that led to enslavement and subjugation.

"In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself, in a dark wood, where the direct way was lost. It is a hard thing to speak of, how wild, harsh and impenetrable that wood was, so that thinking of it recreates the fear. It is scarcely less bitter than death: but, in order to tell of the good that I found there, I must tell of the other things I saw there."

These famous lines, narrated by Dante, open Inferno (I.1–2) and are the allegorical plane on which the meaning of Dante's Inferno unfolds. Dante's Christian path, like the Jewish path from which it arises, finds meaning in life by restoring Godding to the center.  As this week's Torah portion makes clear, this is not just a physical rearranging. Re-souling is needed.

In the Torah portion, the people have arrived in a placeless place, the dark wood, with Eternal Presence in their midst. They have built the mishkan, the indwelling place for carrying Eternal in their midst. Yet still they are lost. What else do we need to do to reimagine ourselves and our societies so that, as the great sage Maimonides said, the lifting of every person's head is the uplifting of the whoile society?

In my town of Asheville, and throughout the United States, there is a cry to reimagine public safety by abolishing the police and replacing policing with a system that restores safety by valuing all life. Can we shift our perception of the wilderness we are in from seeing it as an unwanted exile to welcoming it as a cleared space for newness and reimagining?

Torah tells us, over and over, that it is in the wilderness, where we receive Torah, the instructions of wisdom and guidance. In Buddhism this is called beginner’s mind.  As Suzuki Roshi wrote, “In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few.”

A beautiful teaching from the ancient rabbinical sages of the Talmud is that we ourselves should become the midbar, the wilderness (Thank you to Rabbi Sari Laufer for this). This is embodying the beginner’s mind.  Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes this about the wilderness:

"The wilderness is a place of silence where you can hear the voice of God. The wilderness is a place away from the distractions of towns and cities, fields and farms, where you can focus on the presence of God. The wilderness is a place where you realise how vulnerable you are: you feel like sheep in need of a shepherd. The wilderness is a place where it is easy to get lost, and you need some equivalent of a Google-maps-of-the-soul. The wilderness is a place where you feel your isolation and you reach out to a force beyond you."

NVC: Making meaning without blame or shame

As individuals and as societies, how do we build our capacity to let go of old ways of thinking and maintaining security that, we see now, is costing our very survival?Nonviolent Communication helps us do the inner work of transforming meaning-making away from blame and shame to opening our vision to new creation. We shift from conflict to shared dilemma, from a model of "either me or you" to a model of "us."

NVC, like all the paths, recognize that it's scary to make meaning of our suffering without blame or shame. We have turned to blame and shame to protect us from the vulnerability of the wilderness. NVC offers tools and practices for finding meaning when we realize we are lost in the dark wood.

The first step is to  recognize that I am lost — without connection or clarity. This is NVC as an awareness practice. Moving through the day, I observe my body, heart and mind. I use my observation to become aware of how I am. AmI tense or relaxed? Am I responding and reacting to situations in the way that brings me into connection with myself, with others, and with the values I hold dear in the world?

What do I need, moment-to-moment, and are those needs being met? If not, I trace back to when I felt out of sorts. What happened? What did I observe?

What needs of mine were met or not met when that happened? And now, recognizing that, what do I want to do about it?

Because NVC is about showing up with compassion in the world, I usually want to begin by giving myself self empathy.

I pause, take a slow breath, and say to myself, in a gentle tone,

Oh, when I read that email, or remembered that I hadn't heard back from a friend, or read a newspaper story, I felt tense, angry , hurt, scared.

I take some time to hold and embrace every feeling that comes up.

I slowly discern my feelings from my thoughts about them.

Oh, I am blaming or shaming because I'm feeling lonely and upset.

I return to my feelings and the disconnect from the needs I value.

I really value this friendship. I want to understand why we have broken apart in this way.

This is returning to my inner experience, instead of letting my energy flow out there into blame.

This is using the NVC model to make meaning of what happened and how I feel about it, without resorting to blame or shame.

The Buddhist Path Out of Suffering

This also is the first noble truth of the Buddha. To recognize where I am at in a moment of ill-being.  Dukka, the sanskrit word for ill-being, or suffering, is what Marshall Rosenberg called a life-alienated state of being. In this moment I am cut off, alienated from life, from the energy that supports life.

I am in the wilderness. I am ruled by an "inner" or "outer" Pharoah.

The Dalai Lama explains why the Buddha began his teachings by speaking about suffering. Years ago, I sat amidst 5,000 students n Dharamsala, India for 10 days of Tibetan New Year's teachings in the palace courtyard of the Dalai Lama .  “You would think,” he said, “that starting with the truth of suffering isn't a good place to start.” He chuckled and said, "not so compelling," in his delightful pithy English.

“But,” he went on, “if we don't start by acknowledging that what is going on is suffering, that we are suffering,  we won't have the motivation to find a way out of suffering.”

We are lost in the wilderness by our narratives of blame and shame, not knowing how to count and value all life.  The good news is that in the uprootedness itself we can find creativity, hope and a world of new possibilities.