Naso | Paradox and Inclusion

וַיְדַבֵּר יְהוָה אֶל־מֹשֶׁה לֵּאמֹר׃ נָשֹׂא אֶת־רֹאשׁ בְּנֵי גֵרְשׁוֹן גַּם־הֵם לְבֵית אֲבֹתָם לְמִשְׁפְּחֹתָם׃ מִבֶּן שְׁלֹשִׁים שָׁנָה וָמַעְלָה עַד בֶּן־חֲמִשִּׁים שָׁנָה תִּפְקֹד אוֹתָם כָּל־הַבָּא לִצְבֹא צָבָא לַעֲבֹד עֲבֹדָה בְּאֹהֶל מוֹעֵד׃ 

Eternally Present spoke to Moses: Lift the heads (Naso)  of the Gershonites also, by their ancestral house and by their clans. Record them from the age of thirty years up to the age of fifty, all who are subject to service in the performance of tasks for the Tent of Meeting.

Numbers 4:21-23

 

Naso is the name of this week's Torah portion. The Hebrew word Naso is one of six combinations of letters in Torah that signify the call of Life Unfolding to the children of Israel to count themselves in the wilderness of Sinai. This is one of Torah's six words for calling us to consciousness and systems that lift up inclusion, make space for everyone to count, and build a free society.  Naso can be translated as the call to elevate our consciousness to the realization that building this new society co-arises and is dependent upon elevation of the collective consciousness.  As Albert Einstein reputedly said,  a problem that was created in a particular consciousness can not be solved in that same consciousness..

Rabbi Jonathan Sachs wrote in his posthumously-published text on the Book of Numbers:

The word Naso that gives its name to this week’s parsha is a verb of an extraordinary range of meanings, among them: to lift, to carry, and to forgive. Here though, and elsewhere in the wilderness years, it is used, in conjunction with the phrase et rosh (the head) to mean “to count.” This is an odd way of speaking, because biblical Hebrew is not short of other verbs meaning to count, among them limnot, lispor, lifkod, and lachshov. Why then not use one of these verbs? Why not simply say “count” instead of “lift the head”?

R, Jonathan Sacks, OU Torah

What is the specific flavor of Naso, the word for counting used in this week's portion? The Hebrew idiom designating “paradox” (נְשִׂיאַת הַפָכִים ) is from the same root as Naso. Literally, the idiom means “lifting opposites.”  We "lift opposites" by examining and bringing mindfulness to them. Thich Nhat Hanh teaches that when we bring mindful attention to something, we actually change it. Our choices and actions change when we realize things that appear to us as opposites actually contain and rely on each other. This elevates our consciousness to new levels of understanding ourselves and our world.

Paradox is the thread that ties together the meanings of Naso.

As this week's story begins, Divine Presence gives specific assignments to the families of the tribe of Levi, the priestly caste. These tasks are their opportunity to participate in building, carrying and caring for the communal hub where Divine Presence meets with the people as they wander through the desert, the ohel moed of the mishkan, the Tent of Meeting.

Rabbi Arthur Green, teaching the Chernobyl Rebbe, the Meor Eynayim (Tr: Light of the Eyes) connects each specific task assigned to the family of Gershom, and all the families in the desert wilderness,  to the inner transformative medicine they need to arrive in the Promised Land.  Each family carries a karma to heal, a piece of the Divine fallen spark to lift.  The healing of every family is the road to a collective Promised Land.

The parasha begins with the family of Gershom, assigned to carrying the curtains of the mishkan. Their healing, their tikkun, that brings all of us to a new freedom, is to touch the end of their yearning. In the midst of a grueling desert wandering, with unknown pitfalls at each turn, the inner work of freeing ourselves from yearning seems Herculean. And, if the Promised Land is the Land of Enoughness, this family's tikkun can lead us there.

Naso is a call to a consciousness that can embrace the  paradox of abandoning yearning in the midst of a journey to something better. Isn't yearning needed to motivate and inspire the people to keep going through the wilderness, to a land no one has ever seen? Yearning itself, in the monotheistic traditions, lifts,  carries and holds us.

A Buddhist story illustrates this paradox. An American Buddhist group arranged a meeting between a Korean Zen Master living in Providence, Rhode Island and a highly esteemed visiting Tibetan Buddhist Rinpoche (teacher). The Zen Master held out an orange, and asked the Rinpoche, what is this? The Tibetan teacher turned to his translator and there was much whispering back and forth. Finally, the translator turned to the Zen Master and asked, "Rinpoche is confused, hasn't the Master seen an orange before?"

If we see it as an orange, are we missing its nature of sunshine, water, the seeds from a tree? The fertile yearning of the cosmos that produced the orange? If we ignore that it is an orange, how do we live, feed our bodies, appreciate what is precious before us? Both take us deeply into interdependence.

This is the paradox of being neither attached to our perspective and concepts of things, to our limited experience,  nor ignoring what is true in our lives and experience. In the Torah portion we encounter the paradox of freeing ourselves from yearning so we can live freely in the present moment, appreciating what we have, and the necessity of yearning for that when we are so far from it.

Counting as a Call To Purpose and Mission

It is unfortunate that the words for counting in Torah are are used to justify calls to military action.  I can't see how my ancestors, marginalized Jews in Lithuania and Belarus, saw it that way, and I certainly don't. Rabbi Charna Rosenholtz suggests that each family's specific task from the desert to the Promised Land is a call to "willingness to lift our heads to be appointed to our purpose or mission in life."

Naso is not about armies or invasions. It’s about elevating human consciousness and interrelationships that hold Compassionate Presence in our midst. Buddhist psychologist Daniel Goleman recently asked the Dalai Lama, “How do we generate compassion?” He answered, “By defining and understanding yourself as an extension and in inter-connection with everyone with whom you share resources.”

Lift up your head, look around. With whom are you sharing resources? How can you expand your awareness of your interconnection with all of life? More than ever before we are interconnected globally and we can only deny this by keeping our heads down. How can we elevate our heads in this global era to generate a more compassionate way of encountering others and Ourselves?

Elevating the Collective

Naso also is a counting to advance the great work of the people-in-formation. For the ancient Israelites, that was the carrying of the Mishkan, a holy vessel that carried the Divine with them through the wilderness. In the United States today there is a great battle going on in relation to counting. We have representatives in our government who say openly that not everyone should vote. We have representatives in our government who say that not everyone should be included in a census. And yet Torah, over and over and over, in whose name many of these very representatives claim to rule, shows us six different ways to count to ensure that everyone is counted. We are called to actively build something new and different.

This is a crucial time for our own counting. How are we influencing and impacting  the systems we carry in  our midst so that everyone is counted? In the US, have you supported the For the People Act, creating, for the first time in the history of the United States, the possibility of everyone voting?

This week, I listened to Palestinian peacemaker Ali Abu Awad call to  both the Jewish and Palestinian people to move out of victimhood in the very midst of suffering and violence falling everywhere, and to stand for a new way of being together, sharing the land, ensuring a different future for everyone. This is naso. I am so moved by my Israeli friends who are in the streets crying in each other's arms, calling for an end to the violence and injustice of the Occupation, crying, "Enough." Enoughness is the Promised Land. It is up to us to go to the edge of our yearning to get there.

The Spiritual Battle

Naso is a call for everyone, every family, to be lifted and to lift itself. Torah calls us to a spiritual battle. In the Bhagavad-Gita,  the sacred Hindu text, Krishna speaks to Arjuna the prince. Arjuna is writhing on the floor of his chariot in the midst of the battle of life. He can't act. He is paralyzed by the paradox. He can’t make a decision. He doesn’t know how to be loyal to his own people and also at the same time to his own values of compassion and valuing all life.

I am reminded of a small group I was part of at one of the large Nonviolent Communication gatherings in Palestine a few years ago. Our small “affinity group“ met every day for intimate sharing of our experience. Our group included a Palestinian citizen of Israel, a Palestinian from the West Bank, an Israeli Jewish woman citizen of Israel, a Jewish American woman (me), and a Christian woman from the US.

One day in our meeting, our young Palestinian friend from the West Bank looked at us thoughtfully and said, "I don’t know if I’m supposed to have compassion for the Israelis." He spoke of his loyalty to his own people, belonging to his tribe of Palestinians living in an ancient village that was now “on the other side of the wall” from Jerusalem. And he spoke of hearing of the suffering of the Jewish people, and realizing how we all are suffering in the same way from the same situation.

He was wrestling with the meaning of Naso. Holding the paradox of love and loyalty to his own people and love and loyalty to all beings suffering everywhere.

May we all wrestle in this way and come out on the other side of violence, hatred and killing.

Addendum:

Not Ignoring The Paradox of Torah and Male Supremacy

וְהִשְׁקָה אֶת־הָאִשָּׁה אֶת־מֵי הַמָּרִים הַמְאָרֲרִים וּבָאוּ בָהּ הַמַּיִם הַמְאָרֲרִים לְמָרִים׃

He is to make the woman drink the water of bitterness that induces the spell, so that the spell-inducing water may enter into her to bring on bitterness.

Numbers 5:24

We can disagree and still love each other, unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.

—  James Baldwin

Naso goes on to challenge my own capacity for holding paradox. When does holding actions, words, beliefs, that are abhorrent to me, collide with my sense of honesty, authenticity and care for values I hold dear?

What do I do with passages, such as the one cited above? About women bearing the burden of patriarchy? In my encounter with Torah I don' t want to ignore very troubling and abhorrent collective rituals where women are counted.

Some say that, in the context of the ancient world, including women in any capacity of decision making was a step forward. Today, though, using the suffering and denigration of others as spiritual metaphor suggests an insensitivity and lowering of the head by which we can no longer abide. It pushes us away from Torah.

Is there a way that such disturbing texts can be used to lift our heads, to elevate us spiritually or otherwise? Or has time run out when it’s OK to ever use someone else’s oppression as a “teaching moment”?

In Nonviolent Communication, as well as Buddhism, part of our path is to prepare ourselves so that we can look deeply at what others do that disturb us and connect with the needs, the energies of life, they are trying to make manifest in their choices. This brings us face to face with the capacity of Naso, to lift our heads so that we can hold paradox in our consciousness.

The paradox of knowing that the transformative power of empathy and compassion is the strongest transformative energy. And at the same time admitting that we live in a world where we are all living under systems where one group dominates another and that group does not easily give up power. So when we do anything that suggests or humanizes as okay the actions of patriarchy, white supremacy, European supremacy, capitalist class supremacy etc., we very well may be reinforcing the very systems and consciousness that are antithetical to empathy and compassion.

And another paradox arises in this Torah portion and in the Torah in general. The paradox of valuing the spiritual teachings we can find in anything when we parse beyond the plain meaning of painful and harmful stories. How do we uphold the spiritual teachings embedded in the plain meaning of Torah that have been used for millennia to justify violence and supremacy over women, other tribes, even other castes within Judaism?

Today, I only know this takes me to the edge of my consciousness of paradox. Perhaps the best we can do is to turn to Rilke, who said, “Live the questions.”

Still I Rise

Maya Angelou - 1928-2014

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
’
Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.
Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
’
Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

From And Still I Rise by Maya Angelou. Copyright © 1978 by Maya Angelou. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.