Smelling the Whole Torah
Dear Friends,
It seems like anyone with a kid, maybe all of us, are a little overwhelmed at the transition from summer to fall. And in the bustle we probably forget that behind the scenes in the realm of stars and the hidden energies of our souls, the gyrations of Jupiter which hung over my sky last night like a candle, in the pull of tides and other gravities which work us inside out no attention necessary because we are water, entirely water - the world, we are being reborn.
A teaching on prayer from one of the Chasidic masters reminds us not to consider the creation as if it happened once and for all, five thousand or five billion years ago, but that God is making this morning in the same way she said “let there be light” on the first day of the world. It’s my dad’s favorite verse from the service of praise “This day God made, we should get down and boogie therein” (Psalms 118:24). He wakes up before most of the world, grabs a coffee from the first store to open its counter, and finds a comfy spot on the benches at the giant intersection of 71st and Broadway where eight streets collide and a horde of pigeons make their home amidst the pizza scraps. He says this verse then lights up his stogie and shares it with the birds.
There is imagery in the tradition of God making and destroying thousands of worlds before creating ours, this time, renewing creation daily without destruction. Or maybe there is daily destruction, the deaths that happen every day, the bugs and flowers returning to the earth, souls ascending at and before their time, the little deaths within us, children leaving home for good, what we’ve been that can be no longer, the burial of night, dark collections of water that bear testimony to what we die to each day.
Beginning work on one of Temenos’ major projects for the year – The Whole Torah, mystical coloring pages for kids of all ages - I opened my great-grandfather’s massive multi-volume encyclopedia of commentary “The Whole Torah” for the first time in years. Storage had swallowed my library. Home anew I inhaled the aroma of my grandparents' house in St. Louis where the set used to live and looked over pages I’d marked up and pages I’d never seen before. The commentaries are teaching us what the new images of the Torah will be, feminist, mysticism revealed, dug into the earth that we might know that we are not rulers of the planet but emanations of her mud. Adam, the first creature, literally, mud beast, compostoid, humus creature.
When god reaches out her big hands to take earth to form the earthling, she gathers sediment from all the corners of the world, so that when the creature expires, no matter where she is, the earth will make an opening to receive the being that had once come forth from within her. All the dualities are collapsible, and where they meet in images that are thin, these are the places of song where the soul begins to bounce because she has found her home. We are fashioned in twos, souls and bodies, night and day, life and death destruction and creation. So much tumult we put ourselves through, striving for only one side of life’s wholeness, when all around us, the birdies and the trees are offering to teach us how to pray. Pour forth the song of yourself, and when you’re entirely empty, make way for the transcendent to come through the cavity at the source of your birth.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Zach Fredman