There are two solid mineral structures in this week’s parsha, and they can be understood to represent two different approaches to dealing with anxiety.
The first is the Golden Calf. The people become anxious and worried when Moshe appears to be delayed in coming down from the mountain – we don’t know what happened to him, they say, and he is the one that’s always saved us, so what will we do now? Their response to this anxiety is to build a shiny golden structure and declare – here is the god that took you out of Egypt; no need to worry. We made it look all nice and shiny (like a social media picture); therefore life is all nice and shiny. This strategy is a form of denial, a banishment of the messy uncertain truth along with its accompanying uncomfortable anxiety, sending them both outside oneself and hiding them under the cover of a gold facade. It is an active and externalizing strategy; there is no sitting with the shakiness inside oneself, but instead immediately moving into action in the world and “fixing” the feeling.
By contrast, the second of the two mineral structures offers a radically different approach. The second structure is the tzur, the rock, where God and Moshe meet in the most intimate divine encounter of the Torah. God places Moshe in a tiny crack in the rock and passes over him with all of God’s goodness. If we think of this second rock as God’s alternative suggestion for how to deal with anxiety – how to construct a true refuge, as opposed to the false refuge of the golden idol – here is what we see:
First, the crack represents the anxiety itself, with all its shakiness and brokenness; how does one handle such anxiety? By entering directly into the crack, into the brokenness, into the discomfort itself, by not running away to build something, but by staying with it, actually dwelling in the crack, in the shaky sensation itself.
Moreover, the rock encounter makes it clear that what our shaky anxious parts need most is holding. They need to be placed, like Moshe, into a strong holding environment, the steadfast loving embrace of the Rock of Life, of our life force, tzur hayenu. While the Golden Calf strategy was to push the anxiety out, to externalize, here, the anxiety is allowed and embraced. Instead of alienation and exile, the antidote to anxiety here is connection, the feeling of connecting to a larger whole, the tzur, which represents God and all of life and the universe. To be placed inside this whole is to be reminded of our essential belonging in this world, to be reminded not of distance as with the golden idol, but of deep connectivity and intimacy; we reside inside the tzeror hahayim, the bond of life; we are embedded in a network of love, like the love and compassion and forgiveness that pours over Moshe at the next moment, as God reveals God’s essential goodness in the thirteen attributes.
It is this goodness that we are bound up inside of. To show our anxious parts this holding environment is to allow them to lie in a bed of love and connection, to really rest here, in contrast to the desperate and ultimately untrusting activation involved in building a golden calf. Vayityatzev imo sham. God stood with him there, very still, with no rush and no agenda, just being together, allowing our shakiest parts to know that they too don’t have to run and act, but can stand still in the warm embrace of Presence.
There is no resolution and no solution to anxiety. It is a natural component of human vulnerability in an uncertain world. When we try to get rid of it, to build a replica of our world that is happy and golden, denying and exiling the anxiety, we abandon the most vulnerable parts of ourselves in the service of a god with no cracks who cannot hold us. The alternative, the Torah shows us, is not to try to build our own rock, which is here today and ground up into dust tomorrow, but instead to rest in the eternal Rock whose doors and cracks are always open to us.
The cracks in this Rock are perhaps both ours and God’s (a thought that came from my friend Lynnie Mirvis)– though what that means on God’s side we can’t say exactly – openings of brokenness and longing, of anxiety and loneliness and a sense of incompleteness. These are uncomfortable, often painful cracks, to be sure, but they are also portals to connection, pathways to knowing that we are held inside the Rock of Life. Let us rest in this Rock and know that we belong.
