What are the false beliefs and habits of mind and burdens that we would do well to wash away in a flood, to destroy and erase and leave no trace of inside us? As we see in the Noah story this week, even God had need of such destruction on occasion.
Yes, we generally want to turn towards all parts of ourselves with kindness, not to try to “get rid of” parts that seem shameful, but to welcome them and treat them with compassion so that we can hear their stories and understand them and allow them to shift as needed. But as we work with these parts, one of the things we discover is that they hold false beliefs or burdens that cause great suffering to them and to us and, by extension, to the people around us, beliefs about ourselves – that we don’t matter, that we are unlovable or unworthy or not deserving of compassion, or that we are separate and don’t belong. These beliefs are not equivalent with the parts themselves, but burdens that they carry, imprinted on them, unconsciously taken on, often early in life, sometimes as an inheritance from family or the surrounding culture.
These false beliefs are the hamas, the violence or robbery, that God brought the flood to erase. They do violence inside us, causing an atmosphere of self (and other) aggression, judgment and harshness. They rob us of the joy and compassion that we need to live as whole human beings. And they rob us of access to our true Selves, to our divinely implanted truth, to the soul that God is always breathing into us. They lie to us; they make us feel “less than” when we are in fact made of gold.
And so yes, it is important to wash these burdens away – as the waters of the flood cleansed the earth – to erase them entirely from inside us, allowing the water of our tears to serve as a purifying healing agent. Not that such cleansing is a simple or quick process. The rains of the flood went on for many days and moons, and afterwards, the earth required a long period of healing to recover. All change, even erasure, is slow and requires steady persistent work and patience, gradually chipping away at the beliefs inside us that seem so ‘true,” gradually beginning to notice and doubt and tear away, little by little, at their hold on us. This is a process of deprogramming of sorts.
Alongside the erasure, as in the story of Noah, there must be some salvation. There must also be the energy of preservation. All that erasure is for the sake of someone, is done in order to heal and cleanse and give new life to someone, to ourselves and to all the parts of us that have been suffering. Noah, the Torah tells us, was tamim, “pure” or “innocent.” We each have an innocent young child inside who desperately needs our help to be preserved, to be given safe haven inside us. Even as the storms of cleansing happen all around her, she needs to be protected, to be given a container built out of love and devotion that will shelter and hold her. It is for her sake that we do this cleansing, so that she may no longer suffer the harshness of hamas, of the cruel internal treatment that results from these false beliefs and burdens.
We don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. We let the water do its work, gradually washing away the hamas, always keeping an eye on our precious baby, the innocent pure remnant, hoping that, trusting that, when the earth dries again and we have found some peace, she can emerge into a life of greater wholeness inside and outside us.
Photo by Johannes Plenio at Pexels
