זֶ֣ה אַרְבָּעִ֣ים שָׁנָ֗ה ה’ אֱלֹקיךָ֙ עִמָּ֔ךְ לֹ֥א חָסַ֖רְתָּ דָּבָֽר
These forty years (in the desert), God was with you — you were not missing anything (Deuteronomy 2:7).
What would it feel like to inhabit such an emotional space, where we really feel we are not missing anything?
Our General Sense of Lack
Because we do spend a lot of time feeling that something is haser, missing, for us. We have a basic sense of lack, a hunger and a yearning for things to be different from the way they are, a core need not entirely met, like a hole in our belly that can never be filled, always looking and grasping for some way to fix things, as if the next solution will finally take care of what is missing, which it inevitably does not.
And sometimes the sense of lack is turned inward. We feel ourselves as essentially haser, lacking, inadequate, not whole, not doing things right, not smart enough, not kind enough, not mindful enough, whatever it is, something fundamental missing about us and our situation.
The Antidote: God is With Us
The Torah here suggests a way to approach this basic feeling of haser-ness, of lack. Hashem Elokekh imakh, lo hasarta davar. “Hashem, your God was with you. You were not missing a thing.” How does one come to a place of lo hasarta davar, of feeling that you are not missing anything? Hashem Elokekha imakh, by feeling that God is with you. When we really feel that God is with us, then we know that we are not missing a thing.
Divine Accompaniment
Unpacking this connection, we can focus first on divine accompaniment. Hashem Elokekha imakh, God was with you, Moshe says, through the whole journey of hamidbar hagadol hazeh, of this great and terrible desert. We, too, can feel this sense of accompaniment through our own great desert, the difficult journey of this human life, and know that God has been and continues to be present with us, right alongside us, through it all, like a pillar of cloud or fire by our side.
The One Thing We Need
How does this accompaniment help our feeling of lack, of something fundamentally amiss? The truth is that we are at times missing things, as the Israelites certainly were in the desert; they suffered from a lack of water, security, a home, and a clear path forward. They were missing things, and we are often missing things, too. Life is not perfect. But here is the thing – we can handle a lot, maybe we can handle pretty much anything, when we know that we are not alone. One key feature of trauma is this sense of aloneness, of an overwhelming experience that is experienced alone, without anyone to help you process and hold it. Even when things are very rough, if we know that we have someone by our side to support and accompany us, it makes all the difference.
And so rereading the phrase lo hasarta davar, not to mean that you were not missing anything, but to mean that you were not missing the essential thing, the one thing that makes all the difference, the one thing that when you don’t have it, you feel empty, no matter how good things are, and when you do have it, you feel full, no matter how bad things are. Call it love or connection or divine presence or accompaniment. There is one thing, davar, that helps you feel complete, and you already have that. You were born with that, born with unconditional divine love. God is here with you right in this moment and God is whole and overflowing with blessing and love. When you are aware of and aligned with that fullness and never ending flow, there is indeed nothing missing. Lo hasarta davar.
God Within You
Hashem Elokekha imakh. God is with you. We can take this one step further to understand imakh not just as “with you,” but “within you,” inside you. God resides within you, in the mishkan, the dwelling place, inside you, in the nekudah penimit, that innermost point that was planted in you long ago, your deepest resting place, in the middle of your body, where your own piece of the divine connects to the larger divine energy outside you. In this place, there is indeed nothing missing, nothing wrong, all is well and whole and complete and pure. Neshama shenatata bi tehora hi. The soul that you planted in me is pure. This is your true self, this place of completeness. And from this place, you can feel the truth of: Lo hasarta davar. I am not missing anything. I am complete and whole inside myself. Everything I need is right here.
Holding Both the Lack and the Completeness At the Same Time
And now, returning to the sense of lack in you, to the sense of yourself and your life as incomplete, to the hunger for something more, we can learn to hold that ache together with the sensation of wholeness in the divine. We can offer the parts that feel this essential lack the company of the divine presence that lives inside us.
Like Young Lion Cubs
In the end of bentching (Grace After Meals), we quote a Psalms verse: kefirim rashu vera’evu vedorshei Hashem lo yahseru kol tov. “Young lion cubs suffer want and are hungry, but those who seek the Lord” lo yahseru, from that same root, haser, “do not lack any good (Ps 34:11)”. “Young lion cubs suffer want and are hungry” – those are the little ones inside us that do feel there is a lack, something missing in the world that they desperately need. We can feel them crying out inside us, like young lion cubs, hungry for love and attention and security, a giant hole of wanting in them, always something missing, some lack. We can allow ourselves to feel that AND (translating the vav here as “and” instead of “but”) at the same time, as the verse says, dorshei Hashem lo yahseru kol tov, “those who seek God do not lack”, are not haser, “any good,” at the same time, we also have inside us the ones that seek and are connected to God, and when we feel into that, we know there is nothing missing, and we can hold both of those at once, both the hungry young cubs and the divine place inside us that knows only completeness, holding them both at once so that the young cubs can feel the calming influence of our sense of wholeness in our connection to God. We can feel both the divine and the animal/human parts of us at once, both the infinite and the finite together, the restlessness of the wanting and the calming of the divine place, letting them co-regulate. We do feel wanting and missing, and we also have the capacity to feel connected to God and whole, both at once, letting them speak to each other.
Waters of Repose
And so we make our gradual way to a calm place. In Mizmor LeDavid, too, we speak of lacking nothing – Hashem ro’i, lo ehsar, we say. God is my shepherd. And therefore I am not haser, I lack nothing (Psalm 23). One of the things that the divine shepherd does for us in that psalm is to bring us to mei menuchot, to “waters of rest” and repose, of menuchah. When we are aligned with the divine, the divine shepherd can act within us, so that we can bring our parched parts towards the waters of rest that will fill them and calm them. We have such a strong sense of lack sometimes, of things needing to be different, of ourselves as not enough – we can touch all of that and then bring all those little thirsty sheep, or maybe they are still lion cubs, bringing them all to the divine mei menuhot that is at our center, the resting place, like shabbat, where there is nothing left to do or to fix, no lack, no incompleteness. We can bring them there and let them rest there, floating in those calming waters, trusting and relaxing into the sense of enoughness. Nowhere to go, nothing to do. Lo hasarta davar.
Approaching The World From a Place of Sufficiency
Of course there is also work to do in the world. In the end of the parsha, Moshe reminds the people of their conquest of the giants Og and Sihon. This is how it is. When we feel we are enough, that there is nothing missing, we have a new confidence and empowerment in our activities in the world. Everything we need is right here, and as we move out into the world with that mentality, the giant obstacles before us are indeed much easier to face. From a place of sufficiency rather than deficiency, they fall of their own accord. You got this. You have everything you need to handle this. We take with us the waters of repose and we engage in the world from that unbothered place of trust and wholeness.
Photo by Andrea-Piacquadio at Pexels
