This week, I want to explore the possibility that ga’avah (or gayvah), which means pride, is actually a virtue, and that it is an essential virtue that many of us sorely lack and need. Now of course I know that in certain respects pride when it turns into arrogance can also be a vice, but it feels like we have been so inculcated to avoid it that we have also lost a precious, life thriving sacred quality.
God’s Pride
I am thinking about ga’avah this week because of a phrase in Shirat Hayam, the Song at the Sea, the very first phrase: Ashira lashem ki ga’o ga’ah.(Exodus 15:1). I will sing to the Lord because ga’o ga’ah – God has risen up and up, has become proud and then more proud, from the root ga’ah, to be proud. What we say and sing of God, what we praise God for here, is pride, ga’avah, And not just pride, but a doubling of pride, ga’o ga’ah. (We can also see pride identified as a core divine quality in the alphabetical prayer Ha’Aderet Veha’emunah where the letter gimmel lists ga’avah, pride, and gedulah, greatness, among God’s most laudatory characteristics.)
Emulating God
You might say – that’s God, not us. God can be proud and it’s a virtue, but we humans cannot. For us there is only humility, bowing low. But what about the idea that we have a duty to become like God by imitating God’s characteristics? Indeed, in the next verse in this Song at the Sea, we say zeh eli ve’anvehu. This is my God and anvehu (15:2). That word ve’anvehu is unusual and one of the interpretations offered by the midrash is that it is made up of the words ani and hu, I and Him, I and God, and the instruction is – hidameh lo – be similar to God (Mekhilta deRabbi Ishmael, Shirah 3:11). Emulate God. Ani veHu. It’s you and God, a mirror, a reflection, a back and forth relationship, a connection that helps you know who you are and who you can become. God is your model. And so if God is proud, you, too, should be proud. Ga’o, ga’ah, doubled to include you both.
Remembering Our Pedigree
We are indeed a mirror of God. After all, we were created in God’s image. How seriously do we take that, that we are essentially pieces of God walking around on earth, that there is something divine about us, a reflection of this greater force beyond us that lives inside us somehow always, even in our lowest moments? It is told of the Hasidic Rebbe Shlomo of Karlin that he said: What is the worst thing the yetzer hara, the evil inclination, can achieve? It is to make a person forget she is the child of a king (Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim, Book One, p. 282). The biggest internal sin, in other words, is not remembering your own royalty. Pausing to take in how radical this statement is: usually we consider our inner critical voices – the ones that tell us we are essentially bad and worthless – to be true and almost divine, as if they have the higher moral ground in shaming us. But no, Rebbe Shlomo says here, if it’s denying your inherent dignity as a princely child of God, if it’s bringing you low and making you forget who you really are, then it is most assuredly not God, but the evil inclination.
We are so in need of this reminder of our divine worth. As the 14th century Persian Sufi poet Hafiz writes: “I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being (“My Brilliant Image,” I Heard God Laughing: Poems of Hope and Joy, rendering by Daniel Ladinsky). The astonishing light of your own being. When you are lonely or in darkness. Surely that is what God feels towards us, looking down and seeing our suffering, the way that we continually denigrate ourselves. “I wish I could show you the astonishing light of your own being.” Isn’t it true that knowing that about ourselves would alleviate a lot of our pain? It’s as if we are all these radiant points of light walking around the world wearing darkened shades that prevent us from seeing the light that we carry, so much light we don’t see or acknowledge. Maybe pausing to get a sense of that light in you, even if it is covered over by a thousand veils and clouds, even if it feels far far away, difficult to access, sensing even just an inkling of its radiance peeking through from deep inside you, wanting to come out and shine more brightly. This spark of divine light is your essence, your truth, not what the evil inclination tells you.
How Would It Feel
What if you were to take seriously your royal pedigree and walk with pride, to puff up like a peacock and manifest your colors, to puff up a little and then some more, ga’o, ga’ah, a continual process of growth, feeling that expansion in your chest, ga’o, ga’ah, to spread out and take more space, to say what you think with authority, not to doubt your truth but to give it voice, full voice, to shout it out from the rooftops, or better yet, like the Israelites who had lost their voices as slaves, to sing it out with joy. To truly sing with all your heart takes courage and confidence, like the singer Lady Gaga (see especially her performance of the American anthem at Biden’s inauguration), standing proud, head raised high, mouth wide open, your own divine song pouring through you, clear and strong and powerful in your confidence and dignity and sureness of who you are. Lady Gaga is who came to mind and then it occurred to me that the name Gaga is very much like ga’o ga’ah, an embodiment of this divine virtue of pride, to sing with pride, to step out into the world knowing who you are and never backing down from your own honor, offering it as a gift to the world, your own light shining as a reminder, an inspiration and an awakening to the lights of all.
What would it feel like in your body to inhabit that ga’avah, that pride, that honor, that dignity? Ge’ut lavesh, the Psalm says, God is robed in ge’ut, another form of the same root, here meaning something like “grandeur” (Psalm 93:1). God is robed in grandeur. We are so often cloaked in shame. Can you imagine being robed in divine pride and grandeur instead? If you really remembered your own majesty, how might you sit and walk and move and speak differently? How might you interact with others differently from this place? Can you feel how your own self respect would translate into greater respect for others, how the divinity in you is confident enough to be generous and overflowing, not stinting, but warm and supportive, both taking space and opening space for others? Can you sense the abundance inherent in this divine pride, ga’o, ga’ah, again and again, how it spreads and expands and encourages thriving everywhere it goes, like a ripple in a lake, circles upon circles of radiating honor and pride. Divine pride is not greedy, but generous.
Resistance
Checking in for any resistance coming up around your inhabiting of your own greatness. We all have these voices of shame and doubt and insecurity and fear, voices that say: Who do you think you are, to act so big and proud, to celebrate yourself and walk with your head held high? And sometimes, often, these voices pretend to be the voice of morality, perhaps parroting what you learned as a child – it’s wrong to shine, to take up space, to be too sure of yourself, to express yourself too loudly or strongly. You need to be humble and meek. Otherwise, you might make someone else feel insecure with the radiance of your light. Hide it, minimize it. That’s what God wants you to do, we believe, to hide your light, to shut it down, to be small.
God As Gardener
But is it? Is that what God wants? I ask you something, if you plant a flower seed in the ground, do you want it to only come up small, in pale dull colors, not too noticeable, to hide behind other plants and not show itself? Of course not. You want it to thrive and blossom, to be its full gorgeous self. Surely God is such a gardener with each of us, tending to us and wanting fervently for us to grow strongly and brilliantly into ourselves. As the midrash famously says, there is not a single blade of grass that doesn’t have an angel calling out to it – gedal, grow (Breishit Rabbah 10:6)! Surely we, too, have such angels, coaching us, encouraging us, supporting us, constantly whispering in our ears – gedal, grow! Be your fullest self. Stand up tall and blossom. Sing. Shine. Be proud.
As God said to us at the very start of the world – peru urevu umilu et ha’aretz. Be fruitful and multiply and fill up the land (Genesis 1:28). This is perhaps not just about reproduction, a quantitative instruction, but also a qualitative one – each of you, be large, expand, take up space, claim your potential, your greatness, the fullness of your divine spirit. Gedal. Grow.
The Pushback
But the thing is, often when we do take up that call and begin to expand and grow, those voices of constraint and suppression surface again even more powerfully and try to impede that growth. This is precisely what happened in Egypt. The people grew and blossomed, becoming numerous and strong, and it was this growth that so frightened Pharaoh and led him to enslave them (Exodus 1:7-11). The Metzarim, the narrow straits and shackles of Egypt, their whole purpose was to stop us from being big and tall and proud, to shut us down, to suppress our growth and our voice and our light, to subdue the largeness of our spirit. So too the chariots that pursued us to the Red Sea, their military prowess intended to frighten us into submission and smallness. We still feel that when we see military force in our streets.
There is this misguided force in the world that perceives our growth, our power, and our greatness as dangerous and tries by any means to shut it down. Maybe noticing that force inside and outside you, the way that it disempowers and denigrates you, trying to shame and frighten you into smallness, urging you to hide and to keep yourself tightly and safely squeezed into the box that society has constructed for you. Can you feel the tightness of that box around you, how it limits your ability to stand up to your full height, how it stops you from growing and expanding? You are like a giant oak tree stuck in a narrow wire cage. How can you possibly spread your branches, your wings? Or as the poet Hafiz says in another poem: “You are a divine elephant with amnesia trying to live in an ant hole (“The Sun in Drag,” The Gift: Poems by Hafiz, rendered by Daniel Ladinsky, p. 252).” Can you feel how uncomfortable and sad that is? A divine elephant trying to live in an ant hole.
God Calls Us To Freedom
How do we move out of that box, that ant hole, those constraints and shackles? In a way, that is the story of the exodus, the story of our liberation from constraints and subjugation, our reclamation of our greatness, of our voice and our pride and our ability to sing and express ourselves and walk with dignity. It is God who calls us into this freedom always, who ever desires it for us, modeling for us the self pride and self honoring that we need in order to thrive, continually calling us to inhabit that dignity and pride in ourselves.
This is hard for us. Sometimes we are like Sha’ul hiding among the baggage at his coronation or like Jonah hiding in the bowels of the ship, but God calls to us from there, too, from where we are, in our smallness, in our self doubt and insecurity and shame, encouraging us to wake up to our brilliance and participate in the divine manifestation for which we were born. As God says to us in the Song of Songs: “O, my dove, in the cranny of the rocks, hidden by the cliff, let me see your face, let me hear your voice, for your voice is sweet and your face is lovely (Song 2:14).” Come out, God calls to us. Show yourself. Shine your precious light into a world desperate with darkness and woe. Walk with dignity and pride, knowing you are the child of royalty. Take on some of My own gayvah, God says, My pride in being Myself, I share it with you. Be proud to be yourself. Cloak yourself in pride and majesty as I do and go forth with My love. Ever with My love.
Photo by Jill Wellington at Pexels
