For my son Medad, who is living into his name
Two Scenes of Prophecy
Our parsha has two contrasting scenes of an ecstatic prophetic experience. In the first (Numbers 11:24-25), Moshe gathers 70 elders to the sacred Tent, the mishkan, outside the camp. God then takes some of the ruach, the holy spirit that is upon Moshe and places it upon the 70 elders. They prophesy on that day, and, according to the midrash, do not continue to prophesy after that (Sifre Bamidbar 95).
Meanwhile, back in the camp, there are two people, Eldad and Medad, who prophesy on their own (Numbers 11:26). These two people, who, unlike the 70 elders, are named, these two people decide to remain in the camp even though they are among those invited to the gathering. They remain in the camp and the divine spirit, the ruach, comes to rest upon them there and they prophesy on their own. The midrash says that, unlike the 70, Eldad and Medad continued to prophesy until the day they died (Sifre Bamidbar 95).
The Difference
I invite you to feel into the difference between these two experiences of the divine. In the first, Moshe is at the center and God’s spirit is coming through him and pouring out to the others who surround him, like a funnel or a filter. There is an experience of the divine here, probably a pretty intense one, but it is mediated and contained. Basically, we all get to participate in Moshe’s experience of God. I’m not knocking that. We should be so lucky. But still, just noticing that it is not your experience; it is someone else’s that you share in for a moment. There is safety here but also limitation and maybe some sense of it being impersonal, generic, not directed particularly at you, a loss somehow, the loss of your own fulfillment, the loss of something which you cannot yet even touch or know, what your own soul is capable of.
By contrast, what happens with Eldad and Medad? The Torah takes the time to name them each separately – shem ha’ehad . . one person’s name was Eldad, veshem hasheni, . . . and the other person’s name was Medad – as if to emphasize their individuality, their fully matured independence. They are each standing on their own ground, each whole in and of themselves, equals. While the 70 elders make a circle around the one, higher up Moshe, receiving divine spirit through his mediation, Eldad and Medad stand side by side as equals, receiving prophecy on their own, without mediation, through their own soul capacity.
Your Own Authority
Can you feel that difference in your body? Instead of looking outward to some external authority to find divine wisdom and truth, there is a turning inward to find God inside yourself, a direct unmediated line of access. You are your own authority, you have your own resources inside you, your own way of connecting to the divine.
It’s not that others aren’t helpful to you. Surely Eldad and Medad still needed one another for support. But support is different from dependence. We can support each other in finding the resources inside ourselves, in learning to trust our truth and stand firm in it, we can do all that without hierarchy or dependence. Taking a moment to lean into your own authority right now, to ground that in your body, in your feet firmly planted on the earth. Here I am, I am whole. I am strong. I have everything I need to connect directly to God. Not giving away your power, not giving away your opportunity to live this life as yourself.
Being Yourself
It’s like the famous Hasidic story about Reb Zusha of Hanipol. On his death bed, Reb Zusha was crying, and his students asked him what he was afraid of. He said – I am not afraid that I will be asked why I wasn’t Moshe. God already has a Moshe. I am afraid I will be asked – Zushaleh, why weren’t you Zusha?
We can spend our lives following others, trying to live into their divine spark, and sometimes that works for a time and is even helpful as a kind of modeling. But in the end, God desires us to be ourselves. I would say stronger, not just desires, but actually needs us to be ourselves. Without our unique contribution, something is terribly missing in this world, a hole where we were supposed to be, like a symphony with one instrument missing.
Staying With Yourself
Claiming ourselves in this way takes tremendous courage. The pressure in the other direction is very strong, both internally and externally. I picture the crowd of elders going off together to the Tent and I can feel the pressure Eldad and Medad must have felt to go along with them. Maybe friends and respected teachers are passing by, calling out – hey, aren’t you coming? It’s going to be great! This is not bad peer pressure. That’s what’s confusing. Sometimes everyone else is doing something that’s actually fine or even good. But something inside tells you it isn’t quite right for you. Vayesha’aru bamachaneh. They stayed in the camp (Numbers 11:26). They stayed. To stay with yourself, not to abandon yourself, even to go to a holy place. To stay in your own camp, to trust that your way is also a way, to trust the ruach, the spirit of God in you.
Vatanach aleihem haruach, the spirit came to rest upon them, the Torah says. Rest. God comes to us when we are at rest, when we stay with ourselves, when we rest inside ourselves, when we slow down enough to let our own divine spirit fly back and return to us. We’ve been running around looking for it for a long time. Vayesha’aru. They stayed. Staying where you are and letting it find you. It’s right here.
Self Sustaining
When we do that, when we stay, we become self-sustaining. We discover we are already connected to this abundant divine resource inside us. We are plugged into our own source of nourishment, and that makes us feel content and secure and confident. That’s the difference. The 70 elders, they surely had a great experience for that moment. For that moment when they were receiving from Moshe’s divine spirit, it must have been truly unbelievable. But then what? Velo yasafu. They did not continue. That was it. They had not learned to do it on their own. Once the connection to Moshe was unplugged, there was no more access. It was an experience of dependence. Now sometimes, especially early on, such experiences are important and necessary. We need models, we need to know what is even possible. But if, long term, there is only dependence, then it will be temporary and we will not be fulfilling our potential as independent divine creatures. Moshe is not fundamentally different from any of us. No one is. We were all created betzelem elokim, in the divine image.
Till The Flame Goes Up On Its Own
In a way, the parsha begins with this message of empowerment. Speaking to Aharon about the lighting of the menorah, the word that’s used, beha’aletekha, literally means to cause to go up or rise (Numbers 8:2). The word is not lehadlik, to kindle, but to cause to go up. Rashi famously says here that Aharon’s job was to kindle each light until the flame would go up on its own, ad shetehe hashalhevet olah me’eleihah, me’eilehah, from its own self, from its own resources, no longer dependent on Aharon for light. I wonder if you can feel that me’eilehah feeling in your body, me’eilehah, from your own self; your internal flame has the capacity to rise up on its own, making use of its own resources, its own direct connection to a never ending source. Feeling that sense of being internally resourced, self sustaining, rising up like a flame from that strong base.
Lock Them Up
Such empowerment can be perceived as radical or dangerous or antinomian – for us to be strong in ourselves, to have our own independent connection to the divine and to trust it, to live by it. And it does threaten authority. We can hear that in Yehoshua’s reaction to Eldad and Medad – Adoni Moshe, kela’em (Numbers 11:28). Lock them up, Yehoshua says to Moshe. Lock them up. We are constrained in this way from the outside and also, through socialization and conditioning, from the inside. We have indeed learned to lock them up, to lock up the parts of us that are too strong or independent or confident, that have their own way and their own truth. Out of fear of disconnection or rejection or exclusion, we have learned to lock up our souls, our divine truth, not to stay with ourselves, but to conform, to follow the crowd. And sometimes maybe that’s appropriate. Maybe. But it is dangerous in its own right, so dangerous.
The Danger of Locking Them Up
Because there is so much at stake here. There is the loss of ourselves, the loss of the person we were meant to be in the world, a loss of potential and brilliance and manifestation like the stomping out of an exquisite never-to-be-seen-again flower. Can you feel how sad that would be?
And there is also the danger of relinquishing our independent moral compass. Writing after the holocaust, Carl Jung cautioned that handing over our individual authority to a group with a single mass mind in blind obedience is exactly what leads to such horror and cruelty, and that the antidote is this kind of individuation, taking responsibility for ourselves as individuals with our own access to divine truth (The Undiscovered Self). Our world, today as ever, requires us to each have our own inner authority.
Our Need For Support
But don’t worry. We don’t do this work alone. On the contrary, note that Eldad and Medad are a pair. And not just a pair but a rhyming pair, a duo, Eldad and Medad, like twins, as if they are mirrors of each other, like the Proverbs verse, kemayim hapanim lapanim, “as face answers to face in water, so does one’s heart to another (Proverbs 27:19).” We grow into this kind of spiritual independence together, by facing each other and reflecting one another’s hearts, like angels calling out zeh el zeh, “one to the other,” seeing and pointing out each other’s lights, and, when those lights get dimmed or snuffed out, as happens again and again in this life, helping to rekindle them until they rise up again on their own, me’eleiha, knowing that potential is always there. It’s ok. We need each other. We need support and guidance and friendship and mentorship. What’s important is that we don’t forget that we also always have our own light, our own ruach, our own spirit, our own authority, never relinquishing that God given gift.
Imagine All The People
Imagine what a beautiful world it would be if everyone could truly flower into their own brilliant potential. This is the vision that Moshe himself holds in response to and in contrast to Yehoshua – don’t lock them up, he says. If only there were more such souls upon whom God’s spirit rests (Numbers 11:29). If only the world were full of independent spirits who were deeply resourced in their internal connection to God. Let a thousand flowers bloom. Let each one be themselves. That is ultimately what God wants, the world full of a thousand brilliant lights. This is a messianic vision, a vision of what we are aiming for, where we are headed, both collectively and personally, what is possible. As the prophet Yoel says of the end of time– “After that, I will pour out My spirit, my ruach, on all flesh; Your sons and daughters shall prophesy; Your elders shall dream dreams, And your youths shall see visions (Joel 3:1).”
That is the vision we hold even as we live in a more limited world, the vision that every person has a light, that every person holds this potential for prophecy and for deep intuitive connection to the divine, that we each are a flower that wants to bloom. As my eldest son, whose name happens to be Medad, as Medad put it, there is here in the Eldad and Medad story a tiny taste of redemption, “a 2 out of 72” taste. Letting that little two taste fill you and inspire you as you move back out into the 72 world.
Photo by shu lei at Pexels
