This essay is dedicated to the memory of Sandy Cohen, z”l, who lived honestly, bravely and fiercely through what she liked to call the “bewilderments” (from Aviva Zorenberg) of this desert life. May her spirit find peace and rest and love with God.
The second of this week’s two parshiyot begins with a listing of the Israelite desert sojourns, 42 stops over the course of 40 years. The midrash offers a mashal, a parable, to explain this extensive travel log: It is like a king whose son was ill and he took him on a trip to a far away place in order to heal him. When they returned, the father began enumerating all their travels, saying – kan yashanenu, here we slept, kan hokarnu, here we were cold, kan hashashta et roshkha, here you had a headache.
The midrash goes on to offer a nimshal, an application of the mashal to the Torah’s context, which goes like this: So, too, the holy one said to Moshe – so, too, should you recount to them all the places where they angered Me, shehikhisuni (Tanchuma Masei 3, cited in Rashi without the nimshal).
Anger vs Care
All the places where they angered Me?! Anger? That’s not what the mashal was about! The mashal told a tale of a parent’s tender concern for a sick child, not anger over misdeeds.
It is here, in the slippage between mashal and nimshal, between the parable narrative and its Torah application, that the mashal does its work. The mashal is a kind of alternate divine version of reality, a dream vision of how God views things, a way of shifting the lens, lifting us out of the daily grind, even of the normal Torah narrative, to help us see things differently.
Because our everyday version of reality is one of anger and wrongdoing and punishment. This is the human register in which we normally live and in which the desert story has been unfolding. Hikhisuni. They angered Me. That’s how we understand our desert sojourn – how it has been described in the Torah narrative up till now – as a series of instances of our own sinfulness followed by divine anger and punishment. But the mashal offers an entirely different perspective – we are not sinful, but ill, and God is not angry, but lovingly accompanying us on a journey towards healing.
Our Habitual Turn Towards Judgment
Pausing here to come into awareness of the pervasiveness of our turn towards judgment, our deeply ingrained, often unconscious orientation towards constant evaluation, the critical judgment of ourselves and others, the assessment of fault and guilt and blame as a primary mode of thinking, the pressure to do the right thing, the sense of our badness and shame and the corollary habit of self punishment and harshness, not allowing ourselves love or kindness or compassion or grace, replaying again and again our mistakes, the many subtle ways we punish ourselves, the maybe not entirely conscious belief in a judgmental God and a judgmental universe.
I notice this habitual orientation in prayer sometimes. As I turn towards God, inevitably my first thought is– God will not want to be with me today because I have not been attentive or present or “good” enough. God must be angry. And then I remember – that voice is not the voice of God, but the voice of my own inner critic.
The Mashal’s Alternate Vision
There is another way of seeing things and the mashal offers us a glimpse into this other way, what I think of as the divine way. Which is this – that instead of anger and judgment, what stands at God’s core is love and care and compassion. Hashem Hashem kel rachum vechanun. When God describes God’s essential attributes, they are thirteen attributes of mercy, not anger. The question is not what we did wrong, but how much compassion there is for our suffering. God is less worried about assigning blame and more concerned with offering care. In God’s eyes, we are wounded, not sinful; we are in need of love, not anger or criticism or punishment. Would you yell at a puppy with an injured leg? That’s how God sees us, according to this mashal. It’s rough to be you, God says. I see that and I’m here with you, wanting you to heal. You aren’t bad, just hurt.
What happens if you shift into this mindframe? If you imagine God seeing you as a hurt puppy, or as a beloved child who is ill? Can you feel the compassion, the tenderness, the softness, the gentleness enter you? Oh, I’m sorry it’s so hard sometimes, God says. Lie down with me now and rest. Let me hold you. It’s not your fault. It’s just hard to be you right now. I care. Not – I judge. But – I care. I care that you are ill. When we are suffering, do we say to ourselves – I judge, or I care? Maybe some of that judgment can melt in the face of this warmer, softer substance, the golden light of compassion, letting it seep into your bones and organs and limbs, all the places that hurt and ache, letting them be touched and perhaps even a little healed by this soft light of divine care.
Never Fully Healed In This Life
It’s not that it’s all going to necessarily be so easily healed, our myriad wounds and illnesses. Surely some will, but perhaps we, like the little child in the mashal, will spend our whole 40 or 90 year journey in some way wounded. If the 42 stops represent the full span of our lives, then what can that faroff place of healing be other than the world to come, the final promised land, our destination in death? While we are alive, we are somehow never fully healed – better, yes, much better, so much growth and healing can happen – and yet we are necessarily never fully done in this desert life. The rabbis say that “no person leaves this world with even half of their desires fulfilled (Kohelet Rabbah 1:13) “ We are forever reaching, incomplete, dissatisfied, still not entirely well. It may be that it is only in the final release of death and the return to our Source that we can experience full healing and peace.
Along the Way, Accompaniment
Which is why, along the way, during all those stops through our lifetime, some more or less painful as we go, during all those 42 stops through the desert bewilderment, the mashal does not picture God as occupied in trying to fix or heal us. God is satisfied with accompanying us as we are, ill or wounded or broken as we are. This is so profound. There is a screaming absence in the mashal of any attempt by God to heal the child along the way; all that is offered is company: Kan yashanenu. Here we slept. Here we were chilled. When you slept, I lay down with you. When you were cold, I was cold with you. At the end of the day, that is the most loving thing we have to offer anyone in their pain, what God offers here – company. I will travel with you in your suffering. There is no agenda of healing here, and yet the presence itself is indeed healing in some way, gently, surreptitiously, without announcing itself, just by being here.
Our Pain Is Seen
“Here we slept. And here we were cold.” “And here – you had a headache” God sees and acknowledges our pains. So often we feel unseen in our suffering. We just want someone to notice and care. Just that. “Here you had a headache.” I knew you had a headache. I saw it and I was sad for you; I cared. Can you feel how much we want that, for someone to just say – I see your pain. I believe you.
Are We All Ill?
We are all this ill child in the mashal. How does it sit with you to imagine yourself as ill, to imagine all of us as ill? This is not to pathologize us, but on the contrary, what the mashal is doing here is to normalize suffering, to normalize the human state of woundednessl. That is how we walk through the long sojourn of our lives. We imagine that perfect health is possible, achievable, we imagine that other people are normal and completely healthy, physically and emotionally, but none of us escapes suffering in this desert life, none of us escapes emotional wounding or physical illness of one sort or another, some more, some less, but the state of humanity is perhaps an inherently broken state on this plane of existence. Illness is part of the human experience.
I am saying all of this not from a place of despair and quitting – certainly we still pursue healing – but from a place of dropping the sense of fight, dropping the rope in your tug of war with suffering, giving yourself permission to relax, accept and love yourself through your pain. It is part of who we are.
Which is precisely what calls for compassion, not anger, but compassion, great compassion; our brokenness, our woundedness, our suffering calls for compassion. And it calls for grief, too, the joint sorrow of our impossible human predicament. Can you touch that as well, the sense of joining in sorrow, like touching into a giant ocean of tears – it hurts but it also feels good, there is comfort in it, the comfort of joining, being together in it. We can’t fix it, but we can lie beside each other through the long chilly night.
Resting With It
It seems fitting in this regard that the first thing the mashal mentions that we do together on the journey is to sleep – kan yashanenu. There is so much rest here. We are given permission to put down all the tools and urgency, and just rest together. lying down next to the suffering child in you, stroking her hair, singing her a lullaby. That’s where the love is, right here, as you lie with her; let it well up in you and overflow. Such a sad suffering world sometimes. Not doing anything but resting with it, loving it and all the crazy precious broken people in it, including yourself, all of us lying together in God’s gentle caring embrace.
Hilltop View
It’s hard for us to see things this way in our gritty daily lives, to see the care and compassion that is here. But the mashal stands atop a hill looking down at the whole lay of the land, like an end of life survey, taking in an entire lifetime of events. What the mashal offers us is a version of what people have reported in a near death experience – a sudden flash of clarity about the divine light that suffuses our lives at all times. We thought we were alone in our suffering, but when we climb up into the dream-like hilltop vantage point of the mashal, we see that everything was and always is suffused with that warm glow of light; Despite appearances, this life in all its hardship is suffused with light.
Kan yashanenu. Here we sleep together. Right here, today, without being healed or better or entirely pain free, right here, as we are, we can rest together. Here we can love and hold ourselves and one another through the desert bewilderments of this life – as God does – slowly becoming part of that light that suffuses the world.
Photo by Susanne Jutzeler, suju-foto at Pexels
