(Originally published in 2022)
On the cusp of leaving Egypt, the Israelites receive their first commandment as a nation, the mitzvah of Rosh Chodesh, of marking the new moon as it emerges each month. This mitzvah signals the importance of hidush, of renewal, of believing in our own capacity to constantly renew and become new people. The whole Torah depends on this capacity, on this core belief that we are not our history, that we are never stuck, that we can change and release and renew.
This was an essential teaching for a people moving out of slavery. God was freeing them from physical slavery, but they could only really be free if they could imagine themselves as new people, if they could somehow release the conditioned habits of thinking about themselves as slaves and imagine themselves afresh, freer and larger than they ever thought they could be.
That’s how it works for us, too. Our past experiences, our history, our trauma, our wounds, our childhood, even our parents’ and grandparents’ trauma – it all functions to limit our vision of ourselves and of what is possible for us in this life. The Torah’s insistence on our capacity to renew ourselves is a way of asserting that we are not doomed to remain in the prison of this constrained historically-conditioned vision, that we can release and reimagine who we are.
It is like going through a door, leaving behind the tightness of the room we were in, and entering out into a wide open space of possibility. Indeed, in this same commandment concerning Rosh Chodesh, the Israelites are also commanded with regard to a doorway – they are to take the paschal lamb and use its blood to mark their doorposts, to mark the passageway from one way of being to another way of being, from the limited conditioning of their past to the open potential of something new.
Let us think through what this transition might have felt like. What were the Isarelites’ limiting beliefs coming out of slavery? Here is what I imagine for them – see if any of this sounds familiar – thinking of yourself as small and subservient, thinking of others as more important and more powerful than you, feeling a sense of being a second-class citizen, that others count or matter more, feeling that your worth depends on your work product, not on your essence, that you are not enough as you are, that you have to earn your worth, not feeling that you deserve redemption or God’s love or compassion, excessive fear of authority and disobedience, and the need to constantly please others in order to feel safe.
These – or others of your own – are the limiting beliefs that make up the walls of our identity, our struggles, our ego, our wounds. We live inside the house built out of these walls.
But there is a door out of this house of bondage, and our ancestors in Egypt marked it for us so that we can see it clearly and find it. It is a door lakhem, to you – hachodesh hazeh lakhem, this renewal is for you, to you – to your truest self, to your fullest potential. Who would you be without all your history and struggle, without all the wounds and baggage of your past? Can you sense the possibility of your own largeness, your unending capacity for love and freedom and spaciousness and peace? What would it feel like to fully inhabit that sense of self?
Going through this doorway is not something you force or make happen through your own effort. Vehotzeiti, God says – “I will take you out.” It is God who draws you out and through the door, gently nudging you forward, with love, to something new, to some larger possibility of who you might be, towards yourself, towards your own potential as a human being with a divine spark. You can’t make this happen, but you can allow yourself to be drawn through the door in this way, allow the flow, allow the grace, the unfolding, the manifesting that is wanting to happen inside you. Your soul is wanting space; God is calling you to leave your cramped quarters, to step out into the open air and view the endless stars of the sky, yourself among them.
This going through the door is not a one time movement. Do not despair when you inevitably end up back in your smallness, back in your house with the constricting rooms, back in your limiting beliefs and old habits. That is the way of the world. The moon waxes and wanes. Every single year we need to leave Egypt again. Every day, every moment, we are given the opportunity to practice. Thrown back into our smallness, we have to find the door and go through it again and again. We are lucky that the door is marked for us, that the Torah reminds us continually of the possibility of leaving Egypt, of leaving our narrowness, of our capacity for renewal and release and change even in the darkest times.
Yes, even in the darkest times. Be’eretz Mitzrayim, the Torah says – this commandment was given in the belly of the best, while they were still trapped in narrowness, in slavery, while the sky was still completely dark, as it is at the beginning of each month, on Rosh Chodesh. Even in that darkness, we remember the door, we believe in renewal, we remind ourselves that it is possible to emerge, to get out of our mitzrayim. The past does not have to dictate who we can become in this moment.
Photo by Amina Filkins at Pexels
