The Midrash: Flying Up and Running Backwards
A midrash is told in the name of Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi that at Har Sinai, upon hearing each and every utterance of God, the people’s souls flew out of their bodies, and each time they had to be revived and returned. And, moreover, says Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi, at each and every divine utterance, the people ran backwards 12 mil, a long distance, and each time, again, they had to be returned to their place (Shabbat 88b). Flying upwards and running backwards, two ways of running away and not staying in place, not staying with ourselves as we are.
We Are Like That, Always Running Away
We, like the people at Har Sinai, spend a lot of time running away from where we are. We are restless, distracted, going in a million directions, like a snowglobe, shaken up and always moving, never standing still. We reach up to the sky, wanting to be more than who we are, or we turn away and hide, feeling small and unworthy. We are forever running away from ourselves, looking elsewhere, trying to fill a hole that cannot be filled.
I love this midrash because it normalizes this energy inside us. Yes, that is the way human beings will react to a job, to this new possibility of a covenant with God. They will run, first this way and then the other, trying to figure out how to do it right, never thinking that to stand still as they are is all that is required. We can allow this energy inside us, greet it and say hello to it – ah, yes, it’s you, that restless energy. I know you, even the midrash knows you. You always want to run. You never want to just stay where we are.
Practicing Coming Home
I think the midrash offers us, and the story of Har Sinai offers us, an opportunity to practice the return home, to notice the running and to pause and stand still, and to do it again and again. With each dibrah, with each utterance, says Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi, they ran away and came back, they ran away and came back.
We can practice noticing all that restless energy and letting it gradually die down, like that snowglobe, no longer shook up, all the snow gradually coming to rest at the bottom, our minds and bodies coming to some greater stillness. It’s ok to rest. You are enough as you are. You don’t have to climb up to heaven to get the Torah. The Torah was given on Shabbat, a day of rest, of standing still. It is in this resting place that we become open to receiving God’s gifts. We thought we had to run around, but God just wants us to stand still and be present and receive.
Standing Still
The giving of the Torah is known as ma’amad har sinai, ma’amad, meaning “standing,” because this was an experience of standing still; we receive revelation in such stillness, vayityatzvu, standing as still as a matzevah, a statue, or as still as the mountain before us, that rooted and stable in ourselves.
Notice what happens when we pause and stand still. Ach tov vahesed yirdifuni. “Goodness and kindness chase after me,” we say in Mizmor ledavid (Ps 23). I once heard an interpretation of this phrase from Julie Kaminsky: These good things, they are always running after us, but we miss them, we don’t notice them, because we are also busy running, often in the opposite direction. If we pause and stand still, we can turn around in our stillness and let them catch up, let them reach us, let them in, let in the tov (“goodness,” also understood as a code word for “Torah”) and the hesed (loving-kindness) that are wanting to be part of our lives.
We can practice the return to this stillness. We can notice when we leave, naming it – ah, there is that restless energy again – and then return, like the Israelites returned, again and again, returning to our place of stillness, returning to our center.
Finding the Center: Left, Right, Then Center
What we are returning to each time is indeed our center, that point deep in the middle of our body, our nekudah penimit, that is always at rest and connected to the divine. Sometimes it is hard to find that center, and maybe that is part of what the Israelites were doing with their running. They ran first in one direction, and then in the other direction. And then they returned to center. That’s how we find center sometimes, we feel our way to the middle by checking out both sides, like in yoga, going all the way to the left and all the way to the right and then back to center, to stillness in the middle (an insight of Wendy Solon in another context).
It’s like the end of the Amidah or kaddish (a point brought to my attention by Saralyn Elkin). We bow once to each side and then return to our center, arriving home. Or like the lulav. We shake the lulav in all directions during Hallel, and then, when we get to the name of God, we come back to center. That’s what this is about, finding that still center place where God can meet us. All that running about won’t do it. We need to keep coming back to stillness, coming back to home. That’s where God meets us.
We Don’t Do It Alone
This is hard, this return, and it’s important to realize that we don’t do this work alone, on our own. We are helped, we are drawn back to it by some greater force, like a magnet. Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi describes it this way: each time the people’s souls flew up out of their bodies, God rained down a reviving dew that had the messianic capacity to awaken the dead. God was loving them back into their bodies, into their full vitality and aliveness. And each time they ran backwards 12 mil, God sent ministering angels to walk them back, to whisper in their ears encouraging words – you can do this. God believes in you. All you have to do is return to yourself, return to center, stand still. You are whole just as you are. Don’t doubt yourself. Return.
And so we return, again and again. We abandon ourselves, we run away, we get distracted, we feel incapable, and then we get buoyed again by these whispering voices, by this gentle caressing dew. We don’t do this alone. We are continually supported and encouraged in subtle ways through our lives. Maybe sometimes we don’t notice it or trust it or are too busy to take it in, but it’s always there. As they do each Friday night for shabbat, the ministering angels are ever ready to walk us home. And maybe, too, we are all ministering angels for one another.
Har Sinai was both a communal and an individual experience. In our stillness, we can do both at once, as you might feel sometimes in the silent amidah in shul, each person on their own and yet all together. The description of Har Sinai is full of that double language, sometimes using the singular and sometimes the plural, often in the very same verse, as if to express this dual reality, that this is both an individual personal experience and a joint communal one at the very same moment. It’s like the paradox of the words Zakhor and Shamor both being said at the very same moment, bedibur ehad. There is a miraculous element here – a multiplicity that is both separable into different parts and at the same time whole and unified. When we come into stillness, when we return home to our center, we return to a connection to ourselves, to God and to each other all at once, and we remember that we belong here just as we are.
Photo by Min An at Pexels
