Here, in the season of teshuva, of returning home to God and to our true selves, we read about another mitzvah of return, using the same root, shuv – hashavat avedah, the mitzvah of returning lost items to their owners. I want to offer a reading of this mitzvah of returning lost objects in relation to the inner work of finding and retrieving the lost parts of ourselves and returning them, bringing them, too, back home inside us as part of our teshuva process, as part of the process of becoming more whole, more aligned with our divine potential, more fully ourselves.
Lost Sheep
In detailing this mitzvah, the Torah draws a picture of a lost ox and sheep wandering about (Deut 22:1). Can we sense the presence inside of any lost parts, like sheep, wandering about, wanting to come home? Perhaps it feels more like an absence, an ache of longing and incompleteness, some essential part missing, like a family with a lost child or a puzzle with missing pieces.
Ignoring Them
Or maybe we are unaware of them. The Torah says first vehitalmta (Deut 22:1)– at first, you try to pretend you don’t see these lost objects on the road, you ignore them, you turn away. That is our initial natural inclination inside, too. We have protective defenses, walls and curtains put up in order not to see or feel these lost parts of us; we cover over their cries with a veil of busyness and distraction and restless anxiety.
When You Can No Longer Ignore Them
But at some point, the Torah says, lo tukhal lehitalem (Deut 22:3), you will not be able to ignore them any longer. At some point, the defenses stop working or become too painful or something happens to open up a crack in our system so that we suddenly hear the bleating of those little lost sheep – their sadness and homesickness erupts into our consciousness – and we begin to feel the tug of wanting to bring them home.
How They Got Lost In The First Place
Now these sheep, how did they get lost in the first place? The word used here for lost, nidahim, has the connotation of thrown out, cast out or exiled. These are parts of us that didn’t just go wandering off on their own, but actually got thrown out, sometimes quite violently.
Connection to “Rebellious Child” Passage
Indeed, the section not long before this one in the parsha, concerning the ben sorer umoreh (Deut 21:18-21), the rebellious child, depicts just such a process of exiling. The ben sorer is a child who is deemed to be rebellious, not listening to his parents, and a glutton, eating and drinking beyond what is considered appropriate. And so the parents are instructed to bring him to the elders in the town square, he is declared a rebellious child and then stoned to death by the community.
Now this process, according to the rabbis, never actually took place (Talmud Sanhdrein 71a). Which is interesting, and makes sense in a way. Maybe this passage is not so much prescriptive but descriptive of a process that on some level happens to all of us – the process of socialization, a process by which we are taught not to listen to our own internal authority, which is deemed rebellious, but instead to listen to external authorities, and a process by which we are gradually taught that our natural appetites – not just for food, but also for attention and love – that our natural appetites are greedy and outrageous, “too much,” so that over time, the child parts in us who are “rebellious” and “gluttonous” and also full of life, are indeed stoned to death by parents and community, cast out in a violent way as a price for entering society. .
Stoned Child Parts Become Inner Lost Sheep
The thing is, though, that these stoned and shunned parts of us do not actually die. Instead they are exiled, cast out of our awareness; they become the lost sheep that appear soon after in the Torah, the nidahim, the exiled ones inside us.
What pieces of ourselves were lost? For many of us, it was indeed the rebellious child in us, the one who has her own authority and voice, the assertive part of us who knows her own mind and stays true to herself. And it may also have been the “gluttonous” child in us, our appetites for food, for love, for attention, for the joy of being alive, our real needs which were deemed greedy and therefore went into hiding so that we sometimes don’t even know what they are and feel uncomfortable asking for them. Along the way, maybe what also got lost is agency, confidence and self assurance, self acceptance and self love, a sense of mattering and the right to be angry and stand up for ourselves, joy and playfulness and a simple unmediated aliveness.
The process of socialization creates a lot of nidahim, of exiles, inside us. Can you sense any of your particular lost sheep, maybe see them looking up at you beseechingly, wanting to come home?
Like Moshe At Burning Bush
As we look for our little lost sheep, we are a little like Moshe, who, the midrash (Shmot Rabbah 2:2) says, was led to the burning bush because he went looking for this one little sheep that had gone missing, over the rocks, up the hill, to a quiet nook and a burning bush. When we search inside in this way, we are expressing that same care for each little sheep inside us, noting their absence and searching for them, wherever they are, letting them know we don’t want to go on without them.
Lost Sheep Are The Way to Our Soul
And maybe, too, there is some sense that if we do follow them, we will get to the burning bush, to some divine revelation, maybe there is some inklining in us that these lost parts actually hold not just a part of us, but a sacred part of us, a part of our divinity, a part of our soul, a part of our ability to connect to God. What we lost in giving up our authenticity to be socialized was nothing less than our own pathway to God, our soul’s true essence.
And so, as we search, we can listen for the call of the lost sheep inside, and know that it is not just a call of a young child’s pain and lostness, but also a call of our own soul wanting to come home, to return to embodiment, to return to our fullest truest selves, to the person God wants us to be. To return these lost parts is to do teshuva of the highest order.
Gathering Them In
Ve’asafto, the Torah says – you will gather this lost sheep in to your home. Inside, we can do this energetically, sending out the invitation through all parts of our body and soul, calling all the lost parts, opening our arms and hearts to gather them in, to draw them close, to bring them home. Yes, they were thrown out, but we can open the doors and call them lovingly home now.
Divine Work of Redemption
This ingathering of exiles is the unfolding process of divine redemption. As we will hear in a few parshiyot: Im yehiyeh nidakhakh beketzeh hashamayim, misham yikabetzkha Hashem elokekha umisham ykakhekha (Deut 30:4), “Even if your outcasts are at the end of the world, from there Hashem your God will gather you and from there God will fetch you.” From there, from the far-flung corners of the earth, from behind the curtains and veils inside us, from there God is continually drawing our lost sheep back home inside us. It is like a central force inside us that radiates welcoming energy throughout our bodies, the divine energy of ingathering, of teshuva, of return, calling all the lost sheep home. Maybe you can see those sheep perking up their little ears to this call, lifting their faces from grazing and slowly making their way to center, to home, to self, to God.
With Patience
This is a slow process. The Torah explains that the person whose lost item you take in might live far away and it might take a long time until they come to fetch it (Deut 22:2). It is the same inside. It may take a long time for us to find our lost parts and the journey home may be arduous, involving traversing difficult emotional terrain. We can breathe in trust and patience, letting the process unfold in its own time, allowing it to be slow, maybe for right now just imagining a future possibility of wholeness and integration and allowing that to be enough, opening to the slow redemptive process of teshuva however it is for us.
We Do It Together
The Torah speaks of returning the ox and sheep of akhikha, of your fellow. We do this redemptive work together, for ourselves and each other. Sometimes we may find a lost puzzle piece that belongs to our friend, and we hold it for them until they are ready to seek it. We do this work together, this work of return and ingathering of the nidahim, of our lost exiled sheep. Together we create spaces that welcome these pieces of ourselves and each other, pieces that have been shamed and stoned and cast out, we open to them, again and again, with the strength of our joint intention and with the strength of the divine presence that works through us, always gathering the lost ones, always drawing them close. As our own lost sheep make their way home, it creates a ripple effect, so that gradually more and more sheep, all over the world, are making their way home, a tidal wave of personal and communal return.
Photo by Markus Spiske at Pexels
Beautiful