וַיְדַבֵּ֥ר מֹשֶׁ֛ה כֵּ֖ן אֶל־בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל וְלֹ֤א שָֽׁמְעוּ֙ אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֔ה מִקֹּ֣צֶר ר֔וּחַ וּמֵעֲבֹדָ֖ה קָשָֽׁה׃
But when Moshe told this to the people, they would not listen to Moshe out of a crushed spirit and harsh labor
(Exodus 6:9).
The message Moshe was delivering to the people was one of hope and redemption, but the people could not take it in. How do we navigate those times when we, too, are closed to hearing the whispering – or thundering – voice of divine care and support?
The Israelite Situation
The people are enslaved and suffering. Moshe has previously reported to them that God is planning to redeem them, and they did believe him then (Exodus 4:31). Meanwhile, though, things have gotten worse for them. They are given the extra task of gathering straw in addition to making bricks, and the oppression feels cruel and unending. God now delivers a lengthy speech to Moshe using four different terms of redemption – arba leshonot ge’ulah – and asks Moshe to pass this message on to the people. But the people cannot hear Moshe. Rashi explains lo shamu, “they didn’t hear,” to mean lo kiblu tanhumin, “they were not able to receive comfort.”
Our Own Closedness Sometimes
Pausing here to recognize that feeling in ourselves sometimes, the inability to receive the threads of support and comfort and hope, the nourishment that is being offered to us. Maybe we can imagine the offering as a sweet song that comes to us on the wind – in four different forms – from four different directions, the same sweet song coming to us from all around, and then we can feel inside for those moments when we simply cannot receive this sweet song, cannot receive the love, the hope, even the idea of release from our pain. It’s like you are sitting in a very low pit and you can hear the faint notes above on the breeze, but they make no sense to you from the place you are in. The words sound false and untrue and untrustworthy. You cannot take them in.
A Normal Part Of The Pattern
How do we navigate these moments of not being open? First, we should recognize that this closedness is not true of us all the time, as it wasn’t true of the Israelites all the time. They and we do sometimes believe, they and we can sometimes hear the divine message, just not all the time. So we can start by normalizing this pattern, noticing how we go in and out of openness and that is ok.
This is important: the Torah recognizes this closedness as part of the normal human pattern of existence, part of the process of growth even, we open to possibility and faith and trust, and then we close up again, only to open again more fully later. That is the way we are, perhaps the way we grow. Moshe gets upset about it, but God does not. God just proceeds with the plan as if nothing unusual or problematic has occurred, almost as if God is shrugging and saying: So the people couldn’t hear you this time? Do you know how often that happens to Me? It’s just the way it is. They aren’t always open to hearing. We just keep going, we just keep loving them, we just keep sending them hope.
I want to pause here and fully take in this perspective. It is not a problem that we and the Israelites sometimes cannot take in the divine message. Yes, it’s sad, but it is not a problem, not something to beat ourselves up about. You are ok just as you are, in your sometimes open, sometimes closed self.
God Does Not Give Up
And God will continue to try to reach out to you despite your closedness just as God continues on the road to redemption in Egypt, undeterred by the people’s lack of faith. God will not abandon you just because you are closed right now, but will stay steady in the effort to redeem you and draw you into freedom. God will keep calling to you, keep sending songs on the breeze, waiting patiently for you to emerge and open to them, never letting go of that confidence and faith in you. It’s ok if you can’t open today, God says. I’ll stand faithfully knocking at your door, like a devoted lover who will not give up.
The Stress Behind the Closedness
So we start with acceptance. Sometimes we are closed and that’s ok. And then maybe moving from this place of acceptance, we can look more closely into what is going on for us, why we have closed and how we can soften that stance. The Torah says the Israelites could not hear Moshe because of avodah kashah, hard labor and kotzer ruah. Kotzer ruah, often translated as “crushed spirit,” literally means shortness of ruah, spirit or breath, and Rashi explains that when a person is in distress, neshimato ketzarah, their breath is short.
While we are, thank God, not suffering under terrible oppression and enslavement like the Israelites, we still know something about what stress and distress feel like. What kind of stress are you under right now? Maybe there is some form of avodah kashah, of hard labor, in your life, even if it is self imposed, some place where you feel stress and pressure to perform or produce or accomplish or do something in a certain way within a certain time frame, so that your body is tense and anxious and your breath is indeed shortened. We have striving parts that work so hard and are so singularly focused on getting things done – the next brick built, the next assignment checked off – and that agenda driven energy narrows our perspective, making us feel like we are living in a cramped box, with no room to breathe and see the larger picture, closed to hearing the divine song of infinite possibility.
Or maybe there is in you a sense of kotzer ruah with the meaning of “crushed spirit,” some hopelessness around something in yourself or the world that makes you feel low and despondent, like the Israelites, and that, too, closes you to the divine, making your breath and your outlook shallow and depressed. It is so hard to see any light when we are sitting in the bottom of a pit.
Shortness of Breath
Both the work stress and the despair can lead to the other meaning of kotzer ruah – based on Rashi’s interpretation – “shortness of breath.” Most of us regularly breathe in a quick, shallow way. It’s a societal pattern. We are so busy, it’s almost like we are rushing through our breath even as we are rushing through our lives. If you pay attention to how you are breathing right now, can you feel how quick and shallow each breath is as it comes in and out of you? When we breathe in this way, it doesn’t leave much time or much space inside us for God to enter. Our shortened breath is itself a kind of closedness to God.
Breathing Deeply
We can practice lengthening our breath. We do this from a place of acceptance and also care, from a place of caring for the parts of us that are stressed or depressed, seeing them in all their tightness and endless effort and despair, and out of that place of care, offering them a deeper breath, breathing into yourself some greater spaciousness, the merhav Yah, vast divine expansiveness, letting the God of Ruah breathe into you as God breathed into the first human, letting God breathe that breath, that song of love and possibility into you, as if you are a sleeping newborn baby, seeing the baby’s entire belly go up and down with each breath, and feeling that same deep, nourishing, complete, slow relaxed breath inside you. The practice is to breathe slowly and deeply – through your nose if comfortable – all the way down into your belly, placing one hand on your chest and one hand on your belly, and when you breathe, feeling the rise and fall of your belly with one hand while you sense the relative steadiness of your chest with the other. Letting God breathe into you in God time – patient, eternal, abundant, unhurried. Let God breathe you. Deep into your belly, let God breathe you. All through your body, let God breathe you.
There is space now inside you. All those parts that were so cramped inside the box and the pit, whose vision was so narrow, those walls are opening up now, broadening, extending, making room for air and a broader perspective, making room for the divine song of redemption to enter, not to replace all the stressed out parts, but to tend to them, to offer them room to breathe and look up and see and hear and maybe begin to believe in something larger, to look up from their work and see the vast sky and hear the song on the wind.
Breathing God Into Ourselves
We are breathing that vast sky into ourselves. Ani Hashem, the parsha begins with and says again and again – Ani Hashem, I am God, this God of yud and heh and vav and heh, this God of the verb “to be,” this God of beingness. It is this Ani Hashem which we breathe into our tightest places, into the parts that are so focused on doing and efforting, that work so hard and are so exhausted, we breathe this Hashem, this beingness into those places. We offer them a taste of divine presence and beingness and rest, no action, no movement, nothing to do or accomplish, no avodah kashah, no avodah at all other than this simple avodat Hashem – to rest with God, to be with God. There is nothing else.
What Do You Hear Now?
What happens when we do that, when, in the midst of a moment of stress or distress, despite our crushed spirit and overwhelm, we breathe deeply and connect to the God of breath and of being? What do we hear? Lo shamu. The Israelites didn’t hear the message of hope and redemption at that moment, but eventually they did hear it. What happens to us if we open now? What nourishment have we been closed to that maybe we can now hear and take in? What is the song on the breeze saying to you right now?
Photo by Julian Jagtenberg at Pexels
