This week, as the exodus story comes to its conclusion, there is a shift from telling the story to memorializing it for all time, instituting ways of passing it down, through the celebration of Passover, the Haggadah, and the wearing of tefillin (Exodus 12-13).
The Child
As part of these memorializing practices, there is a future imagined child who asks questions and is in need of instruction and explanation. Ki yishalkha binkha, the Torah says, when your your child comes to ask you questions, you should tell her this story of how God’s mighty hand redeemed you (Exodus 13:14).
The Torah is constructing for us here an imagined conversation between two parties, one, a child who is in need of something basic for spiritual grounding, and the other, a wise older person who has access to the knowledge of God’s presence and power in the universe and who can transmit this knowledge and experience to the child.
Now I believe we all live with an inner child inside us, and often this inner child has many unmet emotional and spiritual needs. Viewed from this perspective, what the Torah is offering us here is a paradigm for how to serve the needs of that inner child.
Unblending
The first task is to even see that there are two parties inside you, to sense the presence of that inner child and be able to separate enough to be in relationship with her. So I invite you to feel into any current or recent emotional challenges where you felt some intense unbearable emotion, for simplicity sake, let’s say a time that you felt great fear and shakiness, overwhelming and impossible shakiness in your bones, or persistent anxiety. I know it feels like such intense emotion is all of you, that this fear or this anxiety is all of you, but I invite you to experiment and see how it feels to imagine that this intense fear is actually a child inside asking you for something, to set up in your mind’s eye a scenario where there is indeed a dialogue like the one in the Torah between two parties, a child and an older wiser Self connected to the divine.
So perhaps you can begin to do that by imagining that you are taking the fear out of you for a moment so you can look at it and interact with it, perhaps seating it on your lap across from you, seeing it clearly as a young child, imagining a child who felt that level of fear, seeing her there on your lap, trembling and shaking. Feel the fluttering in her belly, the activation, the rapid heartbeat. Really feel her sensations, and at the same time, bring to the experience a little separation, a little distance, a witnessing quality, a sense of – she is my dear child and I am here to care for her – unblending so that, as in the Torah scene, there are now two parties in dialogue and in relationship, so that instead of being her, you can be with her and offer her something.
God’s Mighty Arm
The Torah has a suggestion of what to offer her: the Torah suggests that one of the primary things that this inner child of ours needs is to know about God and God’s power in the universe. That is the essence of the exodus story – divine power – behozek yad hotzi’anu – with a strong arm God took us out (Exodus 13:14), with a strong arm God took us out of an impossible situation, with a strong arm God vanquished the despot that seemed so powerful and undefeatable.
What you have to offer the child of fear inside you is this knowledge of God’s strength and incomparable power. The child looks around and sees only the concrete world with all its frightening aspects of cruelty and injustice and corruption and despotic domination. It feels to her like that is all there is. She sees Pharoah’s chariots and all the militaries of the world and she quakes in her boots. All there is for her is the news headlines, ever dreary and terrifying, like the stories and traumas of her ancestors’ persecutions that live on in her bones. That is what she knows. Fear and trembling is what she knows. She does not know about this invisible divine force.
And that is what you hold for her, what you access for her, what you show her. Hozek yad. The strength of the divine arm. Despite appearances, despots do not rule the world. Pharaoh was powerful, but his power falls into a lump on the ground compared to this divine strength, his greatest charioteers drowning in the sea of God’s eternal insurmountable power.
Inhabiting that Divine Strength
Your little one, she shakes and trembles, she is terrified, and you, seeing that, show her this strength of God’s, show her the drowned chariots, the truth of this unseen divine force, and she nods, listening, but she needs something closer, more tangible, more personal, and so you bring that divine strength into your own body for her. You channel it, like a magnet, like a radio picking up unseen wave signals, you channel the invisible divine power that exists in the air, you channel that into your body, so that it flows into you like electricity – energy, strength, power, force, might. Your own arm bulges with muscle, a yad hazakah, a mighty arm that is fierce and assertive and courageous. There is divine strength in this world, a strength that laughs at the Pharaohs of the world, and you hold the knowledge of that strength for your little one in her fear, you show her how you, too, carry it inside you, that you are not just fear, but also great might and fierce strength and indestructible courage. This divine power was always in you in some way, but now, for her sake, you notice it more clearly, you expand it, you fan its flames by attaching it to the larger divine power outside of you. Turning towards your little one, you let her touch and feel your bulging arm and she sighs and curls up in the crook of that arm, shielded in the protective circle of your divine strength.
Tefilin (Phylacteries)
Maybe this is what the wearing of tefillin is about – diving embodiment, cloaking ourselves with divine energy, channeling it, becoming like God, reawakening that capacity inside us. I imagine the top bayit, the top black box of the tefillin worn on your head, I imagine it as a kind of antenna, picking up the waves of divine energy in the air and drawing them in, and the other box, the one on your arm, it symbolizes the conversion of those waves into a muscle of your own strength, the hozek yad of God translated into your own hozek yad, the strength of your own arm. Maybe imagining that yourself right now, feeling as if you are wearing tefillin wrapped around your head and one arm, picking up the radio waves of divine strength in the air and letting them course through you, awakening that same divine strength in you so that your arm bulges with power and might, with confidence and courage.
Both Fear and Strength
How is your fearful child doing now? Can she sense your strength? She doesn’t have to stop her trembling. See if you can feel both energies at once, both the shakiness of her fear and the calm strength of divine power in you. The Torah speaks of two parties in relationship with each other. See if you can get a sense of what that might be like for you, to have your inner child self and your larger divine self be connected to each other, speak to each other, touch each other. The fearful shakiness and the calm still strength, both inside you, in dialogue. Maybe sensing how, the strong You offers a co-regulating presence to the shaking child so that gradually she stops trembling and lies quietly in the crook of your arm, hiccupping at first as she stops crying, and then breathing slower and more even, relaxed and safe nestled in that sanctuary inside you.
This Is What the Child Was Asking For
Noticing how it is the child’s need that draws out this divine strength in us. It’s like that gnawing fear in us is asking for something. Ki yishalkha binkha – when your child asks – the fear is your child asking you, begging you, to access strength, to remember God’s power and inhabit it, to embody that divine capacity, to live into your full potential as a creature of God. Please, I’m so scared, the little one says. Will you please be strong for me?
And the way that we come into that strength that our inner and outer children need, the Torah advises us, is to remember God, to bring to mind that there is this other power in the universe that defeats despots and is beyond normal calculation or understanding. It is this power that brings comfort to the child. The world is not how it seems, my child. There is more. I am more. I am you, a terrified child, but I am also a divine creature. I am holding you and God is holding me as I hold you, like Russian nesting dolls.
What Is This Magical Thing?
And maybe, as you introduce the child to this divine force in the world, maybe the child peers up at you from the crook of your strong arm and asks – mah zot? “What is this (Exodus 13:14)?” Meaning – I sense, like on Pesach with the mah nishtanah, I sense that something different is afoot, that this is no ordinary substance I am taking in. Just as matzah is different from hametz (unleavened bread), i sense there is something different here, that this divine power is not like Pharaoh’s, not just in size or capacity, but that it is incomparable, from another dimension, a different plane of existence. Mah zot? What is this?
And in the very question, in the Hebrew word for “this,” zot, perhaps we can see that the child already understands the key here. For the word zot is connected to the supernatural. The eighth day of Chanukah is called Zot Hanukah and holds special mystical significance as a day beyond the normal 7 days of creation. And the letters of the word zot themselves point to this supernatural number 8 as the first two letters, zayin and alef, add up to 8. So it is almost as if the child is saying – mah zot, what is this supernatural thing I am sensing? Not so much a question, as an exclamation of wonder, like – wow, what is this cool thing you’re offering me! I can’t even name it; it is just a “this,” undefinable, beyond words, like the zeh, the “this,” that the Israelites pointed to at the Red Sea when they said zeh eli ve’anvehu. This is my God. This indefinable substance, this sense of strength, this force that rescues me from my distress time and again, this thing that holds my deepest fears, this strong arm that holds me when I am that little child shaking, this zot, this indefinable zot – what is this – and, oh, what a wonder is this, is zot.
She Knows
The child in us knows. I do believe the child in us knows better than we do in some way, she is closer to the source, closer to a memory of that prebirth connection, closer to our essence. She knows and she is in us to teach us, she asks us so that we may learn by teaching her, by showing her, by bringing it into the open, by having to proclaim, to witness, to be magid about God’s power. She wants us to help her remember, to bring her back to what she knows unconsciously is true but in coming here has forgotten. In her terrible trembling need, she elicits in us a fierceness that makes us bind that knowledge onto our arms and hearts and minds, the knowledge of a God who cares and saves, the knowledge of our own divine strength. Because she needs it so badly. She begs it out of us, and she knows – she knows when the right answer comes, the one that has a feel of zot, that inexplicable substance. Only that will soothe her. She will keep crying until she gets it, until we learn to teach her what she already knows.
