Eretz zavat halav udevash. A land flowing with milk and honey.
Here is where this phrase appears in our parsha – in the beginning, in the description of the Bikkurim ceremony, where a person brings the first of their newly harvested produce in a basket to the priest and makes the following declaration: We were slaves in Mitzrayim (Egypt) and God brought us out to this land flowing with milk and honey. And now, here is the fruit of that land (Deuteronomy 26:1-11).
This declaration describes a shift, a shift that can happen when we allow God into our lives – a shift from a mentality of hard labor in the tight place of Mitzrayim to the ease of flowing with milk and honey.
Mitzrayim
How can we inhabit this shift? Let’s start in Mitzrayim, where I think many of us often reside. Mitzrayim is a rigid, narrow, tense place where the work feels harsh and oppressive, the to-do lists endless, overwhelming and impossible. Maybe there is an internal task master like Pharaoh who harshly whips you to keep you working past your natural limitations. And there is lahatz, pressure and stress, tension, heaviness and hardness in your body, a sense of desperation and urgency around needing to complete the requisite number of bricks. Your muscles are clenched as you try to force things and get it all done perfectly, with effort, control and aggression. Checking where you feel this in your body, maybe as a tightness in your chest, head, neck, shoulders or arms, or as a heaviness in your belly, the sense of stuckness and despair around it, no choice. Coming into awareness of how this is so often the norm for us, this state of harshness and tension.
The Flow
But God calls us to explore a different possibility. Does Pharaoh really need to be in charge inside us? What happens if we let God in? What kind of alternative place does God beckon us into? Eretz zavat halav udevash. A land flowing with milk and honey. Flowing. See how here there is nothing forced, nothing pushed beyond its limits, no striving to make something happen. There is flow and ease and an allowing of a natural abundance, sweet and gentle and continuous. We have entered the shefa, the overflow of the divine energy current.
Lying Down In the Flow
Can you lie down in that flow? Perhaps imagining it as a river or a network of rivers traversing the land with a warm milky sweet continuous stream. Lie down in that flow and let yourself be carried by it. It’s not going very fast; it’s made of a slower liquid than water, more like molasses, thick and slow. There is no rush. Maybe your heart rate slows down as you enter, relaxing into the gentle movement that surrounds you, giving yourself over to it, letting your body move with its waves.
We spend so much time trying to control and do it right and make things happen. Does the earth need you to keep it turning, does the sun need you to make it rise, is it you that causes the trees to bloom and flower and bear fruit? Is it you that keeps your heart beating and your breath coming in and out of your lungs? So much happens without us. We think it is all on us, but it is not. Taking a load off, not feeling quite so responsible or burdened or overwhelmed, and for this moment just letting the world run itself. Lying here in the river and letting yourself be carried along, like the birds who soar in the sky by entering a rising wind current – they don’t work hard, they just find a current and glide – easefully, effortlessly gliding, not flapping your wings, letting yourself be carried, be cared for, be nourished. Like a fetus in her mother’s womb, or like a newborn baby drinking her mother’s warm sweet perfect breastmilk. Did the baby make her own milk? Did the mother make it with her own will or control or force or effort? It happens without our making it so. Letting go and lying back, maybe taking in some of that warm milk, letting it nourish you as nothing else can.
Becoming Part of the Flow
As you lie there in God’s river, sensing, too, how you slowly become part of that flow, how the rhythm of the current enters deep into your body’s own rhythms and you become aligned with it, a part of it, your breathing in sync with the soft lapping movement around you. There is no longer a sense of you lying inside a river, two separate entities, but just one thing – the river of God’s aliveness – and you are that, you belong to that, you are one with that. There is no fight here, no resistance, no separation, no harsh pushing against, but a surrender, a joining, a participating in something that wants to happen, even if we cannot understand it and worry over where it is going, still in this moment maybe there can be a trust, a letting go and falling back into God’s river, letting ourselves dissolve into its waters.
From Frozen To Liquid Form
Going back to those places of tension you were holding in Mitzrayim mode, there is an invitation here to move from frozen to liquid form, to let the warm milky waters soften those places of stuckness and rigidity, to coax them slowly into relaxing and dissolving in God’s river. It’s not that we don’t honor those tense places. They have been working hard and long to get us what we need, to keep us safe. But there is another way. They just didn’t know it until now. Are they open to experimenting? What if God could be in charge inside instead of Pharaoh? It is hard to trust, yes, so hard. They can always come back out afterwards and take back up their arms and their efforts. But just for this moment, let them taste this ease, let them soften into this river. Softening, dissolving, moving from solid to liquid, from stone to flesh, becoming a flow of milk and honey, becoming fluid, feeling your body’s natural fluidity and flexibility and dynamism return.
Letting the stuck places unfreeze inside you, letting things move again like a river. Yes, there may be pain or sadness or fear in those stuck places, there may be terrible hurt, but it’s ok, let them move and release and be felt and witnessed as they gradually transform back into the nourishing milk and honey they were intended to be. Let everything inside flow, becoming part of this divine river, becoming yourself a land flowing with milk and honey.
Sweetness
A land flowing with milk and honey. There is not just milk here, but some sweetness, some honey. From a nutritional point of view, surely milk would have been sufficient. But the honey, the honey is extra. It’s like flowers. Why create flowers, why create so much beauty in the world? Why not just make purely practical utilitarian plants? Or it’s like the difference between a nurse who comes to take your vitals with a warm smile and one who just mechanically fulfills her job. The honey is that smile. The honey lets us know that God offers us this nourishment with joy and love and grace, an extra flourish to show it is done not as a dry obligation but with a wink and a playful laugh, the tender sweetness you feel towards a small child or puppy. Sweet, like honey. Can you take that in, that sweetness in God and that sweetness in you, that flow of sweet energy between you?
The Flow Is Unearned
Now this flow of milk and honey – take note that it is offered to us absolutely free. The root natan, to give, is repeated six times in this passage. God gives this to you as a matanah, a free gift of divine grace. You do nothing to earn this stream of nourishment, just as we have each done nothing to deserve this life, this breath. We could not possibly earn it. It has to come free. Even if we think we work for a living and earn our daily bread, it is only a half truth we live in. The full truth is divine grace, the tremendous gift of this world, of our lives and our sustenance and the gift, too, of the people in our lives, our friends and family, our partners and children, all gifts of grace to us. Where did they come from? How did we ever deserve all of that? We cannot and we need not. God is noten – God gives all of that to us because it is God’s nature to give, a free flowing everlasting stream of goodness coming our way.
Learning To Receive
And what is our role in all of that flow? One of the things we most need to learn, no easy task, is how to receive, not to work ourselves to the bone in the Mitztrayim mode, as if we are trying to earn something through labor that we cannot possibly earn, but to receive, to sit and let God love us. What does a gift giver want more than for you to actually take in and enjoy their gift? Maybe pausing and relinquishing all effort for a moment, being still and opening yourself to receive, giving yourself over to God’s care, allowing the flow to reach you. Perhaps this most of all is what God asks of us, to simply receive this flow, not to work so hard that we obscure it.
Grace Leads to Gratitude
Sensing how that touches you, God’s desire to give it all to you for free, unearned. Sensing how that touches you – the sheer grace of it – and maybe out of that grace, sensing gratitude arising in you, those two words and concepts deeply linked, our awareness of grace giving rise in us to a natural gratitude and thankfulness, also freely given on our part. Thank you, God. Thank you for this river of milk and honey, for this ease, for the gifts that you continually give me even though I deserve them not. I stand here with them in a basket, these fruits I did not earn from the land that wanted to flow forth and give me its blessings, I stand here with this basket and acknowledge Your gifts with a full heart of gratitude and joy.
Joy
Because gratitude leads to joy. Our knowledge and acknowledgement of God’s grace fills our heart with singing. This is what happens after the Bikkurim declaration – Vesamachta bekhol hatov asher natan likha Hashem Elokekha. You will rejoice in all the good that Hashem your God has given you (Deuteronomy 26:11). Let your body fill up with a knowledge of the good that God has freely unconditionally given you, let your body fill up with that and overflow with gratitude and joy, overflow with your own stream of milk and honey sent back to God, sweetness and grace on both sides.
An Answer To The Verses of Rebuke
This flow, this grace, this gratitude, this joy – I believe this is part of the cure, the path to healing for ourselves and our world. The parsha ends with the tocheichah, the “rebuke,” the terrible curses that actually do happen around us today and always, and we wonder – what are we to do with all that fear and cruelty? The Torah suggests that the antidote is to learn to serve God with simchah, joy (Deuteronomy 28:47). Somehow joy cures us. Maybe the Bikkurim ceremony which begins our parsha– God always places the cure before the malady – teaches us how to get there. It is by learning, slowly, gradually, with patience and repetition, learning to shift from living life in a frantic tense Mitzrayim mode to inhabiting the divine flow of milk and honey, it is by learning to make this shift that we grow into greater awareness of God’s graciousness in our lives, leading to gratitude and joy and contentment, to a sense of sweetness that we carry around with us and spread wherever we go, bringing that divine overflow into the world, doing it again and again until maybe some day somehow we become ourselves a land flowing with milk and honey.
I invite you, as we conclude, to become aware of that potential in you, even just the barest inklining of it, to know that this is your highest truth, your essence, that you, like God, are (and are meant to be) a land flowing with milk and honey. Going back to the river with its soft warm gentle movement and sensing your own part in it, that you are a wave in that river, a ripple in that divine flow. Resting in that flow, your own and the wider river of God, and knowing you can return to it at any time.
Photo by andrea-piacquadio at Pexels
