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Torah Tuesday with Rabbi Mordecai Finley Many narrative sections of the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) are universally known as peaks of world literature. Accessing the depths of this great literature is difficult for most people. Theological assumptions often get in the way of seeing the text as primarily addressing the....

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New Classes...Sign up today on Teachable   NEW CLASSES Led by Rabbi Finley Begin this September. Poetic Depths of the Bible Many narrative sections of the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) are universally known as peaks of wor

Moonlight – Sunlight - The First of the Seven Weeks

Religion Beyond Religion, God Beyond God, Find Pure Being

Thoughts Coinciding with Torah Portion Va-etchanan
©Rabbi Mordecai Finley, 2024

This week is the first of seven weeks that take us to Rosh HaShanah. This week’s Torah portion is an excellent first step. We have here the 10 Commandments as well as the Shema, two foundations of the Jewish religion.
In thinking about the High Holy Days, though, I find myself drawn to another part of our Torah portion – the first few verses. “Va-etchanan” means, “I pleaded.” Moses pleaded with God to allow him to see the Promised Land. God refused. There are competing theories as to why God said no, but the most important thing was the “no.” Moses was not going to get what he wanted, what he dreamed of, what his life’s purpose was. At least what he thought his life’s purpose was.
According to the book of Deuteronomy, Moses did not collapse. He did not quit. He doesn’t even seem to have been depressed. He carried on. Promised land, but apparently not promised to him.
Perhaps Moses says to himself, “All right. I did not see that coming. Now what?”
People say that when one door closes, another opens. Perhaps, however, when one door closes, you look around at where you are, and you realize you are where you are supposed to be. Or know, at least, that you are not going anywhere soon.
Perhaps the God Who is called “I am Who I Am” was saying, “Be here now.”
When Moses was denied entry to the land, did he suddenly understand that his life was never ultimately about his going to the land in the first place? Canaan was to be the place where the people of Israel could create a spiritual and moral path to God in sovereign boundaries. Perhaps that was not to be the work of Moses – that work was to be bequeathed to others.
Moses had been traversing a path to God since he went out to see his people in Exodus 2:27. That journey intensified when he fled Pharaoh’s palace as a fugitive, on a journey into the unknown. When Moses encountered the angel of God in the heart of fire in the burning bush, he was told by the angel, “Take your shoes off your feet, for the place that you stand upon is holy ground.” That ground was his holy land, a holy place he never left. He was on holy ground wherever he went.
As we begin our walk to the Days of Awe, we must remind ourselves: the work we are doing, at its core, is not about the High Holy Days. Our deepest path is not about religion, not even about God. The Days of Awe are about encountering the God beyond God, an encounter with pure Being. The soul encountering its source. Right here, right now.
This encounter can be profoundly unsettling. Beyond the text, beyond the prayers, beyond theological knots – a place where you just know a Presence that cannot be named – yet, it somehow knows your name. Silence is the greatest prayer, as we experience the unbearable lightness of our being.
Menachem Mendel of Vorki was asked, “What constitutes a true Jew?” He said, “Three things are fitting for us. Upright kneeling, silent screaming and motionless dance.” (Buber, Tales of the Hasidic Masters)
This encounter is unbearable if it lasts too long. If you stay there, you can’t come home. If you have been there, you can’t come home anyway, not the way you used to be.
This experience never leaves the heart, and in some ways creates a hole in the heart that yearns to be filled. Some of us are born with that tear (a “kera” in Hebrew) in the heart; for others, life rips it open. It can only be filled with the overflow of pure being (the “shefa,” as the Kabbalists call it). The overflowing, the “shefa,” has many vessels into which it pours itself. Religion-this-side-of-God can certainly be one of them. For many, however, religion out of a can is not a satisfying vessel. Much of religion-this-side-of-God refuses to admit it is a finger pointing at the moon. It is not the moon.
And the light of the moon is not its own light. Moonlight reflects sunlight.
Healing the wound and suturing that tear takes us into the world of spirit, to the garments of God: Love, Justice, Truth and Beauty. The Good. The Holy.
When experiencing the incoming Overflow, you face the existential burden of knowing that you are must choose a life - in every conscious moment, another choicse - in the presence of the Knowing One. With this knowledge, a calm resilience, a strength and courage, settles in as well.
When God says to Moses, “You can’t cross over to the land,” perhaps Moses thinks, “I’ve been on this land the whole time, anyway.”
Of course, the problem is we can forget all this. Just go back to sleep. We have to be disciplined and methodical about staying awake to the beauty, to the light, to the love. We have to find a way not to fall back asleep. Hence religion.
So here is a start on the path to the High Holy Days: As we are taught in our portion, remember to love the Divine and all the garments of the Divine, when you lie down in the moonlight and when you arise in the sunlight. From love will come duty, from duty we find truth.

Seekers of Truth Among the Ruins
Thoughts on the Sabbath Before the 9th of Av (Parshat Devarim) 2024

We’ve all had moments of joy, connectedness, and purpose, where life felt as it was supposed to feel. We long to recreate those moments, to make them last. Well-being is within our reach. This is the good news.

For some of us, however, for some period of our lives, well-being seems unattainable. For some period of our lives, we might feel unfulfilled, unnourished, lost, alone, confused. We might take it out on ourselves or on others.

Misery, or the need to inflict misery because of our own misery, is inevitable. Sometimes misery comes from tragedy. Despite the good will of people, things unravel badly.

The good news is that if you are reading this, you are alive and conscious today. If you decide to, you can learn a teaching, and make use of it.

Here is the teaching for this period in the Jewish calendar, the commemoration of the destruction of the Temples, the memory of the land of Israel being laid waste. Let me start with an image. You are sitting among ruins, wind whistling through burnt out buildings. Or you are in a forest of trees blackened by a raging fire. You decide to put one brick on top of another. Or you go searching for a surviving sprout and start to nurture it.

Or you have lost your way, your ego-self having insisted on the always unique but well-travelled road to perdition. However, it’s today – you can take the road less traveled, the high road. How far? It does not matter. You are no longer on the road back to Egypt. You are heading elsewhere.

We are at the conclusion of the time in our calendar, the three weeks between the 17th Day of Tammuz and the 9th of Av. Both dates refer, in the minds of the ancient Rabbis, to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 586 BCE by the Babylonians, and in 70 CE by the Romans.

When the ancient rabbis asked the cause of the ruination of the Temples, they referred us to the Sin of the Molten Calf from Exodus 32 and the Sin of the Spies from Numbers 13-14. Those narratives are rooted in spiritual psychology archetypes of avoiding and rejecting truth.

“Sin” does not just mean a moral transgression, though it includes that. “Sin,” more existentially, means acting against our authentic nature – our authentic goodness as human beings.

The Sin of the Calf can be understood as the rejection of a divine teaching that would commit us to transforming ourselves – actualizing the well-being that is within our reach. The Molten Calf is the fixed place that justifies where we are now – that what we think, feel and say is right and true as an unreflective matter of habit. Truth beckoned, but the people preferred the familiar error of worshipping the young bull. The Worshipping of the Calf, as an ego-state, refuses any external criteria for truth and any path toward transformation. The Calf refers to Permanence, the way things were; the Divine takes to change. The Sin of the Calf is the rejecting of a teaching of truth so that we can live in a reality of our own making.

The Sin of the Spies is the sin of creating false history, to justify our current state of mind or feeling. It is gratifying in the moment to reject the truth and replace it with a reality of our contrivance, but those contrivances all eventually lead to misery.

The Spies, as a spiritual concept, represent the refusal to accept a reality, moral or otherwise, that does not match our feelings. The Sin of the Spies goes even further – the spies create a new reality. Conquering Canaan was a fearsome task, so, 10 of the 12 spies thought, it can’t be done. Any claim to the contrary was greeted with hysteria. Egypt was redefined (in a follow-up rebellion to the Sin of the Spies) as a land “flowing with milk and honey” (Numbers 16:13). The Israelites had pleaded with God to bring them out of Egypt; then they say that God brought them into the wilderness to kill them (also Numbers 16:13).

So, what is the truth? This is the right question. True - our inner lives are subjective; we experience the world through our own subjective lenses. It is also true that there is an objective world; there are other people and there are facts. There also exists a standard of the right way to live.

We assemble the truth of the right way to live through reflection on our own lives, including our engagement with other subjective human beings. We try to figure things out. Truth is assembled as a project, often with people with whom we disagree and wisdom traditions that awaken us from our torpor. Deep well-being is connected to living a life of truth. Misery is lies – those we tell ourselves, or those that other people are foisting upon us. (This is why I try to begin all relationship counseling with a “police report” - just the facts - to help people disconnect from the narratives that blind our vision.)

The city of ruins, the blackened forest, the journey to perdition are all the result of rejecting a life of truth. During this week, as we contemplate the ruins or the possibility of ruins, we also commit ourselves to a lifetime of the humbling, laborious work of building and planting truth, as we journey towards the Days of Awe, toward deep and sustained well-being.

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Shabbat Chukkat 2024 – Mystery and Tragedy

Mysteries and tragedies percolate through this Torah portion. Seemingly, out of nowhere, we are given arcane laws on purification from the taint of death. These laws surely reach back into some ancient stratum of Israelite religion, when issues of impure and pure (tamei and tahor) were of deep concern.

In the following verses, we find out why “the taint of death” is relevant: Miriam and Aaron both die, and the people suffer a kind of spiritual death. Moses suffers breakdown and bereavement. The people become thirsty and discover the solution of immediately returning to Egypt. The people are regressing to the behavior of their deceased parents, behavior that we readers thought were long forgotten. The sins of the parents are visited upon the children through a compulsion to repeat. Wars are fought, people die, and, at the end of the portion, as if the people could no longer restrain themselves, they complain, as their parents did, about the food.

The litany of complaints that their parents rehearsed were unearthed.

God (as depicted here) does something brilliant, from a literary perspective. God reminds them of the snake who had engineered Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden, a snake now operating within the unconscious of the Israelites. A rhumba of rattlesnakes attacks the people. The deficiency of the bread is forgotten. God has Moses form a “Healing Snake on a Staff,” itself a vestige from some long-forgotten mystery healing cult (see my attached Shabbat thought).

Tragedy, death, the obsession with purity, anxiety projected onto food and drink, repetition of compulsion, recrudescence of ancient religion, all combine to make this portion have the feel of a swirling dream. We will interpret the dream together this Shabbat!

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Finley

(see comments if you like to join us Friday night or Shabbat morning)

Coming Near
Thoughts on Torah Portion Korach 2024 (adapted from prior years). (long, but worth it!)
Rabbi Mordecai Finley, 2024©

“And the children of Israel said to Moses, ‘We are dying, we are perishing, all of us are perishing! Everyone who comes near, near to the tabernacle dies! Are we ever going to stop dying?’” (Numbers 17:27)

These haunting words are recorded after the terrible story in this week’s Torah portion, the narrative of the rebellion of Korach and his cohorts. Korach, a cousin of Moses and Aaron, attempted a coup. Korach used tricks of demagoguery to drum up suspicion and anger against the Holy Brothers. From the text, we can see that Moses was heartsick after the accusations. From the moment Moshe killed the Egyptian man back in Egypt until this point in the narrative, Moshe’s life has been a tough, isolated and often desperate one. He hasn’t gotten a break.

Moses has been the living tissue linking God to the people of Israel, a people rife with suffering, pain, and fear. The Israelites were seemingly always on the brink of rebellion so that they might have the freedom to destroy themselves. And Korach thinks that Moses wanted this job. Even worse, Korach thinks that he himself wants this job.

The mutiny of Korach and his mates is put down by God, we are told. The earth swallows up Korach and his family. The 250 co-conspirators are incinerated. With great Divine furor, the legitimacy of Moses and Aaron is made manifest.

That haunting coda to this narrative, “we are dying, we are perishing . . .” tells us something deep about what was happening. Perhaps the surviving Israelites became aware that all the rebelling, complaining, mistrust, and bizarre interpretations of history (e.g., “Egypt was wonderful!”) were rooted in something spoiled within them. The Israelites, since they came out of Egypt, had been succumbing to their inner disruptions and blaming others for their wretched feelings. The slavery in Egypt was horrible and traumatic; what they did with that trauma was up to them.

Trauma sticks to our bones. Those who cause it are often either long gone or out of reach. If the offender is near, talking to them often makes it worse. When trauma is mixed with a drive for vengeance or retribution, it can hollow out the marrow of goodness. Sometimes we project the cause of trauma on to others in ways that serve our ego interests. Vengeance affords us moral superiority. Whatever the cause, whatever the source, only through through inner work, consciously or not, can we cleanse our bones. Holding others accountable can help, but blaming does not ultimately cleanse us.

The people who spoke these words of deep anguish, “we are all dying . . .”, had become aware of the terrible toll of their rebellion, the toll on themselves and on everyone around them. They think back to the Molten Calf and the Sin of Spies, to the murmurings, the defiance, the constant attacks on Moses and Aaron and realize the carnage they have suffered is due to the strife they themselves have inspired.

All this complaining, rebelling, murmuring, all this chronic unhappiness, has been futile, a waste.

No more second chances. In the end, their children, not they, would arrive at the borders of Canaan, bearing a law that would make them noble, that would bestow a dignity that their parents could have achieved. Had the desert generation had their way, the Israelites would have perished in the desert, massacring each other, or they would have trudged back to Egypt, accepting the chains of slavery.

What was that generation of the desert so angry about? These rebellions, the defiance, the fear, the suspicion, the chronic unhappiness – where did it come from? What did they really want?

The Bible is literature, not journalism. Whoever shaped this text, whatever mixture of Divine and human that meets your theological fancy, wanted us to see something in our selves.

We all are dying and we all will perish. Perhaps our only question is this: with whatever control we do have over our lives, what will we leave in the wake of our few moments here? Wreckage or refuge? A howling waste land or paths through the wilderness?

Will we leave behind the sorrow, the anger and fear? The self-loathing and loathing of others? The projections onto others, the refusal to face the reality of our own being? We perish under the weight of our own refusal to live a life of truth.

A life of truth can be seen as one truth that is said in different ways. We are each an unfolding mystery. In some moment of piercing grace, we can realize that at the core there is no one to blame and no one at fault for who we are at this moment. Whatever has been done to us, has happened before this moment, we are here now. Perhaps in the next moment, we will have to hold transgressors in our past accountable. Perhaps in the next moment, we will be held accountable.

As we we arrive to this very moment, however, everything has led us to a singular choice that we must make right now – wisdom or not? The future, or the past? Starting now. Right now.

Our wounds, inflicted and self-inflicted, unfold with our mystery. We have a choice to make now – unfold with healing or fold in upon ourselves with shame, resentment or grief?

The mystery unfolds into an open horizon. Do we fill this space with love and kindness, as much as possible, and with courage and righteousness when required? Do we fill it with purpose and service?

“Everyone who comes near, near to the tabernacle dies!” The generation of the desert came near to the tabernacle and the spirit of God found there filled them, in one way or another. For some, the nearness of the tabernacle filled them with dread for what it required of them. For others, the nearness of the tabernacle filled them with envy because it made them see what they were not. Some were filled with the urge to evade, to blame, to hide.

For others, approaching the tabernacle filled them with a sense of the divine unfolding within, a love and grace of God that might not protect them, but that would accompany them through this rough and uncharted desert. For some, the nearness of the tabernacle made them aware of the community forming around them, a gathering of sojourners and journeyers drawn toward that pillar of light.

The Bible quotes the unquiet ones, who finally see what they have brought upon themselves. “We are dying, we are perishing, all of us are perishing! Everyone who comes near, near to the tabernacle dies! Are we ever going to stop dying?”

The quiet, wise, loving and courageous ones perhaps responded in their hearts, “Everyone who comes near, near the tabernacle lives. And we will never stop living as long as we are alive. We choose life. And when we die, our souls do not die, and we will have left something of beauty behind.”

This Shabbat online with Rabbi Mordecai Finley and Rabbi Sheri Manning. Click to read more on Torah Portion Sh'lach: https://conta.cc/3L2fm40

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(this is a long one but I think it is worth it!)

Knowledge, Will and Blessings

Thoughts on Torah Portion Naso 2024 (adapted from previous versions)
©Rabbi Mordecai Finley

This Torah portion contains the height of Jewish liturgy, the priestly blessing. What is a blessing?

I often meet with a person who is looking to change their life and it comes down to “the moment when.” People want to give up anger or resentment, be more forgiving, have more courage or less confusion. All the pieces are in place, the skills are known, and the launch button awaits. When is the moment?

This is one of the mysteries of the will – that energy that seems to form somewhere deep in the unconscious. Oddly, we often can’t just “will up” the will. If I am resistant to doing something, I can sit and affirm all day long that “I have the will,” but reciting all those affirmations might just tire me out. The will that forms in the unconscious is much more complex than reciting affirmations. Affirmations have to register somewhere very deep, way below language.

I think the mystery of the will resides in some kind of knowledge. We know things in the mind, but the tacit knowledge in the area of the soul is another kind of knowledge altogether. When the soul knows something, it also knows its own calculus - the inner life cost of doing something, which always entails the cost of not doing something else. The soul is the realm of our deepest values, our maxims, our starting places, our belief systems. We can examine our inner life beliefs with rational scrutiny, but our deepest values are not formed by rational thinking. Our deepest values and beliefs form in deeper, unseen parts of us. Sometimes our deepest values and beliefs, from which we conduct our lives, form in a chamber of holy truth. Sometimes, however, they form in the shadow, an entangled place of distortions.

For example, a young adult may have a hidden, shadow belief that “I should never disappoint my parents.” Then some friend might make a rational case to them that they “have to start living for themself.” The child might feel anxious, because in hidden realms a judgment is being formed – shall I stop trying to live up to my parents’ expectations? The child has to weigh the suffering that will occur in letting the parents down against the benefit of “living for themself.” The forming of a decision in the hidden realms causes its own suffering. This young adult might start getting angry at the parents, angry at the friend, or avoid the question altogether. “Live for yourself” is a very complex question. To form an answer, we have to have considerable knowledge of the self. Not living for someone else does not mean that the next things won’t entail their own kinds of errors.

The hidden beliefs and values of the soul might be going through a process of transforming that starts with ambivalence, confusion and often sadness.

Forcing yourself to do something before the soul is ready either produces frustration or, what it does produce comes at a great cost, a cost we pay later in guilt, resentment or exhaustion.

For example, I have seen well-intentioned friends persuading feuding people to “just talk to each other” before one or both were ready. The resulting conversation did not go well.

Fierce battles rage in the realm of the unconscious. Battles of working through fear, grief, anger and resentment, getting sober (staying sober), facing others and facing one’s self. Getting something done will not get done well if the Shadow has determined is too difficult or not worth it. In the “hero’s journey,” facing the Shadow is the fight through the thicket. The hero knows the quest, has found the tools, has been given the map, but there is always the fight through the thicket of resistance, planted and maintained by the Yetzer HaRa.

For us, on the hero’s journey in our lives, there is always the temptation to take the inner war into the interpersonal space. Blame someone else or something else for our suffering. Ultimately, you can only fix the outside world, even the system, so much. Ultimately, you have to bring order to the self.

If you have already read some story of the hero’s journey, you know whether the hero makes it through or not. But in our story, we-the-hero do not know the outcome. The soul does not know of an inevitable victory. I don’t find the advice, “It will all work out” to be help. Maybe it all won’t work out. I think a good part of life is living through things not working out. Saying that it will all work out does not make it all work out.

Once the hero’s journey begins in the holy chamber of truth, the realm of the soul only knows one thing – no willful turning back. “If I am to suffer defeat,” the soul knows, “it was because the Dragon (of Resistance) outfought me. Not because I gave up.” The Hero returns to the teacher or the Teaching, learns new skills and weapons of war against the Yetzer Ha-Ra, and starts out again.

When that moment of realization occurs in the soul that one can do no other that will the struggle, it shudders through the body. It is a singular knowledge, a heart firming and an opening into the vastness of a life of meaning. We all know, however, that the firm heart can weaken and the opening into the mystery of being can close up again.

A second kind of will is needed. The first will is the decision to move. The second will is to keep moving. The first one is related to courage, the second to resilience and perserverence. Doubt has been overcome. Now one must accept the pain.

Where does prayer fit in? What do prayers and blessings do for us on this journey? Perhaps they awaken unseen, supernatural forces to some good purpose. But perhaps a prayer or a blessing awakens the soul to a knowledge, a decision, a resilience - all circling in the realm of the mystery of the will.

When our inner work has taken us down to a core question or insight, we see what has to be done. For example, a person once asked me for a prayer for prosperity. I asked him exactly what he wanted God to do. Several things came up: that his investors should overcome fear and suspicion. That his partners would be efficient. That, in general, good fortune would reign. “Prayers should be specific,” I advised. He ended up praying for his own good judgment to affect all those issues, with some good fortune added.

When we appeal to the divine with some laser point focus, it seems that the mere bringing of the amplified light of the soul to bear on some question can have a transformative effect. It seems that once we bring the light of the soul to shine on some problem, we no longer need divine intervention, or the divine intervention has just occurred.

It can be the same with the words of others. Sometimes another person can see into us with such precision that they can discern what the obstacle is, and then offer words that can help us break through that obstacle. The words of others might not be phrased as a blessing, but that is their effect.

Prayers and blessings, at their finest, are the culmination of intense introspective or empathetic effort. We can’t always determine what happens next, but whatever else we do, we are filling the inner world with will, insight, and devotion. Those ripples never cease. Everything matters.

From our Torah portion:

May the Divine bless you and stand guard over you.
May the Divine bring illumination to you and be gracious to you.
May the Divine presence be borne toward you and grant you wholeness of being.

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Gemstones, Banners and Insignias

Comments on Torah Portion Ba-Midbar 2024 (adapted from prior versions)
©Rabbi Mordecai Finley, 2024 (edited)

Warning: There will be a homework assignment at the end of this teaching.

This Torah portion, Ba-Midbar (In the Desert) begins “The Book of Numbers.” This Torah portion has many lists. The Torah portion comprises, for example, lists of tribes and the number of males twenty years old and up in each tribe. These men over 20 are termed “kol yotzei tzava” “all who go out in the Legions” – the organized militia in case of war. It is a boring list until we get invaded.

We have descriptions of where all the tribes/militias stationed themselves around the Mishkan – the Dwelling Place of God. Twelve tribes around the compass, four stations NSEW, three tribes each.

The lists go on.

If you avoid reading the lists, you’ll miss a verse. In Numbers 1:2, we are told “the Israelites shall encamp around the Tent of Meeting, each man by his banner and the insignia of their clans (ish al diglo b’otot l’beit avotam).” As far as I know, the “banners and insignias” are not expanded upon in the Bible.

In Rabbinic Literature, especially Ba-Midbar Rabbah 2:6-7, the imagination of the Rabbis fills in what the Bible leaves out. According to the Midrash, each of the 12 Tribes had a uniquely colored banner. The colors of the banners were determined by the colors of the gems associated with each tribe on the Breastplate of the High Priest (see Exodus 28:17-20).

In addition to a banner, each tribe had an insignia on its flag. The insignia was an animal or other image symbolic of the unique characteristic of each tribe.

For example, the stone on the Breastplate for the tribe of Dan was a jacinth. Therefore, the color of the tribal flag was “like sapphire.” According to the Midrash, embroidered on the flag was a snake, the tribe’s insignia, based on Genesis 49:16-17:
\
Dan shall govern his people,
As one of the tribes of Israel.
\
Dan shall be a snake by the road,
A viper by the path,
That bites the horse’s heels
So that his rider is thrown backward.

This verse is a subtle one. The “horse and rider” seems to refer to the Egyptians at the Sea of Reeds, where the cavalry was thrown off its horses by the raging waters of God. Dan represents a just government, stopping any new trampling horses, and throwing any new oppressors to the ground.

The three tribes together, each with its banner and insignia, on each point of the compass, formed a regiment, and each regiment had a tricolor – the three colors of each of that regiment’s three tribes.

In this short section of the Midrash, we have a symphony of colors and insignias, standing for the 12 battalions and four regiments of the ready reserves.

The Midrash asks: Why did God assign to each tribe a banner, according to the colors of gemstones on the Breastplate of the High Priest, and insignias representing an array of allusions? The Midrash refers us to Deuteronomy 32:10. In that verse, the desert, the midbar, is described as a “tohu, y’lel v’shimon,” “a wasteland – howling and desolate.” Rashi adds a comment to that verse, where he alarms us by saying that the desert was home to “the howls of crocodiles (taninim) and birds of prey.”

The Midrash and the verse in Deuteronomy, as many of you can see immediately, is resonating with the unformed void before creation (tohu) and the ancient mythological sea monsters of Babylonian mythology (the taninim).We add to that chaos vultures, feeding on death. We can smell the rot of chaos. It would be hard to find a better image describing the crisis of chaos, a chaos against which creation constantly struggles.

A howling, desolate wasteland, where birds of prey and sea monsters screech and roam about. The Wasteland – a world evacuated of meaning, the stench of death and decay, a shattered world that invites nihilism and despair.

In my mind, the Midrash speaking on the “banners, insignias and gemstones,” using the distressing imagery of Deuteronomy 32:10, is teaching us how to navigate the Wasteland.

We have to form communities in the Wasteland, communities of meaning aligned to struggle against forces that teach destruction.

To create communities of meaning, we must find gemstones hidden in the terrain of desolation. Even in this howling Wasteland, there are precious stones to be found, sparkling with beauty. representing our mostly deeply held values. As we give those gems names, we find that the colors of the soul are being brought to the surface.

Laws and norms are established. Don’t eat birds that feed on corpses – don’t be nourished by cults that teach death.

Straighten up. Find your tribe (you won’t be doing this alone). Fall into formations arrayed around the presence of God. You are a spiritual warrior and are hereby enlisted in the ready reserves.

Chase off the vultures and crocodiles that infest our land (and our college campuses), with light and order. Create symbols that remind you of your search for meaning and purpose.

We find our place among other gemologists and banner makers, embroiderers of symbols, organized around light and law, shapers of meaning in the Wasteland.

Your homework: Find gems, give them names. Each day find the gem that today is speaking to you, in “light and wholeness.” Bring the colors of the soul to the surface. Create banners that guide your way. Fill your life with insignias and symbols. Find your tribe. Face front to the Dwelling Place of God. Stand at attention.

Metaphorically - why is this book of the Bible called “In the Desert” (the howling, desolate wasteland)? To remind us of where we are, what we must do, and what is at stake.

It’s not all homework. You can take one day off a week, to refresh your soul. But please, stay vigilant. The vultures and crocodiles never rest.