Beth Knesset Bamidbar

A Family Place

From The Bimah

So Where Are You Going?

 

How many of us start the day with, “Good morning, Lord!,”and how many of us start the day with, “Good lord, it’s morning!”  In today’s world of rush to work, hurry to activities, run to appointments, it’s easy to get caught up in trying to be someplace instead of being some place. 

 

As we read through the book of Exodus (Shemot), we follow the story of Moses and the tribes as they leave Egypt to get to the Promised Land.   Forty years of being in the desert certainly seems like a long time to get to someplace, yet what was it like to actually be there?  We are taught that we were all at Sinai, but we need to remember that we were also all on that journey.  A careful reading of each Torah portion reveals that it wasn’t just “get out of Egypt and get through that sea.”  The Israelites had to deal with their daily lives and readjust to a life that was different from what they had known in Egypt.  Moses had to struggle with trying to get God’s word to these stiff-necked people.   Of course, there were always the troublemakers-remember the Golden Calf incident?  Moses made many trips up to Sinai to get the tools (Torah, Ten Commandments) that the people would need to get both someplace and to some place.

 

The place that we want to be, that we need to be, is not a physical place.  It is a spiritual place.  For some, the spiritual will be represented by their idea of “God.”  For others, it will present itself as the beauties of nature and how that makes them feel.  Sometimes it will be an everyday experience that becomes transcendent in a new way, such as in the following excerpt from Dr. Rachel Remen’s book My Grandfather’s Blessings.”

 

“Recently during a physicians’ seminar on listening, we all took out our stethoscopes and spent everal minutes listening to our own hearts.  We are all middle-aged peo-le and for the first little while everyone anxiously diagnosed themselves, fearful of hearing a split S1, a third heart sound, or perhaps the murmur of an arteriosclerotic valve.  But as time went on, we moved past all that and heard something steadfast in themidst of our lives that had been there always, even before we were fully human.  Our lives and all other lives depended on it.  It was a profound and ineffable encounter with the mysterious.  Most of us were deeply moved.  We had auscultated and diagnosed hearts for years, but none of us had ever experienced this before.  In that moment we had glimpsed something beyond our habitual way of seeing and hearing and knew that what we work wth every day is life itself.  It was the sort of moment my grandfather would have blessed.

            Afterward there was silence.  Then one of the cardiologists present began to speak about his work and to wonder aloud how one could be so close to something holy and not know it.  It reminded him, he said, of a prayer that he had heard some time back.  Somewhat embarrassed, he began to recite it aloud:

 

            Day pass and the years vanish and we walk sightless among miracles. 

            Lord, fill our eyes with seeing and our minds with knowing.  Let there

Be moments when Your Presence, like lightning, illumines the darkness in which we walk.  Help us to see, wherever we gaze, that the bush burns,

unconsumed.  And we, clay touched by God, will reach out for holiness

and exclaim in wonder, “How filled with awe is this place and we did

not know it.”

 

Begin today to make your “someplace” become your “some place” and fill it with awe.  

 

B’shalom.