Beginning the Book of Exodus, Or Why Retell
“The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science.’
Albert Einstein
The Torah I seek is of mystery, a Torah which calls us to upend constricting patterns of mind and heart, retell the delusional, self-serving stories we embed ourselves in, deconstruct, disrupt for the sake of transformation, as a seed must break out of the hull to sprout, as form is forever dissolving for the sake of new form. The Torah I embrace is process as much as content: to awaken, to change our minds, our experiences, our bodies. In reading the same stories year after year, we are able to use the familiar narratives, just as we use our same selves, to see anew, to wrestle with, to find the mysterious, the unconscious, the paradox, the contradictions. These ancient stories have composted and enriched the soils from which we live from and die into, turned by time and mystery on the ground of this moment’s living. We intuit and discover what might come from this soil, known and yet unknown. This is the Torah as alphabet that the poet, the storyteller, the wanderer, composes into the telling which is a mix of the said and the unsayable.
In these ancient stories which become us in this moment, compassion, kindness, joy, wonder awaits, calls us to reconstruct another way from the material of dysfunctional families, enmity between siblings, misogyny, murder, rage, despair, wandering, slavery and fog. This Torah is seeking us, yearning to teach us to see the infinite in an ordinary fire in a bush, to hear the voice of Mystery everywhere: mountain, river, well, desert.
The first covenant is the one we say yes to when we are born into human form, each of us receptacles of rich webs of co-arising life forces; a covenant that announces with our first breathe that we will live and die, suffer and receive, that we can become instruments of hatred and greed and also kindness and compassion. We the wanderers across generations, cultures, languages, are the inheritors of the capacity to ask, answer and be mystified by how we might find love, wonder, beauty even as we get caught in the brambles of our own delusion, forgetting how to see through the fog, to hear below the surface. We enlarge this covenant in the Book of Exodus, giving birth to ourselves as a people. Our movement out of slavery becomes inextricably linked to our efforts to create sacred community and practice. We say yes to an aspiration across time, to be an intentional people, to be seekers and guilders of sacred and ethical relationships. We say a collective yes to evolving laws and systems for the sake of living with larger purpose, braiding compassion we hope, with justice and truth, even as we stumble, forget and lose our way.
Year after year, we read the same story: we will be enslaved, will be redeemed, will be enslaved. Some years we are not moved, we do not hear or see, like the Hebrews in Egypt we do not want to leave the comforts of our enslavements, our constriction. Other times an image, a word awakens us and we find within and everywhere the slave and slave master, the movements towards toward and away from liberation, in the large and small decisions that make up our days and the works of our hands. We retell the stories so that we might remake our lives, so that we might remember to be like Pharaoh’s daughter and know this is our story: to hear the cry of the other, be willing to break the rules and step into the river, with outstretched arms.