Ghosting God, Ghosting Self
Day 104
“Hear my words that I might teach you, take my arms that I might reach you” are, to me, Paul Simon channelling the call of the prophets, whether he was religious, whether he knew the prophets or not. My premise, as I have stated before, is that we are descendants of the prophets, we all have within us a prophetic voice and, in Paul Simon’s case, his voice comes out in his songs, in his actions as well.
On this 6th day of Elul, these words from verse 4 of “Sounds of Silence” are ringing loud in my ears, they are getting past the tinnitus that I suffer from and, again like Judah’s words to Joseph, going right to my soul. The beautiful, fearful, trembling, awesome aspect of Truth is that our souls know it when they hear it and no matter how hard our rational minds try to blot out the truth, our souls know it, store it, bring it up to us time and time again until We the People finally surrender to it. This is one of the objectives of the month of Elul, it is one of the goals of Yom Kippur: admit, relish, roll around in, and commit to TRUTH! Yet, as we the people continue to hide like Adam and Eve in the Garden, as we the people continue to lie as Cain did regarding his brother Abel, as we the people continue to turn to Golden Calves like the Israelites did, we the people continue to ignore the “words that I might teach you” from Moses that are in our Bible and continue to repel the “arms that I might reach you” even though we KNOW that only through the “outstretched arm of God” were we brought out of Egypt. What is our need to reject “my words” and “my arms” is the question God asks over and over, as I read the Bible, as I understand the prophets.
It is not modernity that has caused these problems, as I have listed above, this way of rejecting words of Truth, repelling arms that want to hold us, goes back to time immemorial, the question I have is, as Pete Seeger asks, “when will we the people ever learn”? I believe We the People are capable of learning, I know We the People are capable of changing, I also know how easy it is to reject the “words that I might teach you” because one doesn’t like the messenger, the “words” are inconvenient to the goal of fame, fortune, power, and the “arms” enveloping and reaching one will cause a total breakdown of the facade, of the masks we the people have been wearing. It is, once again, a battle between our rational minds and our intuitive minds.
This battle is well portrayed in the Talmud with some of the Rabbis trying to rationalize the irrational, by their very nature some of God’s commands in the Bible make no sense! Hence they are called statutes, commandments, yet, even the Rabbis of old tried to make sense of them rather than surrendering to the wisdom of God, rather than embracing the “arms that I might reach you” that God extends to all of We the People each and every day, that are even more wide open during this 40 day period. Every child wants to be held when they have a boo-boo, yet We the People are refusing God’s offer to hold us in “arms that might reach you”! WTF??!! It is unbelievable to me that I rejected being held for so long, it is miraculous to me that I finally surrendered to a power greater than myself and I allowed myself to be held and healed when I thought all was lost.
Jewish lore has it that God is calling out to We the People from Mount Sinai each and every hour of each and every day. The calls are AYECHA, where are you, SHEMA-hear, listen, and understand, and EMET- Truth. These words, like the words of the 10 Sayings/commandments, like the words of the prophets are all given as gifts because of God’s great desire that God’s “words that I might teach you” will help we the people change into We the People whom have the same goals as God; to make the world a little better than when we found it, to speak truth to power, to care for the needy and the poor, to welcome and love the stranger because we were strangers in a strange land(for Jews this has been the story of our existence), to send up for Justice, to be merciful, to be compassionate, to pursue righteousness, to be a Mensch!
This is the path I accepted almost 40 years ago and I am still on it, I have NOT arrived nor will I ever. This truth is embedded in my psyche and, rather than give me permission to quit, it is the driving force to keep going on. I use these 40 days to Shema/“hear the words that I might teach you” and “take my arms that I might reach you” through hearing and experiencing God’s call as I did in that jail cell and to experience the joy of God’s embrace, even when I screw up! Being in Covenant with God means the “words” and the “arms” are never retracted, all I have to do is rejoin after I have gone astray.
ACTION STEP: Notice, make a list of the “words” that you hear and the “arms” that reach you which you follow and which you reject.
God Bless, Stop Ghosting God, Ghosting Self, Rabbi Mark