God is Elkanah.
God is a zealous,
Jealous,
Passionate,
Impassionate God.
We're also told that God is a compassionate God.
And God is a devouring fire,
Esh Ochelet.
Fiery,
Spicy,
Like the gum jabbar,
Like hot sauce.
We often,
I think,
In Judeo-Christian circles,
Think of God's compassion,
But God's passion is less often spoken of.
A good artist needs a lot of passion,
And if we understand God to be the one who inspires and incepts us to create,
The one who has made creation,
The creator,
And that which makes us create,
It's nice to know that God also feels the burning of passion,
The flame of desire,
The wish to make.
So this week,
And in Deuteronomy,
More globally,
Moses is recounting the stories of wilderness and the people's experience,
Israelites' experience,
Since leaving Egypt.
And he reminds them not just of this case,
But don't forget the origin.
That,
For example,
At Sinai,
Nothing like this had ever happened before.
Had anyone heard God as we had?
And that we possess things that we do not,
Did not earn.
This,
In Christian circles,
Is usually called grace.
Jewish communities have a little more difficult time understanding the concept of grace,
Of God delivering things to us unmerited,
Although it is certainly a theme in Hebrew Bible and elsewhere in rabbinic writings.
We just,
Like certain scriptures,
We've ceded it to our Christian brethren and don't understand it.
It is deeply rooted as our experience as well.
How do you cultivate the possibility for grace?
How do you open yourself to grace,
As my yoga teacher used to say?
How do you hear God's voice?
I've been saying this year that I think scripture is not God's word,
But it might be God's voice,
In the same way that Art,
Shakespeare,
Rembrandt heard God's voice.
Maybe not word for word,
Letter for letter,
Dot for dot,
But Art contains the echoes and the reverberations of the divine.
And in Jewish tradition,
Revelation,
Covenant,
Experience like that is ongoing.
I can't speak for other faiths,
But the idea,
I think in Quran and in Greek scripture,
Christian scripture,
Is that revelation is singular and experienced.
In the Mormon church,
I believe this is true as well.
Judaism revelation is still happening today.
God is still revealing God's self to us at every moment through these conversations even.
Not that I'm so wise,
But conversations around subjects of wisdom are revealing again,
God's desires,
God's wish for us,
Our experience of God.
Moses stayed longer after the revelation at Sinai,
We're told.
It is always with us.
I've been learning about the concept of motivational interviewing and the quantum experience,
Which is a professor named Miller,
Emeritus professor out of the University of New Mexico,
If I recall correctly.
And he talks about a word I haven't thought of in a while,
The noetic,
Which is a fancy way of saying the revelations,
Epiphanies,
Mostly epiphanies,
Things that come to you without effort,
Ideas that arrive unbidden.
How do we cultivate the experience of allowing ideas to arrive unbidden?
Mostly,
You've heard me talk about meditation as a way to cultivate that.
For me,
It's walks in the woods.
For some,
It's psychedelic experiences,
Though I can't in good conscience recommend those.
They have their own dangers I would never suggest.
Drug use,
Play.
How do we get on the right path?
The Torah's morality is v'asitah yashar.
The Torah's morality is not each person do as they will,
But that you seek the correct path,
The Tao.
It's a very different word that means almost the same thing.
How do we,
As a Buddhist priest suggested to me,
In their koan,
She said,
Stay straight on a curving path.
What does it mean to do the right,
The straight,
Forward thing as artists,
As creators,
As moral people?
How do we see God in the noetic?
How do we continue revelation?
How do we continue understanding the divine will for us,
The spirit of the creator moving within us?
In revelation,
We are told that Moses and the Israelites experienced God face-to-face,
Walking with their whole heart and spirit,
Just as Jacob and Esau saw each other face-to-face,
Panim de panim,
Panim being face and be it within or to.
But if you make a pun on the word,
It could be panim bifnim,
The face within.
How do you see the face within?
How do you see the inner reality?
I think it's a cultivation of openness and open spirit,
And sometimes we might call that smallness or humility,
Which is not to say that we think less of ourselves,
But we think about ourselves less or less often.
Maimonides,
The great medieval Jewish philosopher,
Says that the foundation of all foundations,
The pillar of all wisdom,
Is to know that there is a first existence,
And in most translations that would be capitalized because first existence is clearly a synonym for God,
The divine,
The mystery,
Who brings all existences into being,
That which in scientific terms we might say preceded the Big Bang.
That all the existences of heaven and earth,
Maimonides says,
And between them derive their existence only from the truth of God's existence.
We are all echoes and emanations of our Creator and our creative impulses,
An echo and an emanation of God's creation.
To feel that,
We have to get small.
To use Steve Martin's language,
You know,
He talks about the drug of getting small.
One time recently he felt real small and a policeman pulled him over and said,
Are you getting small?
You can look up the routine.
It doesn't hold up except as a philosophical argument.
How do we get ourselves out of the way of creation?
How do we get ourselves out of the way of revelation?
How do we get our own egos out of the making of painting or song?
This is not easy.
How do we open ourselves to the noetic,
The surprising,
The epiphany?
So Moses says in the Torah,
I stood between God and you at revelation.
If you are attending,
By the way,
You're welcome to use the chat and introduce yourselves,
Ask questions,
Interrupt.
Whether you're on YouTube live or Instagram live,
I can see both commentaries.
Moses says,
I stood between God and you because you were too afraid of revelation.
But the Magid of Zlotchev,
Who I guess is about the 18th century,
Said this anokhi.
One of the words for I is anokhi,
And that the I-ness of self stands between us and God.
Thinking of ourselves too much,
Making ourselves too inflated with yeasts and sugars,
To use the rabbinic language,
Becoming too big for our britches,
Which is probably what they would say in Appalachia where I am.
That's in the way of God.
You can't hear if you're only listening to yourself,
If you're making too much noise.
If you are,
Personal critique,
Listening to music on a walk through the woods,
You're not going to notice the woods.
If you can't put the podcast down,
You're going to miss the experience.
Listen to music when you're listening to music.
Enjoy the woods when you're enjoying the woods.
Do one thing at a time.
Get yourself out of the way so you can be that creator.
Not easy.
These skeins,
These screens,
These scrims in theater language between us and the world,
They're not helping the creative process.
So what do we do?
This week we have the famous Jewish liturgy of V'ahavta,
And you might love God.
You ought love God in all of your actions.
One of the Hasidic,
One of the revivalist preachers of the past couple of centuries said,
How could you command someone to love God?
You can't command emotions,
Though that's done at least once or twice in the Hebrew Bible.
You're commanded to feel joy on Sukkot on the tabernacle's feast.
I definitely have problems with these.
Don't make me feel joy.
I'm going to be snarky just to oppose you.
There's an SNL sketch about the pelotont,
Right?
If you encourage me while I'm exercising,
I'm going to exercise less.
I need to be teased.
I need to be assaulted.
Neither of which is true for me,
But you can't command emotions,
And this teacher knew it right away.
So the real command was the previous verse,
Which is to hear,
To listen,
To attend.
That's all we got,
Right?
You can't command revelation.
You can't command love.
You can't command the noetic.
You can't command passion.
You can't draw down God's creativity by force.
You can be open to it.
You can listen for it.
You can attend.
For some of us,
That's meditation.
For some of us,
That's role-playing games.
For some of us,
It's giggling with our children.
Me,
Recently,
It's a lot of long walks.
Whatever it is for you,
Do it.
This week,
We talk about the Sabbath commandment,
The commandment to observe Saturday as day of rest,
Day without creating,
Day without changing nature.
I don't care what day you do it on.
I don't care if you do 24 hours straight,
25 hours straight.
I don't care if you do it while you're eating.
I don't care if you do it in your bed,
But take time not to do,
Or take time not to do much,
Or take time to only do one thing at a time.
Heschel,
If you have the time to do something,
Read Heschel's book,
The Sabbath,
Which talks about palaces in time.
It's hard to make yourself small.
It's hard to notice revelation and epiphany.
It's hard to hear.
It's hard to attend to things.
It's hard to be creative.
It's hard to sit down and do the work.
Honestly,
That'll be a subject for another week.
It starts with listening.
