Devarim
THE BIG IDEA
What life goal have you been unable to attain and who do you hold accountable for it?
According to the Torah Omens this is an excellent time to set the record straight. Stand like Moses at the edge of the promised land and tell your side of the story as accurately as you can.
Admit your own limitations, name the missteps taken by yourself or others, and allow sadness and anger to surface and be fully felt.
Beginning on Saturday night and lasting all through Sunday, we enter the most favorable time of the spiritual cycle to admit to our failures as individuals, as a people, and as a human race. Our world continues to overflow with human suffering, war, poverty, mass killings, crime and corruption - not to mention the physical and emotional abuse, hurt and neglect passed from parents to children and between spouses and siblings.
Take time to become conscious of own your part in our collective brokenness.
Use this day to feel. Use this day to cry. Use this day to go to the deep dark places. The 9th of Av is a channel to the deepest loss, longing, and grief, it is a time to mourn the destructive force that fear, anger, resentment and jealousy brings to this world.
But remember, we go to the darkest places in order to pray for more light. Go into the pain to emerge more sensitive, grateful, aware and responsible for each precious moment in this sacred life.
INNER HATE SCAN
In the final book of the Torah, Devarim, Moses retells the story of the spies from his perspective.
Rashi, the most renowned and respected of torah commentators points out that Moses is naming the Israelite’s pattern of projection. When they said “BECAUSE THE LORD HATES US” it simply wasn’t true. God loved them, but they hated God.” Rashi brings in a proverb to explain further, ‘What is in your own mind about your friend, you imagine is what is in his mind about you’
Basic projection.
When we hate something but can’t admit to our hate or anger we internalize that feeling so deeply we assume the other hates us. In the case of the Israelites in the desert, they had internalized their hatred of God so deeply that they claimed that God hated them. As if the Source Energy of the Universe would take them from slavery, fight their wars, give them water, food and shelter in the desert only to set them up for a massacre.
Internalized hatred is a sneaky thing. It can mask itself as victimhood or persecution when really it is our own unprocessed judgements that need somewhere to go.
Take time this weekend to investigate your own hidden judgements and projections.
Where in your own life do you feel like you are forgotten or neglected? Where do you feel persecuted or set up to fail in your own life. Where in your heart do you feel that someone has something against you for no reason? Is it God, a parent, a boss or a friend?
Find a quiet space to journal or mediate on any sources of hate or discrimination or neglect in your life. Name them. Scan your body to see where you store that memory. Write out everything you think they hate about you. And then, when you are ready, do your best to admit how you really feel about them. Was there another way to see the situation, or read their behavior? Are you hiding your own hurt, anger or disappointment by projecting it on them?
In his final speech to the nation, Moses begins by naming the most offensive of projections, that God hated his own people — which paradoxically merited the karmic consequence of that unprocessed emotion, God then actually deemed them unworthy of entering the land, and that generation was sentenced to die outside the land. (except Caleb and Joshua, the spies that maintained faith).
This exercise is meant to scan for any internalized hatred, or fear, or judgement of another, and notice ways that is creating negativity in your own life. Sunday is a great time to try this exercise.