It was Shabbat Naso, the longest parashah in the Torah, read in proximity to Shavuot, the great wedding celebrating the enduring wisdom given to us on a mountain top. We had prepared.
Was it a complete gift, this wisdom, or did we turn ourselves inside out and twist ourselves into a posture of acceptance? Some crazy yoga that we submitted to methodically and daily in order to gain the gift:
Here is your wisdom, nicely packaged. It’s now in book form. First it came as thunder and lightning, but some time into the future, after you are done with the telling, you will begin the writing. Then it will be a book, then it will return to lightning in digital form and you will return to telling because the words are on the wind, in the rain. Maybe once in a while you’ll project them on a wall or write them in a journal to remind you that the word has shape — and that the word does not have shape, it has sound. The Torah calls it the return to thunder.
In the portion Naso is the threefold blessing of the priests. In the reading of the Sefat Emet, Hasidic commentator, to be blessed with shalom is to be blessed with a sort of wholeness, an inner point of truth that opens from the individual to the many to the All to the Universal.
In the Sefat Emet version, the threefold blessing is given in the singular opening onto the plural, one and many, the individual as it opens onto the universal — to bring the blessing from the individual instance to the universal application, the conduit from the one to the many, to break through your skin and live in God.
Wherever God dwells, there is blessing, wherever there is blessing there is shalom, an inner point of truth. I am you and you are me and we are all together.
One year on Shabbat Naso, I was sitting in the minyan and a guy from the drug and alcohol support meeting (Shalvah) I convene came in and whispered to me.
“I used today. I gotta stay close to this,” he said, referring to the sober meetings. “I want this so bad.”
He had been a heroin user since he was 15. You are here with nothing, I was thinking, but I said: “Your dearest possession right now is your sobriety. Get clean, and that one possession will open onto all other blessings. Without that blessing — nothing.”
He knew this. Yeah, yeah, he said. We were talking in a code language of recovery.
“It’s a test man, all of it,” I said. “You will be tested daily. Today a test, tomorrow a test, each day a dangerous quiz, and if you fail it today, you might make it tomorrow. One day at a time. Go home tonight and take tomorrow fresh. Do-over, every day new. That’s a blessing.”
“Yes, it’s a blessing,” he repeated.
With the Sefat Emet, we are at home in our skins because the trip is internal. When we find our peace, we attach to the inner point of truth within. Each part is a whole, each instance opens onto the All. Only Everything is everything.
Humble and opening Up, every day new. Every year another chapter on the story as it winds Upward.
Rabbi James Stone Goodman serves Central Reform Congregation and is a past president of the St. Louis Rabbinical and Cantorial Association, which coordinates the d’var Torah for the Jewish Light.
