Tyler’s Torah Thoughts for 3 Cheshvan, 5784
Parsha Noah: (Genesis 6:9- 11:32)
Fourth Portion: Genesis 8:15- 9:7
Today’s portion starts with:
15And God spoke to Noah saying:
16″Go out of the ark, you and your wife, and your sons, and your sons’ wives with you.
I’ve written about this idea the past two years. Leave your safe space. This is the path to freedom. We must risk if we are to be free. Our safety – the ark – becomes a prison.
It’s interesting how a few days ago, I wrote this (about the second portion – Genesis 7:1)
On one hand, the ark was a lifeboat. On the other? Would it not feel like a prison? To go into the ark, before the rains come, and stay with all these animals, to keep everyone safe? It would have been constricting. It would have been noisy. You couldn’t escape. Before the rains of abundance flowed, it may have even been bitter.
So on one hand, Noah saw the Ark as freeing. A path to free himself of the world around us. And yet, it became a prison in the end, to where Hashem had to tell him to leave.
What worked for Noah’s survival? Ended up becoming his prison when he was safe; until Hashem told him to leave.
How many of us experience this? We build a lifeboat in order to survive. The trauma passes. We are safe. And yet we stay in our Ark even though we don’t need to.
Yesterday, I read a passage from Mark Nepo’s “The Book of Awakening” and it was along this theme:
“The emotional patterns of our lives are very strong. They often come into being because we’ve needed them to survive. But sooner or later, we arrive at moments where the very thing that has saved us is killing us, keeping us from truly living.
Being invisible once kept us from being hurt, but now we are vanishing.
Or Listening once kept us in relation, but now we are drowning in our unheard cries.
Or avoiding conflict once kept us out of the line of fire, but now we are thirsting for contact that is real.
Early in my life, I learned to protect myself, and this meant I became very good at catching things. In fact, I never went anywhere without my catcher’s mitt. No matter what came at me, nothing could surprise me. And while this saved me from the unpredictable assaults of my family, and even helped me in my odyssey through cancer, it eventually had a life of its own.
Everything – birds, women, friends, truth – was intercepted by the quick reflex of my mitt. Eventually, nothing got through, and the very thing that helped me survive was now keeping me from being touched.
The softness and wonder of the world was vanishing from my life.”
He goes on to conclude this:
“It seems our ability to be authentic and free can’t touch us until we breathe our way below the twitch of our patterning. Often, this requires outlasting the anxiety of needing to catch or fix what comes our way, so we can truly respond from the center of our being.
There is, after all, a difference between helping someone because if you don’t you will lose their love or some sense of your own image as a caring person, and helping someone because your impulse of heart moves you to their aid.
And finally, this is the big takeaway:
We are, each of us, in a repeatable war between defending ourselves from hurts that happened long ago and opening in innocence, again and again, to the unexpected touch of life.”
For me. This is significant. I lived on an ark for 40 years myself. From the age of 9 to the age of 49, I’ve been just surviving. I was in a repeatable war. Living out patterns of life. Until Hashem called me to leave my ark.
The Torah study these past few years has helped me become much more free. Those of you who know me best these past two years can attest to this fact!
It is the difference between Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Post Traumatic Growth. Hashem is asking Noah to leave the safety of the Ark. Noah knew it was safe; and he still didn’t want to leave.
And Noah left. He waited until Hashem called him. And he left. And what did he do? He built an altar to Hashem!
And Hashem made a promise (Genesis 8:21-22):
21And the Lord smelled the pleasant aroma, and the Lord said to Himself, “I will no longer curse the earth because of man, for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth, and I will no longer smite all living things as I have done.
22So long as the earth exists, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.”
This is freedom. And then, Hashem gave Noah a new command:
Be fruitful and multiply.
Take this freedom – and multiply it. That is our purpose. That is the blessing.
What are your thoughts?
Here is my commentary from the past two years:
Tyler’s Torah Thoughts for 30 Tishrei, 5782
Today’s Torah portion gives us the story of Noah and his family leaving the ark.
Verse 8:15 & 16 says “God spoke to Noah, saying ‘Go out of the ark, you, your wife, your sons, and your sons’ wives with you.”
Consider that Noah did not leave the ark on his own. Despite the ark coming to rest and no longer in the water, Despite seeing the dry land all around. Noah waited.
Rabbi Schneerson wrote:
“Noah and his family enjoyed in the ark a taste of the messianic era, when animals will coexist in peace, which explains why he was reluctant to leave. But God told Noah to leave the ark, since his mission in life was not to isolate himself in an atmosphere of holiness, but rather to ‘be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.’ You might be tempted to lock yourself away in an ‘ark’ of personal spirituality. The Torah, however, teaches you that you must ‘go out of the ark’ and take responsibility for the world around you.”
As I meditate on this, I am struck with the questions of what are the “arks” I’m comfortable with that I’ve been unwilling to go out of? For 5782, I know my Torah learning and study has been one of those arks. I spent a lot of time in 5781 studying and reading the Torah (mostly on my own). This year I’m called to share what I’m learning with others.
We are responsible for the world around us. It would be easy to eschew this responsibility and tell ourselves “well, God is bigger than I; certainly he can’t hold me accountable for what is going on around me?” The truth is he doesn’t hold us accountable for what is going on around us; he calls us to engage with what is going on around us and bring light (the soul spark of Hashem’s neshama in us) to the world. As i was engaging yesterday, the truth is our personal past isn’t real. It lives as brain function in the present moment. When we are thinking about our past and we are unwilling to move because we are stuck, we are forgetting that all of this takes place in the present moment. There is no past, there is no future. It’s all in our brains, right now. All I can do is engage with the next 60 seconds. That’s what I can control.
And what did Noah do as soon as he left the ark? He built an alter to Hashem. He made sacrifices on this alter.
This leaves me with more questions for myself;
- What other “arks” am I living in and comfortable with that I don’t want to leave on my own?
- What is Hashem asking me to do with this moment of my life?
- What (metaphorical) altars to Hashem do I need to build?
- What do I need to let go of (sacrifice) that may be holding me back.
Not a lot of answers. But certainly many questions.
Would love to know your thoughts- what are some of your answers?
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