Gratitude, compassion and commitment to others reveal a power that has always been ours: to live a life of wholeness. View the study sheet here. Watch the recording here.
A recent Pew Research Center report found that among the seventeen advanced economies studied the United States is the most conflicted when it comes to questions of social unity. Seven in ten Americans say there are very strong/strong conflicts between people with different ethnic or racial backgrounds. And it ranks second regarding disagreement on facts. Fifty-nine per cent of Americans say that people cannot agree on basic facts.
This atmosphere of degraded social unity increases suspicions among us. The effect is not only on the social level. In a culture of intensified conflict we become more emotionally self-protective. We withdraw from social engagement, cautious about sharing with others who we are, what we think, how we feel. Hiding our true identities from one another, we become divided not only from others but increasingly from our own selves. Finding ourselves in an expanding spiritual and psychological wilderness, we wait for deliverance.
The story of the Israelite exodus from Egypt lends itself to be read as a tale of just such a deliverance: redemption by a mighty hand and by wonders sourced from a power outside the people themselves. Yet, woven within the story’s fabric is the echoing of a message first told in Torah’s opening chapters: this creation is a garden for you to tend, not Me; what happens next is up to you.
Seeded throughout this week’s Torah portion are hidden reminders that we hold the power of our deliverance. A deep reading uncovers what has been planted in the text. The word which gives the portion its name, beha’alotecha, is typically translated as “when you mount [the lamps on the lampstand].” The Hebrew form of the verb emphasizes the degree of human initiative and allows as a translation, “when you cause to be brought up [the lamps onto the lampstand].”
Later in the portion, Moses beholds a new dynamic at work in the community. Seventy elders, who have accompanied Moses outside the camp to the site of the sanctuary, become infused with a measure of divine insight previously possessed only by Moses. He celebrates this development, and the text then says in a typical translation, “Moses then reentered the camp.” The form of the verb again encourages a more nuanced rendering: “Moses then took himself back into association to the camp.”
At the end of the portion, Miriam, upon criticizing Moses’ leadership, is stricken with a form of skin disease. God’s instruction to Moses is often translated as, “Let her be shut out of the camp for seven days, and then let her be readmitted.” Again, the particular form of the verb suggests that Miriam can take agency over her restoration: “…and then let her bring herself back into association with others.”
In the middle of these events the people complain bitterly. They long for the days when they were in Egypt, a time they construct in their memory as one of stability, security and sustenance. God is incensed. The conflagration that follows is a consequence of failing to adhere to the prime divine directive: you hold the power to your wellbeing; surrendering it results in terrible destruction.
Wolf Kahn was born in Germany in 1927. His father was conductor of the Stuttgart Philharmonic, a position he lost in 1933 when Hitler rose to power. Kahn was sent to live with his paternal grandmother Anna, whose home in Frankfurt was filled with art, while his father escaped to the United States. In 1940 Anna managed to place Wolf on the Kindertransport to England. From there he sailed to New York, where he reunited with his father. Anna Kahn and Kahn’s maternal grandparents did not survive the Holocaust.
Kahn studied art and eventually found his way to Hans Hofmann’s School of Fine Art, a center of the Abstract Expressionism movement. For Kahn, Abstract Expressionism served as a sanctuary from the totalitarian nightmare that had consumed members of his own family. It was an artistic approach that rejected predetermined forms, ideas, and any notions of absolute truth. What mattered was the inner search and an expression of personal integrity on the two-dimensional world of the canvass.
“Abstract expressionists believed in spontaneity,” Kahn said. “Knowing stuff ahead of time was considered a sin. You’re supposed to perceive freshly each time and be very alert to the moment.” Mystery was not considered a disturbance of well-being and wholeness. It was an invitation to enter new dimensions of oneself. He recommended, “Paint the nameless. The best control is no control. Go out and start painting using only elements in the landscape to which you can’t give a name.” Hidden there is an experience that can heal a fractured life.
Pictured here is his painting Yellow Stripe. Two swaths of crimson pour across the canvass. Nutrient-rich green is both above and below the surface. Life is finding its way through. The horizontal and the vertical coexist. Flow and upsurge. And bisecting all is an embedded band of yellow. Kahn shares with us a counterbalance of elements. On canvass is the active tension that is wholeness. A wholeness that cannot be given, only discovered…over and over.
At the end of The Wizard of Oz, Glinda the Good Witch tells Dorothy, “You always had the power [to return home] my dear, you just had to learn it for yourself.” At the end of Deuteronomy as the Israelites are about to take their final steps out of exile, Moses reminds them that the teaching they have received was never far from them: “It is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart.”
“There is in all things a hidden wholeness,” wrote the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. Fear, anxiety, the desire for control…all bury more deeply that hidden wholeness. Gratitude, compassion, openness and commitment to others…reveal a power that has always been ours: to live a life of wholeness.
Join us here at 7:00 p.m. on Thursday June 20 as we explore hidden wholeness.
