This week’s Torah portion, Behukkotai, begins with these words: “If you will walk in My laws and keep my mitzvot, to do them…I will walk among you, and I will be your God, and you will be My people; I am YHVH your God who brought out of the land of Egypt, from being slaves to them; I broke the bars of your yoke, making you walk upright.”
I love this invitation to metaphorically “walk” in Godly ways, with the promise that this will result in God “walking” with us, causing us to “walk upright,” a metaphor for liberation. When I was preparing a study sheet a few years ago for this Torah portion on the theme of “walking,” I came across this teaching from one of my favorite authors and spiritual teachers, Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, from her book, The Way of Tenderness. In this section, she discusses the necessity of engaging with that which is most difficult in our experience on the road to spiritual awakening:
“If we were to simply walk past the fires of racism, sexism, and so on because illusions of separation exist within them, we may well be walking past one of the widest gateways to enlightenment. It is a misinterpretation to suppose that attending to the fires of our existence cannot lead us to experience the waters of peace. Profundity in fact resides in what we see in the world. Spiritual awakening arrives from our ordinary lives, our everyday struggles with each other. It may even erupt from the fear and rage that we tiptoe around. The challenges of race, sexuality, and gender are the very things that the spiritual path to awakening requires us to tend to as aspirants to peace.”
I appreciate this teaching for a number of reasons, but perhaps most because it refuses to accept the divide between spirituality and work for justice that some many assume to be true. If, as Manuel writes, “spiritual awakening arrives from our ordinary lives, our everyday struggles with each other,” then it is precisely in those places where we often experience the most pain that we can seek wisdom and liberation. This feels particularly important in this moment, when there are so many “fires” of the sort that Manuel references here. What I hope for all of us is that we can find in the everyday “walking” of our lives seeds of peace and transformation. When the world gets difficult around us, can we both honor our pain and our anger, and also seek to keep our hearts open to those with whom we disagree? When we feel like we might be overwhelmed by grief, can we sit with our sadness and, through it, realize our connection to others? Can we learn to care for ourselves and for others despite the ways we feel beaten down, despite the many barriers that the world throws up between us?
In thinking about what it means to walk in godly ways in the midst of the fires around us, I was moved to read this this prayer/poem by Rabbi Ariel Tovlev, written in response to the binaries that are tearing us apart, to being told that if one has empathy for Israeli hostages, then they must not care about Palestinians, and if they care about the people of Gaza, they must not care about Israelis. It is called “ Empathy,” and it too is an invitation into our heartbreak, for the sake of keeping our hearts open, and our humanity intact.
With blessings for a Shabbat of light and love, and a sense of Godliness walking among us.
