January 2014

This New Year’s coincides with the beginning of the book of Exodus in our Torah reading cycle. In the beginning of this fast-moving book, learn of the enslavement of the Israelites to the Egyptian Pharaoh, the birth and miraculous rescue of Moses, and God’s call to Moses at the burning bush.

Let’s take a minute to reflect on God’s words at the burning bush, which I think contain some wisdom for our new year.
And God spoke to Moses, saying:
I am ‘YHWH’
I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, as ‘El Shaddai’,
But by My name YHWH
I was not known to them.
(Exodus 6:5)

In this speech, we learn of two different identities for God. One is El Shaddai, which literally means something like “The God of Breasts.” As Rabbi Mishael Zion teaches, El Shaddai is “a throwback to the Canaanite feminine Gods, a pre-cursor to the Kabbalistic feminine aspects of God, …God as Mother. Shaddai is the experience of the baby who suckles their mother’s breasts, and experiences a world of deep sufficiency. There is enough – enough milk, enough love, enough warmth and connection.”

On the other hand, YHVH is unutterable, and is best interpreted as a breath. The letters make up something like the verb “to be” in the present tense, which otherwise does not exist in Hebrew. It means something like “Is.” This is why if we want to say, “The boy is good,” we say “Yeled tov,” (which has no verb) because the IS is reserved for the Being that underlies all existence.

So what does this mean for us as the New Year begins? Well, I invite us to think that these two ways of looking at God are also two ways that we can approach the coming year. First, in El Shaddai mode, we can take time to reflect on the abundance in our lives, and feel grateful for all that we have. We can look to the future, and cultivate trust that there is enough goodness in the world to go around, and that one way or another, we will be okay. We can feel inspired to work for what we want, because we believe the universe has enough abundance to realize our deepest dreams.

Second, in YHVH mode, we can breathe deeply and accept what comes, understanding that some things are beyond our control. We can meditate on how we are connected with everything else that is, that we are only a small part of the great wide world. We can feel grateful for the joys and successes we witness in other people, appreciate the changing sky, and move on from histories we cannot change. We can remind ourselves that, though we will work our hardest, we must also have compassion on ourselves and others when things don’t go the ways we have planned. We can open ourselves to the possibility that the way things are now is that seed of the way things can be in a perfected world.

As we enter the year, may we all be blessed with both abundance and acceptance. May we be blessed to connect with God as both a loving and personal presence and eternal and as unknowable mystery.

Happy New Year,
Rabbi Margie