A constant vantagepoint overlooking a changing world

Let’s suppose that, every morning, you wake up at the break of dawn. You don your robe and slippers and make yourself some coffee. When it is ready, you pour it into your favorite mug and stand by the bay window that looks out on your back yard. Cherishing those few moments of silence before the kids get up, you have a chance to watch the world fill with color and sound and come to life. 

Now, imagine that, at the end of each lunar month, you fold up your house and everything in it. The bay window, the bed, the coffee maker, the mug - everything is disconnected from everything else and loaded onto a truck. You drive for a day or two in some direction, and then you stop. You unload your bay window and your bed and your coffee maker and your mug, and then you put them all together in the exact same way. 

The next day, you wake up at the break of dawn. You don your robe and slipper and make yourself some coffee. When it is ready, you pour it into your favorite mug and stand by the bay window that looks out on new your back yard. Cherishing those few moments of silence before the kids get up, you have a chance to watch the world fill with color and sound and come to life. 

And then one time, your drive takes you to a place that is not so pretty. The scene that unfolds as the sun rises is not nearly so pleasant - maybe the back yard is strewn with empty bottles, and someone has graffitied something hateful on the wall. Just the same, you watch the world fill with color and sound and come to life. Somehow, the daily ritual provides you with a way to take it in, to process what you see, and to consider how you will move forward.

This is how I view the mishkan. The mishkan was built as a wandering Temple that moved as the Jews moved through the wilderness. It shared many features with the Temple that would ultimately be built in Jerusalem - a menorah and an Ark, altars - but it differed in one essential way: it was designed to be dissembled and moved. The boards that constituted its walls were easily separated from one another; it’s primary furnishings were fitted with rings into which poles were inserted and the object was lifted and carried; the loops and hooks that connected the massive tapestries that covered the mishkan could easily be undone. 

The mishkan was dissembled and reassembled at least 42 times in the wilderness, as the Jews moved from Sinai to Israel. The trips between those 42 encampments may have been uneventful, like moving from one nice Boston suburb to another. But just as often, all hell breaks loose. A mass rebellion occurs; there is a panic over perceived lack of water; a rock is stricken in anger; the spies return; Miriam dies; the people demand meat and God plagues them. Each time something like this happens, the mishkan is once again reassembled, the candles are lit, the incense is burned, the daily offerings are offered. 

What is the experience of lighting the candles when one has moved from one suburb to another? Perhaps not so dramatically different. And what is the experience of lighting the candles when one is looking out on a back yard strewn with empty bottles, and someone has graffitied something hateful on the wall? Perhaps at such a time one feels the darkness so deeply that they are sick to their stomach, and they know with a deep knowing that the light they bring is the light that the world needs in order to survive for one more day.

Such is the nature of a life guided and framed by ritual. A few words of gratitude upon waking, a half-hour of sitting meditation around midday, a blessing over food, a walk in the woods after dinner - all of these work as lattices for our days and weeks and months and years, marking time and pointing inward or outward, reminding us to notice and to open. And they might not impact us so much when we do them - until suddenly they do. Suddenly we are acutely aware of being awake, of clinging to mindfulness like a raft in turbulent seas, of deeply needing that walk, of feeling genuine gratitude for food when food has suddenly become a bit more sparse.

Passover is coming - that odd collection of exotic foods, silly songs, stories told, broken matzahs hidden and found. Woven into the fabric of the “different night” are tales of families struggling to communicate, mysteries tellings of late-night rabbinic jam sessions, recollections of promises made by our Redeemer, mystical math that makes 10 into 50 into 200. Within each of these is the promise of realization, connection, gratitude, growth. And most of the time most of that potential remains latent - until it doesn’t. Suddenly, the hagaddah pops. Each line, each story, each character shakes off the dust and struts its hour upon the stage. 

Perhaps this year is such a year. For many of us, life has been turned inside out or upside down. We may find ourselves confined to tight quarters with family, with little exposure even to our next-door neighbors, with less to distract us than we would like, face to face with our personal and familial patterns, and suddenly, we may say, “Ah! So this is slavery! And I am my own Pharaoh!” And suddenly, the haggadah pops and comes to life and we can see just how much we need it.

Perhaps these scripts, songs, prayers and stories can help us sort out our lives a bit, straighten out our relationships a bit, speak our minds bit, hear each other a bit, see our blessings a bit, and set our course toward next year in Jerusalem. 

The strategy of no-strategy

The Purim story, in a nut shell, from Esther’s perspective: she has become queen. And then, for five years, nothing happens. What does the queen of Persia do, after all? Just come to the party when Achashveirosh says to come to the party. Keep your head on your shoulders and your wits about you. Decorate the palace Christmas trees. Maybe some kind of half-hearted and not-ironic campaign against bullying.

And then she gets desperate word from Mordecai that trouble is brewing. Haman is plotting to kill all of the Jewish people in the kingdom, and Esther will have to intercede on behalf of her people. She fasts for three days, and then invites the King, along with Haman, to a party. And then…. she invites them to another party. 

Esther’s thinking at this point is one of the great mysteries of the Purim tale. It turns out to be the precise turning point of the story: in between those two parties, Haman sees Mordecai, Mordecai refuses to bow to him, Haman is incensed, he consults with his wife and advisors, realizes he must have Mordecai killed NOW, builds a gallows (in the middle of the night!) and goes in the middle of that same night to tell the king about his new plans.

Meanwhile, the King Himself cannot sleep - some say he is bothered by the fact that Esther invited Haman, and he wonders if Esther and Haman are conspiring to kill him, and then he wonders if maybe there is some bad karma that would put him in danger, like maybe some unpaid debt, and he discovers that he never rewarded Mordecai for saving his life 6 years ago. In a rare moment of clarity, Achashveirosh connects his suspicions about Haman and his debt to Mordecai and devises a plan to take care of both: he will ask Haman how to reward a “man whom the king wants to honor,” offering a kind of Rorschach Test to see what’s on Haman’s mind. The rest, as they say, is history.

Looking back, we can see that Esther’s plan worked out perfectly: she invited the king and Haman to a party, and at that party invited them to another party, and in between the two parties, everything changed. But what was her strategy? What was she thinking? Why plan for two parties? 

Ibn Ezra (medieval commentator on things that need commentating) suggests that Esther waited to tell Achashveirosh that the threat to the Jewish people included her because she didn’t see any indication that anything had changed as a result of the three-day fast she had undertaken. And when she saw Mordecai paraded through the streets of Shushan the next day, she was encouraged. 

For Ibn Ezra, the plan was to get to Point A and then wait for an indication that it was safe to go to Point B. Her plan was to put herself in the situation she needed to be in and then to feel the textures of the moment, to trust herself that she would know what to do when she felt clarity, and then to move forward when she knew it was time to do so. Her plan was to be completely OK not acting if the time wasn’t right. She bought herself more time because the time wasn’t right. 

I suspect that there are a lot of moments in which we are expected to show up with our talking points in hand. Elevator speeches rehearsed, responses anticipated, counter-responses prepared. Lesson plans must be formulated. Agendas for the meeting sent out in advance. Clever questions are conceived in case the conversation wanes, calibrated to include the right level of intimacy and curiosity. We are supposed to know how the song goes and what the plan is. We should know our lines, and when we are supposed to say them.

Sometimes, however, we cannot know in advance what will be needed of us. We are venturing into something novel and uncharted. It is a genuinely unprecedented, definitionally unknowable  moment, and to know how to act within that moment requires total unobstructed presence and presence of mind, alert, open, empty.

At these special times, we realize that our plans and strategies are defenses against the demands of presence and spontaneity, that our frameworks and vocabularies and heuristics are as good at preventing beautiful moments as they are at facilitating them. That all the work we do beforehand betrays a lack of trust in ourselves, and in the moment, to open up at its own pace. That our analyses are attempts to fit the round peg of demanding moments into the square holes of our narrow perspectives. And we may well have built up our lives to protect ourselves from exposure to the unknown. 

We’re all invited to Esther’s parties this Purim - both of them. The invitation is to spend a few hours in Infinite Time, fully present - with Haman in the room, with Achashveirosh in the room, not panicking or lurching toward solutions, not pressuring ourselves or each other to do anything or say anything or change anything until we are ready, until we genuinely sense that the time is right.