Eikev -- 5773

“Every spot on which your foot treads will be yours” (Deuteronomy 11:24).

Moses, spurring his people on, is speaking about the land from “the wilderness to the Lebanon and from the River – the Euphrates – to the Western Sea” (11:24).  He’s claiming a wide swath of territory for them, asserting their dominion.  It’s a bold statement with implications that echo until our own day.

I read it differently this week, out of context.  I think not of geopolitical space, but of personal space.

I learned as a high school drama student to “claim my space” on stage.  Mr. Ingle taught us to stand strong, even in the ensemble; Ms. Roston taught us to send our energy into the earth, “down to go up.”  Mr. Grenier tried to push us over during a scene.  Claiming one’s space means knowing that you belong where you are and that wherever you are belongs to you.  Being grounded in that way allows you to be both rooted and free.

People who claim the place where they stand have “presence.”  Great performers own the stage and deny you to look away.  Fine teachers hold their students’ focus without a word.  A capable police officer can control a chaotic situation singlehandedly.

In Everyday Holiness, Alan Morinis offers a brilliant description of humility:  taking up the right amount of space on the bench (52).  Some people, with overinflated egos, puff themselves up like chametz and demand energy they don’t deserve.  Others shrink from attention, making themselves invisible and thereby denying all they have to offer.  They take up the wrong amount of space on the civic bench.  They misunderstand their value.  They aren’t claiming their space. Both are acts of ego.

It is so important to have a place where you belong.  Feeling simultaneously special and part of the whole allows you to enter the wider world with a clear and appropriate sense of self.  It occurs to me that troubled youth may have no such place to call their own.

If you have the sense that you belong somewhere—anywhere--you can carry it with you wherever you go.  It becomes an inner attitude of appropriate humility, of knowing your inherent value AND the true contribution you can make in a particular situation.  Then, “every spot on which your foot treads will be yours.”

Where is your spot?