Friday, January 11, 2013

Vaeira 5773

God charges Moses with an historic task—liberating his people and changing history.  Moses demurs.

“’Go and tell Pharaoh king of Egypt to let the Israelites depart from his land.’  But Moses appeared to God, saying ‘The Israelites would not listen to me; how then should Pharaoh heed me, me—who gets tongue-tied!’”  (Exodus 6:10-12).
Moses does what so many of us do:  he assumes his own incapacity.

We tell ourselves stories of our own incompetence:
o   An earlier failure was my fault.
o   My earlier failure is bound to happen again.
o   I’m not capable.

Somehow recordings tell us we’re not good enough, that we’re not smart or likeable enough get placed in our heads.  We psych ourselves out of doing great things by thinking that failure stems from our own inabilities, rather than from the wider environment.  We see failures as proof of our incapacity rather than as opportunities to learn, and weave these into the stories of our lives.
But in fact we have extraordinary capacity.  Each one of us is capable of doing miracles in our own lives and in the wider world.  Each one of us is so special, so miraculous that the Universe summoned us into existence at this very moment, just as we are.  We are needed.  Our sacred task, both simple and profound, is to accept that truth.

When we know we can, all things are possible.

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