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?

Dvarim 5773

Standing on the edge – it’s exhilarating and terrifying. 

Moses stands on several edges at once in this week’s parsha, Dvarim.  It’s the first in the book of Deuteronomy.  He stands on Mount Pisgah, the Promised Land arrayed at his feet.  He stands on the river bank, preparing to cross over.  He stands “in the fortieth year, on the first day of the eleventh month,” the generation-long wandering about to conclude (1:3).  He stands, therefore, a month away from death.

The edge is a place of both opportunity and danger, since one thing must end so that another can begin.  It is a place of great energy:  recall the flush of new love, waves crashing at the sea shore, a hang glider poised on a cliff, the first day of school.  These moments, along with life cycle events like b’nei mitzvah, weddings, conversions, and funerals are called “liminal.”  The word comes from the Latin for “threshold” – that place of transition from inside to outside, from single to married life.  When you cross over the edge, anything can happen.

As a closing thought, this poem by Guillaume Appolinaire.  My boss at my first real job kept it pinned over her desk, and I’ve never forgotten it:

Come to the edge, He said.
They said, We are afraid.
Come to the edge, He said.
They came. He pushed them... and they flew.
 

When have you stood on the edge?  Were you exhilarated or terrified?  How did it work out?