Seasons of the Moon - Shevat 5759
Hopelessness is the feeling that things are forever
frozen in stone.
When the world came into being, it first existed
as primordial matter without form: "Darkness on the face
of the deep; and the Divine Presence hovering on the face of the
water." The world was then a world of water. Water is the
ultimate symbol of matter without form. Water has no form; it
flows where it may. It can take any shape at all. It waits for
the vessel that holds it to give it shape, to give it true purpose.
There are times when we lose contact with our true
purpose. Times when the form that we have made for ourselves
is not what the Creator intended. We have become sealed and unresponsive
to spiritual reality. In Hebrew this is called tuma. Impurity
means to be cut off from the Source. Sealed. The landscape of
that sealed existence is a world of hopelessness.
If only we could return to a world where things
were not sealed in stone; where we could re-fashion ourselves
in the form that the Creator intended for us!
Every month the Jewish Woman, the Woman of the Moon,
returns to the Waters of Eden. The waters of the mikvah. When
she returns to those waters, she returns to a primordial world.
A world of water. An amniotic world where existence has no shape.
A world of formless matter where things have yet to be defined.
It is there that she is renewed like the moon. Re-defined. The
Woman of the Moon returns to the water, to an earlier stage of
creation, to that primordial world before definition and form.
And in that water she is re-formed, as new.
The word mikvah comes from the same root as the
word tikvah - Hope. The essence of hope is that we are not bounded
and trapped by our present reality. Hope says that we can connect
to that which is outside and beyond ourselves. To the Source.
Every mikvah is like a little sea. The gematria of yam (sea)
is 50. 50 represents the transcendent. The gateway to that which
is beyond.
This is the essence of purity. Of tahara. Life
is not frozen in stone. Hope tells us that we can return to the
world of water to be become purified. This is the essence of
hope: That things can be re-made. That we can change ourselves.
That we can break the treadmill. The mikvah tells us that we
can go back to the world of water, to that world of pure matter.
The mikvah tells us that we can regress to a world before form,
that we can re-make ourselves and become pure.
The moon has no light. All its light comes from
the sun. The People of the Moon have no light of their own.
All our light comes from the Creator. We are a glimmer of moonlight
in a dark world. That is our purpose. To receive and reflect
G-d's light. We measure our success in this world, individually
and as a people, to the extent that we are reflectors of the Divine
Light. If we want to light up the world with our own egos, we
block the Divine Radiance. The ultimate aim and purpose of the
People of the Moon is to be like the moon - that all its light
comes from the sun.
This is the secret of the survival of the People
of the Moon. This is what has baffled historians for millennia.
Why are the Jewish People still here? The glory that was Rome
is sipping cappuccino on the Via Veneto. The Greeks are eating
calimari in the shadow of the ruins of the Parthenon. The Persians
are weaving rugs. And the People of the Moon are what they have
always been - one nation declaring that G-d is One and His Name
is One. Who is like Your people Israel, one nation in the world?
Every month the moon seems to die. It disappears
from the sky and is no more. But at the very moment it seems
to die, it is reborn. Many times in our long and difficult history,
we have been written off as fossils. But just when we seem to
have been gassed and burned into oblivion, the sounds of children's
voices learning G-d's holy Torah are heard in the suburbs of Jerusalem.
Like the moon, we rise renewed and reborn. What is the secret
of our eternity?
The classic nations of world history burn like
a supernova. A hard fire that flames so brightly. The world
is awash with their light. You would think that nothing else
exists in the universe except them. In their glare, the People
of the Moon look very shabby and forlorn. A little moonlight
almost lost in the brash glare of a vaunting star. But, like
some Hollywood epic, each great empires fizzles out, to be lost
in the black holes of history while that little moonlight keeps
on shining. Receiving. Reflecting.
Only one Light is eternal. Everything else turns
out to be as dead and empty as a pack of used batteries. This
is the secret of the People of the Moon. We have no light of
our own, and therefore it can never run out. We are powered by
He who creates reality, who contains the world and all that is
in it. Only in His Light do we see light. This month's sign is
Aquarius/The Water Carrier, or in Hebrew, D'li. The Water Carrier
is the astrological sign of the Jewish People. A water carrier
has no purpose other than to be a vessel for the water. The Jewish
People, too, have no purpose except to be the "water carrier"
of the living waters of the Torah.
This publication is also available in the following formats: SEASONS OF THE MOON is written by Rabbi
Yaakov Asher Sinclair and edited by Rabbi
Moshe Newman.
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Written In Stone
Don't you sometimes feel like your life is written
in stone - that you can't change? Sometimes, we want to go back
to a more innocent time - a time when we were pure and our hearts
unsullied. But we feel we can't break the mold we're stuck in.
We've created a treadmill from past bad decisions, and now we
seem doomed to run like a rat round and round ... visiting and
re-visiting all the mistakes we've ever made.
A World Of Water
Moon-Light
Tahara
Before you were born
Distant drumming
In a waterworld
Hearts beating in hope
You and mummy and me
And all our hopes
That return one day
To the sea
In Purity
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