Chukat
Numbers 19:1 – 22:1
Thirty-eight years have passed since our last Torah portion, and the Israelites who had known the slavery of Egypt have all died. The new generation’s only memory of captivity in Egypt is the tales their parents left behind. Metaphorically, we have done our spiritual work while wandering in the wilderness and have managed to leave behind our slave mentality, our narrow consciousness plagued with unrelenting attachments and cravings for control. We have been able to transcend this aspect of ego-bound consciousness, yet it is still part of us even if seemingly a distant memory or an ancient tale.
As the story unfolds in Torah, the time has come for conquest, for circumventing or defeating the armies that would prevent us from entering the Promised Land. Before engaging in battle, Moses sends emissaries to ask the various powers for safe passage to their final destination. Torah recounts the plea these messengers present to the king of Edom, a descendant of Esau, thereby replaying the original encounter between Jacob and Esau after their terrible falling-out.
“Thus says your brother, Israel: You know the hardships that have befallen us; that our ancestors went down to Egypt, that we dwelt in Egypt a long time, and that the Egyptians dealt harshly with us and our ancestors.” (Num. 20:14-15)
Some rabbis translate the Hebrew “va-yarei-u lanu,” rendered here as “dealt harshly with us,” as “made us seem harsh, bad.” In other words, “to justify their cruel treatment of us, they proclaimed that we were evil and deserving of persecution” (Etz Hayim: Torah and Commentary, p. 886). Perhaps what this new generation of Hebrews realized in saying these words is that our enemies tend to brand us this way—those who hold grudges against us, those who dislike us—as bad people deserving of all the evil that befall us. Perhaps they were asking the Edomites not to fall prey to the same hateful trait and to rise above the unhealed story between their extended families. Conceivably, the rabbis—through their interpretation—were commenting on their own lived reality.
Perhaps what they were touching upon goes even deeper than that, and has to do with the essential nature of our enslavement. What keeps us stuck in our own Egypt is the self-talk that convinces us that we are harsh and bad, deserving of all the evil that happens to us, and certainly not deserving of freedom. All these years our inner Pharaoh “made us seem harsh, bad” to ourselves as a way to keep us enslaved, stuck in our self-defeating inner story. We have come to believe in the myth of our separate sense of self and in all the limitations we have placed upon it as a consequence of our own narrative of unworthiness. Moreover, we have completely identified with this mythical self and—like a Golem—given it a life of its own. This myth of a fixed, permanent, independent self has been layered upon the Light of our True Self, keeping us in the darkness of its lie. What we most suffer from is a case of mistaken identity, believing ourselves to be this sinful, broken, undeserving, mythical creature we call “me.” Our stories are like the armies guarding the entrance to the Promised Land. Some we will have to fight and defeat. Some we will have to outmaneuver. Some will simply yield and offer us safe passage. But we will have to face each and every one of them and shine upon them the dissolving power of the light of Truth, for the only way in is through.