Seekers of Truth Among the Ruins
Thoughts on the Sabbath Before the 9th of Av (Parshat Devarim) 2024
We’ve all had moments of joy, connectedness, and purpose, where life felt as it was supposed to feel. We long to recreate those moments, to make them last. Well-being is within our reach. This is the good news.
For some of us, however, for some period of our lives, well-being seems unattainable. For some period of our lives, we might feel unfulfilled, unnourished, lost, alone, confused. We might take it out on ourselves or on others.
Misery, or the need to inflict misery because of our own misery, is inevitable. Sometimes misery comes from tragedy. Despite the good will of people, things unravel badly.
The good news is that if you are reading this, you are alive and conscious today. If you decide to, you can learn a teaching, and make use of it.
Here is the teaching for this period in the Jewish calendar, the commemoration of the destruction of the Temples, the memory of the land of Israel being laid waste. Let me start with an image. You are sitting among ruins, wind whistling through burnt out buildings. Or you are in a forest of trees blackened by a raging fire. You decide to put one brick on top of another. Or you go searching for a surviving sprout and start to nurture it.
Or you have lost your way, your ego-self having insisted on the always unique but well-travelled road to perdition. However, it’s today – you can take the road less traveled, the high road. How far? It does not matter. You are no longer on the road back to Egypt. You are heading elsewhere.
We are at the conclusion of the time in our calendar, the three weeks between the 17th Day of Tammuz and the 9th of Av. Both dates refer, in the minds of the ancient Rabbis, to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 586 BCE by the Babylonians, and in 70 CE by the Romans.
When the ancient rabbis asked the cause of the ruination of the Temples, they referred us to the Sin of the Molten Calf from Exodus 32 and the Sin of the Spies from Numbers 13-14. Those narratives are rooted in spiritual psychology archetypes of avoiding and rejecting truth.
“Sin” does not just mean a moral transgression, though it includes that. “Sin,” more existentially, means acting against our authentic nature – our authentic goodness as human beings.
The Sin of the Calf can be understood as the rejection of a divine teaching that would commit us to transforming ourselves – actualizing the well-being that is within our reach. The Molten Calf is the fixed place that justifies where we are now – that what we think, feel and say is right and true as an unreflective matter of habit. Truth beckoned, but the people preferred the familiar error of worshipping the young bull. The Worshipping of the Calf, as an ego-state, refuses any external criteria for truth and any path toward transformation. The Calf refers to Permanence, the way things were; the Divine takes to change. The Sin of the Calf is the rejecting of a teaching of truth so that we can live in a reality of our own making.
The Sin of the Spies is the sin of creating false history, to justify our current state of mind or feeling. It is gratifying in the moment to reject the truth and replace it with a reality of our contrivance, but those contrivances all eventually lead to misery.
The Spies, as a spiritual concept, represent the refusal to accept a reality, moral or otherwise, that does not match our feelings. The Sin of the Spies goes even further – the spies create a new reality. Conquering Canaan was a fearsome task, so, 10 of the 12 spies thought, it can’t be done. Any claim to the contrary was greeted with hysteria. Egypt was redefined (in a follow-up rebellion to the Sin of the Spies) as a land “flowing with milk and honey” (Numbers 16:13). The Israelites had pleaded with God to bring them out of Egypt; then they say that God brought them into the wilderness to kill them (also Numbers 16:13).
So, what is the truth? This is the right question. True – our inner lives are subjective; we experience the world through our own subjective lenses. It is also true that there is an objective world; there are other people and there are facts. There also exists a standard of the right way to live.
We assemble the truth of the right way to live through reflection on our own lives, including our engagement with other subjective human beings. We try to figure things out. Truth is assembled as a project, often with people with whom we disagree and wisdom traditions that awaken us from our torpor. Deep well-being is connected to living a life of truth. Misery is lies – those we tell ourselves, or those that other people are foisting upon us. (This is why I try to begin all relationship counseling with a “police report” – just the facts – to help people disconnect from the narratives that blind our vision.)
The city of ruins, the blackened forest, the journey to perdition are all the result of rejecting a life of truth. During this week, as we contemplate the ruins or the possibility of ruins, we also commit ourselves to a lifetime of the humbling, laborious work of building and planting truth, as we journey towards the Days of Awe, toward deep and sustained well-being.
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