Vayera: Letting Go

Vayera: Letting go

In this week’s Torah portion, Lot and his wife are having trouble leaving behind their home in Sodom. They are miraculously saved from the total destruction of their city by angels that come to visit them, and yet, they exemplify the very human characteristic of dragging their feet when it is time to go, looking backwards when they are supposed to be moving on, and generally struggling with letting go.

15. And as the dawn rose, the angels pressed Lot, saying, "Get up, take your wife and your two daughters who are here, lest you perish because of the iniquity of the city."

‫ּׁשחַר ָעלָה ַוּיָאִיצּו ַה ַּמלְָאכִים ּבְלֹוט‬ ַ ‫ ּוכְמֹו ַה‬.‫טו‬ ‫לֵאמ ֹר קּום קַח אֶת ִאׁשְּתְ ָך ְואֶת ׁשְּתֵ י בְנ ֹתֶ יָך‬ :‫ַהּנִ ְמצָא ֹת ּפֶן ּתִ ָּספֶה ַּבעֲֹון ָהעִיר‬

16. But he tarried, and the men took hold of his hand and his wife's hand, and the hand of his two daughters, out of the Lord's pity for him, and they took him out and placed him outside the city.

‫ ַוּי ִתְ ַמ ְהמָּה | ַוּי ַ ֲחזִיקּו ָה ֲאנָׁשִים ְּבי ָדֹו ּו ְבי ַד‬.‫טז‬ ‫ִאׁשְּתֹו ּו ְבי ַד ׁשְּתֵ י בְנ ֹתָ יו ְּב ֶח ְמלַת י ְהֹוָה ָעלָיו‬ :‫וַּי ֹ ִצאֻהּו ַוּיַּנִחֻהּו מִחּוץ ָלעִיר‬

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Bereshit 19:15-16

Lot tarries. Lot clings to the reality he knows, even when it is no longer serving him – even when his house is literally surrounded by evil and on the brink of destruction.

In a moving and beautiful display of compassion, the angels take the family by the hand and forcibly remove them from their city. It is that hard to leave behind the familiar and venture into the unknown.

In order to truly let go of something – a place, a habit, a relationship – my experience is that we have to be willing to allow grief to fill the empty space of whatever it is we let go. Zen priest Greg Snyder says that grief is one of the heart’s natural responses to impermanence. Mourning losses - even the loss of something that wasn’t serving us – is necessary in order to move through the world. Resisting the feeling of that grief is what causes us to cling, like Lot and his wife, to the past, feeling stuck and unable to move forward.

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Lot’s wife exemplifies that stuck-ness in one of the most vivid metaphors in the entire Torah: 26. And [Lot’s] wife looked from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.

- Bereshit 19:26

:‫ וַּתַ ּבֵט ִאׁשְּתֹו מֵַאח ֲָריו וַּתְ הִי נְצִיב ֶמלַח‬.‫כו‬

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks proposes that it is her “post-decision dissonance” that causes her to turn back – her inability to fully commit to the decision to leave and her endless ruminating over what she was giving up. When people are lost in this dissonance, they “have second thoughts; they need reassurance; they “look back”.1 She became a pillar, an unmoving, solid structure. She became salt, an element that when put on the earth, does not allow new life to grow. She was literally frozen in indecision and regret, as so many of us are at different points in our lives.

Opening up to our grief is not pretty or neat, but it seems to be the only way we can move through this life that is filled with hard decisions and waves of loss without getting stuck. As blogger Dr. Arnie Kozak writes, grief is the admission price to the present moment.

There is a powerful story about this in the Buddhist tradition. A wise Buddhist teacher has a son who dies. He wails and cries all night after it happens and the few days following. His students become unnerved – didn’t their teacher regularly tell them that life and death are illusions – just changes in form from one thing to another? Why all the hysterics? Wouldn’t a Buddhist master be “above” such things?

One student approaches the teacher and asks him, “teacher, why are you wailing?

Didn’t you teach us that death is just an illusion?” The teacher answered, “yes, and the death of a child is the most painful illusion of them all.”

Grieving loss is not something that can be transcended once we are spiritual enough.

When we let go, we do not let go of grief, we let go into it. We fully feel the pain so that it can be processed in the body, rather than replayed over and over again in the mind.

Rumi puts it beautifully in his poem, Birdwings: Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror up to where you are bravely working.

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http://www.rabbisacks.org/covenant-conversation-5768-vayera-the-music-of-ambi valence/ 2

Expecting the worst, you look, and instead, here’s the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see.

Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.

If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed.

Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birdwings.

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The Institute for Jewish Spirituality’s mission is to develop and teach Jewish spiritual practices so that individuals and communities may experience greater awareness, purpose, and interconnection.

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