Fluidity + Rigidity = Catastrophe

Careful what you wish for

At the outset of this week’s Torah reading the Holy One tells Moshe to gather precious materials from the Israelites, “And they shall make Me a Sanctuary, and I will dwell among them.”

This is an incredible blessing and opportunity. But it is also a serious threat. Being near the Holy One, or having the Holy One nearby, is actually incredibly dangerous. Soon the Holy One will tell Moshe “For I cannot reside in your mist. You are a stubborn people. Lest I devour you along the way…” The path through Tanakh is littered with the bodies of people who go too close.

And yet, when the people hear that news, they are crestfallen. “And the people heard these words, and they mourned…”

You’d think they be relieved to be out of reach of this devouring fire, this fierce, protective God. But they are not. They are aggrieved, because they want to be near the Holy One. They know that proximity to the Divine is most alive, most creative, most real, most central. They know that near to the Divine is near to the hearth that warms the world. They know that being near God is most resonant and most evocative of the Infiniteness that resides at the center of their own experience. What to do?

The Holy One’s words to Moshe contain the information we need - “You are a stubborn people. Lest I devour you…” The danger is more pronounced because of that stubbornness. It is the ultimate Fluidity of the Divine that combines with the Rigidity of the people that amounts to a recipe for disaster. The traveling sanctuary provides a mutual compromise. God will be somewhat less fluid - “make two cherubs of gold… and I will meet with you there, and I will speak with you from atop the ark-covering, from between the two cherubs that rest upon the ark.” And in exchange we must be less stubborn.

How? For starters, being at least somewhat less convinced that we know exactly what’s going on, what’s good and what’s bad. The absolute certainty with which the Israelites decided that Moshe was late, that he was probably dead, and that they should make an idol must be mitigated. The rigid response that automatically produced a fixed outcome in response to certain inputs - like unease, anxiety, lack of knowing - must be softened by faith, prayer and longing. “I don’t understand what’s happening here. It seems bad to me. I’m anxious. Please help” is a much better response than “make us a god who will walk before us because we don’t know what happened to that man Moshe.”

Purim, in so many ways, is an object lesson in forfeiting stubborn opinions about what ought and what ought not to be. In the span of a story, so many things that seem so bad turn out to be quite good. An unprecedented danger becomes an incredible blessing. Mistakes are ultimately seen as perfect, coincidences as clear plans, and great ascents of wicked men are walking right up to the gallows.

The Talmud issues the Purim challenge of attaining a perspective in which the great binary is dissolved, in which we are no longer so stubbornly attached to the blessings of Mordecai and repulsed by the curses of Haman. Closeness to the Fluid Holy One demands that we loosen our fixation on that seemingly intuitive but ultimately rigid binary. Of course it seems accurate, and we should generally stay close to Mordecais and steer clear of Hamans, but that is not a fact written a stone. It’s a guideline that occasionally must be overridden, and our ability to remain flexible enough to hear the call to do so is what allows us to have a traveling sanctuary that does not explode or implode.

This is an essential message for a scary time in human history when a lot of people are quite sure they knows exactly what and whom is good and what and whom is bad. Those assessments are surely guided by wisdom and logic and clarity. And they are also definitionally out of synch with the essential fluidity of the Fluid Holy One. It would be hard for that clarity to be more clear than the statement “Haman is awful”, and yet Purim demands that we circumscribe that clear statement within a larger realization that the Holy Fluid One can do amazing things with awful people.