Shattered Vessels and the Storms of Life

It is 3am and I am up with my smallest dog, Ginger, who is storm phobic. If she is awakened by flashes of lightning she sees in the window or rumbles of thunder she hears, there is no getting back to sleep, well, for me anyway. It's time to get up, give her anti-anxiety medicine, turn on all the lights, and put soft music on the TV. With my Dolphin brain, once those lights go on, I'm awake for the duration.

While I could be frustrated with the sleep interruption and deprivation and inconvenience, I've decided tonight to use the time productively. So I checked my email. Interestingly enough, this is one of the emails I received:

If we are fault finding, putting one another down, being selfish, being violent to our spouses or children, if we are cheating and being dishonest, then we are not living the old Sacred Way. The old way is about respect, love, forgiveness and sharing." from WhiteBison.org, and quoted from Meditations with Native American Elders: The Four Seasons.

 

It sounds to me like "the old Sacred Way" aka the Good Red Road, speaks the same truths spiritually as what our various spiritual traditions have tried teaching us through the years, including the spirituality which is the basis of the 12 Steps.

It's so simple; it's just not easy.

Little Ginger being terrified of the thunder and lightning is what we must look like from a G!d's-eye view of the world.

How did our brains get so convoluted, so far away from how we were created to be on the earth? Why do we seemingly choose to live our days locked into the disordered thinking and behaving brought about by being disconnected from G!d and from one another, and from the spiritual principles which keep us on the good path, the Old Sacred Way?

We are definitely fragmented, shattered vessels that still retain one G!d-infused shard of glass.... Perhaps you are not familiar with this story of the creation of the world? I will explain.

The Kabbalists embraced many theories about how the world was brought into existence. Perhaps one of the best-known is that from 16th century CE kabbalist, Rabbi Isaac Luria. R’Luria asked himself the question, “How can there be room for the universe when G!d fills all of space and time?” This, of course, led to a very convoluted, lengthy, and complicated explanation, and I shall attempt to summarize the essence of Rabbi Luria's attempt to answer his question.

Rabbi Luria posited that, at the beginning of time, G!d’s presence filled the universe. When G!d decided to bring this world into being, in order to make room for creation, G!d contracted, drew G!d's self inwards a bit. The Hebrew word for this is tzimtzum. From that contraction, darkness was created. When G!d said, “Let there be light”, the light that came into being filled the darkness, and ten holy vessels came forth, each one filled with “primordial” light.
 
G!d then sent forth those ten vessels, like a fleet of ships, with each carrying its cargo of light. Had they all arrived intact, the world would have been perfect. But the vessels were too fragile to contain such a powerful, divine light. They broke open, shattering, and all the holy sparks were scattered. Some returned to their Source, G!d, some became stars shining in the sky, and the rest were hidden throughout the newly-created universe, and within adam kadmon, the original human. This shattering is called “shevirat ha’kelim,” or the “breaking of the vessels.”

While most traditional commentaries on Lurianic kabbalah regard the shattering of the vessels as a cosmic catastrophe, some modern commentators note that the process of this contraction resembles birth contractions, which brings another perspective; i.e., that the breaking of the vessels can be viewed as a birthing process of the universe, not unlike the Big Bang theory. Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, whose teachings draw on those of Rabbi Luria, regards this as an interpretation appropriate to our day.
 
To this I would add, while I do not believe in a physically-embodied G!d-Being, I would venture that if G!d did have a body, it would be female. Why? For two reasons. (1) this concept of tzimtzum and giving birth. If G!d were female, G!d would already have a space in which to create the world: Her womb. And the birth contractions were the Big Bang which led to the shattering of the vessels and the birth of our cosmos. (2) Because the Hebrew word for compassion actually comes from the word for womb, "rachaman". And El Rachaman is one of our names for G!d. The Talmud states that we are to be rachmanim b’nei rachmanim (compassionate children of compassionate ancestors) and that Heaven grants compassion to those who are compassionate to others, and withholds it from those who are not (Shabbat 151b). Another name for G!d is Shechinah, which is a very feminine image of G!d, as She Who hovered over the world, perhaps a bit like a mother bird hovers over the egg, keeping it warm until it can hatch the new life growing within it. There are many female images of G!d in the Torah. Why do we fear and deny them?

Turning our attention back to these shattered vessels, let's talk about the light inside the vessels that shattered. This concept, naturally, has a whole rabbinic history in itself. For now, let's consider this Light as, simply, the Light that is G!d. And some of the Light of G!d is in clear view, and some of it has been hidden away. Hidden in the great spiritual texts, hidden in the stars and the earth, and hidden in these shards of shattered glass that are within each of our souls.

In the wake of this shattering event, humans are now tasked with co-creation, to repair, tikkun, this shattering. We were created, so to speak, to gather the sparks, no matter where they are hidden or have been scattered among the four corners of the earth.

Furthermore, when enough holy sparks have been gathered, the broken vessels will be restored, and tikkun olam, the repair of the world, so long-awaited, will finally be complete. It is therefore the holiest task of all to release these sparks from wherever they are imprisoned, and to elevate them to holiness. This vision of redemption is a spiritual one in which all things return to olam ha’tikkun [literally “the world of repair”], a world restored to its perfect status.
 

Until the time of Rabbi Luria, the reason for G!d’s commandments was never provided. If a student asked, “How do we know this?” the standard rabbinic reply was “We know this from Moses at Mount Sinai.” In other words, “Do it because Moses said G!d said so.” Now, Rabbi Luria proposed that there was a purpose to the mitzvot, the commandments, beyond serving G!d’s will. Studying the Torah, observing the mitzvot, healing the ills of the world, or performing good deeds were all ways to gather the sparks, and fulfill the great mitzvah of tikkun olam.

If you have taken ballet lessons, or watched the TV show, So You Think You Can Dance, you hear the term plié, which literally means, “sinking down.” When you jump, you can’t jump without a plié, a going down into the floor before leaping upwards. This speaks to the dance we must do between tikkun olam and tikkun hanefesh. Tikkun olam is repairing the world and tikkun hanefesh is repairing the soul. 

You see, we have to start with our own soul, that plié of sinking down, before we can take that jump into the service of repairing the world. We can’t ONLY work on tikkun hanefesh, our inner spiritual work, but we also cannot do that work of repairing the world without being fully grounded in our own inner being. 

Repairing ourselves and repairing the world, it seems, is the only real work to which we must attend.  

So, how then does any of this relate to being up at 3am with a terrified, storm phobic little dog? 

In the middle of a dark, stormy night, perhaps those flashes of light which terrify littlest dog and awaken the house and require me  now to stay up with her, with all the house lights on, can be a reminder of this holy and sacred task.  

When it is dark, we see the terrifying flashes of light around us, and the small, frightened dog within us sees those flashes and hears that thunder and its little scared brain thinks it is surrounded by a big scary monster going to eat her alive. 

Yet, if I get up, and play comforting music to drown out the angry sky rumbles, the monster sounds in our brains are drowned out. By turning on all the lights, the angry, scary flashes can't be seen, because we are surrounded by the Light around us, the Light that is G!d. 

What a picture of our lives. How often do we find ourselves terrified, surrounded by darkness and noises and scary flashes of light which our finite little disordered-thinking brains perceive as big scary monsters out to get us?

Even in the darkest night surrounded by flashes of lightning  and rumbles of thunder, we can be reminded that all we need to do is get up and see the Light of G!d surrounding us, and hear the comforting music from the realms of the heavens, and all shall be well. By attending to the work of tikkun hanefesh, repairing our souls, which we do by walking a solid path of spirituality, such as that referred to in our quote above, or a 12 Step program of practical spiritual living. When we do that, there is no more darkness, no more disordered, terrified little finite brain which only sees the fear, the scary, the lightning puncturing the darkness, that is to say, the things that are wrong with everyone else, never how maybe one's ego is at the root of the matter... 

So we must look honestly, and ask ourselves, if we are fault finding, putting one another down, being selfish, if we are cheating and being dishonest, maybe even just being dishonest with ourselves, then we are not living the Sacred Way, the way of G!d. The sacred way is about respect, love, forgiveness and sharing, including respect, love, and forgiveness of ourselves.

In the light of day, we ask ourselves, have I neglected repairing my soul? Am I looking too narrowly at the things I am trying to accomplish? Have I stopped growing along spiritual lines?

Let your answers to those questions inspire you to be the Light in the world around you. We need you, we need your light, and you need ours. 

Let's put aside our fault finding and negativity, our selfish, ego-centered ways of being, our self-deception and dishonesty and disillusions, our petty ways of trying to control others and everything around us. Really, that's just us acting like a scared little dog terrified of the storm. There is a better way..... let us be about that sacred work. Let us get up, turn on the Light, hear the heavenly music, and pick up the spiritual toolkit laying at our feet.