Muddy Waters
It’s not quite mud season here in Vermont – we have a couple of months to go, hopefully. But you can never start getting ready for mud season too soon. There’s a wonderful Robert Frost poem, “Two Tramps at Mudtime,” which describes two tramps happening upon the poet as he is chopping wood, and requesting that they be hired to do his task because they are in need of pay. He is reluctant to give it up, but comes to see that their desire – to work because of genuine need - is greater than his, which is to work because of love: And he longs for his work, and perhaps work in general, to be driven from a place of need and love.
But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.
The Torah is perhaps the place where, at least ideally, our avocation and our vocation come together, our love and our work, and this past week we read about the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai, the giving of the Ten Commandments. Now, it says in many places that the whole world was created for the sake of the Torah; that, in other words, everything that had previously transpired in the history of humankind was only to bring us to this place where there could be an intimate encounter between God and humanity, represented here by Israel. But it took a while to get to this point, right? To go back to the story of Noah, God regretted ever making humanity; God looked down and saw muddiness, the messiness of being human – being hurt, hurting others, otherwise behaving badly - and sent a flood to wipe it all out. It wasn’t worth it – having to endure this muddiness to get to a place of intimacy in the future. But after the flood, to keep using this imagery, God probably looked down and saw even more muddiness, literally and metaphorically. Humans couldn’t really change, but God saw that they tried hard – so God’s heart opened and God said, I’ll never destroy again. Despite the perpetual muddiness. In fact maybe seeing the muddiness again taught God that it wasn’t the muddiness that was the problem, it was God’s response to the muddiness.
So what does all this mud have to do with the giving of Torah this past week? There’s a wonderful midrash from a verse in Shir HaShirim that describes Israel as a lily among thorns. The midrash plays with this verse a bit, and says that even many generations after the flood, God again looked down on humanity and saw – and this is a wonderful image - “muddy water within muddy water.” God again wanted to order the world destroyed, but then God caught sight of Israel, a lily growing up out of the mud, and God breathed it’s fragrance, and decided not only to spare the world, but to give the Ten Commandments, to give the Torah. To reach out in what we talk about as the greatest act of intimacy in the Jewish imagination – the giving of the Torah.
A meditation teacher of mine, Reb Anderson, once said that this is our work: to live in the mud, and to live skillfully. If we embrace mud season best we can, if we live this way, where our heart is opened by the muddiness of the human condition and not moved to anger and destruction, then a lily can grow out of this mud. Not in spite of the mud but because of it. The lily – Israel – doesn’t grow in spite of the mud, but out of it. And when this happened in our Torah portion this week, God smelled the fragrance, and was pleased, and gave the gift of intimacy, of the Torah. So this teaches us to not try to escape the mud, but to go towards it, to go further into this world, because that is where the lilies are. And our spiritual traditions, in Judaism, the Torah, help us to cultivate lilies in the midst of the mud. And when we are really living a life of Torah, to return to the Frost poem, maybe we are living a life where love and need are one. Where our work is our love and our love is our work. Something that we sometimes only realize in mud season, even if mud season is still a few months away.