Live the Questions (Shabbat Bereshit)
The other day, I had a challenging interaction with a friend. She approached me with a harsh tone, as if she had been frustrated for some time. I was sad she hadn’t talked to me earlier. Even though our encounter only lasted a moment, I kept thinking about it, trying to understand what happened.
As I did, rather than gaining clarity, I just felt more confused, less present. Perhaps you can recall a moment like this where you let the one thing that didn’t go right in your day distract you, and perhaps come to define your entire day, or week, or even year!
It turns out this has been happening since the dawn of time.
In Genesis, we read this week about Adam and Eve living an idyllic life in the Garden of Eden. All that’s asked of them? “…as for the tree of knowledge of good and bad, you must not eat of it” (Gen 2:16-17). So of course they go do the only thing they are not supposed to – another quirk of human nature since the dawn of time.
After they eat from the tree, everything changes: “the eyes of both of them were opened and they perceived that they were naked” (Gen 3:7). Adam and Eve become self-conscious, aware they are exposed. They feel vulnerable, afraid, ashamed.
At that moment, God asks a question, one that echoes across time: ayeka, “Where are you?”
Adam does not know how to respond.
The first humans hide, hoping their Creator won’t find them (Gen 3:10).
Rav Kook, an early 20th century rabbi and philosopher explains in that moment, Adam “did not know how to give a clear answer to the question, ‘Where are you?’, because he did not know himself, because he had lost [touch with his essence].”
I’m sure we can all relate to this feeling. Especially at this point in pandemic, we are all just trying to get through the day. As Aline mentioned at Community Meeting, “How are you?” is no longer a good question, because we just don’t know the answer anymore.
After Adam and Eve eat from the tree they and their descendants become self-conscious, for better or worse. Rather than seeing everything as interconnected, sensing ourselves woven into the fabric of creation, we perceive ourselves as separate from the world. We feel exposed, afraid, ashamed. We get lost in rumination, and self doubt.
But like a loving partner who feels our absence, God is always seeking us. Saying, I miss you! Where have you been? Where are you now? Come back! To Me. To yourself. With each new moment, life calls us – away from loneliness, apathy, slumber – into relationship, engagement, presence.
I have a regular morning practice that helps me ground and set the tone for my day. I say a few blessings, and then sit in meditation. Recently, I added a daily reflection, reading an excerpt of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry, something to reflect on in the silence.
In a 1903 letter to his protégé, the 19-year-old cadet and budding poet Franz Xaver Kappusof, Rilke writes:
I want to beg you, as much as I can…to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves… Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
So, next we find ourselves lost in thought, wondering who, where, we are, what is happening, may we take it, not as a failure, not as something that defines us, but as an invitation to come back to this next breath or step, to our very essence, that our life might eventually become itself the answer to these questions.