This past weekend we did a workshop at the Pearlstone Retreat Center in Baltimore, MD. We were snowed in and had the place to ourselves, twenty two of us. It was really special.

The process of being enslaved in the Egypts of our old unconscious patterns of thinking is often painful, and coming out and facing our fears and vulnerabilities takes a great deal of courage. I witnessed a lot of courage this weekend.

I had a thought regarding something at the end of this week’s Parsha. Moshe and Aaron, Nadav and Avihu, and the seventy elders ascended the mountain. (Moshe would later go up further by himself) The Torah tells us that they saw God, and under God’s feet was that which had the form of a sapphire brick and it was like the essence of heaven in its purity.

Not everyone learns it this way, but the Midrash that Rashi brings down, teaches that this brick was a remembrance of the pain Israel experienced when they were enslaved in Egypt working with bricks.

So they saw God, whatever that means, standing, whatever that means, on this sapphire brick which was pure.

Applying this image into the context of the experience we shared this past weekend retreat; there is a pure foundation which is built from the material of our enslavement and upon it stands our higher selves.

As children we are soft and impressionable like clay. And being so open and impressionable, children can be imprinted with patterns of thinking that often don’t allow us to be powerfully and freely ourselves. These imprinted patterns harden with time like bricks and become ways of being.

Freedom is the opportunity to distinguish our higher selves from the previously enslaving patterns. One level of freedom is to first distinguish ourselves from that which enslaved us while still in Mitsrayim/Egypt. Another level, we actually leave and witness their drowning. And from another perspective, our consciousness ascends a mountain and understands from there.

From this higher perspective of consciousness and freedom, the same brick of slavery can now be seen as a sapphire of purity.

Imagine growing up in a situation in which I am never really listened to. I might take on a persona of; I’m not good enough. And I might generate my life from a place of constantly trying to prove myself. At some point in my life (one of our workshops perhaps), I have the opportunity to walk out of my Mitsrayim and see it consciously for what it is; an old pattern of thinking that I keep schlepping into the present.

I am no longer enslaved to the “story”. I have stepped out of it. I have distinguished it. The “story” is now an object of my awareness. I, for now, am not under the burden of the “I must not be good enough” brick.

Not only am I not under the burden of that brick, I now know, perhaps better than anyone else, the painful impact of living in that enslavement.

The impact on my life from that experience, and the depth of my feelings from that experience, might naturally ignite a powerful passion in me to actually generate listening in the world.

I have tasted the marror/bitterness of not being listened to. And, I now know, on a cellular level, the importance of listening itself. What was once a heavy brick made of mud and straw, a brick in which children were buried; becomes a jewel which serves as the foundation of a mission that my higher self stands on.

Have a great Shabbos,

Simcha

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