Vessels of Silver and Gold

In Parshat Bo, before we actually leave Egypt, we are told to request silver and gold vessels from those who enslaved us. In Parshat Lech Lecha God promised Avraham that his children will be aliens in a strange land for 400 years and his descendants will leave with riches.

So, we are told that when we leave the slavery of Mitzrayim we will do so with great wealth.

In the workshops that Call of the Shofar facilitates most individuals have the opportunity to consciously descend into places of constriction in ourselves. These places are ways of being and ways of thinking that we have been trapped in and often relate to reality from. These are places where we have been living in exile from our essential selves and from our innate wellbeing. We go to those places to bring consciousness and compassion to them and we distinguish them in ourselves so we can transcend them and live from greater levels of freedom.

During a particular process on the workshop, we remember the events that might have sent us into exile (the famine). We distinguish the enslaving patterns of thinking from our higher essences (the plagues that separated us from them). We make our “stories” objects of our awareness through articulating them to others (maggid). We experience the impact that, living from these constrictions, have on our lives (taste the marror). We leave before our defending egos can reconsider and return back into our old “patterns” (before the bread rises/matzoh).

But what is this wealth we go out with?

Coming from my own experience I want to identify two of the possible riches we leave Egypt with.

One, is the ability to deeply resonate with others who are enslaved and who are in exile from their essential selves.

How much more potential for compassion do I have for the pain of another’s enslavement, after having deeply felt the feelings of my own slavery?

And the other, is the strong passion to manifest the qualities that were missing for us, that we went into exile hoping to find.

As an example, let’s say I was not listened to. Would I not really understand how important real listening is, for each one of us and for the world? I would know these feelings on a cellular level because they resonate to our own experience of living in exile.

We are wealthy in ways that would not have been possible had we not experienced our own Mitrayim and our own freedom from that Mitzrayim.

I think we can consider ourselves wealthy if we compassionately feel for others who are going through their own famine and slavery.

And

I think we can consider ourselves wealthy if we passionately stand for the qualities that individuals need to experience Love and Presence in our lives.

Avraham was promised that we would leave with riches. If we leave our own Mitzrayims with these two gifts, the gift of compassion and the gift of passion, in my opinion, we have been given extreme wealth.

Have a great Shabbos,

Simcha Frischling