Day 3: Illuminating Tiferet through a Mother’s Love

BLESSING FOR COUNTING THE OMER:

Baruch atah HASHEM, Eloheinu melech ha’olam, asher kiddeshanu bidvarecha v’tzivanu noo al siferat ha’omer.

Blessed are You, O HaShem our G-d, King of the Universe Who has sanctified us by Your Word and commanded us concerning the Counting of the Omer.

Today is three days of the Omer.

Counting the Omer is a yearly opportunity for my own personal refinement as I take this yearly journey for the 49 days after Passover until Sh’vuot.  I admit that there are areas of my life that represent the bondage of Egypt - Mitzrayim - whose name means ‘constriction’, ‘limitations’ and ‘boundaries.’ They can result in me conforming and being restrained from the freedom, movement and expression that the Messiah purchased for me.  And as ‘The WORD made flesh’ and the Living Torah, as I move each day for 7 weeks towards my own yearly re-enactment of receiving Him as my Redeemer and Lord at Mt. Sinai; I take time daily ‘counting’, from the Hebrew word sefirah with another meaning of ‘sapphire’. I can say that I am daily ‘illuminating’ the different aspects of my emotional life as I tell the story of my soul; which is divided into seven emotions and qualities. This provides me with 49 emotions that I can daily examine and refine so that I can stand at the foot of Mt. Sinai a year later thanking HaShem for the victories He has shared with me as I run this race for the prize of conforming and renewing myself daily into the image of Yeshua; my LORD and my friend.

Today, as the 3rd day of the counting of the Omer, I will discuss the beauty (tiferet) of chesed (lovingkindness) from the portion in Exodus. Love is the single most powerful and necessary component of life and the foundation of all human interactions. It is the tool by which we learn to experience the highest reality, which is HaShem. Love is both giving and receiving. The opposite of love is selfishness.  Compassionate love is given freely which expects nothing in return. Beauty in love allows us to give love to those who have hurt us. A good exercise of these concepts would be offering a helping hand to a stranger.

Today’s Word: Exodus 13:1-16 is the last aliyot of the Torah Portion ‘Bo’.  Verse 8 requires me to retell the exodus story to my children each year at Pesach as I did.  Verse 14 speaks to me as a mother who raised her children in Torah and a Messianic home but as adults have been smitten with secular humanism. This has forced me to exercise a type of unconditional love for them I never imagined. So this will be a rather personal discussion but will ultimately tie tiferet and chesed together beautifully.

Verse 8 states: “You must tell your child on that day (Pesach).”

Verse 14 states: “If, in time to come, your child asks you, saying, “What is this?” You must say to him(or her), “G-d brought us out of Egypt, out of the house of bondage, with a mighty hand.”

As a woman and mother immersed in Torah as her lifestyle, it was easy for me to share those values and live such a way with my children who appeared to conform to such a path while living under my roof. All three of my children were excellent students and participated in the religious cycles of our home. They enjoyed the moedim and participated in youth activities and seemed to be engaged. But I watched as they left home for secular universities a rapid descent of their worldviews and in particular as it related to their faith and slowly over the next few decades saw them plummet into atheism and human secularism as their mindsets. I thought (my head) that I had done an excellent job in providing my children by instilling them with truth (torah) and the ‘way’ (halachah) to express their beliefs within the confines of normative Messianic Judaism. While I had shared my ‘head knowledge’ with my children and believed also my heart, I failed and the cry of the maddening crowd of secular universities trumped their mother’s life sustaining teachings and replaced it with a culture that was far from her truth. When what I KNEW (my HEAD) to be truth was disregarded by my children almost overnight, my HEART was broken.

  I had failed to instill within my children gratitude to HaShem for liberating us from bondages of all past, present, future, personal and collective ‘Egypts’.  I felt like a failure. I was concerned where these warped beliefs would possibly take them in life. And over many years; my worldview, politics, and well established belief system became abhorrent to them. People like me were responsible for all the ills of the world with our bigoted, homophobic and  ultra-conservative agendas. Funny; in Judaism the heart is the realm of the mind, will and emotions. My mind was set and unmovable - rooted in The Word of G-d and unchangeable. My will was always to follow His will - this is where I needed to have some open heart surgery to treat the anginal heart pain I was experiencing over my children’s rejection of the most fundamental reality of who their mother is - a disciple of the King of King and Lord of Lords; Yeshua.  And my purpose was to advance His Kingdom despite seemingly failing with my own children.

I had to open my heart and open my hand and allow my adult children to find their own way as I had needed to do as an adult also. I had to stop taking their rejection of my version of truth as a failure rather than a right of passage. I needed to reformat my thinking into one that gave myself credit for what I had  provided them.  I failed to remember my own hard road in coming to faith as a young adult, and that each of us has our own private journey as we navigate the reality of our mortality, our sin, and our desire to be connected with the spiritual side of our being, and ultimately, what life is all about. Slowly my pain and disappointment was replaced by a new kind of unconditional love that needed to find new expression as I navigated my adult children’s right to their own self determination while at the same time maintaining relationship and communication. And that requires action as exemplified by the work of my hands.

They say action speaks louder than words. And words had unfortunately caused much of the damage to my relationship with my adult children. I needed to be willing to quietly listen (shema) to their issues without attempting to defend myself. Hebraic listening requires action, though. And for me, that action required that I speak little and listen much initially. My action was to let them know that I respected their opinions. I allowed them to speak in words those memories that hurt them and I made no attempt to justify them; all I did was apologize - to repent - to attempt to turn over a new leaf in how we communicate with one another. I learned how to quietly listen to them and to validate their right to feel the way they do but to agree to look for constructive ways to find new techniques to express our love and appreciation for one another. This would require hard WORK to rebuild relationships based on unconditional love and a willingness to agree to disagree while refusing to  repeat the bad decisions we had made that ultimately derailed our relationships. With the grace and love of HaShem and my children,  I know I will continue to come up with the correct ACTIONS (HANDS) that will continue to strengthen my relationships with them and perhaps engage them with truth as we regain trust in one another. I already am seeing the beauty of our attempts to reconcile with one another. Softening hearts, kinder words, and a real sense of their love and desire to find a way forward. I need to take this yearly journey because I know that I will never be able to fix this problem alone. But I know one thing for sure, that with HaShem, all things are possible (Matthew 19:26).

CHAG SAMEACH