"You stand this day all of you, (KOL), before the Lord your God; your captains of your tribes, your elders, and your officers, with all the men of Yisra'el" (Dvarim/Deuteronomy 29,9).
My irreverent mind engages my reverent mind when asking "Every word in the Torah has meaning so what does "all of you" ( KOL) mean?" How else does one show up? In pieces? At different times of the day?
I was reminded of a moment in my far past. It was the mid-eighties of the previous century and I was an undergraduate student at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Working as the Publications Coordinator and Librarian at "The Maurice Falk Institute for Economic Research in Israel" I was summoned to the office of the president of the university, Prof. Don Patinkin. I lost my breath for a moment in panic. It was Friday, and no one comes to the university on Friday unless you had to. It was more of a laid back and casual dress day. That Friday I was very colorful: Long flowing light purple dress, black stockings, and white knit shoes. Large purple, black and white hand crafted earrings, many bracelets and much makeup to match. If that wasn't enough I had a black-purple-white bandana on my head. Not exactly the way to go to see the president of a University. But there was no time to run to the dorms to change, so I retied my bandana to make me look more "together" and prayed for the best.
Needless to say Prof. Patinkin was quite shocked by the young woman who walked into his office. Considering I was working on preparing one of his articles for publication, my appearance didn't exude the professionalism of an employee of an economics research institute. He glanced from head to toe, in what seemed like dismay and stutteringly questioned, "YYYYou are Mimi?" I smiled and innocently said, "Yes!" Again, his eyes started at my toes and made their way up to my bandana, still stuttering, "YYYYou are Mimi???" Again, in my innocence and attempt to keep my composition as his horror didn't relent, "Yes, I'm Mimi, all of me... (KOO'LI)... To which he responded, "There is a lot of all of you. Yesh Harbeh min haKOL hazeh."
I will leave the happy end of the story for another time, though I will share with you that I never stopped hearing him say that sentence: "There is a lot of all of you. Yesh Harbeh min haKOLhazeh." Time and again I look at myself and hear him speaking to me, and at times I hear him speaking to others; telling us that there are a lot of us. It is in such a manner I hear Prof. Patinkin today reading our opening verse of the Torah portion saying to the person standing in front of God, "Aside from your role as a captain, an elder, a water carrier (as will appear a few verses later), aside from what you do, who you are is a lot!
It is with this understanding that I ask myself in these ten or so days leading up to Rosh Hashana and then Yom Kippur in two Shabbats from now, "How will I stand in the presence of God? What will I bring with me when standing in the presence of the One-and-Only?"
While Maimonides opens his corpus of law, the Mishneh Torah, with the "Foundations of the Torah" ("Yesodei Ha'Torah") teaching us that there are two positive imperatives, to fear God and love God (perhaps "awe" would be a more appropriate translation of the word "yir'ah"), it is only in the Laws of Repentance that he actually explains what it means to love God. I ask, "Does this perhaps mean that in order to believe in God one needs to be in a state of Yir'ah, but in order to return to God, in order to stand in the presence of God, one must do that with love?"What would it look like to stand in God's light with love in my heart? What would it look like to be open to the possibility of experiencing God's love of me?
Father Henry Nouwen, one of my beloved teachers (1932-1996) refers to this question in multiple opportunities in his book "The Only Necessary Thing: Living a Prayerful Life." Two of these moments I would like to share with you. When describing a listening heart he shares with us:
"The discipline of the heart makes us stand in the presence of God with all we have and are: our fears and anxieties, our guilt and shame, our sexual fantasies, our greed and anger, our joys, successes, aspirations and hopes, our reflections, dreams and mental wandering, and most of all our people, family, friend and enemies, in short all that makes us who we are. With all thiswe have to listen to God's voice and allow God to speak to us in every corner of our being. This is hard since we are so fearful and insecure that we keep hiding ourselves from God."
"We tend to present to God only those parts of ourselves with which we feel relatively comfortable and which we think will evoke a positive response. Thus our prayer becomes very selective and narrow; and not just our prayer but also our self-knowledge, because by behaving as strangers before God we become strangers to ourselves." (pp.83-84; my emphasis)
When addressing God's love to us he posits:
"To return to God means to return to God with all that I am and all that I have. I cannot return to God with just half of my being. I suddenly felt a certain resistance to being embraced so fully and totally. I experienced not only a desire to be embraced, but also a fear of losing my independence. I realized that God's love is a jealous love. God wants not just a part of me, but all of me. Only when I surrender myself completely to God's parental love can I expect to be free from endless distractions, ready to hear the voice of love and able to recognize my own unique call."
"It is going to be a very long road. Every time I pray, I feel the struggle. It is the struggle ofletting God be the God of my whole being. It is the struggle to trust that true freedom lies hidden in total surrender to God's love." (pp.73-74; my emphasis)
It is for these thoughts and reasons I return to ask myself, to ask you, praying we will ask each other: "How are you going to enter this Shabbat, how are you going to show up on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur?" "Are you going to leave parts of yourself at home, or are you going to allow yourself the gift of the moment to stand / to sit / to cry / to meditate in the presence of The One-That-Loves-All-of-Who-We-Are. In what form is the opening verse of our Torah portion a personal invitation: "You stand this day all of you, (KOL), before the Lord your God."
May we be blessed with the faith, the courage, the trust and the love to do so. May we grant each other the strength and conviction to do so in moments of faltering. May we all be signed in the book of Loving-Life and good health.
Shabbat shalom.