The
Promised Land
“The
Moses experience is not limited to Moses. In the language of the
Kabbalists, there is a 'Bechinat Moshe'--a Moses quality—in each of
us. Moses represents the radical uniqueness and singularity of human
being-hood.”
Marc
Gafni (Soul Prints)
When
you read Moses' story in Exodus, you see a simple man called to
greatness. Even with deep reluctance, he rises to the occasion
because he believes that God requires it of him. He is able to stand
before Pharaoh, the most powerful monarch of his time, and demand
freedom for the Hebrew people even with the tenuous thread of his own
life trembling in the balance. He then makes the difficult and
dangerous journey through the wilderness as leader of his ragged and
complaining band, only to be told at the bitter end that he may not
enter the Promised Land with them.
How
is it that we modern humans have anything in common with Moses? One
way is that, like it or not, we all undertake that difficult journey.
It may not involve daily meetings with God, or leadership of a
mutinous people, or the lifting of snakes and stone tablets, but
every life has its own wilderness journey. There is a singularity to
each human life that is reality only to the individual living it.
We want to be understood at our very core; we want others to see our inmost being, but that desire is simply impossible.
To that end, existential loneliness is part of our human experience.
Like Moses, we get only a glimpse of the Promised Land.
That
glimpse, however, may be enough. In my world view, the Promised Land
lies within. It is a journey in which we end up where we started and
see the beauty of it for the first time. We may not be given new
land, but we are given new eyes to see that our true home has been there
all along, waiting for us to find it.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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