The Salad- Parshat Ha'azinu

A few days ago, my son told me about a show he saw on food waste. He learned that in our country alone, every person wastes a staggering twenty pounds of food per month! And yet, with a little more consciousness and care, much of the wasted food could be put to good use.

To illustrate the point, they assembled a group of folks and served them a gourmet salad. They asked the group to rate the salad, and everyone loved it.

Then, they revealed the truth: the salad was made entirely out of food waste!

A gourmet chef was given food that is normally considered waste- peelings, stems, stalks and other items that are usually discarded. The food scraps were cut, peeled, marinated, pounded and transformed into something the group perceived to be not only edible, but a unique and delicious gourmet dish.

It’s a good thing that the human mind can differentiate between food and garbage, between “wheat and chaff”, between nourishment and poison. But the shadow side to this dualistic thinking is that we tend to develop a rigid narrative about what is good and usable, and what needs to be thrown away.

Or, sometimes the opposite happens-

Out of fear that something valuable might be lost, some people become hoarders, surrounding themselves with far more junk than they could ever use.

But what if the human mind could be flexible enough to fully use whatever is present? Not hoard for another day, and not look at a fridge partially filled with odds and ends and decide, “there’s nothing to eat!”

A couple months ago, I was away with my son visiting my mother. My wife Lisa was home alone for a few days with our daughter.

Lisa thought, “I wonder if I can avoid going shopping and just live off whatever is in the house?”

Guess what- she did! No shopping that week. They were fine.

When the mind is full of rigid preconceptions, it’s impossible to see the full potential of what is present. But get some space around your thoughts (like send the boys to Arizona!), connect with what is really here in this moment, and new possibilities open up. There are little miracles waiting to happen.

But to open up this space and become present, you need to bring together the two opposite poles of your being- consciousness and flesh.

Ordinarily, human consciousness tends to congeal into a constant stream of thinking, taking the thinker into all kinds of imagined realities, while the body is left to deal with the here and now. The eyes are looking in the fridge, but the mind is thinking about something else!

This week’s reading begins with Moses’ words to the Israelites:

“Ha’azinu hashamyaim va’adabeirah-
Give ear, O Heavens, and I shall speak-

“V’tishma Ha’aretz imrei fi-
And listen, O Earth, to the words of my mouth.”

The “Heavens” and the “Earth” are metaphors for these opposite polls of our being. When mind is extricated from the relentless narratives of thought and brought into intimate connection with the body, then the mind and body can “listen” together as one. When that happens, the “secrets” that are hidden in plain sight can be revealed.

These “secrets” are ever-present, as it goes on to say-

“Let my teaching fall like rain, let my utterance flow like dew, like storm winds on vegetation, like raindrops on blades of grass…”

Torah is everywhere, soaking everything like rain, blowing through everything as the air we breathe. But to see it, to hear it, you have to open to it.

Opening means: there must be an opening in your thoughts, so that your awareness and your body can fully join together.

When that happens, there is no more sense of “me” as the thinker and “my body” that “I” inhabit. That separate “I” drops away.

There is a hint of this in the concluding verses of the parshah:

“Aley el har… ur’eh et eretz… umoot b’har…
Ascend the mountain… see the land… and die on the mountain…”

“Ascend the mountain” means to rise above your thinking mind.

“See the land” means to really see what is right here before you, now.

“Die on the mountain” means that when you rise above your mind and yet connect fully with your body, your ordinary thought-bound self can drop away.

This is the deepest freedom- freedom from the sense of “me” as a separate entity that is living in “my” body.

And when there is no more separate "me", what is left?

This can’t really be described, because language itself is rooted in thought, which is the basis for separateness. But there is a hint in this parshah:

“He is suckled with honey from a stone, and oil from the hardness of a rock…”

In other words, what seemed to be dead is bursting with life. Everything is miraculous, everything is nourishing. 

Rabbi Moshe Hayim Efraim, the grandson of the Baal Shem Tov, told a story in the name of his grandfather:

“Once there was a fiddler who played so sweetly that no one who heard the music could resist dancing. One time, a man walked by a house where the fiddler played and he saw people dancing through the window. He couldn’t hear the music they heard, and so he thought they were madmen, flailing their bodies about tastelessly.”

As we approach the joyful and celebratory days of Sukkot, may we hear the music of Existence that plays all around us and within us. May we be like the sukkah- an open form, a beautiful frame, without much differentiation between “inside” and “outside”.

And as we leave behind the day of fasting, may we take care to fully use and share what we have, nourishing each other and minimizing our food waste. If you haven’t already, make the fast of Yom Kippur real by donating to your local food bank or other relief organization. Take a moment and give tzeddaka now!

Moadim L’Simkha!
Good times!
love,
-brian yosef