Thursday, January 8, 2015

Yin and Yang

I understand that the title of this week’s blog post might throw some of you off.  Yes I know that Yin and Yang is not a Jewish philosophy… it is Chinese.  But there is so much to be learned from it.  There so much that we can begin to discuss around this concept.  How something can be both good and bad, blessing and curse, life and death.  It is not a simple puzzle to decipher but is a reality.  The greatest single example I can think of comes from medicine.  Think of the life saving work of chemotherapy.  Chemo is poison… It’s task is to kill the bad cells.  But it is poison and has very specific target and purpose. So in effect chemo is a poison that is used to save and/or prolong lives every day.  The same is true of other medical treatments.  Immunizations are often created by taking a certain dose of the very disease that the patient is being protected from.  And so in that way it is clear as well that the poisons can be used to save lives as well.  Why am I going on and on about this seemingly non-Jewish business? Two words: פרשת שמות (This week’s Parsha)

In this week’s Torah portion we find a king that was very afraid of a very rapidly growing population of foreigners that was in his midst.  Who were these people?  The Hebrews.  He orders the midwives to kill all male infants when they are born and let the girls live (we’ll save that for another time).  The two midwives: שפרה and פועה/Shifra and Puah, who are actually believed to have been יוכבד and מרים/Yocheved and Miriam, משה/Moses’ mother and sister… The two midwives refused to do this out of fear of God.  When the Pharaoh asks them why they did not follow his law they respond that the Hebrew women were not like the Egyptian ones… They were so strong and so mighty that they would give birth before the midwives could get there. This probably was not what Pharaoh wanted to hear and so he gives up on שפרה and פועה and commands the Egyptian population to take all Hebrew baby males and throw them into the Nile River to kill them.  So that was the law and we must assume that the Egyptian people did as was demanded of them.  יוכבד gave birth to her third child and saw that he was a boy.  She hid him from the Egyptians for three months but was no longer able to as the infant משה was likely making more and more noise each day and also not sleeping as much as newborns do. She did what any rational thinking mother would do and put her infant son into a basket and places the basket in the waters of the Nile River.  His sister watched him from afar to see what would happen. What happens next is the crux of this discussion.  Pharaoh’s daughter, or her maidservant, caught a glimpse of the basket and baby and went out and brought the infant out of the waters of the Nile River.  The Pharaoh’s daughter even goes so far as to announce that this was a Hebrew Boy.  His name was eventually given, משה, drawn from the waters (a remembrance of his origin story).

Why is this intriguing?  Why does this scream out to be explored?  Lets begin by seeing the irony of the characters.  The midwives that were originally to be the instruments of the death sentence became the instruments of the beginning of the redemption.  The law that was enacted by the Pharaoh was openly and clearly violated by his own daughter.  The text does not hide any of this and it can easily be assumed that Pharaoh was aware of all of this as well.  But even more important is that the Nile River was supposed to be the death of the Hebrew people as the males babies were to be thrown in there by the hands of the Egyptians.  Instead the Nile River became our salvation by the hands of one of the highest ranking Egyptians in the kingdom.  The Nile River can be seen as evil and can be seen as good.  The Nile River can be seen as our end and as our beginning.  And in essence it is the yin and yang… it is both.  It is life and death… blessing and curse… destruction and salvation.  This is something that we need to see in our everyday lives.  We need to see the fine line that divides the blessing and the curse in relationships, items and events.  We must see the fine line that determines our successes and failures.  We need to see the the role that we play in that as well.  We need to recognize that each day we choose how to judge and proceed… We stand metaphorically at Robert Frost’s “Two Roads” and we decide which to take.  The fork in the road that Frost speaks of is the line we are speaking about.  The fork in the road is the line between the Yin and the Yang. 

When we combine Frost’s two roads and the concept of the Yin and Yang we find the most important lesson of this very great reading.  With every decision and with every action we have potential to do good and to do bad.  For the two opposites are two sides of the same coin,  (Think Two-Face from Batman) and we do not need to leave it all up to external  forces.  The dividing line is where we stand and look and decide what will make the world better and our lives as well.  That line is the place where the Nile was either death or life.  The place where the Egyptians were either murderers or life givers.  That line is where we stand every day making choices whose impacts are greater than we can ever know.

שבת שלום